starter for @witchofwarmth !
Quifrey--for that is what the boy is called now--is not a fan of the Market Plaza. There’s a lot of... people. It’s noisy and it even gets crowded around lunch time. He’s a little lost and aimless without Beldarut to hide behind, but his master has been busier lately and, Quifrey suspects, trying to finagle excuses for Quifrey to try going out on his own anyway.
Quifrey resents it and doesn’t at the same time.
He just sort of drifts from stall to stall like a ghost... Of course he notices the weird looks he gets. And people gossip about him way more openly without Beldarut around.
He knows they hate him. He hates them back. Or at least he wants to.
He’s starting to get overwhelmed, the noise and the looks and his own out-of-placeness notching up and up until it’s buzzing around inside his head and then he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He doesn’t know what to do with his arms. Is it right for them to just hang like this? He stops to stare meaninglessly at a stall selling magical items, as if this might make him disappear.
Beldarut did give him a grocery list and a purse, but he also probably isn’t even expecting Quifrey to actually get anything. Again, Quifrey is just expected to not be useful...
He’s so distracted by his own whirling thoughts, that he flinches when all of the sudden the magical object he was staring at so intensely gets picked up by somebody. Oh. Someone is right next to him and he hadn’t even noticed.
He follows the hand up to a boy’s face, and his eyes immediately flit away again.
“That’s a stupid thing, you can have it.”
Why on earth did he say it like that?