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TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:pBl/nujl Sat 12 Oct 2024 07:17:43 No.6121286 View View Report

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Yet that is assuming you are at the end. Plainly, at some point - sooner than you would like, no doubt - Nasturtium will try to call upon you here. If you invoke "Wilhelmina's" father again, you might be able to convince him against it, especially if you were to promise to call upon him instead. That promise would simply have to be a lie, but if you were to make it for the day after Titheday, the day after you intend to leave, then you would be in the clear - of him, at least. Weighing against this little gambit is the suspect nature of such a request - and a fear that you might have drawn all you can from the well of "Wilhelmina's" father. Perhaps ... perhaps if you didn't make him promise anything, but you just were to say that you'd call on him two - no, fraying Hell, tomorrow now - it might be enough to get him to leave you well enough alone until then. It wouldn't be as sure of a thing as it would to pull another promise from the man, but you couldn't see it being harder to swing. Easiest of all would be to just say nothing and hope for the best; though going that route would bear neither promises nor reasons to not call upon this house and potentially slit the ankles and pin the feet of everything you had put in place here.

Well ... as it stands, you parted with the truth. And after all of the lying you have done - to him and others - that means quite a deal to you. Does it mean so much to you that you are going to deprive yourself of some very advantageous pieces of whole-cloth? You might be overstating their value, or perhaps even the risk you face here. Considering the alleged infirmity of "Wilhelmina's" father, Nasturtium might assume that he has days to check up on the "two" of you. Considering how vaguely you have discussed his sickness, he might ultimately just decide to stay away on account of the Uncleanliness of it all. And there is the point that by making yourself expected at some point when you know you aren't going to be taking callers means that you are effectively guaranteeing that you will be missed and sought out at some point hence. Just like those most venerable of stories, where by fighting against something you end up bringing about or hastening whatever you were fighting against.

You parted with the truth. That ... that is important to you, and there is enough besides to commend holding your tongue that you are wiling to so. You watch the two men retreat out of the house, stifling a ragged sigh as Nasturtium's porter opens the door for him. With them gone, the easy - or rather, easier - part is done. Now though, you must contend with whoever is keeping the house at this hour. And obviously, you cannot explain away your actions with an ill father. You will need to come up with something that justifies your presence - your very singular, very inappropriate presence - at this unwholesome hour. .

TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:vmXyofjz Tue 12 Mar 2024 08:30:40 No.5949682 View View Report

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You sit and stare down, still squirming on the bench, still looming over the plate, still being growsed and growled at by your stomach, running the exchange between the Guards through your head over and over again. It is a surety that the Belly was mentioned. It is a surety that something referred to as the leeward was spoken of. And it is a surety that one of the Guards ask about going to their barracks. Beyond that, the only surety is that there was no - Maker's Mercy, that's it! That was the end of the conversation! If the Guard had nodded 'no' to his fellow, then he would have had to say where they were actually going! He would have, or the other Guard would have asked him. But that was the end of it. He must have nodded 'yes'. They were talking openly and causally, there would be no reason for them to make like clams for long enough to get out of earshot. So they aren't coming back! Or ... well, perhaps they are eventually - but no, this isn't just a Clerking house, this is an Impound Station. There are salable good here - the Port Authority isn't going to leave this place unguarded any longer than it absolutely has to. New Guards, fresh Guards must be coming! For a surety!

With that, you descend on the plate. The food - cold as it may be - is exceptional! The sauce is ... you don't even know how to describe it, you have never had anything quite like it. The beef - Mercy, when was the last time you had beef - is tender. The greens are cooked perfectly, and if drowned grain tastes this good cold, you can only imagine how tasty it must be when served hot - as you believe it is supposed to be. There has to be a kitchen in this house, somewhere. That ... hmm. That is not a happy thought. After all of the time you have spent in this house, there is still much of it you haven't seen; why, there is an entire wing of the first floor that you haven't even found a way into yet. You haven't found a second 'soft' egress out of the house, one that doesn't require performing an Ice-Lockpick - though to be fair, you can make an educated guess as to where one might be. But most damning is that you have yet to find a second way into the cordoned off archive or repository - and you have yet to find a Family Patent. Thinking of your continued lack of progress - and worse, your lack of focus - layered on top of the small but serious risk that you are taking by eating ... it isn't enough to turn the food to ash in your mouth, but it certainly does dull the taste.

