Chapter 31.2: Minkus' Way

“You’ll— what?” Minkus asked. His sadness gave way to an amalgam of joy and confusion. He held a hint of caution, though.

“I’ll help you find your sister and Ventyr,” she repeated. If she hadn’t felt sheepish before, she was starting to now.

Minkus still seemed to keep his excitement contained. “And you need to talk to Wepp?”

“Yes,” Penny said, setting her jaw. “Our little friend knows things I want to know. I’m sure of it.”

Minkus squinted at her almost suspiciously, stepping aside for a passing Rata Sumian. “Penny,” he said, “we can’t do to him what we did before. Not here, not anywhere. We were wrong.” His tone was pleading, though he stood fully erect.

“Biggie, I…” She stopped, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. The words had begun coming out of her before she had any idea what she was really going to say. She searched the lines of mortar between the stones at their feet.

“You’re right,” she finally said, opting to begin again. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe we can’t do that again, but we need to do something. We need to talk to him and figure out why Skixx killed that guy, what he was after, who sent him—anything. We need information, Minkus.”

Minkus snapped through a surprisingly quick series of emotions, moving rapidly from relief to embarrassed pride and finally landing on something like skeptical curiosity. That one made Penny squirm. Since their meeting, she’d seen plenty of expressions on his animated face, but skepticism had never been one of them. Now here it was, suddenly in his repertoire, and despite her efforts, she couldn’t shake the guilt rising up in her again, not for the girl this time, but for this.

“Why do we need to know those things, Penny?” asked Minkus.

She grimaced again, pointing back at the peacemaker headquarters. “You heard those guys. They’ve got nothing on these Inquest people and no jurisdiction where you want to go. If we don’t do something ourselves, the people responsible for leaving that girl without a father will get away with it. Can you let that happen?”

Sorrow replaced his skepticism, and Minkus crossed his arms, closing in on himself a little. “Penny,” he said, looking up at her, “I just don’t know. That’s not really what we’re trying to do—getting even, I mean. I just want to protect our friends and equip the Vigil with what they need— what we think they need, anyway.”

“Isn’t justice one of your guardian things? Deep magics or something? That’s what you’re always saying, right?”

He winced, frowning hard at the statement. Penny could almost see the gears cranking in his mind.

“Yes,” Minkus admitted, tugging at his ear. “The role of the guardian is to surrender to greater magics: compassion, love, kindness, justice.”

She’d heard him say this several times to different people, and it always seemed to bolster his spirits. This time, though, he slowed with each word of the mantra, seeming more conflicted.

He squinted at her in deep, almost pained thought, and she got that strange feeling he’d given her more than once: that he was seeing far more of her than most people did. What did he know?

Gods, she thought, still waiting for him to respond, what doesn’t he know? He knew she was thinking about that asura girl. He knew she felt the weight of responsibility for what had happened. She didn’t know how, but she was almost certain Minkus knew how that knowledge throbbed inside her, stirring up fury and fear from a lifetime of knowing what that girl was going through and was about to go through. They’d never talked about it, her past—she’d made sure of that. She didn’t even like thinking about it herself, but somehow he still knew.

“Is it really justice?” Minkus asked after his long, thoughtful silence. “Is that what you want, Penny?”

She suppressed a shiver. “What else would it be?”

He inspected her further: her face, her posture—the very way she twiddled at the straps of her pack. She stopped it abruptly.

“Biggie, you already have schematics for that magic-defense projector thing. I helped you copy them, and I understood at least that much of what I was looking at.”

He nodded solemnly.

“You’re already thinking it’ll turn into a fight,” she went on. “I’m just saying that we could make it an informed fight. For a good reason. All your right-and-wrong stuff—we’d be making a wrong right and all that. That’s what your guardian code is all about, isn’t it?”

He nodded pensively, still eyeing her with that mournful, assessing gaze.

“Alright,” he said. “We’ll talk to him. Maybe— well, maybe there is something we can learn. But, Penny, let’s please do it my way.”

She cocked her head. “Your way? What’s that supposed to mean?”

He sighed. “Well, it’s just that when we did this your way, we knocked him unconscious and turned into kidnappers.” The words put an even more uncomfortable look on his big face. “It was wrong, and we should not— I won’t do it again.”

Blinking widely, Penny absorbed his words. He wasn’t wrong, and it wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned how it bothered him. With a shrug, she assented. “OK, what’s your plan then?”

Minkus shrugged, both resolute and uncomfortable as his shoulders rose nearly to his drooping ears. “We talk to him. Politely.” 

Penny blinked at him again, slowly raising a hand to her face. There was no arguing with him, she knew that; she had no ground to argue from, and the truth was, for the first time, she didn’t know if she even wanted to. For too long, nothing she’d done had ended the way she’d intended, all the way back to that business deal with the angry norn. Her contract with the Vigil, her deal with Skixx, ownership of her shop, the kidnapping of Wepp, and the girl— gods, what in Tyria made her think this would have been any different. She didn’t trust Minkus’ politeness plan either, but, gods, it couldn’t go any worse than anything she’d done lately, and she was tired of failing so miserably.

She shook the thoughts away and nodded. “Yeah, fine. We’ll do it your way. But what happens if polite doesn’t work?”

Suddenly that goofy grin shot across Minkus’ face. “What if it does?”

