“Who is General Egilhard?”

Dys stared at Sabina, slightly confused by the half-elf’s question. Wasn’t she with Jadis when she’d met the officious old man a few weeks ago? Noll had been with them. Jadis remembered it clearly since the general had basically snubbed the smith while trying to convince the three Nephilim to join the military and work for him.

“You know, the human with the beard back in Alawar?” Dys prompted, giving the smith a good poke in the side.

“Oh, oh!” Sabina nodded after a moment. “Right! The one that was coming on to you!”

“He wasn’t—he wasn’t coming on to me,” Dys shook her head in disbelief. “He was trying to recruit me.”

“Oh, that makes more sense,” Sabina nodded sagely.

“How in Villthyrial’s wooden dick are you so smart and so clueless at the same time?” Kerr shook her head.

“I’m not clueless,” Sabina protested, “I’m just not really interested in politics or military stuff.”

“Moving on,” Aila cut in before Kerr could retort. “The question now is, how much do we really want to get involved in all of this?”

There was some silence as everyone around the fire thought about Aila’s question. Dys, along with the rest of Fortune’s Favored, had gathered outside of the warehouse to discuss the information Willa had revealed. Apparently, most of Willa’s troops had limited knowledge of the investigation, with most of the details under close wraps. The captain had been open with Jadis once she’d been confronted directly, but she was still under orders to keep the investigation details known to as few people as possible to avoid the spread of inconvenient rumors. Of course, Jadis wasn’t under any such orders and would have ignored them if she’d been given them anyway. She wanted her whole team’s opinion on what was going on.

Jay and Syd were on patrol, keeping guard around the mining compound, along with a couple of the soldiers. Willa and the remainder of her troops were inside the warehouse, resting. With a bonfire set up outside the front of the building, Fortune’s Favored was able to hold an impromptu meeting in relative privacy.

“That depends,” Dys said slowly in answer to Aila’s question. “Are we willing to piss off one faction or another and make enemies?”

“Enemies?” Bridget asked, her arms crossed as looked up at Dys. “Sounds like this Egilhard is already an enemy. Who cares if we piss him off?”

 “Well,” Dys heaved a sigh that sent a plume of frozen breath into the night air. “It’s not just about Egilhard. Magistrate Vraekae is marginally on our side. No offense to you, Eir, but your cousin is absolutely a manipulative bitch and I don’t trust her further than you can throw her. Still, we’re on fairly good terms right now. But if we choose to not help her with this investigation into one of her main political rivals in the region when her agents are in frankly dire need, she might take offense to that. Maybe she won’t, she didn’t actually ask us to get involved and we aren’t on her payroll, but then again maybe she planned for us to get involved from the start since she sent her investigators out here with us. Either way, if we don’t help Willa and just go about our business, thus causing Vraekae to miss an opportunity to catch Egilhard in the act of doing something Vraekae can use against him, then she might take out her ire on us.

“Then there’s the other side of things. If we help with this investigation into Egilhard’s activities, we’re almost certainly making an enemy of him. Right now, he wants me to join up with him so he’s trying to woo me with promises and manipulate me with petty bureaucracy. However, if I show that I am definitively against him and his interests and in full support of the Magistrate, he might decide I’m not worth the trouble and try to eliminate me. After all, just because we help with this investigation, that doesn’t mean we’ll actually succeed in getting him arrested or court martialed or whatever. Who knows how long actual legal action could take. Plus, I doubt the guy is working alone. He’s part of a larger faction, likely has allies that share his interests, and even if we succeed in getting rid of him, those allies of his will probably see us as a threat to be removed since we chose to side with a rival faction. I think that about sums everything up, right?”

There was a long pause as all of her companions stared as Dys with mixed expressions of confusion and shock.

“What?”

“Uh, nothing!” Aila said after a moment, resetting her face into a more neutral expression. “That was quite a detailed analysis, thank you.”

“I genuinely didn’t think you had that kind of thinking in you,” Kerr mumbled.

Dys rolled her eyes and tossed a rude gesture in the therion’s direction.

“Fucking kidding me? I’m not dense, I just don’t always have context or information. I’ve been paying attention.”

Kerr shrugged, giving Dys a knowing smirk.

“I think one thing we should consider is how likely is it that General Egilhard is actually responsible for the crime he is suspected of committing.”

Dys turned to look at Eir and motioned for the elf to explain.

“After all, from what you’ve told us, it doesn’t seem that there is truly any concrete evidence that the general is involved,” Eir continued. “Vraekae believes that he is responsible, but she has an admittedly strong bias against the man. It is possible that this is a rogue element in the local military, something that the general may not have any knowledge of or involvement in. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t necessarily suffer some backlash from him if we aid Vraekae in publicly revealing that the general had subordinates that committed fairly extensive crimes under his command that he knew nothing about. Such a reveal would be embarrassing, to say the least. However, it would be helpful to the empire as a whole since it would be exposing and removing a criminal element that was taking advantage of a strategic resource during a time of crisis. Our involvement in apprehending such criminals would bolster our standing with imperial leadership, and it would further improve the reputation of Fortune’s Favored with the public.”

