| The Wit and Wisdom of Burne
This Mop Mop Bow fellow was the owner and proprietor of "The Kingdom of Peaceable Teas", and the kidnapping attempt had occurred upon his very doorstep. He seemed properly appalled by the situation, and offered to tend to the lady's injuries.
Now, I have some small skill with alchemically based healing treatments, but I will readily confess that this is not my area of expertise. I accepted his offer with gratitude, and allowed him to use his teas to treat the unfortunate lady.
(I've found myself wondering, in my idle moments, whether Mop Mop Bow is actually a practitioner of some debased tea-focused form of foreign alchemy. It scarcely seems credible, let alone practical, but would not be the strangest thing that I've encountered in my adventures.)
When she did not, as I had half-expected, expire some moments after consuming said tea, I cheerfully accepted a cup for myself. One can never be too careful, after all.
The taste of the stuff, however, was not to my liking. Weak, bodiless stuff -- not entirely unlike the culture that produced it, eh? A man's drink should be the color and consistency of tar, and potent enough to wake the very dead!
I MAKE HIS COFFEE. I DO BAD THINGS TO IT. IN IT, REALLY.
As the woman began to stir, Mop Mop Bow explained, in an apologetic sort of manner, that the neighborhood had gone to hell since "King Daikon" and his friend, a priest of Kruetzel, had vanished a few weeks earlier. "Gone to hell?" I thought to myself, "This slum? Well, not so very far to fall, then...."
HAVE YOU SEE THE WAY THAT HE LIVES? THE DAMNED ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY BETTER HOUSEKEEPERS THAN BURNE.
The woman, who gave her name as Delphine, had awoken by this point, and was horror-struck when she heard that this young priest had vanished. She promptly fainted, again. All too typical of the weaker sex.
It was then that the archer appeared from out of the shadows, in a needlessly dramatic fashion. Rakhir had the foolish audacity to challenge me over the matter of some trifles I had recovered from the corpus of one of the thugs I had so heroically slain. I considered, for a moment, extracting his very soul from his body and incinerating it before his horror-filled eyes, but concluded that this would have been rude, and unworthy behavior for a gentleman like myself.
RAKHIR THREATENED HIM. WITH ARROWS. IT WAS AT THAT MOMENT THAT I DECIDED THAT I RATHER LIKED RAKHIR.
Disinclined to resort to such drastic measures, I allowed him to keep the trinkets. None of them looked all that interesting in any case. A knife, I believe that one was, and the other was an alchemically treated bag of some sort, probably intended to hold the Tenor's heart.
Nothing of any real interest, in other words.
AND THOSE GRAPES WERE PROBABLY SOUR, ANYWAY.
And then, Erebus help us, the man in the dress opened his mouth.... | 
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