Obscurity Steals The Spotlight [Aero & Liza]

Subject: Obscurity Steals The Spotlight [Aero & Liza] Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:49 am

The Scene:
It's a bright sunny day in the outskirts of a small town. The day is calm, but how long will that last? Elderly people say that rain's in the forecast, but with the day looking so pleasant and peaceful, who will pay them any mind?
[Details to be Added]

Oh, yes, that one looked good too. This was a nice field, a very nice field indeed. Why had he never come here before? Oh, that's right, because leaving the shop meant that every petty thief in Kaionar would be getting into his stock room. Well, let the joke be on them. Before leaving he'd made very sure to mix up all the labels. Quietly, Baldasarre laughed while he imagined some lickspittle youth putting some poison ivy in his soup, thinking that it was basil. Idiots, the lot of them. Contenting himself with imagining the various ways that the thieves who were no doubt getting into everything back home would die painful and agonizing poison-related deaths made the old weasel smile as he scoured the fields for more plants. He wore his pocketed cloak around his neck like a scarf, finding the silly bit of clothing entirely too bothersome to deal with on such a nice day. With basket in hand, he simply enjoyed the sun and light breeze.

It hadn't been too long since she was bitten by Fredrick, the circus' new sideshow resident. Her left arm refused to move and her shoulder was painfully infected by this point. Why didn't she take the time to learn about herbal remedies? Aside from kicking herself for not being more studious in her spare time, she was quite sure she was lost after finding that the person she needed to see wasn't in his shop. Her wanderings had led her to a field where someone was wandering about with a basket.

"Excuse me, do you know where I can find "Baldassare"?" she asked walking closer. Not once did it occur to her what this being would look like, and least of all would she expect what she found if this were who she was looking for. "I went by his shop and he wasn't there. Would you happen to know where I can find him?" Her shoulder had been bandaged, but since more blood had come out along with an unhealthy amount of pus she had to remove it and just keep it away from anything that would irritate it further. Though it seemed fruitless as even the slightest breeze made her shoulder twinge in pain.

Upon hearing his name, Baldassare looked up, his nose and ears twitching. The breeze carried the scent of the newcomer to him and immediately he could tell that she had an infection of some sort. Infections always smelt so terribly… well, infected. There was really no other way to describe it. Greasy, maybe, but with a tang. Tangy grease. Ugh, flesh wounds were so malodorous-

"That would be me." He replied, setting down his basket of herbs gently and unwinding his cloak from around his neck, slipping it on with a small sigh of discontentment. Picking back up the basket, he simply walked over to the woman and walked straight to her wounded side, looking at the bandage from a distance while making a clicking noise with his tongue. "I suppose it's all inflamed under there. May I?" He gestured to the bandages on her arm.

She nodded silently, for once living up to her namesake, and carefully moved the bandage. "A half spider creature bit me a couple of weeks ago. I can't move my arm and it's totally numb. The venom was purple, a very easy to spot purple." She had ambled about the city the entire morning, and right when she thought she was completely lost she found who she was looking for. What sort of luck was that? Apparently it was "good" luck or she wouldn't have found him.

The infectious bite spanned half the space between her neck and the far edge of her left shoulder blade, and the infection itself probably had spread across her shoulder in its entirety by that point. For one reason or another she felt compelled to apologize for bothering him, but this wasn't a whim. This whole trip was for a remedy for something that had practically paralyzed her for an entire day and completely screwed up her senses for the entire following week. For the moment she stayed quiet, she wasn't used to someone that reminded her of the weasel her father kept in the barn to frighten away the mice.

"Hmm, hmm…" He scanned the wound initially while she was unwrapping it, looking over the bite marks then placed the pads of his fingers on the skin around the wound, lightly feeling out where the inflammation stopped. "I suppose you found yourself an interesting lover that left you with this little gift, hmm? Well, I've seen worse." After examining the bite for a second more, he flicked his ear and picked his basket back up mumbling lightly under his breath something about "corner hawkers" and "no common sense". Once settled with the basket on his arm Baldassarre twitched his whiskers and sniffed. "It should be easy enough to treat, however, we'll have to go back to my shop. Come this way, please, and do tell me as much as you can remember from this spider creature that bit you."

"L-Lover?! No no no you have the wrong idea!" she sputtered turning a bright maraschino cherry red. "The creature intended to kill me. I had gone out to look for a friend who'd gotten himself lost and that's how I ran into it. It was like a centaur, upper half of a human, but the lower half was a spider instead of a horse. After the initial bite I remember blacking out and waking up in excruciating pain and almost totally paralyzed. The latter wore off after about a day. For the record I'm not a street-walker, I'm a gypsy."

