Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Trixie's Bar (Everyone welcome)

Basil whistled and phased through the ceiling, meeting Xueqing at the top of the stairs. "What's cookin' sista?" She asked, her eye-lights studying the girl.

Realizing that a skeleton was in front of her, her footsteps paused as she tried to stabilize herself.

"...Devilish scare. Mobs invading my home. Getting myself almost dead. Then a weird woman coming in doing weird stuff."

Xueqing seemed like she wanted to sleep. Really.

She gave a big yawn, then proceeded to look for a bedroom. Or at least a bed.

"Gee, you really do look tired! Why don't I help with that?" Basil giggled as she waved her wand, cleaning Xueqing up and putting her in pretty pajamas, before blinking her into Sue's room, as the girl fell into the bed. Basil's giggle could be heard across the hallway. "Heeheehee~" She appeared in the room through the floor, and conjured a glass of water on the bedside table. "Rest easy~ and just whistle if you need anything~"

This girl literally passed out the second she made contact with the bed.

Someone put a blanket over her. /hj

"I dunno. I never met that overgrown raisin."

Her gaze, hoarfrost-still, moved over the board with the slow certainty of a glacier reading the valley it intends to take. He watched that appraisal without flinching. Ixqueya’s inquests were to be expected. She was nothing if not demanding. Nothing if not precise.

In his corner, the tavern was a small hollow in a larger wilderness. A wooden burrow dug into the flank of night. The hearth’s fire pulsed behind its grate like a captive sun, lesser than the true sky but stubborn in its service. Lanternlight fell in amber patches across the floorboards, like late autumn sunlight finding gaps in a canopy. Beyond those pools, shadow held its ground. Patient. Old. Watari painted as though he were listening to a landscape.

The board took pigment the way bark takes rain. Dark umber became beam-shadow. A warmer wash became the hearth’s breath. He coaxed the room into being with the same attention he once gave to tracking prints in windblown grass. He did not prettify. He did not condemn. He rendered what endured. Scarred tables. A bench worn smooth by a thousand restless shifts. The dull gleam of pewter. The soot-stain that climbed a post like a slow vine.

He nodded at her commentary. He smiled as well, faint and unoffended, as if she had named the obvious truth of a hill. Small. Temporary. Bound for erasure. “You are right, this chamber is not a cathedral. It is not a throne-room. It is not a place that expects remembrance.” He laid another line. A thin edge of light on a tankard rim. A shadow under a table where boots had worried the boards. Small details. Honest ones. “But the world is not only made of what announces itself,” he continued. “The great deeds happen under banners. Then they pass. The quiet lives happen in rooms like this. They pass too. Often faster.”

His voice stayed gentle. It carried the cadence of long roads. Of campfires under open sky. Of stories spoken low so as not to wake the wolves. “In the steppe, the land does not keep your words for you. The wind takes them. The grass folds back. Hooves erase tracks by morning. If you want a thing remembered, you must place it somewhere the weather cannot reach so easily.” He glanced at the board as though it were a small cairn built from color.

“Everything is forgotten in time,” he said. “Even death claims memory. It takes names. Then it takes the mouths that speak them. It is not enough that a man dies. He must also be unmade.” His brush slowed, then hovered. The bristles trembled with a bead of pigment like dark sap. “Art is how we delay that. Not by victory. Only by stubbornness. A leaf pressed between pages does not remain a leaf. It becomes a sign that autumn once existed. A creature trapped in amber does not live. Yet it refuses complete erasure. That is what I chase.”

He rinsed the brush. The water clouded like silt in a creek after rain. He swirled it once and set it down again with the care of someone who has learned that even small tools deserve steadiness. Then he did something that did not fit her severity. He asked, simply, and with real curiosity. Inside him, the question she had asked kept turning. Whom do you serve when no witness remains. It was the kind of inquiry that strips a man down the way winter strips a tree. Leaves gone. Sap slowed. Only the load-bearing branches left.

