[closed] DANGEROUS GAME

[esquive]

WHO: Kylo Ren, Anna, Etienne, and Marcoulf
WHAT: In exchange for his support at the front lines, a small group has been dispatched to clear bandits from the Comte Chantral de Velun's estate. Spoilers: they're not bandits.
WHEN: Early Harvestmere
WHERE: Orlais, the Heartlands
NOTES: CW: violence, death, murdering innocent folks on the behalf of THE RICH, setting-typical discrimination; it's not great, bob. ASSIGNMENT INFO

The Orlesian Heartlands bloom in every season. In Spring, it is daisies and apple blossoms; in Summer small white flowers and black-eyed susans and poppies all red; and here at the beginning of Autumn the trees burnish themselves and black-green and golds, yellowing grasses ceding to white limbed poplar with their spinning coin leaves. Even far from any field for growing in, the Velun lands paints itself in harvest colors. The land and air recognizes what Celene might not yet admit - that change is a season rotating, and that some things have been the same for long enough that they insist on circling.

Comments

[esquive]

On the other side of the fire, Marcoulf is skinning one of a series of apples picked while fetching firewood. A pot is over the fire already, water in it beginning to flick and sizzle from the heat. It needs to be brought to a boil first - should get there by the time he's finished drawing the knife along the fruit flesh, flicking the pieces into the damp leaves underfoot. It's a waste, but they can afford it.

"I don't see why not." It's a ridiculous kind of question - warrants a ridiculous kind of answer, but he doesn't have the thought to give her one. Honest questions merit honest answers. But here, to give her the benefit of the doubt: "How do you mean?"

[notched]

She interlaces her gloved hands between her knees, resting her elbows on her thighs. Her piercing observation is now extremely overt, dark eyes unwavering. She is terribly serious despite what sounds like such a naive inquiry.

"Are you a coward?" Her tone lacks what would have made this some kind of veiled insult. "What is your allegiance? To yourself, to the forces, to the work?"

She flexes her hands, leather crunching. She decides to give her own answers, to help expose what it is she wants to speak on.

"Nothing of this world turns me. And I wish... to complete my work, with little complication."

Nothing in this world, but put her in front of the shrieking afterbirth of the void again and she will assuredly lose her nerve.

[esquive]

Marcoulf rotates the apple in hand under the poised blade, its skin coming away in a coil. It requires just enough attention that he doesn't look to her or meet that dark, fixed study.

"I do what I'm paid for." Which is the true answer even if it's the easy one. Inquisition doesn't pay much but it's reliable and that matters these days. "You'll have nothing to worry yourself over."

He could very much do with a lack of complication right now.

[notched]

He lacks the sickening fanaticism of the church and the scholars... Which is always something. His idle dourness is even almost familiar, that was many a hunter. Though even other hunters were no longer a safety net. She sits back, leaning away from the light of the fire, putting her weight on her hands.

"There is always trouble to worry over," she answers. She is hyper-vigilant, while the rest of them sleep, she'll be prowling until the sun starts to rise. And on that subject, "Do we expect our travel to be uneventful?"

[esquive]

A shrug. The last scrap of apple skin flakes away and Marcoulf sets the skinned white fruit in the little wooden bowl resting alongside his boot. One down, three to go.

"Travel can be dangerous, but we're well armed with a mabari in our company. Trouble on the road will look elsewhere unless they're very stupid." And he can't imagine anyone dumb enough to try it will really cause any significant delay. "Besides the weather is good with plenty of food to be scavenged." He fetches up a second apple and waggles it at her before setting his knife to it.

"That helps."

[notched]

She contemplates this. Trouble on the road normally takes the form of other hunters now seduced by the power promised of rival factions. All the same kind of power, all the same twisted madness driving them to throw themselves at her. She preferred to travel... lighter-- in darkness, in the trees, the sewers, the rooftops. Anywhere she wouldn't be seen.

All that seems unnecessary here, where Marcoulf tells her that it would be an aberration for their armed party to be attacked rather than the norm. Where they've lit a fire and actually thought to sleep around it. She worries her tongue on the cut of her teeth, feeling out of her depth.

"I don't..." She stops, brows furrowing. She doesn't need the food or the good weather. Maybe one day she'll relearn how to eat, how to rest, how to appreciate good weather. "I'm a hunter. City, forest, hinterland-- I hunt, I stalk, I kill. That's what I'm good for."

