Not Built for This [Memory]

[Vivian]

24th of Glade, 4620

Vivian wasn’t doing well. He’d set up the tent three days ago just next to the road along the border of Daravin. He’d run out of food days ago, and foraging hadn’t gone well. Bara, his faithful draft mule, hadn’t had any trouble. The animal could eat most things, and was currently chewing up thistles by the side of the road. He wandered a bit, looking back at his master. Vivian had been vomiting for a few days now, after eating some suspicious looking mushrooms that Bara had downed without difficulty.

Vivian was regretting leaving the city altogether. Amoren might have been filthy, and he might have never felt really clean no matter how much he bathed, and there was never enough food in the garbage but at least what was there was edible! The whore groaned and clutched his middle, leaning over to vomit in the small pot originally intended for cooking.

“This isn’t fair…I’m skinnier than ever and I can’t move…” he moaned against his bedroll, clutching the blanket over his shoulder. He had piled his clothing on, struggling to stay warm while chills consumed his body. Bara poked his nose in the tent, giving a questioning whicker. This was bad. Vivian hadn’t so much as brushed him in days. The mule was distressed; he didn’t know what to do and his master was ill.

He wandered a bit down the road, ears forward and listening for danger. The mule didn’t want to wander too far from his master. Vivian had proven to be a calm and sweet boy, and every mule ever born knew how rare a quiet hand was. He’d been given to Vivian as a parting gift when the boy was thrown out of the brothel. Bara trotted a few hundred yards down the road, and brayed. It was a hideously loud noise, but it was the only thing he knew to do to call for help.

Hopefully someone would come along.

[Thomas]

Thomas knew he had to stop coming to Daravin, but it was just too easy to make a mint. Sure, magic was far too prevalent for his tastes here, and sure, the vast majority of the populace was too poor to fleece, but he'd found fertile ground in the artisans and Valran with aspirational designs on leveling up in their rabid little ant colony of backstabbing psychotic magicians. Unchecked ambition was easy to exploit; it wasn't like someone could ask for references before he sold them a vial of poison or a truth potion, and typically their plans had a timescale of months or seasons. By the time they realized there was nothing helpful in the bottle, he was long gone.

Being far away before being discovered was central to his business model in general, but it was especially important in Daravin, where consequences wouldn't involve jail or guards or beatings but instead being flayed alive by some poncy bastard with a Mark of Control splitting their soul. It didn't mean he couldn't occasionally slow down, however.

He heard the bray of a mule before he spotted the natty thing. It was healthy, but seemed to have recently fallen on hard times. No one had given it a good brush for quite some time, for one thing, and its bulk looked a bit diminished, as though it were used to a diet of oats and mash but was now recently switching to grazing. Carrot let out a whicker in response, and Thomas knew right then and there that he was stopping. Mules fetched a good price in Daravin, and maybe there'd be a camp site or dead owner nearby. Dead men's belongings could also fetch a tidy price.

He let Carrot and Horse stop to say hello to their new acquaintance and hopped off the wagon, looking around for clues as to where the creature's owner could be. Or hopefully, where their body was. No sense in not at least pretending to be helpful, though.

"Hello?" He called out. "Has someone lost a mule? Where are you, if so?" A response would speed this process up, but no response hopefully meant a bigger pay day, so whatever happened next, this was shaping up to be a win-win sort of day.

[Vivian]

Bara brayed loudly at the strange horses and their pet. He approached the other equines, touching noses and offering a friendly little groom of his teeth against the other's shoulder. Bara was a friendly, sociable sort, raised in a city where he couldn't startle being around other equines or a cacophony of different smells...most of them coming from Vivian. Thankfully the man hopped down from the wagon, and began making noises. Bara brayed again, joining the human in mouth-sounds.

Vivian lifted his bedraggled, sweaty head from the bedroll, and blinked. He heard Bara calling and the muffled shouts of a man. He wasn't sure he could yell. He winced, and gagged above the pot a few times. He'd been shoving it under the tent flap and tipping it out, which didn't help the smell much but did allow him to refill it with bile whenever his stomach lurched. Forget the mushrooms; he was sure he had vomited up every meaningful meal from the past month. He groaned, and lifted a shaking hand to open the tent flap. It was a large, four person tent, but there were barely any belongings. Just a bedroll, Vivian's pack, the pot he'd been using as a vomit receptacle/chamberpot, and the last of the mushrooms laying tauntingly on his plate. He'd shoved them away, but caught sight of them every once in a while. His stomach lurched again.

Bara wandered to the stranger. As a large draft cross, he stood almost six feet at the shoulder. He easily leaned over and lipped at the stranger's hair to get his attention. No, his master was over here. He pointed his nose in the direction of the tent and the groaning coming from inside.

