More kinds of people are on the road as you approach the harbour. There are the menial workers, those farmers either heading out early to make it back in time for dinner or loading their produce onto the carts of wholesale buyers to save themselves the trip, a few pedlars bringing with them household goods for the families in the outlying homesteads, and the labourers arriving to build homes, channels and roads. Then there's the adventuring kind, the people like yourself, in ones or twos or gathered parties. You are all hunters and explorers alike with some heading back to the harbour with loot, exciting the next wave of adventurers landing on this continent. You carry your own bag, an early cache of animal products that you didn't have use for but couldn't bear to waste, unearthed now that they may have use at the harbour. Newies. Their eyes flit to your hefty belongings in awe, you almost strut, though any urge of that thought is doused by a gaunt man with pathetic baggage.
"Why aren't you yapping, boy? Got rot in your herbs? Gahahaha!" The gaunt man is laughing at his own insults, but the worst part is that you are speaking up to him, and no one can hear your quiet voice from afar. Imprudent motherfucker. You grab a tree cone from the ground and hurl it at his face and leap away, hearing the reverberating crack behind you before he can react. "Gahahauck! Ah, tuah, ah." The tree cone splits on his nose cutting his face open. He can't see, his hands unable to hold the warmth dripping away from his face while he spit the taste of iron from his lips.
The people shrink away at the sight, unsure that the man had incited this much violence against himself, but the few adventurers point and laugh like it's within the realm of their banter. A man hauling leathers on a cart picks up a shrapnel from the projectile, squinting at it. "Is this a tree cone?" he flicks the seed with his finger and looks up into the undergrowth with a smile.
You drop down, heart beating fast and throw the cache to the ground before it can take you with it. It is, of course, one hundred and twenty kilograms in one unwieldy bag. With coarse breaths, you gulp two mouthfuls of water before steadily exhaling. The bag goes over your shoulder once more, and ahead of you, chains wrap around trunks, their links biting into the bark, attached to pulleys and ropes that lie strewn on the trampled ground next to felled trees. The canopy opens overhead to the bloomy sunlight as you look over a forest clearance with an unobstructed view of the coastal inlet. The early city itself is quite sparse for buildings, but its unused lands are full of tents, and the adventurers' guild hall is no longer the only three-storey house around. Out on the waters, the old dock's capacity is so inadequate that the vessels are anchoring off the coast to wait in queue.
On the way in, you pass some departing adventurers as well as those few training their skills on the fields or crafting in improvised smitheries in the city's outskirts. A drunk man tending a forge sobers up the moment he spots you holding that hefty bag of yours. He snaps at his son, "You rascal, see what that bastard's dragging in!"
The son piecing together chainmail looks over his shoulder then back to his father. "Who?"
"Are you blind? Him, ah, where did he go? Get him quick! I'm not going through those fucking gougers at the docks again!"
His son drops the unfinished chainmail without hesitation and shouts, "Fuck those gougers!", and runs out of the smithery, his figure as fleeting as the wind.
You walk down a boulevard that leads straight to the dock and esplanade as the sea blows in. Here's the only resemblance of a city. Blocks at this end of the boulevard holds the city's administrative precinct, and it's where the adventurers' guild is located, their old half-timbered hall house with dorm wings spanning an entire block. In the next few blocks are newer houses that fly different flags from the Old World, followed by company branches and headquarters of established adventuring parties, each flaunting their bold insignias and impressive signboards. Closer to the dock, the buildings filter into commerce such as taverns, import shops stocking familiar goods from the Old World, and New World artisans staking their place. You step into the esplanade's market followed by a young man in a wrinkled soot-blackened apron with dirt under his fingernails.
"Evening Sir, are you looking to lay all that off your shoulders?"
"Yes," you say quietly.
"Sorry, what did you say?"
Three blinks pass between you two, and you helplessly take the bag off your shoulders. Their contents clatter and rattle as it hit the ground attracting inquiring looks from passersby.
"Ah well then, allow me Sir." He picks up the bag like nothing and brings it off the path and away from other stalls. He unpacks teeth and tusks on the ground, turning them in his hands, hefting their weight and gauging their dimensions. "I'll take them all, except these, they are too small as ivory stock," he says, but you insist in him taking the rest for a bargain if not for free "Ah. So, so charitable!" he stammers. After seeing the commotion, a man wearing a full-length coat with a ledger under his armpit arrives to purchase the remaining stash at a wholesale price.
"Impressive inventory," he says as a porter hauls the last of your animal skulls, horns and antlers. Looking at the ivory in the apron man's possession, he scribbles something on a page in his book and tears it out, handing you the piece. "But you'd save time coming to us directly."
"You spineless pig!" The apron man shouts at the full-length coat man, and in another commotion, you leave the two to bicker with each other. In the end, you have more than 23 dollars in banknotes, with a handful of five, twenty-five and fifty cent denominations in coins at your disposal. Relieved of your baggage, you start searching for bookstores near the esplanade, passing by different establishments. The signboards read the likes of Thorn and Thistle Pharmaceuticals, Clifford's Compounds, Declan's Firearms, Dun and Daughters' Provisions, Benjamin's Stellar Emporium, Merry Moorings, and The Continental Cosmos Inn. Soon enough, you spot gold foil lettering on a window that reads, Lucien's Chapter House. The door of rings a bell when you open it, stepping into the layout of a small bookstore with a table in the centre that holds a clutter of books and papers that catch your eye. A map. But before you can look at it clearly, you hear faint exclamations and slow footsteps coming from the elevated wooden balustrades that separates the front retail space from the facilities at the back.
A man with pitch black hair with sterling spectacles, wearing a white button-down shirt and waistcoat rests his hand on the railing and says with tense eyebrows, "My apologies dear customer, my client had left the door open by accident. The store is closed if you may please excuse yourself." You stop yourself from speaking out loud and instead reach into the knapsack pulled around your waist. The waistcoat man watches you with a grave expression behind the glare of his spectacles but eases to a dubious look when he sees the journal in your hand. He breathes deeply and says, "We will reopen next week, I have very important guests at the moment." He walks down a short flight of stairs, as you continue to look at the balustrade with wide eyes. A woman with feline features stands in view, two cat ears on her head of long black hair and a slender black tail curling at her thigh, wearing a pleated white garment that rests on her collar bones around a beaded collar. The man stands eye to eye with you, obstructing your view. "Please leave."
You cast one final look over the waistcoat man's shoulder at now six people of different kinds. Feathers? A snake? You don't have the pleasure of looking any further before you turn around, walking back out onto the esplanade with more questions than you came to town to answer. You turn around, looking back to meet the waistcoat man's eyes staring back at you with the same dubious expression, behind the gilded lettering of the window now fiddling with a sterling insignia. His thumb rubs the silver casting in his palm as pressure forms in his head, a subtle dulling of conscious that reflexively makes him hold the insignia tight and alleviate all the pressure at once. To the people behind him, he asks, "How did he even enter at all?"
The waistcoat man closes the phthalo green curtains and leaves you with your thoughts. Natives? You recall the journal at the old home, instances of trade the owner made with neighbours of similar description. For some reason they are at the harbour. Are they here for trade again? You open the journal in your hands to the page you copied the map onto last week and wonder about their connection to the people behind the relics you are uncovering. Your eyes narrow. With one glimpse behind closed doors, the world suddenly opens up to you, but you clench your jaw in the feeling that you're getting closed off from those upcoming opportunities. Lucien, is it? Fuck off.