A Very Impressive Display

Kael read the room before anyone swung a fist — five drunk workers backing up one loudmouth, no weapons, all bark. He tried a flashy dagger trick to make them think twice and, when talk failed, put a knife to the ringleader's throat. When it went loud he made it count: two men down, the first with the pommel of a dagger to the back of the head while Onerous buzzed in the man's face. Kael doesn't love that it came to this, but he trusts a fight he can read more than a room he can't. When the others talked about slipping out, he told them he'd catch up — and walked up to Narok Tarr's table instead of running.

Mistarion ducked behind Scraps' bar the second the first bottle flew — sound tactics for a man with no armor and a mouth full of magic. His cursed beam of moonlight found its mark twice, and the second time it killed. He knelt over the body afterward, checking for a pulse he already suspected wasn't there, and quietly told Scraps the truth of it rather than pretend otherwise. He never went up to Narok's table. He stayed by the corpse and the bar, which felt more honest.

Now felt the drunk's hand close around a can before she saw it, and she handed Scraps her sword before he even had to ask — she remembered Zabetta's warning about giving H&R a reason. She fought the rest of the brawl unarmed, landing nothing clean, and afterward went straight to reclaim her blade rather than linger over the dead. The slur didn't need answering with words; the fight answered it. She said little the entire session, which is exactly how she prefers it.

Verum tried the reasonable approach first — blessing his allies, offering the bullies a drink, needling them with questions about where they were from — before switching to violence without much visible regret. His Thunderwave was the turn that broke the fight open, three men down at once, and he taunted the survivors afterward with a threat that mostly worked. At Narok Tarr's table he cared about one thing — credits, as many as the man would part with — and when the talk turned to throwing the corporations out of the system, he asked the obvious question: if the corpos go, what do these people do for money? He lost interest quickly after that.

ND-E did not start this. A drunk called him a clanker and his friend a toaster, and ND-E answered by putting a pistol in a charging woman's mouth and taking out half her teeth — the plating scratches, but the point lands. He dropped a summoned slab of concrete on an unconscious man afterward and didn't pretend it was an accident when asked. He is a truthful creature and told the truth: he didn't spark joy killing a bigot, but he didn't lose sleep over it either. Onerous, for his part, mocked the man's voice the entire fight.

Velveteen wandered the bar cataloguing everyone's vibe long before anyone threw a punch, then spent the fight itself getting punched in the face repeatedly while failing to grapple, sidekick, or land a single hit on anyone. He refused, loudly and on principle, to eat the corpse when ND-E suggested it - an inanimate object is one thing, a dead person is gross, and he does not understand why nobody else sees the distinction. He ended the night hanging from the ceiling shaped like the exact case Narok wants smuggled, telling the man his whole crew was just where the universe happened to point them.