- Character Biography
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You stand at attention in the main room of the fire house. Large windows in the doors and walls let in enough ambient light that the need for lanterns is minimal, but the place still has a gloomy feel to it. It's large, but largely empty. Long trestle tables are strewn about with piles of equipment or boxes, and empty armour stands line the western wall. The back of the room narrows into something of a hallway, with multiple doors on either side. The southeastern corner has a pair of windowed offices, not unlike one of the Fogey's outposts. Riding along the southern wall, you spot a staircase leading to the upper floor. And beside the front doors just behind you, two ladders rise up through open hatches.
Before you stands a tall female sable, Acting Captain of the 14th Bully Harbour Volunteer Fire Brigade Eskila Ikamaye. "Standing" is a bit of an overstatement; she clings to her halberd like a deckhand trying not to be swept overboard in a hurricane.
"There's no official uniform," she says, her voice droopy with weariness, as if every word had just rolled out of bed. "But we in the 14th wear orange. Other fire houses have their own rules, but most also wear orange. It's like a warning, I guess. To warn beasts that we're there. Orange helps them see us and come to us when visibility is low."
She shows you the helmet she's holding. A heavy thing of plate, with a pointed snout pocked with holes. Large round nubs with a few smaller holes adorn the top, fit just right for her ears. Inside the snout, a simple cloth is crumpled in place where it would cushion the chin, and dark lenses have been melded behind the slim eye slits.
"The cloth is to be wetted before we go in to stop a fire. Protects you from breathing in smoke and ash. Always carry spare cloths on patrol, don't use the same one twice in a row if you can help it."
She shows you the rest of her armour: Plate gauntlets, more bracers than gloves; Heavy plate boots made to cover the back of the calves and the front of the leg up to the knee; and a simple plate cuirass with a set of small pauldrons over a leather cowl, all dented, scratched, and deformed, with a small hole directly over the heart. All of it has been painted a bright orange, the paint scratched and smeared with ash.
"Armour is what you can get a hold of. We can sometimes make deals with the Stoatorian Guard's armoury to take what they don't want to fix up. I try to save up my pay to get everyone in the 14th a good set. Yeah, somebeast died in this... but fire doesn't shoot crossbows at you. You want to protect your limbs, your head, body... Too much armour can slow you down, but when a falling beam from a roof gets you, chain or brigandine won't help much. Sometimes it's heavy enough to crush the armour, so always be aware of that risk. You want to be able to push doors, kick things. Your body is your battering ram once you're inside."
She unslings the heater shield worn over her back with a heavy belt, and lets you hold it. It's surprisingly heavy, all metal with a thick leather backing. Every part of it is singed. The face bears a makeshift crest of red and yellow flame over four squares of alternating shades of orange.
"Where armour can't protect you, this will. Learn to lift it above your head, and in front of you... as far as you can. To hold as many kits between you and the shield... we have some straw dolls in the back room, to practice with. You can do lots more with a shield... sled down stairs, use the pointy bottom part to break things, keep it clean and its a nice picnic table... Always take care of your shield... It's where the souls go."
You blink at her, head tilted quizzically. There's a subtle change in the sable. She stands a little straighter, but her voice wavers. Her droopy eyes gaze off somewhere further than the walls of the fire house should allow.
"To lose your shield is to lose everything, everyone... so keep it clean and in good repair. For those we have lost. For those we can yet save. Because they're not lost. You keep them with you, forever."
An uncomfortable silence settles in the room. You offer the shield back to her, and she makes a dooking noise as she fondles it for a moment. Her halberd, resting against her shoulder, clatters to the ground, startling everyone.
"Oh, yeah... halberd." She picks it up and gives it a waggle. "This is our other main tool. You got the axe on there for chopping at locks and things. It's long and heavy, for safety. Pointy ends, in case you need pointy ends. But be careful not to hurt anybeast. Chopping, thrusting, um... yeah, you can use it like a staff too, whacking. Whacking's good."
