Adrian Blackwood

Lydia paused in the middle of tearing off the section of the list with all the plant-based materials to delegate to Dr. Isley to look for the problem.

She finished the tearing and held the paper out to Dr. Isley. "Perhaps you should, if you're too manly to be seen shopping for cosmetics," she sniffed at Adrian, then asked Dr. Isley, "Would you like to make use of your expertise by looking for those for us? After we've stopped at this charming cosmetics shop, of course."

Sorry, Rey. She didn't trust you with shopping yet.

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It was for the best, really.

Having taken Adrian's arm, it was easier to position herself so that she could step in the way if needed and murmured, "Definitely not friends. Do you know how to get around them?"

Or she'd trust Lydia to Lydia her way through.

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Pam took the list, and passed it an idle look. "I'd be happy to make use of my expertise," she said, and her eyes flicked up to Adrian's. And then to those men. "In more ways than one."

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"I just don't think we should bother them," Adrian said, a little lamely. "They're already having enough trouble...seems wrong to add to it..."

You know, since it would be his fault all the way around. Again.

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"We're not going to bother them," Lydia scoffed, belatedly realizing they should have come up with an alias for Adrian before setting off on this little jaunt. Something to keep in mind for next time. (Possibly a chill just went down Adrian's spine.) "It's not our fault all this...riffraff is in the way."

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"Is it safe for them?" Rey checked, and added, "Relatively?"

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Pam sighed. "You're all very cute," she said. She shifted, moving so she was facing all of them - so it looked like they really were just having a conversational huddle.

Tiny particles of lamia spores drifted away from her, from underneath the disguise. They weren't visible to the eye, unless you had supernaturally intense eyesight.

They drifted on the wind, directed with nary a thought. They settled on skin and between leering teeth, wafted through upturned noses. Ivy told them to play, but briefly; to settle and die in ten minutes or so, their purpose expended, so they'd be washed out of those bodies before anyone would ever be able to tell they'd been there in the first place.

It wouldn't take long. Barely a few moments, really, for the world to start blurring just a little at the edges, turning shades of red, yellow, green-- to make it seem as if any tucked-away blade of grass between the stones was calling to them, and living things, so far away, were suddenly breathing companionably down their necks.

Nature was calling.

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Adrian had no idea Ivy was doing anything, mostly because he'd spent some time staring into middle distance at Lydia's mention of 'next time.' "Technically the warlocks can't interfere with customers who want to shop," he said. "He can just make it so that most people don't want to. And I definitely can't go over there. I don't know if my cousins or any of the warlocks will recognize me, but it doesn't seem like a brilliant idea to give anybody the opportunity to try."

Several of the demons started sneezing. Weird.

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"Well, that's very rude of them," Lydia declared. "And don't be ridiculous. No one who recognized you dressed like that would acknowledge the connexion."

Damn, Lydia.

"But if you don't wish for us to give custom to the Blackwoods, I suppose we can move on." Alas.

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"Maybe they'll be gone if we come back later, if we really need something that way," Rey said. She was planning on following Adrian's lead through all of this. "Though I like knowing where they are."

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It wasn't that Pam could direct these men, per se. Not without a much more significant lamia infection, which would have its own downsides. But she could give a whisp of an instruction: a longing for the meadows, a desire to put one's hands in the soil.

She did.

And listened for more telling sounds than coughing.

Edited Date: 2025-08-20 02:16 am (UTC)

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There was some shifting, some more coughing. A soft murmur from behind them. And then suddenly the group of warlocks and their demons all headed over towards the open meadows, a slow drifting forward.

"Wait, what does that mean?" he demanded of Lydia. "This is a very expensive suit! And--wait, where are the warlocks going?"

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Lydia wasn't dignifying that with a response.

His relatives would have been much less likely to recognize him if he was wearing a color, she was just saying.

"What does it matter where they're going? They're not in our way any more. And I was just getting ready to do my best Caroline Bingley impersonation," she sighed. Oh, well. Onward.

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"How long should that last?" Rey checked, figuring they would probably garner more attention not going one way or another.

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"Fifteen minutes, at least," Pam said. Idly. "I sent them on a little 'shroom trip."

Don't flail, Adrian.

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"You--?" Adrian sighed, looking at the warlocks who were giddily sitting in the meadows. They were drawing attention, but he supposed at least that wasn't attention that was on their little group? "Just as long as nobody thinks that it was witchcraft that did that," he said. "Since it targeted the warlocks at their booth..."

