Anastacia looked around for anything interesting she might want to take a look at while Gilbert and Emilia were planning how they would regroup in the morning. She had already seen a couple of shops selling some neat trinkets along the way from the gate but wanted to look around a bit more before filling their wagon with useless tat.
“Anything you want to do?” She asked and turned to the disguised simulacrum.
King seemed preoccupied by something, his gaze was fixed to something down the road and he didn’t react to Anastacia’s question.
A figure, hidden by a dark green cloak stood by one of the alleys leading away from the main road they had been walking along from the gates. Anastacia couldn’t see their face, but nothing about them seemed out of the ordinary at a glance. It could have well just been just someone trying to keep a low profile or avoid the sun. But the necromancer quickly realized something was off; she was unable to detect the person in any way. That would mean they weren’t made of flesh and blood, which was slightly odd to say the least and piqued her curiosity.
Anastacia tugged on the rope tied to her waist and made King follow her through the crowd, but before they had the chance to get anywhere near the figure, it darted down the alley. The pair dashed after it but the rope between them, along with the junk left all over the alley made running at full speed a challenge, and every time the alley made a turn, the mysterious figure was further away from them, almost like the crates and empty bottles littering the alleys didn’t bother it in the slightest.
The network of alleyways and smaller streets was not something a complete stranger to the city could navigate, and only after a few minutes of running, Anastacia and King were beyond lost – or at least would have been, had they paid any attention to that instead of blindly running after the stranger.
Finally, after a lengthy pursuit, the cloaked figure appeared to make a mistake and made a turn into a pathway that turned out to be a dead end. By then, Anastacia was extremely out of breath and had to lean on a wall while confronting the stranger, who remained facing away from them.
“You didn’t have to run.” Anastacia huffed and gasped for air. “I just wanted to see if you were a ghost or something cool like that.”
The figure didn’t answer to turn to face them, instead it looked up at the sliver of sky that was visible between the tall buildings.
“Umm… Hello? I really didn’t mean to scare you or anything.” The necromancer continued and took a few steps forwards.
Suddenly, the figure launched itself upwards and began running along the wall in front of it, effortlessly scaling at least ten meters of stone wall with nothing to use as a foothold. At the top it hopped on the roof and stopped briefly to glance at its pursuers before dashing away across the rooftops.
Anastacia swore she saw its glowing light blue eyes in that brief moment. “See? It has to be a ghost, people can’t run up walls.” She said and ran her hand along stones, trying to find anything she could grab on to and start climbing.
King seemed to still be full of determination to catch the stranger and began to climb by scraping off the mortar and making his own steps towards the roof. About halfway up, the slack in the rope between them ran out and Anastacia was uncomfortably dangled from her waist for the rest of the way up.
“I feel like being on people’s roofs might be illegal, so lets just look for the ghost quickly and get down before anyone sees us.” Anastacia said while King pulled her up.
The slow climb had left them even further behind, and the escaping stranger was already hundreds of meters away and showed no signs of slowing down. Anastacia and king tried their best to catch up but couldn’t jump nearly as far their ghost and had to look for longer routes with smaller gaps between buildings. While Anastacia had no problems running on the red tiles, each of King’s steps caused some considerable property damage for the unfortunate people that happened to live on the route they took. Sadly, their luck was bound to run out eventually, and they came across a five-meter-wide gap between two buildings that seemed impossible to circumvent.
Anastacia peeked over the edge and quickly took a step back. “Yeah, this isn’t happening. Unless you can sprout wings somehow, I think we could get to that area just by following the main street over there and find it again – or we could just give up now?” She suggested.
King took one last glance at the direction the supposed ghost was fleeing towards, grabbed the necromancer under his arm and jumped off the roof. He made some effort to slow the fall by dragging his hand along the wall, but the landing was still very uncomfortable for Anastacia. After making sure she was okay, the simulacrum sprinted towards the main street, dragging the exhausted necromancer along again. Anastacia made him slow down slightly to avoid any unwanted attention but ended up bumping into a guard accidentally. Not wishing to become a fugitive in any more cities than needed, Anastacia stopped when the guard yelled after them.
