“Is there something I can help you with?” Ovali asked, trying to pull their attention his way.
Their eyes didn’t budge.
“What was it she said before, boys? Out for a walk and buying spices?” The mustached guard said, running his gloved fingers across his chin in a thoughtful gesture. He glanced around the shop and his face twisted into a look of disdain. “Not much to buy here when it comes to spices, I’d think. Unless you want some half-used spices that have been collecting dust on the shelf for over five years.”
The three of them let out low chuckles, and the man’s eyes found mine again.
“Where did you say you traveled from again? Northern District?”
“Western,” I corrected.
“That’s right. I remember now.” He nodded slowly as he took a step further in, closing the distance between us. “So what’s your excuse for stopping by this dump?”
Ovali let out a little gasp behind me. “Dump? Excuse me, sir, but the items for purchase here are of the highest possible value. Why, we have true art among our goods.”
The guard’s eyes flicked between the merchant and myself and then to the shelves with their mishmash of assorted goods.
“Of course,” he began, stepping up to the shelf with the statue of the naked woman. He picked it up, eyeing the design of the piece. “The highest value.” His fingers released the statue, and it crashed into the stone floor, shattering and sending pieces skittering across the floor and under the shelves.
I tensed at the noise and Ovali let out another troubled gasp. The men behind the mustached guard seemed uncomfortable at what was happening, too. One of them had turned his back on the entire thing and was looking out the window at the street, his stance shifting nervously.
“Please, sir. Please do not destroy my goods. They are all I have.”
The guard made a tsking noise with his tongue and turned his attention back to me. “I believe I asked you a question, girl.”
I gritted my teeth. It was a cosmic miracle that I hadn’t already closed the distance to this idiot and put a fist in his teeth. But I knew doing that would only cost me what precious little autonomy I had at the moment.
“I have an unexplainable love for trinkets and useless baubles,” I told the man. “One of the items that this man had on display in his window caught my attention, so I stepped inside to see what he had to offer. I was just getting ready to leave when you came inside.”
He watched me for a long moment and then nodded, an almost imperceptible tilting of his head. One of the other guards leaned up and whispered something into his ear. He nodded to the man.
“What caught your eye?”
I’d been expecting the question. I reached behind me, groping for one of the random items that Ovali had sitting on the counter. My fingers closed around something and I lifted it up.
“This,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster.
Mustache’s eyes wavered on the object for a moment and then a smile crept across his face. “You stopped in for that?”
“Yeah.” I nodded to emphasize the point. “Just caught my eye.”
“Interesting taste you have.”
The man behind him leaned forward again, his lips moving, but his voice too low for me to hear. Once again, the mustached guard nodded. Then he held up a hand. A look of disappointment passed across his face before he spoke.
“Of course, I understand.” He shook his head at me and then started to turn, pausing halfway through the movement. His eyes met mine again. “I’d suggest steering clear of the Eastern Quarter for the next few days. The streets are about to get messy.”
His lips twisted into a wolf’s smile, his eyes glinting with some unsaid pleasure.
I didn’t have time to ask what he meant as the three guards pushed out of the shop, already moving back the way they’d come with some speed.
Sighing, I leaned back against the counter and let my head droop for a moment. I stood there simply taking it all in, a new System window appearing in the corner of my vision.
People Person +1
I let out another sigh and said a mental thank you to the System, which had once again become my unlikely savior. A small part of me had wondered exactly how my story had worked out on the guards. If my [People Person] skill had improved, then perhaps that had something to do with it. It was the best answer I had at the moment, at least.
I dismissed the message and turned back to face Ovali, whose face had become etched with a troubled look.
“No respect,” he muttered. “The dragon’s dogs bite the hand of everyone that it meets—whether they feed it or not.” Turning his head to the side, he spat onto the floor, then his eyes met the piece that I’d picked up and he began to chuckle.
“What?” I asked, finally looking down at it. I deflated immediately. “You have to be kidding me…” I murmured, holding the piece up so that I could inspect it more closely.
It was a piece of rock. It was pretty, I had to admit. Swirls of blue and green and yellow flowered through the rock, which was flat on one side and rounded on the opposite. But it was not particularly something that you would go out of your way to possibly purchase from a trinket store. Not unless you were a rich patron with far too much money to have any kind of wit about you.
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That raised even more questions about how I had managed to ward off the guards. The one watching the window had seemed very nervous about something, though, and the mustached guard’s ominous warning about staying away from the Eastern Quarter was equally as disconcerting.
“Now,” Ovali began, finally managing to cull his laughter. His face was red from the effort and he had tears of joy streaming down his cheeks. “You wanted to talk about setting up a deal of some kind. What do you have to offer?”
I set the rock down on the counter and looked the merchant directly in the face. “One of the only non-imperial controlled paths in and out of the city, and a direct connection to people outside of these walls. People who can get things you might want.”
The man’s eyes sparkled like a dragon’s eyeing a chest of gold trinkets.
*** *** ***
A while later, I left Ovali’s shop behind. I’d waited, letting the short man check the street outside to make sure the guards weren’t out there, waiting for me to come out. When he didn’t spot any sign of them, he assured me it was probably safe, but then offered to let me leave out the back anyway.
I took him up on the offer and slipped into the alleyway that ran between his building and the one behind it. The alley was quiet, the sounds of the city streets dampened by the buildings that surrounded me. I took another moment to clear my head.
Thinking back to the guard’s words, I tried to determine if I could pick up on any clues in the things he had said. But even repeating those words in my mind I couldn’t come up with anything solid.
