Three Doors, One Clock

Kael let the group argue the angles — cartel, corpo, third way — without pushing hard in any one direction, more interested in watching how everyone else tipped. He bought six shots of the local rotgut off Scraps and drank it like it was the best thing he'd ever tasted, mostly to see if anyone would call him on the lie. Nobody did; the crystal didn't flicker either. What stuck with him was the paperwork glimpsed on the way out — Korlok's face on a wanted sheet made sense. Mistarion's didn't, and Kael filed that away without saying so out loud.

Mistarion didn't go upstairs. He stayed at the bar with Scraps, aware of being sized up and unable to do much but let it happen. When the others came back talking about a lie-detecting crystal that never once lit up, he recognized the thing from half-remembered schooling — a detection charm, not a compulsion, and it had caught nothing from anyone in that room. The news that his own face sat on a security bulletin landed harder: not an answer, just another locked door with his name already on it, and one more reason to be careful about which faction learns to recognize him first.

Now sat through the commander's accounting the way she sits through most things — present, watchful, unbothered by the fifteen hundred credits hanging over the group. She offered no argument for any of the three paths and no objection either, content to let the louder voices spend themselves arguing cartel against corpo against the quiet option nobody could put a name to. If something comes of the tracking beacon still buried in the shuttle's bones, she'll be ready for it. Until then, she's just watching the room decide.

Verum pushed back early on getting dragged in front of H&R in the first place — he hadn't swung first, he'd only shoved off men who came at him — but once the march upstairs was clearly happening, he stopped resisting it. In the aftermath he was plain about his priorities: he wants off this rock, but coin comes before the exit, and he'll work whichever faction pays fastest without pretending loyalty to any of them. He floated digging into each side's history — Narok and Zabetta Tarr's past marriage chief among it — on the theory that more information never hurts.

ND-E read Commander Achike as exactly what he presented: a soldier, disciplined, dangerous, and not currently a liability. He laid the three paths out loud for the group in the Slag Pit afterward, cold and clear-eyed about what each would cost — piracy and its baggage, corpo ties and cleaner money, or the grassroots faction's wide net of favors instead of credits. He leaned toward squeezing use out of two sides at once, on the theory that being valuable to both the cartel and H&R is safer than being loyal to either, and said so without flinching, because lying was never an option he had anyway.

Velveteen rode the ceiling the entire meeting, changing color with his mood for an audience that mostly didn't notice, and made his one position very clear: no corporations, not after the last one put him on the Rock. He'd rather throw in with Narok Tarr's people than anyone wearing a company badge, and said as much plainly once they were back at the bar. Pressed on whether he'd actually act on that instead of just following Kael wherever Kael walked, he didn't have a good answer — but he knew which way he wanted the group to lean.