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Mustadio looked down at himself, frowning. Skinny. Skinny, and hairless. Oh, there were some few hairs under his arms and a few more lower down, but they were downy and fair and only visible with several days' worth of sweat and grime on them-- as they were now. Thank the Gods bathing soap wasn't hard to come by in Goug.
He had, too, a little pot of what was locally called "Grissip," a mixture of citrus oils and salt used to scrub grease from skin. It worked wonders, turning a pair of blackened, calloused machinist's mitts into the smooth, if slightly pink, hands of a gentleman. The cost for even a few ounces of it was dear, however, as the citrons had to be imported by sailship.
Worth it though, he thought as he rubbed the gritty mixture between his fingers and between his palms. Worth every gil, as was the hair oil, the wooden comb, the nailbrush and the pumice stone, all purchased in the Lowtown that evening. Ramza had said they must depart on the first boat to Warjilis, but that would not be until morning. Mustadio resolved that by the time he stepped off that boat and into Lionel, he would be a new man.
He glanced down at himself again. Perhaps the same man, but a much cleaner and more presentable one, at least. And when he saw her again...
There hadn't been much time to think of anything but staying alive while they'd fought off Ludovich's men atop Zaland's walls. But later, when they'd ducked into cover to catch their breath, he had gotten his first glimpse of her: tall, solidly built, with a strong chin and a mouth that, though serious then, was bracketed by laugh lines. Both her skin and her thick blond hair had seen the sun-- no delicate parasol had ever been clutched in those strong hands-- and she wore breeches instead of skirts and seemed totally unbothered by this lack of modesty.
Ser Agrias Oaks of the Lionsguard had looked him up and down, quirked an eyebrow, and dismissed him, turning her attention elsewhere. Mustadio had fallen in love with her at once.
He squinted at the temperature gauge on the tall copper tank before him, then turned the spigot just below it. Hot water erupted from the spout with a grumble and a glug into the dented tin bathtub; a cloud of steam rose up as well, filling the tiny washroom with the faint smell of rotten eggs.
That was sulfur, from the geothermal vents far beneath the city. The water that spouted from them wasn't fit to bathe in, nor to drink: too full of metals and minerals that would doom any who drank it to a slow death from poisoning. That was if he could even keep the pipes clear of scale and residue long enough to fill a glass.
But those boiling pools emitted heat, and heat was energy. Even toxic steam could spin a turbine, and that movement powered many of the machines down in the mines as well as all the lights in the city. Some of that energy could be diverted to heat homes, and some could even be used to boil clean water...
Ramza had very politely interrupted Mustadio's explanation at that point to ask him to shut the door so he might have some privacy in the tub.
Hot water on demand had been by far the most popular novelty of the evening, even more so than the magic lantern his father had repaired to show a collection of hand-painted slides, or the little self-winding clocks crowding every windowsill and bookshelf, announcing the start of each hour with a cacophony of bells and chimes and chirps. Ramza had grinned and run his fingers through his hair as if anxious at how greasy it'd become; Gregory, dragoon's helmet under his arm, had exclaimed how glad he was to see a real bathtub again and had practically started stripping down in the hallway.
The washroom could hold two people if one of them moved the collection of empty soap bottles off of the bench, but as the tub could only fit one they each had to wait their turn-- and then some, to allow the water tank time to fill and heat again. There'd been a bit of good-natured debate about which of them was most in need of a wash (after Gregory, who'd gone in before even stopping for dinner). Mustadio had encouraged his guests to go first, then snuck off to the lowtown, thinking of Ser Agrias.
Now, as he sat on the bench and breathed in the steam, he thought of his mother.
Few houses in Goug had private baths. It was expensive to source all the copper and other parts and fittings needed, expensive to hire someone who had the knowledge of putting such things together, and, in the most densely populated city in Lionel, expensive to dedicate an entire space to bathing when it was far cheaper to use one of the shared facilities that charged a few gil per tub, even if you walked up the hill to one of the nicer ones. And the Bunansas were machinists: they couldn't get much done if they were always fussing about a little dirt.
