(Strive 10:6)

A flash of familiar purple caught my eye, and I turned to see a woman striding quickly toward the exit. The bracelet on her wrist was deep amethyst, the same color that had brought me back from near-death by the forest.

The man on stage continued to narrate, and I realized that while I’d been watching, the mezzanine had become packed tight with people, standing so quietly I hadn’t noticed when they’d joined us. I tried to push past them in the direction the woman had gone, and they seemed to wake as if from a trance, protesting half-heartedly.

“Where are we going?” El asked from my shoulder.

“I want to thank her,” I said. “I think she was the one who saved my life.”

“You do that. I’m gonna stay here.”

“Suit yourself.”

El leaped onto a high shelf where she curled up, but she didn’t close her eyes, instead continuing to watch the singer spin his story. I shook cobwebs from my head and took the stairs down, exiting the building.

The woman with the purple ring was nowhere to be seen. Only a few folks lingered in the plaza, and most seemed on their way somewhere else. The burbling fountain in the center was the loudest sound in the air. No birds called, and although it felt like a summer evening, no cicadas chirped either.

“You look lost,” said a voice next to me.

I spun to see a gray-haired man sitting behind a table strewn with random paraphernalia. His face held a bored expression as he shuffled a deck of cards with one hand. A crystal ball, a kettle of tea, and a mahjong set rested in front of him on a checkered tablecloth. A fortune teller, then.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Did you see a woman in a purple ring come this way?”

“Oh yeah.” He riffled the cards again. “Looked like she was in quite a hurry.”

“I’m looking for her—” I cut myself off as I realized I sounded like a stalker. “She saved me from a bad situation,” I finished lamely.

“Mm…” The man leaned back and squinted at me. “What do you say we play a little game first?”

“What?”

The man shrugged toward the building I’d emerged from, where the sound of music continued. “Show’s not over for another good half hour, and I’m getting a tad lonely out here. Why not help me warm up my act?”

I looked around the empty plaza one more time. To be honest, it wasn’t like I needed to chase the healer down right this moment. “This isn’t a scam, is it?”

“No, sir, not at all.” He held up his stubby hands, and a pale blue ring glinted in the late afternoon light. “Just something I do for fun. But if the results please you, a donation wouldn’t go amiss either.”

“Alright,” I sighed. “Go ahead.”

The man grinned and gestured at his instruments. “What type of reading should we do for you? Romance? Family? Business?” He twirled a hand around the crystal ball theatrically. “No, all of that seems too mundane for a man like Xavier Shaw.”

My attention, which had been wandering, was pulled back. “How did you know my name?”

His kada gleamed again, and I saw that his left eye also shone with a pale blue hue. “I told you this wasn’t a scam. Yes, this is real fortune-telling, truer than true. Here’s another party trick: I happen to know that you have a peculiar weapon stowed in your kada.”

I folded my arms. “You could probably say that about anyone here.”

“Ah, you’d be surprised,” said the man. “But yours is unchristened, and thus an inferior tool. May I see it?”

Only politeness prevented my eyes from rolling out of their sockets. Reluctantly, I retrieved the pellet gun from my inventory with a gesture, but the man shook his head at once.

“No, no. Not that. The other, the hotelier’s gift.”

“This?” I said doubtfully, pulling the plunger out from my inventory.

His eyes gleamed at it, the udjat seeming to glow brighter than ever, reflecting in the plunger’s brass haft. “Yes, this is the one. This is it.” He held it carefully, not like a person holding something dirty, but as a cherished and priceless artifact. “You’ve wielded it well, and because of that it is ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“A name, a name! For names hold power, and that which we call a rose, by any other name… might smell like feet!” He let out a witch-like cackle—for effect, I hoped. “Would you allow me the honor?”

“The honor of naming my plunger?” Self-consciously, I looked around, wondering if I was being punked, but the square was deserted. “Um, sure, I guess.”

The fortune teller’s fingers twitched and his udjat-eye burned blue, giving him an unhinged look as he intoned:

“Usage begets familiarity,

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Familiarity begets understanding,

Understanding begets naming,

A name begets power.”

As he spoke the last word, the plunger turned bright in his hand and trembled, and at once he set it down on the table as if it were a snake that would bite him. An oily coating seemed to peel off of it, leaving it somehow more refined than before.

“What did you do?” I asked in a low voice.

“Examine it,” he said, and I knew he didn’t mean with the naked eye. As I shifted my fingers, the plunger’s new description burned in my udjat:

Purgator.

This is a Named Item. It was originally a Fancy Plunger.

Note: Naming granted this item the ability to remove status effects. This is an active ability. The activation command is P-U-R-G-E.

“Purgator,” he pronounced, taking a swig out of a brown paper bag. “That which purges, or that which cleanses. Not bad, eh?”

I passed the plunger to my left hand and signed with my right. As the characters scrolled around my wrist, a mote of violet light traveled through the air from my kada to the plunger and hovered, revolving around it in a slow orbit.

“How does this work?” I asked, swinging it back and forth, the light following lazily.