He thought of what he had bowed to over the years. Not crowns. Not applause. He had bowed to necessity. He had bowed to comradeship. He had bowed, at times, to sheer survival. He had outlived men who deserved longer summers than they were granted. The memory of them sat in him like stones carried in a pouch, not heavy enough to stop him walking, never light enough to forget. He looked at Ixqueya again, and answered her creed-question without trying to polish it into something impressive. “I do not believe in that Lord of Light. I do not feel it in my bones.”

He let the statement stand cleanly. Then he softened it, not into faith, but into tolerance. “But I find it inoffensive,” he added. “Some have found peace beneath it. Some have found the courage to be kinder than they would have been. If that is true, then I will not begrudge them their warmth, even if it is not mine.” His gaze lowered briefly to the board, to the humble scene he had chosen as subject. Then he spoke of the Tree. “As for the Tree of Life. The Undying Tree.” His voice grew quieter, as if he were speaking of roots beneath soil. “I do not hold it as ornament. I subscribe to it because I have seen it.”

A pause. A breath. “I have seen endings refuse to stay ended. I have seen rot become door. I have watched the world take what should have been final and fold it into a new shape. When you have seen that, it stops being scaffolding. It becomes weather. It becomes terrain.” He shrugged one shoulder and set the painting back onto its stand. His eyes traveled its details again. The way a forester studies a grove, deciding where the deadwood lies, deciding what should be left untouched.

“I paint to preserve,” he said. “To raise questions. To make a mind stop and look twice.” A small grin came, bright as sun on snow. It held acknowledgement and a gentle jeer. “You should understand that. You lecture about how ice preserves. How cold keeps rot from doing its work too quickly. I do the same with pigment. My frost is color.” Then he exhaled. Her philosophy deserved respect. It also deserved friction where it overreached.

“You say power is a consensual hallucination. Often it is. Crowds are easy to steer. They will crown a man at dawn and stone him by dusk if hunger sharpens.” His eyes lifted to her. Steady. Warm. Unafraid of her verdict. “But some sovereignties do not need acclaim,” he continued. “A river does not ask permission to carve a valley. A mountain does not require a vote to cast its shadow. Winter does not convene a council. It arrives.”

He did not deny her last sentence, either. He refined it. “And yes,” he said, “death is sovereign. It comes. It tabulates. It repossesses.” His voice remained calm, yet something firmer moved beneath it. “But it is not the only force that does not require applause. Love does not ask a crowd to make it real. It burns in one heart. It changes what that heart will do. Memory is the same. Principle too. They are not thrones. They are roots. Quiet. Persistent. They crack stone over time.” He looked again at the painted patrons. The soon-to-be-forgotten. The soon-to-be-dead.

“These small lives matter while they are here. Not because the cosmos claps. Because choices ripple. A hand shared at the right moment can keep a man from becoming a corpse that night. A kindness can turn aside a cruelty that would have taken root. It is not grand. It is still real.” His hand rested lightly on the stand, not painting for a breath. The tavern continued its murmurs like wind in reeds. Fire cracked. Smoke brooded overhead.

“When the fire gutters,” Watari answered at last, “and the snows press in, and no one remains to witness me. I will still be serving the same thing.” His smile returned, smaller now, true. “I will be serving remembrance. Not glory. Not comfort. Remembrance. The refusal to let the world vanish cleanly.” He tilted his head toward the painting again, returning to her final barb without bitterness.

“And if it is also distraction; then it is a humane one. A mind cannot stare into the night forever without finding it staring back.” His eyes held hers. He let the question stand beneath the low canopy of smoke, like a lantern set on the ground in a dark wood.

Ixqueya withheld her reply.

The panel remained before her like a reliquary laid open for inspection. Not a devotional object, but an exhibit. Hours macerated into stain and glaze. She did not appraise the depiction alone. She weighed the mind that had composed it. The strict rationing of radiance. The sanctioned persistence of umbrage. The way the grate’s embercore was rendered less as comfort than as deposition, as if flame itself had been compelled to testify. It was a restraint elevated into a principle. A homily without a congregation. A memorial that refused sanctimony.

