"So what do people do around Yharnam for fun, anyway?"

Conversation fell silent at once throughout the Leprous Hound, voices dying down so fast that it seemed like Balyn's question echoed off the wall behind the bar into an ocean of silence. Eyes turned to the former hunter, suspicious eyes, hostile eyes, incredulous eyes.

"Was it something I said?"

The looks did not grow any less forbidding.

"Seriously, how is this a hard question?"

It was Louis, the Hound's bartender, who broke the silence. He extended a long, not to say clawed finger (no, not that finger) and beckoned the ex-Hunter over to the bar.

"Come and have a drink. On the house."

Never one to say no to free liquor, Balyn got up and walked over to the bar. Two stools conspicuously emptied next to him the moment he sat down, which was not an unusual occurrence when an outsider drank at a Yharnam bar. The Hound was actually a more welcoming spot than most of Yharnam's watering holes, owing to Louis's interest in foreign cultures ("never be more bigoted than the man pouring the drinks" is a sound rule of thumb), but Balyn was a special case.

Louis took a bottle from behind the counter and poured. Dark amber rum flowed into a glass, its rich color hinting at untold secrets and hidden truths, like blood that had been refined and purified to extract and concentrate its potency. He pushed it across to Balyn.

Who picked up the glass and drained it at one gulp. He wasn't really a poetic soul, especially where alcohol was concerned.

What he missed in romance, though, he didn't let pass in potency. He gave a gasp and a wheeze as it burned its way down. "Strong stuff," he breathed out.

"Never could quite understand how you foreigners can drink that stuff straight," Louis remarked. "Then again, I suppose that you agree with me, since you didn't stop to taste it."

"I'm more of a beer man, myself," Balyn agreed.

"Not a lot of call for beer hereabouts," the hirsute bartender said.

"You're telling me."

Balyn shook his head.

"So what did you want to say, Louis?"

"Balyn...Yharnam is different from other places."

Balyn glanced left, then right, looking along the length of the bar where various patrons were drinking their various cocktails, which varied widely in their pungency and alcohol content but shared the same core ingredient of fresh, thick blood.

"I have picked up on that, yes."

"So you can probably guess that our amusements here aren't quite the same."

"Well, I figured that it would involve blood somehow."

Louis blinked, eyes vanishing and reappearing as if by magic in his whiskers. Or fur. So long as his fingers could still hold a bottle and pour, he was human enough for Balyn.

"You have some odd ideas, friend."

"Blame the rum," Balyn said. "Not that anyone else does, when they say that," he added in a spirit of honesty, "but you could."

"What I'm trying to get at is, Yharnam isn't really much for public gatherings. It doesn't suit the local temperament to get a crowd together for an opera, a museum opening, some kind of athletic or combat tournament, that kind of thing. Once, maybe, but these past decade or so has taken the wind out of it. The scourge, you understand."

Balyn supposed that it could take the enjoyment out of a night at the theater if the man next to you turned into a beast and started mauling everyone in the orchestra pit.

"So you prefer more private entertainments, is that it?"

"Exactly. A card party, a game of chess with a friend, a musical evening with the family, that kind of thing. Even the more off-color kind of entertainment tends to be handled on a one-on-one basis."

"Oh, yes," Balyn nodded agreement. "I know a lady who was in that line and worked out of her house. Though she was looking to get into a more stable career, now that she's a mother and all."

"A lot of people even prefer solo hobbies: reading, collecting, scientific experimentation, crafts...We get a lot of hunters coming in here, and a bunch of them like building things in their spare time—something creative to offset all the violence of the work, maybe. Of course, it might just be tradition. The way I hear it, the fellow who started the business was a bit of a dollmaker when he put down his scythe."

"...I have a feeling that I should probably stay well away from that one."