Wynn smiled and said, "You are doing just fine. I am of a certain age that enjoys prattling on from time to time."
She eyed the ghost and the intriguing large man who wasn't human at all. She said, "It has been sometime since I have entered an establishment such as this on my own."
Rose"Oh, I'm sure you're much older than I am. You must have such fascinating stories... like, what other places 'such as this' have you been to?" Rose asks her prettiest patron amid the mixing ritual for this oddly involved liquor.
Back in her place-self she would have had delightfully sullen servants to serve her such things, though it would have been extracted from the many fruits of the briar that grew up around there. This was truly her first time having to do this on her own. Oh, maybe if she did this well enough she'd impress this one, and have a new enemy to share with and show her appreciation for!
Once she slid it over to Wynn, Rose could finally get to the backlog created by her own fascination. The strange grey human with the bird in particular
reeked of fascinating things, so she saved his order for last.
But there was a more important matter to attend to...
Her eyes turned to Uchiten, and his conversational partners. "Excuse me, dears? I'm afraid there is no fighting permitted in my bar." A smile graced her lovely features... and then opened wider, further than any face had any right to, revealing only to them the manifold thorns of this most delightful Rose. Then everyone blinked, and it was as though the sight had never been there: just white bone concealed by pink flesh. "This is your only warning."
-----------------------
Max
The Nosferatu had been cooperative enough to follow him without much of a fuss over who he was or any of the things around them. For that, Max was grateful. He was less happy about how the roman Elder had started to be difficult only once they were already inside the clothes store.
As soon as Marius (what Max had learned his name seemed to be, after some prodding and awkward pointing that had him worried the entire time he was going to accidentally trigger an anger frenzy from rudeness) had walked in behind him, his calm, somewhat humored look had shifted into a sneer of suspicion at almost everything. Max wasn't sure where Marius was expecting him to the bring them, but after taking one look at his face (which admittedly looked terrifying with a sneer), he had a pretty good idea this wasn't in the other man's expectations.
The Mekhet had to admit the place was a little... gaudy as far as these typical men-oriented stores went. Maybe because especial attention was being called to all the promotional sales.
That alone would've been okay to deal with, but Marius did not seem satisfied to even hang around, had already stared down a shop employee until the poor fellow almost literally crawled away, and appeared to regard most of the articles around with what Max guessed was some degree of disgust. He also didn't seem to appreciate the idea of the dressing rooms.
Max sighed as he heard another rip. This was the third shirt Marius damaged while testing their adequacy. Hopefully he wasn't going to find too much of an issue with the discreet, thick jacket he had just handed him. He'd scoffed at the previous one with a bit of a displeased arching of the eyebrows.
In hindsight, Max really thought he should consider himself glad he just hadn't commited any accidental slight upon Marius. Things would be much easier if they could just communicate, however...
Taking an absent minded look around him, he stopped and blinked when he saw a board hanging from a wall with the information that the shopping area had free wi-fi.
... Convenient. Now he hoped Google Translate wouldn't fail him at grammar and that his pronounciation managed to not be on the level of language-butchering.
MariusIt was fortunate that his capabilities prevented him from being recognized for the dead thing that he was right now. After frightening away the shop keeper he chose to conceal himself as just another part of the night's crowd, lacking in distinguishing features or memorable presence. It helped to soothe his mounting frustration at the living rabble's barbarian tongues, strangely marked numerals, and unpleasantly bright light fixtures.
What was this strange alternative to torches that they possessed? It was, perhaps, preferable to open flame and he would have to take one of them apart and see what was inside of course, but right now they just hurt his eye sockets with their brightness and their unceasingly loud hum. In fact the structure they were in was full of similar hums, a chorus of them, drowning out his hearing in their disgusting novelty. And the
stench. It was as if the very air itself was a poison, one that he was fortunate to not have to worry overly much about.
On their way there he had vanished for but a moment, opened his chest cavity with a sharp scrap of metal that he found in a container, and removed the dirt from his lungs. At the very least he could speak without wasting precious vitae on projecting the illusion of communication onto his current guide. He of course had to replace the blood to heal with afterwards, but that was a simple matter.
