Hunting for Poppy

Previously on Saga of the Jewels…

The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. He discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the FIRE RUBY. Ryn sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, and VISH the poppy-seed-addicted bounty hunter. Together the companions decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. They have thus far succeeded in retrieving the Fire Ruby, borne by Ryn, and the Lightning Crystal, borne by Nuthea. They have now come to the land of FARR where they intend to compete in a hand-to-hand fighting tournament in order to attempt to win its prize, the EARTH EMERALD…

EPISODE THIRTY-SIX: HUNTING FOR POPPY

One day before the tournament.

Vish was pissed off.

As he stalked the stone-paved streets of some lower level of this wretched Farrian city, weaving in and out of the milling crowds, their inane chatter filling his ears, the hot noonday sun beating down on him, his limbs ached with longing and his heart was full of craving.

Damn the old man, he thought to himself. Damn the boy for having mercy on me and allowing me to live when they defeated me outside Nont. Damn the poppy. I want the poppy. Damn Veln for betraying me. Damn them all to whatever hells may or may not exist.

Another wave of craving hit him, right in his guts and loins, and he visualised himself taking a small black poppy seed and placing it into his mouth. Just as he had done a thousand times that day already, he imagined it coming to rest on his tongue, recalled its intense, sweet taste permeating his mouth. He imagined swallowing it, and the torrents of pleasure that would surge through his body as a result.

But no true taste, no true pleasure came–only a shadow and an echo of past tastes and pleasures that left him hollow and wanting real poppy and in need of replaying the whole routine in his mind again.

He bumped into someone, banging his face right into them.

“Hey, watch where you’re going!” said the big brutish man with a bush of beard. Probably Dokanese.

“I apologise,” said Vish, holding up his hands, not meaning it at all but wanting to move this latest irritant along as quickly as possible. “My mind was elsewhere.” That much was true at least.

The man’s fat face softened, but only a little. “Well, be more careful next time, Aibarian.” Apparently the man was well-travelled enough to judge Vish’s nationality just from the small strip of skin visible from within his head covering. Perhaps by his style of dress too. The man walked off, leaving the Shadowfinger to his flashbacks and his poppy cravings.

He walked on, and another craving-wave rolled through him.

Actually, Vish reflected, he knew that at least one hell did exist. He knew it existed because he was experiencing it now.

For some stupid reason he had agreed with the old man to space out his poppy hits, which meant that he couldn’t have one today.

In an effort to focus on something other than his imagining taking poppy again, he tried to recall the conversation he had with him earlier that day.

“Now master Vish,” the old man Cid had said to him at his door when the Shadowfinger had gone to see him to request some more poppy earlier that morning, “you know we agreed that you would start spacing out your hits and wait a bit longer until the next one.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Vish said. “I want one now.”

“But you agreed to this.”

Why had he agreed to it? He couldn’t even remember any more.

“Maybe I did,” he said “but I’ve changed my mind. Give it to me now.”

“Vish, you can’t just go back on your agreement like that so easily. You know, some poppyheads give up poppy all in one go, just stopping ‘cold chocobo’, and never go back. If the physical withdrawal symptoms can be managed safely, that is actually the best way to do it.”

“What?!” Now the old man wasn’t just talking about spacing out the hits; now he was talking about stopping them altogether! “There is no way that I would ever do that.”

“It might be the better way for you to do it. Ask the One. Ask the One to help you, to relieve you. He will.”

“I don’t believe in your ‘One’, old man.”

“Just try it. He believes in you.”

That had really pissed Vish off. “Don’t give me that poodoo! Just give me my poppy, old man! I don’t believe in your ‘One’! He’s not real! What has he ever done for me? Where was he when my mother threw me out on the streets of Saudran to fend for myself? Where was he when I was begging and stealing and fighting among the street rats? Where was he when I was doing all the terrible things that I’ve done just to stay alive, and then to get my next poppy hit?”

The old man, to his credit, had at least gone quiet for a moment at that, and bowed his head slightly in sympathy.

“I do not have an easy answer for you,” Cid said. “All I can offer you is that I believe he saw those things happen, and that he felt them with you, that they grieved him, and that he has given you a way out of that life, now.”

Vish considered the old man’s words for a moment. There was a certain…appeal to them. But they just seemed unreal to him. They seemed like an invented fantasy. Reality was much crueller.

“I want my poppy, old man. Give it to me. Now.”

Cid sighed. “No. You may be able to make your own choices, but so am I, and the poppy belongs to me. I am choosing not to give it to you now, and I’m sorry, but that’s the end of the matter. You need to begin to learn that you can survive, and even begin to experience some peace and enjoyment, without it. One week. That is my concession. You can have some more poppy seed in one week.”

The old man closed the door in Vish’s face.

Vish seethed, fury filling fibre of his body, along with the longing for the poppy, in fact only another expression of it. For a moment he considered bashing down the door, overpowering the old man, slitting his throat, and then stealing his whole poppy supply and running away from the group.

And he had almost done it.

But he hadn’t.

Why didn’t I do it? he thought now as he traipsed the cobbled streets of Shun Pei. He should have just done it!

But he hadn’t done it, he discovered, because somewhere, in a miniscule corner of his darkened mind, a tiny little shred of hope had appeared. The smallest sliver of a ray of hope had formed; hope that he might actually be able to come off the poppy one day and be freed of his all-consuming constant desperate craving for it.

