Simnia had been peering hard at the elf, determined to hear and to understand every word despite the noisy jabber all around and the ever-present problem that was the distance between their heights -- but then, Anisa's quiet voice reached her clearly, and the dwarf grinned brightly upon her. There was a swell of appreciation in Simnia's heart that this little human did not appear to be condescending to a lowly dwarf, as most other humans tended to be.

"A pleasure to meet you, Miss Anisa," she said with a respectful bow of her head, as she had done all her life when meeting a human, and it never occurred to her to do any differently. "My name is Simnia, and I'm a Free Dwarf." She took great pleasure in saying those two words. They made her feel a bit giddy. But she had noticed how much fear was reflected in Anisa's eyes, and she tipped her head and patted the girl's shoulder in worry, leaving a trace of apricot smell on her sleeve. "Are you all right, dear? You look pale."

She was distracted by the flash of a wad of papers being waved in her face, and with a dazed stare Simnia took them, and she squinted with a befuddled expression at all the silly markings all over the page. Her new elven friend was kind enough to translate, though, and it was enough for Simnia to know that there was a way open to her to board that ship and get out of this awful thieving place for good -- treasure hunt or no treasure hunt, none of it made any difference to her.

"Well I don't know about any cesspool bureausy," she huffed in response to the elf's explanation, "but a ship's a ship, and I think I'd like to be on it regardless, if this paper here means that much," she said to both Anisa and the kind elf, but she was still a bit unsure when she asked the elf, "could I possibly borrow that pen?" When she had it, she fumbled with it, and wrapped her fingers awkwardly around it and poked a hole through the page in her attempt to make a mark on the line. She muttered under her breath, poked a few more holes, made a splotch of ink, and finally dipped her finger in the splotch and spread it around in a thick scribble, and that was good enough for a signature she didn't have.

Having returned the pen to the elf, Simnia pushed her way to the table and paused uncertainly, giving the well-dressed human there a scrutinizing and suspicious look before she spoke. "Excuse me very much, good sir," she said in a hard voice raised to be heard over the chatter, "pardon me, but what sort of work and quarters, exactly, might or might not be available aboard your ship for a Free Dwarf? I have been a mechanic at the lowland rail lines," she added quickly, "I know my way around the machines, if you've got any, Sir, and my name is Simnia." She wouldn't escape slavery only to be condemned to slavery aboard a ship -- and she worried that her new elf friend and the pretty Anisa may have just signed their freedom away, too. She clutched the holey, splotched contract as if it were the very freedom she had only so recently won, and she watched Maithien with a steady and fiery determination.