[R7 Evening, Umbida's] Along The Driest Ocean [Open!]

knitting

The two men stank of yesterday’s rum. That foul chemical kind of echo sticking to their clothes. Leaning in close to one another, they blinked through their bleary eyes, many chins trembling as they whispered their conspiracies through ragged browned and broken teeth. Wouldn’t catch Sabah standing that near to either of them, she thought grimly, mouth pressed in to a thin line as she gave up pretending to read her book. Not for a thousand concords and all the tea and coffee in the windward market.

“Say it was one of these…fuckin’ desema Anaxi types from out of their slums,” whispered the first. He was tall and narrow as the handle of a broom, with sunken hollows in his cheeks and pock marks bored deep into his face. As he spoke the ball in his throat bobbed wildly, wrapping his arthritic and grotesquely warped fingers around a spur of apah. “Ea, have you been in that neighbourhood recent? The stench is worse than a tannery and they are all of them thieves. All of them trying to interfere with our womenfolk and whatwhat. Ea, ea…it would work, my friend.”

“Yaka!” hissed the second, hand plunging into the ragged scruff of short dreadlocks that hung loose and dirty around his face. His face was hard and lined deeply, like cracks all along the dried earth of the desert. “I cannot feed anyone this shit. They’ll smell it from miles away.” The speaker was Uncle Izem, but not in a voice that Sabah recognised. Usually he was gruff or sharp or drunk, with little in between. Snapping at her that she filled her head with nonsense and would never be of use to anyone, slurring his nonsense in indistinct mugrobi or yelling about something. Here though, in his place in the narrow corridor between the shop front and his little backrooms he called home, Izem seemed harassed beyond reason as he leaned against the wall and raked at his own head desperately with his dark hands.

“Hulali save us. Hulali and the rest of the circle,” he muttered weakly. It was ended though as the narrow slices of his watery eyes locked on with Sabah’s. It was too late to turn away and pretend that she hadn’t heard him, Sabah supposed, making no effort to do so. Instead she only pulled up her chin and met his gaze defiantly. “Do I employ you to gawk at me? Business is over. Ma'ehau,” snapped the old man as he emerged.

“Hulali save you from what? What has happened, Izem?”

Her uncle flapped his hands and slapped the wall in a rage. “Get out, stupid…serpent….water eel! Hulali drown my sister for birthing such a wretch. ” Again he slapped the wall, again, again. Made it desperately clear that he wished it was the girl beneath the flat of his palm and not rough concrete work.

“Bhze, I am going,” Sabah drew herself up and clutched at her book. “Do’mea, do’mea, do’mea. Fuck. Ent no call to talk to me so ignominious.”

It made for a nice parting blow, she figured. Leave the old man to stew over a word with more than two syllables and call it a victory on her part. She could work out his words and the meaning behind his panic later when he’d calmed himself. Only, as she turned and began to leave, Izem let out a grunt of effort and hurled something at her head.

“I give you ignomeenus. I talk as I wish in my own establishment. If you don’t like it I’m sure there are all manner of other positions for one who knows big words like ignominious and fuck all else. Ma'ehau. Ma'ehau”

It was the brass plate from a set of weighing scales, clattering to the floor. Sabah gritted her teeth and let out a huff of air. This job was a parade of indignities one after the other, a fucking festival of shame from start to finish. For the thousandth time this week she considered telling Uncle Izem where to stick it. Thought about flying from the shop in a fit of glorious rage. But of course she did not. Only pinched at her temples and tried to ignore the burning in the back of her skull as she left.

And outside The Gripe stank of a thousand drunk men and a thousand bottles of yesterdays rum. Piss ran thick through the gutters here, rotted fruit was picked at by flies and feral animals, everything seemed to be alive with decay. From the rotted wood of the storefronts to the maggots writing through off meat wrapped in old newspapers.

