Secret Interrogation Roll (Persuasion partially applies)
Chachi smiled and nodded while her brother kept digging the hole deeper. Trying to sell this scam as legitimate was the final confirmation. She marched to the local foreman's office. Flanking Tetlkoto with Oku around the other side, her armor hissing and chittering as the plates shifted in response to potential threats. When Chachi told her that she was going to imprison her brother instead of killing him, Oku sulked for a few minutes, but she soon brightened up. "I'll kill him next time."
The foreman, a thin man in early building, gave the usual gestures of supplication and then at Chachi's wave gave them the room.
She deployed the first part of the speech she'd been composing in her head for the last week, "I want you to understand that this is about trust. You have broken my trust. You went behind my back, your Matriarch's back, to do something frighteningly foolish. You do not have my trust in you as a person. You do not have my trust in your ideas. You can regain it, perhaps, with absolute honesty and obedience from this moment on."
"I don't know what you're talking about," he was a good liar, his face was openly baffled.
"You must take me for a fool! Why do you have a full shipment of mortal blood heading West!"
"I… Don't…?"
"You're planning to trade with the Aby…!"
"SHHHHHH!" she was gratified to see sudden panic on his face, but interrupting her like that was so rude!
"Did you just sush me you…"
He was frantically gesturing. Chachi could see rivulets of Teotl flowing around the office. She shut that down in an instant. She gestured for Oku to restrain him, and her sister grabbed Tetlkoto by the throat and poured lightning into his riverways. He screamed and shuddered while the smell of putrid burning flesh filled the office.
Chachi grimaced, "ease up! Ease up!"
Oku shrugged, "sorry, thought you wanted to get this party started right. I don't know what you mean when you just wave your hand around," she dropped her twitching brother on the ground and the pair waited while he finished vomiting blood and regained some semblance of composure.
"It was just a ward!" he finally gasped out.
"A ward?" Chachi frowned down at her brother.
"For privacy! Do you know a privacy ward?"
Chachi slowly shook her head. Even if she knew one, she couldn't use non-pillar techniques until she progressed her diamond spirit. She looked over at Oku. The warrior shrugged sheepishly, "I know one. It's nothing special."
Similar lines of Teotl flowed out from Oku. Tet sat up and very slowly withdrew a red vial. "Red-3. Can I drink it?" Chachi nodded, and with the help of the elixir he steadied.
Tet sighed and inspected the ward, "you don't just talk about trading with unsavory types. Even if a conehead informant isn't listening in, our rivals have got to have someone scrying you all the time. You can bet they'll jump on any slip. Our HQ is protected with arrays but we can't afford to shield every dinky little office."
Chachi frowned. She could shut down anything below Transformation, but only if she perceived it. A technique to invade her privacy would be stealthy. She'd need to find a solution if she wanted to share sensitive information in the future. Perhaps a ring? His actions made sense, but she didn't apologize. Tet was in the wrong and she had to maintain control over the conversation. She did clear out some of the putrid Teotl Oku put in his riverways. The smell was already fading to crisp air in her presence.
"Fine. So now we can speak freely," he shrugged and made a so-so gesture at Oku's ward but Chachi ignored it, "I know you are planning to use this pearl garden idea as cover for trade with the Ab… Unsavory types."
Tet's eyebrows climbed up his forehead "who told you that? Teo?"
"No," Chachi's frown deepened, "I told him. He was very disappointed. I gathered the evidence myself. Shipments of blood and trash, only valuable to them. The obviously bad deal. The guaranteed profit. Just admit it."
Tet straightened his back and shook his head, "I admit to nothing."
The prodigy sighed, cultivation was so easy, why was business so hard?
Her brother ran his fingers through his long black hair, "I think you need to take another look. Where would I even get crates of blood? It's not like we buy it. Only the charities collect the stuff. I don't know what you mean by garbage. I was loading up goods in high demand out in the islands. Unless, you mean the stuff that's only valuable to mortals we're bringing out for the big grand opening giveaways. Sounds to me like you mistook charity for skullduggery."
