Thar Shaddin

(This post and others in this thread do not involve Dorcas, but the NPCs that are associated with her home in Marn)

Late afternoon made an ideal time for market shopping: the morning chaos had long since dissipated, and all of the vendors were back from their midday rest. Nobody had packed up to leave for the day, yet. Perishable items, rapidly losing their freshness, were piled into markdown crates.

Meat and produce were not the only less-than-fresh features of the market at this hour. Mounds of the day's trash were reaching their critical point, and canvas curtains had become tangled and streaked with mud. All of this would be swept, smoothed, and dusted to relative tidiness for the start of the market day in the morning, but for now the entropy of the day hung in every stall.

The late afternoon market patrons were generally pretty shabby themselves. These were the bargain hunters, willing to rifle through a barrel of wormy pears to find somthing salvageable. This was also the time of day to find other types of questionable goods for sale, as seedier vendors skulked around to cater to the lower element. Some, like Flosmarra, did not appear so outwardly dissipated as others, but everyone mutually knew where they all stood. And for anybody not explicitly familiar with Flosmarra, the studded leather cuff looped around the handle of her shopping basket served as a hint. She was out shopping, but it didn't hurt to do a little casual advertising.

Flossie strolled through the narrow aisles of the market and chatted her way through amiable negotiations about price. A husband and wife vendor graciously gave her a discount on wheat flour in an exchange that involved a lot of warm smiles and mutual touching of arms. Before she left, the three of them briefly discussed meeting some time in the next few days, after dinner.

Near the back of the market, the filth of the day was rather thick, and the stalls were pushed together more tightly. Flossie had to swivel her wide hips this way and that as she navigated the footprinted mud. She found herself uninspired by the wilted leeks and scaly slabs of pork, but her basket was not as full as would be expected, and she couldn't be returning home empty-handed.

"Where is she?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Where the fuck is she?"
"Please, sir, she wasn' here when I woke, see?"
A horrible, thick noise that can only come from flesh thrown against flesh sounded from the tiny room, followed by a sharp squeal. Johnston Colbuk held a handful of auburn hair in his grubby palm, and pulled upward until the whore screeched. He bit the dry skin on his bottom lip, and his cold eyes hardened. "Now, where the fuck she be, eh?"
A tentative knock on the open door was what saved the whore. Johnston held her by her hair suspended for a moment, then looked to the doorway. "What?" From around the door frame a thick-looking blonde with a plump face and plumper breasts peeked, and then held up a wooden box of cherry that had absolutely nothing inside.
That nasty little cunt had run off with the goods. Shit.



Stella fingered the little box in her hands, tracing its edges with uncertainty. Around her neck she wore a few pieces of expensive jewelry, too many in fact for it to be fashionable. There was only so much room in the box, and she had taken everything she could get her hands on because she needed all of it, as far as it would take her. But then, now that she was too far for Johnston to find her, where was she to go? Who could she travel with? Surely she could work out some travel companions by offering her services to them along the way, but, what was she supposed to do? She realized that an escape was more difficult than she had ever imagined it would be. She realized that it was not the walls and the sickening people in charge of her who had kept her in those horrible places. It was her.

Now that she was out, she recognized that she wasn't really out. She would never be really out. She was a whore, plain and simple, and there was no other life out there waiting for her to take hold of it. She had been dealt these cards for a reason. She was meant to rot on the edges of society, lurking in the darkest places doing things she didn't enjoy to earn money for assholes like Johnston. She didn't have a choice; it was just the way things were.

Stella had entered the market hoping to sell what she had stolen and receive enough bishani to get going to a place she didn't know she wanted to go to. She had no direction, and for Stella, no direction with this much freedom was incredibly dangerous.

Putting on a shining, wonderfully fake smile, she stood in the midst of the daily market sellers between a man with some barely-alive chickens in a wooden cage, and a large-breasted woman advertising melons (appropriately so). She waved her hands around like a gypsy dancing, and slipped a necklace made of jade and ivory around her wrist from the little box. She twirled it around her fingertips to display it from different angles, and let out in a booming, feminine voice, "Jewels and gems of faraway lands! Their mystery will attract you, their beauty will suit you!" and other such nonsense words to get her point across. Women and men alike mostly passed her without much hindrance, but she was lucky to sell three of the pieces to some idiots who couldn't tell that what she was selling them was clearly not worth the amount she wanted. Half of this jewelry was fake anyway, and half of the fakes had been forged by magic.

