All towers, Sonora defied the sun and stretched its fingers to the sky as if trying to stab it, and it inched closer the nearest one got to the core. It shone with lights – many of them white and yellow, but there were reds and greens and oranges and sometimes purples and blues – that felt cold. It was not the wild, biting and clawing cold of a blizzard so much as an indifferent cold, or a greedy cold that sought to suck the warmth out of you. Although it was said that lightning made it possible – the humes there called it electricity – Grudge had seen lightning before, and knew it to be a searing thing, wrathful and violent, far hotter than fire though not as warm, and there was a difference between hot and warm.

It was not often that they walked alone and unnoticed while in a crowd. Humes there were much too tall to notice the little creature with the knife and the lantern passing through, and Grudge was quick enough to get their tail out of people's feet. Only later would they conclude that, rather than height, humes there did not tend to look down where they walked: if their eyes were not pointing at the way ahead, they were generally looking up. The third most common position for them to be, Grudge noticed, was ‘closed.’

And then there was the stone on which they trod: jet-black, but under the light of the lampposts you could see that there were hints of dark grey and dark blue too, and it was smooth yet granulous, as if the road was made of sand and fine gravel glued together with treacle.

Grudge had been walking those streets each day for hours at a time for the last eleven days, but there were still areas that that had eluded them not due to the city being labyrinthine (it was not) so much as the fact that it was, simply put, vast, vaster than any place they had ever visited before. Full of the most unusual of facilities, too: at one point they found a large place from which they heard bursting sounds (series of them) not unlike those of cannon shots but more piercing and high-pitched. It was the kind of noise that stabbed at your ears, rather than shake your whole being. When Grudge entered the building – the door was not locked – all they saw was a lone man firing what they recognised as a very small cannon at a target that they could not see, but knew to be still, for that person did not seem to move either during the process. But that man was not the person they were looking for, and so they were gone.

It did not take them very long to find a place that was familiar to them in function, if not in name and shape. Grudge did not normally venture into inns and taverns even in their world, but they knew what they were – they had seen them before, even if the ones in Sonora were called all manners of things, such as restaurant, diner, trattoria and bistrot, and the one that stood in front of them in particular looked less like a house and more like a box with windows, but the substance was there. For no reason in particular, they stepped in.

An aproned hume woman greeted them – she assumed their name was ‘honey’ – and then carefully looked at them up and down, her eyes lingering on the knife and the lantern before processing the rest.
“Well, I'll be damned,” she said in the end. She then glanced at the general direction of the tables. “Look, honey, I know who you are because somebody has told me about you. That somebody works for me but she has been calling in sick for the last few days, so that's some tough luck for me.”
Suddenly there was a glint in Grudge's eyes, but the woman quickly noticed it and resumed talking before they could start doing so themselves.
“I'm short on staff tonight, and I know you know how to cook because she told me that also, so follow me into the kitchen and help me a bit and then I will help you too later. Come on.”

Grudge found themselves complying without raising so much as a comment – protests were uncharted territory for them, at least when it came to being the protesting side: as the protested party they had, in fact, experience that most people would define as ‘ample.’
It was true that they knew how to cook. They did not know many dishes, and they lacked the ability or the reason to invent others of their own, but Yunyuq and Mikkel did teach them about the process. Cooking was, depending on which one of them you asked, an act of love or the power of transformation at work. As far as they were concerned, most cooking really involved juggling small quantities of fire, water, plants, and dead things.

A couple of hours later, snow began to fall. Grudge watched as some of the snowflakes drifted down to the window and died as they sliced some potatoes. Slicing had always been by far the most curious part of the cooking process for them: the reason was that it fundamentally consisted of trying to stab things wrong, on purpose. It felt extremely unnatural.

“Hey! I've got an order for a spike and a marriage of cackleberries on an oval for table fourteen. Take care of it, will you?”
“Yes.”

Grudge brought the plate of hash browns with eggs on top to the counter – something that took them considerable effort – and left it there until they noticed that there was noone that would come and bring it to the table. So they slid the starch-stained knife into their robe, went back to the counter, reached for the plate with some more difficulty, and walked to the table themselves.
“Your spike and marriage of cackleberries on an oval is ready,” they said flatly. The customer appeared to be a silver-haired, pale-skinned hume. His eyes were golden, not unlike Grudge's own. Grudge recognised them. “You are the man who carries the tiny cannon. I saw you earlier, elsewhere, before I came here. Truly this city is wonderful. It provokes a lot of wonder.”

Grudge was already turning to head back to the kitchen when the customer made an additional comment on the rarity of their kind. In a rare moment of perspicacity whenever it came to social affairs, they realised without any further prompting that the man wanted a conversation, however short that was going to be. And so they stopped, albeit reluctantly, for there were other things to be cooked that night, and more customers to be served. Still, if they didn't stop, that customer would have been left unsatisfied, which was, to their understanding, equally problematic.

