“Alright, the process is very simple. You prick your finger with the tip of this here quill, and your blood will tell us your name while transcribing it into the registry.”

“Sounds a bit ghoulish…”

“Hey, it’s reliable. You want cutting-edge magitek, you’ve come to the wrong city.”

The drahn sighed. The dwarf she had been sent to find, Maerwhentt, was apparently the grouchy dwarf woman Gwenett’s younger brother, she had found out rather quickly once the dwarf came from the kitchens of the inn that doubled as the Guild of Adventurers in this city, and she was quickly coming to find out that while Gwenett was long-suffering and perhaps somewhat short-tempered, Maerwhentt had a chip on his shoulder large enough to qualify as the Sphinx’s missing nose. Interestingly enough, Maerwhentt had no beard, nor did he have an overlarge helm; his face was, while young, not nearly that of a human child’s. The proportions were entirely off, and that was immediately apparent. He had the figure of a potato and waddled like a penguin before ascending the footstool behind the bar, bringing down the massive tome that even now rested open and spread out before the two. His hair was russet and his eyes were bright blue, but more an electric blue than any more common colour. They also lacked pupils.

“Ah, well… In for a farthing, in for a quid…” she sighed to herself. The massive book in front of her seemed older than any book she had ever seen, in this life or her last, and was, to her admittedly amateur eyes, better-maintained than the vast majority of first edition releases a fraction of its age. Laid out beside it was a quill made from a feather the likes of which she had never seen. Depending on the light, it seemed to contain every colour she could conceive of, and a few that called her sanity into question to look upon them, for these hues were so vastly different from any earthly shade designed to be perceived by mortal eyes. She tore her fascinated gaze away from the multihued quill, picked it up by the metal nub, sharpened to a fine, almost needle-like point, and pricked her finger on it. The pain was momentary, and she put her finger in her mouth after she had gotten blood onto the quill with a muttered curse; the quill, however, stood to attention and began to fly across to the book.

The volume opened, and thousands of pages with more names than she cared to count flew by, resting finally upon a page somewhere in the middle of the massive book. There, at the top of the blank page, it inscribed a name.

Unfortunately for her, it was a name written in characters she could not read.

“Katsumi of the Fallen Rain…” read Maerwhentt. “Y’know, I had a feeling it would be aught like that. You drahn and your flowery naming conventions… It’s like it’s too much to ask for you to have a given and dynastic name like normal people. Here. Take your loan. It’s to be paid back at five percent interest, so make certain to pay it back quickly, or risk owing more than you can ever repay.”

Reeling from the fact that she could now put a name to herself, Katsumi remarked, “Sounds more than a little predatory. Dare I ask what happens if I fail to pay it back?”

Maerwhentt looked at her suspiciously. “You wouldn’t be the first of your kind to take a generous loan like that and go running. But know that you don’t want to know what our collection methods are like. Let’s just say debtors to the guild are common targets for less scrupulous adventuring companies.”

“...I see,” replied Katsumi at length. “You seem hostile…”

“Hmph. I would think that someone of your racial persuasion would be used to people being short with you. And rightly so. Thieves, liars, and cheats, the lot of you, without a single redeeming quality to your names save for how high brothels will pay for your kind,” said Maerwhentt. “Be grateful, drahn. Any self-respecting Host at any other city would turn you out on your posterior without a gil to your name. To be fair, it’s only because my bleeding-heart older sister sent you to me that you’re even getting this much. Here. A dispatch of one hundred gil to your name. You’ll probably cheat and steal the rest of what you need—I swear, if the Guild charter didn’t explicitly state our neutrality, I’d call the guards on you without a second thought. Would probably make the streets safer, anyhow.”

The dwarf took a pouch from beneath the counter and threw it directly into Katsumi’s chest. She caught it deftly, and, without inflection, said “Thanks.”

Maerwhentt waved her off. “Go on. Get. You’re making the other adventurers nervous. And take your Parameter with you!”

“Parameter?” asked Katsumi.

In response, Maerwhentt grumbled, slipped off his stool, and went over to the shelves that lined the wall on her right in the hallway behind the desk that led to the kitchens. From the shelf he pulled a scroll, and then went right back to the desk, climbing once more onto the stool and throwing the sealed scroll at her. “It’s on you to keep it safe. Know that if you lose it, gaining another one is going to cost you far more than you’re ever likely to be able to afford!”