Impulsively, you reach for the nearest of the two cups - then you stop yourself. All things considered, you are not particularly thirsty at the moment, and it might be that this wine is worth more to you as working material for a cast of Cold-Touch than as a beverage. This line of thought is like a cherry; one draws another. If new Guards are to come here, would it be for the best if there were no signs of a meal remaining on this table?

TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:p4HPEaMP Tue 21 Nov 2023 05:20:30 No.5837818 View View Report

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Still ... this remains your best bet. Having since been distracted by your thoughts, you turn your attentions back to your bundled spare dress, and finally finish retrieving one of the Nodules. It is not as warm as it once was, which is all well and good, but it remains to be seen if it has come to any harm - or if it is even still in working order. You start to shift the bundle around in the rucksack so you can get it buttoned up again when your hand brushes up against one of your latest 'conquests' - a linen sheet taken from the closet. Which makes you think - if the sensory organs in the room happen to be Lenses or Peepers of some stripe, what would happen if you were to cover them up, or move them so they were pointing at a wall? Well ... it is possible they could still perceive movement through the sheets, or see the sheets as moving, and target strikes accordingly - and as for moving them, you could end up hurting the Construct. Or yourself, for that matter. After all, if it was worth it to set one security-surety, odds are that it might have been worth it to set a second. Or a third.

Yet somehow, in spite of all of this, you feel undaunted. You feel as if this trick with the linen is going to work. Because it has to. Twenty seconds is not going to be enough time. Neither is a hundred and forty. You take up all three sheets under your left arm, then close your rucksack up. All that is left to do is pin in a fresh Nodule, and then perform the casts. Still, you wish you had more light to work with. Perhaps you should take the snap-sparker in there, just ... just in case your eyes aren't throwing off enough light. No, that - no. It won't put off enough light to be worth the trouble. If you had a candle, you'd bring it in, unlit, in your hand, then light it with the snap-sparker once you got into position at the fireplace - but you don't have any damned candles. Besides that waxen derelict you found discarded in the basement, you haven't seen a single candle anywhere. Maybe ... would it be worth it, just to check the room to the left of this one. There was that desk - at least you thought it was a desk. If it was, then there might be candles or something to write by just sitting on it, waiting for you. On the other hand, to check it, you would have to do quite a bit of groping just to get there. It was practically in the far corner of the room, past that wrought iron ... hatstand?!

Oh, you fraying, blithering idiot! No one makes hatstands out of iron! That must have been a candelabra!

Almost before you even realize it, you are bolting to the door - the other door. You wrench the thing open, and rush right in, making a beeline for the shared wall. Once you smack the meat of your right palm down on it, you proceed to bull your way through the blackness. No crab-creeping this time! You bull into the chest, having managed to overshoot the preceding obstructions, but if anything it makes you glad, because the very next ... ah! Here it is!

TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:oF3bbUSm Wed 02 Aug 2023 22:41:15 No.5727415 View View Report

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As you pass out of the clerk-house you cannot help but feel the eyes of the entire room on the back of your neck. Instinctively, you want to turn around - but you know better than to do that. Still, your walk out stretches longer than you would have thought, and the sensation of being stared at is such that you actually end up standing ramrod straight against your better judgement - simply in a bid to keep yourself from shivering. You also catch yourself - twice - beginning to pick up speed as you quit the place, and it is only by counting each and every one of your steps that you manage to keep your gait measured and unassuming through the gallery, the vestibule and down the front stairs of the house. Even once you are back down on the sidewalk, you can still feel the shivers threatening to overwhelm you, and the sensation of being watched has not yet be assuaged by distance. However, you are at least comfortable enough to start some plotting.