She stares at the halberd with an expression somewhere between blank and confused, and you can't help but get the thought that maybe she doesn't truly know what she's talking about in this particular regard. She finishes adjusting her shield over her back and turns to gesture at the room you're in.
Behind you, the wide-double doors of the fire house lead out onto a short porch at the northwest corner of the building, with only a pawful of stairs leading down to the street itself. You'd noticed grooves in the stairs, the porch itself, and they continue inside, slowly curving eastward to the far back doors. Those back doors open, and another volunteer pushes along a small wagon, the rumble of it filling the large room. The doors swing shut behind her, open and closed, and you realize they're on special hinges that would allow the doors to open both directions.
As the wagon approaches, you can see it's filled with barrels of water. Eskila and the other volunteer - a female wildcat with tortoiseshell fur wearing a simple orange tunic, her mane styled into short curls - begin to fill the gaps between the barrels with various tools and supplies that have been piled on a nearby table.
"Blankets," she says, "are one of the better things for small fires. Wet blankets can kill a fire. We have these hoses, too... We connect them to pumps all over town." She points to a large map on the northern wall. "Every pump and rain barrel is marked there. If you have trouble with maps like I did, you'll learn them on patrol, until it feels like you're walking on the map paper itself. The wagon has first aid kits, some juice rations..."
The hoses, horrific tubes of thick canvas and leather stitched together with the occasional copper band and rivet, are coiled up and hung on the sides of the wagon upon nubby metal hooks. Metal couplings on each end are fitted with a narrow nozzle or left open to be connected to a pump.
Eskila takes one of the blankets and demonstrates clipping it to her armour's pauldrons. "Button clasps on each blanket let us wear them like a cape... You can do it like this, or around your neck like kits do. It's great extra protection for bad fires, but it can get really heavy, so we do training days where we try and run from one end of the Slups to the other with the blankets soaked."
She lifts up one of the rain barrels in the wagon as if it were half its size, spilling some of the water onto herself.
"And practice getting these in and out. We store them outside to get rain, and there's a pump out there as well for dry days. The wagon should always be full and ready to go when the bells ring. And when you hear the bells ring, someone find Oreva..." She gestures to the tortoiseshell wildcat. "And pat your ears three times. She's deaf."
Eskila puts the barrel back in the wagon and stares at her paws for a moment, then slowly makes a few awkward gestures towards the cat. Oreva shrugs, nods, and leaves to pad up the staircase.
"So that's basically it for the gear... We have some in storage for you, we'll try and find something that fits. When you're off duty or just relaxing or anything, you put it on one of the stand there by the wall. Everything needs to be close at paw and ready to go. That's my office there, in the corner. Oreva's office is the other one, with the extra window on the other side. She helps me with the paperwork because... reading..." The sable screws up her face in an annoyed sneer. "But it's not working out very good, because she doesn't know how to talk..."
She scratches behind her ear with a bemused frown.
"Okay. Follow me. So back here, we have some washrooms..." She gestures at the doors to the south side. "There's tubs, but they're mostly used for washing the gear. Upstairs washrooms are nicer for sleeping in the bath. Storage room just beyond there. These rooms on the other side, we don't really use yet. So they're just more storage for now. When we had more beasts on duty, they were like extra offices and private rooms for the Captain and other officers to sleep in. The bunks upstairs are all shared rooms. Eventually."
She pushes the back doors open, leading you out to the garden. Even more barrels are out here, lining the tall, ivy-choked fences. Behind them, you can barely see the roofs of the neighbouring buildings, close enough that only the southern side could afford room for an alleyway. Obviously nothing looms over the northern wall; you know the street was on the other side.
