>>5795065You only had one more stop to make before your departure, and one more man to talk to: Harrison Murray.
“Who?” Pearce had asked, confused.
“From the party last year,” you reminded him.
“Surprised you aren’t looking for your little blonde friend, then…” Pearce mused.
“Ha!” Rudolfo had laughed. “A chip off the old block, ey wot? Though the ELFIN blonde—almost white, almost gold—now THAT is the finest hair in all the realms. Just like—”
“Yes,” you said through gritted teeth, “I have met mother. I know who you mean. And Pearce?”
“Hm?”
“Shut up.”
“You’re the one who brought me,” he said with a shrug.
Harrison Murray was not to be a traveling company ion—you hardly knew the man, after all, and this was a dangerous and sensitive matter you were embarking upon. However, he had something you wanted—something you might well NEED, as a meditative aid or as a bargaining chip: shirin, the off-white powder which had brought you to this point with its uncanny and eerie revelations.
Tracking Murray down was easy, after all your experience scouring school and municipal records for far older and more obscure records. If the tall, lean man was surprised to see you at his door, he still quickly recognized you—the Tower’s only half-elf student at present—and was quick to acquiesce to allow you and your party entrance into his home when you explained what you were about.
“It’s good, right?” he’d said, rummaging about in a cupboard for a small box. “Once you get used to studying with it, it starts to get hard to study without it!”
You’d been noncommittal, but you weren’t oblivious to the rather concerned look Pearce gave you. It wasn’t like THAT though, obviously. You didn’t plan to take the mind-expanding invigorant willy-nilly, as if this was some sort of psychoactive pleasure-cruise. You planned to use the shirn sparingly, if at all, when appropriate, or perhaps to trade it!
(But you did feel a certain thrill when he produced his envelope of the stuff)
“This should be enough for three ‘study sessions’,” Murray said, but pulled the envelope away when you snatched for it. “But it doesn’t come EASY, fellow traveler! The cat-man I got this from is only in town once a year, twice if I’m lucky, and it costs COIN.”
You had coin, of course. JUST ENOUGH coin, it seemed… Or perhaps the price was set at ‘whatever the half-elf can afford’? You didn’t’ haggle much.
>You now have four uses of green shirin 