Around them, the tavern persisted in its paltry observances. Mugs rose and settled with the cadence of small appetites. Cutlery whispered against crockery in a slow abrasion that sounded like thrift made audible. Vapors from the hearth refused ascent. They clung beneath the rafters in a low, self-inflicted canopy, soot-dark and meekly interminable. The blaze continued to speak in bright crackle and ruddy breath, yet near her it felt diminished by classification, not quenched. Subordinated. A domesticated astral thing penned behind iron.

On the painted surface, bodies existed without appropriation. A shoulder angled toward warmth. A back bowed into vigilance. Fingers strangling a tankard as if it were a charm against the next hour. No pilfered faces. No sentimental larceny. Only mass, inclination, and intent. The commonplace reduced to its cadaveric syntax.

When she finally spoke, her cadence carried no mollification. No warmth. Only the immaculate sound of adjudication that required no public assent.

“You take my austerity for disdain,” Ixqueya said. “You are mistaken. I do not hate recollection. I despise the pageantry that anoints it.”

Her gaze did not lift to him immediately. It lingered in the interval between them, as if assessing whether speech itself merited habitation in that air.

“Remembrance is not dominion. It is a leech that survives by sufferance. It squats within the living and perishes when the living deny it lodging.” A pause. Mortician-calm. “A page without eyes is pulp. A bone without rite is offal. A name without a mouth is mute air.”

The lantern’s amber pool quivered across the board’s grain. The painted hearth remained a bruised nucleus of heat. Her pupils did not widen. Her features did not soften. Her attention had the chill of stone floors in chapels where the dead are kept near the altar so the faithful do not forget the tariff of breath.

“You speak like a man enamored of roots,” she said, eyes returning to the work. “You forget that ground turns rancid. That hoarfrost thickens. That tenacity is not eternality. It is a treaty with what will outlast you.”

Her armor answered her breath with minute, arthropodal assent. Plates settled. Seams flexed. A faint kiss of frost lingered where she had stood before, then ebbed, leaving only a pallid trace as if warmth had been taxed and found wanting.

“You have raised a creed of postponement,” she went on. “You traffic with dissolution. You bottle instants like specimens in spirit.” Her gaze drifted along a stingy highlight he had granted to a tankard’s rim. It was exact. Intractable. “You do not claim conquest. You pursue deferral with the devotion of a man who has mistaken delay for virtue.”

Her eyes narrowed. Not in rebuke. In discernment.

“Here, we part.”

She straightened, and the room’s heat seemed to recoil in reflex, as if embarrassed to be discovered in her vicinity.

“You treat reprieve as service,” Ixqueya said. “I treat it as implement. A fulcrum. A wedge. A key.” Her voice acquired that flinty, tutelary cadence that dismantled illusions without raising volume. “Finality is the only reason your refusal matters. Remove death, and your preservation becomes trinketry. A narcotic for the timid who cannot bear clean endings.”

Her regard swept the room; the barkeep’s counting fingers. The patrons hoard warmth like coins. The choreography of creatures behaving as though tomorrow were owed to them by covenant.

“Your work is not frivolity,” she allowed, and the concession arrived antiseptic, unromantic. “It is accurate. It notices what most discard. That has use.” The word sat like a cold weight. “Do not alchemize use into transcendence. Preservation is not revolt. It is collaboration with inevitability under terms you cannot ultimately impose.”

She inclined her head with the sparseness of a magistrate acknowledging competence. Nothing more.

“You are not a zealot,” she added. “That alone prevents you from becoming tedious.”

Praise from her came as an absence. No ornament. No caress.

When she spoke Sukegei’s name, it fell into the air like a chill coin dropped onto stone.

“Your inference aligns with my own,” Ixqueya said. “Tools are seldom told when the altar is already dressed. Foreknowledge compromises function.” Her eyes hardened, pale as lake ice over depth. “If he endures, it will be by mischance. Not by mercy.”