"There was a gate there," she says, pointing to the wall of green. "But we let it grow over so beasts would stop trying to break in and steal things. The doors are all special so the only way to lock them is from the inside with a big piece of wood, but you can lift that up with a good enough lever, but don't. Stealing is wrong. Well, it's okay to do it if you're locked out and need things... Not stealing, I mean, the lever thing. That's okay to do. Anyway, we mostly don't lock anything anymore, since Oreva lives here now... but sometimes, I think when she's feeling nervous about being alone..."
The sable sighs. Apparently the troubles of having a housekeeper who can't hear you knocking was weighing on her just as heavily as the souls of the unlost.
"Yeah, so this is the garden... this spot to the left of the door is good for morning naps, if you like sunlight... Over on this side we have some training dolls... They're mouldy. The ones inside are clean."
You gaze momentarily at the straw dummies lined up against the fire house's red-brick wall. The straw is distinctly green and mossy. Beside them, close to the door, is a large water pump with a piece of short leather hose dangling from it and coiled messily on the ground. Eskila kneels and tidies it up a little.
"Do you like waffles?" she asks. "I think it's time we go upstairs and get some waffles."
TO BE CONTINUED.
- - - Original Waffle Day post for future reference when finishing this up ... - - -
Vacations were supposed to be refreshing. Yet no amount of little umbrellas, beach chairs, or tiny cucumber sandwiches could get Eskila to rest. And then the crew on the ship ride home had been buzzing about the Opera burning down again, and even though it wasn't part of the 14th's jurisdiction, the talk instilled a sense of misplaced urgency that was difficult to shake. After all, it had already been weeks ago.
Perhaps the urgency she felt as she stepped onto the docks was simply hunger. After all, it was Waffle Day.
The walk from the docks to the Slups hadn't been contemplative, for there was little to contemplate about. It was a fair day, the cooling weather brining the air even this deep into the twisting, ramshackle streets in the heart of Bully. Nothing in the general vicinity was on fire, just the usual smoke from beasts cooking breakfasts throughout town. Dreams of syrup-soaked waffles gasping for air in a deep lake of butter swam through her mind, much unlike the waffles.
Eskila stood in front of the 14th fire house and yawned at the board nailed haphazardly across the doorway. She put the fishbowl she was carrying down on the steep, and pried the wood away and opened the door.
It was dusty. No one was cooking a waffle. This made her ears droop. First things first... Commander needed to be put in his tank proper. She headed upstairs, only paying attention to the task at paw: Refreshing the tank water with the pump in the washroom, and watching him swim about in the larger container for a little while.
Tidy time. She grabbed a nearby broom -
She sat up, blinking, confused. She stumbled into the chair in her little corner office - she was already downstairs - and stared at the lump of green fuzz on a plate on top of the papers. She moved it aside and unsealed the first missive.
"Sss...son... con...gra...t...tu... congratulate...shins... Sap... Cap...tain..." She knew this next glyph! "Ikamaye."
Odd. Who was this Captain Ikamaye? Should she be reading their mail? That was a crime, right? Yet the outside of the letter had her other name glyph on it. Maybe there were more clues inside.
"On... y...yoo-urrr... your... p... pro... mot... shin. I am... r...re...sig... nin... singing?" She scratched at her nose and squinted harder at the paper. "Re...sig...ning... fr... from... my... po...sit... shin... as... S... Cap...captain... Oh..."
The morning ticked away, lulled to sleep by the monotonous sable's salient struggles with the written word. In summation:
Everyone had resigned. There had been an incident with some fireworks (da... - heck! She'd missed fireworks! And upon thinking the word "heck", she dropped a gilder into the Cuss Cup, along with an IOU ripped in half for the other half a cuss she'd almost thought) along with some other incidents, such as another sergeant sleeping with the Captain's wife, which had ensued in a brawl in which two privates had gone bankrupt betting on the wrong beast; one getting an eye pecked out for not refilling the Kipper Jar for the Missertross, resulting in the 14th being blacklisted pending an apology delivery of pickled cod and fried potato fingers, which had in turn resulted in no one knowing when they needed to do their jobs...
