He wasn't in the only half-decent room in a back alley inn in a small town called Climpsch - in the unimportant country of Painsch; that made decent whicker – he was, actually, in that place -

it was just that equally he was inside something far more vast and complex - connected to reality, in a way that Painsch wasn't and/but – but this was only the immediately obvious part.

And yet his ear acted the way it did – it only did – in the presence of – it was ontologically incapable of error in this – in the presence of what were lies; a lying world more concretely; more accurately. The connection to the place itself, or what it – his mind was thrown in a whirr.

He had to immediately seat himself, instead of throw his perfectly weighted side-sword at the face of a Cyclops, which, while rude, he was almost fourteen efforts out of fourteen convinced wouldn't have really killed him, or really have been particularly morally questionable.

Pry-Boak [cL^YoP] blinked again and the weird reality from out his ocular-passage... vanished.

Art stood up and then sat down, then immediately got up again and started to dress. He dragged his trousers, a coarse black cotton, over his legs, then set about removing the two diagonal belts that he used to keep his knives and throwing implements; steel stars mainly, if he hadn't lost all his - in the eyes of his foes, he laughed aloud to himself, ignoring the look from off the weird big face of the Cyclops that his laughter had suscitated.

If he wasn't pissed out his face the last night he might have done this before undressing; his haste to be free from the efforts of the haberdashers art, when inebriated, only cost hungover Art more painful and boring, in the performing of these banal tasks, tiresome effort that was really hard and unfair, also unkind on hungover Art, as he was now, which he recognised with more and more acuity as his, relatively speaking, normal perceptions of reality and consciousness returned.

“Have we spoken yet, in fact? Remove this, could you?” Indicating vaguely the belts for throwing stars, other stuff. “You have magic powers I presume from the fact of your very supernatural appearance and the fact also of there being rather a lot of weird mythology surrounding the entities to whose race you evidently belong.”

“Toss it.”

He was still getting used to his mysterious new connection to full consciousness and felt rather more like a normal entity/person/whatever he was - he'd never been sure, than he'd assumed he would, with every passing moment.

Art threw the tangle of clothes and belts at him. The colour of all that stuff was brown. Colours are important.

“It's a quest, is why I'm here.”

“Rather presumed that also.” He really hadn't gotten that far. But pretend you're smarter than you are, sometimes, and sometimes, dumber.

Pry-Boak set about the task of untangling what had been thrown at him; belts, or fifteen leather snakes, he didn't know.

“I obviously am a strange supernatural entity. I can see that myself, and I acknowledge it immediately -”

“I thought you people were bigger -”

“Not necessarily very polite,” Art couldn't read the extent to which he was or was not offended; that large single eye made the effort of investigating, a matter that was really after all only of passing psychological interest, rather disconcerting, “but I am - that is, small, for my – I think kind is a polite word.”

Art checked under the bed for his boots. There'd been a lady who'd agreed to warm up his private parts, after what had been a terrible trek through a wasteland of memories and demons, that he'd slaughtered with abandon - but that was kind of hazy, now, and there had been a woman, a lady woman if he recalled correctly, who'd warmed him up. And not solely his rude areas. But. - Had she stolen his boots?

He arranged a whicker chair by the thin-paned window, that let blurry light through, and pointed it at the Cyclops.

“It's a quest?”