Third Day, Probably:
A few days passed, and Verad gradually learned how to apply himself at the trade, which, in the main, meant figuring out which work details he should follow in order to avoid future trips to the infirmary. Breaking apart the ore was just not the thing for him, he decided. As rugged and virile as he was, it was far better to feign weakness by appearing incapable of such serious and difficult tasks, lest his employers suspect him of enacting some scheme against them. Nor could he spend all his time in the infirmary, for that would prevent him from assessing the character of the company and its organization.
Thus Verad took a page from the chapter of no less prestigious a work on criminology than the collected writings of the Manderville guides to inspection and inquiry, and took the bold move of hiding himself in the plainest of sight. Feigning injury on another breaking team to such an extent that even he marvelled at the skill with which he portrayed intense, searing pain, he found himself reassigned to one of the ore dressing stations, closer to the mine's entrance. There he was handed a long-handled hammer, a stack of small chunks of ore by a supervisor, and told to break, break, break.
The work was difficult, but not impossible. Whatever it was about the act of drawing the ore out of seams that crippled him was absent here, and he felt the pleasure of sweat on his brow as he applied mallet to stone, smashed rocks to pebbles. The workers, he noticed, were smaller and slighter and more worn, Midlanders and Miqo'tes of a more slender disposition than those in the tunnels. This made him fear that he would stand out even more than he already did as the sole Duskwight, for given his own far more chiseled build and his identity as a well-known peddler about the town, someone would have recognized him and thought something amiss.
His fears proved unfounded, however, and a day passed with no incident, and then another similarly so. When he retired each evening he was exhausted, a problem alleviated only by the heavy meals and cheap beer he could acquire for but the price of a day and a few hours' change. Even the better meals were not good, but leg of ziz roasted into a leathery hunk and fried bread with honey were far better fare than the gruel and broths served to the workers who tended towards frugality.Â
The beer, however, was sour and yeasty, exactly as terrible as he preferred, Â and after a few sips he could almost imagine Miss Foxheart serving it to him with a laugh and a smile. Such thoughts comforted him after his meals, after which he would fall into the deep, half-dead sleep of the weary.
So the days passed, and there was a charm to this, he supposed. Were it not for the circumstances of his arrival, his and all those around him, then he could see a rustic charm to the notion. He mulled over his meal as he pulled apart a piece of ziz between his fingers - to use his teeth, he feared, was to loosen them - before popping it into his mouth. If this were meant to be the worst of the labor-trade, he supposed, then the best surely could not have been so bad, could it?
As he thought this, he saw Gliding Bone approach, supper in hand and fresh bandages over his eye, and those only at Verad's insistence. He had gone back to work in the tunnels, and that over Verad's protestations. He remembered speaking to his wife at their homestead outside of Horizon, her dark hair ragged and her eyes as red as her irises, to ask if he had seen the man.
"Bellveil," said Bone, seating himself before Verad could draw a mental conclusion. "Managing the dressing well?"
"Hm? Oh, yes, of course! Much simpler work. I think the break was just - well, as Eorzea's Greatest Archer, Pending Certain Conditions, you know, I have to keep my wrists in excellent shape, and that was just the wrong position for them to be in. I could have kept it up, of course," he went on, after gagging down a thick portion of ziz-meat. "But I couldn't bear to let Eorzea lose one of its greatest champions in so doing, don't you agree?"
Bone smirked, no doubt impressed by Verad's stoicism. "Yes, of course," he said, taking a spoonful of gruel. "And how are you finding it otherwise?"
Intimating his meaning, Verad was about to drop his voice and respond, before a voice interrupted. "Bellveil? Verad Bellveil." Glancing to his right, Verad found himself being gawked at with great force and aggression by a sandy-haired Midlander with a grin that showed the gap in his teeth. "Is that right? You're him, right?"