Sabah took, as she so often did, a left when she ought to have taken a right. Right led deeper into the bowels of The Gripe. To the places where the street gangs sat out on their corners, acting the big I am with their fighting and their knifing. To where the prostitutes hung out of the windows trying to catch the attention of passers by. Where the butcher tried to pass off cat meat for cow and where the doctors in the backrooms mired with blood were willing to trade shills for good teeth and iron fillings. And right led home.

Left on the other hand was the world she had no business being in, a year at school had proven that. She had no desire to go back of course, and yet she always seemed to be walking that way. Back towards Hluun or Deja Point and the places that sat in the shadow of the great white university. Usually she would walk and walk and walk for hours at a time, hands in pockets and her ill fitting shoes rubbing up blisters at the back of her heels until they burst and soaked the soles. Take the cable carts back before it got home and tell her mother that she had been ‘nowhere’ after work. It was almost true. For she never seemed to have an idea of any kind of specific destination, simply followed the concept of something ‘away’, stopping nowhere, talking to no-one. A nobody sort of person walking to nowhere.

It was not far from closing time, she realised, when she finally reached Umbida’s. She’d cheated and taken the cable carts and had coin enough for a coffee to still a stomach that was wanting its dinner. This was a familiar place to her, in the same way that the neatly paved streets around her were. As familiar as the rot and the prostitutes were the students with their satchels and the vast libraries. Nobody in The Gripe understood a place like this, just as nobody here understood The Gripe. And Sabah, well, she understood nobody.

All she wanted was to read her book; Along the driest ocean: A history of the dura tribes of Mugroba. She ordered her coffee for there seemed nothing else to do. And yet when she ought to have been immersed she could not help but think of Izem. Something had surely spooked the old man. But she didn’t know what. And the not knowing both annoyed her and filled her with a strange sort of dread. 

Char

Pulling her goggles down from her eyes, Fazeia entered the coffee house. She was grubby, her skin coated here and there in a layer of dust and sand giving her an odd sort of patchwork effect. Beads of sweat had gathered in the creases of her face and stains of various hues coloured her linen cloak. She paused for a moment to take in what patrons were still in the place, then approached the counter, shoulders still rising and lowering, exposing to all her shortness of breath.

'Umbida?' she asked. The counter was unmanned and Faz leaned over it, craning her neck to look into the back room behind. She groaned with impatience and held up a hand to her face, inspecting it. Slowly straightening her fingers, she wincced and then called out louder, 'Umbida!' Again there was no response, so rising up on her toes, Faz reached over the counter with her good hand and after a bit of rummaging retrieved a couple of damp cloths.

She turned and took a small table by the wall and leaning back in her chair, wiped her face with one of the cloths. It reeked of old coffee and soap, but it cooled her down and lifted some of the dirt from her skin. Her hand throbbed so much, Fazeia swore she could hear it. Her knuckles were twice their normal size, fingers so swollen that her hand was only recognisable by her rings, now stuck tight at the base of her fingers. The rings were not only beautiful, they could be useful in a fight, inflicting more pain than bare knuckles and sometimes managing to split open skin and spill a little blood.

Staring for a moment at them, she mulled over whether she should try to get the rings off, but one cautious attempt at pulling one loose told her it was pointless. With another groan, she wrapped the other cloth around her knuckles and laid her hand on the table. Fazeia looked over at the counter, but finding it still empty, she swept her braids back over her shoulder and rested her head against the wall, once again eyeing the other customers of the coffee house.

knitting

Sabah remembered from her school days that it took all types inside of Umbida’s. Along with the students, the politicians and the artists came the workmen too, the house staff and cleaners who like she had once done found the siren call of a dura run establishment something of a comfort amidst the overwhelmingly arata populace that surrounded and attended the university. True, it was supposed to be inclusive and open to all- but most people knew, obviously, that it had never really been like that. She had read and heard, through her school days of the situation of the Anaxi classes, listening to her classmates tut and sigh over the problem that came from not giving certain liberties to the ‘lower races’, talking about how much better it was in Mugroba, how lucky certainly the dura and wika were here that they could read and write and own their own homes. Could even aim to take the telling if they so desired. As if Mugroba were some wonderland where dura and arata could go arm in arm singing tales of brotherhood. The notion made her want to snort. Had done too on several occasions. For all their talk, they still referred to them as lower races. Her class had still been overwhelmingly skewed towards the galdori. No gollies lived in the gripe and as far as she could tell, humans still occupied minimal places in parliament. And honestly, she used to wish she could have demanded of her schoolmates, her amati, was there ever even a moment when any one of you ever truly saw me as somethin' like an equal?

