Despite his reluctance to leave his post due to the difficulty of traversing even a short stretch of the Living Storm’s territory, he had no choice now.

The mud was shifting, trenches collapsing, old puddles of Rubedo being absorbed altogether, all swirling and shifting and mixing together as the beast at the center of it marshaled its strength.

One could see towers of rock slowly rising from the muck as clay was dredged up to encase skeletons in new shells. Moreover, he felt a great swell underfoot, an impending upheaval, as if Ubul was trying to see whether he could still perform his old feats of geomancy from within his indestructible prison. Whatever Ubul was doing, it would be a bad idea to stick around.

Indeed, just as he had escaped what his senses deemed to be the immediate area of danger, a sudden upsurge of earthen fury ripped through the earth. Geysers of churned soil and stone erupted, trees were uprooted, and faults in the ground were revealed as gaping cracks.

When, some time later, he would arrive to Willowdale’s immediate vicinity, he would find that a disconcerting pattern had been exposed by the quake. Were things not rectified, the Buried Gardens - the arcane and very much literal foundation of Willowdale’s fertility - could be rediscovered before their due time.

...But then, the ridiculous pageantry of a caravan spearheaded by a gigantic ironclad floating vessel might be sufficient distraction.

Following the quake, the markets returned to normal operation with staggering speed. Besides a few older folk who had lost their balance and a few things that had been knocked to the ground, no real damage seemed to have occurred, and so it was that Zel and Zef decided to simply continue perusing the markets as if nothing had happened.

For one, there was the obvious factor of novelty, of curiosity, and for two… Zel needed to find someone who could replace her arm-harness, and somehow, she had a strong feeling that Collier wouldn’t have the time to do so - at least not in a timely manner.

They came by a good number of interesting stalls, tents, and other mercantile establishments as they walked.

One had a wizened-looking man sat out in front, selling various alchemic wares from ingredients to tools and glassware. Behind him, there were great jars stacked ontop of one another, and each jar contained a deformed, fetus-like homunculus with an adult replica of the alchemist’s face. They were labeled as “The Aspiring Alchemist’s Best Friend”, and cost a little over a hundred gelt each. Some of them looked half-dead already.

Another was simply an open tent with a copious amount of melee weapons on display, most of them plain, utilitarian, and simple. It was also one of the more frequented vendors, if the sweaty, stressed-out looking workmen stocking the shelves were to go by.

Right next to it was a similar establishment, but for firearms. These were… Almost exclusively muzzle loaders, with a small minority of weird intermediary designs using custom-made cartridges. The firing mechanisms varied from wheellock, to sparklock, to runelock, to… Needles meant to pierce a special paper cartridge, of all things.

They carried a copious variety of blunderbusses as compared to the expected offerings of pistols, rifles, and other firearms. One particular item that stood out was a weapon labeled as not for sale, this being a short-barreled muzzle-loader, whose barrel also doubled as the handle of a saber. The firing mechanism was apparently contained mostly within the scabbard, though the practicality of such a weapon was dubious at best.

At that point one might as well just attach a gun to the scabbard, or use the bulk of a blunderbuss as the mount for an axe.

Curiously, they lacked a firearm that Zel had come to consider a ubiquitous middle-step - lever-operated volcanics, with that strange self-contained ammunition. It seemed Collier was the sole saleswoman of such innovation, not to mention her apparent obsession with miniaturizing cannon shells for use in personal firearms.

A short distance further, they came upon a big tent with an altogether amusing mode of self-advertisement.

It had a sleazy-looking, slit-eyed man with suspicious scales on his neck manning the counter, speaking with a comically exaggerated hissing affectation to his tone, exalting the effects of his wares.

THE SINCERE SNAKE-OIL SALESMAN

They offered a wide variety of products, but the chief among them was actual, literal snake-oil. The salesman made an entire comedy routine out of cartoonishly convincing bystanders of the efficacy of his snake-oil, claiming that it could cause the upper layers of one’s skin to turn into serpentlike scales and spark a molting process that would cause aged skin to peel away whilst the layer underneath would be restored.

He played it up, intentionally making it seem unbelievable, only to offer a free tryout to any comers, stating that he would give them a free bottle if it worked.

When, inevitably, someone curious gave in, it actually did exactly what was advertised. After the show, he shifted to a more trustworthy version of his persona, earnestly warning buyers that using it for long periods of time could cause mutagenic reactions, using himself as a living example, and stating that it wasn’t deleterious as much as it was a strange thing that people asked about.

Besides snake-oil, he also displayed a wide variety of small cosmetic products, aphrodisiacs, and so-called “massage crystals''. To the surprise of none and the feigned outrage of many a housewife, they were mostly conspicuously cock-shaped quartz sculptures that rumbled like a hive of angry bees when supplied with a bit of essentia. It was no more surprising that such enchanted implements were offered in shapes and materials that implied the maker’s intent for their use with prolonged appendages, as well as ones that looked almost identical to a regular old lightgem, and even glowed slightly when active.

They might’ve bought one or two of those, or even some snake oil, were the tent not practically swarming with customers already.