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It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
"Well I have no idea what you guys are talking about but uuuh, blonde lady, you seem weirdly nice for a vampire. But then, that may just be because you're really pretty."
"I--" not hope, hope is Iomedae's, 'strive for' "--strive for you to make it."
That's it, that's all she can say. Really all she can even think. 'I strive for you to make it.' It's too close, the stranger, to -- too many different things she's learned to accept the loss of, layered on top of one another.
She focuses on looking forward to the Letho blood. And then the other part of what the stranger said catches up with her.
"Oh, some crazy Chelish guy is making giant flying wolves that somehow count as part human for some magical purposes. And I'm an anthropovore, so . . ."
". . . By the way, what's --" BY GOD SHE SHOULDN'T ASK THIS "--your name? Mine's Teg, if you didn't catch it." WHAT ARE THEY DOING, WHAT CONVERSATION IS GOING ON TONIGHT
She runs out.
"Five guinea pigs."
She's holding one out, a black-and-white piebald one. It's squeaking.
???? What do they want guinea pigs in here for? Oh, forget it, Somayyeh, mandarins don't do things for reasons.
"Praise the Gay Patient."
She answers Katie's question before she gets distracted [ actually, should she get distracted? whatever, if Katie escapes that was Urgathoa's will too. plus she's pretty securely bound ].
"Well, they're really good in combat, and they don't answer directly to Hell, but they're smart enough that they can answer directly to Cheliax." She grimaces. "They don't have souls though. He's making other stuff too. Evil phoenixes . . ."
"Hey guys, I don't mean to be a bother, but --"
She catches them all, gathers them all up into her cloak and holds it at arm's length.
"Aww, babies! Oh, shit, you're totally gonna sacrifice these things, aren't you. Oh, well, whatever, not like they live very long anyway I guess."
She does not appear to be paying very much attention directly to Katie anymore. She is paying a lot of attention to her cloak.
"Hey, Tazich --" head jerk toward Katie "-- could you --?"
Nod. Though also paying a lot of attention to Teg's cloak, she moves and takes up the watch over Katie's semiprone, bound form, fiddling with one of two hilts with an eyebrow raised.
She edges into a darkish corner, drops all the guinea pigs in her lap, puts up the cloak with one arm as a privacy barrier, and with the other hand breaks their necks before draining them one by one.
People continue sifting through the lab stuff. Ran has put together a makeshift stove on the floor, embanked slightly in the hallway so it won't be seen from outside even through the front-entrance curtains. [ The lamps they've left on are dimmer and softer than the fire. ]
When she lowers the cloak there's still enough blood around her mouth to make it obvious what she's been doing. She's not very conscious of that, though. She nudges the drained guinea pigs a bit away from her so the others can retrieve them.
She picks -- what appear to be not soybeans, actually, but fava beans -- from the tortured, mammoth plant that's been disentangled from Katie and now reaches halfway across the shop floor, and throws them in one of the pans over the fire, which Somayyeh has gotten up to Create Water into.
They generally confer about what to put in the four pots. They toss a [ beheaded, skinned and gutted ] guinea pig in one of them and it starts subtly growing.
They rouse Teg and sub in Ran to watch Katie so Tazich can help too. Out of the bag of holding the non-Ran four heft a dead bat-winged wolf the size of a draft horse, pushing it off to the side of the ritual circle. Its ears resemble a sheep's and its limply rolling eyes resemble a human's.
Teg and Tazich in particular appear distracted by it.
"Wait, are you guys... cooking? The guinea pigs weren't sacrifices, they were ingredients! Is this, like, part of the ritual, or are you just hungry?"
"There's a little-known Neutral Evil saying. 'You can maximize two functions at once.'"
??? Is Urgathoa messing with them?
She signals Ran to open up a Whisper, and has Ran signal Teg to Detect Evil on Katie.
Hm, somehow that actually feels more unsettling.
She tries to keep her composure.
"That is the plan. You might live, kid."
Please, Urgathoa, kill her. She will die, right?
She considers framing the outsider for an escape attempt so the skirmish ending in the stranger's execution, which is looking increasingly less likely, can happen as Somayyeh originally envisioned it.