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It's always nice, trading at the Cumaean Canal. She spends the morning sipping coffee in town while she catches up on surface gossip. She collects various bits of intelligence about who's up to what. She keeps in touch with a few friends.
And then around midday a surface barge makes it through the canal. A Tanned Merchant that she's made an ongoing arrangement with brings a hold full of surface produce, and she has a matching load of darkdrop coffee beans for him. She and her crew haul pallets of beans up from the hold of the Heart's Handbasket, her ship, and wait at the staging area as the Merchant's deckhands unload their cargo as well. She walks up, apocyan and irrigo streaks bouncing gently in her currently peligin curls, and clasps his wrist with quiet smile.
"Pleasure doing business with you as always."
He grins, leathery fingers wrapping around her wiry wrist in turn. "Likewise, carissima. You and yours have been well?"
"As ever," she replies with a smirk. "My ship is one of a kind, and we keep each other safe." She snugs a living wooden sculpture of a woman into her side.
"Good, good. Perhaps one day you two will finally come have a drink with me in Naples."
She shakes her head with a chuckle, dark feathered wings spreading briefly behind her. "And perhaps one day you'll remember that the sunlight won't be as kind to us as it is to you, and instead come down here early enough to get lunch with us."
He laughs, and they exchange various bits of news. The various crews start transferring pallets while the two captains finish their chat. No one notices two stacks of mirrorcatch boxes being exchanged, tucked away among the lettuce and the coffee.
When the conversation wraps up, both captains and the wooden beauty start hauling pallets as well. The job is done soon enough, both holds full once more. The boxes disappear into a hidden compartment, lost beneath pallets of fruit and vegetables.
And then she dismisses her crew for the rest of the day, and resumes chatting and hearing people's stories.
