Ambergryph woke up to the sounds of the news. This did not please him. Being somewhat light-, sound-, and temperature-sensitive while he slept, if it got too light, loud, or warm he'd wake up whether he liked it or not. He was just as displeased that it was the news he was waking up to as he was at the fact of waking. He was not terribly keen on all the bad news-they never showed him any bad news he could do anything about, so he hardly saw the point.
Ravenna, his roommate, was in the habit of watching the news. She was not the sort of person you would expect to watch the news-half dark elf and half sphinx, a werewolf, and with a personality comparable to a golden retriever. One would think bad news would be the last thing on her mind. But it was for work. She and Ambergryph worked as mercenaries, which basically meant that not only did they catch criminals bounty hunter style, they also did odd jobs on commission, ranging from bodyguarding to babysitting to physical labor. If someone's up to something illegal, they'd hear about it on the news before they heard about it at work.
Ambergryph himself was equally inhuman. He was half dragon, and half…something like a wolf. No one's really ever come up with a name for his father's kind, but there's more than just anthropomorphic wolves, and they call themselves "our kind" because there's no one (except dragons, under certain circumstances) who looks much like their species. Future civilizations will find ancient documents and refer to one of the most varied species of the ancient world as "Owrkynd" or something.
Because Ambergryph slept on the couch, and the only TV in the apartment was in front of it, Ravenna could not have gone anywhere else to watch the news. Ambergryph was not much of a morning person, but Ravenna seemed to be an "awake" person because she was always perky. On one occasion Ambergryph stayed up all night and she woke up and literally bounced out of bed. It was a little creepy to see someone you grew up with act like that if you've always been asleep whenever they did it in the past, especially if you're of a species that lives as long as theirs did (they were both about 158 years old, pretty infantile by the standards of their species, but mentally around an 18 year old human.) Because humans have one of the most stable maturing processes of all the races, their ages are used as reference points for the mental capabilities of other races.
The anchor made some inane comment about the previous story that he no doubt thought was devastatingly, crushingly witty. Then they made a quick comment about some people going missing, had a cursory interview with one of the family members, and moved on to more interesting (read: gruesome and violent) things.
No one very important to the social high life, of course. When they go missing, it's top billing on the news the instant someone finds out, and it takes up most of the allotted half hour. But important to Ambergryph, because then he needed to go out and find them. Not only because he cared, but because he got paid to do just that sort of thing. Ambergryph knew all about how the social high life works. It mostly consists of abiding by the rule of nobles oblege, which these days means, as Ambergryph puts it, "being a total prick to people less rich than you. Which is why I took one look at the title of 'duke' that I got born with, and I said, 'Blow you!' and went out to live in the world where I could make a living and didn't have to be an asshole to people for no reason"
He muttered something half intelligible at Ravenna about turning it off, and the dire ramifications of not doing so. She laughed and changed the channel. He decided this was close enough and got up. He wandered into the kitchen of something to stick in his mouth. If it was a pleasant something, this was all to the better.
He found some sort of sweetened peanut butter-flavored breakfast cereal. This was good enough, Ambergryph decided. He ate a little. Something sank in. Dashing back into the sitting room, he snatched the remote, and went back to the previous channel a rewound to the report. They had one of those newfangled devices that let's you treat live TV like a recording, although you can't fast forward until you've paused or rewound. At this point, Ambergryph was extra glad they'd had the extra money lying around and bought it.
"I suppose you'd want to call the locker-room thefts an open-and-shut case, then. Yesterday, the third disappearance was reported. Just like the other two reports, when bounty hunters went to investigate all they found were some draconic tracks and a few spots that turned out to be rabbit blood. Moving on…" the anchor said. He paused it.
Arden doesn't have a police force. All police work is done by bounty hunters and mercenaries. Also, Ambergryph knew about the locker-room thefts, and those weren't an open and shut case, the two mercenaries on that case took a month to finally get it. An open-and-shut case is when you get a report of a major domestic fracas, and when you go to check it out, there's a lady with a right-angled fire poker, or possibly a bloody sword, standing over a man with a bashed in head or a bit of a draft in his chest, and she's sobbing that he said something he shouldn't have about their son. The term open-and-shut case comes from the fact that the case is basically solved the instant you open the door, so the only thing left to do is take the guilty party out the door and shut it behind you. Ravenna and Ambergryph were a registered team-which means that they were required both by law and by company (or rather, dispatch) policy to say no to jobs which only one person can do, unless the same employer has another such job registered.
