Current mood:	cheerful
Entry tags:	prompts, writing

tiny wee stories with all manner of dubious qualities
In this post I promised I would write to prompt, although I'm not sure that this was really intended as a prompt.  Anyway, this one is for diatryma .




The hotel was as excessive as Hemiclotes had promised, but Theandra still thought the staff might object to fishing an escaped mouse out from under the sink, which was why she was crouched on her knees peering into the little space between the bottom of the cabinet and the floor in the increasingly vain hope that it might reappear.  If nothing else, they would certainly remember her, which would be exceptionally counterproductive.  But there was still no sign of the damn thing.

She sighed, getting to her feet at last.  The crick in her neck protested mightily, which wasn't surprising; falling asleep on the train always meant she'd pay for it later.  At least Hemiclotes was paying for the hotel and its overstuffed pillows. 

"Sorry, no dice," she said aloud, turning back into the main room.  She got no answer, but then, she had expected none; Gosphilion was probably asleep, curled up in the pillowcase inside her backpack, and the mouse was unlikely to talk to her in any case, especially not if it'd divined her purpose in bringing it along.  Mice were dull that way, which was why she usually fed them to Gosphilion; besides, they were cheap, and while she wasn't going to stint on him, she was still running on a student budget most of the time, and hamsters weren't quite so cheap.  That dreadful woman Ysildre at the school kept giving her dirty looks for it, but she really couldn't get too distressed by what Ysildre thought of her.

She should probably put the sword somewhere a little less obvious, she thought, looking at it lying on the bed with some unease.  The blade looked horrifically sharp against the dull bronze of the brocaded quilt, and the darkened metal of the hilt gleamed against the silly pillows, about as sinister as she'd ever seen it here in this overpriced room.  It wasn't really likely that anyone would try to bother her, but just in case she caught it up by the hilt, trying not to be gingerly with it, which she imagined would've been hard enough even if she hadn't known its purpose.  She wished she could just toss it under the bed and forget about it like she'd got used to doing staying in petty bed and breakfasts on the way, but like most fancy hotels there was boarding to prevent anything getting lost.  How useful, she thought irritably, and finally settled for putting it in one of the big flat drawers in the freestanding wardrobe. 

That dealt with, she turned to take better stock of the room, which really was quite nice, inconvenient bed or not.  She could get used to this, she thought, and then, abruptly wishing she hadn't, she looked away.

The big window looked out on the street below - something boring and downtowny, although with enough of a slope to make the few drivers nervous.  More importantly, it faced the hotel opposite, a blunt-looking yellowish building with little designs of herons and reeds cut into the stone over the windows. 

And if their source was reliable, Dariat would be there.