[Lyr Tlansson]

Lyr was getting a headache from all the confusion, the yelling, and the mess. Jorel. It felt like Telath had been turned upside down and given a good shake - an unknown youth of shaddy, too-raw-to-be-out-of-diapers looks, and elven at that, smoking and telling Lyr that his child had a case of the diaper rash?

"Jorel." He didn't even know the blasted spawn of Phedos' name. And yet, mysteriously enough, Lyr found himself once again obeying the young elf's words - had he a spell on him, or something? "Feth if I know, I only got to this Haya-crazed town a brightening ago... feth."

He looked around at the small street-corner on which this whole show was being played out, in a helpful manner, as he a herbalist was just going to conveniently pop up from one of the surrounding windows. The look-see, of course, produced nothing of the sort. Lyr shifted his shoulders somewhat helplessly, and only by the concurrent push-and-pull of the knapsack on his back did he remember that the elf had asked if he had Rose's supplies with him.

That, fortunately, he had, though he was running rather low on diapers too, having not had time the previous brightening to find a place where he could ressuply himself. Swinging the pack onto the ground, Lyr unclasped the top and began riffling through the goods inside - that is, through all of those things which he hadn't wanted to leave in his room at the inn... which meant, of course, nearly everything. Out came his visa, his rich cloak, bank certificates, the wrinkled deed to his old house in Trysvale, which he hadn't thought to sell when he left and was probably not worth more than a sneeze at this point anyway; out came an old flask without its top, a piece of hard soap - and, finally, Rose's things: a worn blanket wrapped around two extra diapers and a bottle with a soft tip.

Lyr picked up a diaper and held it out to the elf, as if expecting the youth to sit down and change Rose's diaper right in the middle of the very public street. But it sort of fit into the whole topsy-turvy world in which the vagaran felt he had landed. "Here.... feth!" Some sense of normalcy got jumbled up in Lyr's currently topsy-turvy world, and he realized that he'd pretty much laid out all his private affairs - or not so private, but still - for all of Imperia to see... and to steal.

Feeling his head begin to really pound, Lyr bent and began shoving everything back into the knapsack, for a moment without further regard to whether the elf was going to take the proferred diaper or not. "Feth! And - and - feth, what by Jorel's pants is your fething name?" He latched on to the last vestiges of his sanity as his natural, inbred and ingrained suspicions rose to the fore of his consciousness. The nature of the child-streetrat and Jaedaxian protester was what Lyr had never quite escaped, and what he finally reverted back to now, when all of the other superseding methods of identification had been divested from him: no longer thane, no longer in Trysvale, no longer panting after a beautiful woman, no longer even a father, now that the elf had taken Rose in his arms: what was Lyr, now, the substantially-built scruffy-looking youth standing in the midst of a foreign city with a bag full of odds and ends, an expensive sword at his side he didn't really know how to use, looking at another young man holding a child which he thought was his, but could never really be sure in his own mind was? Who, in aetheria's name, was Lyr?

...Who, in aeternia's name, was this elf?