Before entering Miss Audrey's ho, Jenkins had to repeatedly assure Chocolate his hands were clean, but the cat still persistently swatted his approaching hand with its tail.
So, after greeting Miss Audrey with a cardboard box in his arms, Jenkins had to sheepishly ask to use her washroom and borrow her soap to wash his hands.
Soap had been around for a long ti, but its high price kept it from becoming commonplace. Miss Audrey's, however, was clearly a high-end product, undoubtedly infused with fragrances, which would explain the rich floral scent.
After a thorough washing, Jenkins presented his hands for the cat's inspection. After a couple of sniffs, he finally regained the right to pet his feline companion.
After nearly a month of long theoretical studies, Miss Audrey had finally decided it was ti for Jenkins to get so hands-on practice.
Once they finished dinner together, she beckoned Jenkins out the door. Carrying the cardboard box filled with miscellaneous junk, they boarded a carriage at the street corner, and she instructed the driver to head for a certain street in the southern part of the city.
"I had originally planned for our lesson to be last Thursday, but sothing ca up that I had to deal with. I do apologize."
"No, please don't apologize. Whenever you have ti is fine. I'm in no hurry."
Miss Audrey wasn't a Nolan native. In fact, all Jenkins knew was that she had spent most of her life in a small nation in the continent's interior, on the border between the Cheslan and Fidektri Kingdoms, which was ho to the Holy See of the Church of Destiny and Equilibrium.
Yet her accent was nearly indistinguishable from a local's. Without knowing her background, one would never guess she was from another country.
Her attire today was the sa as always, though she had tied her hair back with a golden ribbon, letting it fall naturally down her back. It was the first ti Jenkins had seen her wear it in that style.
He ntally compared the hair of all the young won he knew and concluded that Miss Audrey's was the most beautiful, though Miss Mikhail's golden locks looked the silkiest.
"But Chocolate's fur is the most comfortable to stroke."
He sumd up his thoughts, stroking Chocolate, who was busy licking its paws, and began to wonder just where Miss Audrey was taking him.
The carriage dropped them off on a rather narrow comrcial street. Moonlight filtered down from the sky onto a street devoid of pedestrians. Judging by the signs on either side, the area was filled with shops selling tal components and machine parts.
They walked along the street, one behind the other. When they reached the next intersection, Miss Audrey glanced around before leading Jenkins onto a wider avenue. They passed a gentleman's club, a sweet shop, a bookstore, and a tailor's shop on the corner before turning into a small adjacent alley.
The alley was flanked by high walls, its purpose likely to connect two different districts.
"This is the place... Could you give so light?"
"Oh, of course. One mont."
At Miss Audrey's direction, he sent the sphere of starlight gliding forward, skimming along the ground. It didn't take long for them to spot a rust-covered sewer grate. It was so caked with dirt that it nearly blended in with the surrounding ground. If Jenkins hadn't happened to step on it, they might have been searching for a long ti.
"This is it. I ca down a different way last ti, so I wasn't entirely sure of the exact location. Let's go."
Miss Audrey didn't ask Jenkins to lift the heavy grate. Instead, she crouched down, rolled up her sleeves, and traced a circle in the dirt on its surface with her jade-like fingers. She had Jenkins step back, then murmured an incantation. With a dull thud, a hole opened in the surface of the grate.
Below, a rickety-looking ladder was embedded in the wall of the shaft. They climbed down, one after the other, and began to make their way through the labyrinthine sewer pipes, guided by the light of the star-sphere.
The sll wasn't overpowering, fainter even than the section of sewer near the black market. The tunnel was spacious and free of nauseating refuse, though the walls were slick with repulsive green moss. Every so often, a rat would dart out from the darkness, making them jump.
The rats were quite large, and he wondered how they managed to find food in such an environnt.
In the dim glow of the distant light spheres, he glanced at Chocolate, perched on his shoulder. The cat had never shown the slightest interest in rats. The last ti, in the warehouse of Pops Antique Shop, it had simply watched one scurry right past its nose without reacting.
"Are you really a cat?"
He joked in a low voice. Chocolate opened one eye, its amber iris seeming to glow in the darkness.
"ow~"
They continued through the sewers for another ten minutes or so, and the complex system of tunnels soon left Jenkins completely disoriented. Only Miss Audrey seed to know the way, constantly murmuring to herself as if using so special thod to navigate.
Soon, they entered a tunnel with no branching paths. After a few minutes of walking deeper into the darkness, they reached a dead end.
But what the starlight illuminated was not a smooth pipe wall or an uneven brick face, but a tal machine embedded in the earthen wall.
Its surface shimred with a mixed luster of copper and silver, but it wasn't smooth. Instead, it was covered in tiny, thorn-like protrusions, as if it had never been polished.
The machine stood as tall as a person and was perfectly integrated with the surrounding earth. Protruding from the soil around its fra were rust-colored pipes that crisscrossed like the roots of a plant, occasionally hissing as they vented puffs of hot steam.
It looked nothing like a product of their era. Based on its appearance and artistic style, it seed like a strange machine that could only have been born from so far more frenzied steam-powered civilization.
"Yes, this is it!"
Miss Audrey placed a hand on Jenkins's other shoulder, her voice low and steady.
"B-08-02-8214, the Equal Exchange Vending Machine."
"An Extraordinary item?"
Jenkins asked in surprise. He blinked, and sure enough, the surface of the machine, with its strange industrial aesthetic, was suffused with an incredibly complex spiritual aura.
"This machine originated from a failed expedition into a Mysterious Realm during the 15th Epoch. That's sothing you'd only find in the most ancient archives of the Church of Creation and Machinery. Its location isn't fixed, and there's no discernible pattern to its movents, but it usually appears in the forgotten corners of a city, where people are unlikely to notice it. As for its function... do you see that drawer-like structure at the bottom?"
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