It was nice to know that she wasn't the worst he'd seen, but that left her wondering about just what "was" the worst he'd seen. Still she followed him closely "What's the worst problem someone's come to you with, if you don't mind me asking?" For someone to call her a streetwalker based on her clothing wasn't actually that uncommon, but for someone to assume she'd gotten an infection that bad from a lover was a first. Not only did she hold no interest in having a relationship, but she reacted rather angrily to any sort of pain. Therefore that sort of scenario was unlikely to yield any good results for anyone.

Baldasarre raised an eyebrow, taking the girl's blustery denial as a secret confession that the spider-man was, indeed, her lover. Well, he'd heard of flirting with death, but this was a bit too much. Perhaps it wouldn't be worth wasting his good stuff on her if she was just going to crawl back into his multi-armed embrace and get bit again in passion. Oh well. To each their own, he supposed. The rest of the the description he listened to whole-heartedly and started assimilating the possible remedies for the gypsy's problem. Street-walker, corner-hawker, gypsy… Whatever she wanted to call herself.

"I have patients come to me with swords through their chests that have been coated in poison then burned in place to make extraction impossible. I've seen cases of prostitutes that have neglected their illnesses for so long that limbs must be amputated. Trust me, gypsy, you are by no stretch of the imagination a worst-case scenario." He simply shrugged after the short explanation to her simple question, heading back to the Kaionar gates and his little apothecary shop. Well, at least nobody had kicked down his front door. How very nice of them.

With a deep sigh she shook her head. "Never had a lover to be truly honest. Nor do I wish to have one. Any kind of romance leads to trouble. Disease, abuse, and a host of other malign possibilities." She smiled as she walked into the shop. "Reminds me of the bottle collection I have back at the circus." Indeed it did look like he had more glass than a top notch china shop. Mostly she collected colored perfume bottles and bottles that were shaped strangely, due to a flaw or by natural design it didn't matter.

"Thank you so much for taking time to help me." Now honestly she usually didn't take insults too harshly, but in this case she was in lots of pain and she hadn't been in too good a mood for a week or two now. Under most other circumstances she'd have probably reacted differently, but she had the sinking feeling that she should probably take her savings and get a new set of clothes while she was in Kaionar. Perhaps it might improve how people saw her, but honestly she was more worried about keeping herself properly dressed than whether or not someone thought she was a whore.

"Probably the most sensible thing you've said." Baldasarre mumbled to himself about her comment with the lovers. Really, it was people being poisoned by lovers that he saw the most of. But eh, it kept him in business and gave the young people a past time, so who was he to complain? For the most part, he ignored her idle commentary, simply nodding and twitching his whiskers at her thanks and set down his basket on the front counter. After taking quick stock of his supplies, he found that he hadn't been robbed blind, which was a nice change and then began sorting through his supplies. "Now, how will you be paying for this?" He asked, unstoppering a bottle that was incorrectly named "deathwort" and sniffing it tentatively, checking to see if the herb inside was still viable. Eh, good enough. "Will it be currency or customs? I'm fine with either, but you're going to have to make an offer before I can treat you. Strictly business, of course." He'd been cut out of a deal or only half-paid too many times to not be cautious.

"I brought a small amount of money with me. If the amount I have isn't enough, then I'd be more than happy to work for you to pay the rest. I'm a fast learner and I promise to work hard." She pulled out a small bag and held it out. "That's about as much as I dared bring with me this far into the city." A sinking feeling began to grow in the pit of her stomach, and she started to fear this wouldn't end well. She felt she'd said enough and just seriously hoped he'd think over taking her on as an apprentice.

In a small spell of nervous energy she rubbed her numb arm and looked around the shop. Finally she looked to Baldasarre uncertainly and waited for an answer from him. Her shoulder still stung, and now that she'd moved around quite a bit it had started bleeding again. "Hell's bells and pulpit upstarts." she muttered to herself.

Baldasarre glanced up at Silence for a moment, trying to figure out if she was serious or not, then pushed around the cooing in her purse, silently counting. "Hmm, this'll get you enough for a few doses, but if you want more than that you'll have to come back with more money, which I do recommend." He then went about measuring out herbs and colored liquids, combining them and separating parts, a thoughtful look on his face. "If you want to work here, then work here. But don't expect that I'll give you payment before working off your debt. If you just want in because you don't have money, don't bother. This isn't the place for you. One mess up because of negligence could mean the death of a patient, or giving an antidote to someone who requested a poison. Furthermore, if you work for me, you'll do so with the full knowledge that you are helping to kill people. I doesn't matter that the one who wields the blade is not you, the poison that stops a victims heart will have come from your work."

