90 Zi'da 722
Morning
Maxine hovered over her empty mug at the tavern like a dog over a cleaned bone. Her lithe shadow cast its small darkness over the little real estate she occupied where she sat. Ithecals that dwarfed her stomped in droves outside in the streets, diligently and industriously beginning their routines to take on the trial with the rise of the sun. Inside this unassuming hole-in-the-wall she'd discovered was nearly empty. The barkeep, a slender lizard with green hue, had mostly abandoned her to begin his opening duties.
This city, with all its hulking reptiles, was strange to her. Once again she elected to follow Kasoria wherever he went in this world as a member of his merry Band. She was steadfast and loyal in their mission in Rharne like she was supposed to be. Their journey over to the Eternal Empire proved to be a challenge to her psyche. Stone cold clean as he demanded, she couldn't escape the fierce draw of the vices that relentlessly called her name. Rharne was the perfect playground for her personal catastrophe. She was too weak to fight the calling forever. She indulged.
Hiding her relapse proved impossible eventually. That's why she was here: cast aside in this dreary bar instead of standing armed and beside Kasoria at the Imperial Summit. He was right to shun her. Her eyes were bloodshot with insomnia and Ambrosia clung to her like a favorite companion. Once she started she couldn't stop, and now she was back in this place she scratched and clawed her way out of like her life depended on it. Because it had. Now she was alone, away from the Old Man and The Band, wary of the shadow of Raskalarn and Karem, and memories of the reptilian guards of Slags Deep and special teams that hunted her in Rynmere hung on her mind.
The Old Man had some harsh words when they last spoke. Even if she wanted to stop, she couldn't. Narcotics had a grip on her so tight not even she fully understood it. What she did know was this: as fervidly as her body desired this spiral on a deeply cellular level, she so badly wanted to win her way back into Kasoria's good graces. Those two things couldn't co-exist. Right now she was the shameful addict again, wallowing in sin and recklessness that reminded her of all the red she'd ever colored her hands with. The sun was rising over the horizon. The space in her head turned progressively more opaque.
"You're not from here," a voice a couple stools down observed evenly.
Maxine gradually pulled herself from her dismal dystopia to peer at the stranger. It was a woman, a human, clad in the stiff leathers of a traveler but clean in appearance. Her hair was swept back and wavy over her shoulders. Just barely the Rusalka thought she could make out the imprint of a sword hidden behind the flap of a jacket. The barkeep placed a mug of ale in front of the stranger and she traded up with a coin.
"I'm not from anywhere," Maxine answered lowly.
Neither of the women really looked at the other. Maxine went back to decaying over her empty glass, trying to think about anything other than the fact she was only thinking about when she was going to use again. The traveler, taking a drink from her mug, seemed equally distant. Maxine ran a hand through her hair and sighed. Her thoughts began to shift in a new direction. This time toward Sabrina, the ugliness with the Dorricks, and the horrors from the past that seemed to want to be dredged to the surface to point their accusing, vengeful fingers in her face.
The empty mug in front of the Rusalka was ripped away so swift she nearly jumped. The barkeep raised his hairless brow and put a fresh one down before her. She blinked at him as he walked away and vanished into a back room with the empty mugs in his scaly hands. Maxine peered down at the drink, finding it frothy and full.
"You smoke?" the stranger's voice was there again.
Max turned to find the woman slipping a tobacco cigarette from a case and offered it her way. She regarded the offering warily before slowly reaching over and plucking it from the woman's fingers. The Rusalka popped the cigarette between her lips, pulled a candle her way, and leaved over the flame until the end of the rolled paper began to burn. She pushed the candle back where it was and curiously found the stranger closing the case, only to slip it back into her pocket.
"You don't?" Max asked with a tilt of her head, inhaling the warm smoke into her lungs thereafter.
"No," the stranger admitted with a shrug. "But people do. So I carry them."
"Am I about to start foaming at the mouth?"
"By the way you keep breathing that shit in, doesn't look like you care much either way."
"That's 'cause I don't."
"Hm."
