Two left in line.

An Ikesian woman in an archaic dress and a Grekurian man balancing on stilt-like metal feet, attached at the knees. He wore nothing of note, save a pair of old military boots.

Old and young.

The former exuded more life than the latter.

Then, just the crippled soldier was left.

A half-minute and a brief exchange later, the soldier left the stall with a reinvigorated stride, a wry smile upon his scarred visage as he bit pieces from a fried turnover shaped to resemble a rat.

Zel stepped past the short curtain, forced to bow her head just to pass. The diminutive peddler looked up at her with only slightly exaggerated awe, oohing and aahing as he intentionally showed off his cartoonishly oversized buck front teeth. His skin was slightly yellow, his facial features slightly childish, his eyes slanted and narrow, but none of it was quite Pateirian. He wore a cone-shaped hat, its front plastered with “HONEST PING” in big brush strokes.

The food cart itself held a great deal of mocking Pateirian-themed memorabilia, chief among them a caricature of the Divine Emperor rendered in meticulous portraiture and very literally enshrined right behind where the peddler stood, in plain sight. Right next to it was a blackboard with a menu listing various “traditional” dishes, from the so-called “three-squeaks delicacy” to “skinned dog”, “vivisected rabbit”, “cat fried in a bag”, and so on, with prices in gelt - ones that included decimal spaces, as if gelt had smaller denominations. Did gelt have smaller denominations? Yet another thing to look into later.

Free space on the board was filled with proclamations of how the suffering of an animal before consumption improved the taste and health benefits many times over, and how boiling dogs alive was emperor-approved.

Not a single animal or butchering implement could be seen anywhere in the impressively compacted kitchen. Just a vat of boiling oil, a great deal of dough, and several animal-themed turnover molds.

“Uh- H-herro? You wan orda, yes?” leaned in the peddler, a Kargarian accent shining through his caricatured performance for a moment.

“Three cats, a rat, and a grasshopper,” she said. Ping sprang into motion like a man possessed, going through a gamut of motions in mere seconds, revealing that the lidded containers by his left held the fillings. Cats were filled with off-colour ground meat, while rats were filled with cheese, and grasshoppers with some green vegetable filling.

He noticed her looking as he filled the second cat, reassuring her without so much as a trace of his cartoonish accent that, “It’s just spiced chicken, no worries.”

She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “You do this schtick everywhere you go?”

Ping’s eyes darted around for people in the line, his hands not slowing down a bit, and only once he saw that there was nobody behind Zelsys he responded.

“Pretty much, yeah,” he said, the Kargarian accent in his voice fully taking over.. “It’s rare that the caravan goes to a place where they like mainlanders. Worst I’ve had in recent months was a couple hundred miles northwards, some town that had gotten occupied too recently for me to know. Dropped the accent before the third day ‘cause the customers kept bringing up how it wasn’t safe to mock the empire like that.”

He fished the cat turnovers out of the oil with steel tongs while he talked, putting in the rest. Grinning, he clicked the tongs, and a killing intent flickered behind his eyes, “As if I couldn’t defend myself. Eight and a half gelt for the lot.”

“Take it you’re not from the empire yourself, then,” Zel continued as she fished up a silver and some coppers from her pocket.

Ping took a copper, snapped it between his fingers, and flicked her a perfect half, pulling the rat and grasshopper out of the oil and deftly wrapping each individual turnover in some paper tissue and wax paper. He kept on talking while he did this, steadily slipping into that accent again as he did, probably due to the person that Zel felt standing behind herself: “Not from the empire, no. From offshore isrand, rast bastion of honorabru ord kingdom.”

Finally, he stacked up the turnovers and handed them over with a smile. Then, as if nothing had happened, the caricature character of Ping returned in full force when he nodded her goodbye and did his song and dance for the next customer.

“Meat, greens, or cheese?” she asked. Sig turned from a shelf to look, glancing over the bundle of turnovers in her arms.

“Cat,” he chose, reaching out a hand, and she obliged. “Makhus is out back.”

So she went, presenting the same choice to the swordsman. Sweating and struggling for breath after having damn near cut a large rock in half, he chose greens, raising an eyebrow when she handed him the grasshopper. Nevertheless, he took a bite, offhandedly asking, “Where’d you get these?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” she chuckled, kicking the boulder. “There’s a food cart across the street. Red wood, shingled roof.”

Then, it was back inside. She just laid out all three remaining turnovers on the kitchen table and sat down, taking a cat for herself and kicking her feet up on the table while she waited for Zef.

It smelled outstanding, the meatiness and spices of the filling seeping through and mixing with the scent of the dough. Biting into the cat’s head, the browned outer shell cracked under her teeth and gave way to a soft, airy body of slightly sweet leavened dough. Yet further under that was the ground meat filling, the flavours of garlic, paprika, black pepper, and several other, unrecognizable spices complimenting the chicken.

Between the savoriness, the spices, the mild heat, and the generous amount of salt, Zel almost regretted not trying to pry the recipe out of that peddler.

Another bite, and another, and another.

The cat was headless by the time Zef finally came into the kitchen, wearing that familiar white sundress, sans bloodstain, sandals on her feet and round-framed glasses with dark-green lenses over her eyes. Zel recalled that there were several pairs of these in the hoard, but just how many?