The Open Market




"Fern!  Or maybe Rocket!  Or Dad said that Fido was what my great-great-grandfather called his dog.  Whatever a dog is; he said it like an alphadon but with bigger ears and a smaller tail and fluffier, but it doesn't have feathers so it sounds kinda boring and you couldn't have ridden it," the girl says in one breath.

Ajax doesn't seem to find anything objectionable about the scanner, and the father employs it, running it over the egg at a distance of about three feet, squinting at the screen.  Finally, he nods.  "Looks healthy and viable.  Well, Channa if this one is what you want...?"  The little girl nods furiously, nearly vibrating out of her skin.  "Then 100 seems fair to me too."

The woman who'd made the comment about the scanner just snorts and moves on her way as the father digs out a rarity, a genuine SATI token wrapped in leaves.

--

Nests and Nooks

Jass comments further to Roam as he pokes at his "alarm".  "You look like an outdoors kind of guy, not like these lab-bound higher-ups all over here.  You think we need all this techy nonsense?  Just gets in the way and makes everything worse.  Never really works right, eh?"

"I'm very happy I could help you out.  I hope this little one grows up to be well-behaved, helpful, and a good mount for you, Channa," she says to the girl.  Coralian doesn't react to the SATI token.  As long as it spends, currency is currency, and she has seen them a few times before.  She passes the egg as she receives the token.  "I hope the rest of the Walk brings you as much luck as today."  Coralian hands the little girl the plasic blocks she'd gotten from the time anomoly earlier.  "These are for you.  Have fun with them.  Build a little bit."

After they've left Coralian tucks the token into a secure interior pocket.  No use tempting fate.  She's still got a few spices, saps, and food roots left after the osteon's purchases, and other assorted bits she's scavenged, so she'll remain in her spot a bit longer.  If she's able to sell out this morning, she'll be freer to enjoy the rest of the festivities and perhaps make some business connections.  She pats Ajax lovingly, hops atop his shell into a cross-legged seat, and keeps an eye out for wandering food vendors.  Sales can work up an appetite!
This message was last edited by the player at 22:33, Fri 04 Oct 2019.

Roam looks at Jass confused a moment.  "Well for better or worse, that's why we're all here.  I greatly prefer being out on the trails if I can help it.  What about you Jass?"  Roam kept scanning the people wandering through the area.  He checked on Tarla to make sure she wasn't about to eat the other inhabitants of the inn.
"Maybe we should walk a touch girl.  Idle hands and such."  He patted her snout and called to Jass.  "Back later.  See you man."

Leaving the odd man and looking for something better to do, Roam leaves Nests and Nooks, Tarla at his heels.  Keeping a careful eye out, he doesn't see anyone else from Haven in the crowd, which is perhaps all to the good.  He passes out of the inn and tavern district and into the commercial ones, which are still open.  Some even have electricity, a luxury in most places, but much more common in Kelanio.  Eventually his path takes him to the open market, where small-time merchants are selling whatever they could make or haul that doesn't demand the display space and patrolling of the main market that will open tomorrow.

Most of the folks here are looking for bargains ahead of the festival, unwilling to deal with the more established operations or crazy crush that will happen tomorrow.  There are virtually none of Kelanio's elite here; most of the shoppers and sight-seers are wearing clothes that have seen a lot of hard use and wear, some still thick with road dust.  Over to one side, you see Coralian and Ajax at a food stall, pondering over the choices.

One exception is a woman with short brown hair on a large struthiomimus, wearing brand-new SATI-issued black clothing, complete with zippers, bearing a bow on her back as she looks around eagerly.  Her dino steps hesitantly through the crowd, sometimes stumbling in the press of traffic.

As Roam and Tarla move through the crowd, they can hear a bit of a commotion up ahead, then some raised voices, and finally some screams!  The crowd begins to boil and scatter as you see two large hadrosaurs honking and dashing through the crowd, heedless of the people in their way!



