Your Friendly Local
May. 26th, 2023 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinonFandom: Etrian Odyssey IV
Word count: ~2000
Characters: Logre, Kirtida
Warnings: There is one pretty gross line about a corpse.
Notes:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
genprompt_bingo - "Pipes and Beer." With this, I have actually completed a line! I have also completed a personal challenge, which was to get back on my bullshit (i.e. complete this line by revisiting old familiar fandoms). Okay, I did fudge it by making the Zelda and EO fics for installments other than the ones I spent most time writing for, but still counts.
I.
Whirlwind slid into his accustomed booth near the back of the Peacock Bar. The view of the stage wasn't great, but he had sightlines to the entrance and the notice board. He wasn't here for the dancing anyway.
He didn't have a compelling reason not to be here for the dancing. Logre would've had plenty of compelling reasons, but those didn't help. Whirlwind was, of necessity, someone who hung around in places like this - who had an accustomed booth in the back after just a few months - so he'd made himself get used to their beer. So, likewise, he was trying to make himself enjoy the entertainments. The music was louder and less mannered than back home, and played along foreign scales that never, to his ear, seemed to resolve to anything. Maybe he'd get it eventually. For now, he was privately grateful that the night's show was an hour or more off, and the worst he had to deal with was a man in the opposite corner tuning some big-bodied string instrument. He could watch people from here. Nurse the requisite one to three drinks. Slip out, if need be, when they dimmed the lights.
Except that right now somebody was sauntering over and claiming the seat opposite his. One of the dancers - Kirtida, wasn't it? - wearing about seventy-five percent of her performance rigging, or eight more scarves than the average person. It was amazing she could move as quietly as she did.
"Well?" he said. "To what do I owe the honor?"
"I was wondering much the same," she said. She had a slow, thoughtful voice; he wondered if she put it on for customers. She looked about twenty years old, but that part was probably true. "I saw you at our last show, and I didn't think you cared for it." Well, no wonder. If she had seen him that night, she'd probably have caught him frowning through the performance, unmoved, but trying to find something in the style of it that he could make sense of. Sweeping back her heavy braid, now, she said, "So - you do not fancy women?"
After the skyship crash Logre had come to tangled in the limbs of a Flight Corps lieutenant. He'd had a bruise in the shape of her patella, and she, for her part, had been dead for hours. Their faces had been so close together that he hadn't seen, until he got up, the messy concavity of the back of her skull.
This had knocked any amorous tendencies right out of him. In fact it had left him faintly nauseated at the prospect of human touch. In the Empire it would have been trivial to conceal a weakness like that - the situation so seldom arose - but people in Tharsis were more effusive, less rigid about personal space. He kept having to suppress a flinch. People found him edgy and suspicious - he could see them thinking it, and still couldn't make himself blend.
Well, no better time to practice than now. He allowed himself a smile, a little sarcastic. "You think highly of yourself, huh?"
"Beg pardon?"
"If someone isn't smitten with you, they must not like women at all - that's your assumption here, isn't it?"
Somberly she said, "Or perhaps you have a lost love in the place you came from. I would also make allowances for that."
This is banter, he noted, with some surprise. I'm being bantered with. "No offense, Kirtida, but I'm not really the confiding type."
"Clearly not. You aren't the only person here under a false name, but you are the most obvious about it." He raised his eyebrows. She held up her hands for peace. "It's not a crime. Many people are here to reinvent themselves. To get away from something."
He snorted. She didn't know anything, after all. He hadn't asked to be reborn, and all he wanted was to go back.
He wouldn't, of course, even if the ship had survived. He wouldn't have returned empty-handed; there was no conceivable universe in which he'd abandon the mission and go straight home. Home, even when he got there, wouldn't be as he remembered it; on the eve of the expedition's launch, Emperor Alfodr had quietly issued a new round of austerity measures. The timing had been calculated - see your Emperor, brave and splendid, risking his very life in parts unknown to save you all. Is it so much to ask that you do your part too? Work harder, eat less, stop having children without permission.
