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31_days2006-01-07 09:31 pm
mythicbeast.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2006-01-07 09:31 pm
[Jan. 6][Valkyrie Profile: Illusion of Memory] In the Land of the Sun
Title: In the Land of the Sun
Date/Theme: January 6th: Valsa de Eurydice / Samba de Orfeu
Series: Illusion of Memory (an Interactive Fiction set in Valkyrie Profile's world.)
Characters/Pairing: Raeger, Judas (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
myaru's boy) (Both are original characters.)
Rating: PG-13 (better safe than sorry!)
Summary: Between being mistaken for a boy on a regular basis, getting lost in the muddle of a seaport town, and being firmly squashed under the thumb of her vampireslave-driver captor associate, Raeger's probably going to go insane.
A/N: In which I try an experiment: actually introducing the situation before plunging into the muddle, for the sake of people unfamiliar with the characters. Unfortunately, that means this is rather long (around 8k sans notes) so, uh. Not very light reading. ;_; THE PROSE, MA, IT STINGS AND HURTS. Also, THIS NEEDS A BETTER TITLE. And heavy editing, but that's a given! The only way this relates to the theme is that the music, to my ears, sounded appropriate as BG music for a seaport, which is where this happens. Er. Yes, that's the lamest ever.
Much as she liked to think that she'd seen a fair bit of life (and quite a lot more of other things she'd have been perfectly happy not seeing for the entirety of her existence, such as visceral, gruesome, and above all unneccessary death) outside the shuttered mansions of Artolian nobility she'd grown up in, even Raeger had to pause at the sight of Aragon's haphazardly sprawled market. Artolia was inland, hemmed in by mountains, and if she had to be honest about it, more than a little backward; Aragon, a seaport teeming so ferociously with life that its seams frequently burst to inundate her senses with a dizzying array of sensation, was anything but. The girl kept her head low and scurried, more than walked, to catch up with her taller companion, resisting the urge to grab onto his sleeve to anchor herself in an otherwise dizzying world. That would, after all, be admitting weakness.
The air here stirred only occasionally, the threat of wind constantly buffered by the buildings that rose as naturally as though they'd sprung wholly formed from the ground, as varied and odd as the people that milled around them. She'd never been this close to the sea before, but Raeger certainly remembered reading about it -- dreaming about going to it, even, though not quite under such circumstances as these -- and she was almost sure that there would be fresher air by the harbor, strong winds that rolled off the sea(or perhaps the ocean? She had no way of knowing the difference), reeking of wild tales and wilder places. The girl wondered, tugging at the high collar of her shirt, whether the atmosphere by the docks was an improvement over the marketplace in terms of relief from the heat. Judas had specified to avoid the harbor when possible, though, and she didn't imagine she was going to have the opportunity to measure the difference herself, not while she was in his company.
Raeger's eyes, already little more than green slits as she squinted against the bright midday light, narrowed even further as that train of thought prompted her gaze to slide over to her erstwhile companion, eying him with equal parts apprehension and respect. Well, probably more apprehension, but it was better than outright fear, wasn't it? His hair, like hers, was swept up into a severe-looking bun at the back of his head, covered with a cloth cap and stuck through with an enormous jeweled pin, though his clothes seemed more comfortable than her own stiff robes. It would take an exceptionally dull-witted individual not to realize that they weren't local to the area, but not a single person turned more than a token glance their way. Raeger thought this was extraordinary, but after they'd passed the midget juggling dead weasels on a street corner, she supposed that the people here had seen things far more fascinating than the foreign-looking nobleman with his page in tow.
At the thought, the girl frowned, feeling vaguely as though she was missing something in the subtext of the situation. Granted, there was enough about it to distract her -- she wasn't precisely world-wise, she'd admit that, but she wasn't stupid enough to think, even after more than half a year of it, that being (sort-of) kidnapped by a vampire (who had, incidentally, murdered one of your friends -- not a very good friend, mind, but it was the principle of the thing) and bullied (thought she preferred to use the term coerced, since it seemed less pathetic somehow) into being his servant (though she had to admit that he ended up doing most of the work anyway) was an ordinary situation for anyone to find themselves in.
The point was, though, that there was a fishiness to this particular endeavor that she couldn't quite put her finger on, and she supposed that to a degree, it had to do with her enforced change of outfit. Bards generally had the inclination to dress in a manner that suited their demeanor, and she was no exception to the rule, and donning an outfit similar to her captor's -- claiming any sort of kinship, really -- felt more than somewhat bizarre, if only because she'd never worn something so blatantly exotic in her life. On a technical level, the clothes chafed in the most uncomfortable places. How did people breathe in these things? At least she could console herself with the fact that she was wearing sensible underthings. After only an hour on the streets, she'd already caught sight of others clad in much less, and she'd had the mortification of having a particularly buxom woman wink at her in an all-too-friendly manner.
There was a suspicious thought, lingering in the back of her mind, about whether or not she was actually wearing the clothes appropriate for her gender, but she dismissed it as soon as it came. Judas wasn't the kind of person to make any mistake of the sort, unless he intended to in the first place. She'd simply have to trust him in this case, since she didn't have much other choice.
In front of her, Judas half-turned to check that she was still keeping up with him, and she took advantage of his brief pause to hurry up to his side. The increase in speed jostled the leather satchel which she kep slung over one shoulder to rest on her hip, and with a shrill noise of protest at the unwanted movement, Ky poked his head out to let his displeasure with the situation be known. Raeger's pet ferret, much-abused and about as useful as wet sand on a rainy day at the best of times as he was, disliked the vampire intensely, and avoided him when at all possible. That included, for the most part, staying out of sight when he was around(which was a good idea in any case, because Judas wasn't particularly fond of what he viewed as the annoying rat that took up entirely too much time of Raeger's time, and would have seized on the slightest reason to conveniently arrange for the ferret to 'disappear'), and he'd been hiding in his mistress' bag since they'd left the inn earlier, pawing for space amongst paper, ink, and quill.
The unwarranted disturbance of his sanctuary, in combination with the stifling heat inside the bag, was enough of an excuse for Ky to immediately attempt wriggling out of it, once he discovered just how much cooler the great outdoors actually was. It was even worth having to smell the Bad Man, in his opinion, and it was to his great displeasure that he found himself being forced back into the satchel by an owner less-than-elated as his newfound desire for freedom.
"Ky!" Raeger hissed, completely unsympathetic to the ferret's situation, not being possessed of fur or knowledge of what it was like to be wedged into a leather bag at the very height of noon. "Behave!" Her satchel squeaked in response, thoroughly unimpressed, before bucking like a fish, frantic with the hob's efforts to break out. She wedged it under her arm, and was panting by the time she drew level with the vampire.
Judas looked at her, mildly annoyed and apparently sufficiently untouched by the heat around them to expend effort on something as petty as irritation. She'd learnt, long ago, that the vampire had a way of tilting his head just so, as though to inquire what exactly Raeger was trying to do; in this case, his expression might as well have been audibly asking, 'why are you clutching your bag in both arms like a toddler with a toy somebody wants to take away?'. Registering the slightly hounded expression on her face, he switched tracks, and instead informed her, in a passably neutral tone, "The last thing you want is to get lost here. Keep your... pet under control, would you? "
Raeger nodded dumbly, and with that, the vampire pivoted neatly on his heel, clomping off at a brisk trot as though it was the middle of the night and he was fully in his element. The girl looked after him, thoroughly dismayed, and wondering exactly what she often had before, under similar circumstances: wasn't his kind supposed to burn to a crisp in daylight? Not medium rare, not well done, not even very well done; by all accounts, his corpse should have skipped all stages of 'cooked' and headed for 'spontaneously combusted' the moment sunlight touched it. Shaking her head in bewilderment at a puzzle that was not solving itself, no matter how hard she shook the bag holding all the pieces, the girl hurried after him.
Somehow, the sun felt hotter on her skin here than in the desert. Never mind that, technically speaking, more square inches of her were actually covered by the robes Judas had gotten her; she still felt hot, like a buttered lobster shuffled into an oven. She wondered if it had something to do with the dampness in the air. The smell of brine permeated the very stones of the town, and lingered even in the comfortingly human bustle of the marketplace, wrapped around sharp corners and dark alleys like a particularly tatty cloak its owner was loathe to shed. All the rain from the night before, however fierce it was, seemed to have done little to reduce the odor's strength, and if it already had, Raeger decided that she never wanted to discover what the normal potency of Aragon's unique 'flavor' was.
As it was, the reek made the bard's nose itch with a fierce longing for the fresh air of Artolia's northern woods, crisp and sharp and laced with just the slightest touch of pine. And uncluttered, definitely uncluttered; not like the veritable assault on the senses Aragon threw at its visitors. Layered on top of the brine were the assorted, undeniable traces of human activity: the heady, golden beckon of meat roasting on the grill, the sneeze-inducing wares of a brightly-clad man hawking spices, even the musk of animal dung carelessly deposited on the road, ready for an unwitting traveller to trip upon it -- Raeger made sure to avoid stepping in that whenever she could, though between trying to keep up with Judas and keeping Ky from hurtling out of the satchel, she inevitably stepped in a few ill-placed cowpats anyway. Cowpats in a city, she thought, cringing. Well, where there were cows, there were certain to be cowpats, and she certainly couldn't imagine any of the oxcarts around the place pulling themselves.
There were more than smells to occupy her curiosity, though Ky could clearly catch a whiff of them himself; his struggles grew fiercer than ever, giddy at the prospect of even more nooks and crannies to explore. In response, Raeger's grip on him tightened, because the last thing she wanted was to have to chase Ky while dodging the feet of the crowds stampeding down the roads. Keeping her attention divided between Judas' vanishing back, holding the ferret in check, and still having enough time to look around at the market stalls herself, which were taunting her from every direction with their bright colors and proudly-advertised wares, was not a particularly easy task. A pink-faced, sweating merchant exhorting customers to purchase his lovely melons was overtaken midyell by a tanned man peddling his services as a tinkerer; their voices combined were soundly beaten by the earsplitting efforts of a wrinkled old woman enticing the crowd to let her peer into their future. Raeger personally did not need any cards to tell her that she was going to be nursing a severe headache by the end of the day.
