"Hah, maybe I will," Gennady chortled. I gave him a mock glare as he headed off, leaving me alone.
I stood there, at the corner of the cave, gathering my thoughts: Gennady was right. I would be behaving foolishly if I called out Lisa with no evidence— simple lies and deceit to someone she just met did not count. Furthermore, I barely knew them. They probably trusted me as much as I trusted them.
I had to show that I was an asset to them first— not to prove myself so I would feel accepted, but to be accepted so I had some influence within the group; whether Lisa would betray us was a worry for another time, and was something I should just keep in mind when talking to her. But if I wanted to spend my time working with Ginah’s Crew to disrupt the Elise’s functions, I needed to be able to work well with these people at least on some level.
If Lisa truly could be bribed to betray these pirates, it would allow the Elise to run unimpeded in growing their enuim trade. I did not want to let that happen, although I acknowledged that I would not stay around if it looked like an unwinnable fight. Therefore, I had to ensure these pirates had a modicum of a chance to put a halt to their supply of drugs, and had to be on the lookout for potential hurdles to this such as Lisa currently was.
Perhaps I was being paranoid as Gennady said, but I could not be certain; I was just being wary. After all, I wanted to leave for the Taw Kingdom with a clear conscience, and both those outcomes were predicated on Ginah’s Crew’s success.
For the next few days, I took Gennady’s advice and focused on socializing while practicing my magic; I had pushed aside learning how to create mana tech for now as I wouldn’t be able to do anything useful with it anytime soon. That was not to say I completely ignored it— I simply spent less time on it than I had previously been spending.
I felt out of place amongst the boisterous pirates which made gaining their trust more difficult than it should be. The way they treated me almost seemed as if they held no apprehension with my presence, but I knew they weren’t willing to divulge anything truly important to me just as I wasn’t willing to do so with them. My mask served as both a physical and metaphorical barrier between me and most of Ginah’s Crew, barring Braz.
The man was about as open as anyone could get: he treated me as if I was just another person, and wasn’t trying to constantly guess whether I was a Goblin, Half Goblin, Half Dwarf, or Hobbit— the last one which I did not understand since they were extinct, but a kid put the idea out anyways.
Ever since I confronted Lisa about her lie, there had been kind of a rift between us. It was not obvious at first, and we did speak to each other whenever we saw one another, but it wasn’t as often nor as long as before. I never got to know her personally in the first place. so I didn’t really see it as a loss, yet it also made observing her difficult since we never really interacted now.
I never spoke to Jack before, and I did not plan on starting now. I did not like the way he treated Gennady.
I did, however, get to know the young man Gennady had taken as his pseudo apprentice; his name was Sevin and he was the same one who gave me his mana crystal the other night. He seemed nice— friendly, but not as open as Braz. A rather normal person, in fact.
That was actually the most significant piece of information I learned about Ginah’s Crew— most of their members came from pretty average backgrounds before becoming pirates. Just as Lisa told me, these people found themselves in economic hardship due to some reason or another, and found themselves turning towards crime to survive. Most of their stories ended with Ginah swooping in at their lowest points, offering them a chance to escape from that life without principles.
It was an attractive offer, one which many of them accepted before finding themselves here. When I asked Sevin whether he regretted doing so, since he now found himself embroiled in a territorial war with another criminal organization, he simply shrugged.
"Not really," the young man said, lowering the pistol he was building from scratch. He had been inscribing some runes onto the weapon’s surface before connecting it to the mana crystal— a technique Gennady told me was not often used by Dwarves. "I don’t like the Elise. They don’t do things fair. We’re different from them— better than them. It is our duty to drive them and their supply of enuim out of Luke, before it becomes an issue throughout the country."
"Why does that matter?" I asked, cocking my head.
"The enuim? It’s a incredibly destructive—"
"No," I cut him off. "Not doing things fair," I clarified, "why does that matter?"
Leaning back on his chair, Sevin scratched his cheek as he took a moment to gather his thoughts. "Because then you ruin things for everybody. Being unfair hurts people. It stops them from benefiting as much as you, just so you get an advantage. And I think that’s wrong."
"But aren’t you guys being unfair by being pirates?" I pointed out the obvious. I carefully watched the young man for his reaction— seeing if he would get angry at what I said. "You guys commit many crimes. Illegal things like stealing and robbing, which would hurt someone somewhere, no? That’s unfair, is it not?"
He paused for a moment, turning to face me. He slowly said, "It is unfair if things
