Objection! Reverse Shakedown!

The town guards swaggered over to us. The waiters and attendants of the restaurant moved instead to soothe the other patrons of the restaurant about the disturbance.

One of the town guards, a broad-faced man with a rough mustache and stubble chin, pulled at an empty chair and pushed it over towards our table. He sat on it, facing backwards, and grabbed a chicken leg off the spread.

He munched on the meat and then pointed with the bone at Yae, "I remember you. Didn't I tell you to keep out of trouble? I see you've found yerself a whole new set of troublemakers."

Yae frowned slightly. "They were the ones to accost me, what was I supposed to do? It was self-defense, that it was."

"I'm not talking about some little crooks. You should just have ran away instead of makin' a show of it! Violence is not a solution to everything!" and then he pointed at me, "And you… what's your excuse?"

I smiled. "It was crazy, officer! There were these idiots who just wouldn't let us go until we allowed them to run their faces into our fists! Repeatedly!"

He scoffed. "A joker, huh? You'll find we have no patience for jokes in this here parts. No one asked you to butt in, you lot did more damage to the town than anyone."

"They were threatening to do things to Yae!" Elze shouted out. "You can't blame us from DOING YOUR JOB FOR YOU! What sort of town guards are you anyway? Where were you when all of this was happening?"

"Hey, what we know is what we can do about. If rascals want to rumble in the streets, that's not something we can fix until someone tells us so we can go there! You know how big this town is? We were actually just about to get there when you lot just all decided to run away! Don't you play dumb now, there's lots a' people who saw you fighting recklessly in this here good town!"

"Hmm? Why is damage to the town more important than criminals accosting people out on the street?"

Monika pulled up relevant info about town guards. When thinking about town guards, what immediately leapt to mind was Sir Terry Pratchett's novels about the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork in Discworld.

/"But that itself was inspired by the Rembrandt Van Rjin's painting of the Night Watch, which itself was commissioned by Captain Banning Cocq and seventeen members of his Kloveniers – civic militia guards! So… town guards might not actually be directly employed by the local lord or mayor!"/

She looked at the town guards. /"Yet volunteer militia would certainly be better dressed, better equipped, and better motivated for crime prevention. I think maybe they're less volunteer police officers than the more structured protection racket of the local government."/

Wait.. that brought up a strange idea. Could… could the whole thing actually have been staged, and the town guard were about to swoop in and show themselves being all protectors of the peace? The deliberately leaked Yae's location as bait as an excuse to show off and gleefully and justifiably break some heads? Remind the shopkeepers about how much they were 'needed', maybe?

I shrugged. "So what's the problem?"

"The problem is that you used magic in town. That's against the law. You damaged town property! And that's gots its penalty!"

"One could also argue that being under fear for our lives, NOT resorting to magic would have been dumb as hell going four against about, what, ten armed and hostile criminals? Criminals who had some strange courage to commit such violence in the middle of the day, threatening rape and death, and people were just watching interested at seeing a young girl beaten down."

Then I shook my head sadly. "I do not have much sympathy for this town."

"Who needs yer worthless sympathy? Two gold penalty for ye," and he looked at the girls, "each of ye, or ye spend a month in the clink!"

"Ha! Good lu-"

I reached under the table and patted Elze's knee to keep her from resorting to violence. She glared at me, pop-eyed, from the side. I shook my head gently. We did not actually have the budget to pay for an interesting restaurant floor fight scene with tables and plates and fleeing diners flying all over the place.

I had a thing against ruining other people's honest business for no good reason. I was always on the side of the poor innkeeper on those kung-fu movies and wished they had a decent bouncer to toss these hot-headed idiots out on the street.

"I guess that just leaves one question, then…" I reached into my chest pocket and flashed my purple Adventurer's Guild card. "Am I being detained?"

Monika groaned and palmed her face.

The town guard tsk'ed. "Just like I figured. You lot always think you can get away with anything. Just a Purple? Don't get too full of yourself, boy."

"There's nothing wrong with taking free legal advocacy that comes with being a duly licensed adventurer. The Guild does not usually interfere, but that doesn't mean they can't be asked to intervene. Some of us choose to follow laws as much as possible – and expect that the law treat us fairly as well."

"Just for that, it's three gold and if not we're bringing ya in right now!"

I raised my gloved hand up, still urging Elze or Yae not to move. The town guard flinched a bit, but then there was that flash of eagerness passing across his face?

I held that pose for several long agonizing seconds. I measured how much hassle it would be to just fight our way out of this joint. The guards had their hands on their swords and bent down slightly ready to move, but as the seconds passed no one budged.

I stared at the guard in front of me, meeting his eyes with the blankness of my own plastic-shelled visage until I could see him sweat. His face broke open in a contemptuous sneer.

"You… you don't even actually want to do that, do you?" I murmured. "You want me to swing the first punch…!"

I closed my raised right hand to one pointing finger. "[Playback], please."

Then I had Monika replay the recording of what he had just said for the past thirty seconds. The sneer slowly faded from his face as he realized we had some magic to accurately replay events as evidence to his own superiors. Null magic was personal magic, it was not something they could stop just from denying access to magic stone.

"Oh. Right! I forgot, you did say you could perfectly remember and repeat again everything you could see and hear!" Elze gushed out melodramatically.

