Unsanitary

Unsanitary

My name is Osef. I am a barista in one of the many cafés that our grand city has to offer. I work at Nut Cakes; I know it is not the best name but I am not the owner, just an employee and it is true that we do make a lot of our pastries with a variety of nuts. Nut Cakes is located on a busy street, with many travelers and regulars who frequent the cafés for family, business, or personal outings. Obviously, we are frequented by adventurers as well, although usually after they have had a chance to clean themselves from whatever chaotic insanity they had been involved in. You must understand, adventurers, although typically rich, muscular, intelligent, and often well-traveled, are not sane. Who, I ask you, in their right mind would hear about a vampire’s mansion and think “yeah that is where I want to spend my weekend?”

I digress though. I had come into work that afternoon, relieving Kema, who I might add said nothing about our employer, Vaspute, having a meeting with some adventurers earlier that day. There was an immediate lunch rush but that is typical. We had a lot of guards, even some legionaries, and several clerks from the dock warehouses, I am pretty sure we even got a few nobles down from the palace. I like the lunch rush. It helps the time at work speed by so that one minute I am scurrying between the customers and Vaspute, who is cooking in the back, and the next minute we are closing the shop. Unfortunately, today would not run along the simple, smooth course it so frequently does.

I could tell that the group that stepped inside our quaint little café was a band of adventurers, I didn’t need to see the weapons and armor to recognize that. All I had to do was take a deep breath and the smell of sewage and blood wafted from them. It took all I had not to puke. I remember glancing at the street to see if other cafés were still open; if they were closing then we could close. They were not, so of course, we could not. I tried to smile as the four approached; one a halfwit brute with an axe, the other’s robes told me the prissy individual was a mage, the attire and quarterstaff of the silent third spoke to me of a monk, and then there was the obvious cleric, with their fanatical advertisement of some foreign deity in the charm around their neck. They briskly informed me that they were here to see Vaspute, which I, of course, thought was a load of shit given that Vaspute didn’t often hire the dumb and the restless for work. The cleric individual saw, or magically probed me to discover, that I had my doubts about their connection to my employer and, as though to reassure me, placed a severed monster’s arm on the counter.

I am not joking when I say I almost lost my lunch and my mind. I knew though that this group of crazies would mock me if I became flustered, so I counted back from ten in my head and tried not to stare at the long-gnarled claws, five in all. The hand looked almost human, and the flesh was putrid. There was an even more pungent odor that arose from the blackened blood where the limb had been severed. It was just sitting there on the polished wooden counter, the counter that I scrubbed, that I cleaned so that customers could eat their pastries right off the surface if they wanted to. How was I going to clean this? I glared up at the smug cleric as the anger easily drowned out my nauseated stomach. “VASPUTE!”

I zoned out most of the following conversation between my employer and these lunatics, just staring at the damned hand and knowing that the health and food board would want to hear about this. So, now you are, and I hope you will do something with great urgency, we must ban adventurers from our establishments!