On his way back, he stopped by the tavern and looked up at the second floor, where he could see a lantern still glowing, which he thought meant Verity was awake. He wanted to go up and speak with her, but she’d said to wait until the next day, and he would abide by that, as much as he wanted to get things moving. He didn’t really understand why she would have wanted to put it off. Bards were supposed to take joy in other people, never wanting a quiet moment to themselves, but it seemed that Verity hadn’t been cast from the same mold. Given what he knew of her history, this was little surprise.
The temple was quiet as well, with no lights on, which meant that there was no chance to speak with Hannah ahead of schedule, not that Alfric really wanted to. By his reckoning, clerics were one of the most useful professions you could have with you in a dungeon, depending on which god they followed, but they were also one of the hardest to convince to go in. Hannah was a devotee of Garos Orag, one of the best gods for healing, and also one whose clerics were typically the least inclined toward dungeons.
And as for the last potential member of the party, Isra, all Alfric knew aside from her vital statistics was that she came to the biweekly market in the mid-morning, carrying meat and skins from a day’s hunting, sometimes with the meat smoked or dried, sometimes with the skins tanned, and occasionally with other goods as well. She didn’t live in Pucklechurch, but she showed up on the censusmaster’s query, and she’d been seen around often enough that she must live somewhere in the hex, though the woman at the general store hadn’t had any clue where that might be.
All in all, Alfric had to call his first day in Pucklechurch a qualified success. If he could get a party together and head down into a dungeon within the next few days, everything would be back on track.
Alfric knocked on Mizuki’s door just after sunrise, having woken up to twilight filtering in through the curtains of his tavern room. She answered quite a while after he knocked, wearing a robe and looking disheveled, her hair out of place. She was squinting and frowning as she looked at him, trying to keep the light from fully entering her eyes.
“You,” she said.
“Alfric,” he supplied.
“Have you had breakfast?” she asked.
“I don’t eat breakfast,” said Alfric. “Lunch is my first meal of the day. It’s the custom, where I’m from.”
“Well, you can wait outside while I make breakfast, or you can come in and sit there awkwardly while I eat,” she said. “Your choice.”
“Sorry if I woke you,” said Alfric. Looking at her, there was really no need for the ‘if’.
Mizuki waved away his apology and staggered into her house, clutching her robe close to her and leaving the door open by way of invitation. She was barefoot, and Alfric hesitated slightly by the doorway, looking at the different shoes there, before deciding to take his boots off. He didn’t know the custom in Pucklechurch, nor did he know whether Mizuki would actually follow that custom, being as she was half Kiromon. He set his sword in a holder by the door as well, then trod into the house, following the sounds of someone banging around in the kitchen.
The house was too large for one person, that much was obvious from the outside, but it was fully furnished, and almost everything was slightly dusty. Ash filled the fireplace, and the fabric of the couches was faded. There were places on the walls where pictures had once hung, their removal leaving nails in place and bare spots beneath them. It gave the impression of having been effectively abandoned ages ago, but Mizuki clearly lived there. Alfric wondered, briefly, whether she was a squatter but dismissed the notion. Squatters weren’t common in small towns like this, he didn’t think, and besides, there was something strongly Kiromon about the architecture, though he still thought it strange even by those standards.
The kitchen was something different. Where the rest of the house was in need of cleaning, the kitchen was immaculate. A four-plate stove squatted in the center, along with a dual oven against one wall, all heavy cast iron. The tiled blue-and-white walls were obscured by hanging copper pots and pans, with a selection of knives against one wall, all polished until they gleamed. Two porcelain sinks, side by side, connected to a glass tank of clean water that hung from the ceiling and was likely fed into the house system. Braids of garlic and dried bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling, and when Alfric peeked into the open chiller, he saw a small selection of fresh ingredients. Mizuki had already grabbed a slab of pork and was pulling a few other things out, including glass bottles with dark liquids in them, a block of cheese, and a clump of thin mushrooms. He took a seat on a stool next to the island counter that the stove was set into.
