Chapter 135: 133 – Uni

Walking towards the courtyard gate, Zef showed a few photographs - surprisingly, they were all legible. Pointing out a particular photo capturing rapid motion, where Zelsys was mid-dodge whilst the golem’s descending fist neared the ground, Zef remarked, “Even I saw this as a total blur, yet it captured the scene with perfect clarity. No wonder it has such volatile output, the thing must be working some sophisticated magic to mitigate exposure and focus issues.”

Despite the vastly increased amount of attention directed towards Zelsys - be it from stares or occasional exclamations - none dared impede her or Zef’s passage. It was perhaps helped by the fact she used people trying to grab at her to discharge the leftover Fulgur in her system as small, seemingly incidental shocks. They delved into the crowd and strode through unimpeded, finding Makhus sat at a nearby food stall positioned conveniently within direct sight of the courtyard. It was one of the boats - still floating a good meter off the ground - the customer area being a dock-themed raised platform with stools themed after various nautical objects - one was just an entire barrel, another a stool with a ship’s wheel for a seat, and so on. He raised a tiny ceramic cup to them, kicking it back and proceeding to lift some sort of orange blob off a wooden plate, dropping it into his open mouth.

Walking up the ramp, Zel and Zef seated themselves next to him, neither paying particular attention to what was behind the establishment’s counter for the moment. Great big tanks with fish, barrels, lots of fisherman iconography - a seafood stall.

“What is that orange-”

“Sea urchin roe - eggs, pretty much. Hell of a show you put on there, I could tell you figured out something big right in the middle of the fight… Unless you’ve been holding off on making your cleaver do that crazy shit, which I doubt,” he said, picking up and eating another roe piece. 

At the chef’s attention, Zel glanced up at the menu board, choosing, “We’ll have the uh… Pickled rice with tuna, is it? And some of the plum wine.”

It was written in strange phonetic hieroglyphs, which Zelsys could read with some difficulty. The chef - a young-looking woman in a plain apron and with short black hair - smiled, nodded, and walked into the back, separated only by a curtain that went halfway to the ground. She dug up the coins for it and set them in two neat little piles on the counter.

They spoke for a short while, which ended up mostly being Makhus asking about the fight, Zelsys eagerly expanding on his questions, whilst Zef flicked through her photographs and showed ones that she thought to be relevant. Soon enough, the topic turned to the cleaver.

“There’s something about the extra step of producing an arc… But what? Is it just the repeated ritual of it? Does the arc somehow transform the Fulgur or carry along other essentia from the air?” she thought aloud, certain of the method but not the reason.

“I think I’ve got an essentia meter laying around somewhere, though it’d probably take me a couple days - if not weeks - to figure out basic artifact analysis… You should probably just try to find an appraiser somewhere around here, there’s bound to be a good one.”

“And while we’re there we could have some of the hoard appraised, too,” Zef cut in.

The chef finally came out with their order, carrying both the food and the drink on two wooden plates and setting them down before them with a beaming smile and a deep bow. They ate and drank, and with each mouthful and sip of steeply sweet alcohol, Zelsys grew increasingly convinced that this should’ve cost more than they had paid. She had half a mind to leave a tip, but some half-forgotten memory in the recesses of her mind screamed that it would be terribly offensive to this particular chef.

So it was that she simply used the money she would’ve used to tip to order some of that so-called sea urchin roe that Makhus seemed to be enjoying so much, as well as more plum wine. The girl went out of her way to prepare it in front of Zel, bringing out a pair of sea-urchins, cracking them open, pulling out the bright-orange matter and arranging it neatly on a wooden plate, the whole process. 

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When offered a piece Zef refused to taste it, citing that she hated the texture and that she was happy sipping plum wine. 

“Doesn’t help that I can see the individual eggs,” she murmured half-jokingly.

The texture was something between custard and butter, the flavor a pleasant blend of sweet and slightly briny with a savory undertaste. With just a mouthful she could tell that it was probably rich in protein, and was overall something she would have liked to eat again - just not on a daily basis. 

Even the second - admittedly small - bottle of plum wine vanished quickly, even before Zel could finish eating her portion of sea urchin. 

“Right, we should probably go look for that appraiser, no?” Zef pointed out, to which both Zel and Makhus agreed. Only… Zel found no reason to drag the alchemist along. She pointed at the space just behind the stage as they got up off their stools, telling him, “I almost forgot to mention, when I spoke with that Krishorn heiress with the flute, she asked me about you and asked me to tell you to go backstage after the show, that the guards would let you pass.” 

Makhus blinked a few times and raised an eyebrow, the light disbelief in his face betraying the fact he wasn’t certain if she was pranking him. 

“No bullshit?” he asked plainly.

She had to admit, it was a little hard to believe when she repeated it like this.

“No bullshit,” she affirmed. “She asked for someone ‘good enough to turn a raw Azoth Stone safe for consumption in a couple weeks, perpetual stubble, slightly long hair, handsome soldier type’.”

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