But they had made her a sandwich for her return, to celebrate her becoming the new Captain. Well-earned, the letter had said, seeing as she spent all of her earnings on repairing, cleaning, and stocking the fire house with anything that it needed.
She took the plate of fuzz upstairs to the kitchen and dormitories, and gently slid the fuzz into the trash. It wobbled pitifully at the bottom of the bin.
She cast about for the waffle plates, but they were no where to be found. In fact, quite a lot of things were missing from the house. Each little dormitory bunk had been cleaned out, and the door to the one she shared had been locked to keep her armor and other belongings safe - she'd been barred from bringing much of anything with her on her medically mandated vacation.
Her stomach rumbled, and frustration welled up. The food stores were also empty, or else also fuzzy, and even the tin of coffee was gone. The Cuss Cup would be full by mid-afternoon at this rate.
She stirred at the bottom of the stairs, not bruised, but a little sore where her arm and face had struck the wall. She stood up, collected her fallen halberd, and slouched down the hall to the foyer and the street beyond.
Breakfast. Coffee. And then: The bank to get her vacation pay, followed by pickled cod and fried potato fingers brought in person to the nearest post office with a formal apology that she'd had to repeat twice after drifting away in the middle of the first attempts. But the Gulls would again deliver news of fires to the 14th, so that was worth it. She got kippers, and a jug of vinegar, a few packets of spices, and a caboodle of other essentials necessary for keeping things running smoothly.
It was evening by the time she trudged back to the 14th and put everything away; she started a new pickled kipper jar kept by the upstairs balcony door, swept and mopped, brought her armor downstairs and put it on one of the armor stands in the foyer, cleared out the rest of the papers in all the offices and put them in a crate to be sorted once she'd hired a clerk to deal with it all, and finally she could...
It was dark, and there was a waffle stuck to her face. Really, truly stuck on there.
With a sigh, she went to run a bath. One particular perk of such an establishment: their own water pump, and a nice little furnace to heat the water to keep it from freezing. Winter was the worst for accidental fire breakouts, especially in the poorer parts of the Slups, where beasts realized they didn't mind their home burning because it wasn't like they were about to last until the next night even with four walls and a roof. The thought that three of those walls also belonged to their neighbours wasn't kept in mind on such nights.
She spluttered awake, bolting upright, cold water splashing everywhere.
Shivering and snuggling her towel around herself, she slipped into her bunk at last. Eyes closed. Eyes open. It made no difference in the darkness. She turned this way and that. Plans formed, melted, formed again. Ideas and responsibilities clashed ceaselessly, her feet kicked, her tail thrashed, blankets and pillows flew across the room and were collected to fly again.
At some point she found herself out in the training garden out in the back, the pitiful clumps of grass moist with dew. Wet lumps of wood scattered around, the last remnants of the last practice held there. She raked it all up, breath fogging little puffs that became visible with the bluing of the sky, and then stacked the water-chucking buckets by the door. Amazing they hadn't been stolen, what with being outside -
What had she been doing in the hallway? She was still standing up. It was light again. Groggily, she went upstairs and put on a kettle for coffee, changed out of her orange pyjamas into her orange tunic and skirt, and even though it wasn't Waffle Day anymore, she felt she deserved to eat the rest of them before they too turned fuzzy and green.
Of course, she shared a few crumbs with Commander, who swam about nipping at the waffle chunks. Yes, she was a good turtle mom.
Downstairs, she put on her armored boots, grabbed the Cuss Cup, and went to sit outside on the stoop. As the Slups and Trenches woke around her, she rattled the gilders in the cup and called out:
"Make the most important decision of your life! Prove to yourself you have the strength and courage to climb trees! Join the Bully Harbor Fire Brigade! Become part of an elite... become part of a peacekeeping... become part of a force! See historic buildings! And stop the spread of dangerous flames throughout the Harbor! Become a hero! Become a legend! Become - "
Eskila wobbled and looked down into the Cuss Cup. It was empty. The shadows had shifted again. And there was somebeast standing in front of her, giving her a rather funny look.