It took all types inside Umbida’s yes. But she couldn’t ever remember seeing a sand coated human woman fiddling around the counter before sitting with her somewhat gruesomely oversized hand. Her mind, as it often did, immediately went to the kind of scenarios that could be the cause of the swelling and the dust. An insect bite? She needed to be closer to discern any kind of entrance point of tooth or tiny fang, some kind of blunt trauma, if she could see any form of abrasions or contusions about the rings that would certainly aid in this hypothesis. Medicine was not an area she had ever specialised in, but as an intelligent child she had managed to dabble in certain areas. Of course, being a human, she was limited with how far that sort of knowledge had been able to take her- outside the practical side of things. Research she had discovered had always been somewhat lacking where medicine did not encupslate diagnostic spells or using biomagical properties to set bones and heal maladies. If left to the humans, medical knowledge would have had to have been gathered in less humane and more gruesome ways she didn’t doubt. With dissection and dead bodies and the like. It was not a path she had ever been encouraged into at Thul’Amat- not when those with magical ability could do it so much better. This was a concept that she seemed to encounter a lot.

She was drifting off into these thoughts and didn’t necessarily even mean to be staring at the woman when she may have inadvertently caught her eye, tipping her head though she supposed just as she had done with Izem that there was no going back. Despite catching a blow to the head. For an intelligent woman with a passion for learning, she nevertheless always seemed to avoid learning from any mistakes learned in social situations. She nodded a small bow with her head which seemed polite enough and then asked, “Fight, fauna or fey? Can’t make an assessment from way the fuck over there. Hold it up for me or somethin’ yeah?” 

unwanderinggirl

((I think the three of us should be a crazy sort of mix. Heh.))

Stood up again.

Someone might as well go set his sails on fire.

Suhayl shifted uncomfortably in his seat, simmering with impatience and frustration, knowing full well the price of things well-hidden within the hull of his boat were dropping by each house that slipped through his fingers. Had his acquaintance changed their mind? Had they been caught by someone else? Had they lost their coins in a bet? The compact little wick ran hands over his face before scanning the crowd one more time, nestled as he was in a floor-cushioned corner even as the number of remaining patrons began to dwindle with the length of the evening stretched even longer. Unfortunately, this was not the first time he’d found himself left out in open waters, abandoned to the sharks, his time and risk invested in transporting illegal goods but not a single coin to show for the work.

Surely not all his contacts were desema … Well, okay, maybe they were. What he wouldn’t give to strap a few to his keel and take them all for a ride out to sea. Yar’aka. That would show them.

Suhayl couldn’t help but look up when the human woman stumbled her way into the coffee house, dirty, injured and loud. Light eyes followed her as she moved with familiarity toward the bar, helping herself to meet her needs and calling for the attention of the busy owner. A smirk creased itself into the dark skin of his face, and while he said nothing and didn’t move to offer assistance, he wasn’t entirely shy about watching what unfolded, either. He’d finished drinking well over a house ago, deciding too much alcohol mixed with his current case of nerves would only lead to less than desirable outcomes.

Now, however, he considered changing his mind, quick fingers curling around his empty mug though he waited to stand and swagger his sea legs toward the counter where the human woman stood investigating her obviously swollen hand. The Bethaj wanted to make sure his timing was right. He was patient despite his curiosity, concerned now that his contact had been on the receiving end of whatever this dura had been involved in.

