Roman stood completely still near the door and said nothing.

The old man asked again, his voice carrying the patient, unhurried tone of someone who had spent a long time waiting for things and had gotten comfortable with it.

"Nesari? Did you bring the Blossoming Grass?"

Roman looked around the room properly for the first time since he had entered.

It was not a large space, but it was packed. A long wooden table ran along the far wall and covered almost the entire length of it, and on that table sat more bottles, pots, and mixing vessels than Roman had ever seen gathered in one place outside of a proper Alchemist workshop.

Some of the bottles were sealed and labelled in handwriting too small to read from where he stood. Others were open, and from those open ones came a smell that Roman could not fully describe, something between old wood and dried plants and something sharper underneath it all that sat at the back of his throat.

The walls had shelves, and the shelves had more of the same. Materials he recognised and many he did not, all arranged with the kind of organisation that only made sense to the person who had put it there.

The old man was still waiting, and Roman soon cleared his throat quietly.

"This is not Nesari," he said. "But I am sorry, I am not going to tell you my name."

The old man went still.

Not startled. Just still, in the way of someone recalibrating.

He was quiet for a moment, and Roman looked at his face properly and noticed what he had not caught in the dim light of the entrance. The old man’s eyes were open, but they were not focused on anything. They moved slightly, the small unconscious movement of eyes that had long since stopped being used for seeing.

He was blind...!

Roman soon got to realise that, and he reacted with a sharp glare.

"Why will you not tell me your name?" The old man asked.

Roman thought about it honestly.

"I am not entirely sure," he said. "Maybe I just do not want it used against me."

The old man was quiet again.

Then he said, "Is it because you are being chased?"

At that point, the room felt smaller suddenly.

Roman did not answer immediately, and the old man did not push it, and the silence between the question and the response stretched just long enough to be its own kind of answer.

"How did you know that?" Roman asked.

"The way you came through that door," the old man said simply. "The tempo of it. Someone moving at that pace and stopping that quickly is not someone who chose this place. They were pushed into it." He shifted his weight slightly on the floor. "I knew it was not Nesari from the first step. She moves differently. But she is the only one who comes here, so I called her name anyway."

Roman nodded slowly, even though the man could not see it.

"Is she your daughter?" Roman asked.

The old man shook his head once.

"My granddaughter."

Roman leaned his back against the wall beside the door and looked at the cluttered table again.

"The Blossoming Grass," he said. "What is it?"

The old man’s expression shifted slightly. Not closed off exactly, but careful.

"The last ingredient I need," he said. "For the last mixture I intend to make. After that, I am done. I will retire."

"What does the mixture do?" Roman nodded and asked. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

The old man said nothing for a long moment. His hands, which had been resting on his knees, moved slightly, fingers adjusting against each other.

"That is not something I have told anyone," he said finally.

Roman looked at him. He could tell from the way the man had said it that pressing directly was not going to get anywhere useful.

"What would it take for you to tell me?"

It hadn’t taken long before Roman asked that, because at that point, he really wanted to know what the Blossoming Grass and his last mixture was all about.

The old man turned his head toward the sound of Roman’s voice with the practiced accuracy of someone who had been navigating by sound for a very long time.

He was quiet for a while. Long enough that Roman started to think the conversation had reached its natural end.

"Find my granddaughter," the man suddenly said.

Roman had to blink a couple times.

"Find her?"

"She went out since last night to get the Blossoming Grass. She has not returned. She knows this city well enough, but she does not always know when to be careful, and today is not a normal day in Strength City." He paused.

"If you find her and bring her back safely, I will tell you what you want to know."

Roman looked at the door.

Outside that door was a city full of security personnel who were actively looking for him and would have his description circulating by now.

"What does she look like?" He still asked.

The old man was quiet for a moment in a way that felt different from the other silences.

"I have not seen her since she was born," he said. "I was already blind by then."

Roman did not say anything to that, including wondering why a blind man had been in the Badlands for so many years.

He overlooked it.

"What I know," the old man continued, "is that she carries a black bag wherever she goes. And she walks attentively. The kind of walk where you can tell that the person is aware of everything around them even when they appear relaxed. That is the only detail I can give you."

Roman stood at the door for a moment with his hand near the handle.

A black bag. An attentive walk. Somewhere in a city that was currently looking for him.

He thought about the old man’s mixture and what it might be capable of, and whatever it was, the fact that this man had spent years working toward it and had never told a single person what it did was reason enough to want to know.

He thought about Arnold as well, somewhere on the other side of the city, hopefully still breathing.

He exhaled slowly.

"Alright," he said.

"You will do it?" The old man asked.

"I will try," Roman said. "No promises."

"I did not ask for promises," the old man said. "Just try."

Roman gave the room one last look, the bottles and the pots and the strange layered smell of years of work, and then he opened the door and stepped back out into the street.

The striking air hit him and he stood on the doorstep for a second, looking left and right.

No guards visible.

At least not immediately.

He went left, because left was the direction he had not come from, and he started walking with his head down and his eyes moving, looking for a girl with a black bag and an attentive walk in a city that was already having a complicated morning.