Silence coagulated. Even the hearth’s crackle sounded, for a moment, like punctuation.

Ixqueya retreated a pace. Then another. The tavern’s warmth crept into the territory she vacated, cautious as a mendicant testing whether the storm had truly withdrawn.

“You have answered sufficiently,” she said. “I require nothing further.”

Her gaze lingered on the board once more. Not possessive. Not wistful. Appraising, as one appraises a bridge after crossing. Which supports are held? Which joints protested?

“Continue,” Ixqueya concluded. “The mundane requires witnesses, even when it does not merit them.”

She turned away.

No flourish attended her withdrawal. No threat. No blessing. Only the winter recession from a room that had endured it without succumbing to its polar spell.

She did not depart the establishment. She repositioned.

Nine feet of cold jurisprudence moved with a rehearsed economy. The floorboards registered her passage in deep, reluctant groans. Patrons tracked her with peripheral instinct, then performed forgetfulness with the quick reverence of those who understand the etiquette of tempests.

She returned to her corner. The same alcove of thinned traffic. The same angle from which the room could be read like an account book without requesting permission. She did not sit immediately. She regarded the chair as one might regard an animal with a history of biting. Then she lowered herself with measured inevitability. Wood complained. The table trembled. The furniture offered its small, ignoble prayer by enduring.

Her ledger waited where she had left it. Clasp sealed. Cover cold and dark. She drew it nearer without opening it. Not yet. It was not solace. It was an audit. Her palm settled upon it with a gesture that could have resembled benediction in a kinder creature. In her it was ownership. A hand laid upon an altar to remind the altar who dictates the rite.

From this vantage, she observed without being approached. She accrued the room.

A sleeve tugged down too quickly. A glance rehearsing exits. A coin counted twice, as though arithmetic could bargain with fate. A laugh arriving late enough to betray its manufacture. Kindness performed too loudly to be clean. The banal always indicted itself when watched long enough. Deceit required motion. Innocence did not.

Her eyes drifted, briefly, toward Watari’s corner again. Not an invitation. Assessment. He had resumed his labor. He would, because men who treat quiet craft as a vow are less predictable than braggarts. Braggarts announce themselves. Vowed men persist. Persistence could be a virtue. Persistence could be camouflage.

He was Nokhoi. Southern. A lineage she dismissed in aggregate with the ease others reserved for vermin. Yet he possessed a restraint that did not smell of court. It smelled of attrition. That incongruity made him an irritant to her taxonomy. A blade tempered without vanity. A mind that could have knelt to cheaper idols and instead chose a harsher discipline.

She watched the room the way a mortician watches mourners. Patient. Unsparing. Mildly contemptuous of performance. These patrons would lie still one day. Their fears would become irrelevant. Their schemes would lose their hands.

Death did not require applause. Only time.

Her gaze slid to the hearth. The fire looked vigorous. Hungry. Demanding fuel, air, attention. A poor god. A god that could be starved. Warmth drew worship because it sells the illusion of permanence.

She did not grant the illusion of laughter. Her mouth moved in a minimal curve that was not amusement—recognition, sharp and private.

“So much devotion,” she murmured, too low to become theatre. “To things that cannot keep their promises.”

Then she returned to silence.

Observation became sacrament. Cataloguing became prayer. She watched patterns cohere. She watched aberrations germinate in damp timber. She waited for the room to disclose what it was concealing.

Winter remained in the corner, enthroned in a chair that resented the honor. A priestess of endings, unmoved by the tavern’s small gods.

Watari watched her relocate with the focus he once gave to predators that did not need to rush. Ixqueya did not retreat. She simply changed her angle. A judge shifting from dais to gallery. The boards beneath her answered with the tired complaint of old wood. The room adjusted around her without daring to admit it had adjusted at all. His eyes followed the motion. They caught, for the briefest instant, the line at her lower back where alien addition suggested itself. The wasp-stinger shape. Barbed implication more than decoration

A faint distaste tightened his mouth. Watari had never trusted such insects. Not for fear of pain alone. For the way they arrived without warning. For the way they punished without reason. In the grasslands of his youth, where the sky lay wide and merciless, he had seen a whole camp thrown into agitation by a thing no larger than a fingernail. Horses stamping. Children woken from sleep with a cry. Men swearing at darkness that would not answer. The steppe taught him early that small cruelties were often the most faithful. They did not tire. They did not negotiate.

