ER:Ritsuko

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A non-player character in the Errant Road role-playing game. She's on stage only briefly (and unlike most such transient NPCs, manages to escape the game with her life), but plays an important role in events around the smuggler's paradise town of Nautkia, one of the game's key venues. Needless to say, she doesn't exist in the Poe-verse.

At first glance, Ritsuko appears to be nothing more than the completely benign operator of a produce wagon bringing vegetables and such things from market to restaurants, bars, businesses, and so on. In Nautkia, however, nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and it develops that she's also on the payroll of one of the smuggling gangs in town, carrying not-entirely-licit "produce" from one party to another; in other words, a mule.

She enters the game playing this "courier" role, not for delivering contraband, but rather, taking the frightened Lillith to meet the smugglers she works for, to try to get them to arrange to get half-elf Leofric (one of Ritsuko's "customers") and his half-elven colleagues out of town, as it's become too dangerous a place for them now that an elf has arrived. (This, needless to say, is a pretty good reason for Lillith to want to get out of town herself.) This almost turns out disastrously when Ritsuko makes an intermediate stop at a bar to deliver her normal cargo, and Lillith mistakes the place for the one where she's supposed to meet the smugglers. The barmaid at this place is none other than the elf in disguise, the particularly nasty Peregin Bauti, who relishes taking out half elves with explosive force and doesn't mind wiping out entire human villages in the process. A timely intervention by Sister Rose and Argus, followed by a classic food fight, saves Lillith from Bauti's ministrations, but not before there's further damage to Lillith's already battered psyche. Ritsuko sensibly disappears after this encounter, and we don't hear from her again.

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