He slid into the window seat, his bench wobbling like one leg was shorter than the others. Cara and Maeve squished onto the opposite bench, Maeve looking like she’d rather be anywhere else. After all, the place was cramped, warm from the open kitchen fire behind the counter, and the air smelled like charred scallions and old soy sauce. A strong scent for someone Cara had to lend a spare black leather gas mask to for sure, but she’d get used to it soon enough.
Gael grabbed one of the falling-apart menu off the table and squinted at the list. The handwriting was scratchy, like Miss Alba had scrawled it after one too many drinks. Black sea broth with mystery crab, shadow spice noodles, and albino serpent pulled noodles. He snorted at the last one. Are the noodles pulled, or is the albino serpent pulled?
He wasn’t a picky eater, though, and he didn’t really care what he stuffed down his mouth. While the girls took off their masks—and Maeve fumbled with her straps awkwardly, needing Cara’s help to take off—he leaned back and shouted over the clatter of pans and pots.
“Miss Alba! One bowl of the Shadow Spice Noodles, please, and make me see colours after this! I want the strongest alcohol you’ve got! Anything above seventy percent in concentration will do!”
Cara kicked him under the chin, giving him a sharp glare. "Could you not embarrass the clinic for five goddamn seconds?"
"Too late for that," he replied, grinning from ear to ear. Cara sighed and turned toward the kitchen counter.
"I’ll take the Black Sea Broth, Miss! And please don’t give Gael his alcohol!" she called. Miss Alba gave both of them quiet nods as she started oiling up the pans and woks, reaching for the messy shelf of condiments behind her.
Gael sighed.
Whatever.
I’ll pop the eighty percent stuff once we’re back in the clinic.
Maeve, meanwhile, was flipping through the menu back and forth like it held the secrets to immortality.
"... You gonna order, or should I just take your share?" Gael asked, tossing his menu away as he propped up one cheek with his hand.
Maeve scowled at him. Her lips pressed tight, and her eyes darted back to the menu, clearly overwhelmed at the sheer amount of options, so Cara nudged her gently from the side and leaned closer.
"Don’t worry. It’s not as weird as it sounds,” Cara said softly, pointing at the menu. “The Black Sea Broth is just a rich fish-based soup from the far south, and the Shadow Spice Noodles are beef noodles with spicy shade petals sprinkled in. The albino serpent is…. uh, some sort of eel, I think?"
“It’s a serpent,” Gael said pointedly.
“Nobody in their right minds would serve serpents in noodles. It’s some sort of eel,” Cara reassured.
“It’s a serpent,” Gael said again.
Maeve nodded slowly, her brows knitting as she continued going through the menu. Gael tilted his head, watching her closely. She looked like someone trying to navigate a whole new world, which was… weird, to say the least. She was eighteen, nineteen maybe? Even if she’d been locked up for the past three years, she should’ve been to a noodle shop in the upper city before. He was pretty sure the silver-tongued upper city folk had noodles.
Surprisingly—or unsurprisingly—Maeve finally settled on something simple. “I want… the plain noodles with seaweed… crystal… broth?" she mumbled.
Gael snorted. “Coward. You should try the albino serpent.”
Cara shot him a look that said shut up, so he leaned back, hands up in surrender. Meanwhile, Miss Alba started working the stoves with practiced speed, flames licking the bottom of the woks. The sizzle and clank of rusted metal filled the small shop, and with his stomach growling, Gael tapped his fingers on the table, glancing out the window at the quiet alley beyond.
What a beautiful morning—
Then Cara reached into her greatcoat and pulled out a thick, weathered, leather-bound book. She slammed it onto the table with a force that made both him and Maeve jump.
“Here we go,” Cara announced, flipping it open.
Gael groaned. “Do we have to? Now?”
Cara paused mid-flip to stare at him. “Bets on how deep in the red we are?”
“Twenty Marks on ‘not really’. Now turn it sideways so I get to read it too.”
- Repair fees for the clinic: 15,000 Marks.
- Loss of assets during treatments: 8,000 Marks.
