He couldn’t quite repress his sigh of relief when the priest said they didn’t have to pay to spend the night at the HUGE church. He had little concept of the currency here, but if the charity he’d seen Etono giving to panhandlers was any indication, the silver coins he’d gotten from ‘Mathers’ were more than this type of lodging was worth. He would have doubted the people seeking refuge here would have been able to pay more than what he’d seen Etono giving out. [b]“We understand,”[/b] Matteo said aloud, making a mental note to return with a more appropriate donation once he had a better idea of what he was dealing with. 

The mention of soup provoked another sigh from the small man, this one more longing. [b]“Ah-- really? I might just do that, thank you.”[/b] So this place fed the poor as well as housed them. As someone utterly lost in these new surroundings he’d found himself in without memories to speak of, Matteo felt a mild glow of admiration and gratitude for this place. Would he have felt the same if he wasn’t down on his luck? Probably not, but it didn't matter. He pulled himself to his feet and shakily made his way over to the soup cauldron, following his nose. 

As he waited patiently to be dished up with thin broth, he wondered how serious the priest's offer to join this place had been. All offers at this stage merited consideration, didn’t they? He wondered just how much of an exaggeration the promised ‘bloodshed’ and ‘suffering’ had been-- to a person who lived this kind of life, healing victims and tending to the weak, surely it must seem that way. His pondering and wandering thoughts made him realize that he was very, very tired. 

[b]”If we have to be up at ‘first light’ we’d better get some rest,”[/b] he said to Ash and Aoi, settling back into the hard wooden pew with his soup. [b]“Thanks again for getting me here. We’ll…”[/b] he trailed off. [i]We’ll what?[/i] Talk about what happened? Try to get more information out of the Silver Moon recruiter? Find out where the blonde girl who’d been with them in the office had gone, or where the best place to hide from Old Bear might be in this city? [b]“...we’ll do something in the morning.”[/b]