Waffle House, Tuesday Morning

[deathsmajesty]

"Why won't they just leave?" Liliana demanded of the alien beside her as they hunkered down in a booth, trying to subtly keep an eye on the TV-headed creeps milling about outside the restaurant. They seemed loathe to actually come into the restaurant, quite likely due to the staff's absolute unwillingness to tolerate nonsense, but they weren't leaving, either. Just standing there, holding up various reward offers towards the glass like that might entice either person to come out.

Of all the places Liliana had intended to visit today, this Waffle Hut wasn't one of them, and of all the people she intended to see, Stark was most definitely not one, either. But they'd both ended up getting menaced by an ever-growing crowd of TV heads and had ducked into the one place that had offered sanctuary and, well...now here they were. Sharing a sticky booth, getting stared at by the crowd outside and utterly ignored by the staff within.

[For said glowy alien, please]

Comments

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana was a helper!

"Not hiding something doesn't mean everybody knows about it," Liliana pointed out. "I certainly didn't. And they were gone for ten years for a war; I'm sure much of what they'd known before has been relegated to storage and never retrieved." She gave him a look. "Also, if you're at the bedsides of people dying, then surely you must know how frantic, how emotional everything is. Even if they know it stone cold fact outside of such times, it's easy to forget when you're on the verge of losing someone you care about. Especially if it's an unexpected and ugly death."

And then she dropped her eyes. "I saw that a lot. As a girl. When I was a cleric during the war."

[stykera]

"There wasn't time to say anything else once I... once things started to happen. I couldn't do anything. I was being held there."

By scary men, apparently.

[deathsmajesty]

Yeah, the reminder about the men in her head had Liliana stop lecturing and drink a few more swallows of coffee.

"Scarrens?" she asked eventually.

[stykera]

"Their empire controlled much of where I'm from. They look...somewhat like lizards. I'll be happy to never see another. They were cruel and used me and discarded me. Sold me. Traded me. I'm not certain."

At least that was to be assumed. He'd been on Katratzi and ended up on a Budong before becoming Scorpy's science experiment.

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana decided that Scarrans were what Stark's plane called viashino because that was easiest. "Just because you could...ease their way?" she asked. "Did they die so brutally then?"

[stykera]

"Sometimes," Stark said. "Sometimes they just wanted someone there because they could. We're rare. Stykera. Rarer now. I think I was a...a status symbol?"

[deathsmajesty]

"Ah," Liliana said with a nod. "Yes, I can see that. I have been places where non-humans were treated that way. Fashionable for the nobility to have an elf companion or a merfolk living in their carefully terraced garden pools."

[stykera]

"Neither the Scarrans nor the Peacekeepers thought of me as a person," Stark said quietly. "Baniks are a lesser race. But I was valuable."

[deathsmajesty]

Yeah. Liliana didn't like that, he could see it in the way her nose wrinkled and her mouth twisted. "As a thing," she agreed. "Not a person. Of course."

[stykera]

"I haven't had to live like that for a long time," Stark said. "But it doesn't go away."

[deathsmajesty]

"No," Liliana agreed, her expression going inward for a moment. "It never really does."

Three guesses no prizes where her mind had gone back to.