The Color Purple

[Lorelei]

((OPEN, but do check the recruitment thread))


Another day, another crushing defeat.

Lorelei stood in the surprisingly well-lit shop, her shoulders slumped as she looked over what almost certainly wasn’t purple magicyte. The teen had sought the illusive piece of crystal for days now, scouring the endless multitude of Radasanth’s stalls and shops. The best result she had gotten up until this point was a cackling laugh, the worst an earful of shouted curses as she was chased out of shops by bearded men with bushy eyebrows and weird body odors.

From the few more cooperative ones – old grandfathers who patronizingly called her my child and lectured her about meddling with forces she couldn’t possibly comprehend – Lorelei had learned that magicyte wasn’t exactly illegal in Radasanth, but wasn’t exactly legal either. Legally, it could be sold and bought as long as its provenance could be provided, but such officially approved magicyte was in too high of a demand to ever make it to shops. Hence, most of magicyte that did make it to shops came by way of smugglers, and was usually sold under the counter and only to a certain clientele. From what she had gathered so far, Lorelei certainly wasn’t amongst that select number. She had almost lost all hope of acquiring the accursed thing when she came upon Dolgen’s Emporium.

Both the shop and the owner were distinctly different from what the teen had observed in her search so far. Most businesses that peddled magical items looked less like shops and more like personal studies, with their shaded lights and grumpy, uninterested old men looking more keen on getting you out of their abode than suffer your insolent patronage. Dolgen’s was nothing like that. The shades were drawn back from the huge window that faced the street, letting in the crisp light of the spring morning that revealed shelves upon shelves of trinkets and twinkling baubles, spread around haphazardly with no obvious order to them. It looked like a place that had everything, but at the same time a place where you couldn’t really find anything.

And Dolgen himself was no different. A flamboyant man in his early thirties, he dressed in ostentatious colors, wore a ring on every finger (all of them magical, he insisted) and looked more like someone who would sing ribald songs and court ladies of ill repute. He dubbed himself The Curator of Curiosity, his shop The Treasure Trove and addressed Lorelei as Little Princess. Most of it was for show, of course, a spectacle meant to dazzle the gullible, but not all of it. Lorelei could sense that there was no true magic in the rings Dolgen wore, but there was no doubt that the man was a sorcerer of some sort. And while the Treasure Trove looked more like a junk heap, she could also detect that there were actual magically potent items sprinkled throughout the Emporium’s inventory. And when she had asked why that is so, Dolgen had simply responded: “Those who know what they’re looking for will find it.”

Well, she had certainly known what she was looking for when she had first entered the shop yesterday. And unlike all those before him, Dolgen had neither ridiculed her nor sent her away with a tongue lashing after she had asked about purple magicyte. Instead he had offered her a devilishly handsome smile and a wink and said: “Purple, eh? Purple packs quite a punch, Little Princess. Drain you dry if you’re not careful. Some say that it can even suck the soul right out of a person. Now, you wouldn’t want something like that to happen?”

“Mister,” Lorelei had said to the man, her face suddenly far too serious for her fifteen years of age. “I’m counting on it.”

Lorelei hadn’t bothered explaining to the magician that she didn’t believe in a soul, at least not in the spiritual kind that the preachers prophesized to their pious audience. But there was an essence, a measure of life to all living things that amounted to more than just the sum of flesh and bone and gray matter. Those acute to it could sense it, certain events could sap it, those with malicious intent could downright destroy it, and if her research was correct, purple magicyte could trap it. And if it could be trapped, it could be tracked, and she definitely needed to track someone down.

Seeing the determination in her eyes, Dolgen had told her to come by tomorrow, but now that she did, Lorelei knew there was little more to his talk than hot air. The collection of purple crystals were spread on a velvety cushion in an ornate wooden box, and none of them resonated with magic. She hovered the splayed fingers over them once again, just to make certain, then shook her head.

“That is not purple magicyte,” the teen sorceress said, dropping her hand. They always tried to swindle her. In the precious couple of years Lorelei had spent with her father before his disappearance, she had accompanied him to the markets several times. And the thing she remembered the most was that everyone had been so respectful towards her old man, all smiles and jokes and, most importantly, fair prices. Nobody had wanted to double-cross the big man with a sword. But a skinny teenager who – and here she was perfectly honest with herself – didn’t know exactly what she was doing was fair game for all, it would seem.

“Is that so?” Dolgen asked, leaning leisurely in the throne-like wooden chair. “Tell me, Little Princess, did you ever see purple magicyte?”

“No.”

“Well, how can you tell it’s not real then, huh?” he asked, perfectly smug and smiling that smile that would’ve been charming if the man in question wasn’t trying to sell her a bunch of useless crap at premium price.