Maxine pulled the cigarette from her mouth and eyed the burning end. Smoke wafted up from her lungs. The stranger, unbothered, continue to drink. The Rusalka tasted the ale for herself. Her inner demons enjoyed the taste of that indulgence too.
"Thanks," she regarded the stranger finally after a few moments of shared silence. "For this."
"Sure," the stranger answered. "Looked like you could use 'em."
"So, what? You some military type or something?"
"Something like that."
"You're not from here either. On some super secret mission?"
"Nah," the stranger laughed with a shake of her head. "I'm on...sabbatical, you could say."
"Seb-what? That foreign for somethin'?"
"Taking a vacation. I do that every once in a while. Just especially right now."
"A vacation to sit in shitty, nearly empty taverns with shitbirds?" Maxine looked up when she heard a growl and raised a disarming hand toward the barkeep who just emerged. "No offense or nothin'."
"More like a walk-about of sorts." When the stranger saw Maxine's blank expression in response she smiled a little. "I travel to different places and talk to different people in the world that I meet along the way, like you. Sometimes it brings, not answers but...clarity? I suppose."
Another pair of humans entered the bar together and wandered to the far end of the bar. The barkeep stomped over to them, conversing briefly before rewarding them with their mugs. Then the pair walked away to a table in the far corner. The door eased closed again, sealing the occupants away from the busy outside world going on without them in this realm of pause.
"How long it take?" Maxine inquired. "Clarity?"
"Depends," the stranger replied. "I think this one will take a very long time."
"Ah, well. Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t think you’ll find much clarity here.”
"Hah. I didn’t mean to put any pressure on you. It’s more about having a moment of human experience with another person. If it sorts something out for me, it’s happenstance.” The stranger brushed a bit of dust that landed on the shoulder of her jacket. "Some questions are too big to be answered. And of those, I also have too many.”
"Sounds hopeless.”
"I won’t be offended if you call me a masochist for trying.”
The barkeep took a look at the drinks of his patrons before vanishing in the back room again. Moments later the smell of smoke gently rose and heat wafted into the main tavern room.
"That’s funny,” Max mused grimly.
"What’s that?”
"Trying being painful. I’d agree.”
"Does that mean you’re in a place of trying or defeat?”
"I guess I haven’t decided yet. I’m pretty tired of it all. Of trying.”
"Is it too hard?”
"Yes. And then there’s the question of whether someone like me should try.”
"Interesting.”
Max nearly scoffed. Interesting. Yes, that was one way to over-simplify her situation in all its agonizing totality spanning of arcs of disgrace and dishonor. She sucked in a long drag.
"People,” The stranger began again after another bout of silence and some drinks of ale. "Do you believe they’re naturally good or evil?”
"For fuck’s sake,” Max sighed a breath of smoke. "I don’t know…”
"Come on. Humor me. What do you believe?”
"I think they’re probably evil. Or just bad. People are fucking selfish, and violent, and gods damned stupid.”
"All of them?”
"Not all of them. I’ve met a few the rest of us don’t deserve. Those people aren’t most though.”
Max plucked the tobacco cigarette from her lips and watched the end of it burn. In the corner, the other two patrons were whispering lowly to one another. The sound of more wood tossing onto a hearth echoed from the back room.
"What do you think?” Max returned the posed question.
"I think…” the stranger trailed off at first, gaze becoming especially distant as she marinated on her response. "Neither. I think we’re all born with a little propensity for good and a little propensity for evil. Some just start off more lopsided than others.”
"That answer seems painfully neutral.”
"It is,” the stranger allowed. "I told you I ran away from home with impossible questions.”
"What’s keeping you on the fence?”
"Shitty people have surprised me a time or two,” the stranger admitted before taking a drink, a pause, and turning visibly more tense. "And people I loved and respected, people that I knew were unwaveringly, frustratingly good, have done some of the most cruel, unjust, and downright terrible, unforgivable things I’ve ever seen. Shining lights in the dark snuffed out and turned into lessons. So, I just don’t rightly know.”
Max swallowed and nodded slowly, knowingly. She’d never been anyone’s salvation in the abyss. What she did know well was what it was like to act, wound beyond understanding or repair, and disappoint any foolish enough to take any stake upon her. When both their mugs were empty, the stranger ordered another fresh round to fill them.