The chiming clocks had been made by Besrudio, who had the mind for creating such mechanisms and the slender, nimble fingers to build them. Mustadio's pistol, and the pair on the wall above his worktable, had been made by his mother. She had been the one to teach him to shoot, too, and to maintain and repair any of the side-arms and even the larger weapons that came into their shop. There were a great deal of them, for Anna Highwind-- she had kept her maiden name so that she would not have to be called 'Anna Bunansa'-- was known as both a skilled gunsmith and a crack shot.
She had been a vibrant woman, colorful in both dress and manner, who'd kept the wild curls of her hair tied back with a bright yellow bandanna and had two chipped teeth from the fistfight she'd gotten into (and won) on the day she and Besrudio had first met. Before becoming a machinist she'd worked in the Firebreak mines near Balias Tor, starting as a girl of only nine and working her way to Forewoman. She was short-statured and feisty, well suited to the job, but had gladly given it up to join Besrudio in his large, airy workshop.
Thus Mustadio had known her: rough hands, white smile, with a quick temper and a laugh like a rock tumbler that always ended in a hacking cough. This she attributed to 'filthy living,' which Mustadio had assumed meant the years of breathing in the fen-fogs Goug was famous for until he'd noticed one day that she winked at Besrudio each time she said it. Sun-baked and olive-skinned, she didn't blush as brightly as Besrudio did.
As Mustadio reached his teens, Anna's breath began to become easy to lose and difficult to find again. That was how she explained it to him as she sat beside the forge, pumping the bellows with one foot while he pushed slugs of steel into the fire. When they softened it was Mustadio who hammered them out for her, and soon after that he learned to work with his own foot on the bellows as she watched him from her chair by the window. Through that spring and summer she lost weight from her body and color from her face, and though she still laughed and swore and shouted instructions, she rarely did it from anywhere but that chair.
That was when his father decided to install the private bath-- not for the luxury of hot water, but for the cleansing effect he hoped the steam would have on Anna's lungs. Plenty of folk swore by medicinal steam treatments, whether administered by chemists or simply breathed from a teapot, and those, when she'd been well enough to take them, had eased her a little. More steam, then, could only do better, and the chemists treating her agreed. Clean water, potent herbs, and twice-daily treatments would chase the cough from Anna's lungs for good.
Mustadio scrubbed his fingernails pink, fought the wooden comb through his hair, carefully wiped the back of his neck and behind his ears with a rag and used the backs of his hands to wipe his face. Tears were cleansing too, he thought, especially for someone with fair eyelashes like his. And if he emerged from the bath with eyes and nose pink from weeping, he would just say that he'd been very thorough in scrubbing the coal dust from his face, and only his father would know he lied.
It was miles and days before they saw Ser Agrias again, and by that time they were all as filthy again as if they'd never seen the tub at all-- including Agrias herself, though Mustadio thought that with sweat on her brow and wild strands of hair whipping in the wind through the swale she was more beautiful than ever.
Focused on trying to reach the Princess before she was whisked off to the Twelve knew where, Agrias took small notice of the skinny young machinist who was still tagging along with them. Perhaps it was for the better: there were forces at play far greater than anything even someone who'd been in the depths of the Gougish mines had ever encountered, and Mustadio feared he'd have little to contribute to a conversation that wasn't about keeping gunpowder dry in the rain.
At the gates of Lionel, Mustadio saw Agrias stagger with the effort of parrying a blow just as an archer aimed an arrow at her heart. Mustadio had dropped both the archer and the Gryphon knight before he'd even realized his gun was in his hand, and as he rushed to help Agrias to her feet, she'd grinned at him and said, "That contraption of yours is proving bloody useful!"
An airship could not have lifted him higher. He chambered another round.