Katsumi, looking around and seeing that a scene was being made—indeed, every eye in the inn was upon her, and her altercation with the dwarf Host—decided that discretion was the better part of valour; thus, she bowed and made to exit.

Closing the door behind her, she sat down on the step and blew one of her bangs out of her face. The scroll, which was apparently called her Parameter, hung loosely in her hand, the small pouch of one hundred gil—which she could tell wasn’t going to last her very long—held in her other as she pondered her options. She obviously wasn’t welcome in the Guild due to her race, so that lead would be of no use to her.

So deep in thought was she that she was genuinely shocked when a small child dashed past her, snatching her gil pouch out of her hand. Panicking, she scrambled to her feet, stumbling indecorously down the stairs, and then sprinted at full tilt after the child.

Thankfully, the child was either on his last legs after a full day of larceny, or starving and new at this—perhaps both—and she could tell because she was easily able to keep pace with him into the Artisans’ District. Taking the boy down with a flying tackle, the both of them collapsed to the ground.

“You know, kid, a wise woman once said, ‘Never steal from somebody you can’t outrun.’ I’m starting to think she was more right than I thought,” said she. “Now…about my gil…”

The child she was talking to was made of wood.

She’d been had.

“Well, shit…” she sighed. “Back to Square One. Actually, no, back to Square Negative One! Because at least at Square One, I wasn’t in debt on top of being penniless! And weaponless, and armourless, and potentially every other kind of ‘less’!”

She stood from the wood doll and kicked it. “Can’t imagine this is worth much, but I should be able to get a few…”

The doll exploded into a shower of quickly-dissipating blue sparks.

“Oh, fuck you! In what universe is that fair?!” She sighed. “This one, apparently… The fuck am I going to do now…”

How should I know? Pick a direction and start walking.

Frey’s admonition came rushing back to her in that very moment, and she sighed as she followed that advice, letting her feet lead the way.

Her footfalls led her towards the ringing sound of hammer-on-anvil, and the smell of charcoal-smoke along with the foul tang of iron. Before long, she stood outside of a building with a sign that showed a pair of crossed blades. Prior knowledge of RPGs combined with common sense to inform her that this was likely a weaponsmith’s shop, one with a forge in the back of it.

On some strange impulse, like a whisper in her ear that echoed into the depths of her mind, Katsumi opened the door and walked in.

The shop’s interior was silent save for the constant ringing of steel being flattened between two slabs of iron—the hammer and anvil. There was no line of conversation between the master weaponsmith and the apprentice he had occupying the storefront, which was itself quite strange. Add to that the fact that the whispers were continuing and growing louder in her mind, and she had to dedicate some actual effort to blocking them out.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t arm your kind here,” spat the apprentice, sounding distinctly un-sorry.

Katsumi studied him for a moment. He was young, maybe hovering somewhere around fifteen years of age, and his skin was dark and stained with soot. Accordingly, his hair was black, and his eyes were a light brown. He was, while not musclebound, clearly well-built from years of working the forge—she recalled that she had once read that children in preindustrial societies began their apprenticeships at nine, if they were lucky, and continued them until they were twenty-one. This put him in just about the dead centre of his apprenticeship—too far in to back out, but too far from the end to actually believe it to be in sight. When she registered his words, she sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been getting a lot of that lately…”

“Did you not hear me?! Get out before I call the guard!” cried the young, plain-faced adolescent, gesturing to the door wildly.

The sound of metal pounding on metal halted with a hiss of quenching steel. “Boy!”

“Oh, now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve disrupted the master’s concentration! You’d have been gone when I told you to leave in the first place if you knew what was good for you!” hissed the apprentice.

The man who walked out from the back was tall and broad—a giant, really—with pale green skin and a build altogether too large to be entirely human. His eyes glinted in the low light like embers, and his balding pate was host to a head of hair that was long, iron-grey and wiry, complete with a beard that would put a dwarf to shame—not Maerwhentt, of course, but other dwarves, such as his elder sister. He wore a pair of loose-fitting burlap trousers and covered his bare, barrel-chest with a thick leather apron, his hands covered in thick mittens of the same material. The man looked altogether how she might have imagined Hephaestus would.

