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]

"Lucky for me, Castileos has had queens during my life so we have only had to contend with prince consorts and not kings. I thought the Chantry was all women though? I've only seen them around in the odd hats."

There's a nagging about Tevinter but everything about that place sounded so bizarre that she'd rather just keep her thoughts to herself.

"Sometimes it's the other way round; she showed me things I wouldn't have seen on my own, at least not from her side of it. She might have taught me to be a little less reckless, I know, I know, how could anyone think such a thing of someone like me. But I hate to worry her so I agree to at least try to think a plan through a little longer than I used to."

[lettersfromhome]

"The most powerful positions belong to women, but men join as well. The Chant teaches us that they are too prone to making rash, emotional decisions to have any true authority, but..."

And she gives a mild shrug at that. It's likely all political, as most things with the Chantry are these days. It should be enough to have faith, and yet.

As she continues to speak of her friend, Mia finds herself smiling a little wider. She does indeed sound like a woman after her own heart. "You must miss her," she remarks, turning over another card onto the table after a moment's pause.

[foxsays]

"It still is something to adjust to for me. All of us embody the sea in our own ways, it is mother and father and neither at once though when women can only be the moon, in some ways men can only be the sea. We don't have authority exactly, only our love and reverence."

But then they are allowed to have their fury because the sea is never calm at all times, whipping high into storms capped in white peaks, drowning those it chooses to drown.

Her throat tightens painfully, enough that she can't swallow and she nods, practice the only thing that keeps the smile on her face as she sets her card down. "I worry about her. I worry about her worrying about me - there are lots of things that could have happened because I was returning to her when I came through the rift, I don't know if anyone even saw me and would let her know what happened so she would at least know. That's always the worst part, you turn things over and over and torture yourself."

[lettersfromhome]

"I know the feeling well."

Seeing that familiar pain flicker across the woman's face, Mia felt a faint tug in her chest. The next card pressed down against the deck, a seven this time. "My brother had a habit of disappearing on us after one catastrophe or another. Sometimes I wouldn't know where he'd gone, or if he was even alive. He didn't have the excuse of disappearing through a hole in the Fade, either," she continues, a little more crisply.

But that tone gentles as her eyes lift once more. "But every time I found him, no matter how angry I felt, or how helpless, or frustrated, none of those things could compare to the relief I felt knowing he was safe. As I'm certain will be the case when you return."

[foxsays]

"Your brother?" Forgive her if she sounds shocked but it's almost enough to have her spitting out her drink all over the cards. "But family of any description isn't supposed to do that, even when my father was away at sea we would still know enough to know he was fine and well. To not know such a thing...I am so sorry, I can't imagine the worries you must have had."

She'd slap someone's face clean off their face for such a thing and whenever she gets home and her loved ones line up to do that? She'll take it.

Setting down a Jack buys her a little time but she has to be honest now when she looks up, trying to shrug it off even though she can't. "I've seen the rift I fell through and another one, I...I think it's more a matter of if rather than when. The demons die and it closes in on itself but the rest of us, we remain."

[lettersfromhome]

The due amount of cards are dealt out, though it appears they both have something a little heavier weighing on their minds than the outcome of the game. "Cullen is...a very private individual. He always has been. Stubborn, too. I wouldn't doubt he saw it as protecting us from whatever he was going through. It certainly wasn't done out of malice."

It had still stung. It still did. But it was foolish to expect anything to come of it now.

One hand gestured to the pile, inviting her to take her winnings. But then she sees that crestfallen expression, and she reaches across to place a hand on the young woman's. "They will find a way. I'm sure of it."

[foxsays]

"You aren't private with family though. You're frank, honest to the point you're rude but because they're family you're forgiven." Or that could just be her, she's bad at lying to anyone she cares from and in such instances, lies by omission still get counted as lies. One of the first warning flags for her has always been a reluctance to tell someone something because often, it's turned out to be the most important thing she should actually tell.

A grateful smile is given because well, people don't need to comfort strangers, not here with so much going on. "I hope so. I wish to help however I can but there is a life waiting for me, I wouldn't want my mother to worry more than she does anyway for a wild daughter."

[lettersfromhome]

She doesn't disagree with Araceli's view of it, not even a little. But things could change. Things had changed. It did no good to mourn what had been. There was only the now, and what they could do to make things better. But those were struggles she need not burden herself with. Mia could handle those on her own.

"Take it from a professional worrier. It'll all be worth it when she sees you again. There may be shouting, and there may be tears, but it is a far better thing than the alternatives." Her lips curve faintly. "And it will be a thing you may be glad to endure, before it's over."