He liked to hope the citizens would have shouldered this burden without complaint - that the ideal Empire of his imagination had manifested in reality, this once. When he was especially in need of cheering he liked to think maybe His Majesty had made it back, revived Yggdrasil without him. It could have happened. Anything was possible - except for him to return to a Cloudy Stronghold that was the same as he'd left it.
Into Kirtida's watchful silence he said, "I'm going to guess you're not the confiding type either."
"We make a matched set, then. Two mysterious foreigners, watching closely over the town... Perhaps we ought to stick together."
"Even knowing nothing about each other?"
"Knowing as little as you like." And she smiled, and rested her arms on the table. The motion did subtle and artistic things to her cleavage; Logre was not affected, but wondered if Whirlwind ought to be, or ought to let on as much.
No, he decided, Whirlwind's taste ran older. Avuncular, that was the angle. In this town of reckless young swashbucklers it wasn't hard to feel old - and he was sure he looked it, even at thirty-six. The Empire birthed strong people, and then it turned them skinny and gray.
He sipped his beer, telling himself, Benevolent uncle. Checkered past. Understandably evasive, but friendly enough.
After consideration he said, "Well, Kirtida, if we're going to get along, there's just one thing I have to know."
"And that is?"
He nodded toward the musician in the corner, who was apparently satisfied with his tuning, strumming a few idle chords. "What the hell do you call that thing?"
She grinned. He'd surprised her - that was good, that was promising. "That is an oud." And she held out her hand across the table. "Let's ask no questions more difficult than that."
And for the most part, the agreement held.
II.
His Grace the Outland Count had ordered a celebration to honor the explorers - even distributed some of his own precious supply of imported tobacco for the occasion. In the Dancing Peacock Kirtida had finally tapped a keg of oak-aged black lager, never before publicly released; she'd been teasing it for weeks, and Whirlwind half-resented and half-admired how well she'd stoked people's interest. His own included. Ten years ago he hadn't known a lager from an ale from a hole in the ground, and now he was actually looking forward to some niche local nonsense like this.
Had been looking forward, anyway. In the fug of pipe smoke it was hard to taste much. That was Tharsis for you; they didn't know the meaning of the word "moderation." It wasn't that resources were plentiful, even here - more that they had faith that someone could always strap on a sword and go get more. And now, with the latest developments at the wharf, there were even more resources to be tapped or dangerous mazes to go die in, depending how you looked at it. So spare no expense, right?
Whirlwind hadn't even made it all the way back to his usual table. From the crowd, friends and acquaintances, townsfolk and adventurers, kept flagging him down for a chat or a toast. But he was ambling in that direction, and maybe in another twenty minutes he'd even get to sit down. He'd given up the notion of ordering food as soon as he'd come in the door; the waitstaff would make an effort for a regular, but that did no good if they couldn't even get to him.
There was a raucous noise behind him, and someone jostled him. Being one of the better-trained and more sober people at this particular party, he managed to keep his footing. Turning to the source of the disturbance, he said, "Easy, there -"
"It's you!" Wharfmaster Ciaran, still reeling a little, planted his hands on Whirlwind's shoulders and broke into a delighted grin. He was still wearing goggles and flying gear - probably had four or five identical sets, probably hadn't worn anything else in years. It used to be Tharsis didn't even have a wharf, and Ciaran had been building machines in his granny's backyard that did nothing but explode. Now Ciaran called over his shoulder to the crowd, "It's Whirlwind, everybody!"
Someone shouted back, "We know!"
Turning back to Whirlwind, Ciaran said, "We can get another hundred meters of altitude now. A hundred meters! Can you imagine! And we'd never have gotten anywhere without you" - he socked Whirlwind in the chest - "you beautiful mysterious stranger!" And kissed him on the mouth.
Whirlwind froze. After a moment someone pulled Ciaran away, apologizing. As he melted back into the crowd Ciaran himself could be heard saying, "Come here, I'll kiss you too, I'll kiss anybody, this is the greatest day of my life!"
