For the time being, I pursued the pickpocket at a leisurely pace. Dashing after them would only get me noticed, and there were still too many people on the main street for that anyway. Rather than lose the trail, I decided to wait until we were in a more open area to catch up.
Fortunately, the pickpocket didn’t seem to have noticed me. The way they were moving was more indicative of a desire to flee from the scene of the crime than to lose a pursuer. It seemed like this wasn’t their first time either—they made sure to keep their pace at a brisk walk so as to not attract attention. Fortunately, that made it pretty easy for me to keep up.
Before long, the crowd began to thin out. Just as the pickpocket glanced around furtively and made to slip into a back alley...
Grab!
“Wha—”
“I think you know why I want to talk to you,” I said, gripping the pickpocket’s arm firmly. “Come on. In here.”
I dragged the pickpocket into the alley. I couldn’t have them kicking up a big fuss and making people think I was the bad guy here. A lot of petty criminals were cunning like that—I knew because Maalt had its fair share of them.
That being the case, I didn’t stop dragging the pickpocket along until we were far enough away that no authority figures or kindhearted strangers would come poking their noses in. The unfortunate criminal definitely didn’t come quietly, though, shouting and struggling in an attempt to get away. Several people nearby noticed, but it seemed Lucaris’s general populace was rather lacking in individuals brave enough to challenge a black-robed, skull-masked, sword-toting stranger as he dragged someone into a back alley.
Someone would likely call for the city guard eventually, but I’d made sure to be quick about heading deep into the alley. Even if I was questioned later on, there’d be no evidence of wrongdoing, so I could get away with a vague, perfunctory answer.
Uh, was it just me, or were my thoughts going in a really villainous direction lately? Well, I wasn’t planning on harming the pickpocket or anything, so I was probably fine.
Once we’d gotten deep enough into the alley, the pickpocket went silent, allowing themselves to be dragged along. It seemed they’d realized there was no way out of this, because they’d also gone very pale. Maybe they thought this was the end of the road for them, since I seemed so practiced with dragging people into dark alleys.
It wasn’t an unreasonable leap of logic, to be fair. If an adventurer did something like this to you, it was usually safe to assume you would be killed.
“First things first,” I said. “Think you could return my coin pouch?”
“I-I don’t know what you’re...”
“Hey, come on. Playing dumb’s obviously not going to work here. You and I both know it’s pointless, right?”
I’d meant that in the sense that the pickpocket shouldn’t bother wasting our time, since we both knew they were guilty, but evidently, they were interpreting it quite differently.
“You’re...right...” they said, their voice resigned. “You could just kill me and search my corpse for it, anyway. Here—take it.”
I accepted my coin pouch, feeling all of a sudden like a rather heinous villain as I tucked it away. How had we gotten here, again? Wasn’t I just getting my purse back from a pickpocket?
“So?” the pickpocket asked. “What are you going to do to me? Hand me over to the guard? Kill me here? Just get it over with, then...”
I shook my head. “Nothing of the sort. It’s just that I’d heard your people went back to your home in the ocean. Didn’t expect to see one of you still in Lucaris.”
Indeed, the pickpocket’s appearance alone made it obvious that she—for I could now see that she was a young girl—wasn’t a human like you or me. Or, well...like you, anyway. Sometimes it slipped my mind that I didn’t count anymore.
While the girl was humanoid in the general sense, the skin on her neck and arms was rough like scales, her ears were shaped like a fish’s fins, and the irises of her eyes were much brighter than a human’s. All of these were attributes of the race known as fish-folk.
Of course, like “beast-folk,” the word “fish-folk” was a very generalized term for a wide array of races. Much like wolf-folk and cat-folk differed in many ways, no two ethnicities of fish-folk were the same either. Maalt’s lack of demi-human races meant that I wasn’t exactly an expert on the topic, but I knew at least that much.
I couldn’t tell what kind of fish-folk the pickpocket was, though. Whale-folk and shark-folk were easy to spot, given the size of their bodies and jaggedness of their teeth respectively, but she lacked any such distinctive feature—or at least, any that were readily visible at a glance. If not for her scales and ears, I wouldn’t have been able to tell she was a fish-folk at all, which gave me a new perspective on the sheer amount of diversity out there.
The girl, however, seemed to misinterpret the genuine curiosity in my gaze for something else. “Yeah, pretty much everyone went back,” she said. “But don’t think that means they won’t get revenge if you sell me off as a slave!”
Okay, I couldn’t deny that I was dressed like a slaver. But that still kind of hurt. “I’m not going to do anything like that,” I said patiently. “I just wanted to tell you not to do this kind of thing anymore. Don’t fish-folk earn a decent living here in Lucaris anyway? I heard that even kids your age can harvest rare materials on the sea floor, where humans can’t reach.”
That was the part I couldn’t understand. If she could do that, why go to the trouble of pickpocketing?