faderift | [OPEN] Align my heart, my body, my mind

WHO: Corvo and you!
WHAT: Corvo is starting to settle into Skyhold, and goes to a job interview.
WHEN: Early Harvestmire
WHERE: Around Skyhold
NOTES: Probably gonna be talk about death, killing, etc.

Library

Corvo would not necessarily consider himself a bookish man, but he acknowledges the well of information that can be found within them, and he detests ignorance--in himself, most of all. Slowly, he has begun accepting that whatever drew him to this world does not intend for him to leave any time soon, and thus it would befit him to try to understand more of this Thedas. It's been slow going, at first, because Thedas is so utterly alien to him, completely different from anything he's known before. But he perseveres.

He can be found sitting in the library, hunched over in a corner of the room, a book on his lap, and a piece of parchment next to him. As he reads, he occasionally pauses to jot down a quick note on the paper--questions, phrases, things that he doesn't understand yet, that he will have to find out more about later on.

Feel free to approach him, or if you're close enough and don't look too unwelcoming, he might ask you about one of the things that he doesn't understand.

Training yard

He doesn't just spend his time reading, however. He spends plenty of time in the training area, practicing with his sword and crossbow. While this place is unusual, there's one perk about it--he has a chance to practice his magic without worrying about anyone seeing. Having had several people confirm that no one will be tossing him on a pyre for using his mark, he feels comfortable enough to do it in the open.

While practicing on a dummy with his sword, he holds his hand out, and then there's a sudden blur, and he's behind the dummy, and promptly sticks his sword right in its cloth neck. Practicing with his crossbow, he takes a potato out of a stack of them he had acquired, and throws it in the air. Then he raises his hand up, and a great gust of wind blows up past him, hurtling the potato far into the air. Once the target is an appropriate distance away, he raises his crossbow and sends a bolt into the unfortunate potato.

He doesn't quite smile, but he does look rather satisfied.

Kestrel House

And now, he feels rather nervous. He's never exactly had a good relationship with other assassins, people who killed as a job more than because some people simply had to be killed.

But at the end of the day, killing people was one of his greater skills. The ability to do it quietly, slipping in and out without being seen. The job that he had spent most of his life doing, guarding another's life with steadfast dedication--no. There was a little girl he had already promised to serve. He would not take that job here, not in this strange land with strange people. So assassin, it was. Everyone needs to have a job, after all.

And so it was that he lurked outside of the Kestrel house, hands stiffly held behind his back, as he waited for the man in charge of the guild.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oi!"

(Can you hear the 'mate' that just sort of gets tacked on at the end, like punctuation, bit like a glottal stop, just sort of happens really.)

What the stranger is doing is fancy, no doubt about it but look what he's using. Shocking. This will not stand. Do you know what you could do with those potatoes? They were begging to be chips and Yngvi Congealedinagutterson has something to say about this from where he's sitting, explaining to four nugs (his regular entourage now the other sixteen have buggered off to better and less exciting lives, only Rump Roast, Nug Wellington, Stroganugg and Truffles remain, and the latter is a gift he's just training up a bit to be worthy of their future station) the finer points of traps as he watches a potato get assassinated.

"That is an outrageous waste of a good potato!"

Corvo blinks as he turns to look at--ah. One of the small people, dwarves were the names that they preferred, he believed. It had taken a little bit for him to realize that like the people with pointy ears, they weren't just humans with abnormalities, but an entirely separate race of people. The qunari were easier to believe--large horned grey people were painfully obviously not human.

And now the dwarf seemed rather upset about the...potato? Corvo turns to look at the fallen spud, and slowly picks it up, plucking the bolt out of it and tucking it away. He examines the potato for a moment, as if he needed to ascertain for himself whether or not the potato were truly good, before turning back to the indignant dwarf.

"I needed something to practice with." He explained calmly, then rolls it over in his hand again. "And it's not ruined. Just a little...worse for wear." And dirty, but potatoes came out of the dirt, so it's not like that's exactly a stunning turn of events.

Look, potatoes are incredibly important when you happen to grow up with basically nothing. Because they're filling. And cheap. And pretty much a huge chunk of what you'll feed small dwarven children and they will still be stupendously attached to them after all these years because that's what they shoved at you to shut you up when you were whining about how hungry you were. Or how cold you were. Sometimes how ill. Generally it was feeding you.

"Go find a doglord, could do with a few less of them knocking about, or some of the Orlesians. Happen to know of sixteen off the top of my head no one would miss if they just suddenly were missing their heads." Actually that number is closer to six but you just sort of exaggerate it with Orlesians before he looks thoughtfully (mournfully) at the potato. "Or missing an eye I s'pose. Can't make a chip with a hole in it, unless you're into some weird things. Like Orlesians."

Also to be noted: Yngvi is dirtier than that potato. That potato has probably seen a wash once this year. Yngvi has been rained and snowed on, that's all.

Corvo can feel his eyebrow raising higher and higher as the dwarf spoke. He had thought the Outsider was eccentric, but--well. He supposed that each world needed their own handful of that sort of people. He slowly walks over to the sack that he had procured, and pulls a perfectly unpunctured potato out of it, holding it out to the dwarf.

"I've been informed that it's generally frowned upon in the Inquisition to use people for target practice." He explains airily, as if this were something that could not be generally assumed. "In the meantime, I need to practice on something that the bolts will be able to penetrate, without destroying the item, so I can gauge how successful the hit is. If you have suggestions that wouldn't land me in the dungeon, I'm welcome to hear them."

As if that potato is his mother (or one of the six dwarves Yngvi remembers calling a mother instead of an aunt, a subtle but crucial difference that'd be lost on some random scrubs meaning everyone that wasn't Carta in all honesty) he snatches it off Corvo and cradles it close. Humans. No respect. Always taking food out of a mouth but last time they at least had the decency to be putting it in their own mouths and not disrespecting the food itself.

He'll tell the Tal-Vachefs on this one. And that grumpy human one. Show him.

"And? They're doglords and Orlesians, no one that important'll care, believe me. You'd be doing the world a service getting rid of some of them. I know. But if you want a challenge, s'pose you could go for a halla. Them white deers roaming about? Shitting everywhere? I know a good recipe for them I'd smoke up over the fire if you could put a bolt through them. Hide fetches a good bit, same with the antlers."

Corvo is not exactly the most intelligent man out there, and he's still quite new to Thedas. But even he realizes when he's being given especially terrible advice. He's not exactly sure, however, how he's supposed to respond to this terrible advice. It seemed ludicrous to try arguing with the man, because he was either trying to pull Corvo's leg, or actually believed in what he was saying. Corvo wasn't sure which was worse, but he was quite sure that attempting to debate on the subject in either case was pointless.

"I'll take it into consideration." That seemed neutral enough. Deciding that crossbow practice was over for now, Corvo slides it away, and takes out his sword instead. He glances at Yngvi, and then jerks his head towards where the practice dummies were. "I trust you have no objections to someone poking holes into one of those? They would be a poor meal."

With grace and aplomb. Or something. Someone read that to Yngvi once, or maybe Yngvi read that himself one of the few times he read a thing that wasn't strictly for reasons to do with work or mischief. A fine line has to be walked with Yngvi, one that takes years to navigate, only it's a rope, perilously taut, slung over a chasm with a steep drop into an abyss full of hungry things with sharp teeth and shrieking laughter.

"I've eaten sawdust." A careful examination of his thumbnail is underway because you know some people might not believe that. "Know people that can make bread and cakes with stuff like that when they need to, usually when humans are about. You lot are always greedy, you grow too much."

[OPEN] Align my heart, my body, my mind

training yard;

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject