An Unexpected Reception

Days 1-3, Month 4, Year 919, 9th Era
Yyolwood

The first settlement she came across lay a day or two – well, “day” or two, it was hard to tell without the sun ever moving from its position in the sky – from where she’d appeared between one blink and the next, eyes still dazzled from the overwhelming whiteness that had erased the world. Having followed a winding, poorly-maintained cart path to its outskirts, she spent a candle or so hidden, observing the mid-sized village. It seemed quiet enough, though some of the forms of the people were strange. She saw a man with indigo-dark skin and the sheen of moisture beading on his exposed skin who left a dripping trail of water behind him even in the chilly air, and a massive, hulking woman with gray skin and dark lines tattooed on her face, even–strangest of all–an upright human-walking cat with orange fur. Despite that, they all acted very much like the farmers and townsmen she’d known in Isendel, calling greetings to each other, taking in washing, drawing water, herding animals (regular and four-legged, not upright ones).

As was usual for her, she took on a different face for her first investigative foray into the unknown village. She modeled the form after Hendrich, a player she’d known when she was young and sheltering in the Spindlemark. He hit all the conventional markers of attractiveness – symmetrical, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with dark hair and blue eyes – which would likely help people to open up and answer her questions more readily, but it was deeply unlikely anyone here would know him. Besides, he’d been nice to the young Sav, and in some obscure way she felt he wouldn’t mind her borrowing his face for this moment (especially since he was likely long dead, or at the very least far, far away).

With the aid of the palm-sized disc of polished steel she used as a mirror, she shaped herself with the spell until the reflection looked alike enough to Hendrich to be his twin, then straightened his shoulders – now a much more fraught action that threatened to burst the seams of his shirt, with the extra inches he’d added to his frame – and walked into town. After a quick scout around the village and some eavesdropping, he selected the first place he saw that had a sign with a mug on it. The Brewing Hour, it said.

Barely had he taken a seat on the stool and ordered a drink when a voice behind him said, “Well hey stranger. I haven’t seen you before. Can I get you a drink to welcome you to town?”

Sav jerked his head around to the newcomer – a human woman, perhaps in her thirties, tall and blonde and curvy with a smile curling her lip up at one corner. Taken aback at the greeting coming so suddenly from nowhere, he replied brusquely, “Nay. I’ve one.” He tapped the mug on the bar top by way of unnecessary demonstration.

She ran her gaze up and down and smiled, far too brightly. “Now there’s an accent I’ve never heard before! Where are you from? If you’re new to town and need a place to sleep, you’re welcome to come over. The place is small but… cozy.” Did she wink? No, there was a gnat buzzing around, it must have shied at her eye.

Sav blinked and frowned at the prying question and the invitation. Every instinct screamed trap! “Ah. Nah. I’ve already got a place tae sleep,” he half-lied. The thicket he’d marked as a likely shelter wasn’t much, but even an alleyway or a rooftop felt like it would be better than the house of a stranger who gave invitations for no reason.

She laughed, even though he’d said nothing funny, and reached out to lay a hand on his wrist. He twitched uncomfortably and inched it away. “That’s too bad to hear. If you change your mind, the offer is always open.” She definitely winked this time, he was sure he hadn’t imagined it now.

Unnerved, he fished out a couple of pennies from his purse (lifted off an unsuspecting merchant on the road a day ago) and dropped them on the bar, shoving back from the stool. “I… have tae go,” he fully lied, and hastily strode out of the tavern, leaving his barely-touched beer. Behind him, he heard the bartender chuckle and say something he could only catch a few words of: “… too strong … luck… next time.”

By that time he was fully out of the tavern, the eternally-twilit air cooling down the flush of alarm and dismay in his cheeks. Who was she? Had she been expecting him, somehow, or was she able to sense the magic he had used to alter himself and was hunting him for that reason? He couldn’t think of any other reason to be so single-mindedly welcoming to a rank stranger who was clearly from far-off lands (and he really ought to learn how to mask his accent if he was going to ask any more questions). Basic caution tucked him behind a crate in an alleyway across from the tavern entrance, to see if she followed him out or if anybody looked like they might be tailing him, but another half-candle with no sign of her and only the normal flow of clientele reassured him. Whatever that was, she was at least not pursuing him out.

