The streets were already turning dark by the time Baena was released from the dye-house, just then filling with night and it's denizens. The young human woman scowled into the blackness, her vitriol shield enough. Though fieldless, she exuded righteous rage and indignation, green eyes poisonously narrowed. Running blue/black hands, victims of the vats, over her frazzled dark hair, she stepped with rigid determination over the cobbles, nearly setting up sparks with her pace.

The woman who ran the charhouse had made them all work late, as Mindy was having her baby that week and was unable to walk, and Charlotte was getting married and moving to Brunnhold, and Mr. Hasson, the delivery man, had gotten backlogged on orders. All the women had been scattered to the winds rushing packages from one end of the city to the other, catching rides where they could but more often than not running, to collect this dye and that batch of cloth and running order forms to ungrateful galdori. Baena had been worked the hardest, her biting comments not having gone unheard for the better part of the past few months.

Now she was sore, blistered, and totally vengeful. If somehow she were called upon by the resistance to make an attempt at the king or queen, she would go willingly and win this one for the humans of the world. She would kill them with her pure, distilled malice.

It was at that moment she ran into another walker, and without looking to see who it was that had knocked her back, let loose a stream of curses in shrill mugrobi. "Bajea! Maguala, Desema! Yar'aka, Ju oveka tof!" She had landed on her rear, and her already sore tailbone shrieked at her. What a day this was turning out to be.

Right up to the point that the indecent occurred, it had been what could broadly be termed a fine day. The quota of idiots milling about the archives was at a manageable level and on several occasions Shrikeweed had the great pleasure of sending these impertinent seekers of information off to the purgatory of paperwork. And so it was an amiable Shrikeweed, or as amiable as could be expected, that stepped out the Walpole Street door of the Archives and began the six or so furlong walk to the Pendulum Club.

A note, which had arrived with his luncheon lobster and lettuce, informed Shrikeweed that Godfrey Norland Costwold-Wainwright (Wainscoting to anyone with any sense of decency) would be along in the later evening and had some rather unpleasant matters to discuss over a game of billiards. This, Shrikeweed knew, meant that the man had gone and fallen in love again and was no doubt frazzled beyond all reason. Wainscoting was something of a romance addict, a self loathing romance addict. The only man in all Vienda who could fall in love at the drop of a hat and who detested every minute of the ensuring affair. In a very real sense Wainscoting hated being in love, he simply could not help himself.

This state of affairs amused Shrikeweed no end. That a man such as Wainscoting, with more romantic experience than any ten of the better sort of dandies, should seek advice and council on affairs of the heart from a man widely believed to have no such organ (presumably Shrikeweed's blood was pumped about his body through some other means; possibly it did so out of a sense of propriety rather than through anything so base as muscular contractions). The archivist laughed inwardly and it was in this state of mild jocundity, that the collision occurred.

It was not the worst possible collision of two walkers passing anonymously in the evening, but the force was enough to send the as yet unknown collider sprawling and to knock Shrikeweed up against a passing lamp post. The figure on the ground began to curse, at least Shrikeweed assumed they were curses for the tone was clearly bordering on the blasphemous even if the words themselves were incomprehensible. He waited a moment for a lull in the string of no doubt colorful expletives before replying, "You there. Yes, you! What in the great gears do you think your doing?" Then, after a moment to compose himself, "Have you no conception that this is a public thoroughfare and is therefore liberally populated with strolling pedestrians? Charging about like a drunken elephant and then bleating like a sheep with a throat condition is not generally considered to be appropriate."

The scathing invective Baena received for her hurts was nothing to help her temper, especially since it came from the oaf who had knocked her down. It came to her blindly; she wasn't very good at balancing, or shifting her weight, or really moving after the day she'd had, and she didn't want to take her eyes of her unstable feet. Slowly easing herself off her sore hip and tailbone, plain face screwed even tighter in discomfort, she gave off rage like steam. Whoever it was that was putting on airs and acting like a proper twit above her was not going to be spared the entirety of her rage.

"Mmhph. Well, men who walk with heads full of fancies, ignoring the world about them and expecting some sort of miraculous parting of the people are hideously inappropriate." One colored hand found a cobblestone she liked well enough to make the next move in her ascent, though the going was slow and tedious. Her everything hurt, that was the problem, and every joint and bone whined like a punished child. It made her surlier than even she could normally boast. "Bajea! Anaxi are like the moa in the Thul'Amat stables. They never heed where their feet may land and while bright in plumage are not so within their skulls. Ahh, my back..."

She winced as she finally forced a knee up, a hand coming to rub at her cheek. She hadn't even made any real eye contact with the man, so concerned she was with her own endeavors. "No offer to help a woman up either, disgraceful! Elephant-sheep I may be, but I have met carrion eaters with more manners. Bhe!"

It was just about then that she noticed his field, a none too shabby one either. Only her self-fixation had kept her from noticing it earlier, that and the bruises to her ego. Oh Hulali. She had-- and he was-- well. What a day indeed. She was still mostly on the ground, maybe if she stayed there he'd go away and she'd not have to apologize for being human and rude. That is, if he didn't melt her off the cobblestones with a spell.