"Do you think people can change?” Maxine found her voice rising foolishly despite herself.
"Yes,” the stranger murmured. "For better and for worse, people change all the time.”
"Someone who’s been shit for a long time though. Someone who was never ‘good’ and did those terrible, unforgivable, evil things. Can someone like that change?”
"Are you asking me if there's a futility in trying to change? Fighting what feels inevitable to one's own nature?"
"Yeah, that."
"I guess that depends."
"Another bullshit answer."
"Well, wait. Hear me out."
The stranger rose from her stool. Maxine raised her brow, carefully watching with a sharp gaze as the woman relocated to the seat right beside her. The stranger took a drink, set it down on the bar counter, and rotated just slightly toward the Rusalka with a quizzical gleam to her analytical eyes.
"We talk about 'change' but we talk about it very broadly," the woman began to explain. "I think for me to give a true answer to your question, with my opinion, we have to talk about your own perception of what you're asking me. First, we have to decide how you measure change within this context. So, I ask you in turn, what in your eyes constitutes a change in this hypothetical, terrible person?"
"I don't know," Max muttered and puffed on the cigarette. "They just stop being shit."
"Let's get on the exact same page and work this out. What qualities would they have upon changing that they didn't have before?"
"I don't--fuckin' damn it. Let me think." The Rusalka's brain was coming down now from her last high, and she was starting to feel it. "I guess they're...like...fuck me. They do the right thing like they're supposed to, and they know what that right thing is and when they're supposed to do it. Even when its hard. They don't switch up on people. They have control. They're not corrupt. I don't know."
"We have a start here. There's some qualities there you described. Virtuous and courageous. Trustworthy and loyal. Self-governed. Incorruptible."
"I guess."
"Now let's over-simplify these qualities."
"Okay..."
The world outside that tavern was nearly non-existent now. Even the small room they were in seemed to get smaller the more the two conversed. The heat kept rolling in from the labors of the barkeep in the back room. More light began to wander through the dingy windows. The stranger cleared her throat and tapped the bar with her index finger.
"Virtuous people are moral people," the stranger elaborated. "People who dictate their choices, words, and actions on a set of ethics and principles they can't compromise. To be virtuous you must have virtues: standards and principles you believe in and adhere to. You have to develop a personal code." The woman nodded her head and took a sip of her drink, seeming to listen to her words back to herself and agreeing with her own assessment. "Virtuousness is the foundation of it all I think. It connects with all the other qualities. You'll see." Another nod. Another agreement with the self before she rolled her leather-clad shoulders and continued her wagon of thought for the Rusalka. "Courageous people act on their virtues despite fear and threat of reprisal. Trustworthy and loyal people keep their word, are steadfast in their allegiances, are honest, and reliable because their virtues call them to be so. Practice and will allow people to self-govern themselves on their righteous path, and succeeding in all of that makes them incorruptible. So!"
Max nearly jumped when the other woman slapped her hand down on the bar counter like her appendage was a sure gavel.
"What then does a person need to do to improve their character?"
"Hm? You want me to answer?"
"Don't overthink it."
"Listen, I can barely fuckin' read. I understood about half of what you even said, and I'm fried."
"Come on. I can tell by all the head-shaking you understood well enough."
"You said it. It all comes back to virtue or whatever."
"See?" the woman's blue eyes danced and she gave Maxine a brave pat on the shoulder in reward. "No trick questions. To be a good person, by your own definition, you should probably first work on being a virtuous person. You have to decide what is 'right' in life. You have to write your internal code of ethics and frame your behavior around it, and become it in everything that you do. And I do mean everything."
"You make it sound easy."
"That sounds easy?! Hah!" The stranger nearly spit out her drink before she forced it down. "If that's what you heard, you haven't been listening. All of that is fucking hard. Some trials it is downright impossible."
"So the answer is, ultimately, just a simple 'no' to my original question and there is no fucking point."
"Wrong. Just because something is so difficult it seems insurmountable doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing with everything you have to give. It's a hard road and you may never get to your destination on this type of trip, but the journey itself is sometimes its own salvation."