When she tired to the point of exhaustion and her voice became hoarse, she stopped and pocketed the rest of the pieces, placing them in the box and hiding the box in a pocket inside of her blouse. She had gotten enough to get her maybe a week of food and perhaps a place to stay, and that was about it. What she really needed was a way out of this town. No, what she needed was a goal.

Stella bought a bruised pear to quiet her stomach for a bit, and moved off to the side so that she could eat without anyone accidentally bumping into her. She took the paring knife from where it was hidden in her boot, sliced a small piece of the fruit off, and swallowed it. She repeated the motion until she was nearly down to its core, then sliced it again. The knife cut her thumb and she winced and stuck her thumb in her mouth. When she took it out, it continued to bleed, and she studied the movement of the blood with a curious expression. An unhealthy expression.

What did she have in this life anyway? She had escaped thinking she could run off and live in a fairy tale for the rest of her life. She was not able to be loved; she knew that now. She did not think she would ever be able herself to love again. Children were not in her future. She knew that. What was there in this life that could make her happy?

There was nothing.

Stella flipped the small knife around in her hand. Her thumb had bled and dripped down to her wrist. She studied the knife intently, as if she had discovered it for the first time. She traced along the small blade with her index finger. Who would stop her now? None of these faceless people cared if she were to die here. She was a disposable woman, a creature of the night with one purpose alone. At this hour, in this place, she had no purpose. She had no want. She didn't have anything. Stella stared.

Flosmarra found her feet had sunk somewhat in the mud as she had dithered over whether a sort of greasy looking bunch of kale was worth her bishani. She hastily pulled her old leather shoes out of the muck and took several steps forward, onto a low plank that had been laid out to cover the ground. The hem of her puce house dress, though several inches off the ground, has also become caked with grit in the filthy market.

She set her basket down for a moment to gather her hem up in her hands and realized she found herself staring at the boots of a girl she hadn't noticed before. Flosmarra glanced up with a start to see the girl who had been hanging back from the bustle of the vendors, and who was apparently lost in reverie over the knife in her hand. "Owh! I nurly put my basket rait on top of you, girl!" she said as she straightened up and patted down the bonnet on her head.

Flossie's eyes crinkled with curiosity as she looked more carefully at the girl. Her clothing looked like a cheap imitation of luxury; if it wasn't for the relative modesty of a blouse, Flossie might have thought she looked positively gauche. Her broad face cooled with understanding and interest as she realized the girl had cut herself with her own knife.

She glanced to the side to be careful of eavesdroppers, then leaned in towards the girl. "You laik that a bit, girl?" She was speaking with her left cheek tilted towards Stella, a hint of a sly pucker in her otherwise warm smile. "Do you enjuy a bit of pain. . . guny?" The Marnian slang term was usually used affectionately by madams and pimps, as well as between working girls, and Flossie felt confident trying it out on the girl.

She knelt to put up her basket again and toyed conspicuously with the leather cuff attached to it. This could very well be a fruitful trip after all, if she returned home with a masochist working girl in tow. Her own specialty attracted a good crowd, but talk eventually attracted the opposite of the element she catered to, and thus far their meager brothel had turned away such business.

So far today, few people had bothered her. Most women were turned off by the tackiness and revealing nature of her garb, and men had only stopped to look with the occasional glance rather than showing true interest. The market was generally not the most ideal place for a street hooker, which, without Johnston to look after her now, was exactly what she was likely to become. That is, if she didn't kill herself first. With the exception of some drunken men who had tried to negotiate a price with Stella, she hadn't needed to talk to anyone outside of her own jewelry buyers.

That changed immediately when a pair of soft, rain-colored eyes caught her attention and she was forced to look at a pleasant woman who suddenly seemed to take interest in her. Her thumb was still bleeding a bit, but the running liquid hadn't gone further than her wrist. The words of the stranger made her look back with disgust and then wipe her thumb on her frock; it wouldn't stain because it was nearly the same color, not that she cared. "Nae, I don' like it, I jus' cut meself with me knife is all," she tried to convince the woman, and held up the remnants of the pear she had eaten, as if it would justify her story. She tossed the core of the pear behind her.

Stella looked at her boots, the bottoms of which had become caked with a foul mixture of mud, grime, and whatever was on the market ground that was colored blue. A few flecks of mud had gotten onto her stockings, and she frowned a bit. The woman was messing with something that Stella didn't bother to ask about.