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
The man guffawed and slapped his knee. "Knew it from the voice." He cleared his throat, as if to put on a display, and spoke in what Verad felt to be a poor approximation of his voice. "'Pardon me, my good madam, but would you be interested in any fine duuuuubious goods today?' That's you, isn't it?"
"Ah-hah, well, it's not always a madam," Verad said, pulling at his collar in an absent fashion, "but otherwise that's quite a good impression, sir! Are you perchance a customer? A fan?"
"Oh, not a buyer, but a watcher, sure! Always a laugh to see you walk up to some poor young Miqo'te in the Quicksand and think, 'Well there goes the Dubious Man about to lose a pitch again.'" He grinned, and of a sudden the gap did not seem so friendly. Â Â Â
"Come now," said Bone, tone chiding, rising up just enough out of his seat to loom. He was an older Roegadyn, but to say an older Roegadyn was weak, warrior or no, was to suggest that an axe sharpened over time could only lose its edge. "There's no need for that. He's on a contract here, just as the rest of us."
At this the man seemed to take great delight. "Sure he is! Haven't we seen him, all of us, carried back to the sick hall, complaining of a broken beard?" He glanced to his left and right for emphasis, having drawn other workers to the conversation by his laughter. It was, Verad supposed, a rare sound to hear in the camp. "Hoping for a pretty nurse, perhaps? Hope you weren't too disappointed by the old man here."
This caused Verad to rise, and on the heels of that movement came a slew of others. The Midlander closed the distance between them, and a crowd of workers started to gather around. Out of the corner of one eye, he could see the guards at the barricade, their attention towards them with expressions of mixed bemusement and wariness. At the back of the crowd, he could see the commissary, and Wahlbert sitting out front, taking a few drinks from a flask, his face a mask.
"Oh come on now," said the gap-toothed man, in all the easy confidence of youthful superiority. "Nothing to get riled about, right? That's not what you do, right? Besides, you wouldn't want to hurt me, would you, 'Eorzea's Greatest Archer'?" He smiled, spread his hands, placating. "Tell you what, we can let it drop, just pass me some of that ziz."
A mystery solved, then. It was rare Verad attracted such ire. Irritation, certainly. Annoyance, absolutely. But rarely anger. In such circumstances, there was but one thing to do, so he smiled.
"You may of course have it," he said, genially, but held out a hand before the man could dart past him to take it. "But! I have one point to correct. You need only listen, and then it is yours."Â
The Midlander seemed to seethe, glancing between the food and the hand that stopped him like a vulture frustrated in its efforts to find carrion. In this moment, Verad knew, he had not even a hint of control. "Fine, go on," he said, stepping back. "Nothing wrong with a story."
"It's not that I am bothered by your request to share," Verad said, scratching at his nose with his other hand. "That is fine, of course! But you seem to be under the wrong impression. I do not offer my wares to women out of lechery. There is a reason for it! One I have told no one until today. A story you would not even find in my memoirs, for even the most recent edition ends before the Calamity."
He didn't bother to examine the gap-toothed man's face, instead scanning the crowd. They were confused, mostly, but it was not the sort of confusion to led to Verad being pelted with rocks and other blunt objects. No, there was curiosity there, and his grin grew wide, a shark smelling blood.
"You see," he said, removing his hand from near the man's chest and hooking it into his belt. "There was a time when I was far more egalitarian! In the early months of my newfound trade, I would offer goods of dubious quality - a fine impression again, sir, I must say - to anyone who would ask. Man, woman, young, old, Roegadyn, Lalafell. I daresay there wasn't a soul who was safe from my rapacious dubiousness!" He grinned as if that were a joke. A few of the men chuckled, knowing looks on their faces, as if they had gotten it.
"I would say it went on like this for quite some time - ages, weeks, days, I cannot recall. When one lives dubiously, to keep track of time is to risk becoming respectable! But then it came to pass that I happened to approach a young Seeker, a Tia by the look of him, with that lost look, like a kitten that has somehow become a puppy, that suggested he was newly displaced from a tribe. I offered him my wares, as I am wont to do, with my pitch, as I am wont to do, in my usual manner, and his only response was to burst into tears!"
