Blessed You [Closed]

With his meeting settled with the empress, Kabe had set out to explore Kuriza city once again, his bounty posters still up and proudly displayed, but a renewed confidence that he would be fine if things broke out into a scuffle down here. Arcosians themselves seemed to protective of their previous developments and worldly possessions to pick a fight with someone like him, and he figured the law didn't look to kindly on bounty hunters who cause the kind of damage you'd need to get a grip on someone like Kabe.

So he tried to stick to some of the newer areas of the city. Some fancy new-wave architecture of spiral design and insulated by cement reached up for the sky, stretching the distance between the cobbled marble below and the frosted cloudscape above. Even the statues were new, and Kabe had to chuckle as he noted that one stupid noble's statue had already been defaced by the grungy youth of the city with cigarette butts stuffed into the eyes. Some small figure was there, too. The likely culprit. She reached up and...

Well, that's odd.

"Hey lady!" Kabe shouted at the stranger, who had just thrown old, used cigarettes into her maw. "Those aren't..." As he went on to warn her of the danger of ordinary folk eating whatever they came across as he often did, he was brought to a halt as he got a closer look at the figure.

She looked familiar. He struggled to place it for a moment, and a vague memory of one afternoon in his early years on Duria flashed by, of a pint-sized Kabe biting an ear and thrashing like a wild animal in some kind of hunting-wrestling game he made up. But he'd never seen her again after that. Even after wiping out all of the Durian people. Who was she? Maybe it was a coincidence.

"Sorry- I know you, I think. Or maybe you just look like somebody I used to know. Have you ever been to Duria?"

---

Baq

Well, Kabe thought, pausing in his own internal monologue for implied consideration and dramatic effect. This woman was crazy! And that was something he didn't throw around too often, given the company he kept and the extreme nature of many of their eccentricities. But here this stranger was, winking knowingly and Kabe's greatest achievement and shame — a literal genocide — all the while putting on some strange show and throwing as much energy into it as she could.

Luckily for this oddball Kabe liked crazy. He thought back, only vaguely remembering the day. He definitely was beyond teething at that point, and he absolutely had tried to bite her fingers off in fierce instinctive defense. But they had played, to some extent, and his memories were a little scrambled after that. Maybe there was some truth hidden underneath all the lunacy caked atop it.

"So you're my... fairy patron-god-guardian-angel-mother-deity? Did I miss anything there? Also you... evolved my digestive system?" He didn't really know how to take that. He'd always assumed his weird stomach must have just been some bonewood magic, given his uncle and sister's unique abilities. But maybe that was just some familial coincidence.

"Is that why I can do this?" He said, spluttering up a wooden statue created as a publicity stunt for some terrible superhero movie he'd hated a few years back. It had been worth the splinters to really shove it to those movie-goers for having such bad taste.

---

Baq

This woman was weird. And yet, something about this absolutely absurd level of attachment despite having met him once as a child and radically changing his life made Kabe smile. He even laughed a little, before politely stifling it as he watched globules of tears mixed with spittle dribble down the pointy-eared creature's face along the wooden statue.

A new title, too. Blessed digestor? It was a bit pompous and a little religious and dreary, but he liked it. Something to add next time he rattled off names in the middle of raiding a ship to keep the eyes off his crewmen while they did something dastardly and cool. And a name for the stranger, to tie it off — Baq. And a curtsy! With a strange dress-like garment, followed by sitting against the pillar and gesturing to be sat beside.

"Well, Baq," Kabe pondered on his great adventures, as he sat down beside her, dirt and slush coating the underside of his baggy dress pants. "I've been on adventures aplenty! Perhaps none so great as your goditude might have had, but many all the same. Since escaping that rock I've become one of the most renowned pirates in all the galaxy! My ship strikes fear into the hearts of others, I've eaten many things from many great places! Like this—" he spat, withdrawing an egg-shaped opal the size of his head from gullet space. "—the eye of Nitra! I stole this from the throne room of a kingdom in disarray, battered by a terrible war, and swallowed whole two of it's finest warriors to obtain it. It's worth twice my bounty on the black market, maybe more."

It was odd, sharing stories with a familiar stranger like this. For all her oddities, which Kabe could not judge her on due to his own nature, Baq seemed... nice enough.

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Baq