It figures, he thought, that one of her line would find such a shape appealing. Giants did not borrow from what was pretty. They borrowed from what was effective. Still, the question pricked at him in spite of himself. How had flesh been persuaded into that amalgam. What vow. What pact. What slow series of choices until the body itself learned new borders and called them natural.

He set the thought aside. His attention returned to his board, as if to an old map that still required one last correction before it could be trusted. The tavern’s bones were there in pigment. The curve of a beam where the grain twisted like a stream around stone. The warped plank at the threshold where years had swollen the wood and made it stubborn. The bar counter itself rendered with a craftsman’s respect for honest wear.

He worked in silence. The motion of his hand was steady. Bristles moved like a leaf’s edge dragged across wet clay. Small strokes. Patient pressure. He set down a final line where light died against the underside of a shelf. He softened the hard edge of a shadow where boots had scuffed the floor into a pale track, the kind of track that a hundred strangers unknowingly share until it becomes a path.

He paused over one last detail. A smear of spilled drink that had dried into a dark crescent on the counter. A flaw that spoke more truth than any heroic embellishment. He let it remain. When the work felt complete, he sat back. A slow breath left him. Not relief alone. Something cleaner. The quiet satisfaction of finishing a task that asked for attention rather than violence. The feeling of setting a small stone on a grave that no one else would mark.

He rose. His fox tail followed with a natural sway, unforced, as if it belonged to the same wind that moved grasses far away from any roof. His ears twitched at a shift in the room’s murmur. Sound traveled differently here than on open ground. It did not run. It pooled. It hid behind furniture. It crept along the walls. Watari crossed toward the bar with the unhurried gait of a traveler who knows that haste is a kind of announcement. The fire light caught the edges of his armor and slipped away again, glancing from bronze as it glances from river stones. His shadow went with him along the planks, stretched and wavering, a dark companion that asked no questions.

At the counter he made his request without flourish. Simple words. A simple drink. The barkeep’s hands moved with practiced efficiency, thick-knuckled and quick, like roots that have learned to work in soil full of stones. A cup was set down. The liquid within held the light at its rim and swallowed it at its center. Watari accepted it with both hands for a moment, letting the warmth of the vessel sink into his palms. His ears flicked once more. Habit. Vigilance reduced to something gentler.

He offered a friendly nod to those gathered nearby. Men and women loitering in the loose gravity of drink. Their faces shone with the damp sheen of heat and exertion. Their laughter rose and fell in uneven bursts, like birds startled from hedges and settling again. One leaned too heavily on the counter as if the wood were the only steadfast thing left in his life. Another spoke with wide gestures that belonged in a field, not a room, as though his story needed space to breathe.

Watari did not judge them. He had seen men break under grand causes. He had seen men survive by clinging to small comforts. He understood the difference. Only once did his gaze drift, brief as a fox’s glance toward the treeline, to Ixqueya’s corner. She remained where she had chosen to be. Ledger close. Posture composed. Watching the room as if it were a landscape that would eventually reveal its hidden trails to anyone patient enough to wait.

Watari returned his attention to the cup. He took a measured sip. He let the taste ground him in the present. Then he stood quietly at the bar, tail swaying with slow ease, ears alive to the room. A man who had once served banners and campaigns. A man who now served quieter vows. A witness. A maker. Still watchful. Still moving forward, even if some pretended the world did not deserve to be remembered.


(I am open to any RP if anyone's interested.)

((Of course! She inspires to be a Sister of Battle. It's going to be a long journey. But you will definitely see some content, I guarantee!))