He heard a few scoffs from some of the Miqo'te in the crowd, and paused for an instant to let the image settle. "Ah, Ser Bone, if you could pass me my beer? Thank you, yes. Now then, while I am a dubious man, I am nothing if not considerate, and so I asked him whatever could be the matter. As it happened, I was the first to have shown such consideration, and he confided in me that he had been cast out of his tribe by an over-protective Nunh." This caused a few more scoffs, but there was a sympathetic tone to them, certain that few, if any, of the Seeker crowd were Nunhs themselves. "He had thought to start his own, but he hardly knew where to start in the starting! He had never known how to fight, or how to hunt, but he knew that in Ul'dah, the light of his life, a charming young woman, had taken residence here to become a dancer. If only he could find her, he told me, and prove himself, he could start anew!
"This seemed a dubious scheme for any number of reasons, and while I was not yet Ul'dah's premier distributor of the dubious, I was swiftly gaining a reputation. I pledged myself to aid him on the spot, and offered to play the part of a villain for him. He knew the woman's place of work. I would bother her, he would defend her, lovers would be reunited, and all would be well!" Verad offered a great, wistful sigh, before taking a drink of his beer and stepping forward. The circle around him had started to expand, giving him space. Even the gap-toothed man had stepped back. Noting him, Verad paused to pull a hunk free of his ziz and offer it to the man.
"There you are - here, there's quite a bit of it, and why don't you pass the rest around? Add another to my tab if you like, what's a few days to a man with ten years?" He saw one Highlander hurry back to the mess hall, to place a new order, he presumed, before going on. "Where was I? Right, yes. Now, we had her place of business, a bar of ill-repute and high class along the Steps of Thal, and entering was easy enough after greasing the palms of the staff. Why they wanted the grease, I couldn't say, but dubious deals reveal strange tastes. He pointed her out to me, dancing for some coarse customer, and ah! Such a vision." The workers leaned forward, and he supposed details were required. "Hair as golden as the sun, eyes as blue as the sky, and as for the rest, must I say? We are all gentlemen here, and if you are not, then shame, shame! Let us not trouble ourselves with such digressions."
"Now, we were polite enough to wait until she was completed with a customer, and had finished her routine, and only then did I approach her. As charming a person as I am, I had to take care to avoid being too gallant, though, else she would have been swept away, and the plan ruined. No, I had to be dubious. I slicked back my hair, just so as it is now," he said, running his hand over his hair for emphasis, "and put on my the best of my worst grins."Â Verad's grin was over-broad, looking less like something cheerful and more like something conjured out of an All Saints' Wake nightmare, forcing himself to squint one eye out too far. "And of course," he said, maintaining the appearance, "She was rather short for a Seeker, so I needed to adjust my height."Â
There was an audible crack as he hunched forward, to scattered laughter and chuckles. Through his open eye, he could see that the guards had turned away, back to their boredom. His crowd had grown, though, and he could see even the commissary watching with a jaundiced look.Â
"So it was in this state," he continued, remaining in his position, "That I approached the woman and appeared enraptured. Hardly a difficult thing to do, I assure you, especially putting my voice into my best rasp. Ah, the pleas I made! She was the flower of the desert, the gem of all Ul'dah, and I would be all too pleased if she would only spare me a moment of her time. Her disgust and confusion were all too obvious, of course, and she made every effort to escape me. Too much effort, in fact, for my young Tia friend was still nowhere to be found. There can hardly be an intervention if the man to intervene is not there to do his job, after all"
The man who'd left returned with a plate of ziz - several plates, from the look of it. Verad had not authorized such generosity, but then again, he had said what's a few days, plural. His own fault. He suppressed a sigh and forced a smile as the meat was passed around to the crew, to an increasing level of cheer. "Now, my chief concern was that some other man might intervene in my comrade's place, and then the entire plan would be undone. It was much to my surprise that she intervened for herself! Little did I know that she had been taking lessons with the Pugilists to improve her balance as part of her routine, and had picked up more than a few tricks of the trade. I will not describe the beating - "
"Describe the beating! Go on, go on!" He looked around the crowd to see who had said that, but the call was picked up by a growing chorus. "Very well," he said, with an overexaggerated sigh. "What should I say? That she had learned to strike for vulnerable spots? That given my actual height my vulnerable spots were especially vulnerable? I shall tell you that I am fortunate for my skintone, for bruises hide easily, and ah, there were many the next night! She struck high, low, to the sides, and sent me sprawling through the crowd, gasping and wheezing. But still I kept on! I kept on praising her and courting her, asking for just a moment, only to be rewarded with just that, in the form of a fist to the jaw or a boot to the midsection."