She cleared her throat and asked, "Are you here to volunteer for the Bully Harbor Fire Brigade? Guaranteed wages, and your own halberd?" She bit her bottom lip. "And every day can be Waffle Day."
Before you stands a tall female sable, Acting Captain of the 14th Bully Harbour Volunteer Fire Brigade Eskila Ikamaye. "Standing" is a bit of an overstatement; she clings to her halberd like a deckhand trying not to be swept overboard in a hurricane.
"There's no official uniform," she says, her voice droopy with weariness, as if every word had just rolled out of bed. "But we in the 14th wear orange. Other fire houses have their own rules, but most also wear orange. It's like a warning, I guess. To warn beasts that we're there. Orange helps them see us and come to us when visibility is low."
She shows you the helmet she's holding. A heavy thing of plate, with a pointed snout pocked with holes. Large round nubs with a few smaller holes adorn the top, fit just right for her ears. Inside the snout, a simple cloth is crumpled in place where it would cushion the chin, and dark lenses have been melded behind the slim eye slits.
"The cloth is to be wetted before we go in to stop a fire. Protects you from breathing in smoke and ash. Always carry spare cloths on patrol, don't use the same one twice in a row if you can help it."
She shows you the rest of her armour: Plate gauntlets, more bracers than gloves; Heavy plate boots made to cover the back of the calves and the front of the leg up to the knee; and a simple plate cuirass with a set of small pauldrons over a leather cowl, all dented, scratched, and deformed, with a small hole directly over the heart. All of it has been painted a bright orange, the paint scratched and smeared with ash.
"Armour is what you can get a hold of. We can sometimes make deals with the Stoatorian Guard's armoury to take what they don't want to fix up. I try to save up my pay to get everyone in the 14th a good set. Yeah, somebeast died in this... but fire doesn't shoot crossbows at you. You want to protect your limbs, your head, body... Too much armour can slow you down, but when a falling beam from a roof gets you, chain or brigandine won't help much. Sometimes it's heavy enough to crush the armour, so always be aware of that risk. You want to be able to push doors, kick things. Your body is your battering ram once you're inside."
She unslings the heater shield worn over her back with a heavy belt, and lets you hold it. It's surprisingly heavy, all metal with a thick leather backing. Every part of it is singed. The face bears a makeshift crest of red and yellow flame over four squares of alternating shades of orange.
"Where armour can't protect you, this will. Learn to lift it above your head, and in front of you... as far as you can. To hold as many kits between you and the shield... we have some straw dolls in the back room, to practice with. You can do lots more with a shield... sled down stairs, use the pointy bottom part to break things, keep it clean and its a nice picnic table... Always take care of your shield... It's where the souls go."
You blink at her, head tilted quizzically. There's a subtle change in the sable. She stands a little straighter, but her voice wavers. Her droopy eyes gaze off somewhere further than the walls of the fire house should allow.
"To lose your shield is to lose everything, everyone... so keep it clean and in good repair. For those we have lost. For those we can yet save. Because they're not lost. You keep them with you, forever."
An uncomfortable silence settles in the room. You offer the shield back to her, and she makes a dooking noise as she fondles it for a moment. Her halberd, resting against her shoulder, clatters to the ground, startling everyone.
"Oh, yeah... halberd." She picks it up and gives it a waggle. "This is our other main tool. You got the axe on there for chopping at locks and things. It's long and heavy, for safety. Pointy ends, in case you need pointy ends. But be careful not to hurt anybeast. Chopping, thrusting, um... yeah, you can use it like a staff too, whacking. Whacking's good."
She stares at the halberd with an expression somewhere between blank and confused, and you can't help but get the thought that maybe she doesn't truly know what she's talking about in this particular regard. She finishes adjusting her shield over her back and turns to gesture at the room you're in.
