1        Soul Bound 1.3      Making a Splash 1.3.3    An Unrequited Love 1.3.3.15 Taking in each other's laundry

The waif moved swiftly ahead, bounding between dryish footholds before turning her head to look back at them, while balanced on one leg.

Lucille: "This way, and don't trust your boots. Laudie shatter's sharp."

She set fire to the brick in the cage of her improvised torch, and then pointed to where a jagged blue spike rose from the remains of a bottle half-buried in the mud, which had now been revealed by the dim red light glow. How many guards discovered that the hard way? Kafana noticed that Lucille's own feet were bare.

What was it like to live like that? Kafana felt a desire rise up in her chest, a desire to understand and connect, so strong it was almost a need. She concentrated, opened herself, and felt a tingle from her tiara indicating that the game was emulating her avatar having skill by feeding her hints. She went with it. After all, what was the point of having "Etiquette (common)" and using one of her limited number of slots for wearing magic items on Empress Wei's Broach, if she wasn't willing to make use of them?

Empress Wei's Broach of Virtuosity (EPIC)(UNIQUE)

+8 to skills

Bad luck will fall upon people who spread harmful rumours about you that are untrue, equal to the malice of the spreader.

???

"Empress Wei was virtuous and seen to be virtuous, and so confounded her accusers."

DURABILITY 100000/100000

Kafana: "Pleased to meet you, Lucille. You can call me Jammer-Byor. What news of the roads?"

Lucille nodded, used to hearing the question from the Vecci who camped a few kilometers away, and happy to be given a familiar category she could place these strangers into.

Lucille: "Tangle Alley's still blocked by that recent collapse up north near Bedlam. Tickton's closed, so Koppenberg's moved his stage. Carters have brought in more teams for Lammas Fair, to deal with the harvest wagons, and it's creating so much sludge that several bridges near the Crush have been swept down trough and under."

What? Asking the girl to explain didn't feel right - Lucille was treating Kafana like an insider, talking freely to her, and she didn't want to disrupt that. She looked again at the liquid of the stream, using her Truesight skill and the chemistry perspective she'd gained from Bungo to put two and two together.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Maybe a quarter of the solids were the sort of mud you'd get from cleaning dirty walls or gardening boots. The rest was from animals: primarily horses, but also sheep, goats, pigs and cows. The Wombles weren't travelling along a footpath so much as an open sewer. In fact the whole of the Scarrow was one big drainage trough - a natural low point between the slaughter houses of the Rooks parish and the gentle rise of Tickton. As Nicolo would put it: shit flows down hill. Apparently this was where it stopped. The overlay gave a more precise answer, displaying contour lines which located the lowest spot at a point near the northern end of the Scarrow. She read the label attached to it. "Acheron #5".

Kafana: [Bulgaria, what's Acheron?]

Bulgaria: "The Acheron? It's a river. The ancient Greeks believed it was one of only four that flowed all the way down into Hades' underworld, and called it the river of sorrow. Why?]

Kafana: [I'm looking at our shared map of this area. The low point is labelled "Acheron #5"]

Bungo: [Oh, I added that one! The monks helped me add a lot of details about the tunnels under Torello, and the Royals have been helping too, ever since Vessel Kafana visited their throne and spent nearly half a day healing as many of them as she could. Acheron #5's a massive storm drain whose channel leads to one of the massive pumping chambers set up by mages in a previous age. Nobody risks fighting there, because nobody knows how to fix them, so it's a neutral gathering place of sorts. Even the undead avoid it, apparently.]

Wellington: [Probably a ward, like the one on the Plaza of Peace. Reinforcement magic for the calming buff, and possibly a bit of self-repair, mainly drawing upon MOR. Or at least, that's how I'd do it. Obviously I couldn't say for certain without inspecting it, and my reality magic hasn't yet reached a level high enough to make a permanent active ward that complex. If it gets damaged, tell the Royals the person they'd need to contact would be Grand Master Poggio.]

The slope became gentler and Kafana started noticing signs of life around her; few adults, but a smattering of old or crippled crafters, who mechanically worked away at unpleasant repetitive tasks while keeping half an eye on the lean children who furiously chased each other around the scaffolding. She gained the impression that the children learned how to swing between swaying support poles long before they'd learned to walk upright on two feet, and still preferred it. They gripped the poles with hand or feet impartially, and the only time she saw any of them touch a flat surface was when one six year old boy briefly landed on a shanty hut's roof in order to use it as a trampoline. It creaked alarmingly, and the fat woman inside swore pungently at him, in a drunken Slavic accent and then flung a bar of cheap lye soap at his head which he ducked with ease, giggling as he bounced away. The woman, greasy and sweating, returned to trampling around in circles inside a wide wooden tub filled with clothes and soapy water.

She turned to Lucille.

Kafana: "The kids' parents work nearby?"

Lucille: "Nah, there's no money to be made taking in each other's laundry. Folks on the way up work on the docks, in the shops, or wherever they're told to go by the foremen who turned up to the Muster at dawn because they're in need of more hands for a day or a week. They work on their skills and try to gain a reputation as a meek and useful menial, hoping to gain a longer term position that will get them and their family out of here."

She shrugged.

Lucille: "It can happen, if you're young and lucky, or good looking and willing to put up with stuff."

Kafana ignored a system message about her Etiquette skill increasing and copied Bulgaria's example; she concentrated upon Lucille as a person, and on what she wasn't saying.

Kafana: "And the ones not on the way up? What about their kids?"

Lucille: "Their kids don't do so good. Some starve and fall ill. Some just curl up, too tired to fight the inevitable. Some go looking for a miracle or a big gamble. Priests don't help, just preach about obeying the lords, and the lords certainly don't help. Well, I hear Pazzi helps some maidens who let him kiss them, though I've never met any who say it's happened to them personally. Most just endure, claiming bounties from Koppenberg or Baker's bounty when they can, tightening their belts when they can't. What else is there to do? Nobody lives in the Scarrow because they want to."

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