"Ya got any interest in a necklace, lady?" Stella tucked the knife into her clothes and swiftly pulled out a fake necklace made of a black-colored stone that resembled obsidian. "It migh' go excellen' with yur skin an' all," she lied, pressing her cut thumb to her frock still to keep it from bleeding.

Flossie didn't frown at the girl's demurral, and she didn't walk away. Her thin brow wrinkled at the center, where several stray hairs bristled. She gave a motherly sort of sigh. She wasn't yet swayed from her assumptions about the girl.

"Easy there, guny," she persisted with the in-group term of endearment. Her face opened up a bit as she tut-tutted the sight of the girl's thumb muffled against her questionably sanitary frock.

Suddenly, Flossie turned her head and craned her neck around for a moment or two before spotting her target. "Nen!" she called in the direction of a nearly deserted stall selling natty, dyed yarn.

A skinny woman in a dark brown smock picked her way over to Flosmarra. She was wearing a man's felt hat over her messy black hair. She lifted a gloved hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the nearly setting sun.

When she reached them, she gave Stella a curious eye while removing her oversized gloves. She patted Flossie's cheek fondly. Her hands were lined with black scroll-pattern tattoos, her nails lacquered black. Beneath her unbecoming hat, she had a passably pretty, pale face. In fact, her delicately arched bone structure gave her the distinct appearance of a half-elf.

"Nen, nymph, seen this girl here befar?"

The half-elf named Nen turned to face Stella fully. A slightest shadow of recognition passed over Nen's face, and perhaps Stella would recognize her, in turn, if she could look past her daytime appearance. When in work uniform, she was styled Lady Ith, and she frequently stopped to visit her friends in brothels when on the way to make house calls. She'd seen Stella before.

Lady Ith--Nen--looked rather smug as she responded: "No. . ." She gave the impression she wanted to finish that sentence with "not here at least." She spent a moment pawing appraisingly at the items in Flossie's basket before leaning in to whisper something very brief, perhaps just one or two words, into her friend's ear.

Nen turned and started back towards her stall. "Later, tomater," she crowed with a halfhearted wave.

"Tchh," Flossie exhaled sympathetically between her teeth. She was reacting to whatever Nen had whispered to her, as she looked Stella over again. "Purctic'lly sepper taim, girl. . ." There would be a reason she wasn't at her home.

Indeed, many of the merchants were starting to roll up the canvas mats on their tables and pack away their unsold things. Whatever ulterior motives Flossie harbored, she was also a kind soul. "Kem for sem sepper, then?" She nudged the girl's hip with her basket. "Heh?" Flossie pursed her mouth in a hopeful sort of smile. "I laik your necklace," she added, finally responding to the sales pitch.

She didn't like this at all. She didn't like the feeling of being exposed, and the mild paranoia of being discovered. This woman didn't seem like a person who would expose her, but they were strangers, and for all she knew, Johnston could have sent someone out to find her and might have guessed that she had come to the market. She realized with a suddenness what a stupid move it had been to come here, and all at once a wave of fright washed over her. She licked her lips subtly and finally took her thumb from her dress when the woman called someone over to them, staring at her thumb and thankful that it had stopped bleeding at last. Instead of putting her arms at her sides, she nervously and obviously fumbled around with her fingers as a woman with a hat approached them.

Stella knew what elves looked like. She knew, also, what half-elves looked like, and both made her uncomfortable. She didn't really know how to behave around them. As 'Nen' removed her gloves to reveal hands far more disturbing than the stupidity of the hat she wore, Stella shuffled two tiny steps backward, as if afraid the half-blood would try to touch her cheek as well. No, she didn't like this feeling at all.

And she knew that this woman was terribly familiar. Stella flashed her eyes over the woman in a snide, condescending manner, and forced her teeth together tightly when the whispering started. She couldn't hear shit. The familiarity of the woman did anything but comfort her. Had she been found?

Stella almost glared at the unnamed woman, then caught herself and smiled falsely instead, as she looked her over like a prize pig at some Shim competition. Stella didn't trust this woman at all, and nearly jumped when the basket touched her. Should she run? Or should she drop her guard, and run only when she was sure of danger?

The lady seemed sincere enough...