Behind you, the wide-double doors of the fire house lead out onto a short porch at the northwest corner of the building, with only a pawful of stairs leading down to the street itself. You'd noticed grooves in the stairs, the porch itself, and they continue inside, slowly curving eastward to the far back doors. Those back doors open, and another volunteer pushes along a small wagon, the rumble of it filling the large room. The doors swing shut behind her, open and closed, and you realize they're on special hinges that would allow the doors to open both directions.
As the wagon approaches, you can see it's filled with barrels of water. Eskila and the other volunteer - a female wildcat with tortoiseshell fur wearing a simple orange tunic, her mane styled into short curls - begin to fill the gaps between the barrels with various tools and supplies that have been piled on a nearby table.
"Blankets," she says, "are one of the better things for small fires. Wet blankets can kill a fire. We have these hoses, too... We connect them to pumps all over town." She points to a large map on the northern wall. "Every pump and rain barrel is marked there. If you have trouble with maps like I did, you'll learn them on patrol, until it feels like you're walking on the map paper itself. The wagon has first aid kits, some juice rations..."
The hoses, horrific tubes of thick canvas and leather stitched together with the occasional copper band and rivet, are coiled up and hung on the sides of the wagon upon nubby metal hooks. Metal couplings on each end are fitted with a narrow nozzle or left open to be connected to a pump.
Eskila takes one of the blankets and demonstrates clipping it to her armour's pauldrons. "Button clasps on each blanket let us wear them like a cape... You can do it like this, or around your neck like kits do. It's great extra protection for bad fires, but it can get really heavy, so we do training days where we try and run from one end of the Slups to the other with the blankets soaked."
She lifts up one of the rain barrels in the wagon as if it were half its size, spilling some of the water onto herself.
"And practice getting these in and out. We store them outside to get rain, and there's a pump out there as well for dry days. The wagon should always be full and ready to go when the bells ring. And when you hear the bells ring, someone find Oreva..." She gestures to the tortoiseshell wildcat. "And pat your ears three times. She's deaf."
Eskila puts the barrel back in the wagon and stares at her paws for a moment, then slowly makes a few awkward gestures towards the cat. Oreva shrugs, nods, and leaves to pad up the staircase.
"So that's basically it for the gear... We have some in storage for you, we'll try and find something that fits. When you're off duty or just relaxing or anything, you put it on one of the stand there by the wall. Everything needs to be close at paw and ready to go. That's my office there, in the corner. Oreva's office is the other one, with the extra window on the other side. She helps me with the paperwork because... reading..." The sable screws up her face in an annoyed sneer. "But it's not working out very good, because she doesn't know how to talk..."
She scratches behind her ear with a bemused frown.
"Okay. Follow me. So back here, we have some washrooms..." She gestures at the doors to the south side. "There's tubs, but they're mostly used for washing the gear. Upstairs washrooms are nicer for sleeping in the bath. Storage room just beyond there. These rooms on the other side, we don't really use yet. So they're just more storage for now. When we had more beasts on duty, they were like extra offices and private rooms for the Captain and other officers to sleep in. The bunks upstairs are all shared rooms. Eventually."
She pushes the back doors open, leading you out to the garden. Even more barrels are out here, lining the tall, ivy-choked fences. Behind them, you can barely see the roofs of the neighbouring buildings, close enough that only the southern side could afford room for an alleyway. Obviously nothing looms over the northern wall; you know the street was on the other side.
"There was a gate there," she says, pointing to the wall of green. "But we let it grow over so beasts would stop trying to break in and steal things. The doors are all special so the only way to lock them is from the inside with a big piece of wood, but you can lift that up with a good enough lever, but don't. Stealing is wrong. Well, it's okay to do it if you're locked out and need things... Not stealing, I mean, the lever thing. That's okay to do. Anyway, we mostly don't lock anything anymore, since Oreva lives here now... but sometimes, I think when she's feeling nervous about being alone..."
