Once the Sorcerer’s Hand was done smoking, the hand needed to be left to rest until it stiffened to a stone-like hardness. Krahe took this opportunity to take a break, moving to the bedroom on the upper floor, as it had the nicest sunlight at this time of day and overlooked a nothing-street without any good sightlines to speak of. She sketched up a few protective talismans, pasted them around, watered the plants, and spent some time rolling cigarettes to refill her stock. With this finished, a freshly-rolled cigarette between her lips, she brought out the Nu-Vasara and took to cleaning it. It felt a bit more like brushing an animal’s teeth than cleaning a gun.

  “I wonder. Can you shoot a gun?” she asked Barzai. After all, he could now pull objects out of her Kenoma Pocket if she willed him to do so; actually using that in combat only made sense. A moment later, she amended that thought: “Can you shoot a gun competently?”

  The gargoyle tilted back his head to stare at her with one eye as he seemed so fond of doing. The halves of his beak pulled back to reveal his teeth, and he opened his mouth, and the greasy voice of a chainsmoking old man spilled out.

  “I see it I hit it, I’m like a nympho chimp hopped up on gas station dick pills and mail-order phenazepam. I was out there putting lead in heads with a strip of leather before y’all even became a type-1 civilization, I’m really in this shit. Make Scanners look like a joke the way I reach out and touch a motherfucker, call me Zeorymer.”

  He pointed towards the ceiling, where the desiccated husks of insects littered a spider’s web. With a strobing staccato of his eyes, several bug corpses vanished in a rapid succession of tiny flares.

  “Alright,” she said, taking the Nu-Vasara in hand. “You may use it. As for kenoma storage, you may take out and put in things you would reasonably need. That means ammo, lockpicks, et cetera. Anything else, ask first. We’re working with limited capacity here.”

  With that, she tossed the gun at Barzai, and he caught it. Krahe had been thinking of the best way to use it ever since Favonia had given it to her, and this was the most logical conclusion. She felt that she didn’t have the mental and sensory bandwidth to effectively use two identical guns, let alone two guns with distinct characteristics and ammunition types, plus Thaumaturgy, Theurgy, Afterburner, Astro-Skimming and Diving, the Forming Toroid, the Crimson Star Ring… Et cetera et cetera. All of the tools in her arsenal were something to keep in mind, each occupying variable degrees of focus at a time, and an extra gun to deal with on a moment-to-moment basis would take up too much mental bandwidth. Theurgy…

  “Oh, right. And I’ll occasionally shoot you from now on. When I want to cast the Wandrei Faust or Schwarzfaust through you, I mean. So if I aim at you with that intent, don’t dodge.”

  Krahe packed away the gun cleaning tools, newly-rolled cigarettes, writing implements, in short everything she had used in the last not-quite-an-hour, and, as she did this, she closely observed Barzai acquainting himself with the gun as one might a chimp who had just been handed a blister pack of gas station dick pills and a baggie of phenazepam powder. Somewhat surprisingly, Barzai had better gun discipline than some self-professed experts that she had had the displeasure of working with; he racked the slide a few times, pulled out the magazine to reload the ejected shells, and then shoved the gun into his gaped-open beak, swallowing it. She considered whether he had learned proper gun handling from observing her during their time together, but didn’t give it much thought beyond that. She was just glad this choice wouldn’t bite her in the immediate future. With the Sorcerer’s Hand as stiff as if it had just been cut from a statue, she inspected it wrist to fingertip, articulating its digits, or at least trying to. She set it aside so as not to damage it, and stretched in her seat.

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  With her concentration broken, she realized she was terribly thirsty. She hadn’t drank anything at all since the bitter decoction. In the attempt to clear her throat, the sensation of phlegm in her throat made itself known, and, in the process of trying to cough it up, she realized this would be best done in the bathroom.

  Her lungs, being a Dead Man’s Root model graft, wouldn’t suffer any long term damage from smoking, even smoking far heavier than her own.

  How it achieved this was the ability to clean itself, either when the user triggered that function or when it was truly unavoidable.

  That meant hacking up tarry phlegm every once in a while as the lungs expelled their lining alongside the toxins that couldn’t be filtered out and metabolized.

  It was a somewhat disgusting silver lining that, on the way out, this phlegm tasted exactly like the smoke of her cigarettes. She didn’t catch even a whiff of the taste of the Seven-sided Spire Cigar. Besides the fact she hadn’t expected it, it didn’t feel bad. Halfway through she figured out how to make the process work through blowing her nose, and decided it would be easier to just spit it all up instead.

  She almost opened the tap to rinse out her mouth, but a thought hit her — couldn’t this be traced back to her? So, she held out her hand and incinerated the blackish-blue jiggling mass until only ashes remained, and only then rinsed her mouth. Still, she was thirsty, and Sorayah’s tapwater tasted bad. Not wanting to go looking for a store in this area, she simply went to Sorayah’s kitchen and made some tea. It was either barley tea or mushroom tea, so barley tea it was. She grimaced when the bitterness hit her. Barzai, having followed her, opened the fridge, which Krahe herself had not dared to do after how long it had been left unattended. Grumbling about mushrooms, he walked to the kitchen’s other door and opened the pantry. A bit of wing-flapping later, and he walked out with a hunk of cured, purplish meat.

  Krahe met his eyes, unconsciously taking another sip of the barley tea, and realized that it was one of those drinks. The sort you would never recommend to someone else, because it’s disgusting, but you keep drinking it, even though it’s disgusting.

  The eidolon stared up at her, and she stared down at him. This went on for some time. She took another sip. Disgusting.

  “You have thumbs. Cook it yourself,” she said. She was fairly sure that it would be fine to eat as it was, but she wouldn’t tell him that. As she made her way to the basement, Barzai fumbled around with the meat and began searching with cooking implements. Even as she prepared the Sorcerer’s Hand for its first use, she passively watched through the eidolon’s eyes, as she always did. Ten minutes of rustling and pan-rattling later, finally there came the sear of meat against oil. Several more minutes of this sound followed, intermittently broken up by the sound of chopsticks on metal and the utterances of various profanities and slurs, half in Barzai’s own croaking and half in a collage of other voices. Krahe was a bit taken aback; not by the slurring, but by the fact she learned a few new ones. She’d thought better of her own vocabulary.

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