After talking to the kids in Stella’s place for a while, Will felt drained. He hadn’t talked to people for so long that it quickly became exhausting to keep up even the bare minimum of conversation.
Not only that, but he also had to be extremely careful about everything he said, trying to steer the conversation away from any uncomfortable questions he would be forced to answer.
He had quickly learned from speaking to the old man, whose name was Johnny, that aside from Will, Daniel and the two girls, there wasn’t anyone staying at Stella’s any older than 12. Most of the kids here had lost their parents and had nowhere else to go.
The older girl with the scar was called Teal and from what Will could gather, she was a very quiet person, not even bothering to introduce herself, simply leaving that up to Johnny.
The blonde girl was basically a mini version of Stella. She had a sharp tongue and a tone that commanded attention. Her name was Sarah and although she was curt with Will, she was kind enough to offer to help him get acquainted with the town, telling him to meet her after lunch for a tour.
Needing a breather, Will left the room, saying he wanted to use the bathroom. He walked down the hall, old floorboards creaking with each step. Further along the hall, he heard muffled talking coming up a set of stairs. ‘Those must lead down to the bar,’ he noted.
At the end of the hall, on the right-hand side, the door of a room hung off its hinges, a cold draft blowing through the gap. He peered in and saw the end of a lamppost hanging halfway into the room. Bricks and rubble littered the floor haphazardly along with glass from the broken window.
He could see out into the street through the hole in the wall and saw people wrapped up tightly in what looked like makeshift armour hurry past. Pieces of metal strapped to their chest and vitals over leather armour.
The group was quite large, maybe 10 people, all of them sporting scars and weapons of various shapes and sizes. A big man led the group from the front, he had a bald head with a tightly cropped black beard and sunken eyes. Scars ran down his exposed arms.
Disappearing down the street, Will noted that they were heading towards the exit of the town and suspected they must be a hunting group. Likely off to find some increasingly valuable monster meat.
Seeing how big their group was and how well-prepared they were, Will couldn’t help but wonder how lucky he had been to survive on his way here. It must have been a miracle he hadn’t been eaten, considering how limited his resources were.
Counting his lucky stars, he turned away from the ruined room and walked into the one opposite. The bathroom was a glorified hole in the ground but that didn’t matter, his toilet in the village hadn’t been any better. Although he had heard rumours that Samsari had aqueducts that brought running water to every house. ‘How amazing would that be?’ Will thought in wonder, suddenly renewing his motivation to go there soon.
His real reason for coming here was to take a proper look at himself. He knew he had changed a lot since coming out of the egg… or had he hatched? He wasn’t sure. But he didn’t know what exactly those changes looked like.
Peering into the grimy mirror that hung on a rusty nail in the wall, he almost couldn’t recognise himself. He was uncomfortably pale, almost albino and his eyes were distinctly inhuman.
His right eye was blue and for all intents and purposes, normal. While his left eye, the one he could see ‘life-vision’ out of was green and the pupil was vertical. Leading to a strange disconnect between the two sides of his face.
His curly hair, which had been brown like his mother’s, had become a dark blue-black colour, the same as Latet’s scales. ‘Perhaps I inherited that colour from it, hopefully, its not uncommon so nobody can recognise my relationship with the snake just off my hair.’ He thought glumly.
Aside from that, his build was mostly the same. He was quite tall, just over six feet and very skinny, although now he at least had a bit of muscle, meaning he looked more lean rather than emaciated.
Sadly, he hadn’t turned into some supermodel overnight, although his features did look a little more refined, there was a distinct shiftiness about him. The aspects of the snake had affected him in a way that left him looking slightly serpentine and cold.
He reached up, touching his face, just to make sure it was actually him in the mirror. He looked older now, a lot of the youthful exuberance gone from his strange eyes. The harrowing events of the last two months were directly reflected on his face.
Sighing, Will opened his mouth, examining the two long teeth that looked like fangs. They were blinding ivory white and had silvery patterns carved into them that you wouldn’t notice unless you looked close enough.
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He shook his head, realising that he didn’t understand the changes to his body well enough. Resolving to ask Sarah where Port-Vale’s library was on their tour, he decided he would do some research into snakes as a species.
Once he understood his new racial traits better, he could choose whether to use or suppress them.
It was still early, almost an hour before lunch so Will decided to go and see if Stella needed help downstairs at the bar. He knew the fox was happy enough playing with the kids so he left it be, walking down the steep granite steps that took him beneath the street.
The bar smelt like smoke and old wood. When he walked in through the back, he could taste the bitter smell of alcohol on the air, turning his stomach slightly. The walls were stone and decorated with various oddities that seemed to have no connection and yet fit together perfectly like pieces in a puzzle.
