Three Romulans Walk Into A Bar

Posted on Thu Feb 1st, 2024 @ 6:03pm by Liha t'Ehhelih & Chief Helmsman Kalahaeia t'Leiya

Mission: Fractures
3901 words - 7.8 OF Standard Post Measure

Shiloh stood just outside the entrance to the local bar and peered in. It was busy enough that, even if noticed, he'd be left alone. Good, he thought to himself. He had no issues with trouble, but, there were times he just wanted a small drink and figure out his next plan. Last 2 years he's spent hoping from one place to another, and this was no held no real difference. His time here was just, over, and now he just wanted to try and figure out what the next move was.

He slinked his way inside, trying to hide as much of the 6'4 frame he could. He wasn't overtly tall, but having jet black hair, green eyes, and pointy ears on someone who looked more human after all of that tended to draw attention. Usually, not the kind he ever really wanted. Regardless of what happened to Romulus, and a great deal of ancestors and family he'd never know, there was always still a disdain for anyone with any sort of Romulan blood line. He never could really argue it. The people had a pretty torn legacy throughout the galaxy. Never-the-less, it still brought trouble, even when he wasn't asking for it.

As he walked inside and started heading towards the bar, he surveyed his surroundings. For the most part, nothing was completely out of the ordinary other than one table and one booth. The table housed 5 individuals that looked like they were hovering over some sort of electronic device, and while it could be seen, they were doing their best to keep the contents of it hidden. On the other side was an odd site for him. Two Romulan looking females. For the very quick glance he had, both looked young in terms of Romulan age, but looks among that race were always against the person on the outside.

He sighed a little as he walked over to the bar and took a seat on one of the stools. When the bartender noticed him, albeit with a pretty odd, almost aggressive, expression, Shiloh nodded. "Just a glass of bourbon, neat please."

Without saying anything that could be over heard, the bar tender turned around and started working towards making the order.

Sitting in a booth with a good view of door, a practice that had become second nature after years of having to keep a constant eye out for trouble, Liha had noted the set of pointed ears that walked through that door. Something struck her as off about him, but the fact that he went to bar and took a seat with his unprotected back toward the room made her think it was something along the lines of what was 'off' about her companion. Despite her pedigree, Kali had been raised on earth, a fact that showed all too gratingly often, but she'd at least learned caution due to the same Tal'Shiar threat that drove's Liha's threat awareness - a fact that had initially set them against each other out of completely natural suspicion, until a mutual friend onboard had gotten fed up enough to stage an intervention.

At some point they might forgive Burnie for getting the drop on them for that, if only because they could go for a relaxing drink together even where Romulans not completely welcome because no one was going to mess with two Romulan women who both carried themselves with an attitude that said 'Try it. You will not win.' Somewhat to Liha's annoyance that might even have been more effective for Kali, since a Romulan with her stunted stature who was still breathing suggested fighting skills that would gave any sane person pause.

"What do you think?" Liha said, subtlety tipping her glass toward the newcomer. "Teen refugee planted too far into human territory?" It was becoming depressingly common to see half-assimilated Romulans from the generation who'd escaped before Picard's 'Dunkirk for the RSE' had been shut down. At a certain age some of them - males typically - decided to try to prove they could cut it out here near the former NZ. Her Fenris Ranger friends had pulled more a few of them out of the consequences of that folly.

Kali focused her eyes on the man Liha indicated, without moving her head to tip him off...though given how he had his back to the room, odds were he'd have been oblivious regardless. "Could be. Must've been very young though if he was, without any kin or their surrogates sent with him." It was something that had happened far more than once though, she knew; especially near the end of efforts when seats on ships were limited, plenty of families had made hard choices to save children possibly old enough to somehow perhaps survive on their own, even if they couldn't save themselves. "Even my teenage sisters wouldn't put their back to a place like this."

Once the drink was placed in front of him, Shiloh took a small sip of it, letting the burn soothe him on the way down. This was a reminder of days past, and a reminder to never revisit those days of old. He closed his eyes, letting his mind wander slightly. This was a small form of meditation he practiced, which was almost always accompanied by the fire in his stomach. While this was a bar, he had always been able to tune out the noises in this state. However, there was something outside of his mind that kept drawing him back to the now.