After stoppering a bottle of liquid that was now a pale yellow in color, Baldasarre went back to the counter and met Silence's eyes. "If you don't have that kind of quality, then I don't care how hard you work or how fast you learn. This is Kaionar. The softhearted have no place here."

It shouldn't have come as such a shock that he was so blunt with her, but in this city that was how it had to be. She shook her head when he mentioned payment. Her stomach knotted up and she began to feel sick, but she forced herself to swallow it the same way she did when her parents were killed. "You're absolutely right, and I'm sorry to say that I can't work for you. I couldn't kill someone if my life depended on it. I can however bring you some extra bottles for your herbs if that would help? Even if they're not worth any money, I'm sure they'll be of good use."

Having a bottle collection wasn't a good thing anyway since it was basically just a bunch of glass. It was more a hazard than anything. She looked away from him feeling rather embarrassed. First he thought she was a prostitute, probably still did, and now she basically insulted herself with her honesty.

He twitched his whiskers, sniffing. "Then you've obviously never had your life depend on it." He replied in an absolute deadpan, handing over the vial of potion and taking the bag of coins in return. Pah, the goody-goodies of the world. In his experience, those who claimed that they could never kill anyone were either lying assassins, or had simply never had the opportunity. Being backed into a corner made most rational creatures pick up whatever weapon was at hand and defend themselves to the death. It was a simple matter of survival, and morals had no place when a person's life was on the line. He hid the coins away in one of the many pockets in his coat and looked over his shoulder, taking quick stock of his bottle collection. "If you're selling bottles, then I'll take them. If you're just giving them away, of course I'll take a hand out. Those who deny free things are idiots."

"It did once, but my opponent was a large dragon that could easily destroy a house so I stood little chance of killing it." She shrugged her good shoulder and looked up at him. "You can have the whole collection no charge. I'll start bringing the bottles in this afternoon." It seemed like hours of silence passed before she stood up. There was something she wanted to say, but now for one reason or another she couldn't find the words. Guess this was as good a time as ever to live up to her name once again and stay quiet.

She took a curious look at some of the bottled herbs and guess that they were either very rare, or just in high demand. Now she had many, many questions for Baldasarre, but she wasn't sure if he wanted to take the time to answer any of them. Oh well, if you never ask you never get an answer. "What's in this bottle?" Now the anticipation of either getting an answer or being told to leave hung in the air.

His suspicion was reaffirmed: she'd simply never been given the opportunity. Well, that certainly answered a lot of questions, not that he'd been particularly curious in the first place. Once the business transaction was done, Baldasarre began replacing the labels that he'd moved about, correcting everything. So intent on his work, he didn't even notice that Silence hadn't left until she spoke, and he looked up from his work of labeling a scrap of paper as "spice root" to the bottle that she was pointing at. "Queen's lace." He replied, walking over to the rack of spices and taking off the "death weed" label and replacing it with the "spice root" one that he had just written. "It doesn't do much unless it's dried, powdered and then wet under the tongue. In that form, it becomes a mild hallucinogenic, and is out of your price range."

"I have no use for hallucinogens. I was just curious because it looks fascinating." She looked at a few more mislabeled bottles and headed toward the door. "I'll be back with your bottles shortly. If you'd like my help relabeling bottles or gathering herbs just let me know." He may not have liked her very well, but for a remedy for her useless arm and painfully infected shoulder she certainly felt she should do more for him than simply pay him for his help.

Of course making poisons wasn't something she liked the idea of doing. She was more than happy to do anything but make poisons, but if she took up a job there, he'd have her making the poisons. There was no doubting that. Of course she wasn't a permanent resident either so eventually even if she LIKED her job she'd have to get up and move again when the circus left Kaionar. She exited the shop and returned to her portable home to collect the bottles. Then she remembered that she only had one useable arm, that would make this very interesting.

After quite a bit of finagling she managed to get everything situated by using her pillowcase and two wooden crates that held 24 bottles each. Without doing an accurate count she figured she was carrying about 75 bottles plus the weight of whatever happened to be in them and the wooden cases. It was a very lopsided balancing act and she was more than relieved to make it back to the shop. She could only half smile at the fact she made it without dropping anything. "I. . .brought you the bottles." she said rather softly trying to get her breath back.

