“First, the Great Bazaar!” The narrow street widens into a large square crammed with all sorts of stools and shops. An old street vendor approaches you with a small push cart stacked with many bottles and vials. Strangely, they all look empty. You realize there’s something awfully familiar about this man, but you just can’t trace it. “Hey, berk” he whispers, eyeing other passers-by suspiciously “D’you wanna buy some… air? Just 1 MU” seeing the disdainful look on you face, he pushed harder, “I’ve air from many places, Mt. Celestia, the Abyss, even Acheron!”. “Do you have some from Arborea?” you ask innocently. “AHHHHHH!” he screams, covering his ears with both hands. The vials he was holding crash to the floor. “Not Arborea! NEVER!”. He runs off screaming. It is then that you realize that he looks a lot like an actor you’ve seen on some prime, only much older. What was his name now? Ah, yes, Gary Oldman. You shrug and follow Aziz who was waiting patiently for you.

You cross the bazaar when a small shop at the other end catches your eye. It seems like some sort of restaurant, and there are quite a lot of people outside, waiting. “What is that place?” you ask Aziz. “Oh, that!” he spits “Very bad! It belongs to some mercykiller officer. After he retired he decided to open a restaurant! I wouldn’t go in there if I were you”. Still, so many people can’t be wrong, you think to yourself. You push your way inside, and yet you wait a full hour before you finally reach the counter, only to discover the entire menu consists of soup! Several pots of steaming ochre liquids line up behind the counter where a tall, gray haired man stands with a large spoon and a mean look. "Yah?” he asks impatiently. “Ah…. Ehm… Well…” you struggle to find the words. “No soup for you!” he motions with his spoon at the door “Come back – one year!”. With a bowed head you leave, to find Aziz barely able to hide his giggling. “I told you, and that thing you do with your hands – very bad!”.

After the soup incident, you suddenly hear your stomach calling you, demanding nourishment. “Don’t worry” Aziz says, “I know a wonderful place”. He takes you to a small tavern. Very small, in fact. So small you have to bow you head to get in. You notice a sign above the door “the green mill inn”. You find it to be a pleasant place, inhabited mostly by halflings and other small folk. Shortly after you receive your dish of hot vegetable stew, an old halfling, sitting by the fire surrounded by five tottlers, sips on his cider and starts to tell them a story:

“Once upon a time there lived a very evil man, his name was Madmartigen. He hated and despised anyone who was shorter than he was especially halflings. He made fun of halflings whenever he could, thinking that they had not only half the size, but also half the brain. What he didn’t know that the truth was the exact opposite – what we halflings lack in size, we make up by wit and smarts. It was a young halfling named Farl Greenburrow that finally put an end to his evils. He lured Madmartigen to a small village in the outlands where many halflings had waited for them. They captured Madmartigen, tried him for sizeism and finally executed him in the traditional halfling way – appled him to death”. The old man finished his story and sipped his cider to the cheering of the tottlers.

After dinner Aziz takes you to the fancier part of Sigil (if any part of the smog covered city could be called fancy) – the lady’s ward. You stop at the sight of a marvelous statue, which stands in front of a church. The statue depicts a beautiful red headed woman, with incredibly large breasts. What attracted your attention was the vividness of the sculpture (yeah, right!) and you stare at it for long minutes with an eerie feeling that it might come alive. “Ah, the temple of Sune” you hear Aziz’s voice over your shoulder, “and the lovely Krisnia”. “Is that the woman whom the statue depicts?” you ask. “Oh, no,” he says, “That’s her, in the flesh, so to speak”. “But it’s a statue!” you insist. “Indeed,” Aziz speaks in the voice of one explaining the obvious to a five year old, “quite a while back she stumble upon a magical substance, which she named ‘silicone’. I suspect that it’s because anyone walking around with a cone made of that stuff would look quite silly. Anyway, she made quite a few experiments with the stuff, injecting large quantities of it to several parts of her body, and well, you can see the result. In the end it was just a big silly-cone shaped like Krisnia. Sad, really.” Aziz sighs and moves on. “Come on,” he calls for you, “we need to find a place for the night, and fortunately, I know just the place”.

Aziz takes you into a quite tavern, which is located just between the market and the clerc’s ward. The sign at the front says “the silver quill inn”. You remember hearing stories about this place, but you’ve never actually been here. Aziz exchanges a few words with the barkeeper and a young barriur trots up to you, offering you to carry your bags up to your room. You follow the barriur to a small, yet comfortable bedroom, where he lays down your bag and announces “the Tharsias suite”, and trots off. You wonder why this common seeming room got such a boastful name, when you notice a piece of paper, set in a thin gold frame, hanging on the wall. It looks like a letter, the handwriting clearly dwarven. Curious, you start to read:

“To whom it may concern.

It has been three years since the Covenant had assisted me in breaking free of my captivity in Acheron, and I am still traveling with them. For the past three years I have tried numerous time to break free of that group of no-good-doers, but I cant seem to be able to do so. Every time I try to slip away, they just pop up right there beside me. I even tried to tell them to go and stick it where the gold don’t shine, but they just don’t seem to get the message. Never in my life had I come across such a miserable combination of stupidity. And it sticks to me!

I have made up my mind to go to the one place I can be free of them.

I’m going back to Acheron.

Goodbye all.

Tharsias.”