"Worker's Rights," Marks said as he shook McFaddens's hand, "in my country, that is the Kanzler's favorite joke."
"But my friends, despite all the blustering and excuses of the politicians, our homes are not so different. Do not both our homelands fight wars of words and shadows? It is a fact that neither Rheinland nor Bretonia has ever truly cared about the proletariat."
"To answer your question, I arrived here rather quietly. I took a transport from Freistadt after some "friends" dropped me off there," Marks stated, looking up at his guests.
"This is a good place to lay low, Herr Fredericks. A good suggestion," Josef noted.
"But please, I fill the air with my voice, it was you who suggested this meeting and I welcome the chance to hear what you have to say."
Marks motioned to the bartender, ordering some drinks for his acquaintances, and then sat back in his seat.
"Oh, that's good," Claude said to Syana. "Personally, I'm enjoying my retirement, though I'm getting a bit bored already. Maybe I could find another job in the guild?"
***
"This is a good place to lay low, Herr Fredericks. A good suggestion," Josef noted. "But please, I fill the air with my voice, it was you who suggested this meeting and I welcome the chance to hear what you have to say."
"That it is," Fredericks said. "They get a lot of different people in here. It makes it easy to slip through unnoticed."
"In any case," he continued, "I am a big proponent of a democratic system of government. Bretonia is pretty well off, but even it could use some change. But Rheinland! Well, it's quite bad, isn't it?"
"What sort of actions are you all taking?" he asked. "I imagine it can be pretty dangerous. Perhaps we could find some jobs for those Rheinland would jail here in Bretonia? Or maybe we could sneak you some supplies through Atka? Really though, I'm quite interested in this Volksradio of yours."
McFadden interrupted, "Yes, I heard of that. How is it working out?"
Mathias Brahe had shuffled into the bar several minutes earlier, but said nothing to anyone, instead choosing to slide a worn book from inside his heavy, dirty looking trench coat before hunching over a table to read it. His presence had already attracted the attention of some of the more casual patrons of the bar due to his discernibly odd appearance.
He had height - over six feet of it - and a largish frame which he carried poorly, constantly slouching when sitting down, or hunching over when walking - if you could call his disinterested shuffle, "walking." He was host to dozens of subtle actions - at best mannerisms and at worst involuntary ticks -all of which exhibited themselves to a careful observer. His fingers roamed carelessly over his admittedly sloppy week-beard before moving up to fiddle incessantly with his round, horn-rimmed reading spectacles (which themselves were a curious oddity) before randomly choosing - seemingly of their own accord - to either straighten his lapels, smooth his hair, or adjust his collar, or pick at the table, all like some autonomous machine left running by itself.
If it were not enough that he himself was odd, and his eyewear was strange or that his mannerisms were eccentric, then merely to continue in the same vein of out-of-the-ordinary, which ironically made it (as it applied to him) expected, and therefore mundane, he was dressed curiously, and quizzically, no doubt. He had a dented black bowler hat that at once captured attention and his shoes were reinforced with adhesive tape, yet nonetheless cracked and warped with each heavy, uneven step were shrouded by pants that were too long. A dress shirt that had obviously been expensive when it was first sold but one imagined had lost some of its value with each of its many owners captured his eccentric style well, but the garment that epitomized him was his coat.
At once heavy, yet flimsy, ragged and regal, his grey duster dragged and draped over his crooked form like a mantle. It had a military air to it, maybe the colour, maybe the cut, but perhaps just the attitude it seemed to have, a "destroyed, but never defeated" resolution.
Brahe paid for an obscure Dublin liquor with the last credits on three different credit chits, and, before he took the first sip, he was interrupted by the clang of a drunken bar patron, or as he would term it, "The clarion call of the inebriate", an unloved trumpet, uneven and coarse.
So he ended up doing what he mostly always did. He read, and he eavesdropped.
And he muttered things periodically, and he adjusted his hat, and he fiddled with his glasses. And he shifted his eyes to the right or left every so often, and he arranged the coasters on his table so it was symmetrical. And in so doing, he resumed that mechanical whirring, the hiccups and misfires of his mental machine.
Sarin swaggered in through the doors, and adjusted to the sudden bustle of sound, sight and scent.
Faking her slight stumble and abashed reaction; she careened for the bar, seemingly ignorant of the faces that had turned her way: faces she noted and stored during her mental narrative:
Officers (one with admiral markings - possibly genuine), the usual mining crews,
the race enthusiasts who'd drunk and lost too much, the few pilots in 'custom' flight suits; casting occasional, furtive glances in the direction of the loudest storytellers, 2 well-to-do looking gents talking to a 3rd obscured party, a worn traveller slumped over the bar, and a lone spectacled man in archaic attire, buried in a book.
"I'll have what he's having please Mr Bourne" she asked, nodding toward the bookworm, and handed over her creds. As the glass made contact with the bar, and a rioutious laugh broke out across the room, sarin quickly asked bourne "you know that one? specs?" as she slid a generous tip around the glass.
Re-seating herself at the bar with a relaxed grin, she tucked the id that hung around her neck, back into her suit; a telling gesture to anyone curious enough to look. Smoothing her clothes down, sarin drew a deck of cards and began shuffling.
Their ship prepared, the BAF Admiral and his men stood and departed in an orderly fashion, with a final glance behind them at the suspicious looking characters with fierce glares sitting in various corners of the room. The tension in the room lowered noticeably.
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Paul was a miner who lived and worked on the Hood. His friend John likewise was also a miner. They'd taken to drinking in the bar to ease of the tension that invariably built up when working Dublin's Independent Gold Fields. The threat of Corsair intruders trying to pilfer the gold they had no claim to saw to that. Then there were BMM agitators stirring things up, and all this on top of the natural hazards of mining. Relaxation was sorely needed.
The pair usually sat in a booth that looked out of the panoramic window, a window that offered one of the prettier views of Dublin. One where there was no evident industry grinding away. Drinks were brought and drinks were drunk. They were slightly tipsy when several officious looking people in uniforms stiffly walked out. The atmosphere they were by now mostly oblivious to eased slightly.
"Y'know them'n Bucc'neers been causing trouble out in the fields," Paul slurred. John nodded sagely. Or wobbled his head anyway. "D'you reckon we're g'nna have 'ny trouble from em?" John shrugged expansively, and went back to peering at the frothy surface of his beer-type substance. One of the women on F-deck claimed to be an oracle that could read the future in beer suds.
Paul lapsed into silence, with John feeling no need to break the tradition. Both were peering morosely out the window, when the deck shuddered, a symptom of firing weapon batteries. A twirling Waran shot past the window with but meters to spare; an umbilical cord straining from a maintenance cover that had been blasted open. There was a very obvious Buccaneer-styled jolly roger painted on the side. Sparks seemed to be showering from it's busted shield generator.
The Waran was out of sight. The umbilical wasn't. A moment later, a flailing man in a spacesuit shot past. Who was attached to the umbilical. Paul looked at his drink. He sniffed it suspiciously. It smelt normal enough.
A man who was seemingly pale and sick is in the corner of the bar, all sweaty, his grey eyes empty of any emotions. He drinks his drink alone, cursing at every Bretonian walking past him. He wears a BAF dusty official uniform, and his red hair are perfectly combed. He was grumbling to himself, somewhat cursing the IMG to not let him blast every Bretonians that comes to the Hood.