They looked at each other. From the look on her face, Ravenna had the same feeling Ambergryph had. Not only were they a mercenary team, they were a team with a fairly high reputation, which means that people, sometimes even ones who are publicly outspoken against the existence of mixed breeds of any sort (the sort of people who go around leaving condescending letters taped to people's doors because they own mutt dogs, among other pastimes), sometimes will specifically say at the registry, "We want this job done by Ambergryph and Ravenna.". While this means that they get more work than is their fair share (a mixed blessing in itself), it also means that they had to be careful about screwing up jobs or rejecting them. Otherwise their reputation would go sour and they would have the reverse problem, viz., people would specifically request that they not be allowed to work the job.
So they stuck to only rejecting jobs that they found morally objectionable. On occasion, a mercenary will be asked by a gambler who is also a bit of a sore loser to steal back lost money. This occurrence had been growing in frequency and the bounty hunters at the dispatch now placed bets on who would be asked next.
Ambergryph went back to his cereal. "We should probably head off to the registry. Someone's bound to have put up something by now," he said. Ravenna and Ambergryph had been more or less broke, and living on what was lying around the apartment, for several weeks now, because their registry hadn't been getting any job requests.
Mercenaries and bounty hunters share registries; about half the people at Ambergryph's registry were actually bounty hunters. Their registry had always had a bit of trouble with work because the man who runs it is a reputedly sleazy man. Ambergryph didn't like him. Ravenna didn't like him. Not much of anybody liked him. His employees only work for him because they can't get a job at a registry with a better reputation-everyone who works for this registry works here because no one else would hire them.
Akbar the troll, for example, worked there because this was the only work for which he was qualified that didn't have an IQ requirement (and even then, the other registries rejected him on grounds of intelligence, or lack thereof). Derek Avery, on the other hand, couldn't get hired anywhere else because he was trained for combat and cooking-this was the only combat-related job he could get, and he was a construct (a person cobbled together from bits of other people-Derek was the name of the brain, so the rest of him was Derek too, even if it was a bit of a Tom, Dick, Harry, or whatever previously), so restaurants wouldn't hire him because they were afraid bits of him would fall off into the food (a common misconception, with a slight basis, but Derek had a tendency to hang with an Igor all the time so there was nothing to worry about with him.
As for Ambergryph and Ravenna, they come from a barbarian tribe. Barbarians are reputed to be stupid, violent savages (a black lie-Ambergryph's tribe is intelligent, enlightened, and has a firm grasp on modern concepts like physics and going to the bathroom in private, even if their grasp on using them is a little shaky). So, because it was difficult to keep a secret in Arden City (enough money to the right guy in the pub, and you can find out things about someone else that even they don't know), we ended up here.
The phone rang. Ambergryph picked it up and was instantly sorry. He recognized the woman shouting on the other line.
"HELLO? CAN I SPEAK TO RAVENNA?" she shouted. It was her mother. One of the identifying characteristics of the older generation of their tribe is that they hadn't quite figured out modern innovations. Ambergryph had once watched his father ask the TV if it could hold on for just a second while he went and relieved himself. Ambergryph handed the receiver to Ravenna, but it was a token gesture. She could've held the conversation from the bathroom. With the door closed. Without Ambergryph ever moving.
They held a brief conversation in which Ravenna's mom wanted her to pass on a message that Ambergryph's folks wanted them to take a couple thousand dollars to put away for a while and Ravenna said thanks but we don't need it, we're both alive so obviously we must be doing all right. Her mother said that if they were sure then she supposed it was okay, and Ravenna said if we need it we'd call up and say so. Then Ravenna's mother shouted goodbye, and asked that they move back home so she wouldn't have to shout. She hung up before Ravenna could say goodbye, or tell her that she didn't have to shout into the phone.
Ambergryph swallowed the last of breakfast. "Shall we go?" he asked.
"Yeah, sure," she said. She grabbed the keys to the apartment and they walked out.