Char

Fazeia couldn't be sure if she was being stared at or not, but the young woman across the room certainly did seem to be taking an interest. Her breath gradually returning back to normal, Faz squinted at her, beginning to wonder whether she should know this woman or not. She decided that no, she didn't know this woman and that she was just some nosy gawker, but then she nodded at her and spoke. Fazeia generally didn't much like interference from strangers, but this one seemed to be curious more than anything else and was apparently offering some kind of assistance to go along with her staring.

Sand fell off Fazeia in small flurries as she walked over to the other table and sat down across from the inquisitive bystander. 'I didn't ask for an assessment,' Faz commented, but she unwrapped the cloth from her fist and held it out in the middle of the table for inspection. The woman was a little younger than herself, but she was in Umbida's with a book, so Faz took her for a student hoping to learn something from this encounter.

'A fight,' Faz said quietly with a frown. 'Desema ducked so I punched a wall and then gave me this before running away.' She indicated a bruise blossoming on her jaw. It was small though and less of a concern to Faz than her hand. Fucker couldn't punch for nothing, the trouble was, she could. She winced again as she turned her hand this way and that for the woman and it was only now after having a moment or two to catch her breath, that she began to feel all the other little scrapes and bruises she had collected.

As she looked herself over, finding other lesser injuries on her arms and legs, she noticed other people still staring. It was understandable, she supposed. There weren't many but most of them were obviously students. Well, how nice for them, they would have an interesting little story to tell their friends and Amati, wouldn't they? One though, a wika, watched her with a strange sort of smirk on his face. She didn't like it, but she chose to ignore it for now and turned back to the woman. 'So,' she said with a gesture of mock deference from her good hand, 'What can you do about it?'

knitting

"Ea, loads of stuff," Sabah said simply. As if it were the most obvious thing in the world that she was the best person in this entire place to be diagnosing and treating a damaged hand. As if this weren't Umbida's- filled up to the gills with medicine studying arata who could call down the mona and cleanly put the bones to right in a few minutes flat. Well not always cleanly, she'd studied a little monic theory and knew probably more than most dura that it was never as simple as all that. Hulali only knew why she'd had to be put in that class though- it was like being a frog and trying to learn how to fly. Only probably even more useless. At least by studying birds in flight an engineer and a physicist could learn about thrust and gravitational mass and interpret it into a practical flying machine. No dura had ever learned how to harnass the mona through the intense study of it. By all accounts it was simply an impossible thing. 

Sabah preferred arts anyway. History, literature that sort of things. She even liked vita sciences and mathematics far better. At least these were things that put dura and arata on an even keel. 

"I could start by tellin' you to start pickin' fights you can actually win. But I'm sure you showed that brick wall all kinds of what for," she continued with a faint smile. "Kinda situation like what you described seems like a metacarpal issue might follow, maybe even the phalanx if you have a shitty technique" a flicker to the present company as she explained a little more simply, "Bones in your hand that connect everythin' up together, like."

With little regard for personal boundaries she made to grasp at the hand while muttering,"Those rings should come off first of fucking all and you could put it in a splint at hope that any busted up bones set themselves to rights again." A shrug, because all in all the story and the problem was not wholly satisfying. No adventure and intrigue not really. No difficult plant or insect bite to try and manouever. Just a bar fight and a broken hand.

"Bzhe, bones and fractures and shit are so easy a two year old could diagnose a fucking fracture in the fourth and fifth metacarpal neck like what you've got," she sounded dissapointed until she tilted her head and really looked at the extent of the swelling as a small smirk bordering on something like admiration or at least a grudging kind of respect twitched around her mouth. "Put your whole all into that punch didn't you? They must've really pissed you off. Bit you in the erse though. A rod for one's own back...like a Hoxian Tragedy."

She thought about quoting something, just to take the showing off to a whole new level, but miracualously refrained. Perhaps simply because nothing all that pertinent had struck her immediatley. It would later though and make her kick herself for not being able to roll it off her tongue all slick and smooth as if Ancient Hoxian plays frequently slipped out of her as though coated in butter. 