“What have I told you, boy, about throwing out paying customers?” asked the weaponsmith patiently, and the aura he exuded was so overpowering that if it was a physical force, she wagered she’d have been brought to her knees already by the sheer weight of it.

“But master! She’s a drahn!” protested the apprentice.

“I don’t care if she’s a bloody beastman!” roared the weaponsmith. “I took you on, didn’t I?! Despite your misbegotten father!”

The apprentice cowered as the old weaponsmith turned to her. “Now, miss, how can I help you?”

“Well…it’s a long story. I suppose the pertinent part started when I left the Guild of Adventurers and immediately had my hundred gil loan stolen from me…” began Katsumi.

“Hah! A likely story!” cried the apprentice accusatorily.

“Boy!” roared the weaponsmith. “Get back there and do something productive before I throw you out of my shop and tell my daughter you’ve failed your apprenticeship!”

The apprentice sighed. “Yes, grandfather.”

“Now,” said the weaponsmith, crossing his massive tree-trunk arms as he leaned back into the stone wall behind him, while the boy walked into the back of the shop. “I’m sorry for your loss, but what does this have to do with me?”

“Nothing yet,” said Katsumi. “Look, I would hate to be a bother, but I need gil. I was hoping that you would allow me to work for it.”

The old weaponsmith’s singed eyebrows raised. “Foreigner to these lands? Just off the boat?”

“The boat was wrecked and I wound up on a beach a couple of hours from here, but by and large, yes,” said Katsumi, puzzled.

“I could tell,” said the old weaponsmith. “No one from around here would approach my shop without a sponsor and a sack full of gil. Apprenticeships are expensive as well as time-consuming. Every tool you break, every material you waste, comes directly out of my funds. And I’ve got dues to pay to the Guild of Artisans on top of rent to pay for the land, the tithe for the bloody misbegotten knights, and the price of food. I’m sorry, but the apprentice I have already is enough of a strain on my limited finances. I can’t take you on as one. Not to mention, the Guild of Adventurers is not like to wait for you to start making wages…”

“Then my situation is untenable…” Katsumi sighed. She nodded and bowed. “I apologise for wasting your time.”

She turned around and walked towards the door, biting her own lip as tears filled her eyes, not concerning her situation—though that was so hopeless it would be worthy of tears—but rather, tears of pain brought on by the whispers in her ear and thus in her mind building up to an agonising crescendo.

“Where are you going?” asked the large, faintly green man. “I said that I couldn’t take you on as an apprentice. I never said I couldn’t help you. The whispers. You hear them, don’t you? Hear them slowly driving you mad…”

She whirled around. “How…?!”

The man gave a deep belly laugh. “You don’t think I’m so wet behind the ears that I wouldn’t recognise one of your kind when they appeared before me?”

Somehow, Katsumi didn’t think he was talking about her race. “‘My kind’?”

“Fought beside you people in the last Great War, you know,” he said fondly. “Saved my life, you lot did. The dark knights have sacrificed much for this land and all who live in it.”

“Justice demands no less,” she said reflexively.

“Yeah, that’s what they would have said, too,” said the old weaponsmith with a look of intense nostalgia in his eyes. “I can tell you’re new at this. Unfortunately, you’re likely the last of your kind. And even if you aren’t, I can guarantee there is but a scant handful of you left. I would be surprised if there was another, and I would be shocked for there to be three of you, including you, that remain in the world. Four, and I’d know I was dreaming. Add to that the fact that you’re a drahn—quite likely the most feared and despised race on the continent after a galdjent like me—and the road ahead of you is sure to be long, difficult, and worst of all, solitary. I don’t envy you, last of the dark knights—yours is a duty that few in their right minds would—and you don’t even seem to have been made aware of it.”

The weaponsmith looked her up and down with a critical eye. “Come with me. There’s something I’d like to see about.”

With that, the massive man—a galdjent, or so he had identified himself—pushed off of the wall behind him and walked into the bowels of his shop. Katsumi scrambled after him, which was difficult enough; one of his strides counted for four of hers, and she was leggy as far as proportions went. She still managed to keep pace, just barely, as they passed by a gawking apprentice, who, at a look from his master, swiftly returned to his work, and they descended into the cellar of the shop.