In consideration of how many Port Authority men were still in the clerk-house, you feel that the smartest play would be to let the place 'cool', give everyone there enough time so that only the Guards or the Doormen are left - and they are in their posts. If you were to double back, to try to 'strike while the iron is hot' so-to-speak, you could seriously see yourself stumbling across some clerk or functionary or whoever who came back for some incidental or other. 'An unsettled time'. That's what father calls it, when a place that you are casing goes through a bit where it is not as regimented or predictable as it usually is. And he'd say that it would be easier to rob a well-run Guardhouse than a residence at some 'unsettled time', on account of that absolute lack of predictability. Perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration ... but it gets the point across, and you have no intent nor desire to try to gainsay that point.

That does leave the question of forging a master Family Patent and sneaking it into the Forum somehow. Setting aside the risk, that is a serious undertaking - in terms of both effort and time. You were already going to be cutting things close with your existing schedule, but tacking the Forum and making a second forgery on to it ... what if you end up spending too much time? On the other hand, having a proper Family Patent, something that could actually stand up to serious scrutiny ... that has to be worth the risk, right? After all, this is the rest of your life you are talking about.

So in the end, you have resolved yourself to a course of action ... though that resolution feels more than a little hollow. Perhaps you will forge the copy of the Family Patent first at the clerk-house - see how much time that takes, and how much time you have left, then reconsider the Forum and the master. Or perhaps you won't. At a time like this, making and unmaking decisions like that isn't just unproductive, it is counterproductive.

TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:Sh2n9YQs Sat 10 Jun 2023 02:49:17 No.5684099 View View Report

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You ... Pattern's Peace. Truly, there is no succor for the sinful, is there? Honestly, right now, you are more scared that ... everything you have ... and haven't done ... might be in vain. Scared that you are going to fail, Hell, that have already failed your father, the Maker, your mother that you can barely remember. As absolutely insane as it might be, you are more scared of this rain then the Tenders down the street, and even their charges ... wherever the Hell the might be. And on some level, that fear is pushing you to head to the sewers as soon as you have concluded your shopping and retrieved your hand-cart ... but even as worn down as you are, you can see that is not the way forward. As hard as it may be - as it will be - you are just going to have to accept that the rain will either continue to fall, or it will break.

Or to put it another way, the sewers of the Mount will remain a viable avenue for your exfiltration, or they will not. Whatever the case, it is completely and utterly out of your hands, because there is nothing that you can do to effect the amount of rainwater in the sewers. That is a fact that you are able to wrap your sleep-deprived, overstressed mind around. And as you accept that fact, you have accept waiting ... waiting until you are ready to go to see how things stand down there. Your time will be best served elsewhere, as there are things to do and places to investigate that can tangibly improve and fortify your condition - while peeking around the sewers hours before you are ready to go will only serve to improve and fortify your mood - and that is only if the sewer remains viable.

It is hard to swallow, of course, but ... well, maybe you would feel better about all of this if you were to come up with some alternative - beyond just waiting a hypothetical surge out, for however long that may take. You give it an honest try, but by the time that your feet finally manage to carry you off of Spinster's Street, the only other option that you have come up with is to use the Lifting Oil to get everything down the dried well, then haul it out through the tunnel. And it is not a good option - or at least, as good of an option as the sewers. For starters, you are going to have to carry everything out of the Not-Temple and to the well. And that means you are going to be out in the open for a good portion of that, there simply isn't any way around it. Then you are going to have to park your conveyance near the bulkhead at the basement the tunnel leads to ... and besides all of the noise that is going to make and the attention that will draw, that also means that you are going to have to get your conveyance inside of the Landward Walls, which requires some sort of permitting chitty, which you will either need to steal, forge or somehow buy under the table. That was one of the best aspects of going through the sewers - you never needed to bring the conveyance into the Mount.

TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:n9O5+Gqi Mon 22 Aug 2022 19:16:40 No.5380756 View View Report

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And there are only three ways that would be possible. If part of the sole was shielded, if part of the sole was made from inert material, and if the sole - and presumably, the rest of the boot - was improperly Mitigated or Remediated. Now, it does not seem likely that anyone is just walking around in public with salted or lead-layered soles. And considering how irregular the imprints are, it is not likely that portions of the sole of the shoe or boot that made these prints were inert - and that is not even considering that all of the inert materials that you know of - salt, lead, quicksilver, and a family of rare gases - are completely unsuitable to make soles out of in the first place. So, by process of elimination, that leaves improper, or at least incomplete, Mitigation or Remediation. And while one can perform Mitigations and Remediations without the use of magic ... there is a very real question as to how whoever did this knew that there was Strangeness on those boots in the first place.