Ah, but she was a bard, wasn't she? The clamor of the public at its rowdiest and the throb of civilization's pulse were what she ought to live for, after all, but she was starting to suspect that her fondness for crowds had begun to deteriorate during her extended stay in Judas' company. It was not that she'd begun to despise being in the company of say, human beings, she reasoned, squeezing her way past a pair of sailors with feverish glints in their piggish eyes that suggested newly acquired shore leave and a very clear idea on what they wanted to spend it doing. It was just that it was harder to deal with people after weeks on end of running into little more than a camel or a cactus. The desert was wide, the desert was frightening, and the desert was, well, deserted. Whatever Judas was looking for among the ruins of the kingdom that had been half-buried in the sand, he apparently hadn't found it yet, because he kept insisting on going back to it.
If she'd had half the spine to stand up to him, Raeger thought, she would have refused flat-out to be dragged into this in the first place. But then there it was again, that silent, occasionally less-than-friendly reminder of obligation: she was a bard. More than anything else, what she loved most in the world were stories.
And even if he was a member of the evil undead, Judas knew quite a lot of interesting ones, and he wasn't half bad at telling them.
Then she saw it.
Later, she would think, if her attention hadn't been so distracted and the day so hot, she might have not let herself notice it, tucked up against the side of a building and as unassuming a stall as she had ever seen in her life. She caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye, and before she could think, she'd instinctively spun towards it. Raeger had no eyes for the relative shabbiness of the stall, nor the slightly unhygienic look to the setup as a whole; what had garnered her attention as the sunlight glinted off it, what held her attention now, were the Jars.
They were not, in themselves, particularly special jars. Their walls were were clear, for the most part, with the strange opaque imperfections that tended to riddle poorly made glass the same way arrows tended to riddle assorted religious martyrs. Their contents, though, were what kept her eyes glued to them. Fruit had been sliced into large wedges and immersed in the water the jars contained, crowded together like lemmings in a barrel and just begging for liberation. Chunks of ice floated with them, rendering the water cold enough that condensation rolled off the sides of the jars in droves, droplets chasing each other down the sleek glass.
Cold. Sweet. Raeger's mouth, unbidden, watered instantly.
The vendor, opening her mouth to inquire if the strange lad was planning to hex her merchandise with his near-fanatical stare, was immediately surprised to have a fistful of assorted coins thrust at her, and the boy babbling something at her in a language she couldn't understand. She smiled uncertainly and gingerly accepted the money, then tried speaking to the boy in Hieratic, only to be met with slightly-hysterical finger-jabbing towards the jar of gaily floating pinyas. Sighing, she looked down at the coins in her hand. Whatever the amount was, whatever currency it was in, it was probably more than enough to buy the entire contents of the jar, and then some. For the second time in one minute, the vendor opened her mouth, thought better of it, and shut it again, instead moving to unscrew the lid off of the pinya jar. Every merchant, after all, knows the value of the customer who'll pay any price for the product, and it's even better when the customer doesn't seem to know what its value actually is Still, as she watched the lad walk off happily, she had to shake her head. Been a bit too much out in the sun, that one. And was that a rat in his bag?
Unaware of the extremely confused fruit-seller she'd just left hapless in her wake, Raeger munched on her newly-acquired treat contentedly, gnawing on the thin wedge of pineapple skewered on a stick as though it were the finest of delicacies. And in a way, it was. The bard's brain temporarily disengaged as she occupied her teeth and mouth with the task of stripping salty-sweet pulp apart and gulping it down before the air could strip away the lingering traces of the icy saltwater the fruit had been immersed in. As such, it took her a moment to realize her horrible, dreadful, inherently appalling and basically stupid mistake, which made her stop dead in the middle of the road (and nearly causing great injury to a wagon driver who swerved around her as she did so).
Raeger had lost sight of Judas.
He was going to kill her.
***
I am going to kill her, Judas thought. This was not, in fact, wholly accurate. What Judas actually thought was an intricate string of death threats comprised of detailed, inventive and utterly painful means of generating Raeger's demise, liberally laced with a healthy dose of invective that could quite literally make a sailor cry (and huddle protectively over his crotch, lest the amount of sheer acidity in Judas' tone of voice compel his testicles to wither at the very sound of it). But the general gist of it was, for all intents and purposes, the same, and so for the sake of simplicity, the briefer summary would suffice.
He wasn't quite sure which of them was to blame for Raeger wandering off -- himself, or her -- and that uncertainty alone was enough to put him into a thoroughly black mood, only further exacerbated the longer he couldn't manage to find her. She could have been gone for the past hour, or she could have been swallowed by the crowd in the last five minutes. He had no way of knowing, because his attention had been occupied picking out the stalls where they would be most likely to find the artifacts he needed for the next ritual he planned to attempt in Amenti's ruins. The vampire cursed again, and picked up his pace. Stupid. The word, he assured himself was directed in Raeger's direction. Definitely not his own.
Asking how one could get lost in Aragon's market, he told himself, would be redundant and stupid. Of course you could get lost in Aragon's market. It was remarkably easy to. He had, once, and it was an incident he wasn't about to forget quickly, even if it had happened almost seventy years ago. The more pressing point was, he thought (imagining the veins in his temples pounding with fury if he'd had a heart to pump blood to them), that how could Raeger have lost him? Losing herself was perfectly understandable. Judas, without the least bit of remorse, had already pegged her long ago as one of those sorts of people who had had to have their gloves and shoes marked 'left' and 'right' well into their adolescent years. Even so, he'd expected her at least to be able to follow an order as simple as 'stay close to me, and don't wander off on your own'.
But no. Just that was asking too much.
The girl was a bloody health hazard, he decided, shoving aside the pedestrians with the audacity to block his rampage (there weren't many, because most took a single look at the thundercloud of an expression gracing his features and scrambled out of his path. Judas thought this was a pity. Kicking a few people out of his way would have made him feel infinitely better). Both to herself, and to others. He found himself wondering if the undead could develop ulcers, and squashed the thought down. He had better things to think of. Such as how he could manage to find his errant (among other unpleasant, derogatory, and abusive adjectives, though he'd never say any of them aloud) ... assistant? Protege?
Associate, he decided. That seemed to suit her best, really, and it didn't contain half the connotations of a personal relationship like the other two appeared to.
Those watching the street he was hurrying down were provided with a brief moment of amusement when Judas halted in the middle of the road, stopping so abruptly that he nearly catapulted himself face-first into the mud. Of course, he didn't. Vampire reflexes are good for something, after all. But for just a moment, however brief, he did look pretty damn ridiculous.
Judas, though, was well beyond caring what a couple of rooftop pigeons thought of his poor attempts at aerial acrobatics. Muttering at his own stupidity, he pivoted smartly and strode out into the crowd again, though this time, with more purpose.
And if the citizens of Aragon thought there was something strange about a man fluttering around their streets with one hand pressed firmly against the lobe of one ear, they knew better than to mention it to him.
***
Camels are particular creatures of habit, even if they don't seem to be. It's why they chew cud. In theory, if a meal tasted good coming down, it ought to be even better the second time around. It's why they never seem to go any faster than a shamble. Because quite frankly, they can't be buggered to.
It's also the reason they tend to go into fits of ill-temper, for no apparent reason. There's nothing quite like someone hogging your favorite napping spot to seriously put a kink in your hump. It's a myth that all camels have little or no good humor, since as a general rule, the worst thing they do when unprovoked is be boring. There are those, however, who are genuinely belligerent creatures in and of themselves, with little regard for common decency, or indeed, anything that does not happen to be a part of the next meal.
The camel bull that found the girl huddled miserably on the seat of Aragon's only public fountain answered to a number of indelicate epithets, mostly in the form of a swift kick to the groin if it was in range, and to the face if it wasn't. His real name, as far as other camels themselves were concerned, was Two Hump.
Though he stood slightly shorter than the majority of his lanky companions, Two Hump more than made up for height with sheer bulk. Only an idiot would think that he was in any way less dangerous; his ire was not a thing man or camel would invite willingly, particularly when a light butt of his head, properly aimed, could send a man hurtling across the stable and into the dung heap. The two humps for which he was named wobbled proudly on his back, twin spires dedicated to his might, and among Aragon's flock of near-identical camels, all similarly festooned in rugs and blanketrolls and various goods for sale but conspicuously single-humped, his unfettered form was a sight easily recognizable, even to the blind.
Which was just as well, because it provided most of his would-be victims with ample warning of his approach. Two Hump didn't mind that too much. If a camel could be said to revel in the presence of well-organized fear, Two Hump would be all but rubbing his hooves together and cackling, metaphorically speaking, at the smug, silent authority he held over both his retainers and peers alike. Any dissenters wouldn't be capable of dissenting for very long.
That, of course, brought him to his present state of puzzlement and mounting irritation, mostly directed at the hapless creature getting between him and his favorite drinking spot. What was beginning to vex the camel thoroughly was that it seemed to be completely unaware of his presence, and unlikely to move aside after anything shorter than a small eternity.
Two Hump lowed, letting his lips flicker back from his teeth. On a human, it would have been roughly equivalent to a put-upon sigh. 'Manling,' Two Hump harrumphed, just barely refraining from punting it into the fountain, lest he spoil his own drink of water, 'Move.'
It didn't seem inclined to respond, or more significantly, comply with his request. Two Hump's flanks twitched. 'Manling,' he said, 'I am a Ship of the Desert. I know the Hundredth Name of God. For a thousand years my ancestors spat on your ancestors and ate their clothes and their tents, and we were not punished because it was we who gave them life. Even if the sands of the desert bury your bones and your cities, even if its winds strip your corpses dry and grind your proud monuments to dust, my kind will outlast yours. I will bow for no one.' He paused.
