“So are you, what, some kind of chimera? Some magician woke up one day and thought, ‘what if we had hatchers, but they were made from cats instead of dra—’”

The man speaking, stout and half-elven, was smacked abruptly in the knee by his halfling associate. They were both wearing matching expensive suits in an odd shade of gray. “Never mind that,” the halfling hissed, then turned a broad smile in Ishtal’s direction. It was the first time anyone had smiled at her since she left home, but it felt, more than anything else, like someone streaking oven grease across her fur. “Now, you were saying you saw our posting and were interested in the position?”

Ishtal made herself think of hot meals and a soft bed for the night, and of returning home in triumph. She’d already had to wait a long time to speak with these two, as other interested people came in and out of this office with its shiny wood paneling, and she didn’t want to have wasted her time. “Yes,” she said with an effort. “The notice said that the job involved selling shares in merchant voyages from door to door? I haven’t done that kind of work before, but I’m sure I could learn.”

If anything, her interviewers looked almost pleased when she mentioned her lack of experience. “Don’t you worry about that,” the half-elf assured. “We’ll take care of all your training, and once the learning period is over you’ll have the opportunity to earn quite a competitive living. It’s all in how many shares you’re able to sell; you receive a commission once you pass a certain threshold.”

“What is the threshold? And how long would I be learning for? I’m a little short on funds at the moment, and…I don’t have a place to stay yet.” It clawed at her pride to admit such a thing, but there was no point in getting the job if it would leave her sleeping in alleys for months.

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” the halfling cut in. “If you’re in difficult circumstances, our firm can of course provide you with an advance until you’re earning enough to support yourself. You would have to pay it back, obviously, but that shouldn’t be any trouble. Why, one of our salespeople just finished paying back the last of her advance, only took her two years. She’s one of our best, you know, hundreds of sales every month.”

Hundreds…Ishtal swallowed hard, trying to imagine trying to persuade that many people to buy anything from her, let alone something you couldn’t even see. She liked people, or at least her own kind of people, well enough when they liked her, but that seemed like a bit much. 

Something was twitching in the back of her mind, something the guardian reports warned about when they spoke of the dangers of outsiders. They’d mentioned people like this, who tricked both their employees and their customers so that they were the only ones profiting at all.

She stood abruptly from her cushioned chair, taking a couple of steps back. “That all sounds wonderful,” she said in what she hoped was a convincing tone, “but I’d better think it over. I have a lot of places left to try today, you know.”

She fled before they could protest, cursing the wasted hours.

It wasn’t strictly true that she had a lot more places to try still. But anything had to be better than that.

“You’re here about the job, then?”

Ishtal had only barely ducked inside the trinket shop—a small, cramped establishment tucked into a cranny of a shared building down a questionable alley, and yet meticulously clean and tidy inside, with impeccably whitewashed walls—when the gruff voice called out. She glanced around, and a moment later a man emerged from the back, stocky and grizzled and with the straightest posture she’d yet seen on someone passably human. He looked her up and down dismissively. “You’re at least a change of pace from the rest, I’ll give you that.”

“What are you talking about?”

The man huffed. “If you ask me, we’d no need to hire anyone new at all, but that worthless assistant of mine thinks he’s too good to arrange the shop and set up and take down booths on festival days. So what does he do but put up postings all over town for a new job, and now I’ve got to deal with everyone and his brother coming in looking for work. Well, I’ve already hired a couple of big lads, just to keep Sir Useless from whinging, and there’s no need for you around here.”

“Besides,” he added as he turned around, “you’d rob me blind within a month at the latest. I can always tell these things.”

He disappeared into the back room again, and Ishtal stood there shaking with outrage for a moment. Yes, the shop was full of a lot of the kind of things she had a tendency to absentmindedly pocket, but she could work around that. And even if she couldn’t, it wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong in the couple of minutes he’d bothered to talk to her. He didn’t have any idea what kind of person she was.

She turned and stalked out, fists clenched tight in her pockets.

“…a shame that is about your family being that way,” the burly dwarf said, leaning back more comfortably in his chair. “I’ve had to scramble my way up from nothing without much help myself, so I know how it goes.”

