"Yes, well, let's move on. Untrained shooter, hmm?"

"Yeah. I've used a bam-stick, but not often and I'm an awful shot. Though I've also never had the need to defend myself personally, and the Ambiguous Officer suggested they'll try and give me a proper shooting lesson; maybe I'll be competent with a little practice now that I'm motivated."

"So no marksmanship rifle for you..."

"I was thinking shotgun," the officer says. 

"Hush, let me decide. Which of these sounds best? A gun that will shoot every single time you pull the trigger, even underwater or soaked in mud. A gun that hits really, really, really hard and kills things that usually take more. A gun so steady and smooth an arthritic octogenarian can shoot it five times without so much as a creaking joint."

"Probably the steady one. If I lose my footing I'm in trouble, the cane isn't decorative."

"Pistol then. Clever blowback mechanisms and springs can get the recoil down to almost nothing. I can do that."

He fishes out a wooden and obviously fake pistol from one of the many cubbies, plus a small tape measure.

"Hold that and let me get a couple measurements."

"Sure," she says, and watches how he goes about measuring and whatever fine-tuning or inspecting he needs for the gun itself. She won't understand what he's doing, but she can - probably, he is a new species - understand how he's doing it, and thinking about it.

Quickly and intuitively and efficiently, with occasional shouts to fetch this or that.

He continuously asks questions about mizzium as he works. Does it shatter. How dense is it. How expensive is it. What materials go into it. Any idea what kind of tooling is necessary to shape it. Does it react with a long list of chemicals. Does it rust. Does it accept paint. Is it electrically conductive and how much. Et cetera.

The gun taking shape is a slick, boxy shape, with bevels and curves along all the edges. It'll fire this standard kind of bullet and shouldn't be too hard to clean. At one point he uses tongs to place a tiny ruby glowing like miniature star inside some complicated assemblage, and mentions she'll need to cook it in a fire if it ever dims.

Mizzium is very difficult to shape, possibly it just has to be reforged entirely, she doesn't know. It's less dense than steel, but not by a large margin, maybe ten percent. Very expensive; a decorative mizzium bracelet would cost her about a week's wages, and she made more zinos in a day than a common laborer would make in a lifetime. She doesn't recognize most of the chemical names, but it's not very reactive and doesn't rust, patina, or anything like that. Probably refuses paint, there are slightly-adulterated alloys used to change the color. Mizzium wires are used for some high-performance structures, she's pretty sure, but she doesn't know how much better it is.

His overall manner is reassuring; she doesn't think he's quite too busy thinking to lie, but it's definitely not his priority. The gun itself certainly looks sophisticated, even compared to the others she's seen which seemed very advanced to her.

The whole process takes a couple of hours, complete with a grip adjusted specifically for her hand shape.

"Here we are. Take a look, get used to the feel of it. One Nibble Custom. It's low recoil like you asked, but I was thinking about it some more and for low-skill shooting the benefits of a mirror-dot sight outweigh the drawbacks. These are very new, very clever, and only work because Navarantine Rubies make about as much sense as bombazine, glowing like that - I think an explanation of the optics here would be a bit wasted on you, but the long and short of it is you just need to line up the red dot with what you want to shoot, instead of having to hold your head just so and align fore sight, aft sight, and target."

The Ambiguous Officer certainly seems excited as they quiz him on some of the details. And sure enough, if she holds the gun in front of her, there's two thin little lines of red light shining brightly, seeming to hover in midair, moving slightly as the angle changes.

"It probably would be," she nods at the mention of optics, "I know how a telescope or microscope works but that's about the extent of it. What are the drawbacks?"

She vaguely remembers the first rule of bam-sticks to be "don't point with it unless you'd be okay if it fired spontaneously", which probably applies here. She points it toward the far wall, and looks down the barrel while listening to the Officer ask questions.

The boxy sight on top with its red crosshairs does seem to be a bit more intuitive to use than iron sights.

"Expensive. It's not great at range, the dot obscures the target. But you're not going to be entering any marksmanship competitions, are you? Mox, you'll handle the teaching?"

