"Come on, Izco said it was this way!" Xochitl said, beckoning the others along behind her as they slunk down one of the many alleyways in Tuliyollal. This was a small, out of the way corner of the city, hidden behind taller buildings and even taller cliffs of the towering capital. Her ears shifted back as the tigress took in the huddled groups of vagrant Turali. What were these people doing here? Why wasn't something being done for them? Her brow furrowed as they made their way past, to a ramshackle hovel that was an over-aggrandized lean-to as it flopped lop-sided against the cliffside. A cluster of children that seemed to range in age from six or seven to somewhere in the middle teens scattered like a flock of birds as they neared.  The furrow in Xochitl's brow only deepened.

"You're going to get all of us in trouble, skulking around here in those uniforms."  It was the young shetona they'd chased down the other day, leaning up against a rickety-looking support pillar. He pushed off it, beckoning them with a hand, guiding them down yet another side alley. "Baron Python will think one of us led you here and he'll have it out for all of us. What do you want? Maybe I can get you to sod off before he catches wind of you."

Izco was the first to speak. "I followed you out here the other night. I saw you giving all that food out to the kidlets. Doesn't this Baron guy feed you?  House you? Take care of you?"

The shetona lad only laughed. "Oh, aye, he takes care of us if we bring him enough loot to make it worth his while. He houses us all together in a one-room shanty with nary a blanket to share between us.  Fed?  Sometimes, when he's in the right mood.  Otherwise, we fend for ourselves."

Xochitl's tail flicked back and forth. How could something like this be tucked away in the shadows of the Downripple, little more than a few hundred yalms from Vollok Shoonsa where the Dawnservant regularly held audience?  She glanced between Atlan, Pixie, and Izco.  They'd have to report this to Staff Sergeant Tenoch. The four of them nodded together in agreement.

"Listen," the white-furred xbr'aal said to the young man. "We're going to tell our superiors about this and we'll come and get you all out of here."

He blinked at her, then he gave her the most smug grin before he doubled over in laughter, clutching at his stomach.  He laughed and laughed, all while the quartet of Landsguard cadets watched him in stunned silence. Eventually he stopped, planting his hands on his knees and he panted for breath between huffs of laughter. "Superiors..." He sneered. "You think your finely feathered friends haven't been here before and seen all this?" He waved a hand around at the squalor that existed in the half-forgotten corner of the city. "Ignorance is bliss; you and yours would rather turn a blind eye than do what they know is right."

The four friends looked at one another in concern and consternation. There was no way that could be right! This was the kind of thing the Landsguard was meant to prevent, these children part of the people they were sworn to protect!  Surely a mistake had been made somewhere, some oversight.  Izco shuffled from one foot to the other, a nervous habit of the hhetsarro's whenever he was in a situation he wasn't comfortable with.  Atlan looked around, trying to beckon some of the children out of hiding, but to no avail.  Pixie looked at Xochitl, concern clearly written in the hare-maiden's vivid gaze. "We cannot let this stand."

Xochitl nodded her agreement, her tail no less agitated than before as it sharply went back and forth. "We'll take it to the Staff Sergeant. If he won't do anything about it, then we'll run it up the chain of command all the way up to the Dawnservant himself if we must." She said, her ears tilting back against her mane. "These are children for vidraal's sake, they shouldn't be out here living like this, like they're indentured servants of some criminal ringleader."

"Brave words." The shetona boy taunted. "But you won't get any farther than any of the rest of them.  If it'll get you out of here though, run along and go tell your 'superiors'..." He sneered the word with unbridled contempt. "I bet they'll do a fat lot of nothing, just like the last ones that came through here."

With no other recourse as cadets, the four of them turned and made their way back out into the city proper. All of them held faces that were limned with both concern and frustration. None of this lined up with what they knew the Landsguard to be.  It didn't line up with their tenets, their oaths, their promises to the people of Tural.  It spat in the face of everything the Dawnservant had labored to build for his people. 

"There has to be something we're not seeing here, something we don't know about." Atlan said as they walked.  Every so often, the tow-haired tonawawta would glance back behind them as if he could still see that shadowed place and those beleaguered children even from here. His tone sounded down-trod, as if someone who'd believed in something his whole life was finally seeing it from a new angle.  An angle he didn't much like seeing.

"Did you see all of them?" Pixie's voice was strained with her disquiet over everything they'd just witnessed. "At least a dozen of them, if not more.  Are they orphans, do you think? Surely if they had parents, family, someone would be out looking for them. Someone would have come to Brightbloom Post to report them!"

As they walked, Xochitl's ears stayed pinned back against her hair, her tail lashing fitfully. Tuliyollal was a large city and like many large cities, there were places and people that oftentimes fell through the cracks, overlooked, even neglected. Even in her own village back in Yak T'el, things sometimes fell by the wayside, she could only imagine the magnitude with which it happened here. "No, Pix..." She said, her normally mellow contralto softly grim. "I think they've been forgotten."

Izco skulked along just to Xochitl's right, his own ears and tail as emotive as her own were. "Do you really think the Staff Sergeant is going to listen to us?"

Xochitl's jaw clenched. "Oh, he'll listen to us -- even if I have to drag him down here myself."

Atlan, Pixie, and Izco all stopped for a moment, staring at the back of the xbr'aal as she continued to march down the thoroughfare toward Brightbloom Post.  Was she about to end her Landsguard career before it was even really started?  The three of them looked at each other; Pixie shrugged, Atlan rubbed at the back of his head with one hand, and Izco rolled his eyes.  Taking off at a jog, the three of them caught up to Xochitl, Pixie looping her arm around the elbow on the tigress' left side, while Atlan did the same on her right, and Izco did likewise on the other side of Atlan. The three of them formed a chain of bodies as they made their way along the avenue.

"We'll drag him down here -- together."