[h2]Near Lein[/h2]

Lein's path to the blacksmith was rather unexpectedly interrupted; one blink there was only empty corridor ahead--a simple turn off to the blacksmith in the courtyard beyond it--and the next there was a girl in front of him. The only other trace of her presence was a very faint woosh of displaced air, the girl herself appearing to have materialised from nowhere at all.

To call her appearance ''strange'' would be an understatement. For a start, there were the ears--tall, slender, and definitively lapine, marking her as extremely foreign as much as the unusual cast to her features. The ash-white hair tied back into a rough ponytail was a little strange, if not extremely. But working down from those... her [i]clothes[/i] were incomprehensible in local styles. Some sort of deep blue half-robe with a white symbol recurring across its surface, and below that a nearly-black pair of pleated trousers. The sandals and their accompanying socks were no less strange.

But all of that became immediately less noticeable once one took in the most threatening thing the girl carried and its contradictions: a pair of curved swords, one longer than the other, thrust through a cloth belt. Something that only raised [i]more[/i] questions, given her lopsided posture. After all, what use did a girl without her right arm have for two swords, let alone one with such a long handle? What use was a one-armed warrior missing the accompanying eye on a battlefield, especially if the fringes of the burns at her neck were even more extensive?

All of which was quite a lot to take in, one azure eye boring into Lein's before the stranger gave a bow and spoke in--accurate, though [i]very[/i] unusually accented--Velt to him. "Greetings. You are Lein of the Iron Roses?"

[@PigeonOfAstora]