WHO: Kostos/Alistair/Jehan/Silas & Various Others WHAT: Miscellany WHEN: Kingsway WHERE: Probably Kirkwall NOTES: See comment subject lines! And if you would like to do something feel free to just drop it in here.
Well, that's not fair. Everyone smells. Everyone smells a little, like people. He smells like himself, and she takes stock. Ana Luisa says that learning to memorize smells can save a shifter's life. She thinks it's probably a little extreme, but it doesn't matter. She looks right at him, her eyes dark. Where is she attempting to be. "What are you reading?" she asks, instead.
He might smell—like magic, the crackling ozone of lyrium and the Fade, and like death, like a hundred year old mummy and a half-dozen more recently deceased animals—but only under the usual signs of good (for semi-medieval fantasy) hygiene. And for a moment he doesn't answer. He's deciding how annoyed to be by the question in lieu of response.
"What am I attempting to read," he corrects, echoing himself. Not very annoyed. There's amusement, too, as faint and buried as the smell of magic. "Reports on efforts to clear red lyrium from Emprise du Lion. Observations of rifts there in the interim. "
She squints a little, curious about that smell, and tilts her head just a little, to look him over. "Red lyrium," she says carefully, wondering if that's some kind of weed. That sounds like something that would grow in coffee, which is something she is depressingly versed on, because she had to move to the ass end of nowhere.
Red lyrium.
"That sounds like something you pull out of the ground and burn before it infects the rest of your crop, and you don't look like a farmer."
Dry, but not sarcastic. That was a compliment, right? Surely. Even farmers don't want to look like farmers.
He considers her for a moment, looking thoughtful in a habitually irritated way that doesn't actually mean he's irritated, then looks back at the journal in his hand. "Red lyrium is an alternate form of—lyrium." Obviously. But he doesn't know how to describe lyrium to someone who appears not to know about it, anymore than he would easily be able to describe air. "It's a mineral. It's magic. The essence of it. The red version destroys people." He turns the open journal in his hands toward her. The handwriting is atrocious. "Can you read this?"
She takes the journal and looks at it, and squints a little. She's not very bookish - she only went to school regularly up to the age of 14, after which it was sort of give and take - but she knows how to read cursive, and Ana Luisa makes her read old documents that were written by hand in worse handwriting than this.
She reads out a bit of it, but it doesn't mean anything to her, saying the words aloud. Things that probably mean something to this dude. "You know," she says, looking up at him. "Magic isn't this complicated where I'm from."
They do mean something to him. The most important thing they mean is that, since they made sense, she can read the handwriting. That means he needs her to not-hate him enough to agree to help him, after this, and that means he shouldn't say that where she's from is the Fade and whatever world she believes she remembers does not actually exist.
(That is, also, only his opinion. But good luck convincing him he's not right.)
"Where you're from," he repeats—and it sounds skeptical, despite his total awareness that he should avoid sounding skeptical, because he just can't help it. "What is magic like?"
She takes a moment and reads to herself, and nothing in this book makes sense. However, that serves the purpose of making it so that when she answers him, she sounds distracted. "Only the priestesses do it, and the Caipora, I guess, if that's what you call what it does. They can make things happen." That's not very descriptive, so she looks up and tries again. "Mostly illusions. And some like. Magic that doesn't seem like it's magic but just really coincidental coincidences."
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no subject
Well, that's not fair. Everyone smells. Everyone smells a little, like people. He smells like himself, and she takes stock. Ana Luisa says that learning to memorize smells can save a shifter's life. She thinks it's probably a little extreme, but it doesn't matter. She looks right at him, her eyes dark. Where is she attempting to be. "What are you reading?" she asks, instead.
Why focus on her own needs?
no subject
"What am I attempting to read," he corrects, echoing himself. Not very annoyed. There's amusement, too, as faint and buried as the smell of magic. "Reports on efforts to clear red lyrium from Emprise du Lion. Observations of rifts there in the interim. "
no subject
Red lyrium.
"That sounds like something you pull out of the ground and burn before it infects the rest of your crop, and you don't look like a farmer."
no subject
Dry, but not sarcastic. That was a compliment, right? Surely. Even farmers don't want to look like farmers.
He considers her for a moment, looking thoughtful in a habitually irritated way that doesn't actually mean he's irritated, then looks back at the journal in his hand. "Red lyrium is an alternate form of—lyrium." Obviously. But he doesn't know how to describe lyrium to someone who appears not to know about it, anymore than he would easily be able to describe air. "It's a mineral. It's magic. The essence of it. The red version destroys people." He turns the open journal in his hands toward her. The handwriting is atrocious. "Can you read this?"
no subject
She reads out a bit of it, but it doesn't mean anything to her, saying the words aloud. Things that probably mean something to this dude. "You know," she says, looking up at him. "Magic isn't this complicated where I'm from."
no subject
(That is, also, only his opinion. But good luck convincing him he's not right.)
"Where you're from," he repeats—and it sounds skeptical, despite his total awareness that he should avoid sounding skeptical, because he just can't help it. "What is magic like?"
no subject
That's so much better.