Chachi hissed in frustration. No way he could lie himself out of this, "we could have sourced all of it locally. Shipping it out across a whole region is a waste of money. Either you're incompetent or you're lying."
"Not me. Your mom runs the charities, she just hops on my distribution network. I don't check her numbers."
"You tried to sell me on a bad deal!" Chachi could hear her voice raising and controlled it. She needed to keep her cool.
"You mean the pearl gardens? Who told you it's bad? Teo is cowardly and shortsighted. He's so busy watching the fish already in his net that he won't see the whale," Tet shrugged, "bad before doesn't mean bad forever. I have information that daddy Duke is getting frustrated with the stalemate. If he moves to reinforce his daughter they can secure the gardens, and we'll be there to profit when everyone else shied away. Maybe it's a bit more risky than I made it out to be, I'm a salesman. I sell. I believe in this deal."
She was pacing. Stop pacing.
"Are you sure it's me? Really sure? I know it's not me, so if someone in the Clan is trying to trade with them, I'd say it has your dear mother's fingers in it. The blood had to come from her charities. But, I don't know that it's happening at all. Could be a frame job, you think of that? You could be jumping at shadows.
"He's playing you!" Oku growled, "reading you. Misdirecting. Feeding your doubt. Trying to fast talk away the fact that we caught him red handed. Don't let this weasel wiggle out of this! Let me beat the truth out of him!"
"Shut up, worm!" for the first time Tet showed some fire, his face twisted in sudden rage. Oku silently struck him again, her black armor shredding the skin on his face.
"You think this gets the truth you imbecile!" Chachi's brother gasped to the floor, "a forced confession? Torture? I'm innocent! Divine it! Pull it from my mind! Fucking amateurs!"
Chachi put a restraining hand on her sister's shoulder. She stared down at her brother. "Teo believes the evidence points to you as well. Together we've decided to transfer you to Whitewater. You can help production with their new line of elixirs. In the meantime I will get to the truth. If you truly are innocent, you will stay there while I investigate. If you try to escape, I will take it as an admission of your guilt. If I discover you decided to lie to me instead of confessing when you had the chance, I will be displeased."
She burst out of the room, gasping for air. She tried to maintain some semblance of decorum as she rushed past her employees. When she reached the open fisherman's market she couldn't keep up the mask anymore. She sat on the stinking fish corpses, all propriety lost, and sobbed while panicked mortals hovered around her.
"I miss my dad."
---
Chachi and Oku escorted her brother to Whitewater. Production was her next stop on the Grand Tour anyway. The facility was named after Whitewater River, where the water whipped past in a torrential frenzy. The river was unnaturally rich in Teotl and played an important role in some of their earliest elixirs, before they discovered how to process the deadly Heavenspan water. The facility itself wasn't a secret, but it did masquerade as a minor processing plant instead of their most important laboratory. It was a squat building, unassuming and well-used.
She tried her best to ignore her brother on the trip, and he accommodated by maintaining indignant silence. Oku was less restrained and loudly insulted him the whole way. They entered the facility and were greeted by the few employees who actually gathered the White Water. Like all their production employees, they wore cheap white smocks. Easy to replace, and easy to notice accidental contamination. They took the elevator, a minor treasure capable of slow levitation and the only entrance, down to the much larger underground complex. A pair of Teo's people were waiting for them. The large, solemn man with light hair and silver eyes, marking him as a member of the Atlikiti branch, stepped forward and pressed his forehead to the floor.
"Grand Matriarch. We were instructed by the sounding stone to prepare for your arrival. Your brother's quarters are in the heart of the facility. We will find useful work for him."
"You mean my cell?" Tet spat.
"Better than you deserve!" Oku shot back.
The man didn't react, "they are suitable for an honored member of the core family," he said from the floor.
