[open]

[katabasis]

WHO: Wysteria Poppell, Flint, & U
WHAT: Catch-all for Kingsway
WHEN: Throughout the month - backtagged and forward dated to your heart's content.
WHERE: Kirkwall, various
NOTES: Wildcards welcome; let me know if you want some specific and I'll pull something together for us.

[Starters are in ye olde subthreads.]

Comments

[FLINT]

[katabasis]

baths

[bouchonne]

The Maker is not necessarily known as vengeful. That is not central in the theology surrounding Him. Yet clearly, on this miserable damp day in the Gallows, Flint is being punished for something. There's simply no other explanation. Because after a long and frustrating day in which very little seemed to go right, when all he wanted was the refuge and respite of a bit of hot water, he comes in and the baths are already occupied. Occupied, precisely, by one person. One grinning person.

"Hello, there."

Byerly's manner is perfectly reasonable and polite. Indeed, his general attitude stays friendly as he speaks - "I've been wondering for a while. What is it, precisely, that leads a man to take a childhood dream and decide to make it into a reality?"

[katabasis]

Note to self: next time come at the very start of the hours when the baths are supplied with hot water. It might be loud and crowded, but it's easier to avoid being corned when he can move to the opposite wall and put a half dozen more likely conversation partner between him and-- men like this one, apparently.

He slows as he takes a seat on one of the benches at the bath's wall, boots off and rings halfway from his fingers. After the briefest pause, Flint finishes removing the bits of metal and drops them clinking into one of his boots. "I expect it depends on the dream."

'Are you thinking of something in particular?' he could ask if he felt like inviting further conversation. He peels out of his socks instead.

[bouchonne]

"When I was a boy," By says, as cheery and as wonderful as ever, "I used to play pirates. Well, in a manner of speaking. My cousins, you see, were much larger and heavier than I was, and so very often they would play pirates, whereas I was compelled to play naval officer. Dreadful business, though it has taught me to hold my breath for a very long time. In any case, though, in the end, they moved on from it - one has become an officer in the armed forces, praying for the day that our cousin Pierre kicks it so he might inherit the bannorn, another has taken interest in a shipping business. They moved on."

He stretches out a little further on the bench he's occupying. His speech has been calculatedly slow, ensuring that Flint is well enough naked that to leave would be truly embarrassing - an admission that Byerly is annoying him.

"So what would lead a man to stand, fully grown, fully formed, still waving a black flag and swearing rules don't apply to a blaggard like him?"

[katabasis]

By the time he arrives at the point, Flint has shaken out his shirt and folded it with some attention, tucking it under the heavy belt removed a moment ago. The methodical requirements of undressing has been distracting enough that with his ear only half-halfheartedly turned toward the plodding story, he could almost miss the barb if it weren't so well directed from the start.

Without looking up, he chuckles. It's a low huffing sound.

"I suppose you'll have to find a pirate and ask him." Flint fixes the man with a glance then, brief and flat and little else. Technically, he is a member of the Inquisition. Technically the ship in the harbor is in service of the same and flies no flag at all, black or otherwise. Technically any rumor that's been overhead or said or traded along the Kirkwall docks or otherwise is nothing more than gossip.

He finishes undressing, folding his trousers and small clothes with similar care, then pushes up from the bench and steps down into the bath.

[bouchonne]

Byerly's smile widens just a touch, in appreciation of the man's sharp-witted response. How confident and level and easy he is in that wit. Is he slow to anger? That would be a pity; By loves a man with a temper, a man he can move this way and that as easily as a broken horse...Though, if he's being honest with himself, perhaps he actually loves a slow-tempered man even more. He adores a challenge. The best sort of steed is the one you break yourself.

Or, well, that's what he's heard, at least. He's certainly never done anything like horse-training. Maker, could you imagine? So sweaty.

"You don't know any?" By shifts easily to this new conversational ground. He knows the insult has been comprehended; he doesn't need to belabor the point. "You come from Nascere, after all. They say the men there are wicked and the women worse." He sighs, pressing his hand to his heart and rolling his eyes towards the ceiling in an exaggerated simulacrum of mourning. "Would that I could have seen the place before its demise."

[katabasis]

"It sounds like you know more about it than I do. Last I heard, there was still fighting to be had on the island."

You know what Nascere has precious little of, though? Pipes with eated water being run through them. The company can't be helped, but the pools are better than a basin of salt water with its residual itching brine or a lukewarm standing bath where half his everything sits above the waterline. Here he can and does sink low enough on the submerged ledge to cover pockmarked scars, an aching knee, some pinched muscle or another.

"If you're looking for directions, any Tevene chartbook can tell you the right latitudes." The beard gets a thorough scrub. "If it were me, I'd stick with something dated no later than 8:60. The depths were largely revised when the Qunari landed Seheron."