A massive fish with a sword for a mouth hung from the rafters, right beside an extremely small violin and the painting of a man with no head. All around the room, similar strange artefacts were hung, a particularly striking one being the musket up above the door.
Stella stood behind the thick slab of wood that passed for a bar, a glass in one hand and a cloth in the other. She cleaned the glass obsessively without looking up to greet Will.
The room was dark, dimly lit by glowing flowers in lanterns that hung from the ceiling, making it hard for Will to recognise the faces of the patrons in the gloom. In one corner, he saw the silhouette of the tall man who had given him a pair of shoes.
He was wearing them right now; the heavily worn leather was bliss compared to his fur slippers that had offered practically no protection at all.
“Morning Will,” Stella said softly without looking up from the glass she was cleaning.
“Uhm, morning Stella. I was just wondering if there’s anything you needed help with?” Will asked nervously. Still not sure how he should treat the adult he owed so much to.
Stella laughed, a deep chortle that filled the dingy room with warmth. She set down the glass and looked up at Will through the thick rims of her spectacles, “Of course, you can help, there’s always work to be done around here,”
Fidgeting slightly from all the attention he was getting from the bar’s patrons, Will spoke, “What can I do?” He asked immediately, eager to distract himself with a task.
Stella looked him up and down before bending over, rummaging under the bar until she came out with a massive book that she dropped onto the bar’s surface with a thump.
Opening the book at the first page, she pushed it over to Will while explaining what it was, “In here are the jobs that people need doing. Some offer payment and others just need help, choose one that suites you and I’ll tell you where to go,”
Will marvelled at the size of the book, realising just how many people in town must be in dire need of support, “How did you get all these?” He wondered aloud.
A big man at the bar spoke up, “Right after the first impact, folks kept coming here to drink and complain. Stella got sick of hearing their moping and told everyone to write their problems in that book. That way, we could help each other out when we had some free time,”
Another man, small with a wiry frame and hooked nose laughed good-naturedly. “You should have seen her face when Ricky came to whine about his missing roof for the fourth day in a row. She told him to shut up and write it down or go do something about it,”
“Hey! That’s not fair, I wasn’t whining, just… talking about my struggle with the weather. You’d complain too if your house got filled with ash,” Another man shouted angrily from the other side of the bar.
Curiously, Will lifted his head from the book and looked over, “What happened to all the ash anyway?”
“Don’t you remember?” Stella asked.
“No… not really…” Will said dumbly, unable to lie.
“Eh- I suppose he could have slept through it… although I’m not sure how anyone could sleep through that. Anyways, one day, the ash just stopped falling and by this point, it was a couple of feet deep at least. Everyone was hiding underground in cellars to get away from the fumes when someone noticed the ash started to go down.” The wiry man at the bar said.
“Go down?” Will echoed.
“Aye, down. Like it was being absorbed by the ground or something. It just kept decreasing until a couple of hours later it was all gone. Right after that, the air started to get fresher, and plants began growing again.” The wiry man finished.
“Wow, I had wondered where it went,” Will said truthfully. Not mentioning that he had never even seen the ash to begin with, only heard about it from the snake.
“Aye, it's strange, but perhaps a blessing in disguise. Dr Martin told me that apparently, ash makes really good fertilizer for plants and stuff. It makes things grow quickly and bigger than you can imagine. All I’m saying is that we might have that black snow to thank for all these wonderful new plants growing in the fields,” the wiry man finished.
Quickly, the bar devolved into a debate about whether or not the falling ash had been a good thing or a bad thing, but Will turned his attention to the book. Flipping through the pages quickly, he noticed a trend.
Most of the jobs written there were construction-focused. Rebuilding collapsed walls, reinforcing damaged roofs and clearing drains clogged and filled with rubble. The next biggest job type was, strangely enough, babysitting.
Plenty of parents wanted to go out and hunt for monster meat but couldn’t leave their kids at home on their own. According to Stella, she accepted most of those jobs and those kids spent their time upstairs with Johnny and the orphans.
Aside from that, there were requests to dig through rubble in order to find lost family heirlooms and one written in red ink reading: Deliver Message to Samsari – Speak to Dr Martin for more details.
Leafing through the book, Will picked a job that aligned with his current goal. Help clear the library of rubble. The reward was simply listed as Access to vital information about the nature of our changing world. Something that was incredibly tempting to Will, even if he doubted the information would be accurate.
Writing his name beside that request, he went upstairs to have lunch, deciding to set out for the library right after.