He pantomimed the abuse, adopting his exaggerated posture and swinging to the left and the right, to a few scattered cheers. "Finally I collapsed, and I could take no more. Tia be damned, what would this world be like without a Verad Bellveil?"
"Better!" "Cheaper!" "Slightly less irritating!"
 He ignored the hecklers and pressed on. "I called 'Help, help! I am assaulted!' albeit more inelegantly, and at last I happened to spy the Tia, all this time trying to speak to the wrong dancer! I called 'Help!' again and he recognized my plight and saw my state."
"I will give the man credit, he was quick to intervene once he saw the truth of the matter. My mistake was in not correcting the original plan. For no sooner did he intervene did I find two pairs of boots colliding with my ribs rather than one." This caused a few howls and few sympathetic winces. "I gather he had assumed this was all part of my appearance. Had they not started attacking each other in the chaos, I believe that should have been the end of me. But soon they were spitting and fighting and trading blows. He was quite a fighter himself, it seemed!"
"And it was in that brawl that they recognized each other, and in the joy of that reunion, they soon left the bar, to leave me, bruised and battered, amidst a staring and laughing crowd. Two lovers reunited. A fine thought, and for that, what is the harm in a great deal of harm?"
In another crowd, he would have let that question hang, but here, among rowdier sorts, it was more likely not to be left as rhetorical, so he did not pause to take a drink. "Now, sir," he said, and the gap-toothed man started, as if he had not expected to be remembered, and looked up between hastily-stuffed handfuls of roast ziz. "You asked why I pitch so often to women. And is it not obvious?"
Puzzled, the man shook his head. Verad's smile was passive and benign. "Then I shall explain. After that moment, I stopped pitching to men so often, in the hopes that someone would intervene, as the young Tia meant to, and to see a proper reunion again. And, I must admit, because I have not yet been beaten quite as hard when I do so as I have when I pitch to a man."
A weak ending, he felt, but it would do. He settled back into his chair to finish his beer and give one of the forgotten bowls of weak broth a longing glance, his own meal now forsaken. The crowd gave a few scattered bits of applause, but he had not expected a standing ovation.
Still, there were smiles. Amusement. A bit of laughter. In three days, it was the most of it he had seen in the camp. A welcome relief.
Past the crowd, he saw Wahlbert staring, his flask half to his lips, at the scene. Verad smiled and lifted his mug in greeting.
The officer picked himself up from his seat and staggered, limped back into the commissary building. Verad sighed, shook his head, and drank. Bone slapped him on the back, and he nearly bit through a chunk of his mug.
"Not bad," he said. "But do you really want them talking so much about that Bellveil character through the rest of the shifts, to the other workers?"
Verad scoffed. "You insult me! As if they don't speak of me already!" He smiled behind his drink, then set it down. "Besides, better that outcome than another beating. As someone said, 'Both laughter and bruises will fade, but see which leaves the longer mark.'"
Bone furrowed his brow. "Who said that? That's awful."
Verad opened his mouth to respond, and silence followed as his eyebrows contorted themselves in several directions. "You know, I don't actually know."