- Replacement medical supplies (stolen by rats, melted by acid, or mysteriously vanished): 6,500 Marks.
- General maintenance backlog (including that hole in the roof): 4,000 Marks.
- Repair of ethervein machine: 10,000 Marks
He scanned the first few entries, humming to himself.
"Okay. Reasonable. Cost of doing business. Nothing we can’t—"
Cara flipped the page.
- Compensation for damage to the noodle vendor’s cart (set on fire during an ‘experiment with the symbiote elixir’ two weeks ago): 1,200 Marks.
- Outstanding food tab at Green Sunny’s (because someone keeps ‘forgetting’ their wallet): 700 Marks.
- Protection fees to the Repossessors (to avoid 'accidental' arson): 18,000 Marks.
- Loss of advanced equipment during the ‘Incident’ (includes three hundred syringes, two hundred bonespikes, twenty conical flasks, seven entire surgical tables, and counting): 110,000 Marks.
- Alcohol costs: 10,200 Marks.
- Interest on unpaid debts to Juna of the Black Bloom Bazaar: 23,000 Marks.
“Okay. It’s not that bad. We can still—”
Cara flipped the next page after that.
- Replacement of Maeve’s ruined cloak (after exposure to acid)(I liked that cloak): 500 Marks.
- Cleanup costs for the alley (following that time you ‘accidentally’ detonated a symbiote elixir vial): 9,000 Marks.
- Bribe to the monthly district inspector to look the other way (because the clinic doesn’t have a license): 2,000 Marks.
- Restitution to the flower vendor (whose cart we crushed during a botched outdoors experiment): 1,800 Marks.
- Replacement of two doors kicked down during emergency treatments: 3,400 Marks.
- Payment to a courier service after a failed delivery attempt resulted in ‘property damage’: 1,200 Marks.
- Liability costs for the alley’s collapsed awning while you were chasing down a rat who stole your hat: 2,500 Marks.
- Back taxes on the clinic property (interest included): 14,000 Marks.
- Donations promised to a local shrine during a particularly desperate prayer session: 600 Marks.
- Bandages to make sure the statue of Saintess Severin doesn’t collapse on us: 2,000 Marks
- …
The list went on and on and on, but then the final page of the audit book hit the table with the weight of doom.
Total outstanding debts, fines, and miscellaneous expenses: one million Marks.
“... Damn,” Gael mumbled. “I guess I owe you twenty Marks now.”
Maeve leaned back in her seat, staring at the final number on the page like it might jump off and strangle her. "So, we have a lifetime debt of a million Marks across the board. That’s… what? Five thousand Marks a month for ten years straight if we pay everything back in steady installments?"
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Gael sighed as Miss Alba swooped in next to them, balancing their steaming noodle bowls with practiced grace. He caught a whiff of the broth, and for a moment, life didn’t seem so grim. He dug in immediately with his fork, the rich, spicy flavor of his Shadow Spice Noodles hitting like a warm hug from someone who owed him nothing.
Food’s the best when you don’t have to pay for it, after all.
Maeve, however, wasn’t eating. The only one out of the three of them. She was still staring at the audit book like she’d just been told the world was ending.
“And… how much do the two of you usually earn in a month?” she asked hesitantly.
Cara answered without looking up from her bowl, slurping loudly. "Five hundred Marks on a good month. A hundred on a bad one. We average around two hundred a month.”
Maeve blinked. “But that’s not even close to a million.”
“No kidding,” Gael said around a mouthful of noodles. He swallowed and pointed his fork at Cara. “But my symbiote elixir worked last night. We could, you know, start selling it. Finally let the city bask in my brilliance—”
Cara gave him a flat look. “Selling it requires advertising. Advertising costs money. Money we don’t have.” She took another bite, chewed, and swallowed before continuing. “And let’s not forget that nobody in this neighbourhood knows we even exist. You really think we’re in a position to roll out a grand marketing campaign?”
Gael waved her off with his fork. “Who needs a campaign? Word of mouth. Theatrics. We could do something big and stupid and—”
“Besides, you don’t actually want to sell the patent for the elixir, right?”