There were systems of patronage, back in the Empire. Marriages were tightly regulated to keep the birth rate within a few points of replacement, but - established citizens were free to make arrangements with someone of the same sex, usually offering them protection or advancing their interests. At the time he'd left, Logre had just been aging into the range where he'd make a desirable patron, and certainly his access to the Emperor would have added attraction. He just hadn't thought about it in a long time.
And this had nothing to do with it. This was Tharsis. People could simply get close to each other, for any reason.
His hand shook, a little, as he raised his beer mug to his lips.
"All right there?" said a sympathetic landsknecht.
He smiled crookedly and waved his mug at her. "I was scared I'd spill something when he knocked me over. Any of this goes to waste and there'll be a riot."
He'd been sent in to quell riots in the capital, once. The shortages there had been genuine, not a marketing ploy. People had been too exhausted and hungry to fight him as hard as, perhaps, they had intended to.
He sipped his drink, still tasting nothing, and resumed inching through the crowd, making incremental progress back toward his table.
Although he really ought to get out of the habit of thinking of it as his.
Lately, as the expeditions ranged farther from Tharsis, his thoughts bent more often toward home. Toward the world he would be returning to. Some deep and shameful disloyalty in him found that home paled in comparison - that Logre had been a less enjoyable person to be. But "enjoyment" couldn't factor into his calculus. There was no decision to be made. He had a duty.
Another hundred meters of altitude. It wouldn't take much more than that to make it back. And what did he have to show for his long absence? He had the Titan's Crown, and he'd lost the habit of kneeling to anyone. What would he say to his Emperor?
Threads of music filtered through the crowd noise. Kirtida's old band - when she'd cashed out and bought the bar, she'd offered them a new contract, and they'd stayed. All these years and five of the original seven still performed here. Foreigners carving their own place in Tharsis, becoming a local institution.
Nice work if you could get it. He had hated this music, once.
From behind the bar, too far away for speech, Kirtida pointed at his mug and mouthed, How is it?
He mouthed back To die for, but she frowned, maybe unfamiliar with the idiom.
III.
Even with a crisp new guild registration card tucked into his bag, after everything, Logre got a few weird looks entering the bar. But no one stopped him.
No one stopped him sitting down in Whirlwind's old spot, but - it didn't feel right.
Word count: ~2000
Characters: Logre, Kirtida
Warnings: There is one pretty gross line about a corpse.
Notes:
genprompt_bingo - "Pipes and Beer." With this, I have actually completed a line! I have also completed a personal challenge, which was to get back on my bullshit (i.e. complete this line by revisiting old familiar fandoms). Okay, I did fudge it by making the Zelda and EO fics for installments other than the ones I spent most time writing for, but still counts.I.
Whirlwind slid into his accustomed booth near the back of the Peacock Bar. The view of the stage wasn't great, but he had sightlines to the entrance and the notice board. He wasn't here for the dancing anyway.
He didn't have a compelling reason not to be here for the dancing. Logre would've had plenty of compelling reasons, but those didn't help. Whirlwind was, of necessity, someone who hung around in places like this - who had an accustomed booth in the back after just a few months - so he'd made himself get used to their beer. So, likewise, he was trying to make himself enjoy the entertainments. The music was louder and less mannered than back home, and played along foreign scales that never, to his ear, seemed to resolve to anything. Maybe he'd get it eventually. For now, he was privately grateful that the night's show was an hour or more off, and the worst he had to deal with was a man in the opposite corner tuning some big-bodied string instrument. He could watch people from here. Nurse the requisite one to three drinks. Slip out, if need be, when they dimmed the lights.
Except that right now somebody was sauntering over and claiming the seat opposite his. One of the dancers - Kirtida, wasn't it? - wearing about seventy-five percent of her performance rigging, or eight more scarves than the average person. It was amazing she could move as quietly as she did.
"Well?" he said. "To what do I owe the honor?"
"I was wondering much the same," she said. She had a slow, thoughtful voice; he wondered if she put it on for customers. She looked about twenty years old, but that part was probably true. "I saw you at our last show, and I didn't think you cared for it." Well, no wonder. If she had seen him that night, she'd probably have caught him frowning through the performance, unmoved, but trying to find something in the style of it that he could make sense of. Sweeping back her heavy braid, now, she said, "So - you do not fancy women?"
