Brotherhood Bar-Talks

[Lucend]

Lucendez holstered his pistol as he watched the stranger walk out. 'Good enough' he thought, though he was going to watch whoever he was.

Alonso watched Juan pull up a seat at the bar.

"Tough time, amigo? I've never seen you pull a weapon before... This civil war thing is really getting close, huh?"

Juan looked hurt. It was true, there was never a time he needed to pull any kind of weapon on Crete. But he was on edge.

"Don't worry Alonso. The Brotherhood is working on that, and it will be settled peaceably, I can guarantee it. Despite the idiots, or the people calling for blood." Juan trailed off. Alonso had other costumers, so the Elder just meditated on his glass of water. 'Cretian upper class, huh? Well... at least he got half of it right...' he thought to himself. His thoughts were broken by weapon fire on the landing pads. A man was yelling after the fight and he recognized it as Ares.

Juan refocused on the glass .... 'conflict', he thought.

'I flew so long not knowing exactly where I belong. Now I find my brothers and they're trying to rip themselves apart...' His thoughts lingered there. He needed someone to talk to, but decided anger might get the best of him. There was a mound of paperwork that needed to be done, but he felt as though he were retreating. Lucendez didn't spend much time in space anymore and it hurt to be away for so long. Life kept getting in the way of raiding and flying and all the things that he learned to survive in Omicron Gamma.

He was the hermit elder, and it annoyed him to no end.

---

"The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there."

Osaika Moto, the Fall and Rise of a Kusari Farmer

Juan Lucendez, √ Corsair