Pikachu, I choose YOU! (open)

[Straylor Leonard]

Timestamp: during his brief business trip ...

After purchasing his cabbit, and picking it up after it was groomed and such, Straylor decided that it was about time he bonded with the yellow little critter. It was indeed half cat and rabbit ... and it was so damn cute. Stray wondered how masculine carrying it around made him look ... then spotted several girls giggling and little boys pointing and giggling. This made him frown. Straylor was not to be laughed at! With an audible grunt and something short of a curse, he wandered into a public place and placed the caged cabbit on the ground next to a bench. He regarded it several moments and wondered if the creature was indeed worth 3,000 crowns. That was some three cycles' worth of his living stippended as a Consul.

Damn. Thankfully, Elmaryia was not entirely tight on his random expenses (so long as it didn't look suspiciously like pleasure trips with naked women).

Sighing, Straylor shook his head and uncorked a vial of Medonian Red. The little buggers were suppose to love that stuff. Just the smell of it caused Pikachu (that's what he named her) to wiggle happily in her cage. "You want some don't you?" he teased, swirling the contents of the medium sized vial in front of the cage. "Well you gotta work for it!" Straylor nodded and smiled briefly. "Come on, now, transform or something!"

He looked at the cabbit.

The cabbit looked at him.

Nothing happened.

[Lyr Tlansson]

He was finally going to find himself some of that Demiosian cognac!

That was Lyr's first thought when the pirate ship - his pirate ship (well, not really his, except in so far as he sailed aboard it) - landed at Demios. It continued to be is thought when the cap'n finally let his crew off for a few brightenings' carousing.

There was only one problem: he'd sampled every bloody cognac he could get his hands on in the last brightening, and he still hadn't found it!

In a hazy mess, Lyr had finally found himself back out on the street and meandering slowly while muttering to himself about the fire isles and how fething gleeful Marcus would be if he knew that Lyr hadn't been able to find it... how Marcus, his erstwhile assistant Thane, had managed to clamber and claw his way into the vagaran's mind, was anybody's guess. But Lyr harbored some of the direst hatred he'd ever felt toward that man, and so perhaps it was natural that he should think of him when maddened in general.

Under these conditions, with his cognac-stained shirt opened to reveal a good bit of dirty chest-hair and his trusty sword swinging wildly with every step at his side, Lyr walked through the streets of Demios until he saw red.

Literally - red.

And he thought: COGNAC!

(Why, again, must and will remain a mystery; the important thing was, that that's what actually happened) - and then he saw what that "cognac" was being used for....

"Cognac! That's the Demiosian Cognac, or I'll be Borthanas!" The drunk vagaran cried, slurring his words, one hand outstretched toward the vile in Straylor's hand as he made his way toward his sweet-flavored goal. He didn't notice Straylor, nor Pikachu; all he really saw was a tempting vial of red floating in a lovely cognac-flavored haze....

[Straylor Leonard]

Cognac flavored haze or not, Straylor did see Lyr and immediately recognized him for the former Thane of Trysvale turned rouge. The scandalous champion of Secylion was nearly as infamous as Lady Glory herself, but much less witchy. This was both good and bad for the drifter, though certainly much less good than bad. Raising his eyebrow at the commotion both sunshine colored cabbit and her owner regarded the drunk with startled amusement for a second before the pair had to literally jet out of the way of his lumbering hands.

"What in the name of --" but Lyr was already past him and the curse was no longer need. "Don't you go anywhere --" he was about to tell Pikachu but the damned cabbit was no longer her peachy yellow self; instead, she had conveniently transformed into the odd looking rock she magically became in the shoppe. Straylor sighed, suddenly wondering if his cabbit only knew two forms -- and one of them was 'cabbit'. "You!" he growled at the strange fellow "I know you! You're from Trysvale!"

And the stage was set. The fates must have been laughing their arses off cuz never in a thousand eras would Straylor have gambled meeting the former Thane himself. Where had he run off to? No place good he suddenly thought with an inward grin. Why had he run off from his duties? Now that was a pretty good question. Stray crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. "Mr. Tiansson, wasn't it? Remember me? I believe I was Chief Constable before your ... departure."

Now if Lyr decided to get feisty, there was no other way around it than the old fashioned way. Unsheathing his sword in an expertly practiced maneuver, Straylor could easily smack the man with the flat side of his blade. Of course, this was never the most gentlemanly way to sort things out; but it happened to be the most convenient. For Straylor at least. And as it stood, the young Medonian was not patient enough to thwart Lyr's future aggression with evasions and fancy footwork. Plus, he had Pikachu (yes, the rock now) to worry about. And with that thought, Stray threw a glance at the cabbit-turned-rock's former position, hoping that she wasn't trampled on in the shuffle.

[Lyr Tlansson]

No.... Lyr didn't recognize Straylor. As the current Thane of Trysvale knew perhaps only too well, Lyr hadn't exactly been on top of his job those last few months. He'd had other htings to think about - the always infuriating Lynessa, for example, or where in the grounds he could best get a good oggling of the guard Isilde.