"Thank you lady!  Thank you Ajax!" the girl says, and hugs the egg to her briefly before placing it in a backpack and carrying it very carefully.  Over the next hour or so Coralian can sell the rest of her items to various other travelers, mostly those who want to cook on their own and avoid the higher prices in the city.  With everything sold, she hunts for food, and soon finds a vendor with a cart who's selling deep-fried root vegetables and totorix cutlets, spiced and seared.  Whilst examining the choices, Coralian hears a commotion near her, and suddenly the crowd starts screaming and scattering as a pair of frightened hadrosaurs start running through the crowd, threatening to start a stampede!

Coralian, aware of the vulnerable masses around her, rushes atop Ajax as her mind frantically strategizes.  Grabbing straps to keep her balance, she shouts to her companion, "Run beside them!  Maybe we can calm them, or at least corral them away from the people."  She hangs on for dear life as Ajax takes off, thinking of any way to minimize the damage.
This message was last edited by the player at 15:47, Wed 09 Oct 2019.

Roam tensed as he felt the hurried footfalls impacting into the ground.  He turned quickly and saw the Hadrosaurs running down the street.  Screams started to fill the air and the smell of fear flooded every nose with the panic starting.
Off to the right was an area slightly less occupied than the others.  Roam turned urgently to Tarla, "Please, I need you to chase them over there.  I know you know how.  I also know the smell of everyone afraid is making you drunk and you want to eat them all.  Please Tarla, chase them over there so no one gets hurt."

Roam made eye contact with the raptor and pleaded with the creature.  Tarla just stood, looking at him.  She seemed locked in place, then swift as a thought she was moving and snapping at the Hadrosaurs to get them going where Roam had asked.
He sighed with relief.  You would think after all this time it would be easier to communicate with that raptor, but no.  She still made him pay for every request dearly.  In the end she almost always did what was right, but what happens when she didn't?

Tarla, after a touch of convincing, begins to run and nip at the hadrosaurs' heels.  Soon after Tarla moves, Ajax, Coralian on his back, begins to run beside them, using his bulk to put himself between the hadros and the better part of the crowd.  Between the two, they start to push the hadros over to one of the sparser areas of the market.  As they do, people run out of the way, hauling their children and chiding their dinos out of the path.  As one couple runs, however, their eager and loyal family-sized pteradon screeches and bates its wings, clearly trying to spook the hadros away from its humans!  The hadros snort and plunge, clearly caught in a moment of indecision between charging, fleeing, or fighting!

Coralian tries to get the hadrosaurs' attention to calm them down, but they are far too freaked out by the pteradon to notice.  Hoping to mitigate the potential damage, she directs Ajax to keep himself between the rampaging duo and the bulk of the bystanders.

Roam watched with a growing sense of unease as the Pteradon started squawking and flapping its wings menacingly to defend its humans.  Roam admired it, but knew this was not good for the situation.
How could he help defuse the situation?
Roam grabbed his camera and set the flash to high.  A couple closeups with a flash should dazzle it enough to get everyone out of the way.

Ajax continues to run, protecting most of the crowd with his body, though Coralian is unable to calm the hadros.  Roam uses the flash of the camera on the pteradon, which screeches and flaps skyward.  The hadros continue to plunge head until they reach the tall stone-and-synth panel walls, coming to a plunging, snorting halt, trumpeting out their frustration and anger at whatever had made them run.  The humans and dinosars keep a wide berth (some making the berth wider by the moment as they vacate the open market entirely) as the hadros still look agitated enough to run again at the slightest provocation.

Siezing the opportunity, now that the charging dinos are stopped and lacking a focus for their terror, Coralian again tries to calm them.  She holds a relaxed posture and makes quiet, gentle sounds.

Coralian comes in with soothing noises, calming gestures, and Ajax's solid presence.  They sway back and forth, make a few false starts, but between you, Ajax, Roam, and Tarla, you're able to corral them and get them to simmer down.  After a tense twenty minutes, the hadros flop down on the ground, exhausted by their panicked run.  Behind Coralian and Roam comes a few slow claps.  A grinning older man in the conservative spidersilk suit sometimes seen on SATI higher-ups puts his hands together one more time before stepping towards you both.  His head is shaved, his skin dark brown, he has neat white and pale blue tattoos across the base of his skull and down his neck, and bears a glimmer of rare circuitry down one sleeve.  A small black and white piski, a sort of miniature pteradon not much bigger than a few pounds, perches on his shoulder.

