By the time the ferry has hacked across the harbor, dusk has given way to a purplish early evening. Various lamps have been lit in public house windows; the merchant stalls have rolled up their mats and hurried off with their wares; and the crowding of hawkers and traders which stuffs the harbor front during daylight hours is diminishing with each passing hour as upstanding tradesman quit their work to hurry home or find their way to a drink. In their place, the sailors and fishermen and businessmen and women of somewhat sketchier repute bustle to fill various vacated posts. Here are is a roving knot of merchant sailors, hard handed and already stinking of ale, laughing loudly as they traipse up a stairwell; and here are two harried members of the Kirkwall guard peeling a wriggling pickpocket out of a gutter; and there pass a cadre of dwarven mercenaries, clinking in their ring mail and leathers as they walk ahead of a bobbing palanquin whose curtains have been drawn tight shut.

Desidério Amanza cuts a sharp little figure in this muggy scrapped light between intermittent lanterns as he and Abby climb the stairwell up out of the harbor front and into the warren-like tangle of streets which begin a half story above it. At some point between his arriving and today, he's found himself a smart coat more fit for the weather than what he'd arrived with. He's also wearing the long Riftwatch uniform cloak, jauntily tossed across one shoulder thanks to the fact that it is not, presently, pissing down buckets of rain on their heads.

Every step he takes clinks softly: the wear of leather and metal from the sword belt he wears, the rapier's pommel cajoling eagerly against a buckle or miscellaneous stud.

"I don't think I managed to catch your roommate's name," he is saying while rifling around in the interior pocket of his coat.