Post by Erik Mercer on Nov 7, 2015 6:11:29 GMT
Night falls over the city. The air around the club becomes noisome with voices, a buzz just behind the walls that suggests a swirling crowd of bodies. The stairway swells with the noise, an anticipatory wave. When the door pulls open the sound becomes a living, roaring thing.
Erik likes the fringe, but he’s not without company. Somehow, being born across the Scorch makes you exotic, and Erik is rarely alone in Purgatory. The self-servers and the vagrants aren’t hard to find. It’s business: trading and comparing the wealth and trinkets found buried, or perched alone on the dried bones of an unfortunate carcass; pleasure, in drinks and chatter (tall tales, feats of bravery, talk of unparalleled cruelty, rarely believed); and sometimes, it even turns explicitly sexual. It doesn’t seem like that’s where he’s headed tonight. There’s just one of the usual faces here. Very few nights in Axios could truly be considered ‘boring’, but this one is slow for sure, and Erik starts to think of his quiet little lodge on the outskirts, and how many bottles he can haul there at once.
His friend here looked like he’d fallen asleep under the bar and woke up drinking. He was quite a whiffer. The sour smell on his breath made Erik turn his face whenever he opened his mouth too wide, or breathed out for too long.
This was unfortunate, because he liked to talk. “I heard,” he was saying, though Erik had been fairly unresponsive since he’d begun, “they got a whole stack of guns somewhere.”
Erik thought of the cold smoothness of his glass, ran a finger around the edge.
“Just locked away. Wonder what they sell ‘em for.”
Erik looked up. “Wait, who?”
His answer was a raised finger. He followed it to a shock of blond hair, a face he didn’t recognize. Erik turned away, suddenly concerned. “Who’s that?”
The look on his acquaintance’s face made him think it was somebody important. He was familiar with the expression, being somewhat new to the city, and he was forced to endure it every time someone brought up what was supposed to be common knowledge. “They own the place,” he said, at last. “One of them, anyway.” Then: “Shit, you don’t even know where you’re at.”
Erik had turned back to look again. The dim light caught his bright hair and the curvature of his jawline. “I just come here for a drink,” he replied, distant, eyelids half-drawn.