"Have I come in at a bad time?"

Her theme. I am the female singer/song writer Novellaro played the instruments and composed it.


She halted at the lintel with the rigid stillness of an instrument encountering an unexpected boundary condition.

Beyond the doorway, the tavern did not manifest as “a room full of people.” It resolved as a bounded system with competing fields. A thermodynamic basin centered on the hearth. A laminar-to-turbulent transition where patrons crossed one another’s wake. A stratified canopy of smoke adhering to the rafters like a stubborn aerosol layer whose settling velocity had been vetoed by heat. Sound behaved as stochastic impulse. Bursts of laughter. Cutlery clicks. A chair-leg scrape. Each event arrived as a spike, then decayed into a low, persistent noise floor.

Her mind tried to model it. Her body tried to flee it.

Inside her skull, cognition accelerated until it felt superluminal. A thousand miles an hour, and still climbing. Hypotheses spawned faster than she could falsify them. A runaway iterative solver. Diverging. Recalculating with poisoned priors. Every glance she *might* have caught became data. Every absence of attention became camouflage. She was sure she was being stared at, judged, measured for weakness, though the distribution of gazes in the room did not support the conclusion. The crowd was mostly occupied with its own microeconomies of ale and appetite.

She could not convince her limbic system of the math.

She stepped in, small movements, constrained amplitude, as if she could discretize her presence into tolerable increments. The white-and-blue outfit made the attempt absurd. It fit her like a manufactured certainty. High-gloss, immaculate, tight through the waist and hips, with blue paneling and harness seams that made her torso look diagrammed. The fabric returned firelight in hard specular fragments. Reflection was an announcement. She wanted to be a rounding error.

Her body would not permit it. She moved with dense, unmistakable curvature and a tall, full-limned silhouette that made stealth an insult to geometry. Green skin, not cartoon-bright but vivid in a way lamplight could not ignore. Its surface caught warm photons and cooled them as it returned them, leaving her looking alternately verdant and mineral, as if she were a living sample prepared for examination.

Her horns rose in paired crescents, keratinous and leaf-veined, their ridges catching highlights like fine striations on cut stone. Green hair spilled beneath them in thick waves. Her mouth remained slightly parted, as though she were perpetually about to speak and perpetually deciding it was unsafe.

Her eyes were worse. Better. Both.

Green and topaz, luminous in the shadow as if they stored charge. The pupils diverged into two apertures like an octopoid slit. Then they fused again, seamlessly, as if ink had been poured into a single, obedient pool. The cycle repeated with metronomic insistence. Split. Fuse. Split. Fuse. It was not performance. It was physiology. It made her gaze look briefly nonhuman in its optics, then falsely ordinary again.

And perched on her shoulder, Slouth.

A conch-creature, spiral-shelled and alive, its single ember eye recessed deep in the shell’s throat. The iris glowed with a steady orange intensity that did not flicker with the fire. It was constant. A reference point. A baseline measurement in a world that felt like noise.

She tried to speak to no one in particular, because silence felt like surrender and sound felt like bait. The words came fast, clipped, protocol-driven, stitched together with an anxious efficiency. Every syllable sounded like it had been optimized for bandwidth.

“Evenin’, nuh. Mi sorry. Mi jus’ comin’ inside. Mi nah lookin’ fuh no trouble, yuh hear.” Her throat tightened. She swallowed and forced the next phrase out as if it were a theorem she could hide behind. “Probability o’ confrontation… supposed to be low, if mi assumptions ain’ corrupt.”

No one answered. No one challenged. No one surged toward her with a sneer or a fist. The neutrality should have lowered her pulse.

Instead, her pulse treated neutrality as a feint.

She half expected an attack, verbal or physical. Some insult that would latch to her skin and not wash off. Some shove. Some laugh. The anticipation coiled tighter because it had no release. Her mind kept running permutations, inventing outcomes and then bracing for them.

To keep from drowning in prediction, she began to sing.