The guard took a long hard look at the two, clearly trying to figure out what was going on with them. “What’s the rush, didn’t your parents teach you to not run with sharp things?” He asked and pointed at Anastacia’s spear bundle.
“No, they did not. I apologize, but we have a ghost to catch so we really need to go.” Anastacia answered and kept peering at the rooftops in the distance.
The guard sighed. “A ghost? Well the guard hasn’t gotten a report on anything like that, so do tell us if you catch it, but I’ll let you off if you promise to be careful with your spears and antlers.” He said and waved them off.
“Thank you very much, I will forever remember you fondly for this.” The necromancer bowed quickly and ran off exactly as fast as they had been running before, if not faster.
While rushing through the streets, they caught a glimpse of the ghost every now and then and could follow it without too much trouble, but in their haste, they failed to notice the gradually deteriorating condition of the buildings around them. They had unknowingly entered the rougher part of Merfall and only noticed it after almost tripping over a sleeping drunkard.
The tall and grand buildings had changed into wooden shacks that varied between looking like they were about to collapse and being held together by assorted pieces of planks that had presumably been taken from the construction site around the city’s new wall or from other shacks that were already far too run-down to use as housing. The paved road had also turned into a slippery, muddy mess full of broken glass and other trash. The stench was far, far worse than in the upper city as well, and Anastacia began to wonder if the mud on the road was actually mud or something much more disgusting. The people there were uncouth and largely in need of a good bath, for some reason they also seemed far more interested in the pair of strangers dashing past them than the people of the upper city.
Anastacia caught a glimpse of the ghost’s green cloak on the roof and saw it finally jump down to the ground, just around the corner from where they were. At last they had a decent chance to catch up – or would have, had Anastacia not bumped into some particularly slimy looking fellows that suddenly appeared from one of the alleys. For a second, they seemed like they would make a scene, but wisely decided against it after seeing the supposed trash golem on the other end of the rope. Unfortunately, the ghost was nowhere to be seen when they got to the spot it had jumped down from.
“Damn it!” Anastacia yelled and looked around for any clues about where the ghost might have gone. There were no witnesses and the muddy street was far too trampled for any kind of tracking, assuming their ghost was the kind that left tracks in the first place. From the corner of her eye, she suddenly spotted the door of a nearby building slowly closing. “There!” She yelled, dashed over, flung open the door and only then realized how totally inappropriate and rude it was.
The room behind the door was lit only by a lantern above a large round table. Around the table were five chairs with four of them already occupied by some understandably surprised gamblers that had been in the middle of a game of cards. In the shadows behind them, were two more people that had immediately drawn their daggers and slowly approached the door.
“Remember, no fighting.” Anastacia whispered to King, who was already about to push the necromancer aside to horribly maul the men pointing their weapons at her.
The simulacrum obeyed but still shielded her with his arm.
A sharp whistling sound defused what was quickly starting to look like a difficult situation, and the bodyguards reluctantly sheathed their daggers before moving back into the shadows.
“That’s enough! They’re clearly not from the guard.” An owlfolk commanded from the table, placed down her cards and got up. She was wearing a black gown, had a pelt of some animal on her shoulders and her uncomfortably large eyes reminded Anastacia of Holly, the night waitress working at Rosie’s inn. However, while one could quickly see that there wasn’t much going on behind the waitress’s vacant stare, the unsettling smile on the woman’s face was truly terrifying and certainly was not helped by her pupils widening as she flirtatiously walked towards the adventurers in the dimly lit room. “What do we have here? You two have strayed far from the wastes of Mournvalley and the depths of a machine fortress, haven’t you? Do come in, it would be rude of you to not join our game after interrupting us like this.” She said and gestured towards the table.