In the time that it had taken Silence to leave the shop, collect her bottles, and come back, someone else had decided that they wanted a piece of the action in Baldasarre's shop. Once assessing that the old weasel was alone, the assassin snuck in the back door. It wasn't hard, even though the strange two-legged man-beast had obviously gone to great lengths to keep his stash of valuable herbs under tight lock and key. The assassin was just that skilled that he breezed through the locks and made his way into the back room, opening a magical pouch that had been enchanted to hold a much greater quantity of things than its apparent physical size would normally allow. He was in the middle of swiping everything in sight, content to sort out the ingredients once he was out of the shop when Baldasarre walked into the room, put down the vial of dried mushroom caps that he had planned on eating for dinner and glared at the assassin-turned-theif.

"I'd suggest putting those back where you got them." Baldasarre hissed, apparently not at all surprised that someone had come for his stock of ingredients. Or that it was a man cloaked head to toe in nondescript brown and black leathers with a knife in hand. He'd seen worse.

"You should know that's not a real option." The assassin replied in a cheery voice, gave a short wave, then bolted for the door. When he got to it, however, he found that it had closed shut behind him and locked itself. "Clever old bastard, aren't you?"

"Naturally."

By the time that Silence had come back through the door, the two were fighting it out in the front parlor, any number of glasses having been smashed and scattered on the floor. Currently, the assassin was taking jabs at Baldasarre with his dagger, who had been backed into a corner and was absorbing the blows in his Metae barrier, returning the force of the hits to the assassin, but wasn't quite fast enough to keep up with his younger opponent. When the door opened, the assassin whirled around and immediately went for Silence, assuming that the weasel had called for backup and she was it.

If there was ever a time to prove she was more than just a helpless little girl, now was it. Now was as good a time as any to find something to use against a decent assassin. First thing that came to mind was glass since the room was filled with it; thus she grabbed an empty bottle, smashed it, ran a shard of it through the poison in her shoulder, and got ready to defend herself and more than likely get stabbed. All too suddenly she was faced with the attack/defend decision, and on impulse she chose attack, aiming generally for the ribcage.

She was as good a marksman as she was a seamstress, which was horrendous. In all likelihood she probably missed completely, but there was the off chance she'd managed to make a deep enough gash on his torso to let the poison take hold. "You picked the wrong girl to muck with." All she could do now was hope she made a strong hit and that Baldasarre was okay. "Give up the bag or your chances of surviving this encounter go to zero. If I don't kill you the apothecary will." It was a bluff, plain and simple, but that didn't stop her from trying now, did it?

He had been ready to meet with some sort of defense, but having the girl come at him was a bit of a surprise. He twisted out of the way of the glass attack, earning a rip in the front of his shirt and a shallow cut in the finely woven skin-tight leather mesh that was supposed to protect him from just such attacks. With a graceful side-step, he quickly assessed the situation, keeping the girl to his front and the old weasel in his peripheral. "Sorry lass, I'd love to give up the bag, but I'd rather escape with it." He winked dramatically at her from behind his face mask and cowl, the only bits of his skin showing being a small strip of browned freckly bit around his eyes, which were a combination of foresty green and bright yellow. By his tone it was easy to imagine that he was smiling behind the face mask, and he feinted for Silence's side with the intention that she would go for a block, then turned and tried to bolt out the door that she'd just come through.

His escape attempt was prematurely cut off when he seemed to bounce off thin air a few feet away from the door and landed squarely on his backside with a pronounced "Oomph!"

Baldasarre materialized from where he had stood in front of the door while the assassin was busy charming Silence, a small dagger in hand whose tip was coated with blood. The assassin looked pale for a second and looked down at his arm, the smallest rip in his dark clothing visible where Baldasarre had struck him. "Bloody clever old bastard!" He hissed before going ridged as a plank.

"A paralytic poison." Baldasarre explained briefly for the sake of both the assassin and Silence. "If any of those vials are still good, you may set them on the counter." He said to Silence, then calmly went about finding some rope from a cabinet that up until this point had been hidden behind a sheaf of dried hanging moss.

With her face bright red she gave the assassin a furious kick to the side and spat on him before moving the vials to the counter case by case then the sack. "What're you going to do to the feculant maggot once that poison wears off?" In her anger at the now temporarily paralyzed man she had to work fairly hard to restrain the urge to use foul language when speaking about him. She wasn't about to voice this, but she felt violated.

"Would you like my help putting everything back?" It was a startling experience overall, and her hands were shaky. This was hopefully a one time thing because that was nerve-wracking! She watched the assassin warily and glared at him. "I really wonder what you plan on doing to him." She tried hard to think of something that would make up for what just happened, and came up blank. How hard could it be to think of a way to torture someone?! Very hard apparently.

