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Aimé woke up. He was lying on his back and he could barely see. "Where am I?" he groaned. Wow, did that sound hackneyed he thought to himself. "Fell clichés, will I ever avoid ye?" he said.
"Probably not" answered the girl standing over him. Aimé stared quizzically, wondering who she was, then smirked. She looked wonderful, and not just in contrast to the dank surroundings.
"And what do you have to smile at, mister?" she said. "You can't possibly be proud of yourself. What kind of man would treat me the way you did?" Seeing the completely oblivious look on the young man's face, the girl elaborated. "Those thugs? Those thugs last night, who tried to rob me? There were three of them and I still tried to fight them off, and what did you do?" Aimé tried to think. Probably tried to resolve the situation with the magic of his verbiage.
"I resolved it with my magical verbiage, didn't I?" he asked. The response was not quite what he expected; it was a glass bottle flung at his head. He ducked with all the skill of a professional dodger.
"You ran away and left me!" she screamed. "Now, I'm leaving this horrible place and I hope to never see you or anyone like you ever again."
"Sweetheart! Angel!" he shouted. "I got us here didn't I? And you're safe and well, and no harm came of it, right? And didn't we have a wonderful night?" He smiled his trademark killer smile.
It did not work (to Aimé's considerable puzzlement). "It was wonderful to the extent that I can be physically harrassed by bandits and be manipulated by a fraud under the influence of intoxication. Don't worry, I'll get home alright. I sold those little trinkets of yours to the Orc downstairs. I told him they were precious jewels from the tomb of Elrond Halfelven. Dear Eru! Your associates are dumb. Next time, if you want to impress a girl, show some courage."
"But I'm a lover, not a fighter."
"Pah!" she almost choked with laughter, and walked out the doorway.
Aimé, not noticing this attack on his 'skills', turned instead to his own problems (and by turning to his own problems, we must understand this as his focusing harder on his own problems than he had been previously, for he is extremely self-centred and prone to never thinking about anything other than his own problems). First of all, he was still in hiding; and while laying low was, at times, rollicking and fun, it was often cruel and hazardous. Second, he had a feeling that he had been drinking in order to forget something troubling. Something particularly worrisome. And what's more, he had a feeling that this forgotten thing was something really important. He'd had this feeling for the best part of a year. What did it all mean?
"Where am I?"
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