When the Final Seal Breaks

4th Entry

We arrived to Liliales, the real name of the region formerly known as Easton, late this evening. We met Navar's wife in the city plaza, where she seemed to have been waiting for a long time. She had been sitting on a café patio. When the carriage pulled in, she quickly collected herself and walked to meet us, standing with the regal poise of someone who thinks they stand above others. Her attendant had quickly gathered up the cups on the table and brought them into café, before running to stand beside Navar's Wife, looking only slightly frazzled. I had been watching her more than Navar's wife, and she managed to finish the whole operation before Orleris helped me out of the carriage.

I never really thought too much about it in the past, but marriage existed in this world too. I guess when there are taxes, the government has to have some way to record couplings. I'll probably want to talk to Orleris about it later, because I think there could be some interesting insight to be found the way this world works by talking about the minutiae of our shared legal infrastructure to see how they differ.

She introduced herself as Lilium, which sent off my suspicion sensor. Was this just a trend in the east? I guess my name would fit in more than I thought.

It also seemed the style for clothes stretched across the world. Lilium was wearing three layers of loose cloaks, the innermost dangling all the way to the ground, the second decoratively cutting an angled line from her knees to her ankles, and the third hung off one shoulder at an opposing slant to the second. I noted her attendant's garb was a similar set of three, but the longest was only down to her knees, which was undoubtedly much easier to move around in.

When Lilium escorted us to the inn to rest, insisting our research can start after we take the evening to recover from the journey, I pulled Orleris aside to ask him about buying some local clothes. No one has said anything about the fact that my clothes are very obviously not from this world, but neither has anyone taken the time to give me anything... even to just sleep in. You can't really expect me to wear this any longer, right? Or, at least that's how I explained it to Orleris, who rather shyly admitted he hadn't thought about it.

He pulled off his cloak and held it up. Underneath he had another, shorter, lighter weight cloak. I laughed without thinking, remembering an old gif with a man running around with a bucket covering his head, only to have someone knock it off to reveal a second, smaller bucket still covering his head. I'm not sure what Orleris thought I was laughing at, but he gave the cloak a good hard shake out, before coming right up to me and fastening it around my shoulders. He said I can wear it tonight and we can arrange to have my own clothes cleaned. Its very weird, but apparently, this world has no premade clothing stores. We have to order clothes 'online' for me- that is, teleport an order to a craftsman, then receive the goods via return teleport.

Lilium was listening in on us and told her attendant to stop by to take my clothes to wash tonight. In fact, she just took them, so I'm very uncomfortably sitting here in my room wearing Orleris' outer cloak. I can't believe that all clothes in this world are bespoke, they really have nothing premade I could just wear to sleep?

One day I'll get to the bottom of this strange clothes culture.

Looking back on what I've written, I think I'm doing an OK job at recording what's going on now, which could be valuable for posterity I suppose, but after the broad strokes I wrote in the first entry, I've really struggled to try to write about what happened in the past, fifteen years ago. I spent so long keeping it bottled up inside me that the idea of letting it all out now to share with someone feels like... throwing up. Well, at least the idea of writing about it in any more detail makes me nauseous. And since I'm already extra uncomfortable with wearing Orleris' cloak, I think I'll refrain from reminiscing about it tonight.