The group of individuals with the electronic device were stirring. At the table were two humans and three Klingons, all looking around the same size, that is, massive. While they paid no mind to Shiloh, even the Klingon’s, they were staring around the bar, looking at the booth with the two female Romulans. It didn’t seem that the ebb and flow in the voices and looking had anything to do with physicalities, but there was still something not right about it. They kept staring at that damn device.

Shiloh slyly pulled out the small PADD from his pocket. The PADD had been something he had acquired from his time in Starfleet, something he had heavily modified over the years. With practiced ease, his fingers started tapping the screen, flying in and out of the menus, pulling up a command line interface inside of the PADD and tapping commands. After a few moments, something had finally connected and the readout started scrolling down his screen. He took another sip of his bourbon before really starting to read the print out.

Bastards he thought to himself. They somehow figured out how to dip into a backdoor on the bar’s computer system. He kept scrolling through the log files, taking another sip. Interesting. They found a way to exploit the payment system and are adding an extra 15% on top of the bill and pulling that percentage out. Shiloh looked at the men again, this time probably longer than he should have. Something was nagging him though. None of these men looked like they were smart enough to be able to pull this off. This caused him to look over at the bartender, who was finishing a nod at one of the Klingon’s at the table.

He sighed slightly as he downed the rest of his drink. Shiloh motioned to the bartender to fill him up again while he started typing more commands into his PADD. While the drink was being poured, his notions about the men not being smart enough for this seemed confirmed. It took a highly simple, and very old technique of a Server Side Request Forgery to find the data they had been stealing. He downloaded the data, and the script that was kept on their device to reverse engineer later to return the stolen funds. Once that was done, Shiloh set up a heap based buffer overflow attack to launch their device into a tailspin of restarts.

As the bartender finished the drink, Shiloh picked up the glass and downed about half of the drink. “You know, it’s not polite to skim money off of people like that,” he stated matter of factly.

The bartender looked at him with obvious practiced facial expressions. “No idea what you’re talking about."

With that last comment, he smiled and sent the attack. After only a few seconds, there was an audible curse that came from one of the humans. “You don’t?” he asked with a small grin. Unconsciously, he looked over at the table who was now looking around and talking amongst themselves. It was at that moment, he realized he made a mistake. Not only was he looking at them, but he was the only person in the bar with any sort of electronic device out. He also looked over, just in time, to realize that the bartender was motioning towards Shiloh, as he started to back away, going to the other end of the bar. “Hwiiy veruul,” he muttered to himself as he looked forward and put the hand on his glass.

It took only a few more seconds for a Klingon and Human to stand right at his back. He could smell the stick of the Klingon on his nose, that was very obviously looking down at him.

“Romulan Dog -” start the Klingon before the human put a hand on his companion.

“What my friend here means to say is, why don’t you tell us how to undo what you did, eh? We’ll look the other way and just leave any unpleasantries out of this.”

Shiloh looked at the human, who had some pretty piercing brown eyes if he were earnest. The little smile that was cracked upon the man’s lips, showing the tiniest hint of teeth, was slightly unnerving for some reason. Shiloh could have denied it, but, what was the point in that. He raised his voice just enough to be heard around him. “Maybe you should return the credits you stole from these people, skimming off the bar, and I’ll tell you how to undo it.”

The smile on the human faded as he looked at his Klingon friend, then at the table, whose occupants were starting to stand, getting ready for an altercation.

Well, this should be interesting, Liha thought, taking a swallow of her drink. Having noted him earlier, she'd watched the glances toward the other table and the interplay of devices, and Romulan hearing meant she had picked up everything that had been said. Unless the bartender wound beaten to death, he was going to regret scamming her, but given that the man had openly stated what he was doing instead of just quietly inverting the scam, she assumed he wanted a fight. Perhaps he'd put his back to the room not out of naivete, but to encourage one. Elements knew, she'd gone into bars looking to blow off steam on more than a few occasions, so she wasn't about to interfere. Besides, she was curious to see if he could fight.

Honestly, if he doesn't sock them; I might, thought Kali; her preference with people cheating their customers in gambling was to turn a scheme back on them; but something as hamhanded and forward as skimming drink prices was just practically begging one to break a vodka bottle over their heads.

“Look,” Shiloh said looking back at his glass. “I’m not completely ignorant. No matter what I do, there will be unpleasantries,” the last word he eeked out with a little contempt in his voice. Knowing there was no way out of his, he made his decision. “Besides hevam, you and you’re klivam friends aren’t smart enough for this.” He added some venom to the last word and downed his drink. As the words sunk in, especially to the Klingon, he smiled slightly.

