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Post by Linyü on Mar 15, 2021 21:30:52 GMT -6
No, the stew had been there, and it hadn’t tasted off the way it would have if it had been sitting over a day. That didn’t necessarily rule out the possibility, but even if the ghost had been there, it wasn’t for longer than the span of a nap.
He wished he felt less like everything had slipped out of his grasp - was slipping, still. But there was a limit to what he could do about it, and the only thing he could do now was focus on his recovery.
Holding his breath to muffle a groan, he rose. A dark shape caught his eye: draped over the back of the single small chair in the room was a small heap of cloth, which resolved itself into a change of clothes when he picked it up. The cut of it was foreign, but not so much so that he didn’t know what to do with it.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 15, 2021 21:31:33 GMT -6
He wasted no time in stripping down, folding his ratty clothes with more care than they deserved, out of habit more than anything. He left them in a tidy pile atop the bed. But even changing clothes took longer than he remembered, and certainly longer than he would have liked. His body protested every movement, and he found afterwards that he was lightly winded, despite how little he had done.
The fit of the clothes were loose, but of course they would be. No one designed clothes to be worn by the emaciated. The length of the sleeves and the pants were more or less fitting, and the pants had come with a leather belt to keep them in place, which he had figured out after a little trial and error.
Still, he felt… better, when he had finished changing. A weight he hadn’t realized he was carrying lifted incrementally off him.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 15, 2021 21:31:43 GMT -6
More importantly, however, he knew he would attract less attention like this. The clothes hid the worst of his fragile thinness, and so long as no one looked too closely, he would blend into the crowd as merely another traveler or shiphand. A port city saw plenty of foreigners passing through, and his Xin features wouldn’t be the novelty that they might have been further inland.
They were going inland, as far as he could tell, so that was an issue they would have to face sooner or later. But here, he didn’t need more than this to be able to move about with relative freedom.
Most likely Roku had arranged it, though perhaps Rei had had some hand in it. He didn’t know, and it would have been awkward and unnecessary to bring it up to them. If it had been the cat’s idea, however, the message was clear: do something useful if you can.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 15, 2021 21:31:53 GMT -6
San certainly didn’t want to sleep anymore. He had slept so much lately, and the more he did it, the more he felt as though his own life was slipping away from him along with everything else. He was tired all the time, but he knew he wouldn’t recover without effort.
Almost, he moved to check himself one last time in the bathroom, before remembering that he had broken the mirror there. He looked down, at the dark shape that was himself in the unlit room, and decided it was good enough. The clothes were clean, and he was not going to become much more presentable regardless.
Besides which, the number of people who were out at this time of night… No, come to think of it, he didn’t know the locals well enough to say. That there would be less than during the day felt likely, but beyond that, he would have to see for himself.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 15, 2021 21:32:07 GMT -6
San opened the door and stepped out, closing it behind him. There was no need to lock it. He had no valuables that he didn’t carry on his person, and he had left nothing behind but the shards of a broken mirror and the rags he had been wearing before.
But then, he hadn’t had any valuables since he had joined the Watchful Ones, aside from his own equipment. The only ones who could have gotten at their gear were other agents, and internal sabotage wasn’t tolerated within their ranks, so San didn’t concern himself with the prospect of other people tampering with his things. He checked his equipment nevertheless, to do his due diligence, but it had never been a real issue.
In fact, the stranger thought was that he could have things of his own, for himself, now that he had… what? Run away? Gone rogue?
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 13:03:23 GMT -6
Whatever it was, he certainly wasn’t Watchful anymore. He half expected something like joy or relief, or at the very least, something more dramatic than what he felt, but… San hadn’t been in the habit of interrogating his own emotions in years. At first they had been too raw and too terrible to allow himself to feel, and he had kept himself from breaking down by sheer force of will, discarding them at every turn in favor of throwing himself into his work. Then, later, it had become habit not to dwell on his feelings, because there would have been no point. He was Watchful. At the time, he didn’t think he would ever be anything else. Those who left the service did so by dying, one way or another.
Still, it wasn’t as if he was incapable of joy anymore. But joy wasn’t what he felt.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 13:04:49 GMT -6
If he felt anything at all, if he could put a name to the dull amorphous feeling in his chest, it would have been a sense of confusion. In some ways, he felt as lost as he had been when they first took him and his sister away to the warrens, only this time there was no succession of unsympathetic taskmasters to fill his days.
There was only himself, and his own grim will.
It was that will pushing him through the hall, down the stairs and out from the inn by way of a back door. He opted to use the back entrance to avoid the few patrons still drinking in the main hall and the skeleton staff that served them. In the light of day, it wouldn’t have been noteworthy to come and go as he pleased, but taking a walk this time of night would have made him conspicuous.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 13:06:57 GMT -6
He had already marked himself out as an odd character by the way he had entered, with his gaunt features and the dirty worn clothing hanging from his emaciated frame. and while it was too late to rectify that, he could at least take the pains to prevent it from getting any worse.
