Drops of Patience
Will | Ketch
3,366
Will | Ketch
3,366
Drops of Aquilonia was a small but charming alchemy shop located in the market districts close to but not quite on the western edge of Terminus. A wooden sign hung over the door, painted with a skilled hand and proclaiming the name of the shop in beautiful, sweeping letters.
The inside of the shop was at once impeccably clean and shockingly cluttered. Everything in the small square room was spotless, but rare ingredients lay in towering piles next to pots of flowers of vibrant, varying colors and underneath a high shelf covered in potion bottles of different shapes, sizes, and colors. Wooden boxes were stacked haphazardly next to glass cases displaying rare phials. The entire room was colorful, if chaotic, and in addition to the ingredients and products of alchemy there were alembics, mortars, and pestles. Some were for decoration, others for beginning alchemists.
Knickknacks from the Sea of Aquilonia and the Copiae Ocean were all over the shop as well, sentimental trifles that the owner would likely never part with. Quotes and whimsical jokes were written on small wooden placards hung on the walls and propped up on tables, each painted a different color.
Delphina, the owner, was a young velen woman. She stood a little over six feet tall, with blue-grey skin and patches of scales in a bright cerulean. Vivid coral dreadlocks framed her face, orange and yellow and pink. She wore a pair of tight orange shorts that reached all the way to her knees and a bright yellow shirt, both protected by a long white apron over her front. Her eyes were a shimmering emerald hue, still bright and full of life.
After the excitement of seeing her first solar eclipse, Delphina had only just arrived back at her shop, eagerly planning out a letter to send to her parents to tell them about the spectacular and ominous and exhilarating celestial events. Living deep underwater, it was unlikely her parents had seen much of it themselves. Delphina turned the sign in front of the store to, "Open" and then went to grab some paper to start on the letter while she waited for customers.
Only moments later did her next visitor slide his way into the teeming shop. The man was rather tall, standing just under six and a half feet with a mop of thick dreadlocks that gave him an additional two inches or so. He was garbed in layers of clothing. Beneath the fur-lined collar of his vanilla coat was a grey cardigan, and beneath that was a plaid buttoned shirt. The hems of his cargo jeans were tucked into his mid-calf, steel-toe leather boots. Those frizzy locks of hair were tied behind his neck by black cloth, yet still hung down to his back; almost the entirety of his long hair was kept in a tight net which spared those in his proximity from the slight odor.
Something that would prove surprising to those familiar with the man’s ever-rigid countenance, there was a placid look of quiet interest in his expression, the eyes beneath the pitch-tinted lenses of his sunglasses dancing around the shop. His senses were overcome all at once; the pungent combination of dirt and manure in the flower pots, the bright bronze of the alembic flasks, and the variety of vibrant colors in the near-countless vials scattered all about.
Shimmying around the clutter, Delphina’s dark-skinned guest removed both hands from his pockets, revealing dozens of nicks and spots of skin clearly newer than in other places --- all of them indications of his vocation to those with any inkling of a gunsmith’s daily tribulations.
The door clicked shut behind him as he let it go, but he said nothing initially, assuming the clang had been heard.
Delphina pushed aside her letter in progress and gave a cheerful wave. "Welcome to Drops of Aquilonia! How can I help you today?" The velen stepped out from behind the counter to come greet the customer in person, a bright and toothy smile on her face.
She couldn't help giving the customer a quick appraisal, trying to anticipate what he would ask for. The nicks and scars on his hands could mean all sorts of things. Was he an engineer, perhaps, or a gunsmith? Maybe a mechanist, if not a proper engineer. He could be a woodcarver, working with all manner of tiny knives and chisels, or even, she realized, a fisherman. She had grown up in a coastal city and had seen some of the older fishermen with scars all over their hands.
If she had to guess, she was going to go with her first instinct that he was an engineer. Although she waited politely for the man to answer, already she was thinking of all the tinctures, oils, and potions that might interest a craftsman.
