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Post by Malcolm on Nov 17, 2021 21:41:56 GMT -6
The quest board... Gods and angels, but it gave Malcolm a headache sometimes. Some months there were good, reasonable, perfectly nice requests. Some months, the requests were a little outlandish but not that hard to accomplish, in the grand scheme of things. And some months they were just downright absurd. If he was being honest, it was mostly the latter. If the pay wasn't so good, he wouldn't have even given these types of requests the time of day, not after hearing the kinds of petty, meaningless little things they were asking him to do here. But he wasn't nearly well established enough in this city to be picky about his jobs if the pay was good, so here he was, stuck doing inane chores or favors for random eccentrics and fools. It made his blood boil sometimes, but he reminded himself that he had done worse for less reward. 1
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 17, 2021 21:42:14 GMT -6
At least now he had the luxury of refusing if push came to shove and they tried to make him do something he really abhorred, but unfortunately this request wasn't really dire enough for that.
"Find a doll," he muttered under his breath. What was he, a child? The person who made the request was almost certainly a child themselves, but... No, no, he had to think of the money.
He had also brought Cashew with him, to get the creature acclimated to being out and about in his company, if nothing else. He had some rudimentary control over Cashew now, somehow, and he'd been feeding Cashew long enough that Cashew had lost most of the twitchy leeriness that most creatures exhibited in his company. Animals generally didn't like him, though if they had enough training they would tolerate him, but fortunately he was finding that this could be overcome with bribes, in sufficient quantity. Cashew, certainly, was proof of that.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 17, 2021 21:42:34 GMT -6
The trouble was, Cashew wasn't particularly well trained. Malcolm was working on it, but this whole business of training creatures was a lot more trouble -- and a lot more time consuming to boot -- than he had originally bargained for. The idea of having a little creature companion that could assist him in his endeavors to make money was appealing when it had been just an idea, but now that he was looking at the amount of effort that it would actually take to bring it to bear... It gave him a headache to think about. But Cashew was already here, and Malcolm was already working with him. And, probably more importantly, this seemed to be the kind of thing that was required to fit in with the community in these parts.
Where Malcolm had come from, animals were... Well, not to say rare, but their presence in the city was in much greater moderation than it was here.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 17, 2021 21:44:29 GMT -6
Here, animals of all stripes seemed to be deeply entrenched in the everyday lives of the populace. From smaller and more fashionable pets -- a category to which Cashew belonged -- to bigger beasts of burden, and even fighting monstrosities that he saw now and again, despite having made a dedicated attempt to avoid the Pit and its surrounding area as much as he could.
In a place like this, not having any animals of your own made you stand out. And Malcolm did want to remain beneath suspicion, so he had acquired one of the... what were they called? The horses, the ones with the long tails. It had been trained to carry a rider, the thought of which had been appealing to Malcolm at the time. But Malcolm had no formal training in how to ride the things, and it was neither as intuitive nor as easy as it had seemed.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 17, 2021 21:48:31 GMT -6
Cashew was a good deal easier to integrate into Malcolm's life, since Cashew didn't take any specialty skills to learn how to... utilize, in his most basic capacity as a companion animal. Malcolm did have bigger plans for the little creature, but some preliminary attempts at training, while not failures, had done more than enough to inform him that they were a long way off from making those plans into a reality. And in the meantime, the little fairy boy that Malcolm had taken in was chomping at the bit to spoil this thing rotten, which also wouldn't help. It was just one thing after another.
Still, at least he could take Cashew out and about with him, and not look quite so strange here anymore. It was truly bizarre how a companion of some sort was an almost necessary accessory, but seeing as he was in Rome, he had no choice but to do as the Romans did.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 25, 2021 19:30:32 GMT -6
At the moment Cashew was running amok through the streets. He hadn't yet learned how to ride obediently on a shoulder or in a carrier, and the latter didn't seem worth the trouble if he was just going to squirm out of it anyway. Besides which, he was perfectly ambulatory by himself, so there was no need for Malcolm to bear the added weight of carrying Cashew on his person.
In another city, perhaps this kind of behavior would have gotten them both in trouble. But that wasn't the case here, and at any rate, it wasn't as if Cashew was big enough to do any real damage. The dangers were more that Cashew himself would run into trouble that he was too stupid to get out of, in which case Malcolm would be on the hook for resolving the situation... But he could call Cashew back to him, with a little effort.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 25, 2021 19:30:49 GMT -6
It wasn't something that he had formally trained Cashew how to do, but they had spent enough time together that the little half breed had something of an idea of what he wanted, if that concept was basic enough. It was good enough for now.
Cashew was already attracting a good deal of positive attention. People cooed over him as he ran past, stopping occasionally at some lucky onlooker to beg for treats. Malcolm, following behind, smiled to see it. He had chosen well, even if Cashew did also cause some trouble; clearly he was a natural at this. With the refinement of a little more training, he wold be the perfect accomplice with which to accomplish some masterful pickpocketing. Once he was fully trained, Malcolm might even be able to send him with Yoru for the two of them to run a little routine on their own, without his own assistance.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 25, 2021 19:31:00 GMT -6
After all, Malcolm was long past the point where he ought to be wasting his time with petty thievery. He'd done his stint back when he had been a kid and he wasn't exactly eager to go back to those days. Nostalgia was nothing but a liar, and he wasn't going to fall victim to it. He hadn't forgotten what it had been like to sleep in the cold, on alert every moment for stray dogs or angry drunks that saw you as a convenient target -- and that wasn't even mentioning the ravenous hunger.