“O… Okay.” Anastacia stuttered, stepped inside without thinking and pulled King with her.
The woman took a quick look outside and closed the door. “What a fascinating couple! You, dear child, should have been snuffed out a long ago, but here you are! It is truly rare to see something so bright and brilliant emerging from so deep in the macabre darkness.” She laughed and brought her face far too close to Anastacia’s before turning to the simulacrum. “And you! I don’t even know where to begin. I admire your self-control, but cast aside the clockwork shackles for once and live a little!” She winked and nudged King with her elbow.
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“How do you know all this? Who are you?” Anastacia asked, worried that their cover had been blown.
Suddenly the owlfolk slid off the shoulder straps of her gown and revealed a large moth-shaped patch of black on her chest among the otherwise pure white feathers. “Estreya, and as the sole devotee of Ciel, I know what you do in the dark of the night.” She laughed.
Anastacia stared at the moth pattern for a bit before turning to King and whispering. “Any idea why she whipped her tits out? Maybe we should just leave, I don’t think these are the kind of people we’re supposed to talk to…”
“Oh come on now! You’re adventurers after all, bet your pockets are brimming with excess gold. What’s the harm in a little friendly game of cards?” Estreya sighed and escorted the necromancer towards the table in the middle of the room.
The three men that had been playing cards with the devotee greeted Anastacia as she sat down on the last vacant chair.
“The lads here are… entrepreneurs, much like me. We come here to play for a while and talk about the happenings in the city. Sadly, the last member of our little cabal couldn’t show up today, but now that you’re here, we’ve got the usual number of players!” Estreya explained and moved some chips over to Anastacia.
A particularly grumpy looking elf that sat directly opposite of Anastacia lit his pipe and glared at her. “The name’s Ego, I’m in charge of… pest control here in the lower city.” He introduced himself gruffly while spinning a dagger in his fingers.
The man left of him belonged to some race Anastacia didn’t know, his skin was covered in dark green scales and from his red hair grew two sharp horns. “Hello there, you can call me Geoff, I’m technically a pharmacist for the folks around here.” He said and bowed slightly.
“Basil, I steal shit.” The young redheaded lad on the other side of Ego blurted out and caused an audible sigh from the other three. “I mean, I acquire difficult to find items for people interested in them, for a fee.” He corrected himself after someone kicked him under the table.
Anastacia looked around awkwardly as her new ‘friends’ stared at her. “Oh, is it my turn? I’m Anastacia and that’s King, we’re adventurers and we were just trying to chase a-“
“That’s enough of that, lets start the game!” Estreya interrupted her. “The rules are simple and the easiest way to learn them is by playing. Each chip is worth a bit of money to make things interesting and when you run out, you pay up to the winner.”
“How much is a bit?” Anastacia asked and inspected one of the surprisingly well-crafted wooden chips given to her. It had ‘The Den’ written on it on both sides and felt a bit heavy for such a small wooden item.
The devotee laughed heartily. “You don’t need to worry about that, you adventurers are swimming in gold compared to us regular folk. Even if you lose, it probably wont even make a dent on what you’ll make from whatever you came to Merfall for. Out of curiosity, what was it?” She prattled on while shuffling a deck of cards.
“We rescued this ungrateful brat from some bandits and brought him back here.” The necromancer said, slowly getting caught up in the conversation and forgetting what they were doing earlier.
“The Leinwand kid? Nasty piece of work that was. You shouldn’t ransom kids like that, even bandits should have that much pride.” Geoff grunted and shook his head. “Sometimes I think the whole world is going to shit, common courtesy is a thing of the past.”
“Mmm.” Ego nodded and took out five bottles from a satchel bag hanging from his chair. “Wife keeps making cherry juice, figured I’d bring some along since Estreya brought biscuits last time.” He mumbled and handed them out to everyone.
Geoff opened his and sniffed it. “Nice! I’ve got a bit of something to spike it with, if anyone wants some. We’re all off work for the day, right?” He said and poured a bit of something into the bottle from a flask before letting it be handed around the table.
