The sailor squinted at her. He was a small and wiry man despite his age, with his heavily weathered and scarred skin and abundance of tattoos making him look a bit like a living treasure map.<br/><br/>"A city, you said? Yeah, that's right." he said, sounding like he was enjoying the chance to tell a story and scare a landlubber. "They say there's a whole other city down there, even bigger than Hacre. Just dropped into the sea in a single night, it did, when the ol' queen tried some unholy magic.<br/><br/>"It's what made this place, and you still get the odd dead folk washing up onto the beaches over there and goin' wandering. They say it's still intact right under us, with ghosts walkin' the streets. Of course, no sayin' how anybody knows for sure. Every now and then you got treasure hunters with more guts than brains--they got stories in Hacre about some sharkmen or Dragon-Blooded who reckoned they could swim down, and this ol' scavenger lord who used some sort of machine he said could sail underwater, but they never got in to the city proper....or never came back at all. On a full moon, they say you can hear the old queen still crying--"<br/><br/><em>"Balam! Get your ass over here and help pull! You got time to gossip like an old biddy, you've got time to do what I pay you for!"</em><br/><br/>He let out a wheezing laugh and walked off. He must have been a good storyteller, because it was almost possible to hear crying over the sounds of the ship--no, that was real. Somewhere out there, inaudible to most normal people, somebody was calling for help.<br/><br/><br/><em>OOC: Your Awareness word makes the perception check an auto-pass.</em>