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Outreach to the Bye-Bye-Baldwins

Serenierre

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vickr•app

villyman1212
It has been a long time, dear brother, from our last correspondence and I believe you have been blessed with another fine young grandson. May his name be etched into the minds of all, as befitting the reputation of a family such as yours. I shall be sending a crate of wine in celebration.

However, dear brother, knowing your expert connections in the underbelly of Vesper's mercenaries, I am most obliged to ask whether you could assist with a very sticky mess. I'm being strong armed by some goons and I cannot say no to them. But I need to pass a message forward to Heydenhal. Could you help in establishing a link? I really am desperate and I would only bother you on account of the importance of this issue.

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OOC: I forgot to do it anonymously, lets ignore that faux pas on my end.
 

Thaumantica

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Bye-Bye Baldwin’s (Cabaret)
Vesper, WER


Vadim Lubadov sunk back into his red dyed leather chair and covered his eyes not only from the waves of dancing dregs in the cabaret on the other side of sound proof glass below, but also tv screens in his luxury lounge room that showed brutal pictures and video of his former associates laying dead in pools of their own blood for the entire world to see. It was a matter of hours or minutes before mercenaries cracked through his skeleton crew of guards who vowed to stick with him until the end.

On the table before him rested a bottle of black currant moonshine from Upper Engellachia, and a pistol. The Kadiki, known on paper as Maxim Vitner, was contemplating suicide in his very den of crime in the hopes that Heydendahl’s transitional government would take this as total surrender along with a letter pleading that they let his family keep the riches he had amassed. Vadim picked up the moonshine bottle with one hand, and the pistol with the other, partaking in the first before . . Lubadov’s phone buzzed and rung with a chirp from the fragmented data chat app.

“Arrange a meet with Heydendahl?” Lubadov asked aloud to himself after reading the message. After reflecting for a few moments he realized he had put the pistol down in exchange for the phone and its message, a sign perhaps, but Lubadov shook his head and reminded himself he was searching for a reason to survive - anything to stop him from doing that final deed. The Vesper based criminal took another swig of the currant moonshine and then dedicated both hands to a response:

vickr•app

Vespiki67

Your message comes at the perfect time, brother, so thank you for your well wishes. My Grandson should be lucky to be as handsome and sly as you, dear comrade.

The Mercenary can be reached in Wien, he will go there to present oligarch scalps to the Syndicalists next week, under their eyes perhaps but out from under the eyes of his Thaumantic brothers.

He is not ideological like my previous associates, he is concerned only with contracts and winning, in this I should warn you brother: one cannot always predict the behavior of mercenary operators. But alas, brother, it seems like both of us are doing business with dangerous folks these days!

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Serenierre

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Ever since Elisabeth Martinique had taken over, the Serenien mafia bosses had been able to breathe. But where the government functionaries had backed off, the goons of the Directorate 77 had moved in to entrap them. Andre Rousseau had never been one to fear anyone. His position in the Ardeche underground assured him a certain aura of fearlessness. And yet, all it had taken for him to crumble was a midnight knock on the door and the entry of D77 agents into his life.

Those damn brutes had shaken him and he knew he could not say no to them. He valued his life. More importantly, he knew that they would not spare his family or his friends, or even the entire Ardeche underground crime scene. As he waited for Lubadov's response, George had popped his blood pressure medicine and was relaxing in his armchair.

Although he and his usual criminal contacts were sure of the encryption of the app, he had a niggling fear at the back of his mind that D77 was keeping tabs on him and had cracked the app. Roberto, his techie, had assured him no government had managed to do that as yet, but he was paranoid. Every moment he was nervous.

In the silence, the buzz from the vibrating phone was jarring.

vickr•app
villyman1212
Friend, I am pleased to hear your response. Know this that my operation is highly sensitive. We need to target a high profile individual and it will require considerable creativity on part of the Mercenary but the rewards are well worth it. I assure you. My runners in Wien will meet him. They will be giving him a burner phone where he and I will maintain anonymous contact. Will it be the usual drop off point?