Stella looked briefly to the darkening sky, and then nodded without a word. She stuffed the necklace back into the box from whence it came. She picked up her boots and followed the stranger, not out of trust or stupidity but out of curiosity, and, simply because she was there.
With no direction, she was willing to let anyone and anything guide her. No matter the vibe she got from them. Stella ran her hand over the place the knife was hidden in her clothes. Just in case.

Flossie peered over her shoulder to see that the girl was still following her as she made a few last-minute purchases on her way out of the market. She bought a small sack of new potatoes and a rangy-looking chicken, after shaking some inexplicable pine needles out of its loose, yellow skin.

She paused at the point where the aisles of the market opened up onto the slippery cobblestones of a wider road and gestured with her basket towards the right. The road sloped gently downward. Much of the foot and vehicle traffic along the road was headed the opposite direction of their intent. Flossie took the liberty of nudging Stella's elbow in encouragement as she started walking home. There was still the distinct possibility that the hooker would spook.

She walked in front of Stella, taking careful steps to keep her footing on muddy shoes and damp stones. For not being very fat, Flossie had an impressive backside. Her shoulders were soft and proportionate, and a crocheted mantle draped over them made them appear a bit broader and balanced out the thickness of her midsection. Below the tight strings of her day apron bloomed that rump. It was padded by a petticoat underneath her housedress. The hem of her skirt swung with each step, left and right, and gave her whole backside the look of a separate entity, the form of a large, shaggy dog gallumphing slowly down the road.

"I'm Flosmarra. Or Flossie," she said with a turn of her head towards Stella. "And what's your name, girl? " She pointed down the road to its intersection with a smaller street. "Jest dain there, nat so far," she reassured her.

Stella shuffled along behind the woman, staring low most of the time and shifting her gaze around to study those around her. The crowd had thinned considerably as different vendors packed up for the day, but she was on edge. The random encounter with this woman and the half-elf's short presence had renewed her paranoia. She was afraid that this stranger would betray her, and that she would be discovered and brought back to her old home. She wanted to get away from it. She knew that Nen was familiar somehow, and couldn't place her face, but if she was really somebody that Stella knew then that probably meant Nen knew where Stella was supposed to be at this hour. That was not something that bode well for the girl.

She was completely silent as the woman went about the rest of her market business, always keeping a good few paces behind her and occasionally fingering the place where her knife was hidden. She had no doubt that she could kill this woman, she just didn't know if such would be necessary, yet.

As the road changed, Stella looked to the way the woman gestured with a vague sort of comprehension. She was afraid, tense, panicky, and tired from trying to sell stolen goods. Her mind was racing due to the lack of possibilities ahead of her. She didn't know what she was going to do, or what she was doing right now, or where she was going, or where the hell she even wanted to go.
The touch to her elbow startled her and she jumped sharply, gasping and then relaxing slightly when she realized that it had simply been a nudge, and nothing more. She licked her lips again nervously. It was all too apparent that she had no idea how to behave with this woman.

Flosmarra. Friend or foe?
"Et's Stella," she answered, her voice strangely sharp despite her shaky behavior. Her heeled boots clacked on the cobblestone road with every practiced step, though it lacked her usual confidence.

"Stella." Flossie tried the name out, and nodded in approval. "Pretty."

They made the rest of the trip in relative silence, although for Flossie's part, it didn't feel awkward. Lots of working girls just weren't the chatty type. Nen, for the example she had given at the market, seemed to prefer communicating through familiar touches, whispers, and clear body language.

The only conversation Flosmarra offered during their five minute walk was to offer a bit of insight into that particular woman, the skinny Lady Ith. "Nen's a pretty sart, hm?" she mused, aware she might as well be talking to herself. "She's a quadroon, you knaw."

With Flossie's racial commentary long since faded into the misty early evening, she finally arrived at a narrow alley. She brushed Stella's shoulder to indicate the turn and then led her to the rickety wooden stairs.

The establishment she walked up to was a wooden extension built onto the side of a taller brick building. The cabin-sized pub thus jutted into the alleyway. It was small enough to give the clear impression that some other operation had to be going on in order to make business sustainable. Flossie opened the shoddy door and waved Stella inside the somewhat cramped little pub.

The smell of warm food and spices laced the air, but no food was readily visible, yet. A young man was sitting at the wet bar, bent over a journal into which he was slowly scrawling notes. When the door creaked open, he glanced up to assess the patronage. "'Ey. Flossie," he murmured, and turned his face back to his notes for a moment. In his periphery he noticed the unexpected shadow of another figure near the doorway, and he looked up again.