Not foraging.

[esquive]

A low noise, humming like 'No.' He doesn't raise his eyes to her, but he does clarify.

"You misunderstand." But that's to be expected. She's an odd woman, fallen through a hole into this world. No reason to expect she'll know it's meant to work. "Highwaymen in search of money will be practiced enough to recognize we're not worth the trouble. The rest, the ones that might be reckless enough to pay us mind, mostly attend to their work to avoid starvation. With so much in season, the risk of that kind is low."

[notched]

No, her mind wouldn't have gone to that. Starvation wasn't an issue when it was always the same night over and over and over again. The sense of her total displacement makes her unhappy. Restless in her skin for something to give it structure. She was never very good at having her own structure, like it was a skill no one had ever bothered to even illuminate to her.

"I see," she responds without embarrassment. She'd rather learn the ways of it now than for it to cause her some kind of trouble in the future; in the moment. There was always trouble to worry over.

"I don't understand this world." As though that needed to be said, and she knows it didn't. "Much of it looks the same, first brush, then... Something different under the surface. But not that different."

Mortals, humans, people... they were just never that different.

[esquive]

The second apple makes a hollow thunk as its dropped into the wooden bowl alongside the first. Marcoulf continues to peel.

"That seems common with you people," he says, the particular selection of the words unarguably brusque but clearly absent - no purposeful unkindness to them. He doesn't much mind Rifters, beyond that fact they they're all lunatics. He does glance up at her thin, something wry and good tempered in the corner of his mouth behind the scraggly red whiskers. "Is the sky blue where you're from?"

She's not the first Rifter he's asked. At this point, it's practically a personal joke, no doubt funny only to him.

[notched]

She gives him a pinched look, trying to decide how to answer. "I suppose. I hadn't seen the daylight in..."

How did one count time when time was frozen. When the only thing that progressed the cycle was the illumination of the lanterns cast upon a shadow play of monsters.

"Until the rift."

The Hunt always started at dusk. Through midnight and the blood moon. Into the darkness. Then when a new hunter came to begin again at the first lantern... dusk again. She tries to remember blue skies over Yharnam.

[esquive]

"You should go to Orzammar, then," he says. The third apple's skin comes away all in one twisting, unbroken spiral. He offers it out to her across the low fire, the pot with its slowly bubbling water. "It's underground as well."

Now who isn't in on the joke.

[notched]

"Oh... the filth pit."

Is that her elusive sense of humor? It doesn't sound like she's trying to be funny, but she did also know that Yngvi had been leading her on a dance explaining dwarves to her. If he was willing to call it a filth pit, why shouldn't she? Maybe it would irritate someone and she'd have a fight on her hands. Something to swing her whip at. Blood to spill.

[esquive]

He-- laughs, a low sawing noise as he sets to peeling the fourth and final apple. "Don't say that where anyone from the Merchant Guild might hear you. You'll find yourself at the bloody end of the Carta's attention."

It's still funny though, especially out here in the Orlesian wood turned all golden and gorgeous with the lateness of the season. You couldn't pay him to work underground, but even beyond his simple aversion to the prospect of being under so much dirt, he imagines there must be parts of Orzammar that fit her description. The Deep Roads were proof enough of that, weren't they?

"You're a funny little thing, aren't you?"

Marcoulf, you're hardly broader than she is.

[notched]

She turns the apple in her hands as he laughs, frowning down at it. Food is so unappealing to her. She thinks about the vials of blood in her pouches. Twenty vials and no more to come.

"T'was a Carta who said it, or so he claimed," she responds listlessly, doesn't admit that she wouldn't be terribly perturbed to pick a fight. She's been scrabbling and scrapping since she was a child. In a way, it's really the only thing she seems to know how to do. She's done nothing but polish that skill-- turning from a little thief, to a little thug, to a little murderer.

She looks up at his assessment of her though, an eyebrow arched irritably, lips pursed. Sometimes she wishes she had been born a man, then she'd never hear those words again. As it is, they are familiar though. Echoes of the elder hunters who had trained her, been her friends and her family. Her gut aches.

"Never been known for my good company," she agrees. "And now I've been a Hunter too long."

