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You decide on taking a sweep through the room – and in a small turn of white luck, everyone is sitting close enough together that you should definitely be able to check all of their boots in one pass. Before you do though, you compose yourself as much as you can, then you quickly turn and snag the tankard without another word – doing your best not to even look at that bloated, libidinous slug. While you are able to avoid afflicting your eyes with the sight of him, your ears don’t make it away unscathed, as you hear him cackling at you, for taking his leavings like this.
Desperately wanting to be done here, you let your head fall as you make your way out into the common room. Immediately, you start scanning the floor. At the moment, Strange-Staining is still inactive, but the floorplan here is fairly open – it is possible that there could be prints further in. Even though you are getting increasingly anxious, you do your best to keep your face as neutral as possible – though irregular throbbing jolts of pain from the crook of your left arm are making this difficult. At some point, well after you have left the Mount, you should see about getting these dresses outfitted with adjustable sleeves. It is not just the pain, you are worried that if you make the wrong move, the tightness of the sleeve will somehow manage to pull the needle out of your arm – rendering the wand useless.
Finally, your meandering path through the dining room gets you within range of the first customer. Your breath catches in your throat and your hand tightens on your wand … but Strange Straining does not activate. You keep moving, trying to be unobtrusive – which, for various reasons, all of them painfully obvious, is practically impossible. Regardless, you try. It is at this point that you realize that you have not salted your wand, and you can actually feel your heart skip a beat. You still should be able to cast Head-Knocking without catalysts, but the efficiency of the wand and the efficacy of the spell will suffer. For half a second, you seriously consider salting – though you come to your senses quickly. You are in the middle of the fraying room right now, so all messing around with your pockets is going to do is just draw attention to the fact that you have something stowed in them.
You keep your hands where they are. From a certain perspective though, it seems kind of pointless. Even after your Self-Salt-Remediations this morning, you are still Strange, presumably Strange enough that you would register on a dosimeter, or similar implement. If one of these men happens to be the person who managed to at least half-successfully Remediate those boots, and he has such an implement with him, or some other means to ‘see’ the Strangeness … well, maybe they wouldn’t jump to conclusions. But in circumstances when there is a chance – even a slim one – that magic is involved, father taught you to jump to conclusions. Specifically, the worst ones.