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Thaumantica

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vickr•app

Vespiki67

The mercenary will be told about the drop point, but I can offer no guarantees brother. We will have succeeded if I send you back your crate of wine empty, or with call for another order.

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Lubadov stood and observed the dance floor clearing silently, Eisgarten's Mercenaries carrying rifles behind Vesper Metropolitan Police baring simple batons and hounds. Suddenly he heard someone clearing their throat, a woman, and when he turned to the door the pale figure of Aisling Derring, a creature of Heydendahl Defense Solutions, stood propping one arm up with the other and a cigarette brought to her lips. "Here about a suicide, darling - yours!" Derring sneered through a puff of smoke.

"And why can't Herr Heydendahl let an old gangster blow his brains out in solitude?" Vadim joked, gesturing towards the pistol but actually picking up the moonshine to offer the Vesplander harpy. "Here, a drink to my death?" Lubadov offered.

Aisling walked towards the Kadiki with squinted eyes, focusing on his and then the suicide note written down on the table. "Can't do it can you, what's the problem - fear?" Miss Derring asked. Lubadov smiled and shook his head, "Cука . . I am too addicted to the game, and I am not done playing it yet!"

"And what," Aisling groaned, "Why do you deserve another move?"

Two naked prostitutes and their madame then pushed through the door past German barking mercenaries, their Vesper Metro counterparts arguing with them to relax. "Your friends are scaring away our business, Max!" the madame screamed. Lubadov shrugged, then pressed the moonshine into her chest instead, "Not my friends, but perhaps if you offer Miss Derring here a free show she'll make friends with you?".

Aisling was turning red like her hair, holding back her rage before bursting forth to pick up the pistol. "In 2019 a suicide looks like two shots in the back of the head, so sit in that chair or explain why you haven't fucking killed yourself yet!?"

"Your boss is going to Wien next week, right?" Lubadov replied quickly, holding up his hands defensively, "Let's say the ten oligarchs aren't enough, they're all has-beens already aren't they, and let's say I have a contact in Wien with a contract that can open the Fatherland up to Herr Heydendahl in a way he never will alone?"

Miss Derring released the magazine on the pistol, checking inside only to find there were no bullets loaded inside. "Slav commie fuck, I ought to - " Aisling spurted out before throwing the pistol to the side, "ought to take you with us to Wien . . yes?"

"Дa, it's a gonna be a dirty deal all around, you'll want a muskrat like me along!" Lubadov declared with a wink.
 
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In Wien, a man stood patiently at the crossroads where he knew he had to drop off a package. He had received the package from a dealer of cocaine he had been working with over the past many years. It had been a strange request but he had walked to the predetermined sight and waited to get a signal on his own phone to drop the package. Sure enough when he had stood at the Point, his phone buzzed once and he placed the package.

He had been instructed to quickly walk away and he had lived long enough in crime to know that shady people's instructions were better left followed, if one wanted to live. He walked away. Unsure of what exactly he had set in motion.
 

Thaumantica

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Lubadov spent the tight quarters flight from Eisgarten to Wien packed between two shackled former oligarchs, whining about how they had betrayed first by Grasser and second now by Heydendahl. Midway through one of them, an abusive auto factory owner who had escaped by the skin of his teeth from Ostmark to Eisgarten, noticed that Lubadov was the only sardine packed in this can hurdling through the skies without handcuffs on.

“Never seen you at our reunion meetings!” the Ostmarkian complained. Vadim Lubadov shrugged and replied: “Won’t see me in your prison reunion meetings either, will you?”. The oligarch growled and wrapped his chains around Lubadov’s neck, but before too much pressure was applied an HDS mercenary was on the man’s head with a baton - knocking him out cold in contact. The weight of the oligarch brought the two of them back down awkwardly towards his plane seat and it took some pushing and shoving to get untangled from the stirring prisoner.

“Could I get a seat in front now with the other free folk?” Lubadov appealed, but the mercenary spat directly on the concussed prisoner and said “You are where you belong, Kadiki scum!”. Lubadov forced a grin, “Better here than dead, eh?. The mercenary turned an about face carelessly and returned to his post in the walkway.
 

