Quoted By:
Of those three explanations, the only one that holds any water is the attempted Mitigation or Remediation. You just can’t shield boots like that, and it does not make any sense to make completely irregular portions of a sole of a boot out of an inert material like lead. So it seems that someone correctly deduced that the boots were Strange, at managed to at least knock down some of that Strangeness. To be sure, you don’t need the Mysterious Arts to Remediate or even Mitigate something – and people who do not have some equivalent to your Strange-Staining Glyph can correctly deduce that something is in fact Strange. Those poor, damned Coroners managed to do that, for all the good it did them.
Still …
Without even realizing it, you are turning to head into the public house. Upon realizing this, you hesitate for a moment … until you realize that even if those boots might have been too small for your father to have been the one wearing them, he has professional friends, living in Scrimshaw Mount. It is possible that one or both of these men could be one of them.
That is all it takes to settle it. You set your back to it and haul your cart up over the public houses stoop, and straight through its front doors. There is a bit of vestibule, so as long as no one comes in behind you, as long as you stay here, you figure that no one can see you. Immediately before you is a common dining room, larger but with notably fewer customers then there were at the Blue Boy. That suits you fine though, just fine! You don’t even want to think about how poorly things went there, not to mention how much worse things could have gone, for fear of distracting yourself. You can’t have that – and you cannot get complacent like you did back in the Blue Boy as well.
After a few solid seconds of agonizing over it, you decide that you better get a room before you continue to follow those footsteps. No matter what you do, you are going to attract a lot of attention, so it behooves you to establish your right to be here by taking a room for the night. More than that, if you were just to start wandering through this place with a creaky cart and alarmingly squeaky boots, you might get asked to leave for being a nuisance - or worse, they might call the Guard. Having settled on that, you turn to an even more pressing decision; should you arm yourself before setting foot in the common room? The sleeves of this dress are tight on your wrists, tight enough that concealing a blade in there would be difficult, if not impractical. Similarly, the Oilers that you are wearing have straps to keep them watertight, but that means that they are not particularly well suited for stashing knives in. The apron you are wearing does have pockets, but they have the opposite issue - they are large, and deep, to the point that you would have to fish around a bit for the pin-stiletto. Or your wand if you wanted to go that route.