A few days passed, and Verad gradually learned how to apply himself at the trade, which, in the main, meant figuring out which work details he should follow in order to avoid future trips to the infirmary. Breaking apart the ore was just not the thing for him, he decided. As rugged and virile as he was, it was far better to feign weakness by appearing incapable of such serious and difficult tasks, lest his employers suspect him of enacting some scheme against them. Nor could he spend all his time in the infirmary, for that would prevent him from assessing the character of the company and its organization.
Thus Verad took a page from the chapter of no less prestigious a work on criminology than the collected writings of the Manderville guides to inspection and inquiry, and took the bold move of hiding himself in the plainest of sight. Feigning injury on another breaking team to such an extent that even he marvelled at the skill with which he portrayed intense, searing pain, he found himself reassigned to one of the ore dressing stations, closer to the mine's entrance. There he was handed a long-handled hammer, a stack of small chunks of ore by a supervisor, and told to break, break, break.
The work was difficult, but not impossible. Whatever it was about the act of drawing the ore out of seams that crippled him was absent here, and he felt the pleasure of sweat on his brow as he applied mallet to stone, smashed rocks to pebbles. The workers, he noticed, were smaller and slighter and more worn, Midlanders and Miqo'tes of a more slender disposition than those in the tunnels. This made him fear that he would stand out even more than he already did as the sole Duskwight, for given his own far more chiseled build and his identity as a well-known peddler about the town, someone would have recognized him and thought something amiss.
His fears proved unfounded, however, and a day passed with no incident, and then another similarly so. When he retired each evening he was exhausted, a problem alleviated only by the heavy meals and cheap beer he could acquire for but the price of a day and a few hours' change. Even the better meals were not good, but leg of ziz roasted into a leathery hunk and fried bread with honey were far better fare than the gruel and broths served to the workers who tended towards frugality.Â
The beer, however, was sour and yeasty, exactly as terrible as he preferred, Â and after a few sips he could almost imagine Miss Foxheart serving it to him with a laugh and a smile. Such thoughts comforted him after his meals, after which he would fall into the deep, half-dead sleep of the weary.
So the days passed, and there was a charm to this, he supposed. Were it not for the circumstances of his arrival, his and all those around him, then he could see a rustic charm to the notion. He mulled over his meal as he pulled apart a piece of ziz between his fingers - to use his teeth, he feared, was to loosen them - before popping it into his mouth. If this were meant to be the worst of the labor-trade, he supposed, then the best surely could not have been so bad, could it?
As he thought this, he saw Gliding Bone approach, supper in hand and fresh bandages over his eye, and those only at Verad's insistence. He had gone back to work in the tunnels, and that over Verad's protestations. He remembered speaking to his wife at their homestead outside of Horizon, her dark hair ragged and her eyes as red as her irises, to ask if he had seen the man.
"Bellveil," said Bone, seating himself before Verad could draw a mental conclusion. "Managing the dressing well?"
"Hm? Oh, yes, of course! Much simpler work. I think the break was just - well, as Eorzea's Greatest Archer, Pending Certain Conditions, you know, I have to keep my wrists in excellent shape, and that was just the wrong position for them to be in. I could have kept it up, of course," he went on, after gagging down a thick portion of ziz-meat. "But I couldn't bear to let Eorzea lose one of its greatest champions in so doing, don't you agree?"
Bone smirked, no doubt impressed by Verad's stoicism. "Yes, of course," he said, taking a spoonful of gruel. "And how are you finding it otherwise?"
Intimating his meaning, Verad was about to drop his voice and respond, before a voice interrupted. "Bellveil? Verad Bellveil." Glancing to his right, Verad found himself being gawked at with great force and aggression by a sandy-haired Midlander with a grin that showed the gap in his teeth. "Is that right? You're him, right?"
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
The man guffawed and slapped his knee. "Knew it from the voice." He cleared his throat, as if to put on a display, and spoke in what Verad felt to be a poor approximation of his voice. "'Pardon me, my good madam, but would you be interested in any fine duuuuubious goods today?' That's you, isn't it?"