"I most certainly will, it'll be fun."

"Great, let me just scribble down some quick maintenance notes and we'll be done here."

"Indeed not. Thank you, Nibbles. Where should we go for practice, Officer?"

"Gun ranges are popular enough that there's plenty of options," they say cheerily.

The lesson goes as well as can be expected, after they find an oddly cozy range with short-range targets. The Officer has good training mannerisms - they drill her in safety, then shows her how to load, unload, unsafe, re-safe, and do various other operations on the pistol, including disassembling it partway a few times. Then the Ambiguous Officer fires the gun a couple of times, to get used to it. Then actually shooting, with a large amount of correcting the position of her hands and fingers and critiquing her breathing.

"You'll not become a markswoman in an hour. Practice, practice, until it's automatic, or you'll just forget it all when it's shoot or die."

She's attentive and perceptive, but she clearly doesn't have any instincts for anything like this. She improves a little, though.

"I'm familiar with the principle, yes; 'your practice is how you'll play'. I'll find time. I hope the ammunition is standardized?"

"Yes, this is chambered for forty five-seventy, any arms dealer will have it standard. Just a quick tip, if a place smells like this range does? They're lazy about cleanup and probably unreliable in other ways too. There's different types of ammunition, you probably just want to get round."

"The smell's for the shops? I'll keep it in mind. What else is there, other than round? Hits harder, more accurate, that kind of thing?"

"Wad-cutter's specifically for target shooting, makes nice clean holes. It'll still kill people, just not as much. Blanks have no actual projectile, for... Show, I guess? You use them to start races?" The Officer shrugs. "Ballistic capped flies further, more accurately. Hollow point does more damage to flesh but won't penetrate much. Armor-piercing is what it says on the tin, anything 'jacketed' is the same. Incendiary and explosive shot mostly doesn't come in calibers as small as yours. There's more exotic variations but that's the basic idea."

"Yes, I think I'll be fine without them. Right, I guess I should look for somewhere to stay now. Any ideas?"

"Don't want your introductions right away?"

"A specific introduction counts as an idea. But introductions first is good too."

"My advice for safe accommodations is to make friends with someone who needs manual labor and have the thrulls do some of said labor. The Gentlemen take time and proving oneself to trust. I can bring you around and get people used to seeing you with me, see who's in today, specifics depend on results of said endeavor."

"Fair enough. Without anything to keep them bound together, paranoia is probably an important job skill. Introductions, then."

They start walking in the right direction, after making sure the new gun is safely holstered.

"A key component of the bindings is a distrust of outsiders. I'm sure I only see the surface, and only 'cause I kicked a fat overseer in the nuts when I got fed up with his lechery, and stole enough codebooks and stamps to play hell with the bureaucracy for years, so they have a grudging sort of respect. But I'm not in the business, see?"

"I do. We had... well, more magic. Break your word and that wouldn't be the only thing breaking. But there was still in and out."

"So it goes."

The Officer is happy to take the rest of the walk in silence; The Gentlemen's demesne is a warren of ramshackle construction over old crumbling stones. Laughter and shouting ring out, and knives glint openly in the lamplight. The two human figures and two thrulls attract all sorts of stares and whispers just by approaching this area. They walk quietly until she recognizes a group.

"Travis! I'm here to make introductions."

Travis nearly draws a knife with a suspicious scowl as he turns. "Who the fuck-? Oh, it's Nutcracker." And then he relaxes and opens into a wide shrug, the two obvious lackeys standing behind him. "What's two nice gals like you doing in a hive of scum like this? Got any fresh news for the box?"

"Nah, not today. You know me, stick my toes in but never going swimming. Anyway, Captain brought us out to fucking Piranesi and we're out again to God knows where soon. Like I said, introductions."

"Welllll if I have the pleasure of being yer host today, mind explaining what the walking corpses are about, madam...?"

"She's going by the Dire Lady. They seem obedient, didn't make a peep on the trip over."

"Evocative. And useful."