In some confusion, therefore, Lyr stared at the unfamiliar character who had accosted him so familiarly and tried to place his features as they wove and dove before his eyes. He squinted, momentarily forgetting his quest for the Demiosian fire cognac as all the concentration his hazy mind could come up with was bent upon the stranger.

Nope... nope... he didn't remember him. But Straylor made sure to introduce himself, and the Jaedaxian slowly began to connect a dot or two. Trysvale... Trysvale's Chief Constable.

What, exactly, did Lyr think of his infamous stint at thane-ing in the small farmer's village? He didn't think about it very much. It was, in many respects, a rather painful and ignominious memory, not so much because Lyr felt himself to have been a bad thane (no, that wasn't it at all!) but because disparate forces had conspired to make him, on the one hand, appear like a bad thane, and, on the other, to have crafted a remarkable series of misfortunes and misadventures in his name there.

So it was distinctly without any sense of pleasure that Lyr learned that the young man standing before him was his very own former Chief Constable. "Oh," however, followed by a ripe string of sea-flavored curses, was all that he could produce for a moment.

One oustanding misadventure, however, came to the fore from the fog: the brightening he'd followed a lead to another Chief Constable's murder (clearly, that Constable hadn't been Straylor, who did appear, whatever else he was, to be fully alive) to his house... we're he'd first got his hands on that fething bottle of Demiosian... and during which it had become apparent that the Chief Constable had had a penchant for contraband cognac.

And now he met another Chief Constable of Trysvale in Demios.

Yes... the dots connected. Not perhaps as they ought to have, but it was rather a curious circumstance after all, wasn't it?

The dots intimated that meeting the Chief Constable in Demios was actually a good thing, and might be very helpful indeed on Lyr's quest. So, while Straylor was preparing for a fight, Lyr grinned ear to ear and clapped the other powerfully on his shoulder.

"My man! Just the one I wanted to see!" he roared for the whole street to hear. "I've been looking all over for that fething Demiosian cognac of yours, you know, the you get... under the table, eh?" And he winked broadly, leaning forward adn lowering his voice (though just slightly, so it didn't actually help very much). "You can get me a leg in, can't you? For old times sake. I'll buy ya the furst bumper!" Lyr ended generously, though the jingle of coins in his wallet was noticeably absent, and had been for quite some time now.

[Straylor Leonard]

Straylor raised a brow and tilted his head quizzically. "Wait" he said before the man, who smelled horrible by the way, leaned forward, winked, and suggested to get a 'leg' into something that related to Demiosian cognac. "I think you have me mistaken for someone else ... sir" Stray said dryly. There was no hope for the man, he decided, he was a run-of-the-mill, tumble-and-bumble drunk. Stray sighed, this time because Pikachu somehow decided to pee in rock form. "Damn ... you really need to go to your potty for that" he muttered before flopping open the cage, or Pikachu's 'home' as he liked to call it. "Go inside" he told the cabbit dangerously "or no wine for you."

Now, his yellow cabbit was not exactly the most obedient creature in Telath. But it seemed to know two things: 1) it would not obey Straylor under any circumstance; and 2) it would only do things in the name of Medonian Red. And so, as expected, the cabbit scurried into the cage and sat there, curled in a cute little ball, waiting for wine time to come along. Its nose twitched as it looked up expectantly while Straylor flipped the cage door close and locked it with a twist.

He turned back to Lyr and decided that it was best if he avoided the former thane altogether. "Well it was a pleasure" Straylor said with a curt inclination of his head "serale then ..."

[Lyr Tlansson]

ooc: I'm getting back into things with Lyr... hope you don't mind!!!

Well, he was a cagey one, wasn't he? Lyr's brow darkened, for he did in fact feel some offense that the Constable didn't let him in to the secret immediately. For he didn't stop doubting his own theory for a second: Trysvale Constables and Demiosian Fire Cognac went together in his brain like... like... cheese and crackers, if you will.

He did, however, shoot a perplexed glance at the cabbit as it hopped into it's cage, wondering why the man had such a pet and what it was for. Was he fatttening it up with wine for his pracenda? It seemed the likeliest reason why the man would carry around a cabbit, and after all, Lyr had known some folks back in Jaedaxia who, in the "bad old brightenings", would fatten up mice for the same purpose. Though not with wine, of course.

"Nice little thing you got there," Lyr poked a finger at the cage and the cabbit, smiling in a way that was meant to be friendly. Maybe the way to Demiosian Cognac lay through a bit of harmless chitchat, just to lay down the framework of friendliness. "Feeding him wine, eh? I bet that makes the flavor even better. But he'll need a bit more fattening up, too, cabbits need some extra work because they're so lean to begin with."

But fearing that he'd maybe said the wrong thing - maybe the man wouldn't like to hear that he hadn't done a good job fattening his cabbit - Lyr added, "But don't worry! I'm sure you'll do a good job of it, and your lady with be right proud to roast him up for you. If you've got a lady, of course. Not that I'd doubt you have one, fine-looking and a Constable that you are; I bet the wenches are all over you, Borthanas!" And the youth grinned again, feeling that, amid the slew of awkward and sometimes contradictory complements, he had to have touched on at least one that would do the trick.