Without another word, Shiloh pivoted to his left, smashing the glass into the face of the Klingon, shattering it. He quickly turned over to the Human and gave him an elbow square to the nose, feeling the cartilage snap under the force. He then pivoted back to the Klingon, still reeling from the glass shattered in his face, obvious that some of the glass remained. Instinctively, for someone who’s been in a lot of fight in bars, one hand came up to the back of that grotesque head and another sweeping towards the stomach. Simultaneously he punched and brought the head down, smashing it against the bar. Before the Klingon even hit the ground, he turned back to the Human, a nice river of red rolling down his face. Shiloh could smell the copper. As the human tried to regain his composure, starting to bring back his arm for a punch, Shiloh quickly slammed his fist against the human’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out from under him.

"Not bad," Liha remarked to Kali. "Do you think he's waiting for the other three?"

"He'd better be. Assholes like those don't tend to like it when you make them look like idiots." Kali downed a measured third of her remaining drink; if they'd been cheated on the price, she was definitely going to make sure she finished what she could of it before things devolved further.

While things were going well with the first two, he had forgotten one small issue. The other three. Before anything else could be done by the Human-Romulan Hybrid, he was spun around, now facing the other three with an intensely muscular Klingon. A thought was barely even able to creep into Shiloh’s mind as he was instantly hit with pain that caused him to bend over and lose his breathe. It appeared as though that Klingon had just, what was dad’s old expression - hit him like a ton of bricks. Next thing that seemed to happen was that he was staring at some dim lights, on the ceiling. Crap he thought to himself before he was being thrown, mostly, across the room, hitting a table at a booth and knocking over the drinks before hitting the floor.

An old hand at bar fights, Liha had pushed back and lifted her drink out of harm's way. "Yeah, guess he wasn't."

Also having seen more than her fair share of bar fights, Kali took advantage of both reflexes and below-average size and had ended up not further back in the booth but on the table, finishing the last of her drink in a gulp the second she was out of the way.

As he recovered and stood up, he noticed it was the female Romulans. Great, this couldn’t get any better was what he thought as he blurted out, “Fvadt. I’m sorry.” His usually calm voice suddenly betrayed him as the ‘o’ elongated slightly, giving away a very subtle hint of a Boston accent.

What the hell?!? Kali's prior trains of thought were abruptly re-directed: Subtle as it was, she recognized that accent; and she wasn't used to hearing it coming out of the mouth of anyone else who looked like she did, except her sisters. The more paranoid part of her wondered for a moment if it was all some elaborate ruse to reel her in; but it would've been a pretty difficult thing to fake that subtly and asynchronously; and if the man wanted her dead he probably would've just gone for the chance when he'd hit their table.

Not to waste time, Shiloh ran and launched himself towards the Human who had taken the lead out of the three remaining, attempting a ‘superman’ punch. This failed however, as the Human, quicker than he expected, side stepped it and followed through with a thundering straight right jab, crashing directly into Shiloh’s left orbital.

Liha downed her drink and tipped a brow toward Kali. "Shall we?"

Kali grinned, then vaulted over the booth and grabbed a mostly-empty bottle on a nearby table.

She did not actually wait for a reply, instead hurling her glass to break across one Klingons ear. He shook the glass from his head with an angry roar, turning menacingly toward Liha. She smirked. "Look, the Ferengi has sensitive ears."

"Ferengi?!?" he roared.

"Yeah, honorless greedy cheaters."

That hit a nerve. The other Romulans completely forgotten, he charged her in a rage. A grin lit Liha's face - Klingon's were so easy to provoke - as she neatly pivoted and drove a kick into the side his knee with a satisfying crack. The buckled joint sent him sprawling and without missing a beat, she closed and slammed fist into his neck.

Kali, for her part, had gotten onto another table in the meantime, and leapt off it onto the human with the seemingly rapid reflexes who was distracted with fighting the other Romulan; bringing her acquired bottle down hard over the top of his head. The man swayed at the unexpected weight on his back followed by the hit to the head, but she didn't wait to see if the results would be enough; instead she shifted her weight to shove him a bit as she leapt off and shoved him headfirst and flipped him back over the bar to crash into the cheap bottles along the bottom shelf before whirling to face the remaining Klingons, who were probably going to be a tougher match.