[bouchonne]

"I might do that," he responds, arching an eyebrow. He moves his hands through the water, making little eddies. "I'm a grand sailor myself, you know. Phenomenally talented. Perhaps I'll commandeer someone's pleasure yacht. Take it to Nascere. I think I'd make a fine pirate king."

He sprawls out further, then, stretching out far enough that he can set his ankle on the ledge of the bath.

"Don't you think? I'm terribly dashing."

[katabasis]

"I'm sure you'll do just fine," he says through his fingers without much of a second glance in the man's direction. "Though if you're any sailor, the Inquisition must hate to lose you. I understand there's a ship to be crewed."

You can put that leg down, Byerly. You'll pull something if you're not careful.

[bouchonne]

"Mmmmaybe," he sighs, and sinks down a little further, stretching his leg out even a bit more. Extreme flexibility is one of his many, many incredible skills.

"I don't do terribly well with being ordered about, though. When I say I'm a sailor, what I mean is I'm unparalleled in my ability to handle a catamaran. Not so much...swabbing, dying of thirst and hunger abovedecks, being whipped by a tyrant for my inability to hop-to-it fast enough. You know how it is, I'm sure. I suppose you must have come up being whipped yourself, no?"

[katabasis]

"As it happens, no." Which is true as much as it is a conversational disappointment. He'd seen plenty of lashings, had been caned and beaten as all children on ships are, but had never managed to put his foot so far down his mouth to get the cat himself. He can't honestly even remember the last time he's seen a lash anywhere but on the belt of a merchantman's boatswain. They have no place on a ship of free men and women.

Sinking low enough until the water that he can rest his head on the bath's edge, Flint closes his eyes. Settles. Does the mental math - how long will the baths stay hot when the crew tending the fires on the other side of the plumbing have gone? He probably has an hour before everything starts to go lukewarm. --Which he won't be spending if the company continues to be so persistent, but it's a thought worth entertaining.

"Is there something you do for the Inquisition? Since it isn't sailing."

[bouchonne]

Quite pleased to be able to deliver this answer, Byerly responds, "Diplomacy."

Then he shifts - lowers his foot, which was admittedly starting to cramp up a little - and then leans forward. "But then - how's discipline kept on your ship? If you're not being whipped about."

By knows quite well that this man is the captain of his ship - Flint, of the Walrus, a man of Tevinter (or so the rumors go) who'd defected to the piratical life, who seemed to have just appeared on Nascere. One day absent, the next a marauder and fiend. As if conjured from the Fade himself, as if he himself had tumbled out of a Rift. His sources (which are, admittedly, weaker up North than in the South) gave no good accounting of the man's history. So perhaps some grotesquely incorrect guesses might spur the man into a bit of chatter.

"Is your captain good to you?"

[katabasis]

'Diplomacy' get a low rumbling noise, eyebrows quirking high. Of course. That all follows with enough horrible truth that it might be funny. That it is slightly funny even as he wheedles on. There are points - either strangely recently or what feels like but isn't distant at all - where this kind of razored sharp, prodding, one-sided conversation would saw at his shortest nerve. But Flint has practice now and as far as unrelenting bothers go, John Silver is a hard act to follow.

He scrubs a hand across the lower half of his face, tugging absently at the corner of his mustache. Chin tipping low, he opens his eyes to fix Byerly with an expectant look.

"What's your name?"

No 'I didn't think I caught it--' or 'Who's asking?'. It goes at the thing directly. Which: fine. Sometimes leading by example is the only way to get something done.

naval presence office (for araceli)

[katabasis]

He makes an appointment - not via sending crystal, but by way of exchanged notes couriered by one of the less sharp-edged Walrus men. It's both impersonal and not, equal parts painstakingly professional and absentminded. It would have been easier to contact her directly; it would have taken his full attention for a a minute or more. But he doesn't show up at her doorstep expecting a conversation, and that's more generosity than he's afforded a few other members of the Inquisition. That he brings a bottle with him is downright courteous, suspiciously so or otherwise.

But that's fine. Let no one say Flint is above making himself obvious. A certain clarity can only lend to the comfort of their situation, all things considered.

He at least waits until after pouring drinks to ask the first of his questions.

"Have you decided what's to be done with the Venatori ship yet?"

[foxsays]

Skyhold wrote. Not that their orders don't come from there but this one is enough that Araceli's lost track of the time going over it, a document that's not hurriedly stuffed back in the drawer when Flint arrives because that smacks of guilt or suspicion but shoved in there with something not unlike disgust. Last time she was out that way she finally saw a cetus and it tried to eat de Foncé.

