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While you steel yourself for … whatever may come, your left hand is fumbling in your apron pocket blindly, trying to get some salt on your wand. By the Mercy of the Maker, it will not come to that, but … if your fears about these men are true, then save for your encounter with the Inquisition the other day, you have probably never been closer to being found out as a Witchlet as you are right now. Wanting to be done here, you grab the tankard off of the counter -
“So I'll take it you will be paying in kind for that as well, lassie?”
You want to scream. Partly out of embarrassment, partly because once again, every eye in the room is boring right through you. Struggling to maintain your composure, you walk away from the counter as the gargoyle carver's muse behind you cackles and wheezes. Wanting to be done here as quickly as possible, you glance down at the floor to check for the prints, but you do so too quickly. Your head follows your eyes – which is dangerous, considering that someone might correctly interpret that you are looking at Strange footfalls. You try not to jerk your head back to level, but again you move too fast, and in the end your hood rides up a little. Now concerned about the hood of your cloak entering the envelope of Hide-Eyes, you very deliberately reposition the hood to a safer seat. Even as you do this, your eyes are cast downwards, raking over every square inch of the floor. Currently, you see the two sets of footprints that you followed into the establishment – but if there is in fact a second staircase back there, then it is possible that the men who made these prints are sitting in the room right now, their footfalls simply out of the range of Strange-Staining.
You head into the room. With each sweep of eye and fall of foot, you become more and more anxious. Strange-Staining activation envelope is relatively small – only six feet. And there is nothing that you can do to extend it. There is a bit of white luck in that the six feet is measured from the ball of your right foot, not your center of mass, or Hell, your eyes, otherwise at your height you would have to stoop to see any Strangeness on the ground at all. Still … if it turns out that these prints were made by another practitioner of the Many Mysteries, there many casts, constructs and devices that are intended or otherwise suitable for combat that have effective ranges larger than a few feet.
Of course, the odds that one of these two men is actually a He-Witch is small, and the odds that <span class="mu-i">both</span> are would be vanishingly so … but the chances that men are servants, trained, outfitted and glyphed by a Witch are rather high, considering how they were able to partly remediate their boots. After all, assisting with Remediating and Mitigating Strangeness is one of the most important duties of a Witches Man-of-Arms.
