Chapter -21474836329 (A Chance Meeting in the Bath)
The first day in Remera passed without fanfare. The women went to the baths as they always did as soon as they got into a city and enjoyed the feeling of finally being clean after a few weeks on the road. There was a moment when Ada thought one of the other women was approaching the trio, but at the last moment, the woman seemed to hesitate before turning to go into a different section of the baths.
Ada raised an eyebrow at that and asked the others, “So, any idea what that was about?”
“Sometimes women have issues that need looking into that they don’t feel comfortable talking about in public, so when there is news of a ranger team arriving in town that has a few women, they go to the bathhouse nearest the guard barracks to talk to us,” Atalanta quietly explained. “No idea why she changed her mind and ran off, though.”
With this information, Ada decided she was going to do something. This woman might be in trouble or have some serious problem that called for ranger intervention, and if she was reluctant to come to them, then Ada would simply have to go to her. “I’m going to go find her and see if she’ll talk to me about whatever it is,” she said, moving to the edge of the bath before pulling herself up and out of the water. “Maybe I’ll be less intimidating on my own, since my level still reads lower than the two of you.” With that, Ada headed off in the same direction the woman went.
In short order, Ada found the woman sitting alone in the coldest bath, her shoulders shaking from silent tears. Not wanting to frighten her, Ada circled around and approached the woman from an angle that left her completely visible, and sat down an armspan away.
“Excuse me,” said Ada, “I don’t mean to pry, and please tell me to leave if I’m bothering you, but I noticed you hesitate to approach us just now. Would you be willing to talk about what’s going on?”
The woman turned with a startled expression on her face, but that faded as she apparently recognized Ada from the group of rangers from before. The woman took a calming breath before replying, “I shouldn’t say anything. I just saw a friend I thought had been killed on a trade caravan in town, marked and wearing a slave collar standing outside a brothel. I can’t imagine what might have happened that would have led her to being an enslaved prostitute. Livia’s family are wealthy merchants with plenty of money, so it couldn’t have been to pay off a debt, and she’s never so much as cheated on taxes.”
Ada stood back up and reached out a hand. “Please, will you come and tell the rangers about this? If there are illegal slavers ambushing caravans, they should hear about it.”
“Wait, are you not a ranger? Weren’t you with the others at the gate?” The woman, who still had not given her name, raised one eyebrow quizzically at Ada.
Ada rubbed the back of her head bashfully and said, “Ah, you saw that, then. Sorry, I'm not actually a ranger myself, just working for them as an auxiliary for now, kind of a trial run of sorts while I decide if I want to sign up. But the other two women with me here are the real deal. Come on.”
The woman took Ada’s very firm hand and allowed herself to be drawn to her feet, then the two turned to rejoin Alex and Atalanta. Once there, Ada asked the woman to tell the others the story of her missing friend. The woman, whose name turned out to be Melia, and Livia weren’t originally from Remera at all, but had grown up together in Victia, formerly Coalition City, both the daughters of successful merchants who had made their money during the long war. Livia’s family had apparently decided to relocate the business back to the capital in Ariminum once the notification of the shimagu extinction had been received, but Melia never received the letter Livia had promised to send. After another month passed, a caravan from Augusta reported the wreckage of a caravan, suspecting a beast attack considering the state of the bodies and that the goods being transported were mostly intact. Melia had assumed Livia was dead, and made the decision to move to Remera for a clean break from the memories of her friend. That had been two years ago. Just this week, Melia had heard the rumor of a slave matching the description of her friend at an infamous brothel in town, one known to have only enslaved women working there, and which catered to unscrupulous clientele, due to the women not being allowed to choose who they serviced or what services were being provided. After the long recounting of the tale, Ada looked to the two rangers and asked, “This is exactly the kind of problem we're here to solve, isn't it?”
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Alex nodded and said, “It is, but it must be investigated properly. The first thing we need to do is find out if the slave contract was purchased legally, and find out who sold her and who owns the contract now. If it’s legal, there will be a record, which will lead us to how she became enslaved in the first place. We should return to Marcus and inform the entire team. If there’s a real conspiracy with bandits and illegal slavers, we’re going to need backup.”
“I want to look into this brothel,” said Ada, “If the women are being abused, I’m going to put a stop to it.”
Alex let out a long, drawn out sigh. “Unfortunately, there probably isn’t much we can do there. Legally, a slave owner is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want with a slave, including ending their lives if they feel like it.” She switched to speaking English for the benefit of privacy with Ada, “Look, I know this shit is horrible and barbaric, but we’re only two people, and if we’re found freeing legally owned slaves, at best, we’ll be executed. The government really relies on it for labor and as punishment for crimes.”
“Alex, I love you, but I don’t think you heard me correctly. I’m going to stop it. If you help me or not, I refuse to allow those women to be subject to that treatment.”
Alex let out a sigh and said, “If it comes to it, I’ll be right there with you. Ride or die. But give the rangers at least a couple days to investigate. If there’s corruption, we can hopefully root it out from the source and prevent more of this kind of thing happening again. At least here in this city, anyway.”
“OK, how about 3 days? If we don’t have any leads in 3 days, we start surveillance on the brothel and make plans to clean it out,” said Ada. “We can probably find out more about what’s going on from there, anyway.”
“Sir, we're still not meeting the quarterly quota, and people are starting to get suspicious about how many girls are going missing from the merchant caravans.”
The magistrate sat behind his desk, reviewing the documents the burly man who was now standing across from him had brought for his review. He was right, at the current rate of abductions and retraining, they were going to finish out the month with too few slaves to hand over. There was another page detailing every time one of the local agents had overheard anyone talking about any kind of missing person, with the day, time of day, location, and the level, class tag, and gender of the people observed. There was an obvious correlation of women laborers from levels 128 to 256 in the market district, which coincidentally matched the criteria given by the organization for preferred slaves.
And then, buried three pages in, was a report regarding the local ranger team. Apparently, two pairs had been observed entering the local library, starting several hours, and then exiting with multiple scrolls. Unfortunately, the agent they’d had in the records archive had died around a week ago from some kind of jungle fever and had not gotten around to replacing the man. As a result, there was no way to determine what documents the rangers were looking into.
The magistrate frowned. He looked up and asked his subordinate, “Do you know what this says?”
“Uh, no sir, you didn’t recruit me for my reading ability, which I don't have,” the man replied. “Mostly you hired me to carry papers around for you, and occasionally break some skulls or kneecaps.”
“I know that. I was asking if you understood what all of this means for us.”
“I do not, no.”
The magistrate started to make a snarky reply, but at that moment, an extraordinarily tall woman with long, dark, steel gray hair, blue eyes, and a pale complexion, with wicked looking blackened metal armor covering her body from her toes to nearly her chin, walked through his office door. This was doubly impressive and worrying for two reasons. The first was that the door had been constructed from sturdy, stout oak, and the second was that the woman didn't bother to open said door prior to walking through it.
The woman leveled a malevolent gaze at the men and said, coldly, “What it means for you, is that you're both fucked.”
The magistrate started to speak again, intending to tell his subordinate to get rid of the intruder, but before he managed to complete a single syllable, the woman flicked her wrist, throwing a small object that was little more than a blur, and then his world went dark.
