References to a wider world!
“I’ll remember that. Huh. There’s no rules to this, are there?” She waved around. “What we’re doing, I mean. Back home, I figured it had to be more than just strapping on a sword and looking for loot, but it’s not.” She grinned. “At least the loot is better.”
“Well… kinda, if you know what I mean?” Then I shook my head, because why should she know what I mean? The Marcher lands aren’t what you’d call civilized. I didn’t even know if Sisk could read. “Places have laws about what you can and can’t loot, and the places that don’t still have opinions. And there’s always some things you just know you shouldn’t do.” I jerked my chin towards Mahota. We weren’t whispering, but she was out of earshot if I kept my voice down. “Like screw around with Mahota. I know she told you this isn’t one of the Consortium’s official ops, but she didn’t leave her training behind. When it comes to Hershey agents, the term of art we use in the Free State is ‘starkly dangerous.’ You can trust them to follow through on what they say they’re gonna do, and that cuts both ways.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know how the” — she visibly decided to not use any of the impolite terms — “Hersheyans do. They run pretty roughshod in Ohio. Act like we should be grateful they ain’t the Dominion, either.”
You should be, I thought. We are. Aloud, I said, “Yeah, I hear it’s been pretty bad up there. Not as bad as Michigan, or how rough things are getting in Deseret, but tough.”
Sisk gave me a flat look which made me remember that Kentucky wasn’t always loved in the Ohio river valley, either. “There’s a reason I’m down here and not up there,” she told me, and that put a kibosh on the conversation for a bit. Personally, I don’t think that was fair. It wasn’t like Hershey’s increasing dominion over the Ohio Marchlands was my fault.