"That whole tumefaction situation'll go away if you hold it up," and then without missing a beat she turned to the wick who was staring at them." Spectographs last longer. If you're so interested in gawping," she informed him curtly before turning back to the woman and adding, "He looks strong enough to get them rings off your big fat hand even if it seems like his tongue don't work all that well." 

unwanderinggirl

No one else was doing anything. Perhaps they were too educated to care.

“Well, if you’ve got one of ‘em in the same place you keep that thesaurus ‘f a brainbox o’yours, I’d happily use it to memorialize the occasion.” Suhayl replied without shrinking away as the woman who seemed to enjoy weaving large, academic-sounding words along side her four-lettered ones called him out from his less than secretive observations. He’d have to be all in to whatever this situation was now … and find a new buyer for the live goodies still breathing in their wooden crates in his painted boat’s hull later.

Just another reason to not do business with arati, especially the academic ones. Cowards.

Sliding from his seat, the much shorter wick offered a careless sort of smile, light eyes looking to the injured dura’s hand and then back to the faces of the two women with uninhibited curiosity. He didn’t particularly like the sound of what he was being volunteered for, but he didn’t want to offend their industrious dura spirits by offering magical assistance too fast, too soon, “This really isn’t the kind of neighborhood for a lot’o’fist fights, last time I checked. Lots’o’folks do like to butt heads an’ all, but it’s usually not as literal as your hand’s implyin’.”

He leaned on their table with both arms, one tattooed and one not, out-sized, outnumbered, and out gendered. Not all bad things, generally speaking, but that depended on the situation, “You’re askin’ me to do what now? Who’s goin’ to keep her from keel haulin’ my face with her other hand?”

Char

Fazeia grimaced as the woman took hold of her hand but she let her inspect it without complaint. She looked up at the wika as he approached and scowled at him. 'I'll keel haul yer fucking face anyways, if you carry on talking like I'm not right here in front of you. And where I carry out my business is none of yours. Can find scum in all parts of this city if you look hard enough,' she said.

Faz looked from the wika to the other human and back to her hand and she thought of getting up and finding some arata to fix it for her, but then she recalled having seen a street brawler suffer the same predicament a good few years ago and had watched him take off his golden ring without any assistance at all, magical or not.

'Oh, Hulali help me, I'll get them off myself,' Faz said pulling her hand back. She lifted up the small bag slung across her shoulder and set it down on the table. A jumble of bits and pieces inside, she took them out as she searched for something that might work. Handkerchiefs, coins, matches, scraps of paper, lockpicks and hard sweets were all scattered onto the table top as Fazeia rooted around in her bag.

The merits of never ever cleaning out your bag eventually became apparent as Faz came across something that could work. 'I saw someone do this once,' she said, producing a long piece of thick, stretchy thread. She held up her injured hand and after taking a breath, began to wrap the thread around one of her swollen fingers. It was painful and made her eyes water, but she pulled it as tight as she could, starting near the tip and slowly working her way down towards the ring. Her finger was turning a very dark purple as she wrapped it up tightly with the thread and squeezed it down almost back to its normal size. She looked around then at the other things on the table and picked up a match. Using its head, Faz poked the thread under her ring and pulled the end out of the other side by her knuckle. Her finger was well and truly throbbing with pain now and felt like it was about to burst. She held the end of the thread and pulled it back on itself back towards her finger tip, then carefully began to unravel it from her finger. To her relief, the ring began to turn, slowly moving down towards the end as she unraveled the thread. It wasn't a totally clean job, the skin on her finger was shredded up by the thread as she pulled it off, nevertheless, a look of satisfaction spread across Fazeia's face as the ring reached the tip of her finger and clattered onto the table.