His partner, a woman with darker featured, matched the man's bow, "I will show the Matriarch her facilities if it pleases her."
"Stand and please maintain only casual respect," Chachi responded, "I see no reason to disrupt my own employees."
The tour was uninteresting. Chachi was not so disconnected from her family's business that she'd never seen an array furnace, an electro-purifier, or an essence infuser. All these devices and far more were incorporated into the Cosmic Forge. In fact, on inspection the tools her most cutting edge researchers were using seemed rather crude. If she let them study the forge, perhaps they could improve their own tools?
"As the Matriarch can see, here at Whitewater we use small teams with suitably scaled tools. We focus on producing limited batches of our most difficult elixirs, and on researching new products. Would her eminence like to inspect one of our teams? Team B is doing some fascinating work at the moment."
"You have a strange way of phrasing things. You seem to be avoiding directly addressing me," Chachi commented.
The woman bowed again, "I apologize if I have given offense. I am an adopted member of the… Of your family Matriarch. I was raised as an unimportant lady in the Volcanic Mountain Region. Customs are different there towards immortals of great status."
"You're a lady? A relative of a True Lord?"
"A minor one. I came here to follow my passion of elixir brewing without any distractions and to learn from the great Atlikiti Atalahu."
"Is Team C working on anything now?" Chachi smiled at her own cleverness. Whatever Team B was doing, odds are it was staged for her benefit.
"Umm… Yes. I think so," the tour guide answered.
"Then show me."
Team C was finishing a batch of YELLOW–G–2. Sold as Life's True Kiss, it would significantly enhance the senses of the imbiber for a week. Useless in hungering, marketed mostly to wealthy jaded cultivators looking for a new outlook on life but also useful for operatives willing to pay for an advantage. The final touch was the same for many of their elixirs: dilution. At the brewed concentration it would be far too expensive to sell and would overwhelm the customer anyway. So they watered it down, and one vial became two hundred.
"Everything seems in order," Chachi commented, smiling amicably at the workers. This was the most boring part of the process, but she had to take her lumps after steering away from the whatever show Team B was putting on, "I think it's time I talked to your boss."
The head of production, Atlikiti of the Atalahu clan, was a living legend. He was the oldest living member of the clan, having co-founded it with her father. Chachi found him in his workshop, he didn't have an office. His hair was wild, thin, and white, a sign not of deadly age, but of an old elixir accident. He was fiddling with some kind of liquid metal, and didn't bother to glance up even as the tour guide announced her presence. He dropped a speck of life essence on the metal and hummed thoughtfully as it grew.
"Greetings respected branch head. I'm here to discuss Clan business" Chachi generously prodded. He dipped a wooden spoon into the metal. It came out clean. He frowned.
Chachi cleared her throat. He traded the wood for a chicken bone and the metal clung to it. He smiled.
She shuffled her weight from foot to foot.
She sighed to herself and glanced around the workshop.
Oku broke the awkward stalemate, "hey, yo, old dude. If your face ain't on the floor in five seconds I'm gonna put it there."
Atlikiti looked up briefly, then back to the metal, "what a charming pair of children. I'm doing something worthwhile while I wait for you to say something worth answering. If you want to speak to me, then speak. If you want to fight, then throw a punch. It's been some time since I've had a good brawl. I am the founder of this clan. I did not waste time with formalities with your father and I certainly will not for you simply because you are insecure."
Chachi mentally reviewed what she knew about the reclusive co-founder. She'd never met him in person until now, but he was a frequent topic of conversation. He wanted nothing to do with the management of the business. He refused to meet with partners. He openly disdained salesmanship. He was brilliant at what he did, and that was make elixirs.
"Stand down Oku," Chachi smiled, "you are the sole living founder. But I am the Matriarch. Do you want to be Patriarch?"
"Emperor's Farts, no," he replied while moving around the workshop, "that was the deal. Old Atlahtoani would sell what I make so he could get me ingredients so I could make more. All I care about is the act of creation. What comes before? What comes after? That's not my concern. It's yours. I liked that deal. Don't see a need to change it."