After the skyship crash Logre had come to tangled in the limbs of a Flight Corps lieutenant. He'd had a bruise in the shape of her patella, and she, for her part, had been dead for hours. Their faces had been so close together that he hadn't seen, until he got up, the messy concavity of the back of her skull.
This had knocked any amorous tendencies right out of him. In fact it had left him faintly nauseated at the prospect of human touch. In the Empire it would have been trivial to conceal a weakness like that - the situation so seldom arose - but people in Tharsis were more effusive, less rigid about personal space. He kept having to suppress a flinch. People found him edgy and suspicious - he could see them thinking it, and still couldn't make himself blend.
Well, no better time to practice than now. He allowed himself a smile, a little sarcastic. "You think highly of yourself, huh?"
"Beg pardon?"
"If someone isn't smitten with you, they must not like women at all - that's your assumption here, isn't it?"
Somberly she said, "Or perhaps you have a lost love in the place you came from. I would also make allowances for that."
This is banter, he noted, with some surprise. I'm being bantered with. "No offense, Kirtida, but I'm not really the confiding type."
"Clearly not. You aren't the only person here under a false name, but you are the most obvious about it." He raised his eyebrows. She held up her hands for peace. "It's not a crime. Many people are here to reinvent themselves. To get away from something."
He snorted. She didn't know anything, after all. He hadn't asked to be reborn, and all he wanted was to go back.
He wouldn't, of course, even if the ship had survived. He wouldn't have returned empty-handed; there was no conceivable universe in which he'd abandon the mission and go straight home. Home, even when he got there, wouldn't be as he remembered it; on the eve of the expedition's launch, Emperor Alfodr had quietly issued a new round of austerity measures. The timing had been calculated - see your Emperor, brave and splendid, risking his very life in parts unknown to save you all. Is it so much to ask that you do your part too? Work harder, eat less, stop having children without permission.
He liked to hope the citizens would have shouldered this burden without complaint - that the ideal Empire of his imagination had manifested in reality, this once. When he was especially in need of cheering he liked to think maybe His Majesty had made it back, revived Yggdrasil without him. It could have happened. Anything was possible - except for him to return to a Cloudy Stronghold that was the same as he'd left it.
Into Kirtida's watchful silence he said, "I'm going to guess you're not the confiding type either."
"We make a matched set, then. Two mysterious foreigners, watching closely over the town... Perhaps we ought to stick together."
"Even knowing nothing about each other?"
"Knowing as little as you like." And she smiled, and rested her arms on the table. The motion did subtle and artistic things to her cleavage; Logre was not affected, but wondered if Whirlwind ought to be, or ought to let on as much.
No, he decided, Whirlwind's taste ran older. Avuncular, that was the angle. In this town of reckless young swashbucklers it wasn't hard to feel old - and he was sure he looked it, even at thirty-six. The Empire birthed strong people, and then it turned them skinny and gray.
He sipped his beer, telling himself, Benevolent uncle. Checkered past. Understandably evasive, but friendly enough.
After consideration he said, "Well, Kirtida, if we're going to get along, there's just one thing I have to know."
"And that is?"
He nodded toward the musician in the corner, who was apparently satisfied with his tuning, strumming a few idle chords. "What the hell do you call that thing?"
She grinned. He'd surprised her - that was good, that was promising. "That is an oud." And she held out her hand across the table. "Let's ask no questions more difficult than that."
And for the most part, the agreement held.
II.
His Grace the Outland Count had ordered a celebration to honor the explorers - even distributed some of his own precious supply of imported tobacco for the occasion. In the Dancing Peacock Kirtida had finally tapped a keg of oak-aged black lager, never before publicly released; she'd been teasing it for weeks, and Whirlwind half-resented and half-admired how well she'd stoked people's interest. His own included. Ten years ago he hadn't known a lager from an ale from a hole in the ground, and now he was actually looking forward to some niche local nonsense like this.
