By the time Victor approached Sylvester, the merchant had just finished a sale and turned around, thoroughly pleased with himself, to face the young man.
"Good day, sir. What can I do for you?" the merchant asked, and while he was speaking, Victor noticed he had a rather handsome belt.
Victor pulled out the bounty notice and gave it a little shake. "I'm here about this. Do you really have an imp causing trouble, or was the notice written by the imp itself?"
Sylvester sized Victor up from head to toe. Today he was dressed in a Van Helsing-style hunting outfit, fitted with armored plates, equal parts dashing and imposing. His hair had been tidied up and tied back in a ponytail, dark glasses covered his eyes, four knife scars stood out clearly on his face, and two swords were strapped across his back.
One look was enough. This was a man he could trust.
He nodded politely. "Come now, Master Witcher, don't joke like that. Of course I know imps belong in fairy tales, but I saw the thing steal from my stall with my own eyes!"
"And what exactly did this imp steal from you?"
"The first time it was bread. Then fish, then apples. Small things, sure, but it adds up, and it's cost me a great deal of money! And it's not just me. Every stall in this square has had goods stolen by it!"
"All right, then what does this imp look like?"
"It looks like a vicious, fat cat. A very big one, about up to my waist, and it walks on its hind legs!"
He leaned in a little. "So? Are you willing to teach it a proper lesson with that silver sword of yours?"
"If you're paying enough, of course I'll help. But you should know witchers are growing rarer by the day. Demand is high, supply is low. I pick my contracts carefully now."
Without a word, Sylvester raised two fingers with his left hand and made a fist with his right: two hundred crowns. Four hundred orens, or six hundred ducats. Novigrad really was Novigrad. Even the opening offer was on another level.
Keeping a straight face, Victor raised three fingers on his left hand and five on his right, immediately countering with three hundred and fifty crowns. Prosperous places demanded premium service, and premium service demanded premium prices.
"That much?" the merchant complained at once. "You must be joking, sir. I'm not paying that price for an imp."
Victor lifted an eyebrow and changed his right hand back into a fist while keeping three fingers raised on the left.
Sylvester shook his head again. "Still too high. But we're getting close."
Victor frowned and held steady at three hundred, right hand clenched. That belt was trimmed with silver. He was sure three hundred crowns would not cripple the man financially. Besides, Sylvester would not be paying alone. The other market vendors would certainly chip in.
The people of Novigrad had their own style of bargaining. This was not like haggling with villagers from Lindenvale, who tried to win with shameless sob stories. Big-city folk had developed their own, more refined way of squeezing every last coin.
Sylvester's face darkened, and he said coldly, "Time is money, Master Witcher. You are wasting both. Take my offer—two hundred and fifty crowns—or I'll hire someone else!"
Victor looked at the merchant's arrogant expression, flicked the old bounty notice in his hand, and smiled faintly. "This paper's gone a bit stale. I'd say it's been posted for quite some time already. I wish you luck. I hope someone cheap appears soon, and that the difference in price makes up for the losses you keep taking in the meantime."
Then he turned and started to leave.
"Master, wait a moment."
The instant he said it, the merchant knew he had lost. The other man had seen right through his bluff.
At this point, even if the price was inflated, he had no choice but to let himself be fleeced. That was the nature of negotiation. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost.
Sylvester's tone lost its hauteur and turned courteous. "Three hundred, then. We have an agreement. Your negotiating skills are truly impressive. I only hope your silver sword is as sharp as your tongue."
"Three hundred and fifty. You'll see."
"I thought you just said three hundred."
"Time is money." Victor spread his hands and gave him a careless smile.
"Done. But you must solve this matter completely."
"Relax, I'll help you. What's that old saying again... small businesses are the foundation of economic growth."
"Thank you, Master Witcher. I don't know whether this will help, but the last time I saw the imp, it jumped over that wall and ran into the alley on the right... and it was carrying several pieces of my merchandise."
In the witchers' world, a promise was not absolute, but very few people deliberately broke one. Religion played a part in that as well. Especially in regions touched by the influence of the Eternal Fire, the principle of trust still held strong in most hearts.
So once the agreement was made, Victor vaulted over the wall and crouched down to inspect the ground carefully. The merchant had not lied. The tracks really did look like cat prints, but there was no way a normal cat could be that large, nor walk only on two legs.
Most of the city was paved with stone, but a few alleys still had dirt paths. Among the mess of overlapping footprints, the witcher apprentice was lucky enough to pick out the ones left by the imp.
Following the trail, Victor quickly... lost it completely.
He was not a real witcher, after all. No enhanced senses. No professional tracking training.
Still, that was not a problem. A waist-high upright fat cat existed in no bestiary, but there was one creature capable of taking the form of an imp—
A doppler.
...
"A doppler is a creature that can change its shape at will," Victor said while steadily stirring the contents of the cauldron.
"Humans have all sorts of names for dopplers. Witchers tend to call them mimics, while ordinary folk use names like shapeshifter, double, imitator, and so on. Most dopplers hate those names. Doppler is what they call themselves."
Angoulême, holding a mug of Redanian lager, raised an eyebrow. "I thought dopplers were just a legend. The sort of thing you only hear from drunks rambling in the street, or idiots in back alleys after too much cheap powder."
"No, they're real. Humans simply carried out large-scale hunts against them in the past, and their numbers dropped drastically.
"In fact, they're not really monsters at all, but kind-hearted humanoids by nature. Very few of them ever harm people out of malice."
"Then why do all the stories say they secretly murder someone, replace them, and slip into city life under the victim's face?"
"If humanoids get to choose, most of them would rather live in a city than survive like beasts in the wilderness. Their real mistake is that their gift for transformation is too powerful—powerful enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
"And once that level of imitation starts threatening the uniqueness of the individual, and with it a person's sense of identity, humans naturally come to hate dopplers with all their hearts. Then they invent whatever excuses they need to justify wiping them out."
At that moment, a rainbow glow flared from the finished alchemical brew, and Victor lifted a newly completed Doppler Detection Set out of the cauldron.
Angoulême eyed the outfit skeptically. "From the way you describe them, if dopplers are really that good at mimicry, we won't be able to catch one at all. Can this set really help?"
Victor chuckled. "If I were a witcher, my enhanced senses could track one to the ends of the earth. Sadly, I'm not. I probably couldn't even tell the difference before knocking it back into its original form with a silver club.
"But the Phantom Troupe has methods of its own."
//Check out my P@tre0n for 30 extra chapters //[email protected]/Razeil0810