Well, I'd already used Ford Prefect, and I didn't want to skip to Lincoln Douglass. ^^
**********
I've seen plenty of Places What Serve Booze in my time. Bars, pubs, lounges...
...and this is definitely a dive.
The folder of information I'd gotten from Daimler was very thorough- surprisingly so, as a matter of fact. The reason it's called 'bounty hunting' and not, say, 'bounty retrieval' is that you usually don't know where the target is when you get one. You have to track them down yourself. Half the job is finding out where to look, preferably in a way that doesn't tip off your quarry too soon.
You can imagine my surprise when the dossier on Yugo Slavonovic didn't just have a physical description (Neanderthal), list of crimes (petty violence, mostly, and lots of it), skill rundown (meager), and list of habits (many, all odious at best and illegal at worst), but an entire section full of probable locations. Crazy thing even had street addresses, spatial coordinates, and his usual hours for each... establishment.
I found myself pushing open the improvised door of... well, the dossier called it 'The Drunken Rutter'. The sign outside, half-rotted away and dangling at an angle from half its post, was a bit more crude about it, and that's all I've allowed myself to remember about it.I just call it 'The Horrible Smell', from the first thing I noticed when I'd opened the door. The eponymous stench was bad enough I reflexively cut out my sense of scent. Half a second later, I'd forgotten everything about the smell (save that there was a smell, it was horrible, and I'd chosen to forget it), and moved inside.
If anything, the inside was worse than the outside. All the decay that gave the outside its... charm... plus uncounted years of filth. Oh, and the place was dirty, too- all sorts of mold and vomit and who knows what else, covering great swathes of the floor. Only a few places- the most commonly used paths, mostly- were even remotely close to clean, and that only because they were covered in hat looked like fresh straw.
Outside the dump, an iron ball fell up off the ground. Once it got about thirty feet off the ground, it fell sideways for twenty feet, and began to roll (forward and to the left) downhill. Inside the dump, I fell upward about three inches, and began to move my legs as though I was walking. The Air Comet I'd formed was doing all of the work, though; with my shoes no longer touching the befouled ground, I didn't actually have any traction.
I drifted my way into the dive, instantly adjusting to the low light and loud denizens, and began to search. Three seconds later, I stopped searching. Yugo was sitting right at the bar- big as life, and six times as ugly- slamming down mug after mug of... actually, I'm not sure what that was. Might've been grog. Might've been swill. Definitely wasn't appetizing.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.
**********
I've seen plenty of Places What Serve Booze in my time. Bars, pubs, lounges...
...and this is definitely a dive.
The folder of information I'd gotten from Daimler was very thorough- surprisingly so, as a matter of fact. The reason it's called 'bounty hunting' and not, say, 'bounty retrieval' is that you usually don't know where the target is when you get one. You have to track them down yourself. Half the job is finding out where to look, preferably in a way that doesn't tip off your quarry too soon.
You can imagine my surprise when the dossier on Yugo Slavonovic didn't just have a physical description (Neanderthal), list of crimes (petty violence, mostly, and lots of it), skill rundown (meager), and list of habits (many, all odious at best and illegal at worst), but an entire section full of probable locations. Crazy thing even had street addresses, spatial coordinates, and his usual hours for each... establishment.
I found myself pushing open the improvised door of... well, the dossier called it 'The Drunken Rutter'. The sign outside, half-rotted away and dangling at an angle from half its post, was a bit more crude about it, and that's all I've allowed myself to remember about it.I just call it 'The Horrible Smell', from the first thing I noticed when I'd opened the door. The eponymous stench was bad enough I reflexively cut out my sense of scent. Half a second later, I'd forgotten everything about the smell (save that there was a smell, it was horrible, and I'd chosen to forget it), and moved inside.
If anything, the inside was worse than the outside. All the decay that gave the outside its... charm... plus uncounted years of filth. Oh, and the place was dirty, too- all sorts of mold and vomit and who knows what else, covering great swathes of the floor. Only a few places- the most commonly used paths, mostly- were even remotely close to clean, and that only because they were covered in hat looked like fresh straw.
Outside the dump, an iron ball fell up off the ground. Once it got about thirty feet off the ground, it fell sideways for twenty feet, and began to roll (forward and to the left) downhill. Inside the dump, I fell upward about three inches, and began to move my legs as though I was walking. The Air Comet I'd formed was doing all of the work, though; with my shoes no longer touching the befouled ground, I didn't actually have any traction.
I drifted my way into the dive, instantly adjusting to the low light and loud denizens, and began to search. Three seconds later, I stopped searching. Yugo was sitting right at the bar- big as life, and six times as ugly- slamming down mug after mug of... actually, I'm not sure what that was. Might've been grog. Might've been swill. Definitely wasn't appetizing.
My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.
I've been writing a bit.