The location where Miri and Anne were supposed to drop off the rune appeared to be some sort of antique shop. Miri could tell because all the furnishings of the shop seemed…older in a sense, way more ancient than the surrounding buildings, which were already pretty old by her standards.
The two women entered the shop and were greeted with an impressive sight. From the looks of it, the interior looked more like a museum than a shop—a museum of runes coming in all shapes and sizes, all displayed in various glass cases. Accompanying the runes were various other decorative items—things such as skulls of various small animals, rugs made of different animal skins, and fans made of large, colorful feathers.
Additionally, roosting at a branch growing out a wooden support pillar…was a raven—an actual living, breathing raven. As the mage and cleric walked across the shop, the black-feathered bird seemed to have its eyes fixed on them, almost like some sort of sentry.
“Hello, Miri and Anne. I’ve been expecting you.” A woman’s voice called out to them from out of nowhere—one with a low, sultry, mystical tone.
Miri and Anne turned around to see where that voice came from—a middle-aged woman, roughly in her mid-forties. She had dark-brown skin, wore a red headwrap and a pair of golden hooped earrings, and donned a robe with a mixture of orange and green fabric woven into a decorative pattern. But perhaps the most distinctive trait about her was her eyes—pale white, without any irises. She was also holding onto some kind of cane on her hand, lightly tapping the path in front of her before walking forward and arriving at the wooden counter of the shop.
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Was…was this woman actually blind? All the indications seemed to point to that conclusion.
Miri raised an eyebrow as she gazed at her. “How do you know our names?”
“Oh, it’s just a little bit of divination magic, that’s all,” the woman answered with a pleasant smile, tapping on a glowing rune on her neck that she wore around like a necklace.
“Woah, is that a Rank 5 Oracle Vision rune?” Anne said, gazing at the woman’s runic necklace with gleaming eyes of amazement. “I heard those are incredibly rare and valuable. Plus, they require an exceptionally high Spirit affinity to be wielded.”
“When you’ve been in the field of rune-hunting for as long as I have, you’ll occasionally come across remarkable treasures such as these,” the woman said. “The name’s Morgan Laveau, but everyone calls me Madame Laveau. And I run this humble rune shop, Laveau’s Runes and Wares.”
“Oracle Vision, huh?” Miri said. While she did remember a spell like that existing in game, it was not in the form of a usable rune for the player. That just goes to show how much deeper this world actually was, to the point where even the game version was lacking in conveying. “So does it allow you to see everything in the future, as far as you want?”
“No, not everything. Just some random visions here and there, no further than a couple of minutes ahead,” Madame Laveau explained. “It allows me to detect some threats but not all of them. Even so, it’s still plenty helpful for a blind woman like me who needs to keep a shop free from the occasional thievery. And whatever threats my vision failed to pick up, Noir is usually enough to handle the rest.” As she mentioned the name “Noir”, the raven in the shop let out a caw—indicating that it’s probably that bird’s name. “Now, if my visions are correct, you two seem to have a rune for me. How about we have a look at it?”