Not loudly. Not for attention. For containment. A mnemonic chant of magical theorems and properties arranged with the ruthless sing-song logic of a recitation. It was a periodic table’s cousin. Not elements, but axioms. Not valence, but binding. Each line snapped into the next like a proof forced into rhyme.

“Aether constant. Resonance quotient.
Leyline gradient. Phase-point ratio.
Entropy climb. Containment lock.
Name di law, an’ yuh tame di shock.”

She winced mid-chant, irritated by her own imprecision.

“Dat line sloppy, nuh.” She corrected herself under her breath, still in that clipped cadence, still in that warm, heavy accent. “Mi mean. Avoid metaphor. Keep it formal.”

She moved deeper into the tavern like a particle seeking a minimum energy state. She did not weave with casual grace. She navigated as if the air were full of invisible vectors. Chair legs became collision hazards. Table corners became acute angles of potential pain. Each patron was an unknown variable with an untrusted distribution.

She wanted a corner. Not for melodrama. For geometry.

She found it in the dimmest quadrant where the hearth’s radiance attenuated into soft murk and faces lost their crispness. She slid into the seat with abrupt relief. Back to the wall. One dominant approach vector. A constrained domain where surprises had fewer degrees of freedom.

In that pocket of shadow, her eyes continued their oscillation. Split. Fuse. Split again. The topaz ring around green irises pulsed faintly as it intercepted stray light. Slouth’s ember-eye remained steady on her shoulder, a quiet constant beside her frantic oscillations.

Her mind did not slow. It only changed shape. Instead of imagining knives and jeers, it imagined equations. It tried to turn panic into a solvable model. She kept singing, quieter now, as if the chant were a set of rails her thoughts could cling to while they raced.

“Aether constant. Leyline load.
Eigenmode match. Channel code.
Vector bind. Sigil align.
Keep yuh mind from fractal-spin.”

She gripped the table edge, fingers splayed, needing tactile confirmation that the world was still solid. She listened for laughter aimed at her and heard only laughter that belonged elsewhere. She watched for hostility and found only ordinary motion.

The data suggested safety.

Her body refused to accept the dataset.

So she stayed in her corner, humming proofs to herself in a trembling cadence, eyes splitting and fusing in the dark like a living uncertainty, while Slouth sat on her shoulder and held the line of constancy against a mind moving a thousand miles an hour.

"What?"

"No idea what happened. But nice to see you again, Miss doctor lady."

"Probabilmente. Non lo so più nemmeno io. I doubt anyone does."

"I appreciate that."

"All moments are bad moments when I show up anyway~ But hey, a little wine and fireworks never killed."

" I wholeheartedly agree my furry eared compatriot "

He was simply chewing on a dog toy.

((Both ixqueya and Zelena are open for RP if anyone is interested.))


Ixqueya did not summon appetite. She summoned corroboration.

When the barkeep returned, breath moderated and spine bowed by habit rather than reverence, he carried the alimentary thesis of a medieval European hearth. Not cuisine. Doctrine made edible.

The trencher bread came first. A slab of coarse brown loaf, oval and uneven. its crust fissured by a hard bake meant to seal moisture out rather than pleasure in. The crumb within was dense and slightly damp. It shot through with darker flecks of rye and barley. It smelled faintly of sour grain and old ovens. This was bread designed to be a plate before it was a meal. A substrate. A sacrificial surface meant to absorb grease and endure handling before being consumed or passed downward to dogs or the poor. Its appearance spoke of repetition and economy. No scoring for beauty. No glaze. Only survival.

Beside it sat the pottage. A thick, earthen bowl filled with a slow, beige mass that held heat stubbornly. Barley kernels swelled nearly to rupture. Split peas had collapsed into paste. The surface bore a dull sheen of animal fat, pale and static, without herbs to disturb it. Steam rose reluctantly, carrying a smell of boiled grain, onion rendered submissive by long heat, and salt measured for preservation rather than delight. The texture promised uniformity. Each spoonful would be the same as the last. That was its virtue.

