Clean the counter, turn the skewers, check the pots, serve the customers.
Netzach's hands worked with a certain ease that came with experience. Was it always this easy?
The breaks passed like trills, and Netzach knew why time seemed to pass by so much faster.
Something had changed. He wasn't brooding over his misfortune at being surrounded by drunks and scoundrels. He wasn't shaking a mental fist in the air, cursing at those kings and queens, legends and heroes who had gone and left people like him in the dust.
No, now he knew he stood amongst them. He was a terrifying force to be reckoned with.
The doors would swing open, and another guest would sit down. Just focusing for a bit, he had every secret that person held laid out bare before him.
Notes danced around them, singing their deepest hidden truths. The entirety of their being!
Slowly he catalogued and savoured the Notes of every man and woman in the building, shedding Frequencies once he felt they had lost his interest.
There was not much to see of course, the louts and lay-abouts that populated the Copper Prince all had more or less the same story, but he enjoyed the ability to read it all the same.
There were, of course, other distractions as well...
Bzzz
Netzach felt a certain buzzing in his soul. Every once in a while he would reach out for a particular note. One which had earned him quite a reputation in the Copper Prince.
He walked over to where he had felt it through his Dowsing. A small table playing cards.
The raucous laughter, fighting and other hustle and bustle of the gambling room died down, as many curious eyes fixed themselves on Netzach.
Deception was a Note that was very common in a gambling table. Often games required trickery and deceit. Yet sometimes certain deceptions take it too far, being beyond the rules of the game. So how then do you detect them through Attunement?
The answer was to look not just Deception, but Unfairness. It was a Note that sung a few octaves deeper than ordinary Deception. It denoted that not only were they lying, but they were tipping the balance in their favour. In other words, they were cheating.
His eyes honed in on the man the Note was singing from. You can never be too careful with Notes, it was always far too easy to misinterpret them.
But as Netzach's cold unblinking eyes, which the man would later swear tinted themselves red like a devil, bore down upon this man, he gulped, his hands starting to tremble.
"Oh, Sard, looks like Netzach's on a roll again." whispered a bystander. A small crowd milled to see what was about to happen.
Attunement was subtle, but even so, being able to accurately know things others don't attracts its own kind of attention. They made many rumours about him.
That he had made a deal with a ghost to be able to see other people's cards. Or that he had some kind of sixth sense, which was true enough. Although he doubted that the illiterate and wine-ridden scum of the tavern had ever heard of Attunement magic.
The compass pointed right at his hands. Attuning to him, he could sense notes of 'Unfairness' singing around him, collecting under his left sleeve.
With a dramatic flourish, Netzach said. "He's hiding cards under his left sleeve. He's cheating."
In a seemingly instantaneous movement, the other gamblers at the table leapt at the charlatan's arms, pinning them, and wrenched out a pair of pocket aces from his sleeve.
"OH I KNEW THIS BASTARD WAS TOO DAMN LUCKY!"
Netzach turned around, a smirk already growing on his face, as the the ruckus of the cheating gambler being 'dealt with' began to play out behind him, perfectly on queue.
There was a slight sort of nervousness in their gazes as he walked back to the counter, as though afraid that he would call them out for cheating.
Don't worry, I know none of you are cheating, he thought, smugly praising himself in his own head, You think my powers too crude, and my skills too erratic, my drunk and skittish friends.
I could tell which one of you were cheating even with my eyes blindfolded
And he meant it in the most literal sense.