Peeling his attention away from all of the vivid imagery surrounding him, Tycho set his eyes down on the woman standing just a few inches shorter than him. He met her emerald gaze, and was immediately hit with a bit of nostalgia --- the blue-grey scales and myriad sharp fangs notwithstanding. The velen was far more congenial than the coral-haired terran she reminded him of, as well.
Shaking the feeling, Tycho looked past her at the countless vials scattered about, thinking to ease into the coming dialogue by at least making it worth her time. That level of consideration was certainly atypical of his curt demeanor, but he usually gave an attempt at it when addressing women.
“Oils,” Tycho finally responded, scratching his scarred nose. “What kind of oils do you have?” He stepped past her toward one of the many shelves with sitting liquids. “Specifically for firearms.” Gesturing with his hands, he detailed, “A lot of moving parts need lubrication, for heat resistance and whatnot.”
"These here," Delphia replied, stepping next to the customer and reaching for a lower shelf, "are probably the best I have in stock." She lifted up three different bottles; one was a flatter bottle filled with yellowish oil, another was rounded with clear oil, and the last was bell-shaped with an applicator tip. Setting them back down, she tapped the yellowish one. "Diripiat is probably the one most directly suited to firearm maintenance. Setamol would be good for cleaning a gun, but it would not reduce friction as well, and is of limited use for heat dispersal."
The velen held up the last bottle with the applicator, musing on it. "Ventilarem, on the other hand, is very good at heat dispersal and it is a good lubricant, but has a tendency to dry out or become tacky earlier." Setting it back down, Delphina shrugged and tapped the first bottle again. "Diripiat is a good balance, I would say: it stays moist for long periods, disperses heat moderately well, and reduces friction from firing. For your average firearm, it's your average maintenance oil.
"Truthfully, though, while I keep a supply of different products, I don't have the equipment to do much oil refinery. One day, maybe! I mainly deal with alchemical potions and tinctures, using the finest herbs and rare minerals." Delphina gave an apologetic shrug. "I'd still recommend the diripiat, but if you want something more specialized to your needs, there's an engineer's shop two blocks over that I would highly recommend. Lloyd's Workshop is the name."
Tycho gave a nod, and appeared to be considering the various options presented to him. The bell-shaped bottle of Ventilarem appeared to be the best option but, considering the noted drawback of buildup could lead to malfunctions in mid-use, it would be a begrudging choice for his customers. Still, Tycho nodded at it and confirmed, “I’ll take that one.”
Stepping past her and slipping both hands in his pocket, the gunsmith headed toward the counter.
Without question, Delphina nodded and put away the other two bottles on the shelf, leaving the last in his hands. "That one is quite a bargain, too. It's only four dahls. The others are between eight and ten." The cheerful velen swept around behind the counter before asking, "Will that be all for you today? Or can I interest you in some salve to sooth small cuts and abrasions? I've mixed it myself with a mixture of lotion, essential herbs, and a few drops of dahl volantis." She smiled and noted, "I have some that's unscented, unless you'd prefer to smell like a field of summer flowers or a rushing waterfall in spring."
“No,” Tycho said, as his right hand shuffled about in his pocket. “That’s not all, actually…” Instead of the pieces of exa the velen might have expected, her customer revealed a folded piece of paper. “I actually wanted to ask you about something…” Unfolding it once and then again, Delphina was able to see the prominent word ‘REWARD’ spelled out in bold lettering. “Someone, particularly…” Turning the parchment and sliding it across the sleek counter in front of her, Tycho asserted, “Someone I heard you know…miss Delphina.”
Tycho crossed his arms for a moment before reaching back into his pocket for the four, x-shaped and copper-colored pieces. Each piece fell from his calloused hands beside the bounty note.
A sigh slipped out of the shopkeeper. "Again?" she muttered incredulously. "I thought we were done with all of this. No one's asked about Amgine in months." She took the offered coins and slipped them away behind the counter, before quickly writing out a receipt for the oil on a small slip of paper.