This in no way eased communication. Titus was beginning to think he might get better results by... oh, this was a rather interesting bit of leather. Well he supposed he could try it on, just to see what it felt like.
'
Oh my.' He stretched his arms out in the outfit.
'Hmm... a little stiff, not well suited for battle, but for relaxation purposes it seems to be rather well designed.'He attempted to convey this to the Gallic seer who had misled him to this place to begin with.
-----------------------
Chiyo'It's really tricky,' Chiyo thought to herself,
'to only look at a very specific thing.'That's what she had to think when she took off her blindfold to look at the day's newspaper. By doing that, all she had to witness were visions of how that bundle of print might one day be destroyed. It could get wet, and fall apart, or someone might toss it into a fire, or the building it was in might have caught on fire and burned it to ash, or the dreaded locusts of Lithilanthapi would descend from the sky in their teeming, bleeding multitudes and make a meal of the city's tree byproducts, while leaving helpful quantities of sawdust-honey behind.
Not that she liked sawdust honey, but she understood it was considered a delicacy by the bodiless people of the world of Dionyl, who were only sapient articles of clothing capable of independent locomotion and speech. So she understood why some people considered those things desirable; if it was anything like the root-limbs of prematurely harvested Parasielians, then it was definitely worth calling a delicacy. N-Not that she harvested premature Parasielians! That would be immoral and wrong, and while immoral and wrong things were capable of being cute she wasn't herself immoral and wrong.
She was most certainly cute, though.
Not like the stuff in this newspaper tabloid; thinly veiled mythical activity was rampant in this place, and so it was full of ugly things that only truly uninhibited editors were willing to risk exposing even in vague references here. Like the scandal a month back about spontaneuosly arising castles, attributed publicly to a warlock-engineer in service to the Kardashian dynasty, or the violent noise complaints that people blamed on a migrating army of Jersey Devils. While the exact details were, of course, nonsense, the stories could put her on the trail of the truth far better than the sanitized nonsense of mainstream papers.
Chiyo felt that she needed to look into this, since she was here anyway. It was her self-appointed task for the cause of Hell that she carefully catalogue the ugly things that inhabited this place and make sure they did not have to stew in their ugliness and pettiness alone. Even the horrible things of the world deserved to be loved and acknowledged, and if she was the only one here willing to go there then so be it!
... as long as they didn't have a cup size over a B; there were limits even to her boundless benevolence, she reasoned.
She closed her eyes and nodded to herself. "Un!"
'Now then, who to investigate first?'She turned the page and blinked her eyes open, repeating the process a few times so she saw only the newspaper itself throughout, until she finally found the ads. Then, she placed the newspaper down on the comfortable surface she'd been sitting on, knelt down to get a closer look, and began to sign off to the side. The True Tongue of Heaven, translated to a form even mute people could understand, was her most convenient way ordering Time to provide her the specific information she wanted. So she used that.
Not that she needed to use that, specifically; Time would have understood her if she'd written the demand for information in Martian hieroglyphs, and if she had a pen she might have gone with that one.
Revelation of Unfathomed ErasThe ads were replaced with ones more pertinent to her needs. Chiyo's perception of them was now of the ads that would be in this paper at some plot relevant point later on in Time, the vision pulled from the infinite branches of the future as if it were to be untouched by her own presence. It read quite simply:
Life-Impaired Necromancer Hiring Household Staff. Contact information below.This... this is perfect!' she thought to herself, smacking at the paper.
Necromancers were always being oppressed and looked down upon, left without anyone to care about their fate except their charmingly devoted, pulseless followers! More than that, they were focal points around which other malevolent, ugly things tended to gather. More importantly, these ugly things rarely had any body fat to speak of and so would not exceed her appreciation threshold and cause her to fail in her self-appointed duties. Truly, this future den of iniquity and awfulness was where she was meant to go.
She put her blindfold back on, got off her knees, and left the alley she'd been staying in for the past indescribable period in which Time did not exist and so which could not be measured. Oh, right, she had to fix that part; she snapped her fingers, and the area returned to the flow of Time as it should.
The groaning of overconfident, brutalized young men behind her made her smile grow wider as she walked away. Their contribution to the removal of her ignorance, unwilling though it had been, was much appreciated.
Now she just had to find a pen and some paper so she could write up an application...