One side of the cellar was entirely dominated by a cylinder made from stone blocks that the room could not even encapsulate. Katsumi noted the slight heat coming from the reinforced stone and figured that that was where the forge was located. On the other side of the cellar, there were blades, spears, axes, and more laying against the far wall. The galdjent waved Katsumi over, and she followed him as he came to the wall in question. Using his massive hands, he shifted the mound of weapons to either side of him, and underneath it all there was a long, low case on the ground, made of thick black iron, inscribed with runes, and buckled and chained with a comical amount of locks all over its surface. The man knelt before it, pulled off one of his oversized mitts, and held his hand out over the central lock, whispering a few words that Katsumi could barely hear let alone make out or parse, though the unfamiliar sounds told her that she wouldn’t recognise the language of the words even if she could make out and parse them.

The box began to shake, slightly at first, like a tremor, but quickly it began to shake ever more violently as he continued incanting, like there was something alive in there, something desperate to awaken from a nightmare that seemed without end. Finally, the smith stepped away, the lock clicked, and the chains, once taut, slackened.

The shaking became genuinely violent, but Katsumi felt an urging at the back of her head to comfort what was emerging—a child, insisted her mind, lighting up the part of her brain that contained her maternal instincts like a Tanabata festival; she walked towards the case slowly, the smith making no move to stop her, and she knelt before the case. She placed her hand on it, and almost as though it sensed her proximity, it slowly quieted.

Then the lid popped open with a hiss.

Slipping her slender fingers underneath the edge of the lid, she began to slowly, gently push the lid up and back, so as not to terrify the poor thing any further. When she saw inside, she was so puzzled she hesitated for a moment, before her instincts kicked back in. She reached inside the velvet-cushioned container and lifted out a sword. It was unlike any blade she had ever seen before.

What she expected had been a massive, hulking block of steel, barely able to support its own weight, let alone be swung with any degree of deftness.

What she got was a Western blade that looked to be at least one and a half metres in length, making the weapon longer than she was tall. It was curved, with a single edge, and slender in its construction. The hilt was cruciform and featured a two-handed grip—as though she had a choice if she wanted to wield this magnificent weapon—with a nail-like protrusion, but infinitely more elegant, coming out of the right side of the guard, which she guessed was there to protect her hands. It was…

“Perfection,” she breathed.

“It’s called a kriegsmesser,” supplied the smith. “Some dark knights preferred massive swords that could barely be called that. Hulking, brutish weapons that despite their undeniably sharp edges, broke more bones than skin. Others prefer nimbler blades. That weapon is my finest work.”

“Then…why are you giving it to me?”

“Because in my anger and grief, I cursed it so that only a dark knight could wield it,” he sighed. “It was commissioned for a dark knight I fell in love with during the War. It was…an unrequited love. Her beloved was sent far to the front—in those days, so soon after the end of the centuries-long Inquisition, dark knights were even more feared and mistrusted, by an order of magnitude, no less, than the drahn are these days, and for better reason…though not by much. He fell there, far away from her, and so bereaved was she by his death that she committed suicide. With her died her unborn son.

“Nearly mad with loss and sorrow, I returned to the forges to find the designs for the kriegsmesser there, waiting for me to build it, to give it life as she had failed to do for her child. As a dark knight, she was left to rot. It was thought that burying a dark knight with the appropriate rites would taint the land, you see. So I took her body and extracted, with the help of an alchemist, her blood. Her bloodless body I buried in accordance with the traditions of my homeland, since hers would not honour the sacrifice of one of their own. It was that blood I used to quench the white-hot metal, and thus, inscribed into the blade are a litany of curses, and that black sacrament infinitely darker than the greatest and most malevolent curse.

“Over time, I came to hate the blade, and tried to pass it off to nobles and landed knights when they asked for my finest work. Invariably, they died horrifying and gruesome deaths. The blade was soon acknowledged as a cursed weapon, and I, the one who forged it. Only because of my ‘exemplary’ service during the War was I spared the headsman’s axe.