"It's been... a year and a half since I first came to Terminus," Delphina explained. "I had always wanted to open my own shop here in Terminus." The woman paused and smiled at what she had built. "I wanted to be successful in running my own business. When I was registering the paperwork to open Drops of Aquilonia, I met Amgine. He seemed quite pleasant and friendly, maybe a little bemused. I never would have expected he could be involved in anything nefarious!
"After... the explosion, it wasn't long before bounty hunters began showing up, demanding to know how I knew him and where he was, but the truth was, that was the only time I had ever seen him! Until..." Here, she paused, looking over Tycho. She was wondering if he was a bounty hunter, as he appeared, or if he was secretly a member of the Astra non Obligant, trying to reconnect with the demvir. After a moment, she sighed, deciding it didn't matter either way. Hiding information would only lead to trouble, and her tiny business couldn't afford that. "Near the end of Vesper, last year, he showed up in my shop. He was wearing a mask, another demvir face, over his own. This time, he was... different. I don't know how to explain. Amgine acted pleasantly enough, but there was this sense that he wouldn't be nice if I lied to him. He said he needed to find the captain of the ship that brought me here.
"I don't know how he hid himself in Terminus for nearly an entire year, but I imagine that as of last Nocte Nils, he was on his way out. He didn't say where he was going."
Tycho nodded once after the gracious proprietor was finished apprising him of what she knew. He clenched his jaw particularly at the notion that the machina could be trading faces to maintain anonymity. They were, in his eyes at least, hardly any different from one another in the first place and to be able to exchange his most identifying feature was troublesome.
“Why the captain?” the gunsmith-turned-interim bounty hunter inquired. “What’d he have to do with anything?”
"A way out of Hiemis is all I can figure," Delphina answered with a shrug. "They know each other, and maybe he figured the captain would turn a blind eye to the bounty."
There was a chance the captain may be harboring the fugitive demvir, Tycho surmised. The gunsmith frowned slightly at the idea that this might turn into a wild goose chase. He wasn’t particularly interested in finding several different suspects or persons of interest along the way to finally tracking down Amgine, but Tycho hardly had a choice in the matter.
“Ok,” Tycho said, nodding and thinking. “What do you know about the captain?” Absently, he slid the receipt across the counter towards himself. “What’s his name?”
The velen alchemist hesitated for a moment before reluctantly answering. "Captain Rayes. I don't actually know his first name, come to think of it. My father always just called him Rayes -- my father's the one who pointed me to his ship -- and I never thought to ask." She sighed and folded her arms over her chest, fixing Tycho with a stern look. "I'm certain that he's not involved in any of this business, but he's a loyal man, loyal to his friends. I think he might harbor Amgine if it came down to it, since it seemed like the two had a history together.
"That's if he even knows about the bounty at all. I mean, he spends his whole life on the seas, he has no need to look up local bounties in every port he visits." The last part sounded more hopeful than confident, as if she was trying to convince herself of the captain's innocence. "He makes port in Avelyn every two or three weeks this time of year. Makes a lot of trips around Aquilonia. Closer to winter, he'll be making longer treks along the Copiae, though. If you're planning to look for him, his ship is the Whale's Iris."
The Whale’s Iris.
The namesake was painted clearly in his mind’s theater, plastered along the hull of a vessel, and stuck there. He’d remember that name.
Tycho turned his head away from the velen, and let out a deep breath through his nose. The receipt was slipped into his pocket easily, and both hands were nestled in the vanilla-grey pull-over as well. He took a step back, ruminating on the information so far. Tycho had a name, and a location. She had even told him where and when to expect him not only the nearby port city, but also where he’d be months from now.
The trail was building, but she was speaking of events months in the past. Who knows where the son of a bitch could be now, Tycho lamented to himself.
“So nothin' at all would make you suspect the captain?” Tycho pryed, peering sideways through his sunglasses.
He didn’t want to mention her father pointing him to Rayes; she seemed up-in-arms about him suggesting anything about the captain. Pulling her parentage into it might’ve gotten him booted out of the store altogether.
“What about the pen?” he backtracked, focusing more on Amgine. “Did either of them, Amgine or Rayes, ever say anything about it to you?”