“Same way you use a regular plunger,” said the fortune teller. “Stick ‘em with the business end.”

It didn’t seem the most sanitary, but I was thrilled at this unexpected gain of a new ability. Not only that, the plunger had acquired a new balance in my hand. As I gave it a few experimental swings, it felt like an extension of my arm. “I don’t know what to say,” I told the man. A second ago, I’d thought he was a complete nutjob, and honestly, I still had my doubts.

“Say nothing, then.” He rubbed his fingers together meaningfully.

I flipped a few coins to him, although in truth I had no idea how much was appropriate. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“No sweat,” he replied, placing two of the coins carefully back in my palm. “Now if you’ll excuse me, it looks like the show’s just about over. Gotta set up for the next customer. Whew! I thought he’d never stop yowling in there.”

I stowed the plunger with a flash of my fingers, as theater-goers began to stream out of the building’s doorway. “People are gonna laugh if I run around calling this thing Purgator, no?”

“Hey, man.” The fortune teller held his hands up defensively. “I’m not telling you what to call it. I’m just telling you what it’s called. You can refer to it as ‘Sucky McSuckface’ for all I care.”

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Night fell.

The city’s strange beacon, like an enormous Lux spell, filtered down through awnings and walkways, throwing strange patterns across the paving. Most of the windows were darkened, although one in every few flickered with dim candlelight and the drifting murmur of conversation.

El and I were attempting to follow the directions we’d been given to an inn located in what was apparently called the Public Quarter. Though Master Shaw had made the city sound compact, outside of the main drags, the alleys seemed to twist and double back on themselves without rhyme or reason, and we soon became hopelessly lost.

“This is definitely not the right way,” I said. “We’ve passed that sign with the fish swimming in beer for the fifth time now.”

The raccoon yawned from my shoulder. “When I used to get lost, I’d climb up to a high place to get my bearings.”

“Hmm…” I looked up at a stairway that curved along the inside of the city wall like a tendril of ivy. “That might not be a terrible idea.”

El snoozed as I trudged up the steps, and soon I became conscious of a sound like wind. It wasn’t the wind itself, although that too was picking up the higher I climbed, and I wrapped my hospital gown tighter around myself at the chill.

This was music, like the wind had gained a voice and sang its own breathy song in the night. I wondered if it was some trick of the gaps in the wall that turned the city into something like a massive sound sculpture, but the sounds I heard had the rising and falling arcs of a man-made composition.

I finally rounded a bend onto a lookout post, where I saw a woman playing an ancient-looking flute, sitting on a ledge facing away from me and the city, toward the dark forest. The city’s bright beacon lit the back of her blue robes, her waves of black hair, and her bracelet which, I noticed with a jolt, shone a deep amethyst. Her song was floating and melancholic, and its last note lingered like an unanswered question as she set the flute down.

“So,” the woman said without turning around, “is Death still out to get you?”

“I’m surprised you remember me saying that,” I said after a moment. “To be honest, my head was pretty messed up at that point.”

“With that much blood loss, it’s no wonder. It looked like you’d been sentenced to death by a thousand cuts. Still, what you said struck me as a kind of tautology. Sooner or later, Death—King Yanluo—comes for us all.”

“I wasn’t really being figurative,” I said. “He showed up on the sixth floor, knocking on the outside of the tower, and the First Sender had to bail us out.”

“Is that so?” She finally turned to look at me. Although she wasn’t using a technique, the purple of her wrist ring reflected slightly in her left eye. She was pale and slender, younger than I expected from her voice and posture. Her robes were unadorned but draped in a way that reminded me of flowing water. She held the flute loosely with graceful fingers, and there was a sadness in her face that matched the sound of her song. “I hope you haven’t brought him with you to Shinar.”

“Shinar?” I asked.

“This city,” she said, waving a sleeve behind me. “It means ‘ten-place’ in my language. Whoever chose the name wasn’t blessed with creativity, I guess.”

“Ah,” I said, and then because I couldn’t think of how to respond, “I’m Xavier, by the way.”

“I know.” She inclined her head. “Selene.”

After an awkward pause, I noticed that she was staring at El’s prone form draped over my shoulder. “Sleeping beauty over here’s El Bandito the raccoon.”

“Raccoon,” she said, as if the word were foreign to her.

“What was that song you were playing? It’s beautiful.”

“It’s only one half of a duet,” she said, almost apologetically, and lifted the wind-flute to blow a few hollow notes. “There’s supposed to be a harmony part.”

“Could you teach it to me?” I said. “I’ve got something of a music background myself.”

It was the wrong thing to say. I cursed my eagerness as she gave me a sharp look that told me I'd overstepped.

“No,” she said shortly, and swept past me down the stairs.

I stood there foolishly for a moment, looking back at the dimming lights of a city that’d mostly gone to sleep. Even the hovering beacon seemed a bit diminished, as if it shared our fatigue. A motion on my shoulder reminded me I wasn’t alone.

“Ouch,” said El, propping an eye open. “I thought musicians were supposed to get all the babes.”

“C’mon,” I sighed. “I think I see the place we’re supposed to stay for the night.”