"Ah, hello Miss." He closed his book and gave Flossie an expectant look.

"Stella's hivving sepper with us," she said with a brightness that was nearly negated by the slow, careful quality of her tone.

The teenage boy nodded just as carefully with an eye on Stella, and then suddenly clapped his hand down on his journal and looked to Flossie. "Oh, Floss, sorry, but there's someone waiting for you upstairs. Smallish guy. Glasses."

Flossie looked utterly irritated with this news and scoffed at the clock on the wall as if to say, "At this hour?" She wiped her hands on her day apron and waved Stella the rest of the way into the room. "The guy with the gingery beard, I'll bet?"

The boy nodded and offered another apology. "He'll understand if it's got to be quick. I won't let him make you miss supper."

Flossie shook her head impatiently and tugged off the strings of her apron. "Tchh. Sarry," she said to Stella. "You knaw how it is. Please make yoursef kemfortable--" she indicated the little chairs around the room and the taller stools at the bar with a modest wave of her hand-- "anything else you need before. . ." She pointed to the sackcloth curtain at the back of the room, behind which she apparently had someone waiting for her. "Oh, an' Kenny tends the bar," she added cheerily.

The boy, Kenny, glanced back at his journal while keeping a not-so-casual eye on the two women--the newcomer in particular.

Stella had never really been much of a talker. She certainly didn't feel it necessary to make small talk with this stranger, because the fewer questions Flossie asked, the better. Stella had a hunch that Flossie already knew who, or rather what she was, and was just waiting for confirmation. If she received it, she would run as far and as fast as she could, because there was no way in hell she was returning to that changerforsaken place. Flosmarra spoke of Nen, but Stella said nothing. She didn't even acknowledge that the woman was talking to her, because it was better to distance herself as far as possible mentally. It just made things simpler.

They reached a small, questionable joint that made Stella wary. Their location and the appearance of the building made her wonder, picking at the possibility that Flossie was more than she seemed. Stella let herself be herded into the room, and moved a few tentative paces forward. The air was thick with the promise of food, a welcome invitation for a girl who hadn't had a thing to eat other than a wormy pear for the past twenty four hours or so. Stella inhaled deeply and savored the smell.

A boy greeted them, and she looked sharply toward him to access his nature when he addressed her. He was clearly young, and as he spoke, she noted his bookish voice and interested eyes. She was distracted by the subject of their talk, however. Stella moved with Flossie's hand and then nodded briefly to her when she apologized and wandered away, briefly introducing Kenny.

Stella blinked. She placed a hand on her hip and surveyed the room, eying the clunky little chairs and warm, modest appearance of the place.

She felt her confidence oddly renewed by the scent of food and the warmth of the building. Walking toward the bar, she was careful not to look at Kenny. Her boot heels clunked on the floor until she gracefully seated herself upon a stool. Only then did she look at the boy, and offer an absolutely false smile. "Kenny eh?" She grinned. "You write?" She pretended to be interested, even though she couldn't read whatever it was he was writing.

After Flossie disappeared behind the curtain, her footsteps could be heard fading off on a creaking staircase. A few voices of female timbre could be heard above, muffled beyond any recognition of actual words.

When Stella approached the bar, Kenny closed his journal just slowly enough as to not appear especially secretive. She asked if he was a writer. He lifted one side of his mouth in a smile, a boyish shrug of the face, and his eyes followed the trajectory of his own smile up to gaze at the corner of the ceiling behind him. He looked as if he were assessing a a low-lying indoor weather system.

"Nope," he finally said. His gaze and smile dropped down with the thud of that proclamation, not altogether negative in tone. He still regarded Stella with smiling eyes. He was a barman, and like her, his job involved maintaining the spirits of his customers. He could be false, too. At the moment, his falseness or lack thereof was anybody's guess.

More voices came from behind the curtain, this time seemingly from below their level. A female, shrill, and another whose tone was as soft as the hum of a spinning wheel.

Kenny had been staring at Stella's face for a few moments before the sounds from below broke his brief train of thought.

"Stella," he said as he looked at the curtain, reminding himself of her name as much as addressing her. "Supper's almost ready, I guess." The boy knelt behind the counter and took some time pushing aside a few things in search of clean glasses. "What do you drink, sweetheart?" He had slipped up just a bit there, failed to maintain his cultivated attitude, in calling her on such familiar terms. It was somewhat unbecoming, this boy whose adult voice had barely yet come to roost, saying such a thing to an older woman. The term itself was hardly the worst name a boy had ever called a girl, and in fact sounded aloofly affectionate.