But he had come into town with a mission, and had gotten exactly nowhere with it. Maybe that tavern was out of the question now, with that woman surely on the alert for him, but there were others within eyeshot. He selected one at random and went into it.

A peculiar pattern developed. He would enter. Eyes would turn, glance away, turn back. He would take a seat at the bar, uncomfortable beneath the gazes of half the people in the bar, order a drink, and some unknown would approach and talk to him, often offering to buy him a drink. After the second time this happened, Sav decided to accept, the better to conserve his pennies - as long as it came straight from the server it probably wouldn’t lead to any harm. He would grill the stranger, questions that started roundabout to avoid raising suspicion that he wasn’t even from this time, getting more pointed as the stranger answered questions happily and, for some reason, with a lot of giggling. He would stay for the length of one drink (though he left his mostly untouched), then leave. Inevitably, the person looked startled, and often annoyed, and one gnome with a pert nose and heavy tattoos on his face even said, “That’s it? Where are you going?” to his back when he left (he didn’t respond).

After the fourth such instance, and the third time someone touched him – knee, shoulder, hand; the last person even brushed a curl off his face! – the realization hit him. He’d chosen a form that was too pretty. It wasn’t just attractive enough to put people at ease and make them answer his questions more readily – they were flirting with him.

He scowled at Hendrich’s features in the mirror. “Be that what ye had to evade all the time? Nae wonder ye kept t’ yer dressin room sae much.” Peevishly, he bent the nose, made one eye a little smaller than the other and sank them deeper into the skull, and softened and lengthened the jaw, rounding out the angles.

It didn’t look all that much worse to him, but it made enough of a difference that in the next tavern, nobody approached him. He sat there for a full half a candle and had worked most of the way through his ale by the time he realized he was going to have to talk first.

Feck. Well, perhaps the bartender. They were paid to talk to people, right?

The bartender was amenable, and Sav teased out a few more shreds of information from what they said and what they didn’t say - their method of timekeeping was different, for one (it would have to be, wouldn’t it, with no sun cycle). In all the place names, as well, no single kingdom was mentioned. When he probed further, all the locations named were only towns or cities, or sometimes of lands in a short distance around a city, nominally under its protection. And then there was the City at the top of the world, where there had only been the Veil before when he knew it. Too far from here for many to have had much experience with it, only rumor and legend. No one in Yyolwood had even boasted of seeing its illuminated inhabitants, though there were illustrations in the churches of the White Crown.

Later, Sav would pass by one and shudder at the winged, tentacle-faced figure haloed in light painted on the doors. Their saviors, it was said. Rulers of the world, shepherds against the Night wherever the Light reached.

Having to open up the conversation himself did not come naturally to Sav, though, and for all that the attention was uncomfortable, it was much faster when people approached him first. For the final tavern in town, he returned his features to the original pattern. Yet this time, being aware of the objective of the man who smilingly approached him also made it much harder to focus on the fact-finding mission. He jumped at every seemingly-incidental touch, and the lingering gaze of the latest suitor made him keenly aware of himself - every movement, the color rising in his cheeks, the way he leaned against the bar or tried not to lean too close to the other man, the direction of his gaze as he tried to look attentive but not stare into the other man’s eyes and maybe give him the wrong signal.

Sav escaped from that encounter with very little idea of what had been said. To boot, his inquiries had been noticed. He overheard a small group of friends, drunkenly making their way home, loudly teasing one of their number (he recognized her as Suitor #3, Meirali at the Goose and Hare) about completely failing with the handsome traveler. Another mentioned that he’d heard from Pire who’d heard from Yanod that that man had been doing the same thing all over town, so it wasn’t just her; the exclamations of how peculiar that all was faded in the distance as the group staggered by, unheeding of Sav sitting sulkily on a barrel with his hood up.

This was entirely too much attention for something that was supposed to be a discreet method of investigation. And there was no way he could believably do the same thing using entirely different faces, given how distinctive his accent was. How did Ethan manage to do this kind of thing with any success? (Or had, anyway. Like Hendrich and everyone else Sav had known, he was probably long-dead now, or at the very least far, far away.)

Giving it up as a bad idea, he shifted his features to match Old Velric - plain without being hideous, merely forgettable. He’d just have to find out more the old-fashioned way: eavesdropping, breaking into places and rifling through other people’s papers.

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An Unexpected Reception