Bar
"You can call me Saxon for now," the bartender told Aratani. He scooped up the bills she'd arrayed as an offering quite neatly in one pass of his left hand and then tossed the stack into a brass vase behind the counter. "Good tips go a long way. I'll see you next round," he thanked her, and then moved on to take a drink order from another patron—a "tall" Phod standing five-foot-two—who was staring at Atarani with a grimace wrinkled across his lips. Evidently she'd taken enough of Saxon's attention, but he looked eager to bury his pudgy snout in his next pint and so quickly forgot the Nekovalkyrja when he was attended to.
After he'd served up the piggy alien's drink, Aratani could hear Saxon tell another bartender, "Going for a break. Handle things here until I'm back." To which the other guy, a wiry guy taller than Saxon with a big grin and a purple mullet, confirmed by nodding while he worked.
Cyberspace
William wasn't offered very many more choices from this access point, but the rest of them shed light on the first page's selection. Both customers and, it seemed, the bar's proprietors used the same access menu. He could tell he'd run into security challenges if he went deeper into any of the options. The Nepleslian's choice now was whether he'd try to scrape the surface for information or brute force his way through whatever digital guardians were employed here.
Code:
<MAINFRAME ACCESS>
<"ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD, WHERE EVERY DRIVER IS DESIGNATED">
MENU (CONTINUED):
1. MUSIC 2. GUNS 3. MAINTENANCE 4. SCHEDULE 5. PAYROLL 6. SECURITY 7. BACK
SYNTAX GUIDE: SPECIFY <1> thru <7>
Behind his avatar, William could tell that the cyberspace fortress' gates had closed behind him. Several of the guard programs patrolling the ramparts above stopped their march and peered down at him through the pixelated palms and made a show of watching his presence here more closely. Perhaps their behavior was nothing. But William was the only person logged in here, and there were no signs that individual sessions were partitioned, so maybe he wasn't behaving like a typical bar guest at One More for the Road. At the end of the day, though, he hadn't been ejected from the server yet.
Stairwell
The ID-SOL guard, it seemed, was a very
cool sort of guy. Neither Sif nor Molli's words moved him. The mountainous man's expression didn't shift at all, and the gaze hidden beneath his shades cut a beam so high over their heads that they had no hope of swiping at it from where they stood. He was entirely unflappable. So whatever he thought about their story remained a mystery.
"No Ramios up there," he told them. "And I don't deal with information. I only deal with the list, which you still aren't on. You haven't justified yourself, so I think it's time to go."
It was right about then that the curtain of orange beads parted again. Into the now-cramped stairwell came the bartender, Saxon, who looked a little surprised at first and then chuckled. He swooped past Sif and Molli and right past the ID-SOL guard.
"Don't fold 'em up too much, Rook," Saxon said. "Their friends just ordered and paid. They got that off-world money," he told the sentry in passing, and then proceeded up the stairs. Once Saxon's footfalls faded, quickly obscured by the bar's lively thrum, the big ID-SOL crossed his arms again in Molli and Sif's face.
"Alright," Rook said. "Things are busy upstairs, you get me? No space for you two right now. Wait your turn. Now scram."
Booth
Rio heard a lot of chatter while she listened. Some passers-by, apparently enlisted Nepleslian Marines, had bragged about their romantic exploits—just before and what they planned to get up to in a few minutes. Another nearby table was host to someone burdening their companions with a life story about being related to a famous starfighter pilot, which seemed ridiculous to both Rio and obviously to everyone else in earshot because there were no famous starfighter pilots. But one bit of info amidst the ceaseless din of drunken conversation stuck out to Rio as she nibbled on her fruit candies.
A table of low city gangsters were hooping and hollering about how the Twenty-Eight Gumtrees a few hundred klicks uptown were blown sky high because they crossed the IPG, and how Ramios was about to be out a few million DAs for the trouble. Apparently the Gumtrees owed him big time, and Yoldeen wouldn't be paying back any of his debts for the next few decades at least!
