Alcohol & Assassination

A drink came flying down the bar, quickly caught by Xshayarsha's left claw. A collection of empty glasses had piled up beside him. "Then this guy appears out of nowhere and tells me that the hive master got rayed. Could you imagine that?" Xshayarsha laughed, and Nero laughed with him. Xshayarsha and Nero had both had their fair share of alcohol; they were getting on surprisingly well. Far better than Nero expected. 

"Who was the hive master again?" Nero asked confused. 

"My cousin, Haxamanish, the one I was saying was born with the little mandabiles. You remember, right?"

"Right," Nero said with a smile. "I remember," he continued to sip a type of mead from a tall bioplastic glass. "Haxamanish—that's a hell of a name!" 

Xshayarsha spit out his drink and started to laugh hysterically again just as Merin and Tiye walked back into the casino bar. "Hey, look who's back."

Nero turned around to look at them, he smiled and tried to hide how innebriated he was. "Are you drunk?" Merin saw right through it; the amount of empty cups they had amassed between them didn't help. "It looks like you two have been getting along just fine, throwing away coin like it's nobody's business." 

"No, we've put it all on my tab," Xshayarsha pointed out. He held up one claw and silently called over the bar staff to clean up the mess. "So what did you learn? What did the Magellans say?" 

She was silent at first, then she mumbled something quietly to herself. "They aren't being very cooperative; they are being very Magellan. No offense, Tiye." Tiye shrugged; he wasn't phased; he knew how stubborn his species could be. "They don't think the Securitate would be responsible for an assassination like that. Which is pretty ridiculous." 

"I'm telling you, it's the Securitate; I wouldn't lie," Xshayarsha drunkenly insisted. 

"I believe you, there's something going on here, and I don't like any of it. We need to track down the person responsible. I can't imagine they're too far away yet." 

Nero stood up and stumbled towards Merin. "Whatever it takes, I'll help you out. It's the least I can do," he smirked. 

"Thanks." 

"You're very welcome," Nero nodded his head proudly. "Where do we start?"

Merin tapped her chin as she considered their options. Surely, the Lysima must have some sort of system in place for monitoring the streets of Tramonto. "Is there any kind of security system near Abban's place? See who went in there?" 

"It was all scrambled. They already tried looking at it," Xshayarsha explained. 

"How did they look at it? From an external monitoring station?" Nero asked. 

"External, duhh." Xshayarsha's three voices chuckled again, and he patted Nero on the back. 

"Most security systems have a local disk, we could always check that out. They might have only scrambled the signals to the monitoring station," Nero suggested, his speech still slurred.

Merin nodded. "Maybe you should have drank earlier; that's the first sensible thing you have suggested."

"I try my best. Xshayarsha, my friend, lead us towards where we will find the security system!" Nero grinned as he wrapped his arm around the bug. "Do it or I'll ray you!" There was a pause, and then the two of them started to loudly chuckle again. 

"Can we leave him here?" Tiye whispered to Merin, rolling his single eye. They followed the pair out of the bar, completely unsure if they would even be led to the correct place.

To Be Continued...