“It’s been a century since then. All of my companions have since died. Even the youngest of them is two decades in the grave. It is the hatred in my heart that keeps me alive—that, and this blade. It draws my life out like butter scraped over too much bread, extending my lifespan to unnatural lengths. I should have long since embarked onto the Undiscovered Country by now—I was fifty when the Great War began, and my race scarce lives to seventy. I am twice as old as the next-eldest galdjent in existence. Some call me venerable; those wiser than they call me cursed. And yet, the fires of hatred I feel for that blade have peaked, then smouldered and guttered out, and the last ember went dark ten years ago. Now I just feel…empty. Hollow. I gave all that I am to that blade, and what is left is bestial—an old man well past his time limping on through the ages.

“And yet, now that I look upon you, I am glad. Perhaps for the first time since she died and was forsaken by the land and the people she fought to protect. I am glad that I have lived for this long. So I must express my gratitude to you that I have lived to see another take up the dark sword.” The galdjent began to laugh, and his laughter became choked with sobs. His eyes, too old and accustomed to misery to produce a single tear any longer, squeezed themselves shut. “Thank you. Thank you, bearer of the dark blade. Now, I may finally rest.”

“Wait! How can I repay you for this?!” she cried.

“You have given me payment enough by granting me the absolution I have sought for decades. But if you must find a way to repay me—please, finish the job. Few things are worse than having to die alone and forgotten at the bottom of a long-abandoned cellar, stocked with a masterpiece drowned in all the failures I’ve forged since then.”

Katsumi sighed. “If you’re certain that’s what you desire.”

“It has been all I desired for well over half a century now,” he replied. He pointed to a place slightly left of centre on his great barrel chest. “Here is my heart. Pierce it with your dark sword, that the blade might truly awaken in your hands.”

Taking a deep breath in, she took a deep stance, both hands on the hilt with her elbow held level to support the length of the blade. With an exhale, she drove forth and pierced the heart of the weaponsmith. He spasmed, as though a jolt had just gone through his body, and then blood began to dribble, thick and viscous, from his mouth. “My name is Zeid. And I thank you…dark knight…”

“Rest in peace, Zeid,” replied Katsumi, stepping back and drawing the blade out and to the side in a wide arc.

The weaponsmith, Zeid, collapsed to his knees, and his skin began to turn grey until it was abundantly clear he was petrifying. Then the stone of his form dissipated into a nonexistent wind, the dust resulting of that disintegration flowing away in an unfelt gale that sounded like a sigh of relief.

Katsumi watched until the last of the dust disappeared, and picked up the scabbard from the case, sheathing the blade and placing the whole ensemble onto her back, buckling the scabbard’s leather straps across her chest. Then she ascended the steps.

As she walked up the stairs, the apprentice ran past her down them, and by the time he ascended the steps and called for the guards, insisting that a drahn thief had murdered his master, Katsumi was long gone. And in her wake she left a forge whose fire had long-since gone ashen-cold, a hearth layered with over a half-century’s worth of dust, and a dilapidated edifice that had neither been attended to nor occupied for many years by any objective measurement.

When the guards finally came, that was what they saw—a young man raving almost incoherently about duplicitous drahn, a murder without a body, and a storefront that, by all written accounts, had been empty for seven decades.

All that remained of Zeid or his shop for the past seventy years…was memory.

Katsumi headed for the gates of the city, the gates to the wilderness where, she figured, there would be monsters and other enemies. Having reached the conclusion that this world was somehow inspired by an RPG, though she couldn’t recall which franchise—her memories of her previous life were still very, very vague and indistinct—she decided that her best course of action would be to grow familiar with the weapon that had almost literally just fallen into her lap. And of course, the best way to accomplish that would be with an RPG staple:

Grinding.

A few exchanged words with a guard at the gate, and she was out into the inland fields, plagued by roving bands of monsters. Anticipating the difficulty of drawing her kriegsmesser from her back—which, she knew, was discovered to be grossly overstated in her time—she did exactly that, so as to not have to figure out the ergonomics of it in battle. Surprisingly, the sword came smoothly out of the scabbard, and thus did she advance, sword drawn, upon the first monster she saw.

“Alright, it’s clearly a hare of some kind. With a few marked exceptions, hares are usually first-level enemies, especially this close to the gate,” she muttered to herself. She glanced around the fields, seeing a number of different enemies, and counted them off aloud. “Hares, squirrels, and worms. All first level enemies, until they’re not. Let’s hope that this is the former case, for my own sake…”

With that, she silently ran up to the creature, a hare, and slashed at it.

It leapt and dodged nimbly back.

