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It wasn’t easy, being a pirate.

It was a good life, surely, and it was the only one he’d ever choose for himself other than, perhaps, a Warrior of Light when the situation called for it. He was granted the freedom of the seas, the freedom of escape, the freedom to leave distant lands behind as well as all the laws that governed them. He was a pirate by choice if not by blood, but that didn’t mean it didn’t come with its own set of unavoidable problems.

For one, it meant making enemies. It meant making a lot of them.

After the horrors that he and his crew had witnessed with the Lich at Dusk Grotto, he’d granted them a week of shore leave in the city of Torensten, hoping that a few nights of ale and women might be enough to get their heads back on straight. Meanwhile, Faris found himself back on dry land, back in a city with which he had a rather complicated history, and back among the regular folks who didn’t want much for adventure.

He landed at the harbor, rebuilt after he’d seen them washed away and flooded by the foul beast Kraken. He walked through streets that had never been the same since he’d seen them smashed by the dreaded fiend Chaos. He’d been given a cape after that to mark him a hero of the people, but he kept that safely stored away, choosing instead to wear only his usual blue tunic and green scarf. He’d been around long enough to be recognized if he ran into a foul bit of luck, but most knew him only for the power of the crystal and the crimson armor he wore as a dragoon.

Or so he thought.

He noticed them in the rougher side of the harbor district, scowling at him over their mugs of ale and bottles of liquor. Those looks were dark enough to set his hair on end, and so his instincts told him to pay his tab and get moving, but then he saw them pay their own and follow. They were a rough sort, all of them men about twice the size of him, scarred by their share of battles with daggers and swords strapped to them, glinting menacingly in the hazy sunlight. Faris kept his eye on them as he moved from the harbor to the upper districts, and noticed too that most of them had the same tattoo on their upper right arms. It was a gang then or maybe a band of rival pirates or smugglers that he’d wrong somehow.

Faris could have taken them. He could have called upon the power of the crystal and struck them all down the second they thought they had him at an ambush, but that would be bringing the city more chaos and violence than it really needed. So instead, he kept walking. He hoped that the order of the upper districts would deter his stalkers, but it only made their advances more obvious. The thought of running made him curse himself as a coward, but really, it was more an act of mercy. So as soon as he turned a corner sharp enough that he thought their eyes would lose him, he ducked inside the first open shop he could find and started forward confidently as though he’d meant to be there all along.

But…where was he exactly?

The place smelled of strange spices with a kind of dark, nutty undertone that he’d never smelled before in his life. It looked like a restaurant of sorts, and all of the people around him were seated drinking some sort of darkish brown drink, eating pastries and bread off of little plates. Faris looked up at the board mounted on the wall which seemed to be a menu of sorts, but there was a little too much lettering for him to make out what for, and he certainly didn’t recognize any of the words written on it.

For not the first time, Faris felt completely and utterly out of his depth. He wondered if a life in the castle of Tycoon would have better prepared him for a place like this.

Faris took his place in line and made sure to listen well to the person in front of him so that he could repeat their order without making a fool of himself trying to read off the words on the board. He didn’t recognize the word spoken aloud either, and when the server read out the price…

They expected him to pay how much gil for a single drink? Faris wondered what it must have been spiked with to deserve a price like that.

With his order done, the man in front of him stepped to the side, and Faris hesitantly took his place. He wondered what on all the worlds a “latte” was as he said it, and he hoped he said it right. He was given the same price and had to keep from grumbling as he reached for his coin purse. He couldn’t help but notice that he looked out of place here with his uncombed, wind-swept hair and simple leather armaments made less for fashion and more for withstanding the tossing and turning of the sea. He stepped aside just like the man before him had, and when his name was called, he took his drink and found somewhere to sit with it at a table that was mostly empty.

The drink was hot. Its heat permeated the mug he’d been handed and warmed his hands like mulled wine. It was a lighter brown than the other drinks he’d seen in this place and had a strange kind of foam on top that he couldn’t identify. He knew better than to try gulping down a drink as hot as this and so he leaned back in his chair and took note of his surroundings instead.

The table he was at wasn’t entirely unoccupied. There was another man there, clad in black leather accented by white fur along the coat collar. It seemed awfully hot for a climate like this, but Faris wasn’t about to tell him so. He’d left two seats between them for the sake of politeness. ’You keep to your business and I’ll keep mine,’ it seemed to say, and he hoped it got the point across. In truth, he’d chosen this seat for its view of the door and windows. He was mostly obscured by the curtains on said windows, but if his followers got wind of his location, he’d know it in a heartbeat.

Faris kept the door in the corner of his eye as he looked down at his drink, frowning again in confusion. The harbor district really was a different world from the more well-to-do parts of the city. No matter the kingdom, no matter the city, that was something that never changed.

He hoped his crew was having a better time of it than he was. Once his drink had cooled, Faris sipped it tentatively, wincing at the bitter taste. Liquor he could take, but this? Well, he knew well enough that a man could treasure the taste of anything if he took to it often enough, but he wasn’t sure what there was to take to. Liquor could get him drunk. Why were there so many people drinking this bitter, nutty, foaming milk thing?

Faris glanced over at the leather-clad man at his table to see what he had. The man looked…pale. Like he’d seen a ghost. And then his eyes slammed open and his mug tipped over and the whole dark mess spilled over the table as the man clutched at a scar on his face, his other hand at his shuddering chest. Faris was on his feet in an instant as was one of the servers who the man waved away despite the mess. Faris rushed to his side, forgetting his pursuers in his concern.

”Are you alright, lad?” He reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, thought better of it, and then looked around until he found a stack of paper napkins not too far away and grabbed a fistful of them, bringing them back to soak up the mess of his drink. ”Let me help clean this up. You look in an awful state.” He glanced at the man again. He’d seen enough pain in his life to know the tell-tale signs of a bad memory or was the man having some sort of episode? Was he sick? Faris wondered if his abysmal powers as a white mage would be enough to save a man from a heart attack. Probably not.

He wished for what must have been the thousandth time that Lenna was here beside him.

The napkins didn’t do much but swish the spill around, getting soggy and worn down in the process. Faris took a handful of the dripping things to a trash can, grabbed some more and then went back to the task. ”I take it you didn’t much like the drink,” Faris said with a dry smirk as he glanced at the man beside him. He was young, barely older than a child it seemed, but that scar…

”What brings you to a place like this alone?” he asked just to get the man talking. Talking was the second best distraction from whatever might plague the mind, he’d found. The first being a bottle of whiskey.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have one of those tucked in his belt so a bit of conversation would have to do. ”You don’t exactly look dressed for the weather.”

[attr=class,ooc-notes]Poor Squall. First his trauma and now talking to a stranger.