All the way back at the start, I had asked for and read the Guild guidebook. Reflet Guildhouse was happy to assist, it was always good to see new adventurers treating their new career seriously.

There was actually a very strong precedent for this and helped to protect the Guild's neutrality across different nations. Trumped-up charges was the best way for local lords to try make adventurers 'learn their place', until they learn that the adventurer they were hassling just so happened to have strong ties to an army or well capable of blasting through their town walls all on their own.

The Guild usually did not interfere with their adventurers unless what they were doing impacted the reputation of the guild as a whole. It actually turned out that local puissant lords thinking they could push around the guild and threaten adventurers was a threat to their neutrality. If their kings had already granted the Guild their grace to operate, from where do these petty tyrants get their arrogance?

Adventuring was also an old past-time of royals sending their sons to more directly gauge the mood of the populace and ferret out malingering lords. As the history of the Adventurer's Guild stated, not just a few adventurers became nobles in their own right, even kings. The monarch of a certain northern neutral kingdom was even a Guild Grandmaster.

"Is it just because we're adventurers? Do remember that there is nothing that prevents nobles and royalty from becoming adventurers as well, town guard. I know that you don't know who I am, so let me just ask you this – are you feeling lucky?"

I smiled thinly. You want to hassle me with legalese for dealing with your job of failing to keep the peace from criminals in your own town? Then be prepared for me to hassle you back with politics.

"Feth!" he spat aside. "You adventurers are all the reason we have this problem in the first place! You all think you can just walk into town and cause trouble? We have to live with the mess you all leave behind!"

"I would normally be much more sympathetic with the damage we caused, but really it's a good reminder that there are some people whom stupid untrained criminals can't just push around. If they had any real strength, they'd have been adventurers instead."

He grit his teeth. Implied of course, was that anyone with any real strength would be an adventurer instead of a mere town guard.

"So what if we're just town guards? You're going up the whole of Amanesque! You're just another criminal if you try to fight us!"

"And if I actually don't, you're just another crooked servant trying to steal good coin from their lord by under-reporting income from fines! I get to spend time in jail and get this whole thing made into a scandal for your master and then win money from him! You get to lose your head!"

I laced my fingers together in a Gendo pose and grinned. "Some property damage is nothing compared to evading your lord's rightful dues! I think we should be talking about how much you should be paying /me/ to keep silent about this instead."

"You…! You won't get away with this!"

/"Wait, why have the roles seem to have reversed so suddenly?"/

I kept pushing. "You won't get away with lying about anything, town's man. That eight gold you're trying to extort from me, I could pay a whole lot of adventurers and barristers to swarm this town instead. You know you don't have the personal strength to bring me in, and if you wake up the knights they're not going to thank you for it.

"You're vastly overstating the damage you're using as an excuse for this. I could easily prove that it was nothing more than some broken flagstones on the road and some scratches on the wall. That would be trivial to fix even by the shop guilds nearby. Why don't we go talk to the actual magistrates about the proper fines, hmm?"

/"Oh, I get it. All of this – it's a provocation. It's funny, maybe they actually were going to try to frame you or scam you through the Guild but you accidentally used their very own tactic against them first!"/

He scowled back at me for a few long moments, and I feared we'd have to resort to violence anyway.

But then he spat at the floor. "…. feh. I've no time for this noise. Lord Klass is nae impressed with any dang adventurers, you'll see. But I'm not gonna be stupid enough to get his attention, it's always in a bad way."

He seemed to weigh the risks of me making some official ruckus versus the ruckus he wanted to get. Without a wrecked restaurant, he wouldn't have as much excuse for the hefty fines and the pleasure of seeing us on the rack. Once outside, adventurers would be far more easily able to overpower them, escape, and leave town with minimal damage. Just some adventurers roughing up the town guards... that was not worth the knights' time, making them chase down some miscreants on command.

The tail should not wag the dog.

But adventurers wounding the pride of the powers of the nobility, that was another matter entirely.

He grabbed at a sandwich and motioned for the other guards to start plundering our table as well. "Count yerself lucky it's too late in the evening for me to bother dragging all of youse all the way down town!"

"Yes, that certainly is a believable excuse not to do anything," I replied neutrally.

The town guard snorted again, and then spat out a glob of phlegm at my face. "Wind," I uttered. The snot-ball was deflected off to the side. A waiter yelped out in disgust and dismay at the stain on his uniform.

"Whatever, boy. I'll be watching you. One more step out of line, and I'm tossing you into a cell, see if I don't!"

"We're just passing through, we'll be out of your hair by tomorrow." Or what's left of it, I didn't say. "And if we do meet again, I will remember you too."

Grumbling, they left the restaurant. They took whole dishes with them, and I meant including the dishes. They could probably pawn those off somewhere too.

"Honestly, such ruffians!" the waiter snorted in their wake. He glanced at our purple card and his nostrils dilated in barely-disguised disdain, but a Purple could become a Red or Silver eventually (and thus earn far more) and get famous. A town guard would always be just another trumped-up commoner.

"... I think it's great that you solved that without violence, Mister Zah," said Linze. Unlike her sister, she was much more sensible and didn't enjoy the thrill of combat and didn't hurting others even if they deserved it.

I exhaled roughly and slumped in my seat.

… yeah, this place needed a Sir Samuel Vimes far more than it needed a Batman.

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