She robbed them of wealth

[foxsays]

WHO: Araceli Bonaventura and you!
WHAT: Catch-all for post-Mire; gambling in the tavern, Skyhold parkour 2: electric boogaloo, chilling in the gardens and wildcard available. Also dinner with Korrin Ataash
WHEN: Between returning from the Fallow Mire and folks departing to the darkspawn desert and red templar winter adventureland
WHERE: Skyhold; the Herald’s Rest, battlements, gardens or wherever if you wildcard it
NOTES: Feel free to have seen a wild Araceli roaming past (and possibly up and over) your windows or to have had a run-in with her fox. I’ll match your style/tense.

tavern; teaching cards and dice
If she’s going to have to learn new games of cards, the least she can do is make sure people can play a few hands of the games she grew up with or introduce them to liar’s dice. Liar’s dice is always so much more than just making coin or whatever you’re wagering after all; liar’s dice teaches you how to figure out a tell and how to cover your own with enough practice and how to tell the most bold-faced lies without a single person noticing if you’re good.

She’s more than happy to buy a drink for anyone who wants to play a hand or two. If you’re new she’ll go easy on you if you offer to explain how Wicked Grace works.

parkour;
The best thing about being back in Skyhold is actually having something to climb that won’t have her landing stagnant water that’s full of corpses ready to attack her. There’s always a little note tacked on a corner of the board in her elegant hand offering lessons and her name but it’s easier in small groups or one on one. Often you’ll need to track her down as she does her regular circuits of Skyhold, climbing up and down the walls either side of the fortress

gardens;
The gardens of Skyhold are larger than most gardens in Castileos, lacking the sea air but they’re more sheltered than most other places in Skyhold so she can some of the weak watery sun. After the Mire she needs it so she’s relocated from the library that was beginning to feel overcrowded with actual researchers, something she is absolutely not. Instead she’s working on something of a report, scowling at it most of the time and there are doodles in the margins, annoyed scribbles and half a paw print along the edge of one of the pages but it’s fine, it’s a draft, it’s perfectly fine.

Besides, it’s not even a report exactly, more of a guide, advice about how to actually get around and fight safely in conditions like the Mire.

Feel free to interrupt before she starts getting distracted with her little reference sketches.

wildcard;
Where else have you bumped into her? Or have you met a rather striking fox with streaks of red beneath his black fur and wondered who the hell keeps shouting ‘Lux’ as you stare down at said fox.

dinner with Korrin Ataash;
It took a lot of convincing to get the kitchen staff to allow her to cook. It helps that she had the coin to pay for it thanks to several profitable games of dice because it’s easy to spot a liar and far too many of the soldiers have honest faces here, the kind of men and women that’d be eaten alive in Castileos. She promised Korrin a meal she’d cooked herself and they absolutely deserve it after that hell.

She can’t make her favourite exactly. They don’t have quite as many fish but that’s obviously the problem with being stuck up a bloody mountain although there’s at least plenty of snow and ice to help keep it fresh. One of the helpers stays to explain the herbs she doesn’t recognise but all in all there’s plenty of fish stew served in bread bowls with rich tomato sauce with a healthy glug of good red wine through it.

When Korrin arrives according to the note Araceli left with her, there’s even a candle or two lit. Look, you gotta have ambience for this after she spent a whole day engaged in high stakes kitchen negotiations.

Comments

[foxsays]

"I didn't think cultures in one place would vary so much. You see, we're all far apart, Castileos in the sea with nothing for so many miles, very few countries physically border one another and then the divides aren't as they are on your maps. I suppose magic and having more than just humans changes all of that." That's the main difference she can think of because even when they vary, certain things seem more tied to groups, right until you get to the Vashoth and Tal-Vashoth.

"Vallaslin," she echoes, hoping she'll remember it this time. Learning other languages is fun up to the point where you remember just how natural it is to stress certain things in your own tongue and how fast she tends to speak never helps with that. "I've always valued tradition but then I have never lost my home and so much of our teachings are from what your parents or the people around you show you. Navigating and sailing, reading a person like a book, handling weapons. That was always our way, loving the sea and all within it, we never knew anything but. I think there's a way to move forward - we don't live in the water now and we no longer build below the sea but we sail and make sure we see it each day, we wear our charms and trinkets. Are people truly so opposed to that way of being?"

[serannas]

"You have neither of those things?" she asks, struggling to comprehend that. It's just so... different. It's hard to picture a world like that, but she's sure there are some here in Thedas who would love a world without magic and with just humans populating it.

"You built under the sea? That must have been difficult, especially without any magic to speak of. But your people must have been very resourceful."

Ellana sighs and sits back in her chair. "Yes. That there are Dalish here in the Inquisition at all shows that not all feel that way, but others wish for complete isolation from everything else outside the clan. It's only during a meeting of the clans every ten years that a great deal of news and clan members are exchanged."