She held up her hand, still swollen, now bleeding and even darker in colour, but it felt better for having the ring off it. There was just one left now, so Faz got to work wrapping up her middle finger. She glanced at her tablemates, at the woman in particular and surreptitiously read the title of the book she had with her. 'Amati never taught you this kind of trick, eh?' she asked wiggling her swollen fingers and flinching a little.

knitting

"Never said I was a student," said Sabah sharply to Faz as she folded her book inside of her arms. She'd watched somewhat interested as the little ring trick worked out up til this point. Impressed honestly at such an 'I'll do it myself' attitude. Sabah was like that often too, despised asking for help when she could prove she was as self sufficient as anything. And it was true- there was a practicality to life in the city, especially for dura folk that one could never be taught at Thul'Amat. There it was all theory. For rich arata with their magic and their tomes of old dusty books who didn't need to learn for simply a skill, rather for the joy of learning itself. The idea of learning for learning's sake had appealed to Sabah once. But when you were a dura it didn't put food on the table or a roof over your head. In short you had to have a skill that could be bartered or bought or sold like anything else and any time at Thul'Amat had left her with precious little of those really.

So she pushed it to one side and ignored it entirely. As if she had never been there at all. Fuck the amati, said the dark look in her eyes as she glared at Fazeia, fuck Thul' Amat. She turned her attention back to the strong wick man who's helped had proved unecessary in the end and shrugged her shoulders at him. Faz seemed to have the insults and threats down to a tee so instead she reached out and poked at a handkerchief. "You leave home in a hurry? Hulali's armpit!"

unwanderinggirl

“All I hear are sails tackin’ against the godsbedamned wind. For the love of my sweet painted lil’ boat, y’all do way too much fishin’ an’ not enough catchin’.” Suhayl groaned almost over-dramatically, clearly un-phased by the threats of the larger woman who’d just gone ahead and tortured her own fingers to get her own rings off. He’d just have to deal with that storm as it blew over. Honestly, it must be the vicinity to Thul’Amat or the caffeine in the air, but this whole diagnosing instead of fixing sort of situation was just moving way too slow for the short wick. The bookish dura wasn’t about to pick an arata out of the crowd to lend a hand, obviously. They’d just talk down to everyone. And most likely wouldn’t have give any of them what house it was, anyway.

These ladies needed less coffee and more alcohol if all they were going to do was scowl and cuss at each other. Were they going to spend the whole time discussing what might be wrong or was there going to be some wrapping of wounds or some looking for someone to do do some talking to the mona on their behalf? Was that sort of stuff offensive to dura?

The Bethaj had no idea; getting things done was a source of pride for his people, especially if they were done well. He tried to do all things well, even if he only ever managed to get a few of them right.

Pale eyes flicked down to Fazeia’s purple fingers and mangled hand then to Sabah’s sullen expression. He couldn’t even bother to linger on the book title; books had never held his attention for very long unless they had pictures, especially pictures of airships. It took every ounce of his being not to mentally sort through everything that had just been scattered on the table, and just an extra bit of very rare concern for his personal safety to keep himself from pocketing any of it when no one was looking. Not to say that wasn't still a possibility. Apparently, one never knew when something would come in handy, after all. He could appreciate that.

“Here, how about I make this really easy for everyone? Hmm?” He didn’t smile so much as shift as he leaned against the table, gathering his field with only a hint of caution, obviously offering magical healing and not even mentioning a catch or a price tag … yet, “I can jus’ fix that an’ then y’all can get back to doin’ whatever it is you’d rather be doin’. Pe’a?”

Char

Not a student? That surprised Fazeia. No that no dura who wasn't a student never picked up a book or anything, but she assumed any wordy intellectually posturing types reading books about dura tribes in Umbida's not an hour away from closing time would be a student of Thul'Amat. The strongly resentful reaction she received for the comment, however, told her she was mistaken.

As the young woman began to fiddle about with the contents of her bag, Faz began to put them back inside, tossing them in willy-nilly until she came to her rings, now both released from her injured hand, and carefully put them away in a hidden pocket. 'It all comes in handy one way or another,' she said, finally dropping the thread back into her bag and slinging it back across her shoulder. She wondered what the woman was up to then. She was obviously a product of The Gripe, foul-mouthed, sullen and carrying with her the lingering smell of apah, but clearly there was something a bit different about this one, if not only because of the odd mix of foul and clever words she liked to use.