Now, an Inquisitor, or a Cleanser would be able to get a Dosimetrist to tell them, but then they wouldn't just half-ass a Mitigation and then go wandering around in the those same boots. Now that you think about it, they would kept under curative custody, actually. But on the other hand, someone with a Strange-Staining scarification glyph, or some equivalent, would be able to tell. Why wouldn't they see the cleansing through to the end properly though? Well ... probably for the same reason that you didn't see the Remediation in the alley all the way through; there were other more pressing matters to attend to. Though things would have to be really bad for you to go walking around in communicably Strange boots, leaving a trail behind you. As in, imminent-danger-to-life-and-limb bad.

You find yourself wondering how those boots got that Strange in the first place. Was it from the Morgue? The Refinery? Aldoin's house? Is there somewhere or something else in the Mount that is at least Strange in the Third degree? Maker's Mercy, this is the exact last thing you - and for that matter, everyone else - needs at the moment. You begin to offer up a quick, silent prayer ... but when you see that the footprints lead into the wide open door of the public house, you completely lose your train of thought. And once it occurs to you that there are no footprints leading out, you realize that you have to -

>Please choose ONE of the following:
>Avoid this place at all costs. Find another public house, no matter how long it takes.
>For now, find another public house, no matter how long it takes. But later, return here to investigate.
>Head in right now. Whoever made these prints might not still be here if you put this off.

TrashQM

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TrashQM ID:mwXQWYqI Sat 16 Apr 2022 21:12:01 No.5232249 View View Report

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“Best case scenario, it simply does not work. Worst case scenario … well, suffice to say, it can get really, really messy. Also, at some point, you are going to have to start shaving your body hair off. You do not have a lot of open space to work with. Just … the important thing to remember here is that it is not safe to cover up Inked glyphs. If you cannot see them, then you have no way of knowing if something got messed up or not. Only ever use them on skin that you are going to keep exposed, like your face or hands – and even then, you should also apply anti-perspiration cream, and stay clear of any and all water.”

“There are ways to make the glyphs more permanent, but they come with their own drawbacks. You can tattoo the Ink under your skin, to protect it against getting ruined, but the Ink only carries so much power. For some of the more intensive spells, you can use it up really quickly, and all you are left with is Strangeness trapped underneath your skin – it makes you more susceptible to Mitigation spells, not to mention the health risks. And of course, if anyone were to see them, then it would be obvious that you were a Witch. The other permanent alternative is to scarify the glyph into your body, and while this can be done deep enough that it conceals them from search, the Strangeness becomes even more of an issue with these.”

“With Inked glyphs, the Strangeness is produced on the Ink, and will only enter your body if the Ink gets to a point where it becomes communicably Strange. With scarification glyphs, the Strangeness is produced on the scars … which is you, you know, your body. Your blood will sop it up, and hold it, which again, makes you more susceptible to Mitigation spells. And on top of that … the Inked glyphs draw power from the Ink, but the scarification glyphs pull their power directly from yourself, effectively shortening your lifespan. Scarification glyphs can be just as powerful as Inked glyphs, but for that reason, they typically are not scrivened as strong.”

“Wait … as I have not seen any glyphs on you during … what I mean is, would I be correct in assuming that the glyph that you have been using to hide the true condition of your eyes is a scarification glyph?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“Well then turn the damned thing off! What reason is there to shorten your life like that, now?”

“Oh … okay.”

It is uncanny, really. One second her eyes were … normal, but the next …

“I really do not even think about it anymore. The rate of the glyph that I have is pretty good, almost half a second of Hide-Eyes for a full second of life.”

“Pretty good?! That is terrible! Horrible!”

“I have made my peace with it. Just as you will, in time. Besides, if I did not hide my eyes, then I would end up losing a lot more of my life than just seconds.”

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