Speaking with Management

Memory was inherently tied to emotion. The most striking moments of a lifetime would be inscribed and engraved into the mind through the sensations they offered. A mother’s face might fade, but never their warmth. A journey might be forgotten, but not that night one saw the stars.

For Cerise, the arena underneath the stained ox warehouse was associated with noise – the screaming of the crowds, the squelching of crushing flesh, and the snarls of death threats. When she had a match, the arena was a living, rabid place.

Now, arriving before the arena came alive with violence, Cerise felt like she had stumbled into the wrong address. The bleachers that should have been filled with betting men and women, were reduced to planks slapped atop pairs of barrels or piles of cinder blocks. The walls of the arena, which she had been thrown against and thrown others into, was, in isolation, nothing more than a wood fence.

And the arena itself, the land upon warriors split their blood, was just a large dirt circle. Cerise nearly made a double-take when she saw a man with a broom quietly sweeping the large fighting grounds to smoothen out its service.

How ridiculously bland.

“Honestly… this place doesn’t seem that bad,” Cerise heard Damon comment behind her.

“It’s not the room, it’s the people who like to come here,” The so-called “Marcus” corrected, looking at the arena. “It does attract some bad company.”

“Talking from personal experience, Chekvale?” Andrew scoffed, and was promptly met with helpless splutters.

“I, uh, that is…”

Cerise hummed under her breath in recognition. It was true that Ruben had discovered Cerise to begin with by watching her fight. He never exactly struck her as a purveyor of evil, of course. As before, his arrival was likely the culmination of being rich, bored, and curious about what he didn’t know about his own city.

Like the trees, humans were living things: growing around stone, shying from fire, and twisting into all sorts of shapes through the course of their lives. A night’s indiscretion was hardly anything to judge anyone over.

The round chamber didn’t have far corners to put anything in, but opposite to Cerise, on the other side of the proving grounds, set of short walls installed at the top of a slope in imitation of a theatre’s box seats. In it, two men and a woman were poring over paperwork while occasionally making glances at the arriving party.

Cerise glanced back at her companions. “Don’t ask for their names, and don’t wonder where they came from or where they’re going. They’re just the Management, okay?”

“We’ll follow your lead,” Marcus insisted, as he followed after Cerise in rounding the outer wall of the arena, and up the slope towards the box seats.

The Management were impeccably dressed, and almost out of place. Had their box been at an opera, their fine silk and polished buttons would have made sense, but here they were, at the bottom of society, catering to dregs.

The man that sat on the left end of the long table made a show of noticing the witch for the first time, turned so his portly belly was oriented towards her, and finished shoving a pocket watch into his breast pocket.

“Cerise. I must admit, this sort of meeting is very unwelcome,” The man warned, even as he hid it with a disarming smile.

“Evening, everyone,” Cerise said, bowing with just enough effort to show she was apologetic. “Hate to drop by unannounced, but I’m here to head off a problem before it blows up in our faces.”

“A problem, hm? And is it our problem or is it their problem?” The Manager wondered aloud, as he cast a disapproving eye on Ruben and the others. “What community self-defense force do they represent? Or perhaps they work in a business with no illusions of their cleanliness?”

Cerise waved the accusations off. “Just friends, honest. They don’t run with anyone.”

“Just ‘friends’, hm? It’s a sad day when the witch of Arnis Heart finally flies under the flag of another.”

“Eh, it’s just a temporary thing,” said witch insisted. “I’m sure when the time comes, I’ll be back down in the arena, making bets you all can cash in. I am serious, though, there’s a huge problem that passed through here, so I’m hoping you three can give me directions.”

The man on the right side of the table turned to the group and fixed his glasses with little amusement. “Oh, we caused you a problem?”

“Not you. Avery. He’s a fighter I ran into a few times, moonlighting for some Turmense folk. As Management, I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d ask about Kanis and Syuan – what they were doing here when they hired Avery, what they talked about, and where they went. Management knows everything that happens in this place.”

The bespectacled man harrumphed. “It’s not up to us to care what Kanis and Syuan were after by scouting fighters for extra work. It’s all part of the system of understandings we have. Nor is it up to us to care about where they go.”

In other words, they had all the answers, but no reason to offer them. As far as they were concerned, it was Cerise’s problem, not theirs.

Marcus stepped forward to be by his friend’s side, and spoke gravely. “We don’t have anything against you, but it’s imperative we discover their whereabouts. If they’re working with others, they might be targeting people in the government.”

The last one of the trio, a woman in an elaborate floral hat, looked up, and the prince feared he had stepped on a trap.

“The government?” She gasped and gave a charming smile. “Cerise! You’ve fallen in with the white knights of the city? That’s a large breach of trust to us.”

In the corner of the witch’s eyes, she could see the silhouettes of men hanging around the entrances and exits of the arena. Some burly; some tapping weapons against their thighs. All they needed was an excuse to go after Cerise, servant of the law down in the criminal underworld.

The furtive movements weren’t lost on the others. Damon and Andrew immediately turned around, guarding Cerise and Marcus’s backs as they returned their own hawk-like gazes as the distant figures, almost daring the arena’s staff to make the first move.

Cerise squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and sighed.

“I’m just here because I’m a concerned citizen,” she answered. “Look, I don’t want to play the ‘people will come asking’ card if someone important dies, but we can’t pretend it’s not going to happen. Guards coming in and tearing up this operation, impotently looking for someone to blame.”

“They can look,” The portly Manager guffawed, a glint of challenge in his eyes. “They’ve failed every time. All we get out of it is a vacation.”

Out of the shadows, a man quickly paced up to the box, brushing past Cerise to cup a hand around his mouth and whisper into the ear of the Manager with glasses. That one sighed, and fixed an unamused glare at the quartet.

“How coincidental. Our watchers tell us that Guards are marching in lockstep towards us as we speak.”

The men at the exits were in action. Some were leaving to deal with contingencies in relation to the Guards. Others were beginning to walk through the arena, towards Cerise and the others.

Her stomach dropped. What a time to be proven wrong in the eyes of Management.

“It’s Princess Lucretia,” Marcus quickly insisted. “She must be investigating this separately, and now she’s on the war path.”

“Oh, so you know the Queen Apparent’s movements?” The woman cooed, like a cat singing for a bird to leave its cage. “Perhaps she’ll have second thoughts if she walks in on some hostages she knows?”

“She… she doesn’t know us,” Marcus said, his lie obvious to everyone. Cerise knew they were losing control of the situation.

“Management, we’re on the same side. I don’t want to fight – I’m just trying to stop a poisoning!” the witch hissed.

For a moment, the female Manager looked taken aback, as if she sensed something authentic in Cerise’s pleading, but her expression firmed up while all three members stood as one.

“That’s not how it looks from here.”

“Management, we can still work together,” Marcus insisted. “We can explain things once we all escape–”

“Allen, these four will be coming along as hostages. Help me bring them along,” The woman announced, ostensibly towards one of the men approaching, but the pace of all of them quickened in unison.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Damon grumbled under his breath as he reached for the sword-tool at his side.

“Well, at least Marcus was right about the company,” Andrew added, as he reached under his jacket.

Cerise ran out of things to say as she pulled Marcus behind her, her concentration on the Management slipping as one of the men approaching burst into motion and lunged at her.

The arena, once more, was living up to its use.