The Pocoto Investment

“And finally we’ve come to the worst of Krim’s fine drinking establishments, the King’s Armpit.” Matilda Scarletstrike swung open the door so that Ellison Davo and his brother, Jerald Rex Crew, could walk in. Jerald hesitated in the doorway. The Krim’s Armpit could be a little overwhelming to newcomers. It was a bit of an…

“It’s a little firm called Pocoto,” said Norbert. Ellison restrained himself from giving Matilda a high five. That’s what they were looking for. Instead, he walked closer to Jerald and Norbert and pulled at Jerald’s sleeve. “We turn left up ahead,” he told him. Jerald glanced at Norbert, who sped up his sales pitch. “Several…

“We only had a small window of opportunity to grab him,” Matilda explained to the client, Count Simond. “The building had multiple exits. If we’d taken the time to get enough bodies together to guard all the exits, we would have lost the chance to grab him. But something spooked him, he ran out the…

Matilda and Ellison walked Jerald back to the main gate. The company he ran, Crewe Investigations, now had its main office in a business district on Facepage. Jerald had been renting space in a nice office park, but that world had been swallowed up by Gobble. Given the choice of being part of the Gobble…

The docks were located to the west of city center, where Krim River flowered into the Bay of Krim. They were easy enough to find. Ellison could simply follow the fishy smell. Krim’s owners were remarkably unimaginative when it came to coming up with names, but the docks were a true work of art. The…

At the Crow’s Nest Cafe, Ellison and Matilda grabbed beers and a bowl of fried skirrets and sat at one of the two tables on the balcony with a clear view of the docks. They could see Ander’s ship down below them. It looked too small to make a long sea-voyage. “It must be insanely…

Ellison deliberately avoided looking at Pompas’ ship as they walked past it, for fear of somehow spooking him. “So, going over the edge of the world, huh!” he said, in a extra-high pitch. “I don’t know, the weather looks a little cloudy,” Matilda said, looking up at the sky. “Right, right. You want to sail…

“I’m sure my boyfriend will be back any minute now,” Ellison said. “I’m not in the way, am I?” The sailor grunted and looked up at the setting sun, the same way that someone on a different, more civilized, world might pointedly check their watch. While Ellison had been keeping an eye on Pompas’ boat,…

Ellison got to the Simond Fine Art Gallery first, even though he made a detour to the Central Plaza so that he could pop back out through the main gate and change into his regular avatar. For a few minutes, he was worried that Pompas had somehow managed to escape again. Then he saw them…

Two weeks later, Ellison and Matilda met up with Simond and the other investors at the docks to see the boat set sail. She’d been renamed the Nina. Ellison had been following the gossip in the bars. After Pompas had been marched through the city, word had spread quickly about what happened, and Krim residents…