'Epa'ma,' Faz said to her without much feeling. 'I didn't know student was such a dirty word these days.'

The wika chimed in again and Fazeia turned to him. The offer of help was unexpected, especially after their terse introduction, but she did pause to consider it. The rings were off her fingers, but her hand was still causing her a fair bit of pain. She could go asking arati for help, or seek out the healer she normally used, but that could take some time. She felt the smiling man's field shift in readiness and the unpleasant, debilitating throbbing felt throughout her limb made her mind up for her. Faz held out her hand cautiously.

She paused to look over at the counter, deciding that this sort of thing called for a drink at the earliest possible moment and seeing the lack of any kind of server thumped her good hand against the table irritably. 'Umbida!' she shouted 'It's Fazeia, I'll be coming back there to get my own drink in a minute!' Faz looked back at the wika then and nodded. 'Ea, ea. Go ahead, pe'a. Watch this,' she said to the woman across the table. 'If this works I'll buy us all a drink.'

knitting

Anyone who is surprised that student can be used as a dirty word obviously doesn’t have much experience with students, thought Sabah darkly, but she didn't comment on the subject. More than that, she wrinkled her nose at the offer of magic. Oh, good. What would the dura ever do without magic users deigning to help them all from time to time?

A drink was a drink though and Sabah wasn’t about to turn it down. The spell would work. His field and the easy way he offered help seemed to suggest it. Perhaps not painlessly, in her experience there always seemed to be some kind of ethereal price tag. But she was sure that it would do. And being able to identify a bone and a fracture down to the last detail couldn't much compare to a spell that was simple enough to master in theory but that she could no more replicate than she could start breathing underwater.

"Metacarpal neck," she muttered gloomily to the wick in front of her, obviously rather put out at being shown up while being at quite a disadvantage. Sabah didn't much feel the need to watch the proceedings either. She'd seen people be healed before and knew how to pick out the subtle shifts and changing of the mona that cleaved to a roomfull of arata. The fizz had sort of felt like second nature for a while, as if she may have had a field herself. And then, when she was alone or at home in the Gripe at first she had always felt quite naked without it.

"Where is Umbida?" she muttered then instead to herself, craning her head as if to look around and then standing up. The dura woman tended to be walking among her customers. Unlike Sabah she held no such predjudices against the student types and seemed forever to be genuinely interested in all that they had to say. Something felt wrong to her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it for some reason. 

unwanderinggirl

“Metacar-what?” Caught off guard by being granted such unopposed permission and slightly confused by medical terminology he knew nothing about, Suhayl paused and tilted his shaved head for a moment, blinking down at Fazeia’s hand and trying to imagine where a neck would be instead. Something in there was injured, maybe broken, and that was really enough for him. Details weren’t his specialty most of the time, unless they had a price, “I’ll try to work that in, but I ent sure it’ll work.”

He also wasn’t quite capable of squinting through duri goggles to see their point of view. It was entirely possible he considered his offer of magical assistance a bit of one-up-manship, though not necessarily in the usual way of things. It was simply expected, at least among his people, which he couldn’t exactly expect everyone to understand. It was alright. Most of the time, he managed to avoid too much personal injury over it all.

The short wick rolled his shoulders and exhaled, pale eyes flitting to the bookish woman who was looking for Umbida, sizing her up for a moment against the injured one. Granted, he’d just watched her cut off circulation to remove her own jewelry, which gave him a bit of confidence that the major discomfort healing magic generally caused wasn’t about to get him any fresh bruises, but it was always good to have a backup plan should the first one go over the rails like so much bilgewater.

“Jus’ try’n sit still, pe’a.” Was Suhayl’s only plea for his safety to Fazeia, delivered with a wry grin and a quick wink, “I have a feelin’ you already know it’s going to flooding hurt.” Without a care in all the desert that he was an unprofessional among scholars, the Bethaj fence spoke his spell as if he was talking to an old friend, words quiet but quick. He was familiar with fixing broken things, and as he discussed this with the mona, the dura woman could feel what had been injured in her hand tingle a bit. The tingling was only a tease, however, for the re-knitting process was more like a slow burning fire, making her suddenly very aware of exactly every minuscule part of what had been broken and displaced that was hidden by swollen skin. And, just like that, it was over and things just ached, less swollen and discolored, but whole.