The woman's only response to the first question was another glare. She groaned when the pen was brought up, though. The guards and some representatives from the Arcanum had grilled her endlessly over it in the weeks following the attempted assassination. "Neither of them told me a thing. Rayes just asked if I could bring the cursed thing to Amgine, as nonchalant as could be. His only warning was to be sure it didn't get stolen. I'm pretty sure he was just as much in the dark as I was!"
After how much strife she had gone through over the delivery, she didn't even consider that Tycho might not know she had brought the pen into Terminus. She had almost lost her business license over it, before word came from the Magister himself that her error was forgiven. "The clockwork one, though, I swear if he had skin he would have been pale as a sheet when I delivered it to him. It's hard to reconcile it with what I know he did after, but he genuinely looked worried for me. I'm sure now that he knew exactly what I'd gotten mixed up in, but he didn't tell me a thing."
Silence followed the adamant eruption. Even when trying to avoid agitating her, Tycho still managed to do so. By the way the question so easily lit a spark in her, though, he could tell it wasn’t the first time Delphina had been probed about it. If the demvir truly wasn’t involved and both the responsibility and blame were simply thrust onto him merely by association, Amgine might not be the one everyone was looking for.
Tycho paused there, and pulled himself off of that train of thought; he didn’t care in the least bit whether or not Amgine was innocent. There was five thousand exa on his head, and all Tycho had to do was bring the apparently harmless suspect back to Terminus.
Let the Conexus concern themselves with who’s guilty or innocent.
“Ok…” Tycho nodded, letting that hang in the air for a moment. His eyes dropped down to the bottle. “Can I get a bag?”
By now annoyed with her 'customer,' Delphina looked at the small bottle of oil and considered the canvas bags under the counter. Under normal circumstances she would offer a bag free of charge, but they cost half as much as the oil itself. "Four dahls more if you'd like a bag," she offered, pulling one of the bags out from under the counter, holding it up to show how silly the request was. Her smallest bag could easily carry ten bottles of the gun oil.
After she'd given him all the information he asked for, information that might be leading him to a five grand payout, without so much as a thank you, she wasn't too enthused by the idea of giving him more freebies, no matter how petty they were.
Tycho meant to cock his head to the side, feeling the acrimony from across the counter, but he checked the motion. He frowned, snatched the vial up and tucked it into his pocket with the bounty note. Tycho had what he needed, and wasn’t about to return the ire in kind -- the recluse rarely reached his boiling point before realizing he’d gone far past it. She was kind enough, seemingly only caught in the middle of a murky web.
The gunsmith laughed once, and moved towards the door, shuffling his way through the velen’s crowded shop. He stopped there, peering out of the aperture.
“That pen blew up in the magister’s face,” Tycho stated flatly, letting the velen infer from those words whatever she might. “Sorry for inconveniencing you.”
Caught off-guard, Delphina couldn't bring herself to talk for a moment. Before Tycho left, though, she nodded. "I know that well. I was there. The night that it happened, I prayed ceaselessly to the Vis while rushing potions to those guards who were injured. I didn't know what else to do with the sorrow and the guilt that I felt. All the while I believed they would think I was part of the Astra group, that they would lock me up.
"Don't come to me a year and a half later, with the glint of exa in your eyes, and try to bring back that sick feeling. When Magister Eximium in grace and charity forgave me, it lifted an unbearable weight from my shoulders, allowed me to heal the guilt in my heart as cleanly as Castus heals a bleeding wound." She shook her head distastefully. "I wish you well in your search, bounty hunter," Delphina said, the name spitting from her lips like a curse, "but you are not welcome in this shop anymore. Please leave."
The gunsmith remained there for a moment more, the silence between them only adding to the latent tension in the air. A deep sigh was let out through his nose, though his big-headedness wouldn’t let any compunction be made apparent. Understanding her temper, to a degree, Tycho made no plans to return, satisfied the velen had bequeathed all she knew.
The door swung open to the sounds of the city, and Tycho left without another word.
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