'Now, will you move?'
There was no response, and Two Hump harrumphed again. 'Well, you asked for it.'
Raeger, who could not understand a single word of Camel, and was entirely puzzled as to why one was huffing and rolling its eyes expressively in front of her, was subjected to a highly unpleasant surprise when the camel in question made a curious, gagging noise in the back of its throat--
And spat on her.
"Hey!" she yowled in protest, jumping off the fountain rim and to her feet. This was all the incentive Two Hump needed, naturally, and he butted past her without so much as another glance, plunging his nose into the fountain and gulping deeply. For her part, the bard was too horrified by the mess of regurgitated grass and spit on her clothes -- her new clothes! -- to pay the camel
any proper amount of attention, which suited him just fine. Disgusted, Raeger began to turn away from the greedily drinking camel, ready to plunge down yet another of Aragon's nearly identical streets in a fruitless attempt to search for Judas once again. If she was lucky, she might at least be able to find the inn they had booked a room in.
Unfortunately, this was not to be.
Without warning, a fat, meaty hand latched onto her arm, and the girl froze, feeling the indent of several heavily jeweled rings digging into her flesh even through the cloth. Its grip was iron, even for the deceptive softness of the hand, and she felt the hair on the nape of her neck prickle at the low, booming chuckle that accompanied it. Raeger turned, slowly, expression frozen into a stiff parody of a smile, and looked into beady, too-bright eyes. She gulped.
There's a saying, somewhere, that all the bad things in life come in threes.
Raeger had found her third.
***
Judas was glad that he'd thought to put something on the girl he could track her with, even if he hadn't had any occasion to call on it before now. He'd given her, months ago, an earring to wear, a trinket of ruby, lapis and gold taken from his own ear. Its twin was still attached to the lobe of his other ear, as a matter of fact, and he rested his fingers on the intricate goldwork lightly to activate the spell as he worked on tracking Raeger down. This particular situation wasn't what he had imagined having to use the minor enchantment for, admittedly, and he'd almost forgotten about it; the idea made him scowl. Reasonably enough, he'd expected that the girl would be likeliest to attempt to run away from him in the first month or so; he was faintly surprised when she didn't run for Artolia the moment she wasn't tied to a chair. He'd expected her to make the attempt to get him arrested for murder the first time she got a chance.
That was, really, the reason why this was so annoying.
The spell told him that Raeger lay somewhere beyond a series of buildings, and he bit back a sigh, maneuvering to find away around them. The enchantment wasn't near-specific enough to account for thoroughfares and byways; it just located its partner, and that was that. He'd been expecting to chase her down across large but ultimately easy-to-traverse sand dunes, not crowded streets that smelt of fish and worse things. If he'd known... still, he didn't think she'd gotten lost on purpose. Reluctant a captive as she might be, he knew well enough that it wasn't in her nature to hare off without warning, and any familiar face was a comfort now, even if it was his. He wasn't foolish enough to think that she ever regarded him as anything more than a passive enemy, though she'd occasionally given him reason to wonder.
It was starting to near midafternoon, and for that, he felt grateful. The ring he wore on his finger prevented him from going up in smoke to join the unholy choir just yet, of course, but instincts would out, and he despised the sunlight just as much as any of his kin less well-protected from it. If things went his way, of course, the sunlight would eventually cease to be a problem for him, but until then... He shook his head, shrugging it off. He'd cross that bridge when he came to it. For the moment, Judas concentrated his attention on the humming of the spell underneath his fingers, letting the pitch of its vibration direct him as he navigated through alleys and streets. He'd find her. One way or another.
***
From anyone's perspective, this could be considered a very bad situation indeed. Raeger wished she'd made some attempt at learning southern languages while she'd been in school; if she got out of here, she promised herself, she'd ask Judas to teach her the first chance she got. She managed to peel off two of the slightly-more-than-disturbing man's fingers from her arm before a level glare from one of the merchant's bodyguards stopped her, and she sagged. Really, this day was not turning out as she'd hoped it would. Just one day without any trouble, was that so much to ask? She suspected, with a definite sinking feeling, that it was, and shuffled in place, bearing the highly discomfitting manhandling with as much grace as she could muster.
This time she wasn't lucky enough to avoid the merchant -- dressed in silk and stinking of perfumed oils not quite strong enough to disguise the stench of his breath, accompanied by musclebound aides ready to break the knuckles of anyone who even thought of attempting theft, how could he be anything else? -- and his overly-sharp gaze, much less his concerned clucks as he began to turn her around in his grasp. The spatter of camel spit streaked down the front of her shirt, still gleaming wetly, earned slightly more clucking, and she felt distinctly like a mannequin on display as he continued to look her over.
Typically, Ky was huddling in her satchel, sound asleep. The little traitor. Even so, she felt herself gradually calm, the merchant's mostly-businesslike and somewhat mothering ministrations inviting her to relax. And she did.
Until the merchant reached forward to undo the clasps holding her robe shut.
"Ah! Hey!" What d'you think you're doing?!"
Farant couldn't believe his luck. He was, aside from being a fairly prominent dealer in the more exotic textiles that entered Aragon's warehouses, fabulously wealthy, spoiled as rotten as a monkey in a roomful of peaches, and also an exceptionally greedy, stupid man, with no qualms whatsoever in what kind of merchandise he handled, so long as they were profitable.
Young, pretty boys were only one example of such.
The brown-haired mouse in front of him was just an example of what he typically went after: young, foreign, and to all appearances, abandoned. He couldn't have been more delighted. If the boy had had a keeper, he wouldn't have minded bargaining for an appropriate price for him, but as it was, even that particular hurdle had been neatly taken care of. When he'd caught the boy by the arm in the square, he'd already been gauging his form. Petite, he'd thought, and unlikely to grow particularly tall. Still, for the right customer, his extended period of boyishness might be perceived as a blessing.
Already planning his next course of action, the merchant had smiled, baring unpleasantly yellowed teeth (with the occasional false gold one), and leered at the utterly bemused boy in his clutches. "What's this, a camel calf lost in the desert!" he'd cooed, the harsh vowels of Hieratic clicking of his tongue so quickly that they nearly splintered. "What brings a lad such as yourself to be left all alone in a place as filthy as this?"
Blank incomprehension was the only response he received, and Farant's smile widened. Perfect. The lad really was foreign, and unlikely to understand anything he said, or what he was headed to. He'd be easier to train as a servant, the merchant thought absently, and if he kept his looks until he reached the right age, he could find someone to purchase him. Well-behaved, good-looking slave boys could always fetch a nice price, in the right places. He didn't like to think of himself as a procurer, precisely; he was more of ... a buyer and seller. He never kept any of the boys that passed under his ownership for long, anyway. The satisfaction in a job well-done, a profit well-earnt, and the sight of an incompetent street waif turned into the most elegant of court dwellers was what Farant ultimately sought, and he was never happier than when he found himself with an opportunity to begin the process of turning sow's ears to silk purses all over again. In a manner of speaking.
Yes, he thought, turning the boy around in his hands. Something could definitely be done with this one, and it even came with both ears pierced! Something better would have to replace that horrible single earring, however; perhaps something with emeralds, to set off the eyes. Farant could have danced in glee, wrapped up enough in his own self-satisfaction that he didn't notice the 'boy' trying to pry himself out of his grasp. What did draw his attention was the spit dribbling down the boy's front.
"Dear me, we'll have to do something about that," he tutted. The boy's robe would be simple enough to remove. Just a bit of tugging on the clasps, which were really no more than cloth ties, would sort this problem out easily. He ignored the boy's sudden struggle in favor of undoing the first of the clasps, distractedly noting the strangely meaty sound originating from somewhere off to his right.
The deathly cold hand that suddenly clamped around his wrist, forcing his hand to cease its task of peeling the boy out of his robes, proved to be somewhat harder to ignore.
***
One did not need an illustrated guide to the many facial expressions of Judas of Yodem to know that the vampire was not, at present, in a particularly good mood. Was it the strain of a day in the sun? Was it the hassle of having to track his traveling companion through the filth-ridden streets of a city he wasn't keen on staying over-long in? Was it the time he'd wasted doing all this, only to find said traveling companion being harrassed by an overbloated merchant pig? It could have been any of them, and it could have been all of them; what it boiled down to was that he, at the moment, was finding patience in terribly short supply.
Understandably, then, he was also angry. Enough so that when one of the merchant's bodyguards moved to block his way, his response was to punch him solidly in the face, throwing him backwards into an impressive pile of camel dung. Unnoticed, the rest of the guards instinctively edged away from their employer and the black-haired demon stalking towards him, the tinny chime of alarm bells going off in their heads. They weren't paid to be smart, of course. They were paid to look tough and thump whoever ticked their boss off. The stranger who'd so casually decked one of their companions, half their size as he was, still gave them pause. There was something not exactly right here, after all.
Had it been any other day, Judas might have negotiated for Raeger's release peacefully, but he wasn't inclined to be gracious at the moment, particularly when the tableau before him suggested in every way that his troubles were far from over. As such, when he grabbed the merchant's arm, his grip was anything but gentle.
His smile could have sliced through cheese at twenty paces, and his voice was deceptively soft. "I see you've found my associate," he murmured, and though the other man tried to struggle free of his hold, his fingers did not even budge. "I thank you for your assistance, and apologize for occupying your time." He released the merchant then, tipping his head in what could generously be referred to as a bow, or more easily mistaken for an attempt to shake a mosquito off his face. Quietly, he insinuated himself in front of Raeger, blocking her from view. He would deal with her later.