All three of them felt their fingertips tingle for a few extra moments, and then the wicka just laughed, helping himself to an empty chair as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do after everything else, “That promise o’drink includes myself, I’m assuming … ‘cause I don’t wanna have t’undo that, domea.”

Char

Fazeia shifted about in her chair until she was comfortable. Leaning back, both feet planted firmly on the floor with her good arm draped over the back of her chair, she gripped at the crossrail behind her back and watched.

She felt the tingle, reminiscent of that cold numbing feeling you got waking up in the middle of the night after sleeping on your arm, but the numbness wasn't about to block out what she felt next. Faz had been healed before, many times. For sprains and cuts and a dislocated toe, but none of those had felt as intense as this. She could feel the broken pieces of bone in her hand reaching out towards each other. It was a tiny distance, she knew, but it felt like they were twisting and pulling inside her as they twitched infinitesimally back into place.

Then there was a duller pain as the bone began to mend itself and the swollen flesh of her hand began to calm and shrink back down until it was at least somewhere closer to its usual size. Only now did Faz realise that throughout the process she had been holding her breath and she let out a long steady stream of air as the tingle subsided and she felt the spell finish its work. She bent her fingers. They were still stiff and a sharp pain sparked at the spot she guessed must have been broken, but the pain was nothing like it had been. She could curl her fist again, now only with an uncomfortable ache and the odd feeling of slight swelling. She wasn't tempted to try putting her rings back on just yet, however.

As the wika sat down, she sat straighter and like their bookish companion, looked around again for Umbida. 'Ea, it includes you as I said and I'll get you one just as soon as Umbida decides to grace us with her presence.' Faz continued to flex her fingers experimentally. 'Domea, it feels much better.'

rillani

A clanging and clattering erupted from the kitchen, followed by a tympany-like thud and a slow, rubbery wheeze.  “Thundering sandy flood-buckets!”  Umbida cried out.

She burst into the dining room, eyes bulging with panic.  “It’s going to explode!  Everybody out!”  Customers stared at her until she grabbed someone’s chair and rattled them out of it.  “OUT!”

When Umbida caught sight of her favorite smuggler, a mix of joyous relief and pointed begging crossed her face.  At least she didn’t have to be alone in her current predicament.  “Faz,” she hissed, “help me with the boiler.”

To everyone else, she announced, “We’re closing early due to safety precautions regarding an unexpected potential for imminent explosions, so scram already, you gaping fish brains!”

knitting

There she'd been wondering about the human woman proprietor and no sooner had the question left Sabah's lips then Umbida finally decided to make her presence well and truly known throughout the coffee house. A little out of the ordinary, this, Sabah realized as her frown deepened. Sometimes things had gotten a little rowdy, she could remember from her student days, when the hot drinks had switched over to wine and rum based drinks- all those intellectual types loudly trying to convince the assembled that they had landed on a superior approach to philosophy and politics and what have you. But it wasn't like some Dive in The Gripe- not by any stretch of the imagination where the atmosphere almost seemed like a pot on the stove ready to boil over. Even with the boiler apparently on the fritz and about to blow them all into antelife at any given moment the air was still pleasantly filled with coffee grinds and the pages of old books. 

Tipping her head, Sabah looked from Faz to Umbida. Was this woman a plumber or an engineer? An engineer who got into fights was easy enough to explain away- lots of people got into fights. But then that didn't explain why there hadn't been any tools in her bag when she'd emptied it. Sabah had noticed that; between the loose scraps and lockpicks. "Maybe I could take a look at it?" she offered to Umbida. In truth she knew nothing about boilers- why in Hulali's name would anyone expect her to have cause to have learned that.