The security at the inn was lackluster; clearly they neither experienced nor expected much trouble. There was a man posted near the door San slipped out from, but he was already deep in his cups and fast asleep. It was just as well; San couldn’t move the way he was used to, and had to go slowly to keep quiet, but he managed to slip out unnoticed, and then he had the back alley to himself.
His senses hadn’t been dulled by his time sick and asleep. He had that much to be thankful for.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 13:08:19 GMT -6
Lingering in a place like this wasn’t smart when he couldn’t defend himself, and in his current state, any assailant would need to do no more than strike a single blow to dispose of him. But for the moment he sensed no danger, and so San leaned against the wall and allowed himself to catch his breath.
It was frustrating to have to take so many breaks, and already he looked forward to a time when he had even an average level of fitness again, let alone his previous form.
Roku had said not to push himself too hard, but surely a walk would not be beyond him.
Once his breathing had evened out again, San meandered out of the alley, and onto the main street. This close to the docks, the lamps were bright, but he could pick out places where he might remain hidden from sight if he so chose.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 13:08:32 GMT -6
Night cast the port in a new light; buildings that had been foreign and quaint in the light of day now took a sinister cast, and the calls of the sailors to one another sounded sharper, more vicious.
San had thought he might take a walk along the piers himself, but now that he had a sense of their activity, he discarded the notion. He realized, with a little dismay, that he had never been in a port town himself. He had no idea how they worked, nor had he had the opportunity to familiarize himself with them, owing to the fact that he had spent all his time at sea as an invalid. Ningjing had been the capital, and all his life he had thought of it as the heart of the world. The king and all his ministers were there, and if they wished it, they could find nearly anything within its borders.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 19:46:45 GMT -6
There had seldom been time and space enough to contemplate the worldliness of San’s own life, but he had never felt a lack of it before. Now he wondered. He had never left the city even once in his life, only to find himself cast off to some other continent entirely, if not halfway around the world. Even a port town had been beyond the scope of his experiences.
The feeling of being lost, of helplessness, only intensified as he looked out at the docks, so he turned away from them and walked in the opposite direction. It was a strange and unfamiliar city, but he was already in the habit of remembering his path where he went, so he wasn’t concerned with getting lost on the streets. The force of concentration it required hadn’t been enough to occupy his mind in years, and it wasn’t enough now.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 19:47:40 GMT -6
He canvased the streets as if he were planning for a job, noting places where he might get up onto a rooftop, likely places to set up for rendezvous, and points of easy entry into this house, that shop, and the like. It was an aimless exercise, but it gave him something to do.
He walked slowly, and took frequent pauses for breaks, but even then he was forced to head back sooner than he would have liked. He had to conserve enough strength for the walk back, and he had to make it back without exhausting himself past his ability to recover. He was finding, over the course of his walk, that his state was even worse than he had thought. He had no frame of reference for how it would feel to be so utterly emaciated, having never lived through such a state. The revelation was a bitter pill.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 19:47:51 GMT -6
The walk itself was uneventful, despite his best attempts to find something of interest within it. If anyone was attempting something under cover of darkness, they did so out of his view; and this district seemed, if not affluent, then at least clean. Crime must have existed in this town, but it existed elsewhere, and having spent such a short time here, he couldn’t yet determine whether its presence was large or small.
The man by the back door was still asleep when San slipped back in, though the patronage had all but cleared out of the main hall. Only a few determined drunkards remained, and the tone of their chatter had turned lamenting. These were dockhands, hardened men, now nursing their hurts along with their whiskey. San stayed a moment, to see if his eavesdropping turned up anything of note, but their gossip was all of a personal nature.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 19:48:12 GMT -6
Their bitterness, at least, he could sympathize with.
There was nothing for him to do but to go back to rest, and no place for him to return to but the room. The size of it, which hadn’t bothered him before, now felt grating in a way he hadn’t expected. It shouldn’t have. He had spent most of his life in claustrophobic underground spaces, tucked away with all the other agents until they were needed. But at night, or even during the day, he had purpose, and he could go anywhere that his own legs could take him.
Now he struggled for breath after a single flight of stairs.
He sat himself in the small single chair, where earlier he had found the change of clothes his companions had provided. Perhaps it was a childish notion, but he stubbornly refused to lie down in the bed again.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 16, 2021 19:48:53 GMT -6
He had half hoped to find that Roku had returned, or that Rei had come to take his place, but if they were present, they didn’t show themselves.
It was then that his endeavors finally granted him a small boon: San, who could not bear to be alone with his own thoughts, soon drifted off to sleep from sheer exhaustion.
He didn’t remember drifting off, and only upon waking did he regret his decision to use the chair. His body ached worse than it had the previous day, from the exertion as well as the uncomfortable position in which he had slept. He rose with a grimace, then sat down again as the sense of vertigo overtook him, and his vision blacked out for a moment before it cleared up again.
He had forgotten about that. He didn't want to grow used to being like this, but it was hard to remember all the ways in which his body was incapable now.
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