The dismissal was clear, and his wrist was stinging, but Farant wasn't about to back down yet, not if he could still find something to salvage out of this situation. He supposed that this stranger must be the boy's master; amazingly enough, the man seemed to speak Hieratic with fair fluency himself, though there was an accent to his words that Farant could not place. Alternatively, there was the possibility that he was just another interloper who'd fancied the boy for himself, though from the way the boy huddled in the man's shadow, even he had to admit that that supposition was now highly unlikely.
"Ah, yes!" he beamed widely, hands gesturing at random as he spoke. "It was... this one's pleasure, o most worthy master, one's pleasure indeed! It is not often in our fair city that we see such a fine-looking young antelope, and," Farant looked around before leaning in to whisper conspirationally, "One knew at once that one could not let such a splendid buck be left alone to fall into the clutches of those less scrupulous among our beloved citadel's citizens, may-their-sandals-rot!" He spat on the sand, for emphasis, then straightened abruptly to introduce himself. "This unworthy one's name, should you be pleased to know it, o Greatness, is Farant al-Hassib, but a humble dealer in all manner of cloths and antiquities."
Raeger, woefully shut out of the conversation by a language barrier twenty feet high and rising, could do little more than stare in confusion as Judas and what she'd already mentally dubbed as the insanely creepy man battered phrases back and forth. After a few moments of this, the merchant gesticulated at her, and she shrank back; she was not put at any great ease, either, when Judas turned to peer at her as well, his expression darkening by the second. "What happened to your clothes?" He was speaking, thankfully, in common, but she'd hoped for something more reassuring.
If she were a cat, Raeger's ears would be folding back meekly. "Er. A camel spat on me." She added, because it seemed appropriate, "It didn't, er, belong to this guy. He sort've came afterward."
The answer didn't seem to make Judas any happier, but it seemed to suffice for whatever he'd needed to confirm, and he snapped back into conversation with the merchant instantly. The latter, Raeger noticed, was becoming quite expressive with his gesticulations, and sweat beaded his upper lip as he spoke.
Judas was familiar enough with the weaseling, coaxing ways of Aragon's merchants to know when one of them was working towards a proposed bargain, and while he normally enjoyed the challenge that haggling provided, he couldn't imagine that this so-called humble cloth merchant had anything in to offer him that he actually wanted to possess. While he'd determined, by now, that the merchant had had nothing to do with Raeger's disappearance or the besmirchment of her clothing, the excessively flowery tone of voice Farant chose to take was beginning to grate on his nerves, as was having to dance through all the common niceties; exhausted by the effort of appearing remotely sociable, Judas finally brought the conversation to a head with a blunt, unadorned question.
"What kind of an arrangement are you offering me, exactly?"
"Well, o most admirable of nobility," Farant began delicately, then went on in a clipped rush. "If it is not too much of a presumption, one wishes to know if perhaps the good master would consider releasing his undoubtedly beloved and most precious of servants into this humble one's care, that this blossoming lotus may be brought to the fullest of his bloom and learn how to do the same for others, for one sees much potential in him." The merchant steepled his fingers, pausing to let the offer sink in, and then added, as though it was an afterthought, "Adequate compensation, of course, shall be given. This one does not cheat."
It took Judas a moment to work his way through the curlicues of Farant's speech and the implications of his extended metaphors, and when he had, the first sentiment that leapt to mind was a conflicted one: the sudden urge to strangle the man with his own kaffiyeh warred with the equally sudden desire to cram it down his throat.
"You're asking me," he said levelly, "If I want to sell my aide for you to raise and turn into some kind of --"
"Nobility!" Farant cut in before Judas could finish, and for the first time, a glint of genuine irritability surfaced from underneath his eternally-smiling 'business face', "One prefers the word 'entertainer'. The education provided to these youths is one of the best."
"I'm sure it is. But the answer is no." Without a further word, Judas turned to Raeger and grabbed her by the wrist, fully willing to throw her over his shoulder and march back to the inn if she didn't take the incentive to move herself. Luckily for the girl, she seemed to possess enough foresight to turn and hobble after him.
Sensing, like any good vulture, that the opportunity to fill his belly was slipping away, Farant interrupted quickly, going so far as to clap his hand on Judas' shoulder before he could move out of arm's distance and jabbering in hasty Hieratic all the while.
"One understands that the noble master wishes to keep such a specimen of youth for his own pleasure; but surely, most worthy master, even you must see the benefit in sharing the wealt--" The merchant paused, mid-sales pitch, at the sudden peculiar sensation of the temperature around him plunging down by a significant degree. With a nearly-audible crackle of frost, Judas turned.
Although even the kindest of souls would have admitted that Farant's men barely had two braincells to rub between then, even their inherently simple minds possessed a kind of instinctive survival mechanism, of the sort that had told a slimy, legless ancestor some billion years ago that it was probably a good idea to flop, flagellate, ooze, or otherwise locomote from whatever was attempting to ingest them as quickly as possible. It twitched into life now, with some urgency, prompting them to take another diplomatic step backwards. Or maybe three. The camels that had been taking advantage of the shade were long gone.
It's common knowledge, if not in so many words, that merchants (along with their distant cousins along the great evolutionary tree, lawyers and tapeworms) do not in fact descend from anything more advanced than whatever ancient parasite first decided that living off other things was a better idea than trying to forage for itself. This does not cripple their sense of self-preservation whatsoever, but it does tend to leave them somewhat ill-prepared when directly confronted with a problem, since one does not generally expect one's hosts to come hunting one down in the depths of their own bowels (or as the case may be, their local accounting office). The strange light to Judas' eye, the merchant thought uneasily, rather reminded him of the feverish look his secretary got whenever he was hunting the rats that always gnawed at their paperwork.
Farant twiddled his thumbs. Farant coughed. And then Farant said (forgetting to speak deferentially, for once), in the kind of overly-optimistic tone of someone still rather uncertain of what was going on, but was going to make a haphazard attempt at responding to it anyway:
"So, er, I take it you're not selling?"
His bodyguards were already running before he finished speaking, and then the street, for lack of a better word, exploded.
***
Later, the citizens of Aragon agreed that the only real pity about the entire incident was that the city's only fountain had been destroyed in the mysterious explosion which had torn up a sizable portion of the road all around it. Still, it made for interesting enough gossip, and it was certainly better than constantly complaining about how the harbor stank like the world's midden (which was not, of course, true. It was just Aragon's midden. If it had been the world's midden, they wouldn't have been able to see the water for the manure).
Two Hump, however, was in no condition to mourn the loss of his beloved drinking spot. His owner, Kashim, woke up from his late siesta to a note of apology tacked to his door, along with sufficient payment for a new camel. He had to pay for one of the better-educated camel drivers to read the note out to him, and continued to puzzle over its contents for some time afterwards.
On the other hand, Ichigo, the owner of a fairly well-frequented Yamato grill (or as he put it, a Fine Dining Establisment) and an acquaintance of Judas', found himself suddenly in possession of more pounds of camel meat than he knew what to do with, wondering helplessly if there was any chance of trying to explain that they didn't normally feature steaks on the menu. He supposed that if he served the meat for chitterlings during happy hour, the heavy drinkers would be sloshed enough not to know the difference.
The innkeep of The Golden Chalice found herself similarly perplexed. The guests in room twelve, one Master Yodem and an apprentice of some sort she hadn't seen him traveling with before, had practically vanished overnight, after storming in with peculiarly sooty clothing late in the afternoon. The apprentice had looked thoroughly mindboggled, she remembered, and she wondered if, perhaps, the pair had had anything to do with the activities that had been disturbing the city of late. Well, they'd paid good solid coin for a week's lodgings, and hadn't yet returned for a refund. She supposed that was enough reason not to pry.
And Raeger and Judas themselves?
She never did find out what had made him so angry in the first place.
Random Notes:
* Why is the pineapple salty-sweet, instead of sweet and sour? Where I come from, we sell individual slices of fruit like this rather often, actually (green mangoes, pineapple) but because the fruit itself is rather sour, the water it's immersed in is usually salty. Heck, sometimes we skip the saltwater and just bread the fruit with salt (in the mango's case, sometimes soy sauce is substituted for salt. Gasp). Technically, it should be salty-sour, but salty-sweet sounds better. And anyway, pineapple tends to be on the sweeter side most of the time. Shut up, this footnote is NOT too long. Pinya is actually Filipino for pineapple, but uh, I have no shame in ripping off my mother tongue for would-be-exotic names. Sorry.
* What's Judas looking for, anyway? Overall, he's actually trying to regain his humanity. D: Wow, I bet that's surprising, with all these vampire demon types totally fixated on becoming the oldest baddest vampire ever! But he didn't become a vampire by choice, exactly, and he'd like to be rid of it as soon as possible (imagine 'vampire' as a status ailment like 'frog' or 'mini' in RPGs, only drawn out over the course of a hundred years or so. You'd want to cure it by then too, wouldn't you?) which he hopes to do by resurrecting an ancient vampire king (I'm not sure if this comes across in the writing AT ALL, but they're supposed to be in an Egypt-like place XD).
* This has nothing to do with Valkyrie Profile. Actually it does, but just a little. These are characters from an interactive fiction based on the game. n.n
* Farant was supposed to be twenty million times sleazier, but he wasn't. :( I was too lazy to work on him that long, so I didn't get him to the 'practically-dripping-slime' point I'd wanted him to reach.
* Judas does not actually like Raeger. Or well, he does, but in the 'If anyone's going to do anything of any sort to her, it's going to be me.' Yes, that includes murder. :D
* Trying to do anything remotely resembling officious Arab-type talking ('PROPHET, BLESSED BE HIS NAME, WISHES YOU BEST OF LUCK AND A MARKED LACK OF GENITAL PLAGUES, O BROTHER OF MY FATHER') feels so weird and vaguely (EXTREMELY) politically incorrect XD I suck.
* A kaffiyeh is, IF I remember correctly, the name for the head-dresses assorted desert-dwelling tribes wear. From a dictionary: 'n. an Arab headdress consisting of a square piece of cloth foldedinto a triangle and fastened over the crown by an agal.'
