life savers (the candy, not you)
moze & sampo.
There's an almost imperceptibly high-pitched, creaky sort of faint whine Sampo looses when he sees the clump of hair that falls from the man's cruel grip to the ground. If Sampo ever happens to bald early, this man will surely be to blame.
But okay, he'll bite. Maybe the man has a point. He turns to look at the fallen beam he'd supposedly been rescued from and blanches - oh. Oh! Ooooooh.
Wow!
He could actually have died just now, ha ha ha! Holy cannoli, was that ever close!!
"Sorry, sorry friend! I don't know what came over me just now…" Hands clasp together, wring together. "My priorities got all topsy turvy for a sec there, eheh..."
A small chortle accompanies the stranger's remark. Confirmation - no, he sure ain't no mere scavenger. But of course, it would be rude of Sampo not to elaborate.
"''Course not! The name's Sampo Koski," he falls into a bow, rising with his trademark flourish. "Ancient artifact acquisitions expert extraordinaire, star-traveling merchant who wants nothing better than for his customers to leave satisfied and smiling, one and all!"
Ta-da! He's been working on his new intro. How's that, mister? He claps Moze on the shoulder a couple of times.
"Anyway, Sampo owes ya one, he does, so don’t hesitate to call on your pal if ever you're ever in a bind, all righty??" He straightens then, a light in jade eyes like he's just remembered the most obvious thing ever:
"Hey, well hold on now, you're no mere scavenger yourself, are ya? And foreign to boot, if Sampo had to bet his bottom dollar… What brings you out here into the cold?"
Surely the man is not… gasp…
Competition…?!?
He makes use of far too many words to say far too little. Sampo Koski, by his own account, is a curator of things given value because they have been forgotten. The rest of what he says—and there's a lot of it—is simply noise, only made irritating by the hand on his shoulder.
"We are not friends. This is the first time we've met." Friends—Moze can't even say he has any. Allies, yes. Contacts, certainly. But friends? ...How ridiculous. His duties have never demanded more of him, and he isn't particularly keen on changing that. He is but the General's blade, oft pointed where she directs, and deflected when it angles itself in reverse. If there is anything he needs both now and in the future, it's a target. Nothing more.
"...And I am only a scavenger as far as fuel is concerned. In its absence, anything combustible."
Moze walks past him to take a closer look at the beam, stepping on the discarded locks of hair as he does so. No foul play from what he can see, which only makes this factory feel even more desolate. If there's anything of use still remaining within these walls, it would only be because nature itself had made traps out of human ingenuity left abandoned.
He doesn't know enough about Belobog's infrastructure or technology to be able to tell just what's flammable and what isn't. If anything, everything he's seen thus far has just looked like junk. Very, very old junk. He'd almost argue everything here was combustible if it wasn't for the fact that everything was also very, very frozen... which, for better or for worse, actually makes saving Sampo Koski's life to be a convenient decision.
"Point me to anything here that fits. You can keep whatever artifacts you find otherwise."