Desema, though whether it was directed at the Galdor or herself even she couldn't tell.

(( Hey you started it. http://www.houndbite.com/?houndbite=14786 ))

This spirited diatribe over, Shrikeweed regarded the woman with vitriolic good humor, as curious as emotion as ever there was. True, she had been shockingly rude and totally lacking in tact but there was a energetic quality to the rant which appealed to the true coinsurance of such things, and this helped in some small way to take the edge off the remarks.

"Madame, I will remind you that it was you that, in your hurry, collided with me upon this street and thus it could be said that you brought this current predicament upon yourself.

"As for my apparent lack of consideration in not offering you assistance, I feel duty-bound to inform you that it is not my custom to render assistance to ladies of doubtful character who change blindly into innocent passers-by. Besides," he said, now turning his attention to her hands and noting with mild horror the livid color of those appendages, " I have no idea what beastly thing you have been doing to acquire hands of such a displeasing shade or what loathsome skin condition might render them as such, but I have no intention of indulging my curiosity in that regard.

If you will insist on going about with hands the color of the death of all grapes, then perhaps a pair of gloves is in order?"

Oh, he was a feisty one. Color rising to her dark cheeks, making them less flushed and more ruddy like spilt wine, she bit her tongue, literally. Her lips pursed out with the effort to contain such a dialogue as to make even her sailor-mouthed father recoil. Oooh! Golly-men made her so mad! At least this one made as if to act better than his inbred, redheaded prayer fish-like kin.

As he continued, Beane's patience meter slowly sank; every word lowered the still, and soon there was naught but dregs where once common sense and practicality remained. It was, perhaps, the comment about her hands that fully drove the half mug woman int her tizzy. Damn the fool, galdori or not! She would not let herself be ridiculed so by one of the pampered piglets of society.

"Bhe!" It was a favorite word for today, it seemed. "I walk with care and consideration always! You, sir," she snarled the word, less in rage than total apopilyptic righteousness. "You were the one without care!" Holding her stained hands aloft, she shook them at him like a weapon, green eyes like steel against flint. "And you disdain the mark of days spent laboring? Hm? She shook them harder, drawing them closer to her chest. "I make pretty things for you to wear and forget after one use. I stain my skin til I bleed dye and you, you, whose perfume reeks from on high and coiffed cravat bounces like a lambs tail, you tell me to buy gloves?"

She'd never been happy about her always discolored skin, but for this argument they were badges of honor. "I will not buy gloves to cover that which was so dearly bought to obtain, nor would I even if my meager wages could stretch to allow such frivolities!" She reigned herself in at the last moment, drawing a deep breath from wide nostrils in an attempt to calm herself before she was arrested. This really was not one of her best decisions. Ya'raka. She was in high water now, but she was Mugrobi. They liked their seas choppy and their skies dark.

"Surely," said Shrikeweed in an indulgent voice, such as one might use with a particularly troublesome child, "there are rag and bottle shops which might provide you with the necessary items or of those are not your taste I believe that charity shops exist in alarming profusion about the city for the maintenance of the lower classes." He waved a careless hand about as though to indicate some general direction where such shops might be located, but in truth, he had no more idea where a rag and bottle shop was to be found than the average fish knew how to plan an extensive walking holiday.

The woman had spirit, that was to be sure, even if she was grossly mistaken about the precise details of the collision. Her repartee was witty enough, and certainly filled with acidic malice, but it was (like she herself) a coarse and unrefined kind of wit. The malice was so deeply personal that it lent an unwanted gravity to her remarks.

As she turned her envenomed tongue to the topic of her stained hands, Shrikeweed reflexively looked at his own. There, on the index finger of the right hand was an ink stain, sepia no doubt, and one of not insignificant size. And there too were the calluses caused by long use of the pen and the pressure of the desk; the worn finger-pads from years of handling paper and more than a few tiny scars from innumerable paper cuts. The hands of a clerk, with their own marks of long labor. A laugh, a somewhat bitter and self-mocking laugh, traveled up the Shrikeweedian vocal tract and escaped before he had any real chance to get himself under control.

"Do you think," he said, gasping with terrifying mirth, "that I spend my days doing nothing but staring down my long nose at dyers and lounging about sipping brandy with out a care in the world? If so, you are sadly mistaken. I may not labor in some fetid factory or tanner's shop but work I do. I service that great engine of civilization without which everything would cease to function. I, my good woman, serve the state itself. I attend to the flow of its very life's blood, ti the Paperwork." This last word he said with such gravity and with such devotion that he might have been invoking the name of some great god. At this he drew himself up to his full height, not that this amounted to much, and straitened his waistcoat with a decisive tug to the bottom. And it was in this attitude of dignified hauteur that he remained, staring down his aforementioned nose as the woman with the horribly dyed hands.