Rising from a Klingon who was down for the count, or maybe longer since she was pretty sure she'd broken his knee, Liha considered the rest. The two humans were no longer much of threat (not that they had been to begin with), so it was just the two Klingons facing Kali. One had stood back and was basically fresh. The other had blood on his face from the initial fight with Romulan man, so a bit beat up, but also more hacked off.

What was it Burnie would say? Eeeny, meeny, miney... Bam! Her fist connected squarely on the second Klingon's already bruised jaw.

Instantly forgetting the tiny Romulan he spun on the other one with snarl, swinging a roundhouse that she ducked, landing a shot to his ribs before dancing back. Not quite far enough as the Klingon spun and lunged, landing a blow to her hip that pushed her to the ground. He wore a nasty smile as he moved to loom over her.

Liha kicked straight up - driving her heel into his groin. As he crumpled over in reaction, she rolled , scissoring his lower leg between her legs and then rolled further, bringing him down on his face. Then she quickly pushed up and got a knee on his back and dropped an elbow to the base of his skull.

“You chicken?” Kali smirked at the remaining Klingon who’d stood back slightly, raising her voice over the din of Liha tangling with the other. A smarter opponent wouldn’t be baited by that; but this lot had already proven earlier they didn’t exactly fall under that category. The man snarled and charged her, she sidestepped him with the one advantage of her smaller size and greater speed, jumped up on another table, and as he turned to face her there, clocked him on the side of the neck with what at first seemed like a useless glancing blow from a thin, nondescript collapsible rod that had appeared in her hand seemingly out of nowhere. Appearances were definitely deceiving in this case however, because a moment later the man was suddenly on the ground, shocked unconscious. Damn, Klingons take the max setting on this, just like Nausicaans do…, Kali watched carefully for a moment to make sure he actually stayed down, then whirled to whatever was next, only to anti-climatically find Liha standing over the other Klingon and the young man they’d theoretically been defending nowhere in sight in the wreckage of the bar. All the men who they’d been fighting were out for the count on the floor it seemed…other than the bartender, who was glaring at them from where he’d taken shelter behind the bar. Kali jumped down from the table and stalked towards the bar.

“I’ll call the authorities on you!” The man said sharply but with an undertone of nervousness.

Kali smirked, glanced at the PADDs strewn on the floor the fallen men had been using for the scheme the bartender was no doubt complicit in, and stared him down with absolute confidence. “Great idea; I’m sure they’d love to learn the details of your little racket.”

The bartender quailed, though it might have been as much from Liha striding toward him like Romulan Vengeance Incarnate as the threat of anyone laying bear his malfeasance. "No, look, I'll refund your credits. I'll make it right," he backpedaled, tapping his register padd.

Liha crossed her arms, which placed one hand in position to finger the knife up her sleeve.

"I'll...I'll make it more than right. I'll pay a reward for...for handling those miscreants!" he pleaded, tapping his padd with increasing desperation as the hacking as it kept rejecting his attempts to withdraw or transfer funds. With growing sense of karmic foreboding, he realized that the hacking and counterhacking that had started the fight had probably jammed up the whole system.

And then the screen went blank. He slammed it on the counter in frustration as well as last ditch attempt to kick it into reset. Nothing. It was dead. As dead as he expected to be very soon if he couldn't appease two seriously hacked off Romulans. "It's, it's broken," he stammered, and quickly threw a hand up. "But. uh, I can give you liquor..." He spun, pulling surviving bottles off the top shelf and pushing them across the counter. "High End stuff! Take it!"

Liha looked at the bottles, then at Kali with an inquiring tilt of eyebrow.

Kali shook her head. "No; he could try to claim we robbed him, later."

"Good point. But he still has to pay." She grabbed the bottles, hurling one after another at anything left intact on the shelf. Crash! Shatter! Crash! Liha grinned - it was almost the kind of satisfaction Burnie got out of explosions.

The bartender seemed caught between horror at the destruction and fear of drawing any of that attention toward himself, but the second impulse won as Kali reached across the bar. "No! Please! Don't kill me!"

“I’m not going to kill you." She zapped with a more measured setting than she'd used on the Klingon, and watched him collapse on the mess of glass and liquor on the floor. "I’m just going to make sure you don’t follow us.”

Liha gave an approving 'not bad' nod, followed by an eyebrow shrug. "Want to find a nicer place for another drink?"

“Definitely," Kali agreed. "Because I think we can add this one to the list of places I’m banned from…”