[Thomas]

The creature was eating his hair. Thomas wanted to pretend that he hated it, but no one was around, so he laughed and gave the strange equine a little pat on the nose. When the horse stopped, he espied the tent. As he got closer, he started to smell it. Fresh vomit, and no rot. So whoever resided inside was probably alive. With a mental sigh, he stopped tabulating up the value of everything he found at the camp. Whatever else lay in store, this was not going to be a case of simply helping himself to the possessions of the dead.

He stopped at the entrance to the tent. He would have gagged if he weren't relatively used to the excesses of the body from years of tending to the sick.

"Hello," he repeated, talking to the tent flap. "If you'd be so kind, I'd like to come in and see if there's anything I can do to help."

The thought came unbidden, as it always did, of times when he had not helped so much as helped himself. Stealing from the sick was a tack he reserved for truly desperate times, though, and these were not those. Daravin had been decently kind to him this time around. No need to spread misery. Besides, living men could be much more useful than dead ones, especially if they had reason to be grateful. Conversely, weak men could be pushed over the edge, if it truly became necessary to do so. Not that he relished the thought of killing anyone, he thought to himself.

Well, not random people, at least. Specific people, powerful people... there was a satisfaction in bringing them down. But not people like this.

[Vivian]

Vivian winced. “Come in.” He coughed, and laid back down again. “Water…” Gods he needed water. Vivian was truly a pathetic sight. He was underweight, the covers were half off of him revealing the mark of control on his spine. It was a beetle splitting a man’s head in twain, it’s wings outstretched and limbs lifted. It marked him as a Malformist, though clearly only a fledgling one who would make the mistake of eating mushrooms he couldn’t identify. He was skinny, underweight, bruised from the last clients he’d had before leaving Amoren, and stank to high Heaven. Far from being an intimidating mage who could move mountains or steal faces, he looked more like a dog someone had thrown out.

Vivian wiped his mouth with a hand and made an attempt to sit up, though that looked like it had taken a monumental effort. “Just don’t…hurt the mule.” He coughed. “Please.” He knew he couldn’t do much if the other man did decide to kill his friend, but he hoped Bara would have the good sense to leave him and flee. Mules were good and smart beasts, but Vivian damned well knew their value in the fields and farms that surrounded them. He didn’t want his friend condemned to the plough.

The cause of Vivian’s illness was rather obvious by the plate of mushrooms pushed away on the floor. They weren’t deadly, but poisonous enough that dehydration could claim him if he didn’t get water soon. “Water…” Vivian repeated slowly, wincing and holding his stomach.

[Thomas]

Thomas nodded at the request, and then said "sure, water," when he realized that the strange waif was perhaps a bit too far gone to focus his eyes. "I'll go get some."

He hadn't missed the mushrooms. Brown caps, white spots. They smelled good when cooked, too, nice and savory, almost like roasted meat. He ground them up and added them into emetics all the time and sometimes into hangover cures, too. Presumably, the other guy had not known that he'd be emptying the contents of his stomach for days by eating an entire plate of the things. He trotted to his wagon and retrieved some water and a health tonic. This batch was tinged faintly red, and had a nice fruity smell. They didn't, to his knowledge, work, but what this boy needed was fluids, and the placebo effect could work wonders.

So when he returned, he knelt by the boy, putting down both the water skin and the glass bottle. "Some water," he explained, "and some medicine, too. Drink both. Little sips, though, and the water first. You're probably going to keep throwing up for a while, but at least we can stop you from throwing up your own stomach and have you retching up water instead. I'm Thomas, by the way. You ate some bad mushrooms, friend, but you should pull through it alright."

He stroked the kid's hair, lank and streaked with stale sweat. "Once your stomach steadies, perhaps we can get you a bath," he added. All this, it reminded him a bit of when he first struck out on his own on the road. He was not nostalgic for those days, not one bit, but it felt nice to be able to make someone else's experience as a traveler a bit less miserable.

[Vivian]

Vivian listened to the man's footsteps as he walked away, but gods when he returned...he shakily reached for the water. He wasn't sure what the red flask was, but he avoided it for the moment. Anything other than water made his stomach churn again. He pulled open the water skin and took his first sips, gulping them down and breathing deeply. Even a little of the lukewarm water felt so good. He leaned his forehead against the waterskin, panting. It felt so much better to have water. After a few minutes he took another sip, and another. Each sip soothed his belly.

The man put his hand on his head, stroking his fingers through Vivian's dirty and sweaty white-blonde hair. He looked up at the stranger. "Thank you..." he mumbled. He took another drink of water and shut it, then reached for the medicine. Well, he couldn't get much worse could he? He opened the bottle carefully and smelled it, then took a very tiny drink. It smelled nice at least, like fresh berries, and he closed it. He set it next to the waterskin. "What sort of medicine...? Nevermind...maybe I don't want to know. A bath would be nice... I'm not usually this filthy."

