Seph looked over at her, amused. "As in, the Five Hundred Fuller...?"

"As in," she agreed, smiling. She curled her wrist around the small glass and brought it closer to her body; her spine had a natural hunch in it, and in her current position she looked a little like what a crow might look like stooping over a particularly full bag of salt crackers.

"Kind of a pretentious name for the cheapest drink on the menu," Seph said, glancing back up at the board over the counter. Predictably, most of it was written in Low, which he couldn't quite read - but digits were relatively similar in both Low and High Anthem, and he easily spotted figures that meant 500 at the top of the menu, alongside the price. He could buy fifteen of them with what he had on him.

She shrugged. "Needs to be cheap! It's what everyone drinks when they c-can't manage to stick it in. It's a c-condolence drink."

"More like a condolence sip," Seph said flatly, eyeing the tiny glass, and she rolled her eyes at him.

"Sit down already, I'll get you one if you c-c-can't spare your own stuff for it," and she curled a finger into his belt and tugged until he dropped himself into the stool. As soon as he did, he yelped and gripped the counter, fingers gripping easily into the deep nicks on its surface - the stool was uneven, and tipped a firm thirty-nine degrees toward the counter as soon as he set his weight on it.

She laughed at him. It was the loudest laugh he had ever heard. It seemed to deafen everything else in the room, and it was so sudden that it was like a bark.

"Alright then, here, you'll have mine," she said, passing it to him, "I'll get another one," and tipped her head jerkily at the bartend, alula gesturing pointedly. While she looked away, Seph idly plucked a tiny black filament that had adhered to the little dome of liquid rising just over the edges of the glass. Surface tension. It was probably just water.

"Well?" she said, turning back to him. In her hand was another of the little glasses. Her brows raised, surprisingly expressive; she lifted the glass too, towards him, and after eying her for a bit, Seph raised his own.

"Cheers," she said amiably.

"Cheers," Seph echoed, and downed the glass. It tasted like water that had just had a little bit of feather in it.

"Pretentious name," he repeated, grimacing, and she grinned at him, then shrugged.

"No one would try it otherwise," she said.

"As if anyone has ever even gotten close to achieving that Five Hundred Fuller," Seph muttered.

"Huh? What's that?"

"As if anyone has ever gotten close to achieving that Five Hundred Fuller!" Seph repeated, with more emphasis and slightly yelling, and she winced at his volume and he grimaced at it.

"You don't think anyone has? What's the closest you've ever seen someone get?" she asked, and Seph shrugged, thought back.

"I once saw a body with five scars," he said, "but that was on a golem."

"So they don't c-c-c-count?" She actually bristled a bit.

"Not that it didn't count," Seph said, shrugging, "but on a golem? Who knows if it could even feel pain? If it even knew what it was getting into? Part of it is the knowledge of what you're doing to yourself."

"You seem to know a lot about it for someone whose skin is supple as a squab!" She pinched his arm through his sleeve and Seph frowned at her and pulled away.

"Though...hmmmm! If you're so impressed by a golem with five sc-cars, I wonder what you'd think" - her voice lowered - "of someone with seventeen."

He blinked in surprise. "Seventeen?" As in - nearly twenty? "Who do you know whose been stupid enough to do it seventeen times?"

Her lips puckered. "Well, me!"

He snorted then, instead of gaped. "Right."

She shrugged. "I didn't think you'd believe me," she said, and her wings rolled in a passerine shrug. "Not many do. I've found someone's belief doesn't change a thing."

They sat a bit in quiet. Seph found his head feeling the slightest bit fuzzy, and he picked up his empty glass, running his tongue along the rough rim of it.

His curiosity overcame him.

"I'd believe you," he said, "if you showed me."

"C-can't show you," she told him, grinning.

"Because you don't have them."

"Bec-cause," she explained, "it's indecent to show certain stuff in public."

That was how he first met Rook.