Penny buried her face in her hands. Sometimes this asura was as trying as he was innocent.

The two waited a few yards from the westernmost entryway to the peacemaker headquarters, but it wasn’t long before they were ushered away by a security golem. Despite Penny’s protests and repeated steps away from the machine’s advances, it insisted that loitering was prohibited on peacemaker premises and drove them off. It followed them closely behind until they were at an “acceptable range” from the steps. That acceptable range, as it turned out, put them in a small bazaar around a circular structure not fifty yards from the peacemaker facility, where they waited with an eye on the peacemaker's stairs. To Penny’s discomfort, the golem kept looking back at them, but from where they stood, they could see all three stairways out of the headquarters, and that was enough. Wepp had to come out eventually.

Another hour or so passed, and still they waited. Needing to stretch, Minkus wandered off to see one of the vendors, while Penny remained hunched on a short ledge carved in the edge of the round structure at the center of the little group of merchant stalls.

To her right, one seller stood at the top of a stack of tiered, granite shelves, ranting endlessly about the brilliance of his innovations for home-cleaning.

To her left was an asura woman selling “Cat toys and peripheral items,” a tagline she repeated incessantly to passing shoppers. Instead of the floppy, triangular hats that were so common among these people, this female donned what appeared to be cat ears. Penny couldn’t help but glance at this one from the corner of her eye every so often, in part because she kept catching the female playing with a ball of feathers when she thought no one was looking.

If Wepp didn’t come out quickly, Penny could not be held responsible for what she would do to that cat toy and the ridiculous woman playing with it.

Finally, as Minkus returned from the opposite side of the little market, Penny noticed movement on the peacemaker's stairs. He began to say something to her, but she silenced him and pointed to the distant shape of an asura rising up into the dim, fluorescent light of the plaza. Both quieted, shrinking a little into the trading milieu as they concentrated their gazes.

A slight gleam from the top of the figure’s head indicated baldness, and the body coming up over the landing was narrow at the top and somewhat bulbous at the bottom. His steps were tired, almost bedraggled, but he stopped at the top of the steps, scratching his horseshoe-bald head and scanning the landscape for something. As the figure’s gaze scanned past Penny, he stopped and pointed.

“Oh gods, he sees us,” she rasped. “If you want to have a chat your way, you better hurry.”

Surprised, Minkus lunged forward in the direction Penny pointed.

Because he’d already spotted her, there was no longer any reason for Penny to stay put amid the vendors in that little bazaar, as she and Minkus had initially planned, but she also didn’t want to get too close to the two asura. Minkus would get the first shot at coaxing information out of him. At first Penny had argued that she could do it as well as he could, having had years of sales and business under her belt—she could be charming when she wanted to be, after all. But it didn’t take much convincing for her to concede that recent experience had perhaps given Wepp a bad taste in his mouth for both of them, but especially for her.

So, she stood, forty yards off and tracing the edges of her pistol with a finger, waiting to see if “polite” would prevail. If it didn’t, if Wepp wouldn’t cooperate, Penny honestly didn’t know what she would do.

Her ponderance was interrupted, though.

Already Minkus was on his way back to her, with Wepp walking alongside him. Each had that quintessentially bouncy, asuran stride as they walked quickly, purposefully, back through the crossing traffic.

“Well, damn,” Penny whispered to herself. “It worked.”

As they got closer, their expressions became clearer: Minkus was all grins, but Wepp bore a complex mix of things Penny couldn’t quite decipher. Brow furrowed and thin lips pursed tightly together, Wepp looked as vindictive as ever she’d seen him. Even strapped to a chair, he’d not looked as set on retribution. Maybe Minkus’ plan hadn’t worked so well after all.

Penny scanned him for visible weapons. None were evident, but she floated her hand over its holster just the same.

Wepp froze, less than ten yards away now, his eyes flitting between Penny’s face and the hand perched above her sidearm. “Minkus,” he said nervously, “I fear Miss Arkayd may not be as amenable to this arrangement as you insisted.”

Flashing a glance at Penny’s hand, Minkus stepped between them, still closer to Wepp than to Penny. The pedestrian traffic around them slowed, suddenly making wider arcs to give them a notable berth, though no one attempted to intervene.

“Penny,” Minkus chided. “He wants to help us.”

Moving her hand away from the gun grip, Penny crossed her arms tightly. “Excuse me? He wants to what?”

Wepp stepped out from behind Minkus, standing now at his side. He wrung his hands nervously, but something in his eyes spoke of resolution. “I would like to help you, Miss Arkayd.”

Penny blinked stupidly. She heard the words, and she understood them, but something about their collective meaning eluded her.

“You want to do what now?”

“I would like to help you,” he said again. “I want to assist your efforts in finding Kikka and bringing her to justice. Minkus has informed me that you need information from me, and I would be entirely happy to oblige. That is, if you will also let me aid you in your efforts however else I may be of use. I am not much use with a weapon unfortunately—should this come to open conflict—and I do have my particular difficulty with threats of physical harm, but I am rather proficient with elixirs, applied physics, and magitechnical power generation.”

Penny stepped back, squinting at him. She searched his face for an answer, then Minkus’, then Wepp’s again. Finally she settled her attention on Minkus and opened her hands wide, begging him for clarity. “What the hell is happening right now?”

“Politeness worked,” he replied proudly. “Wepp is on our side.”