* What happened to Two Hump? Let's just say Judas doesn't have a great fondness things that damage new things that he paid for. Yamato, in VP-verse, basically translates to 'Japanese', so.
Date/Theme: January 6th: Valsa de Eurydice / Samba de Orfeu
Series: Illusion of Memory (an Interactive Fiction set in Valkyrie Profile's world.)
Characters/Pairing: Raeger, Judas (
myaru's boy) (Both are original characters.)Rating: PG-13 (better safe than sorry!)
Summary: Between being mistaken for a boy on a regular basis, getting lost in the muddle of a seaport town, and being firmly squashed under the thumb of her vampire
A/N: In which I try an experiment: actually introducing the situation before plunging into the muddle, for the sake of people unfamiliar with the characters. Unfortunately, that means this is rather long (around 8k sans notes) so, uh. Not very light reading. ;_; THE PROSE, MA, IT STINGS AND HURTS. Also, THIS NEEDS A BETTER TITLE. And heavy editing, but that's a given! The only way this relates to the theme is that the music, to my ears, sounded appropriate as BG music for a seaport, which is where this happens. Er. Yes, that's the lamest ever.
Much as she liked to think that she'd seen a fair bit of life (and quite a lot more of other things she'd have been perfectly happy not seeing for the entirety of her existence, such as visceral, gruesome, and above all unneccessary death) outside the shuttered mansions of Artolian nobility she'd grown up in, even Raeger had to pause at the sight of Aragon's haphazardly sprawled market. Artolia was inland, hemmed in by mountains, and if she had to be honest about it, more than a little backward; Aragon, a seaport teeming so ferociously with life that its seams frequently burst to inundate her senses with a dizzying array of sensation, was anything but. The girl kept her head low and scurried, more than walked, to catch up with her taller companion, resisting the urge to grab onto his sleeve to anchor herself in an otherwise dizzying world. That would, after all, be admitting weakness.
The air here stirred only occasionally, the threat of wind constantly buffered by the buildings that rose as naturally as though they'd sprung wholly formed from the ground, as varied and odd as the people that milled around them. She'd never been this close to the sea before, but Raeger certainly remembered reading about it -- dreaming about going to it, even, though not quite under such circumstances as these -- and she was almost sure that there would be fresher air by the harbor, strong winds that rolled off the sea(or perhaps the ocean? She had no way of knowing the difference), reeking of wild tales and wilder places. The girl wondered, tugging at the high collar of her shirt, whether the atmosphere by the docks was an improvement over the marketplace in terms of relief from the heat. Judas had specified to avoid the harbor when possible, though, and she didn't imagine she was going to have the opportunity to measure the difference herself, not while she was in his company.
Raeger's eyes, already little more than green slits as she squinted against the bright midday light, narrowed even further as that train of thought prompted her gaze to slide over to her erstwhile companion, eying him with equal parts apprehension and respect. Well, probably more apprehension, but it was better than outright fear, wasn't it? His hair, like hers, was swept up into a severe-looking bun at the back of his head, covered with a cloth cap and stuck through with an enormous jeweled pin, though his clothes seemed more comfortable than her own stiff robes. It would take an exceptionally dull-witted individual not to realize that they weren't local to the area, but not a single person turned more than a token glance their way. Raeger thought this was extraordinary, but after they'd passed the midget juggling dead weasels on a street corner, she supposed that the people here had seen things far more fascinating than the foreign-looking nobleman with his page in tow.
At the thought, the girl frowned, feeling vaguely as though she was missing something in the subtext of the situation. Granted, there was enough about it to distract her -- she wasn't precisely world-wise, she'd admit that, but she wasn't stupid enough to think, even after more than half a year of it, that being (sort-of) kidnapped by a vampire (who had, incidentally, murdered one of your friends -- not a very good friend, mind, but it was the principle of the thing) and bullied (thought she preferred to use the term coerced, since it seemed less pathetic somehow) into being his servant (though she had to admit that he ended up doing most of the work anyway) was an ordinary situation for anyone to find themselves in.
The point was, though, that there was a fishiness to this particular endeavor that she couldn't quite put her finger on, and she supposed that to a degree, it had to do with her enforced change of outfit. Bards generally had the inclination to dress in a manner that suited their demeanor, and she was no exception to the rule, and donning an outfit similar to her captor's -- claiming any sort of kinship, really -- felt more than somewhat bizarre, if only because she'd never worn something so blatantly exotic in her life. On a technical level, the clothes chafed in the most uncomfortable places. How did people breathe in these things? At least she could console herself with the fact that she was wearing sensible underthings. After only an hour on the streets, she'd already caught sight of others clad in much less, and she'd had the mortification of having a particularly buxom woman wink at her in an all-too-friendly manner.
There was a suspicious thought, lingering in the back of her mind, about whether or not she was actually wearing the clothes appropriate for her gender, but she dismissed it as soon as it came. Judas wasn't the kind of person to make any mistake of the sort, unless he intended to in the first place. She'd simply have to trust him in this case, since she didn't have much other choice.
In front of her, Judas half-turned to check that she was still keeping up with him, and she took advantage of his brief pause to hurry up to his side. The increase in speed jostled the leather satchel which she kep slung over one shoulder to rest on her hip, and with a shrill noise of protest at the unwanted movement, Ky poked his head out to let his displeasure with the situation be known. Raeger's pet ferret, much-abused and about as useful as wet sand on a rainy day at the best of times as he was, disliked the vampire intensely, and avoided him when at all possible. That included, for the most part, staying out of sight when he was around(which was a good idea in any case, because Judas wasn't particularly fond of what he viewed as the annoying rat that took up entirely too much time of Raeger's time, and would have seized on the slightest reason to conveniently arrange for the ferret to 'disappear'), and he'd been hiding in his mistress' bag since they'd left the inn earlier, pawing for space amongst paper, ink, and quill.
The unwarranted disturbance of his sanctuary, in combination with the stifling heat inside the bag, was enough of an excuse for Ky to immediately attempt wriggling out of it, once he discovered just how much cooler the great outdoors actually was. It was even worth having to smell the Bad Man, in his opinion, and it was to his great displeasure that he found himself being forced back into the satchel by an owner less-than-elated as his newfound desire for freedom.
"Ky!" Raeger hissed, completely unsympathetic to the ferret's situation, not being possessed of fur or knowledge of what it was like to be wedged into a leather bag at the very height of noon. "Behave!" Her satchel squeaked in response, thoroughly unimpressed, before bucking like a fish, frantic with the hob's efforts to break out. She wedged it under her arm, and was panting by the time she drew level with the vampire.
Judas looked at her, mildly annoyed and apparently sufficiently untouched by the heat around them to expend effort on something as petty as irritation. She'd learnt, long ago, that the vampire had a way of tilting his head just so, as though to inquire what exactly Raeger was trying to do; in this case, his expression might as well have been audibly asking, 'why are you clutching your bag in both arms like a toddler with a toy somebody wants to take away?'. Registering the slightly hounded expression on her face, he switched tracks, and instead informed her, in a passably neutral tone, "The last thing you want is to get lost here. Keep your... pet under control, would you? "
Raeger nodded dumbly, and with that, the vampire pivoted neatly on his heel, clomping off at a brisk trot as though it was the middle of the night and he was fully in his element. The girl looked after him, thoroughly dismayed, and wondering exactly what she often had before, under similar circumstances: wasn't his kind supposed to burn to a crisp in daylight? Not medium rare, not well done, not even very well done; by all accounts, his corpse should have skipped all stages of 'cooked' and headed for 'spontaneously combusted' the moment sunlight touched it. Shaking her head in bewilderment at a puzzle that was not solving itself, no matter how hard she shook the bag holding all the pieces, the girl hurried after him.
Somehow, the sun felt hotter on her skin here than in the desert. Never mind that, technically speaking, more square inches of her were actually covered by the robes Judas had gotten her; she still felt hot, like a buttered lobster shuffled into an oven. She wondered if it had something to do with the dampness in the air. The smell of brine permeated the very stones of the town, and lingered even in the comfortingly human bustle of the marketplace, wrapped around sharp corners and dark alleys like a particularly tatty cloak its owner was loathe to shed. All the rain from the night before, however fierce it was, seemed to have done little to reduce the odor's strength, and if it already had, Raeger decided that she never wanted to discover what the normal potency of Aragon's unique 'flavor' was.
As it was, the reek made the bard's nose itch with a fierce longing for the fresh air of Artolia's northern woods, crisp and sharp and laced with just the slightest touch of pine. And uncluttered, definitely uncluttered; not like the veritable assault on the senses Aragon threw at its visitors. Layered on top of the brine were the assorted, undeniable traces of human activity: the heady, golden beckon of meat roasting on the grill, the sneeze-inducing wares of a brightly-clad man hawking spices, even the musk of animal dung carelessly deposited on the road, ready for an unwitting traveller to trip upon it -- Raeger made sure to avoid stepping in that whenever she could, though between trying to keep up with Judas and keeping Ky from hurtling out of the satchel, she inevitably stepped in a few ill-placed cowpats anyway. Cowpats in a city, she thought, cringing. Well, where there were cows, there were certain to be cowpats, and she certainly couldn't imagine any of the oxcarts around the place pulling themselves.
There were more than smells to occupy her curiosity, though Ky could clearly catch a whiff of them himself; his struggles grew fiercer than ever, giddy at the prospect of even more nooks and crannies to explore. In response, Raeger's grip on him tightened, because the last thing she wanted was to have to chase Ky while dodging the feet of the crowds stampeding down the roads. Keeping her attention divided between Judas' vanishing back, holding the ferret in check, and still having enough time to look around at the market stalls herself, which were taunting her from every direction with their bright colors and proudly-advertised wares, was not a particularly easy task. A pink-faced, sweating merchant exhorting customers to purchase his lovely melons was overtaken midyell by a tanned man peddling his services as a tinkerer; their voices combined were soundly beaten by the earsplitting efforts of a wrinkled old woman enticing the crowd to let her peer into their future. Raeger personally did not need any cards to tell her that she was going to be nursing a severe headache by the end of the day.
