So! If I may set the scene...
It was a cloudy and slightly windy day. Autumn was here now, and the leaves were falling from the trees on the sidewalks. Business hustled and bustled as usual through the streets, the sound bouncing off the walls, a lively energy filling the entire ArmorCity.
Through this Strop trotted, opting for once to actually commune with the community since he was not on some kind of mission. Nor was he particularly busy with the Way of Moderation tournament. Part of the reason was that he had given up on handling the logistics of the tournament- without his bellboy Cenere to pick up the paperwork, the bureaucratic spanner had truly fallen into the works and the gears of progress had ground to a halt.
"Where would he have gone anyway?" Strop mumbled to himself, as was his habit. "Not in his room, not in the library... he really wouldn't have cut and run just 'coz I didn't pay him?" That surely wouldn't have been the case. After all, students were exploitable resources, willing to work for cheap, even for free as long as you promised to pay them and maybe give them a little something to put on their resumee*. Strop knew. He was that student too.
But this meandering aside didn't at all solve his question. And then there were the various developments surely lurking in the background that Strop cared not to think about, but suspected would intrude upon his consideration at any given moment.
Right at that moment, somebody called out: "Mister moderator?"
Strop's ears pricked. The voice was lilting, female. And pleading. He looked around, but his eyesight being far inferior to his hearing, he didn't see anything.
"Over here, mister moderator!"
Finally localising the sound through all the noise, Strop turned and saw a delicate hand beckoning from behind the corner of an alleyway.
"Can I help you?"
"Please, mister moderator, all my clothes got wet in the rains, and when I hung them out to dry, somebody stole them! I have no armorpoints and I have nothing to wear! Won't you help me?"
Internally, Strop pondered. A damsel in distress! A damsel he couldn't see standing in a quiet alleyway, with a spurious tale of woe! Nothing suspicious about this one!
"Fear not, this ninja horse lives for great justice!" And with that, Strop strode into the alleyway. One second later:
"Hey, that looks like clothes you're wearing. Wait, what's with the syringe? Why does that say KETAMINE? Ow!"
A moment later, there was a thud, and Strop finally stopped talking.
*This spelling is incorrect. But the AG board doesn't support the character I need.