Kenny stood up and deposited a decanter on the bar that contained a few inches of amber liquid, along with a stout little glass. He had a smear of dust along his cheekbone that well outshone the meager hint of the five o'clock shadow near his jawline.

"Brandy?" He was looking at the crystal stopped of the decanter, but found his gaze thus also in line with the girl's decolletage. He couldn't help but let that realization idle for a few seconds before doing anything about it and actually shifting his line of sight. Then he poured himself a small drink and slurped it down.

"To your health?" Kenny offered as he nudged the glass in her direction.

Her failure at starting a conversation did not phase her, as she was all too content to simply sit there and do next to nothing to amuse herself. The scent of food was incredibly distracting, and she had to swallow far more often than normal; she found herself salivating with need. It felt like forever since she had last eaten, though it was true that she had gone longer without food before. Still, the signs of a future meal taunted her senses and teased her. She would have to try and distract herself with Kenny, as Flossie was attending to business (of the variety that Stella had so easily guessed) and the other girls chattered upstairs like squirrels in a nest.

She flitted her eyes to the curtain for a moment, and then leaned forward, folding her hands together and resting them on the bar. Her hair, a bit messed from the day's work, hung over one side of her face and she kept her eyes trained on her fingers. She knew what this place was, or at least had a hunch. A more sensible woman might have run, for she had only just escaped such a situation the evening prior. But the warmth of the shabby building and the promise of supper held her there, secretly on edge, failing to form a plan that would work. She had no plan. She had never had a plan.

Her name jolted her attention, if only just. She looked back up at him without moving and watched as he fumbled around behind the counter. She grinned expertly at his question and the affection he attached to it, revealing a set of remarkably nice teeth for the times. "Brandy," she parroted; she had never really preferred one drink to another, and had learned to simply pretend that the man offering said drink to her believed that he had guessed correctly.

She laughed then, a recited, light chittering that sounded very little like her actual laugh. "Ta me breasts," she teased, waited for him to pour, and drank.

Banter, Kenny could do. Stella's tone seemed a little brighter, maybe sassier than before. He grinned into her glass as he filled it. "I can see why Flossie likes you."

The boy took her overt mention of them as permission to give her breasts another thoughtful stare. As she drank, he rephrased her toast. "Ah, to your charms, may they enjoy a full youth, and may they one day accept with grace the gravity of years well lived." With enough practice, barroom wit came as mindlessly as any other small talk.

Kenny exhibited an impressive degree of either restraint or tact as he returned the bottle to its shelf behind the counter. It was arguably the classy thing to do--classier than, say, the outward appearance of the bar, and its obvious dual purpose as a brothel would call for. However, the little bar perhaps did have something to it that suggested this was a different sort of place. Classy wasn't exactly the word for it, but the floors of the room were tidy, clean of residue, and the visible liquor selection walked the respectable middle road between cheap rotgut and insensible top-shelf trophies. This just didn't seem like the kind of place where customers regularly got piss drunk, or where brawls broke out. And before supper was not the time to overindulge.

Steps could be heard coming up the stairs, and then a pause before a voice just behind the curtain. "Otter! Bring the salt to the table, don't add it now, I'm sensitive, positively." It was the softer female voice, husky and spoiled and weary. "Oh, for the love. . ." The voice trailed off as the feet padded quickly back down the steps.

Kenny had glanced over to the curtain when the woman's voice sounded, then back to Stella with a humorous smile when it seemed there was a hangup in kitchen communication. "Any minute now," he reassured her.

"So." He placed a hand on the counter near hers. It was just close enough to be conscious, whether by imagination or reality, of the heat of warm-bloodedness off her skin. "Are you--and your charms--staying the night in our humble palace?"

People liked Stella. They liked her before they understood the constant turmoil of her thoughts, before they realized her unpredictability, and before they witnessed her pull a knife on them for no apparent reason. She was trained in social settings, manipulative of the behavior of herself and of others, molding a situation to her favor. She knew only how to do this in a way that benefited her business, and had never quite mastered it to the point where she could effectively manipulate any situation to her liking without the involvement of sex or else throwing herself around subtly as she was now. She was a complicated and yet simple creature all at once, but for now she allowed herself the opportunity to jest with Kenny.