The meat was beef. Or rather, what remained of beef after time and salt had done their patient work. A grey-brown portion, fibrous and matte, its edges softened where collagen had finally conceded. It had been salted deeply, then simmered until chew yielded to necessity. No browning. No sear. No Maillard perfume. Only the honest aroma of animal protein stripped of flourish. It glistened faintly where fat had not fully rendered away, clinging as a reminder that calories mattered more than elegance.

Root vegetables accompanied it. Turnips pale and translucent, their sulfurous bite tamed into starch and water. Carrots softened into mild sweetness so faint it barely registered. Onion pieces remained visible, but their sharpness had been disciplined into background presence. Everything shared the same chromatic humility. Browns. Greys. Muted golds. A palette born of winter cellars and stone kitchens.

Ixqueya regarded the arrangement without touching it.

Visually, it was coherent. Nothing extraneous. Nothing decorative. A meal engineered to be reproducible across weeks and bad weather. Aesthetic restraint elevated to policy. The absence of color was not oversight. It was prudence.

She broke the trencher bread between two fingers.

The crust fractured with a dull resistance. Good bake. Hard enough to function as plate. Soft enough to be eaten later. The interior pulled slightly before tearing, indicating a loaf rested just long enough to avoid collapse. No honeyed scent. No butter richness. No herbaceous lift. Grain and fermentation alone.

She dipped the bread into the pottage.

The surface accepted it without protest. The liquid clung thickly, coating rather than dripping. When she tasted, the flavor confirmed what the eye had already testified. Salt arrived first and remained dominant. The barley offered a muted nuttiness. The peas contributed body rather than taste. Onion lingered only as warmth without character. There was no acid to sharpen. No bitterness to instruct. No heat to awaken the tongue. The texture was homogenous. Filling. Pacifying.

It nourished. It did not challenge.

Her palate, conditioned by cuisines that layered maize treated with lime until it sang, chilies coaxed into both sweetness and threat, seeds toasted until bitterness taught patience, found nothing here that argued back. This food submitted immediately. It made no demands of memory.

She turned to the meat.

The first bite required effort. The fibers separated slowly, resisting until pressure forced concession. The salt had penetrated deeply, ensuring preservation. Beyond that, there was little. Beefiness flattened by boiling. Fat present but quiet. No herbs to redirect the tongue. No smoke to suggest ceremony. The texture spoke of jaws accustomed to work rather than pleasure.

It was food for laborers. For soldiers. For winters where the question was not satisfaction, but continuation.

She swallowed.

The vegetables followed. Turnip collapsed into near porridge at the tongue’s insistence. Carrot offered the faintest ghost of sweetness, immediately smothered by starch. Onion registered only as warmth. Everything converged into sameness. Each element distinct in form. Indistinguishable in experience.

Ixqueya ate deliberately. Slowly. Not savoring. Auditing.

The verdict assembled with cold clarity.

This was a culinary culture shaped by scarcity, climate, and hierarchy. A people who distrusted excess because excess invited envy. Who flattened flavor to avoid waste. Who fed their bodies to remain functional and left the soul to seek meaning elsewhere. Their food was not identity. It was infrastructure.

Compared to the meals of her origin, where spice preserved and provoked, where bitterness taught discipline, where sweetness was rationed and therefore revered, this was fuel divested of cosmology. Nourishment without theology. Heat without myth.

She finished the trencher last, wiping the bowl clean because waste offended her more than mediocrity. The bread would be consumed or repurposed. Nothing here would be discarded lightly. Scarcity had educated them thoroughly.

Her mouth curved, scarcely.

“Figures,” she murmured. She leaned back into the alcove, chitin settling with restrained articulation. The chair complained as expected. Around her, the tavern exhaled, reassured that the towering aberration had eaten as they did.

Ixqueya permitted the illusion. Winter did not need to enjoy the meal to understand the culture that produced it.

"Anyone who's not actively trying to kill me, burn my house down, or insult me for being a failure is someone I'm okay with."