Timestamp: Summer, 509 AV
Angelabeth Dunkirk was feeling irritable.
Not that this was much of a change for the nineteen-year-old girl, who seemed to be in a perpetually peevish mood. It wasn't always evident -- indeed, Angelabeth was quite capable of appearing calm and pleasant for extended lengths of time, which was one of the reasons her mother had always found her so helpful around the shop. But it was always lurking just beneath the surface, a state of constant annoyance at the world in general, as well as most specific portions of it that were in contact with her at the moment.
Just now, that meant the streets of Syliras just inside the city gates. Angelabeth flicked her brown eyes from side to side, taking the whole scene in. Streets (dirty), adults (clueless), children (unsanitary), buildings (ugly). It was different from Zeltiva, and although Angelabeth had never thought she would say this, it was probably worse. For a split second, she wished she hadn't left.
Not that there was much of a choice for her. Since she was twelve, Angelabeth had helped her mother in her clothing shop, the Skillful Seamstress. By the time she was fourteen, it was clear that her native talent for design and craftsmanship far exceeded that of her mediocre mother. This had caused no small amount of tension, given that her work was what her mother took the most pride in.
The disparity became more and more obvious until, a week before her nineteenth birthday, her mother had informed her that her services were no longer required, and she probably should see about finding another line of work. But there was a real limit to the number of tailors in Zeltiva -- the city imported nearly all of its clothing, and the sailors especially knew how to make minor repairs themselves. As Angelabeth had no other skills, it was necessary for her to leave town in order to find someone willing to employ her.
The irony was, Angelabeth hated clothing design. The dresses and gowns she so excelled in creating were worthless for actually doing anything, so there was no practicality to them. Most women, she had found, had no idea what their good features actually were, and so the choices they made were extremely unflattering. Invariably, the woman with nice shoulders but bony legs wanted something with a slit that would show off more calf, or the flat-chested girl with a beautiful face wanted something to draw attention to her (nonexistent) bust. (Of course, some of them, no amount of fashion would help, even if properly directed.)
The fashions that were "in" were often impossibly ugly, or required taking something nice and making it bad. Angelabeth drearily recalled the year that featherweave was the latest thing, and she had spent weeks taking perfectly good peacock feathers and making them into flimsy, unattractive fabric. And besides, no one but the rich cared about it anyway -- even in a well-off city such as Zeltiva, a common sailor probably only had one or two changes of clothing of any kind.
But, it was an undeniable talent, and she wasn't equipped to switch careers now. Syliras had seemed like the obvious place to look -- there wasn't much call for fancy clothes in Sunberth, and Lisnar was too strange to take as a first step. Somewhere in this town, she knew, there was a tailor that could use her services, ridiculous as they were. But where?
She took a few steps forward, looking for the way to the commercial district, where she figured something like that might be located. Best to find it before it got too dark, especially since she had nothing in the way of accommodations for the evening.