Stealth and Skin (ObscurePeach x Fun_and_Games)

[Fun_and_Games]

Life had not been easy for her. Not in any way. Would she even remember the time with her father? The man himself was little more than a ghost; tall, a face lost in the hazy smoke of early memories, an impression of haughty attitude and anger for her mother that never seemed to have a purpose. Then, he was gone.

The family's money had gone with him. Her mother said they had been decently well off, though she never explained how or why. She never wanted to dwell on the old days, never wanted to remember or dwell on what had been or could have been. She had been left, cut off, and cast away. That was the reality she lived with. She had lived with that by trying to keep her daughter alive. She had two children...her son had died less than a year after to the plague that came through the city, killing one in three. That time...him. Her mother had used what little favors and influence she had left to try and save him. In the end...she had even sold herself to a doctor who claimed to have the cure. He lied, but he got her for the night. Half broken, her mother had surrendered and simply started selling herself constantly to keep her daughter alive. That lasted until she died from her own disease, contracted from an unknown man some time on one of those endless nights.

Then, it had been HER turn to work off her debt. Fortunately, she had managed to do so with a mop and bucket instead of on her back. The mistress of the brothel always thought she didn't have the right temperament for it, proven one day when she punched one of the patrons. That had cost the girl another year of servitude to pay it off...but none of the customers ever tried to touch her again.

And now, the debt was paid. She was standing on the back porch of the brothel, the alleyway stretching to her left and right. This was the servant entrance, where the cruddy patrons to the establishment couldn't see the rotten meat and watered down ale that got delivered here. Didn't mean it was worse than the street out front....just a small bit narrower. Down here in the Poor Quarter of the town of Lakton, none of the streets were overly safe. But back here, this was the second layer. The place where you didn't go unless you had business. From now on, likely as not to be her home, unless she changed her stars.

A strange feeling: utterly possibility, and yet also...for the first time, on her own, and with no-one making sure a roof was over her head. It was all on her now, her future. Her survival. Everything.

 

[ObscurePeach]

Aphria gripped what meager possessions she had. A ragged cloth bag one of the whores had bought her years ago, out of pity when she was left alone. Inside was what few clothes she had, a little food (putrid but better than starvation) and her most prized possession. It was a necklace her mother had once owned. She’d stolen it, convinced her mother their father must have taken it with him when she was looking for it to pawn off.

She hadn’t been able to stand not having something from before that bastard had left, and had hidden it away all this time. Even now, she didn’t dare wear it. A filthy urchin with even a cheap piece of jewelry would be assumed to be a pickpocket.

Not that she wasn’t a pick pocket of sorts. She was good at remembering which patrons came with more money than just for a whore, knew which girls they requested. Once a month or so, she would hide under the bed and take a few coins when they were distracted. She had a fair amount more money than they thought she had by the time she she was ready to leave, but still not enough.

She glanced over her shoulder as she began walking. She would miss some of the women. The ones who mothered her once she was orphaned. Who had distracted the patrons who leered at her until one day when one had slipped their watch and tried to stick his hand up her dress. The ones who let her cry on their shoulders after, though they didn’t know that she was crying in shame of the arousal she felt when the man cornered her.

She shook her head to rid herself of the memory. She needed more money before she could start tracking down her bastard of a father and she knew exactly where she was going to steal from. The doctor who killed her brother would pay for tricking her mother.

 

[Fun_and_Games]

There was a lifetime between that terrible day when her brother died and today. But, while some things faded with time or changed, other things remained painfully the same. Reputations were hard to kill, and the best con artists were the one who were also partly the truth. The doctor was no stranger around the poor quarter. His name was Whalen Blight, and he was well known as the best healer in the quarter; a dubious distinction, all in all. But, he could cut limbs off to stop gangrene growing, and then burn it closed well enough to not let the person bleed out. He could dig an arrowhead out of a wound and then stitch it up, though infection was a 50/50 proposition at best afterward.

When you had that kind of credibility, when you then told someone you had the cure for the plague, people tended to believe you. Even afterwards, when your cure proved to be nonsense, it was easy enough to wave your hand, tell the survivors that the ones who died hadn't taken it properly and the ones that survived were because of his tonic...even if that was nonsense, more a matter of pure chance...and continue on. You could claim to be a great surgeon, butcher a man and end up killing him even more surely than the original problem, and then proclaim after that there was nothing anyone could have done.

This...was Whalen Blight. And he had been doing it for over thirty years. Ever since his own master had given him the keys to the kingdom of healing arts, which he had then used to poison him before he had learned half of what the old man had really known how to do. But, he had taken over the man's business, which had earned him a pretty penny over the years.

Oh, he wasn't rich. He was still in poor quarter. Maybe, if he had stashed away the money, he might be living comfortably by now. But he drank more than he should, and gambled when he wasn't drinking. He didn't whore much...too many women wanted to pay with their bodies in the poor quarter for him to need to do that. And when that didn't happen...well, a few of the right drugs, and he didn't have to ask anymore with women who came looking for help.

Nasty, in almost everyway.

Rumors of him were everywhere, but...sometimes, the poison couldn't be dug out, no matter how obvious and black the blood it was tainting.

As such, he was not hard to find. He had an apothecary shop attached to a dank cell of an operating room where he did his dirty work. It was in the back of an alley, taking up the entire basement floor of a tannery mixed with a leather clothing shop above; one more indication he didn't know what he was doing, for the stench and filth surrounding the tannery was surely the last thing a healer would want for his patients. He was rumored to live down there somewhere as well, so the basement area would have a living quarters as well. A miniature complex that she could raid and hopefully get a few funds while punishing him for what he had done, at least to her.