24 - Know What's Good For You Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Krahe casually raised her left hand to her lips, shaking the ashes from her cigarette. With it in hand, she turned to meet the stranger’s gaze. Somehow, just moving her arm like normal seemed to have shocked the woman. Perhaps its appearance made people assume that it was damaged beyond function?

“I’m sorry to say that you’ve only made me more interested in whatever dirty shit is going on in this town. I have a bad habit of sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong… And powerful people like Damrus Hashem have an unfortunate tendency of meeting terrible fates whenever I do that.”

The stranger stowed her device and shook the gore off of her gauntlet. “It’s your death sentence,” she shrugged, turning to leave. “At least visit the Seven Spokes and get your arm sealed up, it’s leaking anathema all over the place. The types of folks you mean to go up against know how to track you by less than that.”

“Why give that kind of advice to a stranger? The real reason,” Krahe prodded. The Stranger stopped, giving Krahe a hard stare.

“It gets old; seeing a new face one day, and then pulling a baneworm out of her head two weeks later.”

Something of the exchange made Krahe double-check the bounties she’d picked up. It was right there, she’d just skimmed over it. Besides just bringing in the target physically, bringing in their “souldregs” was a third option for claiming the “dead” option of “dead or alive”.

She went through the evoy’s pockets. He had a small, cheap-looking souldreg vessel with some money on it - a couple hundred DDs. Just to see if it would work, but not expecting it to, Krahe pressed her own and the Evoy’s vessels together and tried to will the contents of the evoy’s to transfer to hers. Surprisingly, it worked. She hoped it wasn’t exactly as easy as it seemed, that such a transfer at least required consent from the holders of both vessels, but until she could be sure she decided to store her Souldreg Vessel in the Kenoma Pocket.

Before moving on she returned to Garvesh and bought a device similar to the stranger’s, spending another chunk of change, most of which was covered by the evoy’s money and what little she got for his souldreg vessel. The brass-cased “reverse epipen” as she thought of it was accompanied by three spare phials, one loaded in it already. A button on its top next to the phial slot made four wickedly thick needles jut out of the bottom end, while pressing a clicky trigger on the side made her feel a sudden demand for Thauma from the item, presumably to initiate its gruesome function.

It was clear he assumed that she’d just forgotten the first go round, but she decided to be nice and let him know about the corpse in front of his store before she left.

Wasting no time, she made her way to the store Garvesh had pointed out. She found relief in finding out that they stocked mass-produced items, though the individual pieces were still fairly expensive. There was no cheap trash to be found here, it was all rather robust clothing; and no wonder, that was exactly how the store advertised itself. She didn’t even notice what the sign above the door said, besides the name “Kamran” and the mention of “tough clothes”.

In the store, she got a closer look at two variations of baneworm- One inhabited a saurian, with similar bulging deformities to the faces on the bounty posters, with long bulged-out “veins” snaking across his head and down his arms, and even across the rest of the body if she were to guess. The shape of his face looked particularly distorted. The other employee was a humanoid with skin much like the Zaveshian receptionist, but one which lacked that giant third eye and had mostly normal anatomy - ears, nose, hair and all. Krahe wasn’t even aware that it was a baneworm in there until the saurian pointed it out, affectionately bragging how he bet she couldn’t even tell and adding on that “I’m still waiting for mine to be finished.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be Garvesh’s cousin, would you?” she jokingly asked the bane-saurian.

With a laugh just as rumbling as Garvesh’s, he shook his head: “No, no, he’s in the back. He did let me use his brother’s body when he dropped dead, though. Blood clot in his brain, y’know. Made sure to change his face at least.”

Upon giving them her order, one of them took her aside to take her measurements; it was the purple-skinned… Woman? The figure was androgynous, but her voice and mannerisms made Krahe figure it was a woman, or at least adjacent. Did baneworms even have sexes?

She had half a mind to ask how exactly baneworms who didn’t wish to live lives of crime sourced bodies for themselves, but she figured it would be excessively rude and ignorant of her. It wasn’t the morality or legality of it that stumped her, but the logistics, in part because she didn’t actually know the physiology or capabilities of a baneworm. Were they just impotent worms trying scurrying around in hopes of finding a lone hobo to take over, or did they perhaps have bodies akin to the monstrosities of Jas’raba and simply transferred a worm-like core into a human host?

So many questions, but she only asked one: “Wonder how they make those artificial bodies.”

“No clue. I’ve heard that they grab unripe Banishers from inside the Banishment Wheel before the big eye forms, but I doubt it. Normal Banishers don’t have normal eyes, just the big one, and Pilgrim Banishers are one-in-a-thousand - walking holy relics. Doubt they’d give their bodies to the likes of us. Hells, Hashem’s gang have been trying to nab a Pilgrim for years with no success.”

“Well, seems they got their big score, then. Garvesh asked me look for one by the name of Casus. Seems he vanished after chasing Hashem’s men away from his cousin’s food cart.”