The assassin winced behind his mask when she kicked him, or at least as much as he was able given that he couldn't move anything below his neck. "Feculant maggot? That'sa bit harsh, don'ta think lass?" He asked with as much good humor as he could while Baldasarre started tying his hands together in a complicated series of knots. His hands started turning colors as the circulation cut off. "Tough crowd."

"Well, I wouldn't want you dislocating your shoulder or something in an attempt to escape, now would I?" Baldasarre asked, patting the assassin on the shoulder like a small child and hunched down next to him, scratching the silver hairs on his jaw thoughtfully. He had been a bit surprised with the hardness that Silence displayed toward the assassin. Well, maybe she wasn't as hopelessly soft-hearted as he had first assumed her to be? He filed away the look on her face for later use if she indeed turned out to be slightly more handy than a wet toad. "Well, first I'm going to remove his mask, then I'm going to ask who his employers are, and send them a gift basket full of lethal poisons disguised as every-day herbs as a warning. Perhaps I'll attach a couple of his fingers. Now, let's see what you're hiding."

Baldasarre reached down and removed the face mask and cowl, revealing a dark-skinned sandy-hair freckled elf who was grinning back at his capturer with a well-meaning and even playful grin. "Don't like what you see?" The assassin asked, and his face shifted slightly, his bones re-structuring to become a bit manlier, his freckles disappearing and his skin lightening a few shades.

"Ugh, a shapeshifter." Baldasarre snorted, throwing the face mask back in his face none too gently.

"Yes a feculent maggot. Does my taste in the common language displease you? Oh well, if you don't like it you can go swallow a flail. And since you mentioned it no I don't like what I see, you're a horrendous creature." Her face was still quite flushed and she was by no means calm or remotely happy. "Don't suppose you have a name either." Upon finishing that statement she looked over at the weasel. "Don't suppose you'd want to roast him, why not force him to work for you as a test subject?"

If anything that was the worst she could think of. She could be angry and batter someone to pieces if she was so inclined, but killing was yet out of her boundaries. Out of curiosity she counted the bottles and found she'd brought him roughly 70 bottles. "After counting the unbroken ones, I've brought you a total of 70 useable glass bottles. Some are shaped oddly and some are tinted and some still have liquids or herbs of some kind in them."

The assassin whistled, his face rearranging against to the first appearance that he'd taken. "Quite a lass you've got there 'ole Baldy-boy." He whispered in what was obviously not a very good whisper, apparently completely unfazed that she was egging the old weasel on to make him into a pot pie. This was Kaionar after all. "I do have a name, actually. It's Aloran Rostinian Haverdo Julianos, but my friends call me Russell. Beautiful women such as yourself, however, can call me whatever they want, especially if they do so in bed." He grinned and suggestively wiggled his eyebrows, flashing his white teeth at Silence.

Baldasarre sighed heavily, standing up and inspecting the the bottles that Silence had brought. "These will hold me over for some time. Thank you." He said after picking up a couple of the ones that still had stuff in theme and sniffing the contents experimentally. "Hmm, yes, I'll sort these in a moment. But for now there's the question of who sent… Russell." The weasel turned his unamused glance at the assassin then fished his dagger out again and went through a storage unit behind his counter. For a moment there was a clatter of glass, then he pulled out a dusty vial, blew it off, and shook the contents. "If I need human experiments, there are plenty that will pay me to use them. I don't need to waste perfectly good material on someone who I don't know what they've already got in their system, especially after going through my stock room. He'll just have to make due with this handy little bottle of liquid truth that I just so happen to have in stock." It wasn't really, but usually being stabbed with fake truth serum did wonders to people with loose lips.

She nodded to Baldasarre and glared at "Russell", her face going red again. "I think I'll stick to "maggot" thank you. You're not my type." In truth she didn't really have a type, but she knew she'd never like this Russell fellow one bit with the way he was acting now. "You must also be fairly low on the intelligence scale to try and steal from Baldasarre." It took her a minute or two to move the stool back over near the counter, but finally she got it moved and sat down to watch the interrogation.

In the meantime she applied a small amount of the mixture the weasel had given her to her shoulder and tried her best not to cringe. She'd never seen someone do an interrogation before and this day just proved more and more fascinating by the minute. As he spoke she blinked then nodded. "Good point." 'Though I wish I could castrate him.' she thought glaring at the shapeshifter.

» Family Reunion (Liza, Jula and Aero)
» Lovely Butterfly Wings [Kat x Liza]
» Mischief Managed (Aero X Eldarwen)
» Games, Antics, & Roving Gamblers [Rogue and Liza]
» Fun and Games~Aero and Tegan