"Ah-hah, well, it's not always a madam," Verad said, pulling at his collar in an absent fashion, "but otherwise that's quite a good impression, sir! Are you perchance a customer? A fan?"
"Oh, not a buyer, but a watcher, sure! Always a laugh to see you walk up to some poor young Miqo'te in the Quicksand and think, 'Well there goes the Dubious Man about to lose a pitch again.'" He grinned, and of a sudden the gap did not seem so friendly. Â Â Â
"Come now," said Bone, tone chiding, rising up just enough out of his seat to loom. He was an older Roegadyn, but to say an older Roegadyn was weak, warrior or no, was to suggest that an axe sharpened over time could only lose its edge. "There's no need for that. He's on a contract here, just as the rest of us."
At this the man seemed to take great delight. "Sure he is! Haven't we seen him, all of us, carried back to the sick hall, complaining of a broken beard?" He glanced to his left and right for emphasis, having drawn other workers to the conversation by his laughter. It was, Verad supposed, a rare sound to hear in the camp. "Hoping for a pretty nurse, perhaps? Hope you weren't too disappointed by the old man here."
This caused Verad to rise, and on the heels of that movement came a slew of others. The Midlander closed the distance between them, and a crowd of workers started to gather around. Out of the corner of one eye, he could see the guards at the barricade, their attention towards them with expressions of mixed bemusement and wariness. At the back of the crowd, he could see the commissary, and Wahlbert sitting out front, taking a few drinks from a flask, his face a mask.
"Oh come on now," said the gap-toothed man, in all the easy confidence of youthful superiority. "Nothing to get riled about, right? That's not what you do, right? Besides, you wouldn't want to hurt me, would you, 'Eorzea's Greatest Archer'?" He smiled, spread his hands, placating. "Tell you what, we can let it drop, just pass me some of that ziz."
A mystery solved, then. It was rare Verad attracted such ire. Irritation, certainly. Annoyance, absolutely. But rarely anger. In such circumstances, there was but one thing to do, so he smiled.
"You may of course have it," he said, genially, but held out a hand before the man could dart past him to take it. "But! I have one point to correct. You need only listen, and then it is yours."Â
The Midlander seemed to seethe, glancing between the food and the hand that stopped him like a vulture frustrated in its efforts to find carrion. In this moment, Verad knew, he had not even a hint of control. "Fine, go on," he said, stepping back. "Nothing wrong with a story."
"It's not that I am bothered by your request to share," Verad said, scratching at his nose with his other hand. "That is fine, of course! But you seem to be under the wrong impression. I do not offer my wares to women out of lechery. There is a reason for it! One I have told no one until today. A story you would not even find in my memoirs, for even the most recent edition ends before the Calamity."
He didn't bother to examine the gap-toothed man's face, instead scanning the crowd. They were confused, mostly, but it was not the sort of confusion to led to Verad being pelted with rocks and other blunt objects. No, there was curiosity there, and his grin grew wide, a shark smelling blood.
"You see," he said, removing his hand from near the man's chest and hooking it into his belt. "There was a time when I was far more egalitarian! In the early months of my newfound trade, I would offer goods of dubious quality - a fine impression again, sir, I must say - to anyone who would ask. Man, woman, young, old, Roegadyn, Lalafell. I daresay there wasn't a soul who was safe from my rapacious dubiousness!" He grinned as if that were a joke. A few of the men chuckled, knowing looks on their faces, as if they had gotten it.
"I would say it went on like this for quite some time - ages, weeks, days, I cannot recall. When one lives dubiously, to keep track of time is to risk becoming respectable! But then it came to pass that I happened to approach a young Seeker, a Tia by the look of him, with that lost look, like a kitten that has somehow become a puppy, that suggested he was newly displaced from a tribe. I offered him my wares, as I am wont to do, with my pitch, as I am wont to do, in my usual manner, and his only response was to burst into tears!"