"A masterful display!  And so apt on the even of the Wild Walk.  I was going to call in the experts with tranq darts, but that wasn't needed.  Who are you, skilled strangers?" he asks, his voice deep and resonant.

Coralian looks slightly confused.  "Maybe we should ensure this pair is safely confined before we risk them getting spooked again?  Conversation can wait a bit."  Her voice is friendly, and just loud enough for the suited man to hear.

She nods to him before dismounting from Ajax. She resumes making soothing noises toward the hadrosaurs.  Assuming they're not skiddish, she'll even approach to stroke them and look for injuries (and maybe signs of what spooked them in the first place).

Roam ignored the man trying to congratulate them, for the time being.  He held his arms out to the Hadrosaurs and slowly calmly stepped toward them, one step at a time.  He breathed in slow and exhaled through his mouth just as slow.  Roam wanted the beasts to calm down with him.
Any little jitter and he just stopped moving and kept breathing for them to hear and calm.  His eyes never left them.

Out of the corner of his eye, watched Coralian approach them as well.  "What spooked them?  Did you see?"

"They were already charging when I saw them, and I didn't see anything behind them."  Coralian's voice is quiet and soothing, unrelated to the information she's providing.  Her attention doesn't waver from her efforts to calm the recently charging pair.

The hadros slowly calm down under Coralian's soothing.  While she doesn't see any obvious thing in their path that might have spooked them, it could have been something like an unexpected loud sound or unusual sight, though most dinos in Grevakc are habituated to a certain level of accommodation around people.  If a dino was skittish around the strange, the owner would have no reason to subject them to the Wild Walk.

"Of course, of course," the man says as Coralian deals with the dinos.

Roam approaches as well, Tarla at the ready, continuing the calming process.

They both discover something as they work on soothing the hadros.  Both have small, starburst-shaped burn marks, new ones, near their hindquarters.  These could be from electrical ammunition, cyphers, or what some drovers call "quikstiks", a kind of jumbo-sized cattle prod used to move large dinos.  But you generally don't see those outside of larger herding situations.

The man has sent his piski off while Roam and Coralian work, and eventually the dino flyer comes back.  Soon after come two men in SATI uniforms, bearing batons and lasers.  He speaks to them quietly and they disperse into the crowd to aid with the other guards who are trying to deal with the resultant chaos.

"Those two are going to see if they can find their owners.  Are those two calm enough that I can scan their DNA for ownership?" he asks.

When Coralian notices the fresh damage mark, she inconspicuously nudges Roam to bring his attention to it.  She frowns briefly.

After the man makes his request, she says, "If you must.  Ajax, watch your step around the man."  Something about this situation seems very ... artificial to Coralian.  She resists the urge to loosen her axe in its hip strap.  Either the SATI guards would be peacekeepers or they wouldn't.  Either way, her tool would make little difference.

The man takes a few steps closer to the hadros and rubs a finger over his eye, making it turn a brilliant blue.  He stares at the dinosaurs for a few moments, blinks twice, and his eye goes back to normal.  "Thank you.  I'll get that through the database and see if anything comes up.  Hopefully the owners will come back soon; the crowd might have swept them along.  I'm Zashran Sambre, at your service, paleogeneticist and bio-circuitrist.  Might I have the pleasure of your names?"

"I am Coralian Redfern.  Generally, I gather what I can from the forests to supply various villages and outposts.  I'm only in town for the Wild Walk."

With the continued calm of the hadrosaurs, Coralian feels comfortable looking around a bit more and taking in more of Zashran and the surroundings.

Roam looks at the others, then scans the crowd.  The sweat is beaded on his forehead, and slowly trickles down.  Finally satisfied that the situation was under control, he turned to the newcomer.  "I'm Roam Linden." 
Roam looked to verify Coralian and Ajax were unharmed.  Like him, they seemed fine for the exertion they underwent.  Tarla was just getting warmed up and feeling anxious to hunt.  Roam would have to take her out of the city soon.