You know, he couldn't think about that now.

"The reagents and plants are that way," he said, pointing. "Shall we? Or, Lydia, did you want to stop at my family's booth...?" He sounded less uneasy about that possibility, but he wasn't not uneasy.

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If everyone had just followed Lydia's lead and bulled through the warlocks like they were horribly rude for being between them and goods they wanted to buy it would have been less suspicious, Lydia was pretty sure, but she should probably be used to no one following her lead by now. She was just silly Lydia Bennet, after all.

"Oh, no," Lydia said through a smile verging on gritted teeth. "We are here for your list, after all. It isn't our fault or anything to do with the witches if those fools took some new drug or other, which is surely what happened, as I shall be happy to tell any shopkeep who comments on their antics."

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"All right, let's assume we only have that fifteen minutes," Rey said. "If anyone really wants to stop there, I'd say now's your chance, otherwise we should just get what we came for and we'll worry about what it looks like if it comes up, and hopefully we don't have to find out if mind tricks work on warlocks."

She wasn't confident they would, therefore she'd rather not chance it.

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More suspicious? Maybe. But no one would be looking at - or remembering - their faces now.

"Besides, like those boys don't know what drugs feel like," Pam told Adrian, with an idle shrug. "Let's go say hi, instead of conspicuously huddling together in the open market."

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True! But Adrian really didn't want to see his family facing retaliation from Gilgamesh himself for drugging this group of warlocks, either. That would be...bad. An unsettling but dazzling array of the different kinds of bad it could be, even!

"Doesn't that just mean they'll know they've been drugged?" Adrian asked, but continued to lead them through. The area where most of the reagents were sold were set up not far from the stage for the slave auctions. No one was selling at the moment - demon auctions were a big deal, held only on weekends and holidays - but the cages beside the stage were full, presenting next weekend’s offerings to a sparse crowd of men in flashy suits very much like the one Adrian had whipped up for himself.

The demons in the cages were very young, so fresh from the Hells that they didn't even have human guises yet. Most of them were baby lust demons, too young to know how to hide their tails. One cage held an entire pack of toad-faced greed demons huddled together like frightened chicks, while another contained a weeping sorrow demon wrapped up like a cocoon inside her dripping wings.

Above the slave auctioneer's stand was another statue. Appropriately for the location, it was a demon. A granite statue of a female just like the queens at Gilgamesh's feet, only this one wasn't kneeling. She was running, fleeing from the king's golden statue with her back turned on the caged demons below, because this was the ninth queen. The one who'd run away from Gilgamesh and left her people to die. The story was right there, engraved beneath the queen's running feet for every demon to read while they waited to be sold. Behold the Coward Queen, it said, who chose her life over yours.

Adrian had to force himself to turn away. His interest in the slave pens wouldn't give up the game, but his expression likely would. "Mineral reagent sellers over here," he said, gesturing. "Plants are two rows further back."

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Lydia wasn't looking at any of that, since if she was a regular shopper here she wouldn't be all that interested and she didn't have time to start a slave revolt tonight besides. "I suppose we shall address the minerals," she said, managing to make 'minerals' sound like the most boring thing on the planet, because they were. She scanned the list one more time and headed for the first person with boring rocks and rock derivatives to sell her.

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Rey was paying attention, thanks to watching for threats, empathy powers she unfortunately didn't want to switch off while watching for threats, and just never having seen anything like this before.

Unsurprisingly, she didn't love it.

And since she was probably no help with either minerals or plants, she did give Adrian one of those 'you okay?' eyebrow raises.

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"Drugged by whom?" Pam asked Adrian. "I doubt your relatives fed or watered them. Besides, the lamia has a habit of making people feel quite... connected... to everything else..."

She looked down at the list in her hands. A flick of her eyes, up at the slave pens.

"Though if you're really worried, I can always make sure it's more permanent."

She would not have a problem with that, but she knew Adrian would.

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"Let's keep the fatalities to a minimum," Adrian said immediately. "You know, what with being in enemy territory and everything." He pointed up to the chain. "That leads directly to Heaven, and Gilgamesh can have legions of soldiers here in seconds."

He gave Rey a small smile. 'Okay' was kind of a stretch, but...even as stressed as he was, this was better than being by himself.

"Let's see what Lydia's got?" Already the vendor was looking nervous.

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