Ah, but she was a bard, wasn't she? The clamor of the public at its rowdiest and the throb of civilization's pulse were what she ought to live for, after all, but she was starting to suspect that her fondness for crowds had begun to deteriorate during her extended stay in Judas' company. It was not that she'd begun to despise being in the company of say, human beings, she reasoned, squeezing her way past a pair of sailors with feverish glints in their piggish eyes that suggested newly acquired shore leave and a very clear idea on what they wanted to spend it doing. It was just that it was harder to deal with people after weeks on end of running into little more than a camel or a cactus. The desert was wide, the desert was frightening, and the desert was, well, deserted. Whatever Judas was looking for among the ruins of the kingdom that had been half-buried in the sand, he apparently hadn't found it yet, because he kept insisting on going back to it.
If she'd had half the spine to stand up to him, Raeger thought, she would have refused flat-out to be dragged into this in the first place. But then there it was again, that silent, occasionally less-than-friendly reminder of obligation: she was a bard. More than anything else, what she loved most in the world were stories.
And even if he was a member of the evil undead, Judas knew quite a lot of interesting ones, and he wasn't half bad at telling them.
Then she saw it.
Later, she would think, if her attention hadn't been so distracted and the day so hot, she might have not let herself notice it, tucked up against the side of a building and as unassuming a stall as she had ever seen in her life. She caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye, and before she could think, she'd instinctively spun towards it. Raeger had no eyes for the relative shabbiness of the stall, nor the slightly unhygienic look to the setup as a whole; what had garnered her attention as the sunlight glinted off it, what held her attention now, were the Jars.
They were not, in themselves, particularly special jars. Their walls were were clear, for the most part, with the strange opaque imperfections that tended to riddle poorly made glass the same way arrows tended to riddle assorted religious martyrs. Their contents, though, were what kept her eyes glued to them. Fruit had been sliced into large wedges and immersed in the water the jars contained, crowded together like lemmings in a barrel and just begging for liberation. Chunks of ice floated with them, rendering the water cold enough that condensation rolled off the sides of the jars in droves, droplets chasing each other down the sleek glass.
Cold. Sweet. Raeger's mouth, unbidden, watered instantly.
The vendor, opening her mouth to inquire if the strange lad was planning to hex her merchandise with his near-fanatical stare, was immediately surprised to have a fistful of assorted coins thrust at her, and the boy babbling something at her in a language she couldn't understand. She smiled uncertainly and gingerly accepted the money, then tried speaking to the boy in Hieratic, only to be met with slightly-hysterical finger-jabbing towards the jar of gaily floating pinyas. Sighing, she looked down at the coins in her hand. Whatever the amount was, whatever currency it was in, it was probably more than enough to buy the entire contents of the jar, and then some. For the second time in one minute, the vendor opened her mouth, thought better of it, and shut it again, instead moving to unscrew the lid off of the pinya jar. Every merchant, after all, knows the value of the customer who'll pay any price for the product, and it's even better when the customer doesn't seem to know what its value actually is Still, as she watched the lad walk off happily, she had to shake her head. Been a bit too much out in the sun, that one. And was that a rat in his bag?
Unaware of the extremely confused fruit-seller she'd just left hapless in her wake, Raeger munched on her newly-acquired treat contentedly, gnawing on the thin wedge of pineapple skewered on a stick as though it were the finest of delicacies. And in a way, it was. The bard's brain temporarily disengaged as she occupied her teeth and mouth with the task of stripping salty-sweet pulp apart and gulping it down before the air could strip away the lingering traces of the icy saltwater the fruit had been immersed in. As such, it took her a moment to realize her horrible, dreadful, inherently appalling and basically stupid mistake, which made her stop dead in the middle of the road (and nearly causing great injury to a wagon driver who swerved around her as she did so).
Raeger had lost sight of Judas.
He was going to kill her.
I am going to kill her, Judas thought. This was not, in fact, wholly accurate. What Judas actually thought was an intricate string of death threats comprised of detailed, inventive and utterly painful means of generating Raeger's demise, liberally laced with a healthy dose of invective that could quite literally make a sailor cry (and huddle protectively over his crotch, lest the amount of sheer acidity in Judas' tone of voice compel his testicles to wither at the very sound of it). But the general gist of it was, for all intents and purposes, the same, and so for the sake of simplicity, the briefer summary would suffice.
He wasn't quite sure which of them was to blame for Raeger wandering off -- himself, or her -- and that uncertainty alone was enough to put him into a thoroughly black mood, only further exacerbated the longer he couldn't manage to find her. She could have been gone for the past hour, or she could have been swallowed by the crowd in the last five minutes. He had no way of knowing, because his attention had been occupied picking out the stalls where they would be most likely to find the artifacts he needed for the next ritual he planned to attempt in Amenti's ruins. The vampire cursed again, and picked up his pace. Stupid. The word, he assured himself was directed in Raeger's direction. Definitely not his own.
Asking how one could get lost in Aragon's market, he told himself, would be redundant and stupid. Of course you could get lost in Aragon's market. It was remarkably easy to. He had, once, and it was an incident he wasn't about to forget quickly, even if it had happened almost seventy years ago. The more pressing point was, he thought (imagining the veins in his temples pounding with fury if he'd had a heart to pump blood to them), that how could Raeger have lost him? Losing herself was perfectly understandable. Judas, without the least bit of remorse, had already pegged her long ago as one of those sorts of people who had had to have their gloves and shoes marked 'left' and 'right' well into their adolescent years. Even so, he'd expected her at least to be able to follow an order as simple as 'stay close to me, and don't wander off on your own'.
But no. Just that was asking too much.
The girl was a bloody health hazard, he decided, shoving aside the pedestrians with the audacity to block his rampage (there weren't many, because most took a single look at the thundercloud of an expression gracing his features and scrambled out of his path. Judas thought this was a pity. Kicking a few people out of his way would have made him feel infinitely better). Both to herself, and to others. He found himself wondering if the undead could develop ulcers, and squashed the thought down. He had better things to think of. Such as how he could manage to find his errant (among other unpleasant, derogatory, and abusive adjectives, though he'd never say any of them aloud) ... assistant? Protege?
Associate, he decided. That seemed to suit her best, really, and it didn't contain half the connotations of a personal relationship like the other two appeared to.
Those watching the street he was hurrying down were provided with a brief moment of amusement when Judas halted in the middle of the road, stopping so abruptly that he nearly catapulted himself face-first into the mud. Of course, he didn't. Vampire reflexes are good for something, after all. But for just a moment, however brief, he did look pretty damn ridiculous.
Judas, though, was well beyond caring what a couple of rooftop pigeons thought of his poor attempts at aerial acrobatics. Muttering at his own stupidity, he pivoted smartly and strode out into the crowd again, though this time, with more purpose.
And if the citizens of Aragon thought there was something strange about a man fluttering around their streets with one hand pressed firmly against the lobe of one ear, they knew better than to mention it to him.
Camels are particular creatures of habit, even if they don't seem to be. It's why they chew cud. In theory, if a meal tasted good coming down, it ought to be even better the second time around. It's why they never seem to go any faster than a shamble. Because quite frankly, they can't be buggered to.
It's also the reason they tend to go into fits of ill-temper, for no apparent reason. There's nothing quite like someone hogging your favorite napping spot to seriously put a kink in your hump. It's a myth that all camels have little or no good humor, since as a general rule, the worst thing they do when unprovoked is be boring. There are those, however, who are genuinely belligerent creatures in and of themselves, with little regard for common decency, or indeed, anything that does not happen to be a part of the next meal.
The camel bull that found the girl huddled miserably on the seat of Aragon's only public fountain answered to a number of indelicate epithets, mostly in the form of a swift kick to the groin if it was in range, and to the face if it wasn't. His real name, as far as other camels themselves were concerned, was Two Hump.
Though he stood slightly shorter than the majority of his lanky companions, Two Hump more than made up for height with sheer bulk. Only an idiot would think that he was in any way less dangerous; his ire was not a thing man or camel would invite willingly, particularly when a light butt of his head, properly aimed, could send a man hurtling across the stable and into the dung heap. The two humps for which he was named wobbled proudly on his back, twin spires dedicated to his might, and among Aragon's flock of near-identical camels, all similarly festooned in rugs and blanketrolls and various goods for sale but conspicuously single-humped, his unfettered form was a sight easily recognizable, even to the blind.
Which was just as well, because it provided most of his would-be victims with ample warning of his approach. Two Hump didn't mind that too much. If a camel could be said to revel in the presence of well-organized fear, Two Hump would be all but rubbing his hooves together and cackling, metaphorically speaking, at the smug, silent authority he held over both his retainers and peers alike. Any dissenters wouldn't be capable of dissenting for very long.
That, of course, brought him to his present state of puzzlement and mounting irritation, mostly directed at the hapless creature getting between him and his favorite drinking spot. What was beginning to vex the camel thoroughly was that it seemed to be completely unaware of his presence, and unlikely to move aside after anything shorter than a small eternity.
Two Hump lowed, letting his lips flicker back from his teeth. On a human, it would have been roughly equivalent to a put-upon sigh. 'Manling,' Two Hump harrumphed, just barely refraining from punting it into the fountain, lest he spoil his own drink of water, 'Move.'
It didn't seem inclined to respond, or more significantly, comply with his request. Two Hump's flanks twitched. 'Manling,' he said, 'I am a Ship of the Desert. I know the Hundredth Name of God. For a thousand years my ancestors spat on your ancestors and ate their clothes and their tents, and we were not punished because it was we who gave them life. Even if the sands of the desert bury your bones and your cities, even if its winds strip your corpses dry and grind your proud monuments to dust, my kind will outlast yours. I will bow for no one.' He paused.