Instead of immediately heading back to the inn, I decided to make my way over to Henrietta’s. It had been a few days since I’d seen her face to face, though she’d been coming by The Slumbering Drake every day to check on Ophelia.
Sil had said something about her believing that Ophelia was suffering from hallucinations, and I wanted to try to get a bit more information on that. I weaved through the alleys, steering clear of the main streets when possible, until I reached Merchant’s Row. This part of the city was even busier than the rest, as people hurried between the shops and open stalls, looking for anything they could still purchase.
The lock down had severely hurt many of the local merchants and shops, and supply for many things like clothes, medicines, and even food were impossible to keep up with the demand. Rumors about the palace opening its food stockpiles had also begun to surface, but we hadn’t seen anything fruitful in that regard just yet.
Opening the back door to Henrietta’s, I took in a deep breath of the assortment of smells brewing in the air. Notes of bitter citrus mixed with more aromatic and floraly scents filled the hallway that ran the length of her shop. The sound of clanging glass drew me into the shop’s back room, where I found the older woman huddled over one of the several tables that lined the room, mixing something into a glass vial.
“Henrietta,” I greeted her.
She grunted without looking up and continued what she was doing. I was used to that. Henrietta was… something special. I wasn’t really sure what she was, to be honest, but I knew she wasn’t from my world. The System had revealed that, and in turn, she’d taken me under her wing—in a way. She’d even told me a little about her world, which had flying machines and advancements that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend by simply thinking about them.
The idea that a machine could fly like a dragon was… preposterous. I still didn’t believe it. But, her teachings had helped me. She’d taught me how to use an ability called [Shroud] which allowed me to hide who I was in the System. I couldn’t hide everything just yet, but she assured me that if I continued using it and leveling it up, I’d one day be able to completely hide myself from there users with System access. At least as far as she understood it.
“Outstanding,” she muttered to herself, leaning up and stretching out her back. “This might be the best batch I’ve made yet.”
Henrietta turned to me, the grey-hair she kept tucked into a bob on the back of her head moving with her. “I see you’ve finally wandered back over this way.”
Shrugging I settled into one of the chairs at the room’s center table. “Wanted to check in with you and see how things are.”
Henrietta made a dismissive noise. “I’m fine, child. I’ve been doing this nonsense since before you were even born.”
“I find that hard to believe. Don’t forget that I’m thousands of years old.”
She let out a cackle. “And?” She let the question linger in the air as she poured two cups of steaming tea.
I watched her mix two spoonfuls of something into them—sugar, I expected—and then she set one of the cups in front of me.
“Did you poison it again?”
Shaking her head she took a sip from her own cup and then sat down across from me. “Of course not. If I wanted to do that again, I wouldn’t waste perfectly good tea.”
I ran [Insight] on the cup. She smirked.
“I hate that,” I muttered, taking a sip of the liquid. It burned my tongue slightly, but the sweet taste sent a refreshing trill through my body.
“You’ll learn the signs one day,” she retorted. “Just keep practicing and paying attention. Maybe one day you’ll even be smart enough to not show when you’re staring at whatever the System spits out at you.” Her eyes flashed with a look of glee. It was slight, so slight I’d almost missed it. I gaped at her.
“Did you just?”
She shrugged. “Making sure you’re keeping your Veil up, child. It’s one of the most important steps to improving it.”
Shaking my head I leaned my elbows on the table, relaxing a little. “I wanted to talk about Ophelia.”
“What about her?”
“Sil said she’s been having hallucinations? Hearing things? She started screaming today…”
Henrietta took another sip of her tea and then nodded solemnly. “It can happen. What we’re dealing with here is a bit of unexplored territory. We have no idea what your doppelg?nger did to her when she incapacitated her back in the palace. Whatever it was, it left some kind of connection, though. Something that keeps triggering her brain to overreact in some way. It’s difficult to explain—impossible by your world’s standards, if I’m honest. If we were back in my world… well, we have machines for this kind of thing.”
“Machines? Like the flying ones you mentioned before?”
“Somewhat,” Henrietta said with a nod. “They don’t fly, though. We had these clinics. They were a lot like the clinic that you broke into, just bigger. A lot bigger in many cases. And they had a lot of patients and a lot of different machines to help the healers figure things out.”
“And they could figure out what’s wrong with Ophelia?”
She shrugged. “It’s possible, but the brain has always been a mystery to most people. The pieces that make it work… they’re complex and finicky. Even in my world it was always a toss-up whether or not the healers would be able to help something related to the brain, especially if it was some kind of injury like this seems to be.”
I leaned back in my seat, letting the idea of machines that could help heal people spiral through my mind. I had assumed that our world was one of the more advanced out there. The fact that other worlds with other types of people and even creatures existed wasn’t news to dragons.
I’d spent countless nights leading this empire, protecting it from threats at a cosmic level. That was part of how I’d lost sight of what truly mattered. How I’d let the [Hero] slip into my court and influence my people in his quest to become a god by his own right.
But the idea that there were machines—these creations even more complex than siege engines and the massive gates and elevators we’d designed for the palace—was difficult to wrap my mind around.
There was also part of it that made sense. If something like the System could exist and it could exist in at least three different variations between myself, Sil, and Henrietta, then what else might the creations of intelligent creatures be capable of?
Without warning, the back door to the shop slammed open, the sound echoing through the entire building.
“Henrietta?” A man’s deep voice called out. A moment later Draxi, one of the members of the Dock Street gang that had helped clean up Henrietta’s shop after we’d made our deal stepped into the room. His eyes met mine and he immediately looked away, focusing back on Henrietta.
“What’s the problem now?” She asked, rolling her eyes.
“There’s a fire in the Eastern Quarter.”