When I got back to the orphanage I asked if Brunhilde knew that Raun was a fire mage and she looked at me like I was stupid.

“What do you think all the wasp launchings were?”

I paused and replied, “...so I take it that they aren’t real wasps?” which deepened the ‘are you stupid’ expression on the older woman’s face. Brun sighed and explained the wasp thing, which is actually collected fire spirits inside a wasp nest ‘core’.

“Higher power mages can actually put cores into corpses to act as the mage’s familiars, but Raun finds ‘em ‘distasteful’. Personally, I find them a gross pain in the ass, especially when the corpse starts rotting and collected mana starts bleeding out from the husk. ‘If you smell a sweet-smelling corpse, bust out the torches’ is what my Da told me.” Brun drew a scribble and then added four lines and some spikes to one end of the scribble. Is the scribble supposed to be wearing a crown? Brun’s smiling for once so maybe that flying dust bunny is what she wanted to put into this world, or more specifically, onto the flour that needs to be cleaned off the table.

“Take over for kneading.” Brun commands, before sitting on a kitchen table and writing tally marks onto her little notebook that she carries in her apron pocket. Gamely I begin, hands mashing and rolling the gooey mixture until it starts to look like something that might become bread.

“What’re you tallying?” I asked before blowing a stray hair out of my face and tearing off chunks of the dough pile to roll.

“Taking inventory. The viscount’s aide visits with each Ritugam and helps ease the transition for adoption between the orphanage and viable parents; keeping track of what we’ve used and what we need helps keep things from clogging up when that prissy nobleman starts stinking up the room.”

“Clogging up?”

“Feh!” Brun made a motion of spitting but the floor remained dry. “Worthless cheapskate always complaining about how much children eat! Has to check every motion of flour from the cupboard to see if the mice cheated us!” So this is a topic that will enrage Brunhilde, gotcha; let’s try and change the topic to something else…or I can poke the dragon.

“So you don’t like him?” I asked innocently. A very long pause hung in the air as I felt eyes on my kneading form. I ignored that and waited for her eventual answer. And waited. Then I heard a very long and exasperated sigh.

“...no, I don’t like him. Nobody with basic morals or a brain would like that man.”

-------------------------------------------------------

Amazing how something that you’ve never had to care about before is suddenly a major part of your day-to-day life, and by major, I mean a major pain in the ass. Brother daffodil, a very obviously fake-named priest, has been having me and four other unlucky fools cleaning the church from the top of the roof to the rats in the basement and after I asked why he chose that flower as a name, it’s normally me down in the basement. I didn’t mean anything by it but apparently, flower-boy was touchy about the subject and I learned of my latent skill of rodent-catching. I don’t mind it much, the dirt floor is nice and cool in this heat, but the priest still insists that he hears squeaking and this is my third go-around.

For a holy man, he’s rather petty.