With a sigh, she took her stance, low to the ground, with her blade balanced somewhat on her elbow, and prepared to settle in for a long, gruelling experience of a fight.

That supposition was quickly dashed when, instead of evading and generally being a hare, it leapt up and started a barrage of kicks. Her instincts shrieked at her, telling her that such an attack would absolutely drop her as she currently was. Hurriedly, she rolled to the side, and with the momentum of that motion, she slashed diagonally up at it while it was caught in the middle of attempting to kick at where she had just been standing. The yielding of flesh to the blade of the kriegsmesser was sweet, and the blood that erupted from the small body and the cry of anguish the small animal gave out was even more pleasing.

Immediately, her instincts screamed at her again, and, twisting and pivoting into a one hundred eighty degree turn, she brought her blade along with her, cutting through another hare that came up behind her. Then, as that one died, she looked around her and saw maybe a dozen hares closing in rapidly on her position.

The hopping of a small woodland creature had never before seemed so ominous.

“I suppose entering combat with one of them aggroed the rest of them to my position… Wonderful…”

Now, if this were an anime, she’d drop her guard, stomp her foot, and complain about most RPGs having no aggro radius for low-level enemies in starting areas, specifically so that occasions like this did not arise. But as this was not an anime, she ruthlessly suppressed that impulse, and stayed on guard as she let out a small affirmative grunt and charged headlong into the group of enemies hopping towards her, kriegsmesser swinging.

She had begun in the midmorning hours. By evening, when she trudged back into the city gates, feeling as though she was on her last legs, covered in cuts, gnaw marks, and bruises from attacks she failed to parry or evade, she had killed perhaps fifty of the woodland animals. Their small, rent and broken bodies were strewn haphazardly across the wooded field. She would have moved onto larger prey, were it not evening, and were she not in such a dire state; those two factors combined and conspired to make her go back into the city. Thankfully, she had made some gil—or rather, what she presumed to be gil, in any case—from the unmitigated slaughter of hares, which was fortunate, to say the least, but perplexed her greatly. For example, she could not for the life of her understand just how that much gil ended up spread between a few hares’ stomachs.

The currency itself was made up of small golden coins stamped with a large bird on one side and a tree on the other. The symbolism meant something, she was certain, but she was way too new to this world to even begin to hazard a guess. So instead, she had pocketed the coins and moved on, leaving questions concerning the havoc such objects must have played on the hares’ digestive systems for another day.

Her kriegsmesser was strapped to her back once again as she strode through Maelnaulde, and she could imagine she looked even worse then than she had that morning, with how much blood and viscera even now clung to her small frame, and how much more torn and tattered her clothes were than they had been when she washed up the previous day. All the same, she followed the sounds of drinking and carousing past the Guild of Adventurers, past most of the city, through areas that looked increasingly distressed, going from merely rough around the edges to impoverished to absolutely destitute. Nestled away in this area of absolute, crushing pennilessness rested a small, ramshackle tavern. Over the door was a sign, and on that sign was a faded, chipped painting that crudely depicted a naked woman with a tankard in either hand, clearly inebriated. The lettering spelled out the words, ‘The Drunken Whore - Bordello, Tavern and Inn.’ “Well, seems as good a place to stay as any, and a sight better than most, at the very least. That is, if the Guild is like the majority of establishments… At any rate, onward we go…”

Blasting the door wide open, she strode into the building, doing her best to seem like she belonged there. She didn’t know that she had a Plan C in case she was thrown out of this establishment on the basis of her race, anyways. She didn’t know the city well enough to even have a coherent Plan C.

Plan B, as it turned out, lasted about as long as it took for her to realise that the overwhelming majority of the clientele were men. Rough, rugged men. The urge to leave as quickly as she could spiked inside of her, but the knowledge that she had nowhere else to go left her unable to act on that impulse. So instead, she walked up to the bar and flagged the proprietor over. “How much for a room, my good ser?”

The man was of middling height and beautiful, but still, the sight of him shocked her. His flesh was pale as driven snow, his long hair was white as bone, and his eyes were a more vibrant red than even the shades of blood she had seen flying through the air from the bodies of attacking hares. He looked her up and down. “Let me guess. New adventurer, got turned away from the Guild on account of you being a drahn?”

“Y-yes, how did you…?”