That was all very well, but Ishtal wasn’t in much of a mood for him to wander off into a personal anecdote for the third time in this interview. She’d only come inquiring about this job, manual labor building tenements in the southern part of the city, as a last resort with the day drawing to a close. As her prospective employer had sat here keeping her talking, she had thought she could feel the time draining through her fingers. 

She leaned forward across the dusty wooden table separating them. “Sir,” she cut in, “I don’t mean to be blunt, but I do need to know: can I have the job or not.”

He blinked, then burst into a hearty laugh. “What? Of course not,” he chuckled, gesturing at her. “I mean, look at you, you’re as lean and spindly as anything; there’s no way you’d be able to put in the work needed. Not to mention that I don’t imagine we’ve any protective equipment that would fit you. It’d be out of the question.”

Something heavy and solid seemed to drop through Ishtal’s chest, crashing through her gut and leaving her hollow. “But…you asked me so many questions…and kept on talking…” No one else she’d spoken to all day, aside from the pair of slimy investors, had bothered with her for more than a few minutes before sending her on her way.

He waved a meaty hand. “Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t have taken up your time, but I can’t resist a good story. And there’s hardly any of your kind come around where a man can see them, let alone have a good chat. And I tend to be quite a talker myself, once I get going.” He stood, stretching mightily. “Sorry to have gotten your hopes up, but I’m sure you understand.”

Ishtal could only summon up the most fractionally polite of jerky nods before standing herself and making her way out of the worksite shed where he’d brought her to talk. 

The shed had no windows, and so it caught her by awful surprise to find that it had grown dark out during her wasted time. The laborers had gone home for the night, and the city was—not exactly quieting, but settling into a lower buzz of noise, a sign that the time for getting business done was largely over.

Somehow, she managed to stride, rather than flee, from the area before finally ducking into an alley. Leaning against the least damp patch of wall available, she pressed both hands over her mouth and let out a yowl of frustration and fear. 

She had nothing, and nowhere to go. She wasn’t even out in open country where she could fend for herself; this was a city, where she couldn’t hunt and there was no safe place to sleep that didn’t have to be paid for. She didn’t even have the comforting thought that perhaps tomorrow would be better: she’d already been all over Lozhapad, talking to more people than she’d bothered to count, and gotten nothing. There might be more places to try tomorrow, but she would only be hungrier and more unkempt then, diminishing her odds of success. 

She was too tired to come up with a plan, or think much at all. The only clear thought she could summon was that she needed to get out of this part of town to a slightly more reputable area, and try to find someplace relatively decent to sleep for a bit. Everything else would have to wait until morning.

Ishtal trudged down the narrow street in what she hoped was a northerly direction. In this poorer area of Lozhapad, the streets weren’t paved, but rather consisted of packed dirt that had turned to mud in some places. It clung to her feet in a uniquely unpleasant way, but she couldn’t muster the energy to be more than slightly annoyed by it.

The streets also seemed to lack a consistent width, sometimes narrowing to something barely wide enough for two pedestrians. Ishtal had just reached one such place when, out of the slightly foggy night, two more people appeared, coming in the opposite direction. She only saw the one at first, a tall, musclebound human in a green cloak with a sword almost as long as he was strapped across his back, and then spotted his companion, who was perhaps half his size. 

It took her a moment to place what kind of People the latter was—his skin was almost goblin-green, but not quite, and while his legs seemed too short for his body, his arms seemed far too long. He was barefoot and shirtless, but wore a formal coat and tall hat for reasons she couldn’t imagine. He appeared to have some kind of pain in his joints, as he shuffled along with the aid of a stick, and his face seemed singularly ugly, with sunken yellow eyes and a pronounced underbite that let a couple of teeth slip out. Perhaps he was simply a goblin, but a terribly disfigured one?

Then she thought no more about it, simply focusing on squeezing past the two of them in the cramped space so she could get on her way.

She would have put the unusual pair out of her mind entirely within another minute, dismissing them as merely one more strange thing on a day filled with more strange things than she’d seen in the rest of her life put together—except that before she’d made it another hundred feet, she was halted in her tracks by a firm grip on the back collar of her tunic.

“That was a pretty good try,” a deep voice said in her ear. “I’m almost impressed. But not quite impressed enough to let you get away with it, so why don’t you come give my boss back his purse, and we can all forget this ever happened?”