PLAYER PLOT: The Least of His Children

[pinprick]

WHO: Nathaniel Howe, Felix Alexius, Anders, James Norrington, Kaisa Daesun, Fenris, Araceli, Inessa.
WHAT: A quest to rescue a slave.
WHEN: August 26
WHERE: Tevinter
NOTES: Will update. Plotting post is here.

The Mastermind: Nathaniel Howe
The Game: Green Goods
The Grifter: Felix Alexius
The Mark: Magister Leo Valerius is an ailing old man, but his mind is sharp. His main concern of late has been to leave his sons a good inheritance, though he isn't exactly straight-up greedy.
The Prize: Alavda Endris is a slave to Valerius. The bad news is that she almost never leaves his side. The good news is that that makes her easy to find.

The Plan: One team is sent in, with Felix dressed as a minor lordling and his entourage trying to climb the social ladder by schmoozing an old magister. Felix claims to be staying as a guest of a nearby lord (technically true) and only visiting for the day. Valerius must believe this boy is an upstart with no political value and too much money.

Another team performs a heist and gains the money Valerius keeps at this estate by pretending to be contractors hired to work on the floorboards in the room with the vault door (an appointment Valerius set up months ago and our team hijacked). Planting bees in the floorboards will clear the room of guards. Felix pretends to fall in love with Alavda and asks to borrow her from Valerius. If Valerius hesitates, Felix offers him more and more money until he consents. He has loaned Alavda to other lords before, and Felix's show of being petulant and stupid should help wear away any suspicion that this is a set-up. In that way, it's a basic hustle. Once Valerius consents, Felix then sends an attendant outside to fetch that amount from the money stolen from Valerius' vault. The entourage departs, claiming to be returning to the local lord's house. They leave with Alavda and return to Skyhold.

MAJOR OBSTACLES:

Alavda is wearing an enchanted collar which allows Valerius to locate her. If it is cut away or in most any other way removed, it sends a massive and lethal shock through her system. The team will need to find a way to remove the collar without killing Alavda.

If/when the collar is removed, Valerius will send people to find her.

Valerius has about twenty guards on his property.

The vault door operates on reacting to a specific keystone which cannot be found, but aside from the magical lock, the mechanism is still a mechanism. A good thief can crack it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is vital that the members of this team keep their involvement and mission details secret before and after the mission. It must not get out that Inquisition members and affiliates were involved in hustling a magister.

Comments

[foxsays]

"Oh, I don't think Ellana would go for just anyone that fell off the turnip cart." Ah, Orlesians: generally super rude but that's one of the only phrases that isn't horribly offensive on some level.

With a nod, she has to cast her mind back more than half a year to her first meeting with Ellana. "I think she was one of the very first friends I made in Skyhold, she came over to learn how to play Liar's Dice."

[blightedson]

He smiles a bit, despite how that could be taken. He went to school is Orlais, sometimes he actually misses her people. "It's hard to think of her lying," he admits after a moment. He might have some kind of rose tinted ideas of her, but he's learning to cope with them. "Was she any good?"

[foxsays]

Were it someone else? Araceli would lie. But this is Ellana's boyfriend so she doesn't feel the need to though she isn't ever brutal about her honesty. "It takes a long time, and there is more than one way to learn how to play a person. Sometimes a pretty honest face can be used to fool a man better than anything else." Which is to say...no. She's not great at it, and Araceli really doesn't know if she'll ever get there. "The first lessons were teaching her the sort of tells people have: spot them at the table and you spot them out in the world where it really matters."

[blightedson]

Felix nods at that. "That's similar to some of the things they teach you growing up in Tevinter."

[foxsays]

"Is that so?" Well, that's a useful sort of thing to have in her holster. Or her pocket since Thedas did not see fit to allow her to keep even empty holsters. "My parents taught me those lessons very young too, though maybe not for exactly the same reasons as Tevinter. I have only spoken to a priest who was there at a party some months ago. What is it like? Growing up there?"

[blightedson]

"It's... different than what you'd expect. I suppose I'm a special case though. My parents loved each other and would have done anything to protect one another and me. They did what they could to stop anything too unsavory from happening to me. Many altus mages can't say the same." There a bit of sadness to his voice. Most everyone in Skyhold knows what happened to his family now. "I still had to learn how to lie and play along, to prevent any sign of weakness. When I was a child, my grandfather tried to have me killed, so I has a crash course in how to pretend I was stronger than I am."

[foxsays]

"Marriage is usually for the nobles or those with money, deeds, something they wish to secure better in my own country. Commoners like me? We don't really bother with it - you love someone, you love them, that was enough." And you just sandwich the surnames together with 'y' if there's a baby so it's a nice mouthful of a thing that maybe three people she's ever met here can say.

But she listens intently, tucking Lux under her arm when he attempts to stray so he won't be a pest or a distraction. Practice keeps her face from betraying too much though a frown knits between her brows and her lips purse. "Why is it that Thedas is so willing to place children upon the block? There was always a braveness in staying soft - when you fall from a great height," Araceli's reputation around Skyhold usually precedes her, "if your body is loose-limbed you won't break a bone. Still, I am glad that your parents taught you for the right reasons. Mine did the same even if it was because I was getting into mischief of my choosing."

[blightedson]

He smiles a bit at the analogy because she knows what she does and because he likes it for what it is. "My parents may have taught me to be thoughtful and kind, but my mother also hunted down my grandfather and the assassins he sent after me and killed them all. Tevinter is still a hard place, and she had little patience for what she saw as betrayal."

Things probably would have been so different for him if Livia had been the one to live and Gereon the one to die. He never wanted to wish for his father's death, but considering how deeply his wife's passing had affected Magister Alexius, it was hard to think about what might have happened had that been reversed.

"I'll have to take some of your classes, I think. To learn to be more loose-limbed."