Lorenzel, Part 2

[Drannin]

Argus stared straight ahead. Looked over at Drusia. Great weave. Brilliant.

<"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"> he mind-asked.

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Paging Drusia! We really need you for the main interaction here. To move things along until you can reply:]

Lillith boarded the wagon and they set off. "Where are we taking you?" Sister Rose asked the older woman, who gave her name as Edith.

"Not far, ma'am," the woman answered, uncertainty in her voice; she wasn't sure about traveling with this motley crew, reasonably enough. "My shop is in the middle of town, just beyond the temple of the heretics. I wish I could move farther away from them, but my resources are limited. I'm sorry if going past that place offends you, ma'am."

Heretics? Rose thought. It was hard to get a good calibration here; "heresy," depending on the local definition, could range anywhere from one of the weird religions of the far north (Lillith's? she thought momentarily, then put it out of her mind) to something as acceptable to most of the Veracian Church as the Mechanists ... or even her own Reformed sect. There were definitely places in rural Veracia where the Reformed Church wasn't welcome. Well, we'll see soon enough. "Don't worry, I've seen worse," she reassured Edith.

Mind-to-mind conversations were still going on as they reached the village square, which had an Orthodox temple on one side, a Millenarian temple on the other. The woman's body language definitely indicated that the Millenarians were the ones she found "heretical." That was interesting; yet another village (or at least another villager) that had no use for that denomination. Had they done something distasteful here? It might be worth trying to find out ... and in the process, letting as much of the town see Lillith as possible, the better to create a false trail. Rose reined the wagon to a halt in front of a greengrocer's, and the old woman motioned them inside.

[Drusia]

[quote="Graybeard"][OOC: Paging Drusia! We really need you for the main interaction here. To move things along until you can reply:]

[OOC: Sorry! I've been really busy the last two days and I haven't been able to read or post. But I'm back now, and I'll have a post up tomorrow morning, I promise!]

[Drusia]

<"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?">

<"I still think she'll need to be out for a convincing effect,"> I reply, <"But a certain artistic addition could make it all the better. Especially if my comrade feels the need to take a peek in the coffin.">

"Oh," I ask, turning towards Maudin, "Do you do costume makeup? Like for stage acting or mascarade parties?"

-- Drusia

[OOC: Again, sorry for the wait! I've been up to my eyes in student papers this week.]

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Sympathies on the overload, D; it happens...]

This is Lillith's kind of place, Sister Rose thought as they entered the shop. There were fruits and vegetables aplenty, and not a piece of meat in sight. Some of the spices, and maybe the fruits, looked surprisingly exotic. A thought struck her. "Are any of these imported from the north or south?" Rose asked.

"Yes, ma'am," Edith replied. "I have had the good fortune to meet some importers from along the north side of the Lorenzel River. They've kept me well supplied with some of these foreign goods. I hope they are okay, though; I was supposed to get a shipment from them yesterday, but they never showed up." Her face changed to a look of concern, but the reason wasn't what Rose was expecting. "These things aren't ... sinful, are they? I wouldn't want to sin against our Lord Luminosita, after all."

Rose wasn't quite sure how to answer that; there were certainly hard-liners in the Orthodox church who'd think that anything from outside Veracia itself would have something wrong with it. But she hadn't asked an Orthodox priest, had she? She smiled at the woman. "I think that Luminosita wouldn't have created all these wonderful things, or allowed people to grow them, if he hadn't intended that we use them wisely and thankfully. Let's just give thanks for his generosity and --"

She was interrupted by a low boom from somewhere back toward Lorenzel. The old woman wasn't fast on her feet, but she still moved with surprising speed to the front of the store, from which a cloud of smoke could be seen on the distant horizon.

Well, if what Argus said Harker told him is right, this elf we're avoiding may have just finished one hunt ... and we'd better get on with it before she starts her next one, Rose thought, the produce and their half-elven "importers" tabled for the time being.

[Porcelain Fish]

Maduin glanced up from examining a rack of spices at Drusia's question.

"Generally in Tsuiraku we use cosmetics only modestly and sparingly, for little things. For more overtly dramatic changes the norm is generally to employ an illusion, especially in stage acting," he said thoughtfully. "There are a few small, eccentrically traditional theaters that use face paint and the like, but for the most part it's too messy to bother with. I used to know a boy who performed in one of those theaters; the paint was all very heavy stuff - terrible for the pores. The actors had to use very stringent cleansers to keep from getting acne."

He smiled fondly at the recollection. "Some of the exotic looks they could achieve with just that paint though . . . they were quite remarkable."

He blinked as a low, dull roar abruptly reverberated through the air, and turned, catching sight of a plume of smoke shooting up on the horizon through the window.

That probably was not a good thing.

[Sareth]

As the rolling explosion could be heard, Lillith spun about to stare, eyes wide and mouth agape. "What was that?" she squeaked. She visibly shook, and seemed to almost instantly materialize from nowhere beside Sister Rose, close enough to almost be wrapped around the nun's arm. "It's not another gollum or anything, is it?"

[Graybeard]

"It's not another gollum or anything, is it?"

"I don't know," Sister Rose said, truthfully. "That came from the other side of the Lorenzel River, I think. The navy base is on that side." Of course, so is this elf, but I'm not going to tell her that, not yet. "It might have been something there, or it might have been something else in town, or who knows what else it might have been. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it." Yet.

As Drusia came out of the shop, however, Rose concluded that it might be a good time for another mind-to-mind chat. She detached herself gently from Lillith's "embrace" and turned past Edith, to where the elf was standing, and --

-- Wait a minute. Why was the old human woman smiling?

[Drusia]

-- Wait a minute. Why was the old human woman smiling?

[OOC:] Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[Graybeard]

[OOC: So, dropping the other shoe...]

The old woman's smile broadened as the smoke cloud rose.

"Do you know what's going on there?" Sister Rose asked, not sure what answer she was hoping for. "Does that kind of thing happen often?"

"Not often, ma'am," Edith said. "I've seen it before, though. I think it was that elf eliminating one of those half-breed freaks."

Uh, oh. "Half-breed freaks? What do you mean?"

"Oh, you know," she said. "The monstrosities that result when humans mate with elves, contrary to Luminosita's will. Errants, the elves call them. I just call them trouble, myself."