Preparing the feed was a simple affair. One that the trio, or more accurately the stablehand, busied themselves with after a quick retreat behind a wooden partition. “Decided on a name for him yet?” Elbow deep in her bucket, she was mixing Muur’s powders and other strange alchemical products into the vegetables by hand.
“Magnus, he’s got the size for it.” Muur supplied.
“Sounds Garlean…” The Roegadyn said with a slightly suspicious side-eye.
“Had the misfortune of trudging through there for a while, mostly ‘cause they took exception to the horns and tail and magic everywhere. Hard to get anything done when the soldiers are starting shit every other day.” Muur snorted ruefully, “Pretty sure the only place that’d be more racist would be Ishgard, from what I heard of their takes regarding anything even vaguely draconic.”
“Hah! Sounds like the Garleans alright." She barked with a laugh, “Don't know much about the Ishgardians. Didn't even have the good sense to come help repel the Garleans five years ago. Might've kept my arm if one of them Dragoons was there.”
“The way the body scars up is both a blessing and a curse, y’know? On one hand, it being so fast means the insides stay inside after a bit of bandaging and stitching at most. On the other, that pile of ‘good enough’ patches means it is a nightmare figuring out something to get the body to actually regrow anything, else we’d have potions of limb regeneration by now.” Muur explained, taking the topic on a hard swerve away from politics and into medicine.
Both Ul’dahan blinked at the sudden and unexpected swerve and looked at each other, then simply shrugged. “Those exist, if you'll believe it.” Whatever agreement they reached, Muur wasn't privy to it. But the ex-soldier(?) took the change in stride, “Only if you've only just lost a limb though. And they cost a king's ransom to boot. Thought that maybe I could get my shield-arm back after the war, but by then the whole stump'd scared over, and apparently reopenin’ the wound by choppin' off another bit of the arm wouldn't have worked… Also, I didn't have ten million Gil to my name.”
“Some metaphysics nonsense, I’m betting. Maybe a good enough engineer could slap together a mechanical replacement, but that ‘maybe’ and ‘good enough’ are doing more heavy lifting than an entire flock of draft Chocobos.” Muur sighed with a shake of her head.
“Ironwork folks might be crazy enough to try.” The woman said with a wistful nod. “But without their founder, Cid? Not likely to succeed… Right, that's the lad's food taken care of.” Taking her hands out of the mess of powdered vegetables, she turned to the pair. “Drop the feed yourself, it'll help with gettin’ him used to you… Probably should go and get yourselves somethin’ to eat after too. It's gettin' mighty late.”
“What? No way.” Orliane scoffed at the mere idea that the hour was as late as it was. “If it was nearing dinner, mom would've sent someone to get me.”
“...I may count as that someone.” Muur muttered with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man staring down the gallows.
to this day every stablehand lucky enough to see the two acolytes calmly feed their rescue, before booking it out of the stables at lightning speed as soon as they were far enough that it wouldn't be spooked, would swear up and down that ‘it was the Funniest thing I saw all month!’
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“Heeeeeeey. Muuuuuuur.” Barely even today days after Muur's extensive alchemical adventure, the horned Thaumaturge had made herself at home in the Order’s library by way of a minor bit of hoarding on her part. A little corner away from the main studying and reading area was where she'd taken to gather any and all books that caught her eyes. So much so that when Silent Umbrage slyly slid herself into that dark margin, she came face to face with a small wall of books rather than Muur herself, “My besties, my pal. Could you help your ol' friend here~?” Not that it even remotely broke her stride when it came to shamelessly asking for a favour.
“How big a mess?” Muur asked without even looking up from the book on the Heaven of Ice she was flipping through.
“Guh-!” Muur's words pierced her friend's heart like an arrow of judgement fired from Hallone's very bow—the way such a depiction was considered ‘apostatic’ by the Ishgardian Orthodox faith was a truly fascinating rabbit hole—“How could you wound me so Muur? To assume so little of me!”
“I am not hearing a denial~” The lizard wizard practically sang.
“Uuuuugh… Fine, if you've got to know. It's a pretty big one,” Her friend said with an eyeroll, the effect somewhat diminished by the eyepatch she still wore, “And I had nothing to do with it! We found one of the Alacran’s hiding spots.”
“Is this an explosions and screams sort of problem or a paperwork and groans one?” Muur asked as she committed the page she was on to memory and gently closed the book. She wouldn’t say no to making a few more scorpion popsicles.
The grimace on Umbrage's face wasn't particularly heartening, “Preferably more screams than explosions. From what I've gathered, it's some sort of whore-house. A very illegal one, where girls are lured in under false pretences and– you get the picture.”
“That I do. Alright, ice it is today.” Muur grunted with a grimace as she stood up, her tail tucking the chair in before gently grabbing the book she’d been reading. Its shelf was on the way out. “Should be a good field test of how it takes to stronger polarizations in either direction. Training dummies only tell you so much.”
Also people started making themselves scarce when the elements she conjured started to glow like a choir should be going ‘HOLY HOLY HOLY’ or crackling in all the hues of an evil overlord. Made spars hard to arrange.
A grimace passed over Umbrage's face, “You know, you really don't need to spend so much time training. Take it easy, enjoy the sights of Ul’dah some more! You only live once after all…”
Patently false, but Muur couldn’t exactly go and say this was her second life, could she? At least not without sounding like a madwoman. So instead she said, “After being on the move for so long, it’s actually refreshing to stick to a few buildings day in and day out.”
“Can't say I get it,” Her friend said with a shrug, “But what I do get… is how L'Fise is gonna nag at me if you keep up! ‘Why aren't you training more Umbrage? Look at the new kid, she's dedicated to her craft and growing quickly. You should do the same instead of adding more notes to your stupid board’.”
