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-Stone
“Dassa mighy big pile ah coin ya got dere,” a deep, resonant voice vibrated behind Dante as a massive hand wrapped itself around his shoulder. It would have been huge even on the biggest of men and looked almost comically oversized resting on the shoulder, and spilling out over the arm and torso, of the short Keeper. “Be a damnshame sommun wereta come long an’ take et fruh ya.”
He spoke Lowerspeak, the dialect that had developed in Fretraci and ultimately spread out to be the prefered language of everyplace outside of The Citadel and The Glowkeep, and he spoke it with the stilted fluidity of a near-native who hadn’t actually been born to it. Sem’s brain, which despite the years he’d spent out here still thought in Highspeak, translated for him “That’s a mighty big pile of coin you got there. It’d be a damn shame if someone were to come along and take it from you.”
The man was as wide as he was tall and as Sem followed the broad body upwards he immediately recognized the telltale signs of a Surfaceman.
His upper body was covered in a kind of jumpsuit made of thick, pale hides that would have been equally good at shielding the body from cold winds as from driving sun. It draped in strange ways with odd cuts that made it hard to tell if the outfit was made of multiple pieces or was simply one singular unit that he crawled into every day.
“Nah dah ya Citty-del boys really nee’ et, do ya naw?” he continued. “Y'all got plenny go-roun, donya naw?”
“Not that you citadel boys really need it, do you? You all got plenty to go around, don’t you now?” Sem’s brain translated in real-time with little gap.
His hands after the end of his sleeves and his face at the top of the tall turtleneck of the “jacket” were the only uncovered parts of his actual body and as Sem looked at the man he couldn't help but notice the strange paleness of the man’s skin. It wasn't simply pale like the undernourished flesh of some lifelong Lowers-dweller who’d never seen light that hadn't radiated from a mushroom; it was unnaturally uncolored as if he lacked pigment at all.
“Nah tha ya tena sen et ‘roun naw, doyanaw?” - “Not that you tend to send it around, do you now?” - he finished.
Sem looked upwards into his face and saw a sinister sideways smile spread across it and as he looked up even further he found strange, pale blue eyes covered in a haze of bloodshot red that almost made them seem purple with black both flecked throughout and bordering the iris giving the entire thing a kind of eclipsical effect.
The man’s head was shaved completely bald but even without the yellowish hair that Sem knew should be there he could clearly see the man was an albino. It wasn’t an uncommon trait either above or below, though still rare enough to stand out.
As he looked further, he expected to see the dull, hungry stupidity that was so common among Surfacemen but was surprised to find a kind of sharp, cunning intellect. This wasn't a hungry wolf snapping at everything that wandered past, this was a tranquil hawk watching and waiting for the ideal prey, and it would seem that he had chosen them as the prey dejour.
He supposed he couldn’t blame the man. Two Citadelians and a Glowgirl certainly wouldn’t seem like much of a threat to anyone who didn’t know the three of them personally, or rather to anyone who didn’t know the man whose shoulder that huge hand was currently casually resting on. Compared to The Commander the other two were little more than a minor nuisance, and they could both clearly see The Commander rising to the surface of those steely eyes as Dante faded to the background.
“Ya sho ya wan do dis naw, suh?” the short man asked slowly in perfect Lowerspeak as he calmly set his glass down onto the wooden table. “Et may naw go d’way ya tink it’will.”
“You sure you want to do this, son? It might not go the way you think it will,” the threat was clear and the tall man recognized it clearly as his mouth twitched slightly on the other side as if he were holding back a laugh.
The taller man chuckled to himself as he replied “I thin I be okay. Ya talk da tongue mighty fine, buh thass jussabou all ya City-del boys do naw, ainit?”
“I think I’ll be okay, you talk the language mighty fine, but that’s just about all you Citadel boys do now, isn’t it?”
“Talk,” he finished with a quick tightening of his grip on the smaller man’s shoulder that made his coat wrinkle and deform against the pressure.
Sem could feel the tightening in the room, the tenseness of the air and the extra pressure of all the eyes that had turned their way. Some looked on sadly as if what was about to come was nothing but a foregone conclusion, others smiled excitedly as they waited to see what happened like children at their first play. Mayhu was watching casually, her hand holding up her face as the other one absently swirled the remaining milk in her cup to pick up as much of the chocolate as possible into the last few swigs.
Dante sighed as he gazed into his glass for a moment, his eyes seeming to grow darker as if the irises themselves were taking in the shadows that had formed in the room while the sun above had shifted away into the late afternoon. “Yaw choice, yaw choice suw. Cannit say I dinn warn ya, naw” he concluded before he spun around, pushing his chair out as he stood so that it bashed into the man’s legs with an explosion of splinters and nails. The force was incredible and the sound as wood collided with muscle and the bone underneath was even moreso.
The Commander swung around a pivoting step and landed one foot deep into the tall man’s shin, pushing down against its backside to force the man’s knees to buckle as he stated calmly “Naw less geh one ting straigh righ off da bah,” his accent deepening into the mumbled drawl of the lowest of Lowers dwellers right on the very edge of The Glowgrotto.
“I ai no FUCKIN’ Ciy-del boh,” he continued as he landed a swift punch hard enough to the man’s now much lower face to instantly break bone as a spray of blood gushed out of the man’s nose.
The tall man tumbled onto his back from the force of the punch, his head hitting the wooden floor with a kind of “tunk” like a bocce ball being dropped onto a plank. In a singularly fluid maneuver, The Commander reached under his camel-colored overcoat, produced a small metal cylinder with a bar across its top, and flicked it off to the side to reveal a long, shining sword.
Sem had never seen it before, though he had heard stories about it, while Mayhu had seen it enough times to know exactly what it could do. It was an Old World extendable sword originally made to be used in some sort of exercise routine designed in the image of a combat technique in the days between hand-to-hand combat losing and eventually regaining its relevance to the world, but its CobTech alterations were evident across its pinched length that had been mashed and sharpened into a useable blade.
The Commander brought it down to rest just under the tall man’s chin as he finished “Imma muthahfukeh GLOHKEEPAH an’ I’h fukeh cuh da shi’ ougha ya, ya tryta taie whass mih, ya fukeh heah me naw, souw?!” while giving the blade just the slightest bit of pressure so it poked a long trickle of blood that ran down the man’s neck.
The man seemed as much amused by this turn of events as he was surprised, as if he was half hoping for a result like this.
“Mah bah, mah bah,” he said quickly in the traditional apology of The Lowers as he held up his hands and shook them slightly. “Dinna meah naw disrespect naw,” he added to complete the tradition. It was usually only added on when talking to an elder or someone who had earned respect in blood and deed in Sem’s experience, a kind of reverential nod to status.
“Aih den,” The Commander stated as he pulled back the sword and nodded towards an empty seat at a table with two much smaller Surfacemen - one female with long, red hair and one male with a mass of straight, dark hair jutting at strange, greasy angles from his scalp - seated at it. “Gah oh back'a ya friens naw.”
The tall man stood up and returned to his seat, fast enough to make it clear he was going but slow enough to keep from conveying fear, and by the time the shorter man had swung around, pushed the blade against the top of the table to force it back into its hilt, grabbed another chair from a nearby table, and plopped himself in it, The Commander had left and Dante was clearly looking back at the two of them.
He smiled as he leaned his arms against the top of the chair that he was sitting backwards in, the hilt of his sword still held in his right hand as he reached out for the glass of whisky with his left and gave it a quick sip.
“Now, where were we?” he asked cheerily with a bright, friendly smile.
