Perspicuous Jones

CHAPTER ONE. Six years working in this city, and I thought I'd seen everything. Ur-Hadesh was a metropolis where everyone was from everywhere and anything happend all the time. Flesh and blood walked arm and arm with metal and bone, and men of cloth were just as liable to pull the wool over your eyes. Always figured it was the heat that made people antsy, desperate. But on that night-- that starry, starry, night-- it seemed like the city's prayers were answered as something descended from the heavens that I'd never thought possible: rain.

It came with all the speed and subtlety of a cackling witch, chasing away the bright, red cloak of sunset and blanketing the city in a dark mantle of grey better fitting the hubble, bubble, toil, and trouble now percolating up from its seedy underbelly. The sudden downpour had cooled the boiling heat of the Yenzian summer down to a gentle simmer, but it also brought with it a different, almost imperceptible change in the atmosphere.

Forget a melting pot. This city was a damned cauldron - and trouble was a-brewin'.

I was just about to call it a day when I heard the tell-tale knock-knock of someone whose hands often beat their brain to the punch. I sat there frozen, hoping the silhouette pressed against the one-way window to my office would take the hint and leave, but after a long pause and an even longer sigh, the late visitor let themself in.

The young mage was a tall, starry-eyed thing-- literally-- and had a gaze so cool, dark, and deep that you almost didn't mind that the abyss was staring right back at you.

"Excuse me," they said, shutting the door behind them carefully. "I don't wish to bother you so close to evening, but I have... an important matter I wish to discuss with you." Their Liriccian accent was heavy, like a black hole, but just as liable to pull you in. I didn't normally take clients past sundown, but something about their tone carried enormous gravity.