He heard a few scoffs from some of the Miqo'te in the crowd, and paused for an instant to let the image settle. "Ah, Ser Bone, if you could pass me my beer? Thank you, yes. Now then, while I am a dubious man, I am nothing if not considerate, and so I asked him whatever could be the matter. As it happened, I was the first to have shown such consideration, and he confided in me that he had been cast out of his tribe by an over-protective Nunh." This caused a few more scoffs, but there was a sympathetic tone to them, certain that few, if any, of the Seeker crowd were Nunhs themselves. "He had thought to start his own, but he hardly knew where to start in the starting! He had never known how to fight, or how to hunt, but he knew that in Ul'dah, the light of his life, a charming young woman, had taken residence here to become a dancer. If only he could find her, he told me, and prove himself, he could start anew!
"This seemed a dubious scheme for any number of reasons, and while I was not yet Ul'dah's premier distributor of the dubious, I was swiftly gaining a reputation. I pledged myself to aid him on the spot, and offered to play the part of a villain for him. He knew the woman's place of work. I would bother her, he would defend her, lovers would be reunited, and all would be well!" Verad offered a great, wistful sigh, before taking a drink of his beer and stepping forward. The circle around him had started to expand, giving him space. Even the gap-toothed man had stepped back. Noting him, Verad paused to pull a hunk free of his ziz and offer it to the man.
"There you are - here, there's quite a bit of it, and why don't you pass the rest around? Add another to my tab if you like, what's a few days to a man with ten years?" He saw one Highlander hurry back to the mess hall, to place a new order, he presumed, before going on. "Where was I? Right, yes. Now, we had her place of business, a bar of ill-repute and high class along the Steps of Thal, and entering was easy enough after greasing the palms of the staff. Why they wanted the grease, I couldn't say, but dubious deals reveal strange tastes. He pointed her out to me, dancing for some coarse customer, and ah! Such a vision." The workers leaned forward, and he supposed details were required. "Hair as golden as the sun, eyes as blue as the sky, and as for the rest, must I say? We are all gentlemen here, and if you are not, then shame, shame! Let us not trouble ourselves with such digressions."
"Now, we were polite enough to wait until she was completed with a customer, and had finished her routine, and only then did I approach her. As charming a person as I am, I had to take care to avoid being too gallant, though, else she would have been swept away, and the plan ruined. No, I had to be dubious. I slicked back my hair, just so as it is now," he said, running his hand over his hair for emphasis, "and put on my the best of my worst grins."Â Verad's grin was over-broad, looking less like something cheerful and more like something conjured out of an All Saints' Wake nightmare, forcing himself to squint one eye out too far. "And of course," he said, maintaining the appearance, "She was rather short for a Seeker, so I needed to adjust my height."Â
There was an audible crack as he hunched forward, to scattered laughter and chuckles. Through his open eye, he could see that the guards had turned away, back to their boredom. His crowd had grown, though, and he could see even the commissary watching with a jaundiced look.Â
"So it was in this state," he continued, remaining in his position, "That I approached the woman and appeared enraptured. Hardly a difficult thing to do, I assure you, especially putting my voice into my best rasp. Ah, the pleas I made! She was the flower of the desert, the gem of all Ul'dah, and I would be all too pleased if she would only spare me a moment of her time. Her disgust and confusion were all too obvious, of course, and she made every effort to escape me. Too much effort, in fact, for my young Tia friend was still nowhere to be found. There can hardly be an intervention if the man to intervene is not there to do his job, after all"
The man who'd left returned with a plate of ziz - several plates, from the look of it. Verad had not authorized such generosity, but then again, he had said what's a few days, plural. His own fault. He suppressed a sigh and forced a smile as the meat was passed around to the crew, to an increasing level of cheer. "Now, my chief concern was that some other man might intervene in my comrade's place, and then the entire plan would be undone. It was much to my surprise that she intervened for herself! Little did I know that she had been taking lessons with the Pugilists to improve her balance as part of her routine, and had picked up more than a few tricks of the trade. I will not describe the beating - "
"Describe the beating! Go on, go on!" He looked around the crowd to see who had said that, but the call was picked up by a growing chorus. "Very well," he said, with an overexaggerated sigh. "What should I say? That she had learned to strike for vulnerable spots? That given my actual height my vulnerable spots were especially vulnerable? I shall tell you that I am fortunate for my skintone, for bruises hide easily, and ah, there were many the next night! She struck high, low, to the sides, and sent me sprawling through the crowd, gasping and wheezing. But still I kept on! I kept on praising her and courting her, asking for just a moment, only to be rewarded with just that, in the form of a fist to the jaw or a boot to the midsection."