Her impression of the cat-man was… Well, it was terrible. Far too emotional, and not nearly enough deadpan delivery.
“A true tragedy. Come on, we got work to do.” Muur snorted as she started walking towards the library’s exit.
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In what was growing to become a pattern with her requests, there was more to Umbrage's little call for help. As the older Thaumaturge explained, Muur’s wasp-based adventure had led the Order to get their hands on leads upon leads— too many leads even. Whatever-his-name-was the merchant had been fingering pies upon pies from the sounds of it.
As Umbrage put it: “The rats have far too many nests, and there aren't enough exterminators to smoke them all out.”
Thanks to that, it would just be the two of them. Meaning that they couldn't quite just show up and burn the door down and send the bastards to meet the Twins’ judgement.
“There's the place.” Umbrage whispered as she pointed out a large, nondescript building that sat on the intersection of four different roads. Due to her insistence, the pair were not wearing their thaumaturgical robes under the auspices of ‘stealth'.
Muur just looked like a foreigner adventurer, since she had kept her chainmail and assorted bits of leather armor that covered what her scales didn’t. “Some ice stairs on the side and we hit them from above and below before they know what’s going on, you think?”
Truth be told, Muur didn’t have a good grasp on Umbrage’s capabilities as a combat caster, so best to check.
“Oh. You can do that too? L'Fise's really going to get on my case…” The other woman grumbled. “I mean– suuure. Sounds good. Would you rather go up, or down? I can do either.”
“I’ll take the ground floor, means I can seal up the easy exits and any tunnels they may have.” Muur chuckled, coaxing out a white-and-gold shard of ice over her hand. Static Ice, unsurprisingly, really liked to stick around and be a complete cast iron whore to get rid of… or modify, which was sometimes a downside.
“Smart thinking, I don't think this place has any of those. But you never know.” Tapping Muur’s shoulder, she quietly broke off from the lizard wizard, “I'm gonna see if I can get a better angle on those windows. Might need to get creative and climb on the roof without being seen… These parts of the city always have weird little alleyways and stuff. Wait here while I sneak into one, alright?”
Without even waiting for an answer, the roegadyn slinked away and left Muur on her lonesome. Well, enough time to get a feel for the layout, at least.
Simple observation only gave whispers of the building's innards, but it was plenty enough to decipher part of the floor plan if you were keen to listen. Which Muur very much was. As was Ul’dah tradition, the structure was actually two of them mashed together. On the right side was a larger one made in the usual style of the city, no flair that might've hinted at its sordid use or affiliations was visible.
The left side, on the other hand, was one of the extremely common mini-shops that grew out of every other building. Most were eateries, others sold knick-knacks and others still turned out to be the entrance to a master staff-maker's workshop. Their only uniting point being whatever they sold was made in house—literally considering the building they were attached to was where whoever worked there lived.
But unlike all of the places that Umbrage had told her to keep in mind because “Their treats are to die for.” This one was deader than what-was-his-face, the merchant turned Atomos. Doors that would have normally opened to let people enter the shop weren't just boarded shut, a pile of junk-filled boxes had seemingly grown right in front of it. Muur could infer two things from this, whatever that shop had once sold, it was now serving some other purpose. Storage maybe?
Unlikely to be where they kept the prisoners, at least, too easy for a pedestrian to overhear something through the wall. Idly, Muur thumbed the pendant keeping her aether in check. It was a pity that she couldn’t turn that sliver of Himiko into a sneaky little crow or shadow to slip into places and scout for her, but alas it wasn’t the kind of thing she could casually train, or was supposed to train in at all according to Cocobuki when she brought it up.
Although, there'd been a slight glimmer in the vaunted Duke of Destruction's only eye when he'd told her not to ‘delve so deep into the abyss that it may call you by name’. So maybe she should poke and prod at him some during the upcoming training session he'd set up for her next week.
Back to the matter at hand though, the more she looked at the hidden brothel, the more she could see its inner layout snap in place. The girls were probably sequestered in individual rooms to some degree, at least when forced to ‘work’. So the bulk of the place was probably made up of semi-independent spaces. Maybe a central space of some manner on the ground floor? A place for clients to come and make their pick?
Thankfully, Umbrage's head poked out from behind a nearby roof. Her sudden appearance and jaunty wave meant that Muur's time pondering the ins and outs of the repugnant affairs happening behind the doors she was about to kick down were over.
As soon as her friend was in position at least, which didn't take long, all things considered. A hop, a skip and an iron grip suspending her on the lip of the roof was all it took for the older Thaumaturge to be in place.
Muur then did her part, raising her staff high as she let the stilling radiance of Stasis suffuse her and her aether before she gave the roof a deceptively gentle tap. The result was like supercooled water being agitated, marble-white hoarfrost spreading out in an orderly wave of freezing tendrils, sealing shut every single crevasse they could find. Obvious from the outside, but hidden from the inside.
Sending Muur another glance (and likely pondering how many remedial classes L’Fise would shanghai her into), Umbrage didn't waste any time in kicking off their two-woman raid by kicking her way through the window's wooden slats courtesy of a flaming ball. The only entrance Muur hadn’t sealed, as a matter of fact.
The sound of fire and shattering wood rippled through the streets like a warhorn calling soldiers to action, albeit with very different results. Most civilians didn't need to hear a second spell going off to either duck for cover or run away from the scene as fast as their legs could carry them. Some stared up at the smouldering wreck of a window with disinterested, or perhaps more accurately apathetic, surprise. Neither were much of a surprise considering what the city had endured only five years prior, but the ones that really caught Muur’s eyes were those that gaped in utter disbelief before pulling out hidden weapons and rushing towards the entrance.
She’d jot this one down as a success.