[Southeast] It was like this when we got here!

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"I do appreciate the virtues of the weapon." Shi-Oda argued/rambled as he and Kira stepped off of an unhappily chugging steam boat onto an old, wooden dock. "The power and control offered by a warhammer can't be doubted - but really, I'll go with a sword every time. For one, the style inherent to the weapon cannot be discounted. Secondly, I'd rather chop something up than knock it away, you know?" Like he wasn't preaching to the very Choir of Sword Enthusiasts, but still; somebody had to fill the silence. Shiyo paused briefly to consider his next point, his heavy boots coming to a temporary stop on the ancient, treated wood, and it creaked briefly in complaint. 

"I think I'll go ahead and count style as the third selling point, just for the simple sake that the iconography is amazing." Shi-Oda added with a resolute nod. 

They'd stopped in Varsi, on their ongoing quest to locate - and dismante - the Cult known as the Followers of the Giving Hand. Not that Shi-Oda had many ideas how to dismantle a cult (without killing a whole lot of people) or even how to actually find one if it wasn't trying to actively recruit him. He just kind of hoped that Kira had a plan, because she was the Solar and had presumably been filled in on some details of this quest during her furtive talks with Mokoto back in the sunken temple. Assuming much, perhaps, but still. Varsi was as good a place to start as any.

Established in the Shogunate era as a launching point for expeditions into Denandsor, Varsi had enjoyed moderate prosperity as a way to get to more interesting/useful places. Travellers from the south could charter ships to finish their journies to Nexus, or establish passage to Lookshy. People from Lookshy and Nexus with deathwishes could head farther south from Varsi if they so desired. The people who had initially settled Varsi had largely been adventurers and the like, who'd decided that life outside of Denandsor was preferable to dying as a horrible, frothing mad wreck of a person inside the First Age city and as such, it was slightly eccentric in culture. The people of Varsi always seemed to be going or thinking of someplace else - even those who were born in, and would die, within the walls of the city often spoke of their intentions to travel elsewhere when the conditions were right.

The city, in Shi-Oda's opinion, cast as handsome a profile as one could expect from a city placed on the ground; a custom that he still considered to be slightly foolish, although not so much odd anymore. Wooden stockades of varying heights - none of them below twenty feet tall and likely carved whole from the surrounding trees - defined the borders of the modest city, adorned with charms and markings warding off evil spirits and enemies alike. The wood itself was positively ancient, likely preserved against the ravages of time and weather by some chemical process. Inside the city itself, the remains of stone towers and buildings peered over the stockades like curious neighbors. Where they had been damaged or fallen into disrepair, the holes had been patched by brightly-coloured wood or canvas. As Varsi was located somewhere between jungle and swamp, it could be presumed that stone was hard to come by - rope and wood was disgustingly plentiful.

Most of the buildings in Varsi were only half that. Tents, brightly coloured and adorned with insignias and crests denoting societal rank or purpose, had been used to 'complete' the remains of ancient Shogunate stone buildings. Some had simply been erected as standalone domiciles, with stone or wooden walls added to them to provide structure or function. Varsi was, it seemed, a city of color and flair; eye-straining shades of red and yellow, blue and white, golden lines with silver base, in every direction. A nomadic city that never moved, filled with a bustling population moving here and there about their daily tasks and errands, entering and leaving the thousands of tents and pavilions or even one of the scattered stone towers. Shi-Oda quietly decided that he liked Varsi.

"Hungry?" Shiyo asked his companion with a faint smile, adjusting his heavy metal pauldron. No matter how investigationwas supposed to go, there was little doubt in his mind that it could be done better with a full stomach.