But it would be some time before he even got that far, and in the meantime they were making good time on their way to the... cemetery.
That was right. This little girl had somehow lost her doll in a cemetery. Of all the places to take a kid, and of all the places to lose one's things...
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 25, 2021 19:31:11 GMT -6
It wasn't that Malcolm was the superstitious type who was afraid of ghosts or anything. He'd seen enough death that he didn't have any real sense of mystique about the whole thing, frankly. And on more than one occasion, he had actually slept in crypts and other places for the dead, if only because the superstitious concerns of those who could afford not to was a pretty good way of avoiding trouble. But it wasn't as if they were pleasant places either, unless it was one of those lots belonging to rich folk who could pay to have their corpse interred in a place that looked like a neat little park, with neat little trees, rather than a crypt packed with the dead.
Not that his fellows would have had even that much. Their own corpses were more liable to end up face down, floating in sewage, and ultimately discarded.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 25, 2021 19:31:21 GMT -6
That wasn't the case anymore, but it still didn't bring back good memories.
When they reached the cemetery, Malcolm could see that it was one of those little park places for rich people. He sighed. Well, better this than a crypt -- did they even have those here, come to think of it? This city was much less densely populated than the one he had grown up in, so maybe they didn't have the same need for such a... space efficient way to store the dead. But suffice to say that the face down in a ditch option was still probably available to those who couldn't afford a nice little plot in a nice little garden. And if the little girl had been visiting someone rich enough to have a place here, then surely she could afford to send a servant, instead of paying Malcolm to fetch her thrice-damned doll.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 30, 2021 19:03:05 GMT -6
In fact, the idea that he was doing the work that should have been relegated to a servant was almost worse than the task itself. There was nothing very difficult about finding a doll, even if the locale brought to mind some unpleasant memories. Malcolm wasn't a child, to balk at something so simple. But the optics of it, that was another matter entirely. When he had been younger, he hadn't had the luxury of worrying about something like that, but now that he had the means for it, Malcolm had developed a taste for keeping his pride rather than swallowing it as he might have done before.
It was difficult to be in a new town, to say the least. Oh, how he did miss the luxuries his reputation afforded him at home. But sooner or later he would quit this place, he knew; and then there would be time enough to do as he pleased.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 30, 2021 19:03:29 GMT -6
It was an odd thing to think about when he hadn't expected to make it to adulthood in the first place, but now that he was here, he planned to live for a good long time. Least he could do, after all that effort.
Whatever Malcolm's qualm with their location, however, none of it seemed to bother Cashew at all. The little creature darted right in without any hesitation, and Malcolm was left to sigh and follow, at a much less enthusiastic pace. A part of him wondered if he would be so lucky as to have Cashew find the doll for him. Creatures liked soft toys, right? At least, some of them did. Malcolm had never been big on animals himself, and sadly he didn't know a lot about them. To be fair though, he hadn't exactly anticipated finding himself in these kinds of circumstances in the course of his life.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 30, 2021 19:03:41 GMT -6
Working with livestock had neither been an achievable career path, nor an appealing one either. One could tend the king's horses someday if one was good enough, but even then the pay was only that of a royal servant's. And he much preferred the idea of running his own patch of the criminal underbelly of the city than serving those who ruled above.
He was beginning to think he would have to start doing more research though, if things kept going at the pace they were going. It would be nice to have a little more control over Cashew. As of now, Malcolm was having to proceed through the graveyard at a much quicker pace than he had hoped for, or else risk losing track of Cashew entirely. And once he couldn't see Cashew anymore, he wasn't sure that he would be able to call the creature back to him, even with the assistance of a bribe.
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Post by Malcolm on Nov 30, 2021 19:05:49 GMT -6
He was supposed to be looking for a doll too, but he was hard pressed to do anything of the sort while sustaining such a pace, and keeping an eye on Cashew while he was at it. "Cashew," he called. Sometimes the creature did respond to his name, though it wasn't the sort of thing that Malcolm wanted to count on for anything, considering it didn't work all the time.
This time... Well, it was hard to say. It wasn't as if Cashew came running, but Malcolm did hear Cashew squeaking a few rows ahead -- or at least it had better be Cashew. If this place was infested with rats that he would have to deal with... It wouldn't be a surprise, he supposed, but it also wouldn't exactly be a pleasant ordeal for him either.
He quickened his pace, until he could make out Cashew's silvery-white fur amidst the gravestones.
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Post by Malcolm on Jan 30, 2022 18:48:46 GMT -6
“You little troublemaker,” he said, closing the distance between himself and the wayward Cashew with a few last quick steps. He was ready to grab the creature by the scruff of his neck -- or realistically, whatever part of Cashew he could reach, excepting maybe one of the limbs, but only because the risk of damaging Cashew would be too great by that point. Perhaps Malcolm could scoop him up -- but just as Malcolm was thinking this, he realized that Cashew seemed to be fussing over something… Something that looked suspiciously like the doll that they were supposed to be looking for.
Or, well, a doll, anyway. Presumably it was the one they were looking for. How many dolls could there be lying around random cemeteries anyway? No, it had to be the one they were after. If it wasn’t, well, they’d made an honest attempt at trying to find it.
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