Basil, who was the last to pour some in his drink, offered it to Anastacia but the necromancer shook her head. “I’m not allowed alcohol, unless I’m going evil.”
“Right… Anyway, we’ll go as usual, one chip at the start of the game and then up to two per raise, and we’ll increase it at some point if the game drags on.” The devotee explained, tossed one of her chips in the middle of the table and started to deal out the cards. “There are four kingdoms: yellow, green, blue and purple. Each of them mostly beats one before them and yellow beats purple, the unaffiliated ones, like green and purple are equal, and the winner is based on the rank of the card alone, same when two cards of the same color are played. The ranks are as follows: Peasant, Assassin, Concubine, Merchant, Traveler, Squire, Messenger, Alchemist, Blacksmith, Mage, Knight, Lord, Herald, Queen and lastly The King. Each of them beats all the ones before them, but The Queen is beaten by The Peasant and The Assassin of either equal or superior color, and The King is beaten by those two and The Concubine. The cards have numbers on them to make remembering the order easier. The other exception is that to beat The Herald, The Queen or The King with just the color of the kingdom, you need to use The Alchemist or higher, but you can for example beat The Green Lord with The Blue Merchant and so forth. There are also two special cards in the deck as well: the first one is The Mercy, which allows you to leave the round at that point without having to pay any more chips; and the other one is The Inquisitor, which lets you select any of your opponents and remove them from the round, but they still need to pay a single chip whenever anyone bets more. However, when there are only two players left in the round, The Inquisitor turns into The Usurper, which has the same abilities as The Concubine of whichever color would give you the advantage against the card your opponent plays or has played. Meaning that it automatically beats anything up to and including The Lord and then The King by its rank, but it can be beaten by The Herald and The Queen. If The Mercy and The Inquisitor are played at the same time, the player that used The Mercy can still be removed and their card made useless. Did you get all that?”
“Absolutely none of it.” Anastacia admitted.
“Splendid, you’ll pick it up as we play. Anyway, in the beginning everyone gets seven cards, and the dealer has to play the first card. Going left from the dealer, the other players play one card from their hand, which either beats the dealer’s card or not. The players that didn’t beat the dealer’s card, will have a single randomly selected card of theirs discarded by the first player that did, or the undefeated dealer. Then whoever placed the first card increases their bet by zero to two chips based on how they think they’ll fare going forwards, and again going left, the other players do the same, after everyone has chosen how much to bet, the highest bet will be matched by everyone. Then the player to the left of the one that played the first card earlier will place a new card on the table and everyone will try to beat it. The game continues until only one person has cards left in their hand and they get to take the chips everyone bet during the round. If multiple people used their last card at the end of the game, the pot is divided between the players that managed to beat the first card, or whoever placed the card that remained undefeated.” Estreya continued and picked up the seven cards she had dealt for herself, followed by the others doing the same.
Anastacia still didn’t quite understand the game but figured that a game of cards never hurt anyone, and despite seeming sketchy at first, the other players didn’t seem like a threat to her. She looked at her cards and tried to remember the rules with limited success. The hand dealt to her was: The Blue Queen, The Yellow Alchemist, The Yellow Peasant, The Yellow Mage, The Heralds from both green and purple and The Inquisitor. Instead of trying to figure out the actual value of her cards, she was fascinated by the nifty artwork on them. The cards of the same color seemed to have a theme between them: the yellow characters were surrounded by golden treasures, the green ones by nature, the blue ones by ships and other maritime things, and the purple ones by magical orbs and elements. However, by far the most interesting one was The Inquisitor, in which the character depicted had their face hidden by the hood of their red robes and was sitting on a pile of corpses that were holding items from the four colored themes.
“These cards are outdated.” Anastacia pointed out. “The red inquisitors are gone.”