The sable sighs. Apparently the troubles of having a housekeeper who can't hear you knocking was weighing on her just as heavily as the souls of the unlost.
"Yeah, so this is the garden... this spot to the left of the door is good for morning naps, if you like sunlight... Over on this side we have some training dolls... They're mouldy. The ones inside are clean."
You gaze momentarily at the straw dummies lined up against the fire house's red-brick wall. The straw is distinctly green and mossy. Beside them, close to the door, is a large water pump with a piece of short leather hose dangling from it and coiled messily on the ground. Eskila kneels and tidies it up a little.
"Do you like waffles?" she asks. "I think it's time we go upstairs and get some waffles."
TO BE CONTINUED.
- - - Original Waffle Day post for future reference when finishing this up ... - - -
Vacations were supposed to be refreshing. Yet no amount of little umbrellas, beach chairs, or tiny cucumber sandwiches could get Eskila to rest. And then the crew on the ship ride home had been buzzing about the Opera burning down again, and even though it wasn't part of the 14th's jurisdiction, the talk instilled a sense of misplaced urgency that was difficult to shake. After all, it had already been weeks ago.
Perhaps the urgency she felt as she stepped onto the docks was simply hunger. After all, it was Waffle Day.
The walk from the docks to the Slups hadn't been contemplative, for there was little to contemplate about. It was a fair day, the cooling weather brining the air even this deep into the twisting, ramshackle streets in the heart of Bully. Nothing in the general vicinity was on fire, just the usual smoke from beasts cooking breakfasts throughout town. Dreams of syrup-soaked waffles gasping for air in a deep lake of butter swam through her mind, much unlike the waffles.
Eskila stood in front of the 14th fire house and yawned at the board nailed haphazardly across the doorway. She put the fishbowl she was carrying down on the steep, and pried the wood away and opened the door.
It was dusty. No one was cooking a waffle. This made her ears droop. First things first... Commander needed to be put in his tank proper. She headed upstairs, only paying attention to the task at paw: Refreshing the tank water with the pump in the washroom, and watching him swim about in the larger container for a little while.
Tidy time. She grabbed a nearby broom -
She sat up, blinking, confused. She stumbled into the chair in her little corner office - she was already downstairs - and stared at the lump of green fuzz on a plate on top of the papers. She moved it aside and unsealed the first missive.
"Sss...son... con...gra...t...tu... congratulate...shins... Sap... Cap...tain..." She knew this next glyph! "Ikamaye."
Odd. Who was this Captain Ikamaye? Should she be reading their mail? That was a crime, right? Yet the outside of the letter had her other name glyph on it. Maybe there were more clues inside.
"On... y...yoo-urrr... your... p... pro... mot... shin. I am... r...re...sig... nin... singing?" She scratched at her nose and squinted harder at the paper. "Re...sig...ning... fr... from... my... po...sit... shin... as... S... Cap...captain... Oh..."
The morning ticked away, lulled to sleep by the monotonous sable's salient struggles with the written word. In summation:
Everyone had resigned. There had been an incident with some fireworks (da... - heck! She'd missed fireworks! And upon thinking the word "heck", she dropped a gilder into the Cuss Cup, along with an IOU ripped in half for the other half a cuss she'd almost thought) along with some other incidents, such as another sergeant sleeping with the Captain's wife, which had ensued in a brawl in which two privates had gone bankrupt betting on the wrong beast; one getting an eye pecked out for not refilling the Kipper Jar for the Missertross, resulting in the 14th being blacklisted pending an apology delivery of pickled cod and fried potato fingers, which had in turn resulted in no one knowing when they needed to do their jobs...
But they had made her a sandwich for her return, to celebrate her becoming the new Captain. Well-earned, the letter had said, seeing as she spent all of her earnings on repairing, cleaning, and stocking the fire house with anything that it needed.
She took the plate of fuzz upstairs to the kitchen and dormitories, and gently slid the fuzz into the trash. It wobbled pitifully at the bottom of the bin.