Thaumantica

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Karl Heydendahl stepped down on to the tarmac in Wien, on the homeland of his ancestors, and sadly felt nothing. He gritted his teeth for a moment, then reminded himself this is exactly what he expected, for the Heydendahl's were generations removed from Ostmark - mercenaries taken for a ride across the world to Westernesse, and content to cling on to the volcanic reaches of Eisgarten.

"March them out, and put them on their knees!" Karl sneered to his right hand man, Heinrich Hass. The untitled and without any official rank, Hass nodded and shot back up the stairs only to lead ten men originally from Ostmark back down the stairs with mercenaries bearing non-projectile weapons at their backs. In German they were ordered to fall to their knees and most complied, but three required a buckling swipe from batons.

"When the native warriors of Westernesse, aboriginals I mean, wish to prove their mettle to their chief and tribe - they return to camp with enemy scalps" Herr Heydendahl told his long cousins under the sound of jets powering down, "From left to right I have brought you factory owners, banking loan sharks, agriculture land owners, and oligarchs from Ostmark who fled to Eisgarten hoping they could escape justice from Horst Grasser, and the National-Syndicalist People's Party."

Karl produced a large knife from his hip, attached only for this occasion in truth, and grasped the thin whispy grey hair of one unlucky gentleman on the end. "I am serious about doing business in Ostmark," Karl said as he put the blade closer to the man's head, "And I know you are serious about justice for your workers . . and our people . ." the blade now pressed into the man's skin, still not creating much of a cut.

"Dear representatives of my Fatherland, how do we proceed?" Karl asked hopefully.



An Hour Later and Away's Away

Lubadov slipped away from Heydendahl's unimposing troop of idiots and maniacs as innocently as he could, but understood immediately he was being tailed by Ostmark's Secret Police. His clothing was gave him away as a foreigner, an extravagantly tacky one at that, and around every corner citizens of Wien steered clear of him as if he put out a force field of dangerous energy.

"The usual spot, eh?" Vadim Lubadov asked himself as he reached into a garbage can to find an impossibly discarded burner phone. Turning, he saw two (at least) Secret Police agents furrowing their brows at him. Lubadov strolled directly towards them, the Serenierre borne phone open in his palm, "care to take a look, brothers?"

If not, Lubadov would scurry back to the airport and airplane and hand the device to a Commodity Adjuster waiting on board to begin negotiations with the mafia boss or whomever wished to negotiate a contracted commodity with Heydendhal Defense Solutions. The first message would go like this: "What is your problem, and how might we find a solution?'.
 

Thaumantica

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Weeks or Months Later

The whirlwind life of managing the raucous cabaret scene of downtown Vesper had once again returned to “normal” for Vadim Lubadov. Familiar conflicts between entertainers, patrons, and even a fresh crop of Metropolitan Police to be bribed consumed his time in an iteration of Vesper nightlife that, as always, chugged on night after night like the machine that it was. Parts of people could be exchanged, and they constantly were, but the Kinist and World Wars had set in motion a machine of sex and substances that had never stopped.

A rudimentary phone and nearly healed scars from a split lip the Dictator had pounded into him after failing to reach his ethnic cousins diplomatically were the only artifacts left of that strange adventure to Ostmark. Heydendahl had ordered he keep the phone on and charged, and like clockwork a plain clothed man with brown hair, eyes, and no profound features would come in every day to check on the device.

“Why not just tap it?” Lubadov asked on one such day after failing to get the man’s name for the tenth time or more.

“Because we ourselves are monitored electronically, if we enter this line into our system it’s then on the Cussian system as well!” the average looking man said quickly before placing the phone down and casually walking back out and down through rows of dancers that always seemed to just miss him with a thrown elbow or shoe. He merely navigated the scene calmly like a ghost that none alive noticed, eerily making his rounds to another haunted soul like Lubadov’s.

@Serenierre
 
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