[foxsays]

"Nope, no elves, no dwarves, no tall grey horned folk of various relation to the Qun. Magic is just sleight of hand, like pulling a coin from behind an ear, breathing fire, tricks anyone could learn if they have the time to master them." Lots of thieves learn the coin tricks at the very least and she fishes a coin from her own pocket to demonstrate, passing it neatly and easily until it seems to disappear entirely.

"Oh not us, we haven't built beneath the sea in generations. The merlings did it long before us, before the realm below was lost leaving us firmly above apart from special glass that we repair." It doesn't really count as building below the sea when you're building down from the surface, not in her opinion and not in the opinion of anyone Castilean really. Maybe it would help if she mentioned how once they could all breathe in the water and that the merfolk could shed their tails but details, details.

"Every ten years? Our most respected captains try to meet every year and that's prior to an audience with the queen - do you really spend so much time apart from your own people? Doesn't that mean things are lost more easily if a clan just loses track of all the rest?"

[serannas]

The trick makes her lips twitch with an amused smile. It looks like something Zevran could do while complimenting her to cause her to lose sight of it.

"That sounds amazing. Well, it is sad that such a place was lost. I can sympathize there, from what I've told you of the Elvhen empire." Once something is lost, there is very little chance of it being found again. She knows that well. Places, people, states of being; once they're lost, so much changes. People are displaced and struggle to remember who they are.

"It's necessary, I'm afraid. Humans don't like it when too many elves are in one place at the same time. That is why Arlathvhen -- the meeting I spoke of -- only lasts several days. If the clans banded together, or even lived near one another, humans would think we were organizing to go to war with them again." Or at least that is what Ellana's been raised to believe, and it makes sense to her.

[foxsays]

"If it had never been lost then we would never have built ships and sailed, settled other lands or found the people already on them," that part of the story is always unclear and everyone clings to their own myths, why shouldn't they? "We built something new and beautiful from what was, it's what you do but then we were the first, the oldest, the ones looking out to the sea and wanting to know more."

After all, it's in their blood to want to go roaming with hungry hearts, following the wind and waves, the great beasts in the ocean, finding their kin split from them centuries beyond counting to remind them of the truths they all used to know.

"Humans here sound like bastards, I'm honestly ashamed to find the way so many of them talk of anyone who happens to be different to them. Are they truly so threatened just by people gathering?" Here, she honestly wouldn't put it past them but when it leaves her mouth it just sounds so utterly ridiculous.

[serannas]

"And that is a wonderful thing. Your people looked forward and tried new things -- different things. My people aren't like that. They lament the past and only really rejoice in a good hunt. It's not moving forward. Not at all." And it's why Ellana had to get away from that life as soon as opportunity presented itself.

Before answering Araceli's question, Ellana looks around the tavern to make sure they aren't overheard. "People believe all sorts of things if rumors are passed around long enough as facts. Some claim the Dalish sacrifice human children. Completely untrue, but with our clans scattered, we cannot prove it. They will say, 'Well how do you know for sure one clan doesn't?'"

[foxsays]

"Some people can't." She says it gently, resting her chin on her hands as she sighs. "It speaks of a great love; some wounds do not heal as we might wish, some people cannot face the new day and still always look for the sunsets instead. Our last queen abdicated because she couldn't stand to rule without her husband by her side and now she lives in a house by the sea, always looking out at the tides." Araceli has always lived a glass half-full life but there are ebbs and flows with everything.

Ellana's furtive motions have her leaning forward, used to such a way of talking in seedy taverns with one hand on the hilt of her weapon but the words have her frowning for all the wrong reasons. "People would honestly believe and say such terrible things? Have they all taken leave of their senses? What is to say there are no humans doing such things as well in some place or even right under their noses?"

[serannas]

"I think it has to do with how we live," she says with a sigh. "It's easy for those who worship the Maker and live settled in towns and cities to look at us and call us savages, or heathens. It is the same with the Avvar. We saw them in the Mire, and they have their own gods too. The ones we saw were in the wrong to kidnap our scouts, but all Avvar are thought to be savages by more 'civilized' folks."

[foxsays]

“It’s not quite the same but to outsiders, Castileos is considered to be of loose morals, a nation of whores and brigands doing what they will, when they will. Permissive is the ‘polite’ word they use for us because we value our freedom greatly and, so long as we cause no harm, taking pleasure where we find it. Our beliefs are considered to be backwards sometimes too, though that’s usually Zimevur and they’ve been bitter a very long time since our fleet drove them all the way back to their own shores and forced them to surrender and withdraw from the other nations as they went.” Not that it had been Castileans alone involved in that but Zimevur had failed to blockade them effectively and had found themselves chased home by near every ship not sent out on relief work to neighbouring nations.

[serannas]

"We Dalish value freedom highly too. Maybe it's common for those with a stricter culture to look down on those who don't." Here she smirks. "Maybe they're jealous." It's a nice thought, even if it's not true.

"I should be going. We'll have to try the game again, and I'll practice watching people in the meantime." Ellana makes sure to slide Araceli's dice across the table to her before she stands. "Thank you."