The man snorted. “To be so green you must piss grass, and then to be so green on top of that that you don’t even know that you radiate naivete like an aura. Truly, youth and innocence are wasted on the young and innocent.”

“I’m hardly an innocent,” she protested.

He scoffed. “Take a look around you, girl. These men are mercenaries, assassins, trained killers. The dregs of Maelnaulde’s society that are tolerated when needed and then left with this place as their only recourse when they’re not. These men have had to bury friends. A few have loved ones who work here because some noble thought they looked like a fun romp and are now overwhelmingly considered damaged goods.

“You’re not in some pretty, gilded city, girl. You’re in the Rouge. A place for whores, bastards, and broken men to come to live out their lives in misery and die pointlessly. This place, the Drunken Whore, exists so that they can do that in peace. So if you’re here to slum it with lower life forms, I must kindly insist that you get the fuck out.”

“Tandem! Don’t be so hard on the poor girl! Can’t you see she’s got nowhere else to go?” called a woman’s voice. It was soft and sultry, husky, even, but with a wicked edge of bitterness to it. From some distance behind the bar came the owner of that voice—a woman, tall and statuesque, but more in how she carried herself than in her build. Her body was covered in a low-cut, finely-crafted yukata that was ornamented and embellished almost to the point of gaudiness, but without crossing that threshold. Her skin was pale like marble, but still a far more natural shade than the man’s bloodless flesh. Her eyes were a piercing jade hue, and her long, silky black hair cascaded down her back and over her shoulders. She lifted a single fine brow as she scrutinised Katsumi, looking her up and down with a gaze that was both far more appraising and calculating than Tandem’s had been. “Hmm. Yes, you’ve got potential. You’ll do.”

Tandem sighed and threw up his hands as he walked away, and Katsumi looked between the albino and his…employer? Paramour? Wife? She wasn’t quite sure how to characterise the relationship that so clearly existed between the two that one would have to be blind to not see it, to not see that something was going on there. Her eyes shifted rapidly between man and woman, and eventually she couldn’t help but ask, “Am I missing something here?”

“Several things, I’d imagine, but don’t worry your pretty head about that,” said the woman. Walking around the end of the bar, she circled Katsumi, and faint, strangely familiar fumes of kizami smoke wafted up into her nostrils. It smelled mostly of tobacco, with a thin undercurrent of amphetamines interlaced throughout, and it made her nose, apparently quite sensitive in her new life, sneeze. “Yes, I think you’ll do quite nicely. You’ll need a bath, of course, and some new clothes—but with a bit of grooming and a few days of training, you’d be an excellent fit for our little family.”

“She’s talking about you working as a whore, if that’s not immediately apparent,” called Tandem. “I know you greenhorns are usually quite oblivious on that score.”

“Tandem!” she chastised the man, before turning towards Katsumi. “Nothing so crass, I assure you. Certainly, our girls do service the men here, but it is a privilege for our patrons, not a right. My husband over there may not look the part, but he is quite adept at forcing those few patrons who try to take more than what is for sale out and onto the streets for the foreseeable future—or really ever, come to think of it.

“You’ll be well-treated—fed, clothed, and given a fair wage. I daresay this is more a halfway house for girls…well…for girls like you, I suppose—desperate and with nowhere else to go, for one reason or another—than it is a brothel,” said the woman. “You’ll see a chirurgeon regularly and be expected to take moon tea to protect yourself. The men are usually careful, but accidents do happen.

“The rules are few, but they are strict. There will be no stealing—and no, I don’t say that because of your race, I say that because I say that to every new girl—no lying, no hoarding, and as a general matter, nothing that could stoke conflict between you and the other girls. Any conflicts that do arise, I shall personally resolve—and my word is final. We are a family here—and very often it is us against the world. Thus it is imperative that we are able to present a united front in the face of adversity. Understood?”

Is this where my life has come to? Turning tricks between the sheets to survive? Well, I suppose it’s probably easier than being a geisha, or trying to make it out there on my own, for that matter, if today has taught me anything, she thought to herself. “Yes. I understand.”

“Excellent!” said the woman, clapping her slender, elegant hands together, and in her grasp, Katsumi noted, was a collapsed paper fan. “Well then. My name is Madam Tsuyu. Welcome, little dragon, to the family. I’m certain you’ll fit right in.”