Coralian, you see people slowly drifting back, some laughing a bit now that the danger is over.  People are picking up their stalls, while the presence of the SATI guards keeps the theft of loose articles to, well, a less-blatant level.  A few people have been bowled over in the crowd, others hurt in the crush, and it looks like everyone is either getting up or getting some kind of attention.  You see some people looking at your little group, but no one seems to be staring unduly, aside from one young woman wearing very bright and new SATI clothing, sitting astride a large struthiomimus and staring raptly at you both.

Zashran smiles as both rescuers introduce themselves.  "Coralian, Roam, it is good to meet you.  I have... a proposal, as it seems you are both people for whom the wild calls more strongly than most, and it's clear your ability with dinosaurs is skill well-earned and oft-experienced.  I have a colleague, one Ms. Lewis, who is an excellent bioengineer.  However, she has lived all her life in Kelanio, and truthfully the vast majority of it in the Salmon Center labs.  She has developed an interest in taking her experiments to the field, to observe the behavior of modified dinosaurs in the wild.  She even spent some time developing some skill with a bow before bombarding her supervisors with requests to get her into the wilderness.  I owe her a debt, so I promised I'd help her find some people to assist her in her research."

Zashran lowers his voice slightly and his expression becomes more serious.  "Ms. Lewis is an excellent researcher, but has a highly romanticized view of life outside Kelanio. Frankly, we'd hate to lose her in the labs, and dread to think of her out there, even with help.  I have interest in hiring you, if you'd be amenable.  I do want you to keep Ms. Lewis safe, but also... I want her miserable.  We'd rather see her have one uncomfortable experience than several increasingly risky ones.  If she wants to observe experiments in the wild, then that is what remote recording devices are for!  Please, would you be willing to give her a safe but brutally honest excursion into the 'deepest jungle' so she'll come back home quickly?  I would be willing to pay quite handsomely for your time and effort in this endeavor."

Coralian continues stroking the hadros to calm them, at least until their human partners arrive.  If anyone passes by with anything the dinos would eat, she'll grab it and feed it to them, tossing a few nautils back to whoever they came from.

To Zashran, she says, "I'm certainly willing to discuss hiring on as a guide.  I'd like to know more, of course.  Heading into the jungles unprepared is not a mistake I plan to make."

Roam narrowed his eyes.  “I don’t understand, there are still SATI stations that have not gone rogue or splintered off.  Why not just transfer her to one of these stations?  What is the goal here?  I have led a fair share of SATI people on hunts or guided them, this wouldn’t be anything special.....
He opened and closed his mouth several times, about to say something different each time.  Finally he shut up and just shrugged his shoulders.  Fine.

Zashran suddenly looks off into the distance, though from the peculiar cast to his eye, you realize he is probably looking at something through a datalink of some kind.  "Let us discuss things further when we're not standing on our feet amidst minor disasters.  My people found the hadros owners, and they're on their way."

Within a few minutes a frantic pair of young men come and chirp to the hadros. The dinos look up eagerly and stomp towards them, snuffling the young men and making the odd humming sound of their contentment.  "Where did you go, Eggy?  I didn't know the osteon's story was going to have special effects like that, I swear, or I would have been watching you sooner!  Don't scare me like that again!" one of them says, stroking the hadro with clear affection.  The other young man, likely a relative, perhaps a cousin, mutters meaningless soothing sounds as he greets his hadro with relief.

When asked, Eggy's owner will say, "We were watching an osteon do a storytelling, and there was a time terror in the story.  He used some flashpowder to make a really big bang and light flash for the effect, and then I think someone backed into Eggy at the same time.  He blundered right into Migs and they were off before we could stop them.  The crowd got so bad we couldn't see them and got separated.  Thank you for stopping them before they got hurt!"

As Coralian accepts the thanks of Eggy and his companion, she thanks her lucky stars that she wasn't at story time herself.  She still keeps a wary eye on the hadros, their newfound owners, and the businessman who 'just happened to come along at the right time'.

To Zashran, she says, "Where would you like to treat us to a meal so that we can negotiate and learn more?"