54 – The Tailor

They passed by more closed stores, dust-covered displays staring at them from the empty storefronts. Pottery and porcelain, paintings, even moth-chewed dresses that hung off the skeletal frames of puppet-like mannequins. Then, for a good long while, nothing - just the front ends of perhaps a dozen houses. At the other side of this gap, nearing a huge mill that stood as part of the town wall, they found a small stretch of stores which were all open, likely kept afloat by the increase in traffic brought to this area by the presence of a bridge right by the mill.

Unsurprisingly, the largest and busiest of the stores was a bakery, a solid thirty people stood outside it in an orderly line, two armed guardsmen standing outside the store as the baker handed out identical loaves. Zelsys thought she might go take a look, maybe buy some baked goods for later, but the bickering of the townspeople waiting for their ration dissuaded her.

Next to the bakery, there was a smaller but equally busy general goods store, and separated from these busy places of momentary comfort by a narrow side alley, there was the very store they had been looking for.

It was clearly a very, very old building, perhaps as old as Willowdale itself, with no storefront or displays. Just a door and a meticulously maintained sign showcasing a roll of thread, with the string arranged into the store’s name - Bherad & Sons. Briefly stepping into the side alley and stowing the wax paper bag into Fog Storage, they walked up the stone steps and entered the store.

The front of the store was densely filled with basic clothing in all common sizes and both men’s as well as women’s cuts, from dress shirts and work pants to coats and even certain types of underwear like long johns. There was a substantial section dedicated to hats, all of which were obviously just the same base shaped and adorned in various ways - most were wide-brimmed hats of the sort worn by farmers to shield their eyes from the relentless summer sun, but there were a couple tricornes and cocked hats.

All of the clothing that was to be found here was clearly mass-produced far away and shipped here, but there was a sign behind the vacant counter that suggested an alternate option.

YES, WE STILL DO TAILORING WORK

STOP ASKING

It was written in thick lines of bright red ink, the writer’s annoyance palpable from the brush strokes. Zelsys looked about and found no employee or clerk present, and so simply rang the little bell that sat on the counter whilst she continued to idly look over the many varieties of generic, inoffensive attire that filled the store.

All of it was white or varieties of vague, inoffensive colours. The greens were olive-green, the browns were beige, even the blacks weren’t quite black - just dark grey. Her gut feeling was that the store’s owner was mocking those who chose to purchase mass-produced clothing by only stocking generic attire that wouldn’t stand out, even if it was of surprisingly good quality.

Her gut feeling was vindicated by the emergence of a willowy, middle-aged Ikesian man, his brilliant-blue gaze searching the room as he seamlessly moved across the floor with a strange grace that belied his stone-still hands, frozen in a resting position at perfect table height. His sleeves were held taut around his arms by myriad pins and needles, and a bright-red piece of fabric hung over his shoulder, as if he had placed it there and forgotten while working on something.

His attire was simple, but immaculately fitted to an unsettling degree, so well his dress shirt fit that it almost looked to be a second skin. The Tailor grumbled something in a tongue that didn’t quite seem to make sense altogether, though Zelsys managed to pick out a couple words that suggested a dislike for foreigners. He then turned his gaze towards her, eyes cold as ice staring up at her from amidst a webwork of crow’s feet, a question on those wrinkled lips.

“What’dyawant?”

“...I’m sorry?” she asked, cocking her head to the side. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

She perfectly understood what he said. She just wanted to make him say it clearly, not fond of the man’s attitude for no reason beyond personal pride.

“What. Do. You. Want?” he enunciated exaggeratedly, speaking loudly and slowly as if she were an idiotic child. Zefaris lifted her eye from a white dress shirt she was looking at to see what the fuss was about, but said nothing.

“Oh, nothing. I’ve got a couple Cold-iron Sovereigns burning a hole in my pocket, and I figured I’d see whether there was any merit to the rumors about how you’ve stopped trying since you started stocking factory clothes. Guess they were right, going by all this stock,” she rattled off, conjuring layers upon layers of lies as she went for the sole purpose of trying to yank on the Tailor’s pride. With every implication she saw his cold anger growing, and with every implication she had to work harder to restrain the smugness in her voice.

One of his eyes visibly twitched as he seethed, “I knew that ungrateful piece o’ shit ‘cross the river’s been spreadin’ rumors! You go ask him for anythin’ n’ I guarantee I’ll charge you…”

The Tailor’s anger towards what must be a competitor vanished the moment his gaze wandered downward, skipping past Zel’s slightly bloodied chest-wrappings and straight to the material of her trousers.

“Hol’ on. You’s all jacked up n’ huge, the fuck’re those pants made of to fit that well? Is that Fog-infused fabric?”

“So it is.”

“I’m sorry to say, I ain’t got the means to modify another Fog-tailor’s work at the moment, if tailorin’ work is what you want done on those. What else d’you need?”

“Can you make new Fog-infused fabric?”

“Sure, but anythin’ more than strips will take awhile. I’m talkin’ a couple months to a year fer an outfit dependin’ on complexity.”