From a large glass bowl on the desk several black arms reach out imperious and demanding. The remains of a wooden ship mostly crushed, the sails billowing sadly with the jostling of the body as it starts to haul itself up and out--

"Fernando enough. Ignore him." Araceli shifts the bowl to keep Flint out of the firing line, judges the distance, then moves it another inch. The range judged. "Of people in this project only three of us have the experience to do it: you, myself, and Charles. Everyone else is some level of sailor or swimmer but that's it. And you've the Walrus. Although I can hear it: either the rifter leader takes the ship or she gives it to a pirate out of Nascere barely arrived, I can sell it but this place falls over itself to shine up all sorts as if it doesn't know how the world works."

Or rather it doesn't want to know. Who wants to know what goes into the sausage after all?

[katabasis]

"Fair enough." And it is. "I can see how neither is easy or politic."

They've certainly made the matter of appearances in relation to her job any easy. Improved the prospects of the Inquisition at sea? Certainly. But its reputation? For all that he's personally evaded saying the word pirate aloud, he's more than done his part to cultivate the murmuring of it. This without even acknowledging that sailors can't keep their tongues from wagging to save their own hides; with the Walrus' skeleton crew roving the Kirkwall docks these many weeks, no part of their occupation prior to entering the harbor can still be much of a secret.

"All things being equal then, it might benefit the project to give Vane something more to do than teaching swimming lessons and how to pull a line. In the sense that it would occupy him. The man doesn't do well at anchor. But," --and here really is his point; Charles can advocate his own captaincy if he cares to-- "That's not unique to him."

[foxsays]

"When has anything been either of those things for most? Until a few months ago my personhood was a matter of debate, it's the way that this goes you just have to guess at everyone else's hands at the table."

With pirates there's an honesty to knowing exactly what a pirate is compared to say chevaliers who might preen and prance and be held aloft as gleaming and glittering things who have bloody initiations in alienages. Or Templars bound uncomfortably tight to a Chantry where more of it than Araceli's comfortable with was written after the sainted lady was martyred. It's getting people to see it. Hold their faces in the damn water and more than half of them would have it go up their noses before they'd take a drink.

"There's something coming up, I'd rather you'd hear it from me before it does the rounds: there's a Qunari dreadknought, the orders just came from Skyhold." If this is-- well if it's an exercise in trust then so be it, the rescue mission was one thing but Araceli's head was in no better state than his perhaps so there's this that she can extend to him. "This one hasn't sunk or exploded, it's abandoned, run aground from what the scouts have reported between Alamarr and Brandel's Reach. We're to recover it."

It's work, as she lifts her glass to take a healthy swallow.

[katabasis]

He's planned how this conversation will go in his head. How could he not? But the dreadnought is a turn so sharp that it shocks Flint into silence, smothering whatever prepared line had been waiting there at the tip of his tongue. It must show on his face too - the lines of his expression rearranging sharply behind copper whiskers. A long pause follows. He takes a drink himself.

It's specifically not the kind of work he really needs, but it certainly is something.

"I don't suppose Skyhold mentioned how likely this is to be some kind of Qun trap while they were at it, did they?"

[foxsays]

There's always something enjoyable about neatly kicking the conversation away somewhere else, seeing how it falls especially when the other person is older; Araceli is under few illusions when it comes to life here and other people and what they might see. A girl, a young girl, a young strange girl in charge of something. There are always thoughts that come into the head.

"I'd have been a poor student there if I wasn't expected to weigh that possibility myself." How many bard teachers would they have had for a thing that she doesn't advertise but comes as an open secret? "But all the same we've made a recent overture with the Qunari not so long again. Ambassador Amsel was away with a team including Commander Coupe, something to do with slaying a dragon before an audience, a glorious one. They're no friend of Tevinter either, far from it, it could be an opportunity. If we're smart about it."

Right now she isn't entirely sure who the opportunity is for, but that'll be for posing to everyone then...it'll land how it will. You can make plans, you can make the back-ups of the back-ups and it can still fall down around your ears to leave it to whatever thing in your bones screams at you when it all comes rushing with the tide.

[katabasis]

Abruptly, he's laughing. It has an off-putting and barking quality, equal parts startled and revolted. "An opportunity," he repeats, as if they're words in a foreign language. "Yes, I expect someone in the Qun is saying the exact same thing."

What a ludicrous fucking notion. Dragon hunting for the pleasure of the Qunari. For fuck's sake. Are they meant to be a salvage crew at their behest now too? He set his glass on the desk and by the time he speaks again, he has moderated his tone into to the tune of 'But sure, let's pretend we're talking about this rationally.'

"We'll need volunteers from the other divisions to get it anywhere. Better if the Inquisition had coin to spare to hire some actual seamen, though I somehow doubt Skyhold wants anyone outside the Inquisition knowing about this even if there were room in the books for hiring hands."

[foxsays]

"Last time they came to Kirkwall it was disavowed, hushed up embarrassingly but the memory is a long one for the people." Certainly to be kept in mind as she smiles back, a hand playing with a chain that has half a dragon's tooth swinging on it. "Three heads there and now we've kicked the hornet's nest they'll have decisions to make."