"So you think it's better to try and fail instead of never trying at all?"
"Is that not virtuous?"
Maxine frowned and let the rhetorical question hang dense over them in the air. Her eyes were glazed over, staring at a barrel behind the bar counter when she felt a primitive pain that ripped her from reverie. She hissed as she dropped the sliver of burning cigarette left into the ash tray set out in front of her. Suckling her finger in her mouth, she tried to drive the heat away from the burn. The stranger barked a laugh at her expense and shoved her empty mug away from her.
"You learn all that shit you just tried to sell me at some fancy university?" Max accused when her pulled her finger from her mouth, trying to keep some of the sarcasm out of her voice but that attempt too was in vain.
"The opposite," the stranger admitted with a sly smirk. "I found most things from university to be detached from reality as it is, although I have to say I bought their ideologies for a little while. It wasn't until I got out in the grit, and the violence, and the ugliness of it all that I really learned how things are. Literacy does anyone good, but other than that you didn't miss much."
"Got street educated then?"
"No better teacher."
"Ain't that fuckin' right."
The two exchanged small, knowing grins. The redness of the woman's left ear, the faded scars, and the general demeanor of this stranger began to seem more familiar now. Their language and perspective couldn't be more unrecognizable though. The barkeep came by and the generous, enigmatic character slid yet another set of coins his way. He returned with two full mugs for either woman. Max felt her hand drop into her empty pocket.
"Don't misunderstand," the woman's voice turned tense suddenly, eyes losing some of that playful gleam as her head turned to look at Maxine beside her. "Even if a person can change, they don't wipe their slate clean. What is done has been done. You don't get to forget the mistakes you've made, the things you've done, and how you've hurt people. You own every fucking bit of all that forever, and damn you if you dare try to pretend otherwise or forget."
"Well for fuck's sake," Max pushed the ash try away and threw up her hands. "Then what's the damn point?!"
"We are responsible for who we choose to be every moment of every trial. We are all accountable for our histories. To make the mistake of liberating yourself entirely from it is to repeat it, and repeating it means you haven't changed. It lends perspective. And humbles."
"So if you do the impossible, have virtues and became good, you still can't escape your past. Then what the fuck are you at that point? Are you good or are you bad?"
"That's just it isn't it?" The stranger laughed without vitality. "How much good can outweigh the bad, and vice versa? If you've been fundamentally good, better than most by far, all your life but you end it in monstrous, bloody destruction, which are you now? Decades of impressively virtuous good or not even a break of pure fucking evil? Where do the scales fall?"
"I thought you didn't smoke," Max turned her head at the smell of tobacco, brow raising when she found her conversation partner taking a puff against a flame.
"I don't."
"That one of your big questions then? The one you ran off to find?"
"Something like that, yes."
"You were right from the start then. I don't have no fuckin' answer for that one."
"Maybe no one does."
"Hmph."
The stranger stood up, plucked the lit tobacco cigarette from her lips, and offered a long sigh of smoke over the bar counter. She quietly finished her drink and shoved it away from the near edge of the surface. Then she popped the cigarette back in her mouth and gave a tug at her leather jacket to adjust it back where it belonged on her shoulders.
"It's gonna be the hardest gods damned thing you've ever done in your life," the woman said. "You're going to fail a lot. You're going to fall down on your fucking face and it'll be confusing, and every time you'll have to talk yourself out of quitting this stupid, hard journey again and again. For fuck's sake though? Whatever you do?" The stranger blew smoke as she pointed at the Rusalka with the cigarette between her fingers. "Fucking try, Maxine."
The leather-clad woman was out the door before the shock wore off the Rusalka sitting holding her mug. She ditched the drink in an instant, throwing the door open before it shut, and racing after the woman into the busy street. Once in the agonizing daylight the addict blinked and squinted through the crowd of towering, reptilian, behemoths. The other woman was gone.
How did she know my name?
Max ran her hand down her face and growled. Had she imagined it all? Was the woman ever really there? The Rusalka quit her fruitless search and turned back toward the tavern to return to her seat. When she did she found herself confronted with her reflection in the glass. Staring into her own eyes, she didn't recognize herself.
A stranger stared back.