“Because if it were, I wouldn’t be able to do this!” Lorelei said. She grabbed the largest of the crystals and brought it up. As she suspected, nothing happened, no unstoppable force draining the life out of her. Just the uncomfortable edges of the thing cutting into her palm.

Dolgen didn’t seem surprised. “Ah, yes. Well, what can you expect at such short notice,” he said with a dismissive shrug. He leaned forward a bit in his chair and pointed his index finger at his customer, his eyebrows raised. “But I still think you’ll be very interested in buying it.”

“And why is that?” Lorelei asked.

“Because of the knife,” Dolgen said. His devilish smile stretched a bit further as the fingers of his hand closed into what looked like a fist.

“The knife?” Her face scrunched into a quizzical frown, her thick eyebrows dropping low. It took a moment for Lorelei to realize that his hand wasn’t exactly a fist. More as if the man held an invisible...

Something sharp and pointy poked between her shoulder blades, sliding through the fabric of her cloak and tunic with ease and pricking her skin. Dolgen got up from his chair slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, empty hand still pointed at her.

“What...What do you think you’re doing?” the teen asked, panic and sweat washing over her in a wave as her eyes went wide with surprise. She froze almost completely, not just her lithe body, but her thoughts as well. An experienced adventurer wouldn’t have been surprised by this, would’ve probably predicted it and saw Dolgen for the sack of hot air he really was. But for Lorelei was still quite green at the adventuring game.

“Whatever do you mean?” the villain on the other side of the stacked counter said. “We’re merely trading.”

“I’ll...I’ll report this to the Watch,” Lorelei managed to squeeze through her clenched teeth, afraid to even move too much.

“Oh, you shouldn’t do that. Because then I have to tell them that you tried to sell me all this smuggled magicyte. And try to guess who they’ll believe. I’ll give you a hint: It’s not you,” Dolgen whispered with a mischievous wink.

“Bastard,” was all she got courage to say under her breath. Tears started to well in her eyes as they usually would in times of great distress, a trait she most definitely didn’t inherit from her father. She hated this show of weakness, struggled with all her willpower to prevent it.

“Now, here’s what we’ll do,” the magician said, lackadaisically walking around the counter to face Lorelei. “You’ll give me your money, and then you’ll take your crystals and run back to wherever you came from. That way I don’t have to make a mess in my shop and you get to live another day. How’s that for a deal?”

Yes, that was the easy way out. Cut your losses and forget about this foolish quest that was obviously too big for her. Run away with tail between her legs and make peace with the fact that she was weak and totally unprepared. She was only fifteen after all. Shouldn’t have been doing this at all. Should’ve been going to school, getting courted by boys with first wisps of facial hair. Should’ve been at home, with her loving family. A thousand excuses to give up flashed through her head, and none of them rang true. It was her pride that stood against them all, that stupid Ravenheart pride that kept her father banging his head through so many walls in his life. And though she had her mother’s figure, Lorelei was still mostly her father’s daughter.

“No,” the teenager said simply, with no emotion in her voice. Her eyes focused on the man in front of her, her pupils constricting as she called upon the Steed spirit. “I think I’d rather make a mess.”

Before Dolgen had a chance to react, she unleashed the full power of the Steed spirit in all directions. The shop exploded. Thousands of items were sent flying and ricocheting through the little shop, clanking and shattering in an ear-piercing din. The malicious proprietor of the Emporium was sent tumbling backwards over the counter, crashing against the far shelf before getting showered with his stock from a thousand different directions. A chunk of his inventory was sent flying through the front window of his shop, blasting out into the street in twinkling spray of metal and glass. In a matter of seconds, all around her was reduced to piles of wood and glass intermixed with what was left of the Treasure Trove. Lorelei herself was taken aback by how much damage she had managed to cause. She had used her magic before, but never in such a closed space with so many unsecured objects around. In such an environment it almost looked like she was standing in the center of a crater of an asteroid that just struck the ground. Such destruction should’ve scared her. Instead it brought a smirk to her pale visage.

Dolgen’s not going to like this, she thought. As if the magician heard her thought, she could hear him shuffling in the far corner of the shop. Lorelei thought it would not be prudent to stick around and discuss reparations with the man. She made her way through the rubble swiftly, every footstep a crunch as she made her way out through the broken window.

The crowd was slowly gathering around the mess by the time Lorelei was out. A few were browsing through the evicted goods, but most just stared at the destruction and the girl in the grey cloak that came out of it. She was still trying to figure out an explanation to offer the onlookers when Dolgen’s voice cried out from inside his wrecked shop.

“Thief! Seize her! Seize the thief!”

For a moment Lorelei considered explaining the situation, waiting for the City Watch and letting them sort out the mess. But then some people started to detach themselves from the crowd with clear intention to apprehend her, and she remembered what Dolgen said moments before about trust.

And then she was running.