'Now, will you move?'
There was no response, and Two Hump harrumphed again. 'Well, you asked for it.'
Raeger, who could not understand a single word of Camel, and was entirely puzzled as to why one was huffing and rolling its eyes expressively in front of her, was subjected to a highly unpleasant surprise when the camel in question made a curious, gagging noise in the back of its throat--
And spat on her.
"Hey!" she yowled in protest, jumping off the fountain rim and to her feet. This was all the incentive Two Hump needed, naturally, and he butted past her without so much as another glance, plunging his nose into the fountain and gulping deeply. For her part, the bard was too horrified by the mess of regurgitated grass and spit on her clothes -- her new clothes! -- to pay the camel
any proper amount of attention, which suited him just fine. Disgusted, Raeger began to turn away from the greedily drinking camel, ready to plunge down yet another of Aragon's nearly identical streets in a fruitless attempt to search for Judas once again. If she was lucky, she might at least be able to find the inn they had booked a room in.
Unfortunately, this was not to be.
Without warning, a fat, meaty hand latched onto her arm, and the girl froze, feeling the indent of several heavily jeweled rings digging into her flesh even through the cloth. Its grip was iron, even for the deceptive softness of the hand, and she felt the hair on the nape of her neck prickle at the low, booming chuckle that accompanied it. Raeger turned, slowly, expression frozen into a stiff parody of a smile, and looked into beady, too-bright eyes. She gulped.
There's a saying, somewhere, that all the bad things in life come in threes.
Raeger had found her third.
Judas was glad that he'd thought to put something on the girl he could track her with, even if he hadn't had any occasion to call on it before now. He'd given her, months ago, an earring to wear, a trinket of ruby, lapis and gold taken from his own ear. Its twin was still attached to the lobe of his other ear, as a matter of fact, and he rested his fingers on the intricate goldwork lightly to activate the spell as he worked on tracking Raeger down. This particular situation wasn't what he had imagined having to use the minor enchantment for, admittedly, and he'd almost forgotten about it; the idea made him scowl. Reasonably enough, he'd expected that the girl would be likeliest to attempt to run away from him in the first month or so; he was faintly surprised when she didn't run for Artolia the moment she wasn't tied to a chair. He'd expected her to make the attempt to get him arrested for murder the first time she got a chance.
That was, really, the reason why this was so annoying.
The spell told him that Raeger lay somewhere beyond a series of buildings, and he bit back a sigh, maneuvering to find away around them. The enchantment wasn't near-specific enough to account for thoroughfares and byways; it just located its partner, and that was that. He'd been expecting to chase her down across large but ultimately easy-to-traverse sand dunes, not crowded streets that smelt of fish and worse things. If he'd known... still, he didn't think she'd gotten lost on purpose. Reluctant a captive as she might be, he knew well enough that it wasn't in her nature to hare off without warning, and any familiar face was a comfort now, even if it was his. He wasn't foolish enough to think that she ever regarded him as anything more than a passive enemy, though she'd occasionally given him reason to wonder.
It was starting to near midafternoon, and for that, he felt grateful. The ring he wore on his finger prevented him from going up in smoke to join the unholy choir just yet, of course, but instincts would out, and he despised the sunlight just as much as any of his kin less well-protected from it. If things went his way, of course, the sunlight would eventually cease to be a problem for him, but until then... He shook his head, shrugging it off. He'd cross that bridge when he came to it. For the moment, Judas concentrated his attention on the humming of the spell underneath his fingers, letting the pitch of its vibration direct him as he navigated through alleys and streets. He'd find her. One way or another.
From anyone's perspective, this could be considered a very bad situation indeed. Raeger wished she'd made some attempt at learning southern languages while she'd been in school; if she got out of here, she promised herself, she'd ask Judas to teach her the first chance she got. She managed to peel off two of the slightly-more-than-disturbing man's fingers from her arm before a level glare from one of the merchant's bodyguards stopped her, and she sagged. Really, this day was not turning out as she'd hoped it would. Just one day without any trouble, was that so much to ask? She suspected, with a definite sinking feeling, that it was, and shuffled in place, bearing the highly discomfitting manhandling with as much grace as she could muster.
This time she wasn't lucky enough to avoid the merchant -- dressed in silk and stinking of perfumed oils not quite strong enough to disguise the stench of his breath, accompanied by musclebound aides ready to break the knuckles of anyone who even thought of attempting theft, how could he be anything else? -- and his overly-sharp gaze, much less his concerned clucks as he began to turn her around in his grasp. The spatter of camel spit streaked down the front of her shirt, still gleaming wetly, earned slightly more clucking, and she felt distinctly like a mannequin on display as he continued to look her over.
Typically, Ky was huddling in her satchel, sound asleep. The little traitor. Even so, she felt herself gradually calm, the merchant's mostly-businesslike and somewhat mothering ministrations inviting her to relax. And she did.
Until the merchant reached forward to undo the clasps holding her robe shut.
"Ah! Hey!" What d'you think you're doing?!"
Farant couldn't believe his luck. He was, aside from being a fairly prominent dealer in the more exotic textiles that entered Aragon's warehouses, fabulously wealthy, spoiled as rotten as a monkey in a roomful of peaches, and also an exceptionally greedy, stupid man, with no qualms whatsoever in what kind of merchandise he handled, so long as they were profitable.
Young, pretty boys were only one example of such.
The brown-haired mouse in front of him was just an example of what he typically went after: young, foreign, and to all appearances, abandoned. He couldn't have been more delighted. If the boy had had a keeper, he wouldn't have minded bargaining for an appropriate price for him, but as it was, even that particular hurdle had been neatly taken care of. When he'd caught the boy by the arm in the square, he'd already been gauging his form. Petite, he'd thought, and unlikely to grow particularly tall. Still, for the right customer, his extended period of boyishness might be perceived as a blessing.
Already planning his next course of action, the merchant had smiled, baring unpleasantly yellowed teeth (with the occasional false gold one), and leered at the utterly bemused boy in his clutches. "What's this, a camel calf lost in the desert!" he'd cooed, the harsh vowels of Hieratic clicking of his tongue so quickly that they nearly splintered. "What brings a lad such as yourself to be left all alone in a place as filthy as this?"
Blank incomprehension was the only response he received, and Farant's smile widened. Perfect. The lad really was foreign, and unlikely to understand anything he said, or what he was headed to. He'd be easier to train as a servant, the merchant thought absently, and if he kept his looks until he reached the right age, he could find someone to purchase him. Well-behaved, good-looking slave boys could always fetch a nice price, in the right places. He didn't like to think of himself as a procurer, precisely; he was more of ... a buyer and seller. He never kept any of the boys that passed under his ownership for long, anyway. The satisfaction in a job well-done, a profit well-earnt, and the sight of an incompetent street waif turned into the most elegant of court dwellers was what Farant ultimately sought, and he was never happier than when he found himself with an opportunity to begin the process of turning sow's ears to silk purses all over again. In a manner of speaking.
Yes, he thought, turning the boy around in his hands. Something could definitely be done with this one, and it even came with both ears pierced! Something better would have to replace that horrible single earring, however; perhaps something with emeralds, to set off the eyes. Farant could have danced in glee, wrapped up enough in his own self-satisfaction that he didn't notice the 'boy' trying to pry himself out of his grasp. What did draw his attention was the spit dribbling down the boy's front.
"Dear me, we'll have to do something about that," he tutted. The boy's robe would be simple enough to remove. Just a bit of tugging on the clasps, which were really no more than cloth ties, would sort this problem out easily. He ignored the boy's sudden struggle in favor of undoing the first of the clasps, distractedly noting the strangely meaty sound originating from somewhere off to his right.
The deathly cold hand that suddenly clamped around his wrist, forcing his hand to cease its task of peeling the boy out of his robes, proved to be somewhat harder to ignore.
One did not need an illustrated guide to the many facial expressions of Judas of Yodem to know that the vampire was not, at present, in a particularly good mood. Was it the strain of a day in the sun? Was it the hassle of having to track his traveling companion through the filth-ridden streets of a city he wasn't keen on staying over-long in? Was it the time he'd wasted doing all this, only to find said traveling companion being harrassed by an overbloated merchant pig? It could have been any of them, and it could have been all of them; what it boiled down to was that he, at the moment, was finding patience in terribly short supply.
Understandably, then, he was also angry. Enough so that when one of the merchant's bodyguards moved to block his way, his response was to punch him solidly in the face, throwing him backwards into an impressive pile of camel dung. Unnoticed, the rest of the guards instinctively edged away from their employer and the black-haired demon stalking towards him, the tinny chime of alarm bells going off in their heads. They weren't paid to be smart, of course. They were paid to look tough and thump whoever ticked their boss off. The stranger who'd so casually decked one of their companions, half their size as he was, still gave them pause. There was something not exactly right here, after all.
Had it been any other day, Judas might have negotiated for Raeger's release peacefully, but he wasn't inclined to be gracious at the moment, particularly when the tableau before him suggested in every way that his troubles were far from over. As such, when he grabbed the merchant's arm, his grip was anything but gentle.
His smile could have sliced through cheese at twenty paces, and his voice was deceptively soft. "I see you've found my associate," he murmured, and though the other man tried to struggle free of his hold, his fingers did not even budge. "I thank you for your assistance, and apologize for occupying your time." He released the merchant then, tipping his head in what could generously be referred to as a bow, or more easily mistaken for an attempt to shake a mosquito off his face. Quietly, he insinuated himself in front of Raeger, blocking her from view. He would deal with her later.
The dismissal was clear, and his wrist was stinging, but Farant wasn't about to back down yet, not if he could still find something to salvage out of this situation. He supposed that this stranger must be the boy's master; amazingly enough, the man seemed to speak Hieratic with fair fluency himself, though there was an accent to his words that Farant could not place. Alternatively, there was the possibility that he was just another interloper who'd fancied the boy for himself, though from the way the boy huddled in the man's shadow, even he had to admit that that supposition was now highly unlikely.
