Work Text:
Nilafell yawned wide as she grumbled her way down the Sapphire Avenue Exchange, her bag of wares in tow. She was generally not fully awake at this hour on a normal day, but the bizarre circumstances that had led to her current venture had made her sleep the previous night extraordinarily unrestful.
She had been irritated when Zoe, the adventurer she had partnered with the past few years, had neither shown up for their usual meeting to discuss what new ventures to undertake, nor sent a note of any sort listing her requests. Earlier in their partnership, Nilafell would have been been concerned that some violent fate might have befallen her patron, but after years of hearing non-stop rumors and reports of the “Warrior of Light”’s many feats of derring-do, she was more inclined to blame the absence on mundane inconsideration. This was the foul mood she had found herself in when her night’s sleep was rudely interrupted by the tiny, fluttering, orange gremlin who had introduced themselves as Feo Ul.
Nilafell had long been a proponent of the view that a proper work day lasted 8 hours at most, began no earlier than 9 AM, and ended no later than 7 PM. She had spent much of her career in the Miner’s Guild advocating as such. So the wretched pixie invading her mind and turning her dreams into some sort of twisted workplace meeting had been outright insulting, especially when they told her that they had come at Zoe’s behest.
The Lalafellin guildswoman had listened to the rotten, self-important twerp blather on about metaphorical saplings and branches and whatnot with a mixture of confusion, irritation, and anxiety, and only after what felt like an eternity of back and forth with the annoying creature had she gotten them to come to the point and explain that Zoe had somehow found herself on an entirely different world, currently unable to return home, and with the gall to ask her to continue working as if nothing was wrong! Perfect! Wonderful! Exactly what she had wanted to hear in the middle of the night about her business partner and best friend! Especially the best friend who made her cackle uncontrollably with the slightest witty remarks or blush with the most mundane acts of kindness, in a completely platonic way that required no further acknowledgement or exploration on her part!
Fighting through Feo Ul’s endless tangents, passive-aggressive comments, and colorful imagery, the guildswoman had finally managed to shoo the pixie out of her mind (after extracting from them the list of requests that Zoe had for her that week), only for the morning calls of passing chocobos to stir her from her slumber. The sunlight streaming through her window had confirmed that her rest was over. The muscles of her face had scrunched in disgust, and she had been keenly aware that to an observer her expression looked like she had just swallowed an entire lemon.
As Nilafell finally made it past the throngs of high class shops and low class swindlers lining the path to the marketboard, she set her bag down and sighed, I am not getting paid enough for this.