[><] What A Close Vote Folks (Content Alert)
The first two you run into are Ethel and Abigail.
Your jaw just about drops when you see the "punishment" they've gotten in "prison."
"Does the Baron owe you money?" you ask incredulously at Ethel's room in particular. Electricity, a desk, two chairs, a radio, a bed even nicer than yours, and what look like the remnants of a similar meal to what you've had on a plate on the desk. The only difference between the two 'cells' is that Abigail's does not have a radio.
Simon shakes his head in amazement. "I wouldn't give this sort of treatment to someone who owed me a life debt," he said. Ethel, all smiles as usual, steps out of her prison cell like she'd just stepped out of the Palace Hotel. Suspicion rises hotly in your mind, but at the moment it's overwhelmed with shock at the two's treatment.
"Wha- you- how?" is all you can eventually ask. The two Englishwomen (one by race one by birth) look to each other, then Ethel speaks first.
"Oh, we just told him what he wanted to hear, I think. He seemed quite interested in what things were like in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly when I started spewing the most nonsensical racist kak I could think of."
You raise an eyebrow. "He didn't ask about the military situation?"
"Oh, he did, but there wasn't much to tell, so the conversation always turned back to farming and how best to treat the natives." She shrugs. "I suppose he kept me here as leverage against you."
You turn to Abigail, and she smiles. "He wanted to know about armor, of course. So I told him plenty." Before you can voice your shock, she leans in and shushes you. "The walls have ears down here, ma'am. I told him plenty all right, and they'll let his tanks beat most Ja-er, Imp armor, but if any one of the ideas he came up with in the short time I've been here could beat a Grant, I'll eat my hat. And if it can make it fifty miles without getting stuck somewhere, I'll eat my tank."
The next one you ran into is Arthur. His prison cell is more typical, though its desk is pretty big and the toilet and sink both are made of metal, not porcelain like the ones in Ethel or Abigail's cells. His reasoning for being in a cell is much clearer. He was leverage. As, he suspected, were most of the others.
Emmannuelle's cell is a ways away, and identical to Arthur's except the sink and the toilet are one block of metal. You're not sure if that or the lack of any discernible way to clean herself is the cause of her hair, but she steps huffily out of the cell as soon as she can.
"That baron is the most barbarous man I have ever had the displeasure of meeting," she said with a sniff. "Half of every sentence he spoke to me was a backhanded compliment about my interest in learning 'the wizened ways of a savage race', and the other half denigrating-" you suspect a great deal of emphasis on the second syllable and the subsequent consonant on the baron's part "-the school of magecraft with which I have chosen to employ my talents! He even went as far, when I became uncooperative, to suggest I might have nègre heritage myself!"
She takes a deep, calming breath, then lets it out. "He kept me here, regardless, because of my skills at healing. Ones he believed you would most desperately need if you were to escape."
There's no argument there. You do need her help. Weronika is not far away, and her story is the same, largely, without the racism. In fact, according to her the Baron seemed almost disappointed that the Poles had not sided with Germany against the menaces Hitler had led it against. He must have caught something of her barely-contained rage, though, because he only 'interrogated' her once.
Then, after nearly half an hour of nothing, not even other prisoners, you find Liselot and Marian sharing a dungeon.
"Wow."
It's all you can say. It is a dungeon, by any definition of the term. The room is about five feet tall, with a bare pair of straw mats in piles on the floor. Even as you watch, something skitters across the floor and out the cell door. There's no seating, no sink, just the mats, a hole in the floor, and chains on the wall. To which Liselot and Marian are both attached, quite a ways away from the mats, and apparently still in the uniforms they had when the train crashed. As to the uniforms, it had either been longer than you think since the train crash, or the baron had been using them to plow a field somewhere.
You point Arthur at the chains and he starts trying to rip them apart, to no avail. Even tapping into that well of strength that is his lupine form doesn't do it, so instead you have Roy use his new sword, and it cuts cleanly through the metal. Suspiciously cleanly. You eye the black jian a little more warily.
"What happened?" Your question is not really directed at Marian. You have a pretty good idea why she's in some medieval dungeon. You're not really sure what her actual political views are, but she works for the Red Army and has vaguely socialist views, and even before you met him you would have known that someone who fought on the White side of Russia's civil war would have a particularly low view of such people. If they even considered them people at all, and you doubt that's the case here.
"He..." Liselot lets out a hacking cough. "There are some Basotho men employed by the fortress I called home. That... monster, described them in most un-Christian terms."
She looks up at you. Coughs again, longer this time. "I objected."
You turn to Emmanuelle. "Can you heal them?"
She opens her mouth, then holds her chin with a pensive look. "I can certainly do something," she says. "Without my equipment... getting them into fighting condition may be beyond me. But I can at least prevent them from slowing our escape... probably."
Two rolls for Liselot and Marian, against a +2 and a +3. Passing the roll will get them 'fighting fit', but anything over a 0 for the result will heal them at least a little. Anything below that will do nothing.