"Ah, yes!" he beamed widely, hands gesturing at random as he spoke. "It was... this one's pleasure, o most worthy master, one's pleasure indeed! It is not often in our fair city that we see such a fine-looking young antelope, and," Farant looked around before leaning in to whisper conspirationally, "One knew at once that one could not let such a splendid buck be left alone to fall into the clutches of those less scrupulous among our beloved citadel's citizens, may-their-sandals-rot!" He spat on the sand, for emphasis, then straightened abruptly to introduce himself. "This unworthy one's name, should you be pleased to know it, o Greatness, is Farant al-Hassib, but a humble dealer in all manner of cloths and antiquities."
Raeger, woefully shut out of the conversation by a language barrier twenty feet high and rising, could do little more than stare in confusion as Judas and what she'd already mentally dubbed as the insanely creepy man battered phrases back and forth. After a few moments of this, the merchant gesticulated at her, and she shrank back; she was not put at any great ease, either, when Judas turned to peer at her as well, his expression darkening by the second. "What happened to your clothes?" He was speaking, thankfully, in common, but she'd hoped for something more reassuring.
If she were a cat, Raeger's ears would be folding back meekly. "Er. A camel spat on me." She added, because it seemed appropriate, "It didn't, er, belong to this guy. He sort've came afterward."
The answer didn't seem to make Judas any happier, but it seemed to suffice for whatever he'd needed to confirm, and he snapped back into conversation with the merchant instantly. The latter, Raeger noticed, was becoming quite expressive with his gesticulations, and sweat beaded his upper lip as he spoke.
Judas was familiar enough with the weaseling, coaxing ways of Aragon's merchants to know when one of them was working towards a proposed bargain, and while he normally enjoyed the challenge that haggling provided, he couldn't imagine that this so-called humble cloth merchant had anything in to offer him that he actually wanted to possess. While he'd determined, by now, that the merchant had had nothing to do with Raeger's disappearance or the besmirchment of her clothing, the excessively flowery tone of voice Farant chose to take was beginning to grate on his nerves, as was having to dance through all the common niceties; exhausted by the effort of appearing remotely sociable, Judas finally brought the conversation to a head with a blunt, unadorned question.
"What kind of an arrangement are you offering me, exactly?"
"Well, o most admirable of nobility," Farant began delicately, then went on in a clipped rush. "If it is not too much of a presumption, one wishes to know if perhaps the good master would consider releasing his undoubtedly beloved and most precious of servants into this humble one's care, that this blossoming lotus may be brought to the fullest of his bloom and learn how to do the same for others, for one sees much potential in him." The merchant steepled his fingers, pausing to let the offer sink in, and then added, as though it was an afterthought, "Adequate compensation, of course, shall be given. This one does not cheat."
It took Judas a moment to work his way through the curlicues of Farant's speech and the implications of his extended metaphors, and when he had, the first sentiment that leapt to mind was a conflicted one: the sudden urge to strangle the man with his own kaffiyeh warred with the equally sudden desire to cram it down his throat.
"You're asking me," he said levelly, "If I want to sell my aide for you to raise and turn into some kind of --"
"Nobility!" Farant cut in before Judas could finish, and for the first time, a glint of genuine irritability surfaced from underneath his eternally-smiling 'business face', "One prefers the word 'entertainer'. The education provided to these youths is one of the best."
"I'm sure it is. But the answer is no." Without a further word, Judas turned to Raeger and grabbed her by the wrist, fully willing to throw her over his shoulder and march back to the inn if she didn't take the incentive to move herself. Luckily for the girl, she seemed to possess enough foresight to turn and hobble after him.
Sensing, like any good vulture, that the opportunity to fill his belly was slipping away, Farant interrupted quickly, going so far as to clap his hand on Judas' shoulder before he could move out of arm's distance and jabbering in hasty Hieratic all the while.
"One understands that the noble master wishes to keep such a specimen of youth for his own pleasure; but surely, most worthy master, even you must see the benefit in sharing the wealt--" The merchant paused, mid-sales pitch, at the sudden peculiar sensation of the temperature around him plunging down by a significant degree. With a nearly-audible crackle of frost, Judas turned.
Although even the kindest of souls would have admitted that Farant's men barely had two braincells to rub between then, even their inherently simple minds possessed a kind of instinctive survival mechanism, of the sort that had told a slimy, legless ancestor some billion years ago that it was probably a good idea to flop, flagellate, ooze, or otherwise locomote from whatever was attempting to ingest them as quickly as possible. It twitched into life now, with some urgency, prompting them to take another diplomatic step backwards. Or maybe three. The camels that had been taking advantage of the shade were long gone.
It's common knowledge, if not in so many words, that merchants (along with their distant cousins along the great evolutionary tree, lawyers and tapeworms) do not in fact descend from anything more advanced than whatever ancient parasite first decided that living off other things was a better idea than trying to forage for itself. This does not cripple their sense of self-preservation whatsoever, but it does tend to leave them somewhat ill-prepared when directly confronted with a problem, since one does not generally expect one's hosts to come hunting one down in the depths of their own bowels (or as the case may be, their local accounting office). The strange light to Judas' eye, the merchant thought uneasily, rather reminded him of the feverish look his secretary got whenever he was hunting the rats that always gnawed at their paperwork.
Farant twiddled his thumbs. Farant coughed. And then Farant said (forgetting to speak deferentially, for once), in the kind of overly-optimistic tone of someone still rather uncertain of what was going on, but was going to make a haphazard attempt at responding to it anyway:
"So, er, I take it you're not selling?"
His bodyguards were already running before he finished speaking, and then the street, for lack of a better word, exploded.
Later, the citizens of Aragon agreed that the only real pity about the entire incident was that the city's only fountain had been destroyed in the mysterious explosion which had torn up a sizable portion of the road all around it. Still, it made for interesting enough gossip, and it was certainly better than constantly complaining about how the harbor stank like the world's midden (which was not, of course, true. It was just Aragon's midden. If it had been the world's midden, they wouldn't have been able to see the water for the manure).
Two Hump, however, was in no condition to mourn the loss of his beloved drinking spot. His owner, Kashim, woke up from his late siesta to a note of apology tacked to his door, along with sufficient payment for a new camel. He had to pay for one of the better-educated camel drivers to read the note out to him, and continued to puzzle over its contents for some time afterwards.
On the other hand, Ichigo, the owner of a fairly well-frequented Yamato grill (or as he put it, a Fine Dining Establisment) and an acquaintance of Judas', found himself suddenly in possession of more pounds of camel meat than he knew what to do with, wondering helplessly if there was any chance of trying to explain that they didn't normally feature steaks on the menu. He supposed that if he served the meat for chitterlings during happy hour, the heavy drinkers would be sloshed enough not to know the difference.
The innkeep of The Golden Chalice found herself similarly perplexed. The guests in room twelve, one Master Yodem and an apprentice of some sort she hadn't seen him traveling with before, had practically vanished overnight, after storming in with peculiarly sooty clothing late in the afternoon. The apprentice had looked thoroughly mindboggled, she remembered, and she wondered if, perhaps, the pair had had anything to do with the activities that had been disturbing the city of late. Well, they'd paid good solid coin for a week's lodgings, and hadn't yet returned for a refund. She supposed that was enough reason not to pry.
And Raeger and Judas themselves?
She never did find out what had made him so angry in the first place.
Random Notes:
* Why is the pineapple salty-sweet, instead of sweet and sour? Where I come from, we sell individual slices of fruit like this rather often, actually (green mangoes, pineapple) but because the fruit itself is rather sour, the water it's immersed in is usually salty. Heck, sometimes we skip the saltwater and just bread the fruit with salt (in the mango's case, sometimes soy sauce is substituted for salt. Gasp). Technically, it should be salty-sour, but salty-sweet sounds better. And anyway, pineapple tends to be on the sweeter side most of the time. Shut up, this footnote is NOT too long. Pinya is actually Filipino for pineapple, but uh, I have no shame in ripping off my mother tongue for would-be-exotic names. Sorry.
* What's Judas looking for, anyway? Overall, he's actually trying to regain his humanity. D: Wow, I bet that's surprising, with all these vampire demon types totally fixated on becoming the oldest baddest vampire ever! But he didn't become a vampire by choice, exactly, and he'd like to be rid of it as soon as possible (imagine 'vampire' as a status ailment like 'frog' or 'mini' in RPGs, only drawn out over the course of a hundred years or so. You'd want to cure it by then too, wouldn't you?) which he hopes to do by resurrecting an ancient vampire king (I'm not sure if this comes across in the writing AT ALL, but they're supposed to be in an Egypt-like place XD).
* This has nothing to do with Valkyrie Profile. Actually it does, but just a little. These are characters from an interactive fiction based on the game. n.n
* Farant was supposed to be twenty million times sleazier, but he wasn't. :( I was too lazy to work on him that long, so I didn't get him to the 'practically-dripping-slime' point I'd wanted him to reach.
* Judas does not actually like Raeger. Or well, he does, but in the 'If anyone's going to do anything of any sort to her, it's going to be me.' Yes, that includes murder. :D
* Trying to do anything remotely resembling officious Arab-type talking ('PROPHET, BLESSED BE HIS NAME, WISHES YOU BEST OF LUCK AND A MARKED LACK OF GENITAL PLAGUES, O BROTHER OF MY FATHER') feels so weird and vaguely (EXTREMELY) politically incorrect XD I suck.
* A kaffiyeh is, IF I remember correctly, the name for the head-dresses assorted desert-dwelling tribes wear. From a dictionary: 'n. an Arab headdress consisting of a square piece of cloth foldedinto a triangle and fastened over the crown by an agal.'
* What happened to Two Hump? Let's just say Judas doesn't have a great fondness things that damage new things that he paid for. Yamato, in VP-verse, basically translates to 'Japanese', so.