“Huh. I suppose you’re right, I haven’t thought about it like that. You’re not supposed to tell everyone what you have though.” Estreya said and placed down a card with the kings of all four colors kneeling down to a white robed character depicted on it, while the other three players snickered quietly. “The Mercy, I’m out.”
“Oh, damn it! Wait, what happens if you start with that one?” The necromancer asked.
The devotee got up from her chair, moved behind Anastacia and leaned over her shoulder. “The next player starts instead, you that is.” She said and played Anastacia’s alchemist for her before King shoved her aside.
With Estreya’s aid, Anastacia actually managed to win the first round and claimed the chips that had been piled in the middle of the table. From there the game continued without her getting extra help outside of King preventing her from doing a few obvious mistakes. They chatted about current events around the city and asked Anastacia about her previous quests and the rope between her and King while the chips slowly changed hands. Eventually, the first one to drop out was Basil, and soon after that Ego had to submit. From the remaining three, Anastacia was actually in the lead, with Estreya as the close second and Geoff almost out of chips.
“Anyone else feel a bit chilly?” Basil asked and rubbed his hands together for warmth.
“Now that you mention it, yes. That’s a bit odd.” Geoff shrugged and tossed his last two chips into the prize pot.
“Sorry, guys, that’s probably me. I tried chilling my juice and may have gone a bit overboard.“ Anastacia admitted awkwardly and turned her bottle upside down to show that its contents had frozen solid.
Geoff laughed. “I could use a lass like you, plenty of my… products need to kept cold.”
The ‘pharmacist’ fell out of the game after that round, leaving only Anastacia and Estreya with roughly even piles of chips.
“Well, we’ve already been at this for at least an hour, and I’m sure you guys have places to be in, so how about we both go all in and the winner of this round gets everything?” The devotee suggested and leaned towards Anastacia to distract her from the chip she slid under Basil’s hand.
Anastacia laughed confidently. “Sure, I’ll take your money too.”
“That’s the spirit! Basil, deal the cards.” Estreya declared and pushed her chip pile over towards the middle of the table.
Unsurprisingly, for anyone but Anastacia at least, the final round ended in Estreya’s near flawless victory.
“Awwww, you were so close even though it was your first game! Now pay up, I know I can get the money from these goofs later, but you might be leaving the city today for all I know, so I’m going to need it right here and now.” The devotee laughed and flicked a chip into the air. “We usually use te- a hundred gold per chip and forty chips per player. I’m sure that’s just chump change for a big shot adventurer such as yourself.”
Anastacia tried to hide her sniffling, she had gotten her hopes up far too much and was now more than slightly bummed out by the crushing defeat. “Fine! I have at least that much in my… my… Where’s my money?!” She yelled, jumped up from her chair and started checking her pockets and backpack frantically.
“Oh dear… Do you not have the money after all? What ever shall we do now?” The devotee said, with absolutely no surprise in her voice. “Oh I know! Come work for me for a bit. It’ll only take you a couple of weeks to cover your debt. I promise it’ll be fun!” She suggested and put her hand on the necromancer’s shoulder.
“But… My friends are in town and have the money! I’ll just get them, and you’ll get what I owe.” Anastacia said on the brink of tears.
Estreya pressed the necromancer’s face against her chest and hugged her a bit too tightly. “Can’t risk you running away on your debt, now can I? Your friends will come for you sooner or later, but until then, you work for me.” She said, sounding very slightly threatening. “Now come on, I have a business to run too!” The devotee tried grabbing the rope to lead Anastacia from it but was immediately stopped by King grabbing her by the throat and squeezing not so lightly. “Okay, okay, okay… No touching the rope, but choking costs extra, so mind your hands.”
Geoff, Basil and Ego with his two bodyguards said their goodbyes and swiftly left the scene as the devotee led the adventurers to her ‘business’.
Anastacia looked at the sign above its entrance and glanced at her surroundings. “They’re going to be so mad this time…” She muttered and turned to King. “Remember, no fighting. Gil and Emilia will find us soon enough so we can leave.”