Luz strutted through the length of the train to get some familiarity with it and it's occupants.
The passenger portion of the train consisted of four cars of coffin-motel-sized, roughly rectangular 'bedtubes', stacked two high, laying perpendicular to their travel. At one the end of the car is a small closet-like restroom, the other end consisted of storage for items that couldn't fit inside the bedtubes or in a small storage space underneath the lower one. A pathway ran along one side of the car.
The rear three cars were packed with burly, rough men, several orcs, and one troll who had moved into a storage area at the end of a car, too big to fit into a bedtube. Already the stench of too many people living together was present, the troupe having traveled together before hiring the runners. Small particles of ashen silt, kicked up from the motion of the convoy and defying the poor filtration units of the cars, wafted through the air and clung to everything.
The noise of conversations drew down as she passed, the men staring at the cyber-laden woman. She squeezed past a particularity tall orc, who grunted and smiled. She felt her ballistic skirt move, looked down and saw that the orc’s hand had found its way into the split that exposed the side of her upper leg, was now resting on her metallic buttock
Luz stopped, looking up to the orc and returned his smile. The orc chuckled softly as Luz ran her metallic left hand up the man’s chest, stopping to hold back the side of his exposed neck.
Suddenly, the orc tensed up, his back arched and his eyes rolled back into his head before falling limply to the ground. The other men stared quietly for a moment at the dazed orc.
The car erupted in laughter. Luz turned and continued towards the front of the train; the remaining men moving against the walls to allow her passage.
¥
Next was a car consisting of two parts common rooms, and one part closet-like showers, clearly not designed with orcs or trolls in mind. The rooms were mostly packed with gear or sleeping passengers; including a couple more trolls and a minotaur.
There were roughly enough beds in the forward passenger car to house the performers, or what Luz assumed to be the performers, since their bodies were lither and more toned than those in the other cars.
The lights were dimmer in this car, almost to the point of requiring Luz to use the low-light in her cybereyes.
“Ugh, this ash is terrible! “ Someone complained softly. “It’s everywhere!”
“We’ll be out of it soon enough…get some rest.” A deep voice responded.
“I need a shower; hopefully the help hasn’t clogged the drains already”
“There’s no point until we leave Puyallup”
“Excuse me” A new voice said to Luz from one of the nearby tubes.
She turned to see a female elf with strikingly unusual black skin and long grey hair looking at her horizontally, just below eye-level.
“Are you new? Because if you aren’t, you know your bed is back there.”
Luz turned on her enhanced vision to see who was addressing her.
“I’m not the normal ‘help’.”“Yeah well, we don’t appreciate the kind of help you bring here,” the dark woman said, looking at the assault rifle hanging from Luz’s shoulder, “this is our home.”
Luz adjusted the settings on her voice modulator to give her voice a softer, sweeter tone,
“You don’t have that luxury, because your home is moving through other’s home, and they might not like that.” “Well I don’t care what they think…we are here to entertain, and we hardly have anything of value”
“Leave her alone” The deep voice said as his two hard hooves hit the floor. “She’s just doing her job that Oblique hired her for.”
Luz looked at the voice to see that this one was a Satyr, with thin, swept horns and the hair on his legs dyed black.
Luz silently moved forward to the prime mover, where she found a ladder leading to the roof.