She cast about for the waffle plates, but they were no where to be found. In fact, quite a lot of things were missing from the house. Each little dormitory bunk had been cleaned out, and the door to the one she shared had been locked to keep her armor and other belongings safe - she'd been barred from bringing much of anything with her on her medically mandated vacation.
Her stomach rumbled, and frustration welled up. The food stores were also empty, or else also fuzzy, and even the tin of coffee was gone. The Cuss Cup would be full by mid-afternoon at this rate.
She stirred at the bottom of the stairs, not bruised, but a little sore where her arm and face had struck the wall. She stood up, collected her fallen halberd, and slouched down the hall to the foyer and the street beyond.
Breakfast. Coffee. And then: The bank to get her vacation pay, followed by pickled cod and fried potato fingers brought in person to the nearest post office with a formal apology that she'd had to repeat twice after drifting away in the middle of the first attempts. But the Gulls would again deliver news of fires to the 14th, so that was worth it. She got kippers, and a jug of vinegar, a few packets of spices, and a caboodle of other essentials necessary for keeping things running smoothly.
It was evening by the time she trudged back to the 14th and put everything away; she started a new pickled kipper jar kept by the upstairs balcony door, swept and mopped, brought her armor downstairs and put it on one of the armor stands in the foyer, cleared out the rest of the papers in all the offices and put them in a crate to be sorted once she'd hired a clerk to deal with it all, and finally she could...
It was dark, and there was a waffle stuck to her face. Really, truly stuck on there.
With a sigh, she went to run a bath. One particular perk of such an establishment: their own water pump, and a nice little furnace to heat the water to keep it from freezing. Winter was the worst for accidental fire breakouts, especially in the poorer parts of the Slups, where beasts realized they didn't mind their home burning because it wasn't like they were about to last until the next night even with four walls and a roof. The thought that three of those walls also belonged to their neighbours wasn't kept in mind on such nights.
She spluttered awake, bolting upright, cold water splashing everywhere.
Shivering and snuggling her towel around herself, she slipped into her bunk at last. Eyes closed. Eyes open. It made no difference in the darkness. She turned this way and that. Plans formed, melted, formed again. Ideas and responsibilities clashed ceaselessly, her feet kicked, her tail thrashed, blankets and pillows flew across the room and were collected to fly again.
At some point she found herself out in the training garden out in the back, the pitiful clumps of grass moist with dew. Wet lumps of wood scattered around, the last remnants of the last practice held there. She raked it all up, breath fogging little puffs that became visible with the bluing of the sky, and then stacked the water-chucking buckets by the door. Amazing they hadn't been stolen, what with being outside -
What had she been doing in the hallway? She was still standing up. It was light again. Groggily, she went upstairs and put on a kettle for coffee, changed out of her orange pyjamas into her orange tunic and skirt, and even though it wasn't Waffle Day anymore, she felt she deserved to eat the rest of them before they too turned fuzzy and green.
Of course, she shared a few crumbs with Commander, who swam about nipping at the waffle chunks. Yes, she was a good turtle mom.
Downstairs, she put on her armored boots, grabbed the Cuss Cup, and went to sit outside on the stoop. As the Slups and Trenches woke around her, she rattled the gilders in the cup and called out:
"Make the most important decision of your life! Prove to yourself you have the strength and courage to climb trees! Join the Bully Harbor Fire Brigade! Become part of an elite... become part of a peacekeeping... become part of a force! See historic buildings! And stop the spread of dangerous flames throughout the Harbor! Become a hero! Become a legend! Become - "
Eskila wobbled and looked down into the Cuss Cup. It was empty. The shadows had shifted again. And there was somebeast standing in front of her, giving her a rather funny look.
She cleared her throat and asked, "Are you here to volunteer for the Bully Harbor Fire Brigade? Guaranteed wages, and your own halberd?" She bit her bottom lip. "And every day can be Waffle Day."