Chachi nodded, "neither do I. But production is a sprawling branch now. You have thousands of workers underneath you at multiple sites. Are you managing them?"
He paused for a second, "when it grew too big to be interesting I delegated to my kids. I bet there's some shuffling around here. Go bother them," he turned to the tour guide, "you, whatever your name is. The Matriarch is lost. She wants to talk Clan business. Find her a chart. Or make her one."
That sounded like a dismissal, and Chachi wanted to leave like a chastised child. I can do better than this.
"What are you working on?" she asked instead, moving closer to the metal.
"This is Exhalted Quicksilver," he responded quickly. The gruffness quickly faded from his voice, "quicksilver is the only living metal. All living things can theoretically cultivate. I've exposed this batch to an exhaltation elixir designed to alloy with the material then I channeled a significant Teotl flow through it in a pattern designed to mimic breath cultivation. If it can reach Hungering I'll be able to shape it in all kinds of ways through elixir exposure, just like a person. Unlike a person, it can grow in size indefinitely and be split into identical parts without compromising its fundamental structure. There are also fewer moral and legal barriers to drinking it."
"Fascinating," Chachi breathed. It really was, "but to what end are you growing a metal cultivator?"
"Can't you see the possibilities!" a manic light shone in his eyes, "a subservient cultivator, with its own Teotl, its own techniques, even its own mind, existing inside you! We'd only need to train it once, then split and bottle, split and bottle, a thousand clones of the same source! This is the future of elixirs! Right before you!"
Oku groaned softly from behind Chachi, "I'm already wearing a living thing. Now you want to have one wearing me? I don't know…"
"Your loss," he sneered, "I am no salesman. Either embrace the future or be left behind. Now you!" he pointed at Chachi, "surely you can see the potential!"
"I suppose?"
The manic light was joined by terrible greed, "then you can see why you should increase my funding?"
"I don't know," Chachi grinned, seeing the power dynamics shift in a moment, "I have a lot of things to consider and our budget is very tight right now. Perhaps I can be persuaded… If I see Production is using my money well."
He matched her grin, "right, right. We run a tight ship here. You'll see, Matriarch. We never waste what we're given."
Secret Oversight Roll
Given recent events, Chachi had one last question for the founder, "You wouldn't happen to know about anything that happens outside of Production?"
He shook his head, "I make an effort not to know."
"Right. Great. So… In Production. Are we doing anything secret I really need to know about? Like, I don't know, treason?"
"I assure you, the Abyssal breeding program was perfectly legal. It's not trade if you steal it. Didn't work anyway. They all died in captivity."
"Right. Great. Anything else like that?"
He shrugged, "We've killed a few rival infiltrators over the years. Technically that's murder? But everyone does it."
Over the next week Chachi tracked down the Production Management Team that handled the logistics of the Production Branch and thoroughly interviewed them. Along with an inspection, she had to agree with Teo's initial assessment. They had nothing to worry about from Production. Whether they were outside recruits or Atlikiti's own children, they all seemed to have deep admiration for the 'legendary brewer.' Following his lead, they built an insulated bubble from the day to day business of the clan. They worked hard, they worked well, and morale was unusually high in Atlikiti's little kingdom. With her arts, she found a few places to cut waste, but overall she was confident Production would keep working so long as they could keep supplying it.
1. Do you believe Tetlkoto when he claims innocence?
[] Yes
[] No
[] I really don't know
2. Will you increase Atlikiti's funding?
[] A little (-1 income)
[] A lot (-2 income)
[] Whatever he needs! (-5 income)
[] He's fine
3. You have voted to build infrastructure. Production could use new tools based on your Cosmic Forge. They won't come close to the Forge itself, but they would be a remarkable improvement and give an edge over the competition.
[] Upgrade the tools (-$5)
[] Leave it alone