Had been looking forward, anyway. In the fug of pipe smoke it was hard to taste much. That was Tharsis for you; they didn't know the meaning of the word "moderation." It wasn't that resources were plentiful, even here - more that they had faith that someone could always strap on a sword and go get more. And now, with the latest developments at the wharf, there were even more resources to be tapped or dangerous mazes to go die in, depending how you looked at it. So spare no expense, right?
Whirlwind hadn't even made it all the way back to his usual table. From the crowd, friends and acquaintances, townsfolk and adventurers, kept flagging him down for a chat or a toast. But he was ambling in that direction, and maybe in another twenty minutes he'd even get to sit down. He'd given up the notion of ordering food as soon as he'd come in the door; the waitstaff would make an effort for a regular, but that did no good if they couldn't even get to him.
There was a raucous noise behind him, and someone jostled him. Being one of the better-trained and more sober people at this particular party, he managed to keep his footing. Turning to the source of the disturbance, he said, "Easy, there -"
"It's you!" Wharfmaster Ciaran, still reeling a little, planted his hands on Whirlwind's shoulders and broke into a delighted grin. He was still wearing goggles and flying gear - probably had four or five identical sets, probably hadn't worn anything else in years. It used to be Tharsis didn't even have a wharf, and Ciaran had been building machines in his granny's backyard that did nothing but explode. Now Ciaran called over his shoulder to the crowd, "It's Whirlwind, everybody!"
Someone shouted back, "We know!"
Turning back to Whirlwind, Ciaran said, "We can get another hundred meters of altitude now. A hundred meters! Can you imagine! And we'd never have gotten anywhere without you" - he socked Whirlwind in the chest - "you beautiful mysterious stranger!" And kissed him on the mouth.
Whirlwind froze. After a moment someone pulled Ciaran away, apologizing. As he melted back into the crowd Ciaran himself could be heard saying, "Come here, I'll kiss you too, I'll kiss anybody, this is the greatest day of my life!"
There were systems of patronage, back in the Empire. Marriages were tightly regulated to keep the birth rate within a few points of replacement, but - established citizens were free to make arrangements with someone of the same sex, usually offering them protection or advancing their interests. At the time he'd left, Logre had just been aging into the range where he'd make a desirable patron, and certainly his access to the Emperor would have added attraction. He just hadn't thought about it in a long time.
And this had nothing to do with it. This was Tharsis. People could simply get close to each other, for any reason.
His hand shook, a little, as he raised his beer mug to his lips.
"All right there?" said a sympathetic landsknecht.
He smiled crookedly and waved his mug at her. "I was scared I'd spill something when he knocked me over. Any of this goes to waste and there'll be a riot."
He'd been sent in to quell riots in the capital, once. The shortages there had been genuine, not a marketing ploy. People had been too exhausted and hungry to fight him as hard as, perhaps, they had intended to.
He sipped his drink, still tasting nothing, and resumed inching through the crowd, making incremental progress back toward his table.
Although he really ought to get out of the habit of thinking of it as his.
Lately, as the expeditions ranged farther from Tharsis, his thoughts bent more often toward home. Toward the world he would be returning to. Some deep and shameful disloyalty in him found that home paled in comparison - that Logre had been a less enjoyable person to be. But "enjoyment" couldn't factor into his calculus. There was no decision to be made. He had a duty.
Another hundred meters of altitude. It wouldn't take much more than that to make it back. And what did he have to show for his long absence? He had the Titan's Crown, and he'd lost the habit of kneeling to anyone. What would he say to his Emperor?
Threads of music filtered through the crowd noise. Kirtida's old band - when she'd cashed out and bought the bar, she'd offered them a new contract, and they'd stayed. All these years and five of the original seven still performed here. Foreigners carving their own place in Tharsis, becoming a local institution.
Nice work if you could get it. He had hated this music, once.
From behind the bar, too far away for speech, Kirtida pointed at his mug and mouthed, How is it?
He mouthed back To die for, but she frowned, maybe unfamiliar with the idiom.
III.
Even with a crisp new guild registration card tucked into his bag, after everything, Logre got a few weird looks entering the bar. But no one stopped him.
No one stopped him sitting down in Whirlwind's old spot, but - it didn't feel right.
