Eternal Sapphtember — Girls who aren’t easy
Outside the taverna, a busted old priest — ascetic vow of nonfunctionality, most likely, arms seized from lack of use, then eventually rusted clean off at the elbows — is droning away about adventurers, as if anyone truly believes any more. Adventurers are mythical. They’re a metaphor for the trials of life, the inexplicability of shape and circumstance, the ways in which one can find meaning and purpose in setting oneself against the world like a fistful of picks to the teeth of a lock.
Ceiling above. Reciproca tosses a judicious few alms in his hopper anyway; pity costs nothing, and goodwill is an uncertain investment, but nonetheless. The bright chits of ancient binary-etched diktat rattle into the preacher’s possession; she waves off his mumbled blessing.
She’d rather be out of this benighted, cycle-throttled bitbucket of a town by now, but Differentio got himself arrested last night for affronting a local merchant, and until they manage to resolve that somehow they won’t be going anywhere.
Still, another night in town is another night she can spend in the taverna; and another night in the taverna—
Behind the counter, Cryptina slings pints of gloop to the regulars, big, brass-and-terracotta, placidly smiling. Her torso’s a stack of millstone-heavy discs, each with a series of symbols stamped all around the its edge; correctly deciphered and aligned, they allow one to open the little crystal-illuminated compartment low in her round and polished belly, in which some particularly ancient and stubbornly unopened maiden might safekeep some treasure of the Builders. If one believes in the Builders, either.
“Say, barkeep,” Reciproca says, leaning rakishly on the bar, showing off the gimbal of her hips. She’s a marvellously articulated model; dozens of golems back in the city appreciated it. She tries out a wink. “Pint of your finest, and tell me — is it true what they say, about puzzle-girls?”
Cryptina’s eyes twinkle. Reciproca would dearly like to fool herself they do so just a trifle more so than for any other nuisance barfly. “Two chits,” she says, in her low and melodically humming way. “And that depends what they say about puzzle-girls, doesn’t it?”
“They say puzzle-girls are surprisingly easy,” Reciproca says, grinning in an optimistically rogueish way, which she hopes is impossible to take serious offence to.
Cryptina almost laughs, she swears it; then looks down at herself, at her heavy stack of pristine engraved discs. Reciproca’s hands itch to put some wear on them.
“Largely depends how many rotors we’ve got,” the barmaid says blandly, and glides along the counter to serve some other luckless clod.