Jadis sometimes forgot that kind, gentle, and oh-so-sexy Eir was not just a priestess, but a daughter of a noble house. She was related to Vraekae and had been trained in a great deal of political discourse, at least before joining the temple. Or maybe that training had continued after becoming a priestess? Jadis wasn’t sure how involved the temple was with politics in the Empire, but she doubted they were completely hands-off.

Eir also had a good point about Egilhard. As Willa had explained, the evidence found so far had been limited. Eleria crystals were being smuggled out of Far Felsen on imperial naval vessels. A shipment had been uncovered during an inspection, though the parties who had smuggled the shipment on board hadn’t been caught. Only two things could be said for certain, one being that the shipment was large, not a minor find that was being secreted out by private parties but a legitimately large amount of cargo that could be used in the manufacturing of hundreds of high-grade enchantments. The other certainty was that the ship where the smuggled cargo had been found was a transport vessel being used by troops that all reported to Egilhard’s command. Even the captain of the vessel was a loyal follower of the general. Those two facts certainly planted plenty of suspicion on the general but didn’t guarantee his involvement.

“Good point,” Dys nodded to Eir. “I guess we can’t assume Egilhard is responsible. I still think he is, but I have to admit that’s probably because I just don’t like the prick. Anyone else have anything to add? Sabina? Bridget?”

Sabina shrugged helplessly while Bridget scowled.

“This is all above my head,” Bridget admitted. “I don’t know anything about politics, I just want to fight demons and go on adventures.”

“Tell me about it…” Dys grumbled.

“I’m just a smith,” Sabina said. “I’ll defer to whatever you say is best since I don’t really know what to do with this sort of situation because I’m not in the military and I don’t get involved in politics and—well. What Bridget said, except about smithing.”

Jadis couldn’t blame either woman for their responses. Neither had signed up for any of the political bullshit that Vraekae and Egilhard were forcing onto Fortune’s Favored. She’d rather ignore all the politicking too, honestly, she just knew that she couldn’t simply by the nature of who she now was.

“Alright, well, what about you, Thea?” Dys turned to look at the quiet guardswoman.

Thea looked troubled, her face a complex mix of worry and agitation. She rarely had much to say, but Jadis knew that didn’t mean she was stupid or without worthwhile opinions. Thea was both intelligent and observant, so anything she took the effort to say was generally well worth paying attention to.

“We c—can’t abandon captain Willa,” Thea said slowly. “Even if we d—don’t want to help her with her, ah, mission, she still needs our p—protection. They’ll all d—die out here without us.”

“That’s true,” Dys acknowledged, “But if Willa insists on investigating those caves further when we don’t want to and if she leaves our company in pursuit of her own mission, that’s really on her, not us. We’re here for our own reasons, not to help her.”

“T—true,” Thea nodded. She was quiet for a long pause before looking up at Dys with an expectant expression. “D—don’t you want to know who c—caused all of this, though?”

Well fuck. Of course Thea had to bring up one of the biggest motivating factors Jadis had trouble arguing against. Curiosity. Was it really Egilhard or someone else? What actually went down in those caves? Shit, she did want to know.  How was she supposed to resist investigating? Not having the answers was going to nag at her like a burning itch.

“Okay, yeah, I do want to know who caused all this shit, regardless of the political consequences,” Dys admitted. “And honestly, I think we should risk the consequences anyway. I don’t know why Egilhard or anyone else in a prominent government position would be illegally mining eleria during a fucking demonic invasion, but whatever the reason is, I feel like it's probably a shitty one. It might bring us trouble, but I don’t think I really care about being on the good side of a bunch of criminal assholes that are sapping vital military resources away from an important warfront for their own selfish gains. What about all of you?”

Looking around at her companions, no one voiced any disagreement. Eir, Sabina, and Bridget still looked worried, but Aila gave her a small nod of support while Kerr shrugged helplessly.

“Yeah, makes sense,” Kerr said. “Fuck those bitches. Who cares if we piss off a fucking general or whatever. Worst comes to worst, we flee the country and set up new lives as farmers on the other side of the continent.”

“Always good to have a backup plan,” Dys snorted.

“There’s one issue I’d like to point out, though,” Aila spoke up after everyone had had a good chuckle. “Stavros and those bandits are still out there. They might have fled, or they could be setting up a counterattack. If we go into those tunnels, they could try to follow in after us, or at the very least steal or destroy our wagon and supplies while we leave it unguarded.”

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that,” Dys said as she ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s not perfect, but I think I’ve got a plan to deal with that. Let me know what you think about this…”