She set her emptied glass down on the bar and chuckled at the boy listed off all the wonderful ways in which her "charms" should experience good fortune. She could drink to such words any day. She pulled her arms closer together to not-so-subtly squeeze her breasts together and expose yet more cleavage, playing with the position of her shoulders to affect them and laughing while the bar boy returned the bottle and sounds stole her interest once more from behind the curtain.

Stella stopped her cleavage manipulation and wondered briefly what face went to such a voice. She inhaled again and sighed, hardly a fraction of a second before Kenny assured the promise of a hot meal.

His question caught her off guard, as she hadn't thought that far ahead and was still pondering whether or not it was a good idea to essentially eat and run, as far away as her weary feet would carry her. There was a charm to this place that her own brothel did not have. Where she had been living it was dank, dark, grungy. Brawls at the bar were not only common but expected. The business as a whole had never been something of glory; it was naturally in areas like this, hidden away, or at the edges of society. She knew there was no chance of happiness here no matter if she stayed or not.

But the hour was late, and the temptation tickled her mind.

She craned her neck slightly and shifted her body weight to give him her full attention, grinning in a charismatic, suggestive light. "Mayhaps, if ye can find a bed big enough ta hold 'em," she jested. Her charms, of course, were of a natural and normal size. She winked.

For a boy who lived in a brothel, Kenny still managed to have a healthy appreciation and attention span towards a pretty pair of breasts. Perhaps it was his youthful libido, or perhaps the natural male inclination towards variety that kept him interested in ogling a new hooker, when he was surrounded by them every day.

"Oh sweetheart, we'll find you a bed perfect to accommodate whatever charms you decide to pull out." He tapped his fingers smartly on the counter beside her hand, and then stepped out from behind the counter to walk to the back of the room where the curtain hung.

He pulled it aside, and immediately tut-tutted at something he saw. "Oh come on, lemme get that," he said rather gently, and disappeared behind the curtain for just a moment.

Kenny came back into the barroom carrying a large tureen with a blue glazed exterior and something sloshing inside. A young woman appeared behind him, preceded by the lump of her stomach. She rather swayed into the room, dabbing at the wispy curls around her hairline that had formed in the steam. Her olive skin shone with beads of condensed steam, and she was flushed from either heat or exertion.

After Kenny placed the soup pot on one of the low tables, the woman put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself, and placed her other hand below the swell of her tummy, which accentuated its form. She was probably nearing her third trimester of pregnancy.

"Who's this?" cooed the woman as she stared at Stella from the middle of the room. She maintained a wide-eyed expression and her hand dropped down the length of Kenny's arm to grip his hand.

The was the sound of more motion behind the curtain, the sound of someone descending the stairs from above and heading down into the kitchen. The promise of food seemed near. The tureen Kenny had already brought up was steaming and aromatic.

"Ah--Udorl, Stella. Stella is a friend of Flossie's come to visit us tonight." He shifted his hand from beneath Udorl's so as to gesture in Stella's direction as he made introductions. Udorl shifted her weight ever so slightly closer to Kenny's side and slowly rubbed her hand up and down her belly as she smiled in Stella's direction.

"And Stella, Udorl is my sister. In-law." He might have flushed just a little bit too, if only from the steam.

Udorl padded nearer to Stella--her feet were clad in felt slippers--and inclined her head, not too graciously. "Hello, dear, I'm the lady of this house." She was certainly all lady. As if her pregnancy didn't afford her ample enough mass to flaunt, she was also showing more cleavage than Stella herself, bound into a tailored bodice of green brocade. Her skirt was long and generously cut, with a wide silk ribbon along its high waist that tied in a bow right above her belly. The effect was slightly ridiculous, to be tied up like a pregnancy parcel, and yet Udorl was somehow lovely enough as to offset this. Her oil-black hair was tied with a similar ribbon, in a loose tail to the right side of her face. She could have been a peasant princess.

Stella might have noticed the way Kenny watched Udorl walking. He looked so intent, but sad. After his sister-in-law spoke up, he glanced past her to Stella again and gave her a rueful half-smile. "You should sit down, dear sister."

Udorl batted her eyes very slowly and looked Stella up and down. "Stella. . . will you be sitting with us? Or with the other wh--"

"With Flossie," Kenny interjected hastily. "With Flossie and the girls, that is. Because our tables are small. Would you, ah, like to sit with Flossie then, or alongside myself--and Udorl, and my brother. . .?"