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Save Point: The Lowgrounds

The Great City, Near the River Srenen

The Lowgrounds is a sector of the city filled with bars and brasseries. Once an industrial lowland near the Srenen, it's been revitalized over the last few decades around the line extending from an old underground transport hub, along which lightshafts rise like truncated cones, cut off just above the ground, all the way out to the water. Small children are simply fascinated by them and like to climb out on top, jumping up and down on the unbreakable diamond glass.

The alignment is beautiful at sunset, when the light spills longwards over the artfully arranged sequence of wide, covered arcades, so-casually strewn stones with patterns shallowly carved into them, water features that helpfully assist to remove the river from the soil and channel it away. On all both sides, just a short distance away, the area shades into a much harder and more urban part of the city, where hookers can be found leaning casually bottomless against concrete walls, where there are unfrequented delivery spaces behind all the shops that actually sell things, and medical places on one side and markets on the other cater to the needs of all sorts of strange travellers. Sethkill rather likes its authenticity, and all the strange things you'll see just by taking a walk for a few blocks out into the sea of apartments on a late summer evening.

The unifying design feature of the Lowground proper, or at least the various restaurants and bars that most of the visitors have come to see and be seen at, is that the external facings have all been covered with a secondary spacing of horizontally latticed pieces of silva wood, one-on one-off, to create a sort of enormous natural trellis for every decorative plant in existence. They've started out growing in ceramic pots, enormous tripodal copper vessels, huge stone troughs and ceramic planters of every type and description, but each of these has been placed up against the walls and the foliage has twined upward immediately, running mad across every surface. Quenched by the limitless supply of ground water from all the fountains and water features, they provide a graceful foliated shade for all the diners and drinkers far more subtle than woven awnings. Some of the plants are recognizably edible, and it surprises him that they haven't been harvested yet in the small hours.

"So, I've been thinking about it and I've gotta ask," comments Keselt, elbows on the wooden table, "how did your father ever wind up getting with someone as hot as Kailey Fenris anyway? I mean, yes, she_was_ a blazingly intense porn star and screwed an enormous number of, well, everybody, but they were mostly her co-stars. And your father is, well, kind of distinctly average-looking. Bit intense around the eyes, maybe, nice horns and teeth, but still."

"My father has this fascinating trick," replies Sethkill. "He can be charming at sethuresses. It's not his fault, it's entirely involuntary. He can wander into a store and get to talking with the sethuress covering the counter and a minute later, she's wrapped around both his thumbs at once."

"He's never done that at me."

"He actually has to try not to do it when friends, family and my mother are around. He just can't help himself. Unfortunately I didn't inherit this useful skill and so I have to do it the old-fashioned way, by having great lines, good looks, and real potential in bed."

Keselt is amused and pushes him gently in the shoulder. "I think you did inherit it and you're just more sparing in the application."

"Like I said, involuntary. He has a surprising number of very wealthy or powerful female friends, because my mother likes to set him loose at parties as a sort of way of showing off just how clever she was to snag him in the first place and how good it would be to be friends with her. One of the sethuresses he knows is called Aivrin and she has this unnecessarily enormous house with floors that are entirely done in various types of stone, mostly slate."

"Don't tell me that's her house in 'Innosedura'?"

"Yup. Kaily Fenris was humping the floor next to the outer wall, in the spare basement bedroom, on the east side. It's practically a place of pilgrimage for her fans and Aivrin has to kick out several unwanted visitors a week whenever she's there. She mostly only uses the house for cookouts and parties, you see, so when she got approached about letting Kailey Fenris use it as a location she was all over the idea. Get an in with a famously infamous porn star and then totally show off just how amazing her house is? In a second. So they filmed there and Kailey simply had to come to the next party, dear, and meet all my friends, and I won't charge you a_nything_ as long as you clean up all the smeared stains and sticky puddles when you're done."