As the minutes passed, and with a few more sips of the medicine, his stomach felt better and better. He sat up, and offered a hand to Thomas. "Vivian Kreine." he introduced himself.

[Thomas]

Liquids and faith really could work wonders. Humble had been right about that, as he had about many things, though Thomas generally tried not to think about his former mentor. A remnant from an earlier time, that, and best left in the past. He monitored the lanky youth, presumably from Daravin given the flowery name and the abomination on his back, as he sipped and watched him perk up like a heretofore neglected houseplant.

As much for something to do as anything else, he snagged a comb from the clutter on the floor of the tent and combed out Vivian's hair as the color began to come back to his cheeks and he sat up a bit straighter. His hair still desperately needed a wash and still smelled like stale sweat and vomit, but at least it was free of knots and tangles, now. It was something, and just about the best Thomas could do at the moment.

When he felt sure that Vivian had recovered enough to handle a bit more conversation, he started in with an innocuous enough question: "What are you doing out here by yourself? And why were you picking mushrooms if you don't know how to identify which ones are safe to eat? Do you not know that most mushrooms can do a lot worse than just make you sick? I assume you were desperate, so in case you get desperate again: you got lucky with the white spots. There are a few that grow around here that would have stopped your heart or turned your kidneys into slurry."

While he was providing gentle-sounding counsel, the accountant in Thomas' brain was hard at work. He thought about the equine he'd seen outside, and the quality of the possessions he'd seen: not sumptuous, but not dirt poor. This was no runaway serf. Perhaps a Valran or similar, given the Mark of Control? In any case, that gave him hope that maybe all this kindness would provide some form of remuneration after all.

[Vivian]

Vivian leaned his head into Thomas' hands, groaning softly as his hair was brushed. It wasn't much, but it made him feel a little more human to have the vomit chunks combed out of his bangs. He still felt filthy enough to throw himself into the nearest body of water, but Thomas' kind hands were appreciated. He was hoping the man wasn't some sort of slave trafficker, or highwayman. The second was less likely in Vivian's opinion; a highwayman would have raped him and slit his throat, then chuckled all the way to the nearest town with anything that wasn't nailed down.

The questions started. Vivian took a sip from the waterskin as he thought about how he wanted to answer. He could lie. He could string this man along with promises that once he was returned to his Valran he would be handsomely rewarded. However, showing up on a Valran's doorstep with a lie was a good way to get one's face pounded in, and he was in in no condition to do that. This man might truly rob him for such a horrific betrayal. Then there was the other option. Pretend he couldn't answer, force the man to take him somewhere. The third option he settled on.

"I didnt....I couldn't stand the city anymore." Vivian admitted. "I...I saw Bara eating the mushrooms. He was fine. I thought it was okay. Clearly...his stomach is stronger than mine." Vivian looked back at Thomas. Handsome sort. He wouldn't mind working for him for a little while. "I don't have much...but if you give me a bath, take me with you...I'll work for you for a bit. I can pickpocket better than most men, and you can always sell my body out to merchants. They pay decently and don't get too drunk. Of course, you can always take advantage of those services yourself."

[Thomas]

Thomas nodded as he listened to the lad explain how he'd ended up eating something that disagreed with humans so much. He'd had the sense to see its effect on his animals first, at least. It wasn't much -- plenty of plants that killed humans didn't hurt animals, and vice versa -- but it was something. A bit naive, perhaps, but not completely stupid.

Then he raised an eyebrow at Vivian's proposition. Rare to find someone so straightforward and business-minded, but offering up his services clinched it: this was a fellow worker. Whores were rarely the sentimental type when it came to their bodies, and Vivian, it seemed, was no exception. Thomas appraised the man again in light of this new information.

He'd be rather striking in a beautiful, slightly ethereal sort of way, when he was properly cleaned up. It could be fun, also, to run some two man jobs, and to have the backup of a mage in Daravin in case shit went sideways. Assuming that Vivian could be trusted, of course, which was a big assumption. No reason not to feel him out, though. They could start small, and if things worked out, maybe a beautiful business relationship could blossom.

"I'm not looking to be a pimp, lad, and whatever that magic on your back does probably means you can protect yourself ably when you're back up to your normal strength, so you have no need of any protection from me. While we're at it, I have no need of your services beyond your companionship and your company. If you're seeking work, however, perhaps we should talk more. There's always coin to be caught in any city, and lots more can be done with two men than with one. Sleight of hand, whoring, and larceny are all well and good, but maybe the two of us can find a job that will be more rewarding than your usual haunts."

He resumed combing out Vivian's hair. At this point, it was more because it was something to do; it was already as clean as it was going to be. It just felt like a nice thing to do, and Thomas did enjoy doing nice things where he could. It didn't make up for all the other things he'd done, but it helped him sleep at night.