It was one of the things that confused Grudge the most, wishes. There was always a contradiction somewhere along the line whenever they came from more than one person. A conflict of interests, as they heard people call it, though they were not quite sure that was the right expression in that situation. Whatever its name, it was why Grudge did not like to interact with more than one person at once. A straight path was guaranteed to turn into one full of forks if there were too many to point the way.

“I do not know of others in this city. Others that look like I do,” they stated matter-of-factly. If there were Tonberries in Sonora, Grudge did not see them. If there were Tonberries in Sonora, Grudge did not care, for they were not created to seek their company, and therefore they did not feel the need to. “She who owns this establishment asked me to replace one of her workers for tonight. So I did. Where the Tonberries are more likely to work, I do not know. I can only suppose it is somewhere where the counters are designed with our heights kept into account. Are there any other inquiries you want answered before I return to the kitchen? The owner asked that I burn two slabs of meat, take them through the garden, and then pin a rose on each on them. However, I must ask that you wait for the answer, for staying here for too long might bring me at an impasse – I believe that is what you call them.”

Humans, though this applied to most creatures that could pass for humans, had the puzzling habit of making assumptions of gregariousness about any creature they talked to, as if looking like a Tonberry or even being one meant that they would be drawn to others who looked like them. Grudge found it interesting that this kind of behaviour was rather more typical of those who made such assumptions to begin with. Humans stayed with humans. Werewolves stayed with werewolves. Goblins stayed with goblins. Dwarves, for the most part, stayed with dwarves. However, they were not, strictly speaking, a ‘real’ Tonberry, and since they were the only ‘fake’ Tonberry that they knew about, there was no one for them to seek. Nobody who would be ‘natural’ for Grudge to seek, anyway.

“I see,” they said diplomatically. “I did not know of them.”
With that, Grudge disappeared behind the counter and returned to the kitchen. It seemed to them that only the golden-eyed man truly paid heed to their presence; the other guests appeared to be too tired, intoxicated, or simply distracted to do so. Or maybe they did notice them, and they simply ignored them.

It was not until nearly two hours later that the diner started to empty, for even the creatures who must have been most attached to the night had decided to go home or, at the very least, go elsewhere. Outside, Grudge could hear angry sounds – not quite screams, not quite music – from those odd horseless metal carriages the name of which still eluded them. Snow was accumulating on the streets at a fairly fast pace, which apparently precluded them movement.

They looked up at the diner's owner, who was cleaning the counter with a rag. Not one customer had entered that place over the past twenty minutes, meaning that Grudge had very little to do in the kitchen. So they did left it, and walked to the table where the golden-eyed man sat. He was still there.

“You said you wanted to ask me more questions,” they said. “Yet I must ask you first: what is the cause of your interest, beside the fact that, to your eyes, I am a Tonberry who walks among humans? Indeed, I should be no stranger than you in that respect. Of the many humans that I have seen here, none have golden eyes. Your eyes are closer in colour to my own. This is very curious. I do not think I know of any creatures that resemble you. What are you?”

Garleans were not a people from their world, and had never been. Grudge knew that much. And there were none – Grudge knew that also, for they were the revenge of all things that breathed and didn't made tangible and thus was born aware of their collective existence – that sported amber-coloured eyes and a third right in the middle of their foreheads. Looking more closely, they noticed that, unlike the others, it was not the colour of amber, but rather looked like a perfectly round, silver-white pearl. At first, they believed it to be an ornament.

“I see,” they said simply while tilting their head. “Yet, I do not understand your apology. I did not ask for your nature to be mysterious; moreover, you answered my question.” Mundanity did not need a justification, and neither did mystery itself – all that one could be in its face was curious. At least, Grudge added to themselves, that is how they were made to face both the mundane and the mysterious, for they were made of both and the World was made of both and everything was made of both, even if it was not of the World. Nevertheless, travelling with creatures at the edge of the mundane or well past it taught them that theirs was far from a universal approach. But for their approach not to be universal did not, in the grand scheme of things, matter.

Hearing that they were not supposed to exist gave them pause until the man decided to elaborate, which was not a very long time. “From the World that gave life to me, Tonberries came to be without the intervention of humans, not unlike dwarves, and goblins, and...” Grudge caught themselves just before they could say "dogs", which would have actually been quite incorrect. They eventually opted for: “...wolves. You showed surprise at me working here before showing surprise at my very existence, and you mentioned a colony of Tonberries living underneath this city. Yet, only now do you mention this. Have you not tried to talk to the Tonberries you have met before?”

Moreover, the man himself limited the scope of his statement to the Tonberries of his world, whatever that world might be, and Zephon was a crossroads of people from different worlds and a different world itself. Why, then, question the existence of Tonberries of worlds other than his own? Yet, there was one thing that Grudge had yet to do, which was answering his question, and clarify a most common misunderstanding.

“As for me, I was created by the Water Crystal. Or the Water Crystal of my World, should there be others elsewhere. You are correct: I should not exist, for I have been separated by the very World that sustained my existence. Yet, here I am, nevertheless. One could argue that this makes me not a Tonberry. Some have, in fact. I cannot say that this is incorrect, nor can I say that this is correct. I do not care either way.”