Gael paused mid-slurp, letting the question hang like steam from his bowl.
Selling the patent? His elixir? The one thing in this whole miserable world that was purely his, crafted from sleepless nights, questionable experiments, and more than a few near-death experiences?
Yeah, no.
Fuck if I let the church or any of the other silver-tongued barons up in the upper city ‘pretend’ like they invented it from scratch after buying the patent.
He sighed, leaning back in his chair. “I’ll admit I’m not inclined, no. Also, even if I were to sell the patent, nobody would be able to reproduce it. There ain’t no recipe I can slap on a label and toss out in a parcel. The process is... temperamental.”
Cara snorted. “That’s one way to say one of the main components is—”
“Shh,” he continued, waving a hand. “It takes time as well—days, sometimes weeks, depending on the batch—to brew even a single vial of it, not to mention ninety percent of the ingredients are rarer than honest men in the city. Even if I wanted to churn it out as the miracle cure it is myself, I can’t. It ain’t scalable yet. I still need to run a few more tests before I can make sure it actually works, and that’ll take me… six more months, at least.”
“And there’s also no chance in hell the church and the barons buying the patent will use it for normal ‘medicinal’ purposes,” Cara finished. “So it’s probably best—for safety’s sake—that we don’t go around telling people we have this shiny new elixir for now. If the upper city catches wind of what you’ve made, they’ll probably send an assassin down to cut us out of the equation after stealing the elixir, and after they get their hands on it…” she trailed off for a moment, smiling darkly, “who knows what sort of chemical weapon they’ll be able to fashion out of it?”
“Lid’s closed on ever selling the patent, then,” he concluded, washing the last few bites of his noodles down with the spicy broth. “But now we’re back to square one. We can’t use the symbiote elixir to make money for the next six months, but we’re gonna die in one if we can’t even scrounge up five thousand Marks.”
The noodles were warm, the broth rich, and for a moment, Gael almost forgot how screwed they all were.
Almost.
As he slurped the last of his noodles, letting the steam fog his lenses, he turned to Maeve.
“So, Exorcist,” he started, dragging her name out like it was a question and a sigh at the same time. “You got any connections? Someone rich and stupid enough to throw some Marks our way?”
Maeve paused, fork mid-air. Her glasses were fogged up as well, and her face scrunched as she blinked at him. “No.”
He clicked his tongue. “No one? Upper city contacts? A family fortune gathering dust somewhere? Don’t you got any relatives to mooch off of?”
She shook her head after a moment of hesitation, and Gael grumbled under his breath, tipping his head back.
“Figures,” he said. “Alright. What if we haul the Myrmur carcass we bagged last night to the nearest Exorcist Establishment? Surely they’d pay a handsome bounty for that thing.”
“No, they won’t,” Maeve mumbled, her voice steady but tired.
“They won’t pay?”
“They don’t put out public bounties for Myrmurs, so they won’t pay even if an outsider kills a Myrmur,” she explained. “And just to reiterate, I’m not getting a stipend, either. I’m on probation.”
Gael leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and gesturing at the double-headed wasp emblem on her shoulder. “So what’s the badge for, huh? Fashion? A paperweight? If your bosses don’t give a damn about you and you ain’t earning anything, just ditch the dress. I mean, come on, join the fun. We’ve got matching poverty-themed uniforms.”
Maeve’s grip on her fork tightened, her gaze narrowing. “I’m not quitting,” she said sharply.
“You’ll be quitting anyways if you ain’t earning anything being an Exorcist,” he said, shrugging. “Manual labour’s not so bad, you know. We’ll probably end up in the Gulch Mines anyways. Just saying, that combat dress of yours? It’ll get filthy down there, so best find something else to wear—”
Her fork hit the table with a sharp clatter, and Maeve’s voice cut through the noodle shop like a blade.
“I said I’m not quitting.”
And that shut him up.
The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable, as Cara glanced between the two of them, frowning.