She never did get to go so far as Kont-aar on her Rivain trip, unfortunately for her. It might've done her well or not but they've a Venatori ship to learn as much as they can from, more pirates and there's definitely Fonce with his vast education she might pry out. That or his adventures.

"We needn't hand it back. Not immediately. Things happen." Not that she'd decide alone but let him take the measure of it, let her measure him with it though the idea clearly intrigues and discomforts her in equal measure with the tooth flipped up into her palm. "We're on our own and I'd hear the opinions of the Division first, honestly I don't know how much I'd trust others to secrecy when there are plenty with reason to hate the Qun but not the sense to shut up about what they're doing. You haven't happened to have sailed a dreadnought? We've none out of the Qun these days."

She doesn't look to a scrimshaw on the desk but her eyes dart to it. You don't stop missing family. Phantom limbs itching, demanding you scratch to the bone.

[katabasis]

"Dreadnoughts aren't much for sailing. IF you want to recover it, our best bet would be to man whatever ships can be mustered - the Walrus, the Tevene ship, whatever boats the Inquisition has access to - and tow it. The alternative is to hope it retains its oars and man those."

Nevermind that if she means to delay the dreadnought's return, those crews would need to be highly selective. If words of the salvage somehow found its way back to the Qun, he can't imagine the repercussions would be especially pleasant. The recovery might be managed with a some willing volunteers guided by more knowledgeable hands, but it'd be a near thing. Taking a ship of that size through the Waking Sea's circuitous channels is asking for ruin.

--Still, to his mind, a better option that returning it. Fuck the Qun and fuck appeasing them.

"If it could be recovered," --and the implication seems to be that it's a big 'if'-- "Where would you even put it?"

Kirkwall hardly tolerates the presence of one raiding ship in its harbor; he can't imagine it'd be pleased to have a Qunari ship there.

[foxsays]

"People see that many ships leaving the docks again so soon and they'll be thinking we're at war with someone else. I'm wary of causing any sort of scene, especially when I have no idea how long our guest's presence is going to stay a guarded secret." They've had Venatori get into the Gallows before, she went after one, if she's had a nightmare of waking up to blood in the streets then that's between her, Korrin, and a carefully worded lie about why she's leaning out the window at three in the morning to see for herself that Kirkwall is very much Kirkwall and nothing especially terrible has happened.

None of it is good, there's a resentment at Skyhold handing her this - it's her job, yes, but it's also a fucking nightmare thanks - as her stomach tightens itself into a knot.

"There's not anywhere we can leave it safely. I know pirates. You know pirates. They're as likely to take if they could and we can't, there's an opportunity to learn from it, equally I wouldn't have the Venatori or any Tevinter forces getting hold of it either." Maybe that's an argument she can use even if it feels clumsy but Flint hates Tevinter, she'd not have them anywhere near a conveniently bereft Qunari ship if she can help it. "Kirkwall will have to deal with what's in its waters in the short term for what won't be there in the long term if it helps us win a war."

Not a popular argument to make with the people but there's time to refine it. Probably time to go to Madame de Cedoux with a 'how would you word this hypothetical situation if I had this in my lap not that I do but if a bitch did'.

[katabasis]

Just because it's a clumsy argument doesn't mean it isn't true. If there aren't Tevinter ships - Venatori affiliated or otherwise - to be found in the Amaranthine this very day, then it's only a matter a time. And she's not wrong that they're better served by the dreadnought in their hands than in anyone else's, but--

"I somehow doubt anyone will tolerate a dreadnought's presence in the harbor here. And if Kirkwall could be convinced to abide by it, I can't imagine the Inquisition's friends among the Qun would accept anything other than a very prompt return. So it might be best to settle the matter of what we're meant to do with the thing after its recovery. I imagine that will somewhat dictate the terms of engagement."

To make a very dry joke.

[foxsays]

"Calling them friends is overstating it, I'll have to talk to Coupe and Herian, probably Thranduil and Beleth too to figure out what, exactly, we say about it all. Since it's going to be coming from the Inquisition and I'll need to ask the rest of naval presence their opinions just to get a feeler for it."

Even if she's willing to ultimately disregard bullshit opinions because you don't pass up a Qunari dreadnought but she's trusting the influx of pirates as well as the general ill-feeling towards the Qun to sway opinion to the we're keeping it camp.

"Maybe we need to start looking into having somewhere a little out of the public eye for situations like this, it's not going to get any better in the future. Say we get to the ship, we manage to work out how to sail it, bring it back here, it might give Skyhold ideas. Or there's just having all our ships in one harbour. If anyone decides to torch it then that's our navy."

Kirkwall being Kirkwall it went up in flames twice before the Inquisition showed up she's not made of faith.