Damn the old man for planting that hope! And damn me for not being able to completely let go of it!

Part of him, somewhere, remembered what it was like not to know the poppy, not to be consumed by the longing for the poppy. Part of him, somewhere, remembered what it was like to experience the joys of life unadulterated by craving and poppy. The memories of happiness were few and far between, but they were there: The play of warm sunlight on the back of his uncovered neck. The gentle morning breeze tickling his skin. Laughter, the company of friends. The touch and kiss of Eflana, his consort when he has been working for Veln. Maybe he could get his enjoyment of all of those things back?

Vish stopped in his tracks.

Instinctively, his feet had led him to a shopfront.

More of a stall, really. The doors of a battered wooden shed opened right onto the dusty street of this level of the city. In the opening they created stood a rickety table with all different sorts of herbs, roots, and plants arrayed on it, which hung from the doors as well. Crushed up powders in jars. Different coloured liquids in stoppered-up bottles. The pale purple flowers of some exotic plant, plucked and laid out in little earthenware bowls.

Behind the table hunched a withered old crone with a hump-back and a crooked nose, dressed in the brown robes that seemed to be worn by most of the Farrians on this level.

“Medicines!” the woman screeched when she saw Vish had stopped, to clarify what exactly it was that was arrayed before him. “Get your medicines!”

When Vish approached her she said “Looking for something in particular, good sir? There a specific ailment that’s troubling you?”

Vish chose his words carefully. As far as he knew, poppy was outlawed in almost every single nation of Mid, including Farr, because of how it tended to make people addicted to it and ruin their lives, not to mention the side effects of making one particularly strong and agile during a hit.

“Do you have anything for a…headache?” he said slowly.

“Headache?!” said the woman. “Why, you need crushed minofin root, of course! You run out? Only one gold piece for a jar! Eat a spoonful every hour till you feel better, which will be soon!”

Vish eyed the small jar of yellow powder that the woman held up to him and shook so that it danced around in a cloud. He was not impressed. He was not convinced that the powder would have any kind of effect on anyone, let alone on him.

“That’s not what I’m looking for,” he said. “Do you have anything…… stronger?” He pulled down the front of his face-scarf down a little, just enough to expose some of his blackened mouth.

The woman narrowed her eyes at him as she regarded him over her crooked nose.

“I am sure I have no idea what you mean,” she said quietly.

Damn, Vish thought and tugged the scarf back up

He turned away from the stall and almost walked into a large Farrian man almost as rotund as he was tall. Again.

The man he had bumped into earlier.

“I know just what you mean,” said the man in a gruff voice. His dark hair was thick on top and he had an untidy beard which covered his mouth, both of which were unusual for Farrians. Were it not for his narrow eyes it would have been hard to place him as Farrian at all.

“Oh?” said Vish, his curiosity piqued. The man had followed him for some reason. Perhaps he had known him for a poppyhead somehow.

“Yeah,” said the man. “Come with me. But keep your distance.”

The man ambled off and Vish waited for a few breaths, starting to tremble slightly at the expectation of possibly being about to get his hands on some poppy. Then he took one last look at the crone in the shopfront, who scowled at him, and followed after the man.

He kept about ten paces behind the man as he made his way past other citizens of Shun Pei, past other stalls, before finally turning off the main thoroughfare and slipping down an alleyway between two particularly large earthen buildings.

It was secluded in the alleyway, and dim, the buildings on either side blocking out lots of light. The perfect place for a poppy transaction.

Vish strode into the alley calmly.

Sure enough, when he got about half way down it, the big Farrian stopped and turned round, and when Vish reached him he said, “So you want to buy some poppy?”

“Yes!” Eagerness made the words trip quickly off Vish’s tongue behind his face scarf. “How much?”

“How much you willing to pay?” said the man.

Foolish, Vish scolded himself. I should have just offered a price. “How much poppy do you have?”

The man held up a hand, a little dark ball pinched between his thumb and forefinger visible even in the dimness of the alley, and Vish’s mouth began to water.

“One seed. For you…” The man hesitated, licking his lips. “...fifty gold pieces.”

“Fine.” Vish was pretty sure he was being ripped off, despite not normally having to buy poppy, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t like it was his money anyway. He just wanted to get his hands on the poppy as quickly as possible.

He reached into the folds of his black tunic and drew out the common purse of the traveling party, which he had stolen before he had come out on this walk after some fool had left it out in the dining area of the manse.

When the man took the coins and saw how many more Vish had in the purse, his eyes bulged.

Ah, Vish thought.

“Actually, friend,” said the man, “you know what? I’m thinking that maybe you don’t need the poppy after all. Maybe we keep the poppy, and we also take that gold off your hands.”

“‘We’?” said Vish.

The big man’s pupils reached beyond the Shadowfinger.

Vish turned. On cue, two more men made their way down the alleyway towards him, each of them with drawn straight swords, in the Farrian style. No doubt that first man behind Vish had a weapon stashed somewhere as well.

“I am thinking you will hand over that money now, friend,” said the first man from behind him, and a point pricked Vish’s back, “and we may think about letting you live. Or you can put up a struggle and we can kill you and take it anyway. I would not recommend it though. You are outnumbered, three to one, and you have nowhere to run.”

Vish sighed. He had wondered earlier if something like this was going to happen today.

He reached for his own sword on his back.