“Just strips should be enough. I need at least two sets of chest-wrappings that won’t remain torn up if they are damaged. Can you do that?”

“Of course, that’ll only be a couple days. Anythin’ else?”

“Underwear.”

A small, self-satisfied chuckle from the old man, his trained eyes already making educated guesses as to her measurements, “Figured as much, the mass-produced shit chafes to no end. C’mon, I’ll measure you. We can discuss the style and cut once I getyer numbers.”

He led her to a spacious backroom that looked to be part workspace, part storage, and part showroom for examples of the Tailor’s best work. With a simple gesture he directed her to a seemingly random spot on the floor, instructing “Now just stand wide an’...”

There was a barely-audible whisper, and Zelsys felt a feather-light touch around and along both her limbs and her body, just barely able to see the Tailor’s lightning-fast flourishing of his flexible measuring tool, its length snaking and whipping about as if it were sentient. A split-second later it was done, and he stood in nearly the same spot as before, clearly expecting her to have been unable to see him measure her.

“Done,” he said with some pride in his tone, visibly struggling to control his breathing as barely-visible wisps of Fog escaped his ears and nostrils. “Now, for the style - either you can give me all the specifications, or you can just pick one of the styles I can guarantee will work on your body type and we can make changes from there. Which’ll it be?”

She chose the latter.

Two-and-a-half dozen pairs of example underwear later, Zelsys had learned more about both modern and conservative types of undergarment than she’d ever bargained for, and she was just about ready to purge from her mind the mental image of high-waisted bloomers with any distraction. All those frills and lace must’ve been a nightmare to deal with.

Out in the front room of the store, Zefaris had already picked out and placed on the counter a few articles of clothing. There were several shirts and pairs of trousers, a wide-brimmed straw hat, as well as what looked to be a very simple white sundress. Between these clothes and the down first half of the payment for her custom order, she was down two Cold-iron Sovereigns and four silvers, for a total of one-hundred and twenty gelt.

The Tailor asked how they intended to carry all that clothing, but the sound vanished from his words when he saw the Tablet’s silhouette in Zel’s hand. He just quietly scooted away while the two women went through the ordeal of placing neatly folded clothes in Fog Storage while doing their best not to scrunch them up, to which the Fog vortex was no help at all.

“What next?” Zef asked as they stepped out of the store.

“I need to speak with the governor, that’s pretty much it,” she answered. “Any clue where his office might be?”

The markswoman gave it some thought whilst they idly walked down the promenade to put some distance between themselves and the obnoxious bickering of the bread line. Her eye locked to a signpost on the street corner, its numerous arrows pointing every which way like the branches of a sheet-metal tree. She approached it and walked halfway around it, looking it up and down before she pointed at one of the arrows.

“Looks like the town hall should be… Across the river and then just down the road?”

“Can’t hurt to try.”

Once they crossed the bridge and followed the road it was a part of, it didn’t take much looking to find the town hall - the building stood out like a sore thumb at the left side of the road, a towering edifice that tastelessly tried to copy classical architecture without its own sense of style.

It had statues and gargoyles, but they were all simplified and identical, even its shape was… Modular. Like the entire thing was designed from pre-built pieces. Even the buildings that surrounded it were like this, but to a lesser degree, their lack of opulence rendering the prefabricated architecture less obvious. Compared to the old buildings at the other side of the street, the town hall paradoxically didn’t look like part of the town at all.

“Why’s it look like that?” Zelsys thought aloud, craning her head to look up at the two-story monstrosity. A young Ikesian passerby took interest, letting her know that “It’s amazing, isn’t it? The old town hall was destroyed in a munitions explosion during the war, yet it only took a few months to rebuild good as new!”

“Yeah, good as new…” Zef trailed off wryly, turning her gaze from the abomination of architecture to one of the more noticeable buildings that stood across the street. Zelsys had noticed it herself and was also curious, but before the youngster moved on, she asked him one more question.

“I take it I can find the governor in there, yeah?”

“Second floor,” he nodded, only slowing down after he had already begun to walk away, half-yelling whilst he continued to walk away. “Office at the end of the hall with a big double door!”

Zelsys just nodded towards him in thanks, then chose to ignore her inevitable meeting with the governor for a little while longer in favor of the storefront that so strongly drew her companion’s cycloptic gaze.

A storefront unlike any other, advertised by an equally unique sign. It was a huge assembly of glowing quartz crystals, arrayed in a pattern that produced uniquely recognizable, bold lettering.

COLLIER’S EQUALIZERS

Below the name of the business, a tagline in the same lettering was painted.

“Enough to stop anything that moves.”

“I’ll wait for you in there, if you don’t mind,” Zef said, clearly suggesting that Zelsys just get the errand done and over with whilst she got caught up on how nice all the guns she couldn’t afford were.

Zelsys - somewhat begrudgingly - agreed on this point. She wanted her interaction with who she expected to be a corrupt bureaucrat to be as short as possible, and so quickly planted a kiss on the markswoman’s cheek before she walked into the town hall.