Chapter 27: 25 – Strolvath’s Caution

The older man let out a barking, coughing laugh, like gravel in a cement mixer, followed by the clattering of coins against the counter. Once the last coin left his hand, he grabbed a seal-bottle.

“I would, werghck- Were it not that ev’ry Vict’ry Demon is different,” he slurred, having pulled the cork with his teeth. A long glug. “It’s an inconveniently psychological condition, ain’t helpin’ it with standardized methods. Now… The main reason I’m here - need to talk to one Zelsys, regardin’ payment for services rendered.”

Sig stared the man down for a moment, then nodded and walked to the back door. The door to the backyard sat partly open, and his assumption that they were in the back yard was confirmed when he stepped through. There were them-shaped imprints in the grass, and the two of them sat at the table in that small nook at the back - Zefaris ever-so-meticulously cleaning her beloved hand-cannon, and Zelsys… Writing something?

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“I knew he’d be here by now,” Zel said when she heard Strol’s unmistakable gravel-speak from the storefront. She’d intentionally left the door open when she had gone upstairs to dispose of her dirty dishes and get some writing implements. As was to be expected of a scholar, the alchemist who previously owned this place had left behind a wooden box filled with writing implements and even letter-sealing tools. In the box were to be found several nicely-made fountain pens, red and royal blue bars of sealing wax, a little quartz bowl stained with wax, and three different seals. One with a simple logo, one with a simplistic glyph, and one that sang in the hand and bore a much more elaborate glyph.

At Zef’s advice, she had decided to use the one with the simple glyph - it was supposedly a widely-used pattern that denoted the sender as somehow related to or involved in alchemy. As it turned out, the bowl was a fad device that was invented to make melting sufficient sealing wax easy. 

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen one outside a snooty officer’s office,” Zef remarked with a joking disdain.

Moments later, Sigmund appeared. He didn’t even get to say anything, Zel just looked up at him and said, “The old man is here about my payment, isn’t he?”

A slightly confused nod from the historian.

“I’ll be out in a bit, give me a minute.”

Another nod, and he was gone.

Zel finished writing her letter to the governor, made sure the ink was dried, folded up the letter so that it could be sealed shut, and grabbed a bar of sealing wax. The bowl did, indeed, begin melting it when she pressed the bar in. After pouring the wax onto the letter’s center and placing the seal down on the little puddle, she noticed a small glyph still glowing red at the bottom of the quartz bowl. 

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Once the wax cooled into a solid seal, she finally took her letter and got up to leave, sharing a brief goodbye kiss with Zefaris before she did.

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Strolvath looked better than he had when she’d last seen him. Certainly not good, but better. His right eye darted around with caution that betrayed his drunkard persona - it was a double-pupiled emerald-green ember, the self-same Homunculus Eye as Zef’s. His left eye-socket was filled by a brass ornament that felt like it could see into one’s very soul. The cross-hatched scars that covered his cheeks and broke up his facial hair were now covered with sooty scabs, seemingly having reopened recently.

She hadn’t expected to just have a short conversation with him in the store and then be done with it, and her suspicions were confirmed when the first thing he said upon seeing her was: “‘Ey. I’ve got lots to tell ya, but it’ll have to be somewhere zipperheads won’t dare to approach. I’ve got a spot not too far from here.”

Zel nodded in agreement and, after grabbing some of her other possessions, went with him. She took her cleaver and Tablet with her, more out of habit than caution.

So it was that the two of them left Riverside Remedies and made their way across the riverside promenade, Strolvath’s faux-hobbled gait leading Zelsys onto less and less tread streets. From the main street, to a side street, to a side alley.

The further from Willowdale’s main arteries they went, the less the pedestrians tried to pretend they weren’t staring. Some stares were lecherous for sure, yet many were inexorably drawn to the tied-off sleeve that dangled limply below Zel’s stump, or to her cleaver. They knew what that weapon was, what it meant - they knew, and some of the elderly gave a reluctant salute at the sight.

Even more noticeably, the further from Willowdale’s main arteries they went, the more the people who they came across changed. On the main streets, one might see the occasional Pateirian, even ones dressed in civilian dress and not overtly spiteful of their surroundings. Indeed, the surface of Willowdale exhibited peoples of all walks of life, sometimes to the point of Ikesians becoming the minority.

Here, however, in these corridor-like streets walled-in by some of the city’s oldest buildings, there were only two sorts to be seen. Ikesians both young and old in an overwhelming majority, with a Grekurian here or there, mostly older folks. 

The young were either fascinated or scared, usually leaning out of a door or window to get a peek before their elders called - or in some cases dragged - them back in. Young men of the disposition to ogle her dared not call out to her, instead bickering amongst themselves using slang that bordered on the absurd. In the span of a minute, she heard three mentions of a watermelon being crushed.

Meanwhile, the oldest of the old usually sat perched in front of their homes, often right next to the door, grasping their canes and chewing sunflower seeds. They generally seemed to look upon Zel and Strol with not hostility for the new, but the same nostalgia that an old soldier might experience at the sight of a fresh-faced recruit.

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