Before Gael could find a retort that’d definitely make things worse, though, two small figures shuffled out from behind the kitchen counter. Miss Alba’s kids—a boy and a girl in tattered tunics, neither older than ten—wore shy smiles as they approached with their brass masks pulled down.
The girl clutched a small, dirty coin jar in her hands.
“Um,” she started, her voice barely above a whisper as the two of them stopped right next to Gael. “Thank you. For… saving mama.” Then she held out her jar with both hands, dipping her head solemnly. “Since papa died, mama’s been sad, and she hasn’t been cooking much, but… You can have our tip jar if you really need it, Mister.”
Gael furrowed his brows.
The jar couldn’t be holding more than a hundred Marks—maybe two hundred if there were a few silver coins in there—but their simple act of ‘generosity’ hit him harder than any verbal insult could.
… As if I’m so desperate for money.
Don’t pity me, you little shits.
He snorted, turning on his chair to ruffle their hair.
“What kind of doctor do you think I am?” he murmured. “Listen, kid. Your mama doesn’t owe me a thing. I don’t charge for emergencies, especially not when there are noodles involved.” Then he straightened, grinning down at the siblings. “But… maybe you can hook us up with more free bowls sometime? Say, one lunch bowl every two days?”
The girl’s face lit up, and the boy nodded enthusiastically. They scampered back behind the kitchen counter, giggling, as Miss Alba stepped out.
She leaned against the counter, her mask hanging around her neck, her smile tired but genuine.
“That’s fine with me,” she said, her voice soft. “After what you did for me, I suppose all of you can come by anytime for a free meal.” Then her gaze shifted to Maeve, winking at the Exorcist. “And you. Don’t listen to whatever that insane doctor’s saying. If you don’t wanna quit, then don’t quit. It’s a child’s privilege to chase whatever dream the Vile hasn’t choked out of them yet.”
Maeve blinked, her mouth opening slightly, but no words came out as Miss Alba bowed to all of them.
Her gratitude was more than clear enough, so Gael looked away and sighed aloud.
“Whatever,” he muttered. “If we’re all done eating, let’s get moving.”
Cara pulled up her mask and slid out the shop first after giving Miss Alba a grateful nod, but Gael lingered. As he passed by the kitchen counter, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, braided flower bracelet. Miss Alba tilted her head as he handed it to her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“You were successfully treated by the ‘Heartcord Clinic’, were you not?” he said, placing the bracelet into her palm and closing her fingers over it. “So you get a souvenir. Feel free to wear it everywhere you go. It’s gonna be free marketing for us, you know?”
She chuckled, her smile softening. “The three of you are really screwed, huh?”
“Yep.” Then he leaned in slightly, his voice dropping to a whisper. “And, uh, maybe keep quiet about Maeve being an Exorcist, yeah? You know how it is around Bharncair. If anyone asks—”
“I’ll just say my Myrmur was taken care of by an insane Raven and his pretty wife in his clinic down on Blightmarch Ward, Asphodel Lane Number Two, the rundown church at the end of the street,” she finished, shooing him out. “How’s that for free marketing?”
Gael’s smirk widened. “Counting on you, lady. Spread the word.”
As he stepped outside, Maeve waited for him by the door, her suspicious gaze lingering on him for a moment before she turned away. He ignored her as well. Whether she overheard him or not didn’t matter to him. It was already going to be tough enough making up some bullshit to explain to future patients why he was chained to his ‘wife’, so he’d rather not have to explain why he was married to an Exorcist as well.
I’m making her cover that emblem up later.
But for now…
The three of them stood side by side by side outside the front door, staring straight at a wet, mossy wall.
All of their arms were crossed..
“... So,” Maeve began. “What now?
Gael let out a long, weary sigh, tipping his head back to stare at the Vile-covered sky. “We need cash. Fast. We’re fucked if we can’t come up with five thousand Marks by the end of the month.” Then he straightened, a bright idea sparking behind his lenses. “But… lucky for us, I do believe I’ve got the perfect idea to make a lot of money.”
Cara raised a brow. “Oh? What is it?”
Gael turned to her, grinning from ear to ear. “We’re gonna rob a bank.”
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