"Which led inevitably to the lost weekend?" sighs Keselt. It's not really that big a deal in her book but it kind of messed up Sethkills life and several others, so she's trying to be sympathetic.

"Oh yes. She was hot, he was charming, drinks were had and they talked each other up into doing the utterly unexpected, which was her taking him home - which she never did, apparently, with anyone, she always kept it on set - and him taking her up on it. They led each other on, she had a camera from one of her shoots, he had a sort of tacit blessing from my mother to do his thing at parties if it added to her extensive network of friends, and some time later she showed up at their house radiantly pregnant and going on about how blessed she was to have finally gotten a child after having been completely unable to get knocked up after several hundred critically acclaimed adult films worth of trying. She never used any sort of protection you know, said it wasn't natural and knowing there'd be no consequences would spoil her performance."

"That's kind of weird, really," observes Keselt. "I mean, she must have known it would probably happen eventually, so what did she think would happen?"

"She was always a little detached from reality. It's what made her fans so obsessed with her, the way she was strangely innocent even as she did things that were utterly depraved. Unfortunately for her, my mother was quite firmly grounded and made short work of her. They would be staying together, Kaily could not share her husband just because they happened to be sexually compatible and there would not be any romantic threesomes. She was perfectly willing to keep Kaily around as a friend and share visitation rights and all the other sort of things you'd expect, but it wasn't what Kaily wanted and she refused to accept it. It was just way too sensible a solution for her. She stormed off and that was the last of it until I ran into my unexpected half-brother years later."

"You know, I shouldn't have mentioned it," apologizes Keselt, seeing the look on his face. "Let's forget I asked and order, okay?"

The small restaurant they're dining at is a cook-your-own franchise where each silva-wood table has a small, faintly flickering sphere on a stand in the center, which implements an old technology related to the stasis field commonly used to store small objects. Inside the sphere is a heat source running in slightly accelerated time, sort of like a tiny flame-coloured star complete with its own solar prominences, whilst the external sphere slows the passage of time instead. The net result is that you can slow-cook a mouthful of food in a few seconds, then cool it by pulling it out smoothly to the point where no-ones mouth gets burnt.

Basically, it's a ludicrously sophisticated solution to the well-known problem of fondue and other molten sauces, by changing the very laws of physics themselves. The shimmering spheres are not permeable to anything with even a small electrical charge, so you can't accidentally reach inside, and implements are provided by the restaurant that resemble a slender two-tined fork and knife that are designed to survive the experience (provided you ground them occasionally on the heavy black iron cusp of the serving tray). They look like an ancient set of fire-tools for stirring the ash in an open hearth, aged to discoloration by the temporal stresses.

The dishes available to order are all completely raw and come with various dipping sauces so you can impale the neatly shaved and shredded bits, soak them, then cook them in a moment. As bits sometimes escape and fall in, there is a small ring of openings near the base of the sphere where foodstuffs cooked to fine black dust over subjective years drift out slowly onto a small tray.

They both order completely different dishes, but as they usually end up swapping and sharing and passing each other the bits they don't like, it all works out really quite well and they wind up feeding each other choice tidbits from the scoured-looking forks. Keselt drinks light green wine from her chalice-cup while Sethkill has fruit-flavoured stonepowder tea, and he manages to forget completely about the awkward questions raised earlier. It's a beautiful evening.

As it gets later they go for a walk about the neighborhood, and Sethkill shows her the strangely gritty sights lying just beyond the main strip of the Lowgrounds. Keselt surprises him by striking up a conversation with a couple of the hookers in a completely natural-seeming way, enjoying the covered arcades with their absurdly expensive brand-named products designed to do nothing but impress, and seeming to relish the privacy of the empty delivery lots. When she's sure there's no-one looking, she pulls him up against a dirty wall and kisses him like she was one of the hookers herself, then pushes him away again with a little embarrassed smile.

When they start to run into too many apartments, they turn back, navigating their return by trees and foliated shadows.