He pantomimed the abuse, adopting his exaggerated posture and swinging to the left and the right, to a few scattered cheers. "Finally I collapsed, and I could take no more. Tia be damned, what would this world be like without a Verad Bellveil?"
"Better!" "Cheaper!" "Slightly less irritating!"
 He ignored the hecklers and pressed on. "I called 'Help, help! I am assaulted!' albeit more inelegantly, and at last I happened to spy the Tia, all this time trying to speak to the wrong dancer! I called 'Help!' again and he recognized my plight and saw my state."
"I will give the man credit, he was quick to intervene once he saw the truth of the matter. My mistake was in not correcting the original plan. For no sooner did he intervene did I find two pairs of boots colliding with my ribs rather than one." This caused a few howls and few sympathetic winces. "I gather he had assumed this was all part of my appearance. Had they not started attacking each other in the chaos, I believe that should have been the end of me. But soon they were spitting and fighting and trading blows. He was quite a fighter himself, it seemed!"
"And it was in that brawl that they recognized each other, and in the joy of that reunion, they soon left the bar, to leave me, bruised and battered, amidst a staring and laughing crowd. Two lovers reunited. A fine thought, and for that, what is the harm in a great deal of harm?"
In another crowd, he would have let that question hang, but here, among rowdier sorts, it was more likely not to be left as rhetorical, so he did not pause to take a drink. "Now, sir," he said, and the gap-toothed man started, as if he had not expected to be remembered, and looked up between hastily-stuffed handfuls of roast ziz. "You asked why I pitch so often to women. And is it not obvious?"
Puzzled, the man shook his head. Verad's smile was passive and benign. "Then I shall explain. After that moment, I stopped pitching to men so often, in the hopes that someone would intervene, as the young Tia meant to, and to see a proper reunion again. And, I must admit, because I have not yet been beaten quite as hard when I do so as I have when I pitch to a man."
A weak ending, he felt, but it would do. He settled back into his chair to finish his beer and give one of the forgotten bowls of weak broth a longing glance, his own meal now forsaken. The crowd gave a few scattered bits of applause, but he had not expected a standing ovation.
Still, there were smiles. Amusement. A bit of laughter. In three days, it was the most of it he had seen in the camp. A welcome relief.
Past the crowd, he saw Wahlbert staring, his flask half to his lips, at the scene. Verad smiled and lifted his mug in greeting.
The officer picked himself up from his seat and staggered, limped back into the commissary building. Verad sighed, shook his head, and drank. Bone slapped him on the back, and he nearly bit through a chunk of his mug.
"Not bad," he said. "But do you really want them talking so much about that Bellveil character through the rest of the shifts, to the other workers?"
Verad scoffed. "You insult me! As if they don't speak of me already!" He smiled behind his drink, then set it down. "Besides, better that outcome than another beating. As someone said, 'Both laughter and bruises will fade, but see which leaves the longer mark.'"
Bone furrowed his brow. "Who said that? That's awful."
Verad opened his mouth to respond, and silence followed as his eyebrows contorted themselves in several directions. "You know, I don't actually know."
Verad Bellveil's Profile | The Case of the Ransacked Rug | Verad's Fate Sheet
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
Current Fate-14 Storyline:Â Merchant, Marine