And she saw beasts and terrors everywhere.

[esquive]

He clucks his tongue as a hen might, setting aside the knife at last and trading it for the small bundle from the saddlebag at his heel. He economically shakes out the cloth, dipping it into the warming water and letting it soak.

"Nonsense," he says as he fetches a leather sack from the same bag. "You mind yourself and don't talk too much. There's worse kinds." More annoying ones, anyway.

A few handfuls of flour are poured into another shallow bowl, a cup of warm water fished from the pot. Marcoulf sets to mixing it with his fingers, muttering at the heat.

"Who did you hunt for?"

[notched]

She knows that question feels innocuous to him. Like she hunted game for some lord. She imagines that life. A life where she never went into Yharnam.

"The Hunt..." her mouth twists. "People in Yharnam turn into beasts. First it was just a few, then a few more. That was the Hunt. We protected the city."

Silent a moment, "We didn't. We couldn't."

[esquive]

A pause - Marcoulf lifts his eyes to her, though his fingers continue to work their way through the flour and water until it forms a paste. After a beat, his attention lowers again.

It sounds like Templars and mages and broken circles. It sounds like abominations spilling out into the streets and countryside unchecked. It doesn't sound strange - these things are more normal than they were when he was a boy - but it is odd to recognize the things that Rifters say as something familiar.

There's an argument to be made here about the comfort of the expected and what demons might use that. There are people who would hear it and see it as proof that the ruling of a Divine-less Chantry can't be true, that Rifters must be demons. But Marcoulf has no business in politics and he thinks if they are demons, then Rifters have been doing a sorry job of tearing the world to pieces.

"A shame," he says. It is, even if it has no bearing here and even if saying it will make no difference to her. "Something like it happened there in Kirkwall too. The city nearly razed to the ground and blood running red in the street, evidently."

[notched]

She had said: Much of it looks the same, first brush, then... Something different under the surface. But not that different.

Maybe there weren't werewolves and other twisted beasts lurking the streets of Kirkwall in packs in the night, but this place had its own ambitions, its own misguided magicks, its own arrogant researchers. She hadn't left the Hunt in Yharnam. There was no leaving the Hunt. The Hunt was everywhere.

"Not a surprise," her tone as dull and matter-of-fact as his own. She likes that about him. Minds himself. Doesn't say too much. "Wouldn't surprise me if they did it all again, a few years time."

[esquive]

"In Kirkwall? No, I wouldn't either. That city is cursed." As truly as some rune enchanted ring might be. Harder to tell under all its people and trade and that pretty story about its Champion, but he isn't lettered and even he knows history hates that city. The cliffs could one day fall away into the sea and he thinks no one would be shocked by it.

"Let's hope to see it," he says, a macabre kind of humor as he rolls the sticky dough between his hands and divides it into pieces. Presses them flat. Wraps the skinned apples in them.

[notched]

That is bleak, and the pure ugliness of it makes something akin to a smile curl her mouth. She hides it in the collar of her coat, turning her head, chin tucked down. There's something to the idea of watching the fall of a city she hadn't invested so much of her heart into. A great cataclysm that she could watch, untouched by.

"From a distance," she agrees. A tragedy at a distance, without all the wretched nuance she had come to learn about in Yharnam: all the good intentions and evil ones, all the desperate bargains and delusions.

She stops her skulking, taking off her gloves to kneel by the fire and add the apple he had handed her to the workings. If she's not going to eat it, it might as well get prepared with the rest.

[esquive]

He chuckles, teeth flashing behind his whiskers as he pinches the dough shut around the small apples. "Of course."

Even better would be to hear about it while drinking in some distant tavern, he thinks but doesn't say as he retrieves the wet cloth from the now boiling water and shakes it out. It's laid damp out over his knees and the wrapped apples twisted in each corner until they form four tightly wound hanging bundles. Marcoulf cheerfully runs a stick between them, sets the lot in the boiling water and hooks the stick on the edges of the pot. At last, he dusts his hands. There; in an hour they'll have something worth eating.

"And you, my dear?" Asked as he wipes out the shallow bowls, stacking them inside each other. "Are you reliable?"

[notched]

Her nose wrinkles, a childish expression of distaste. When she was out in the open like this, it became much more obvious that her face often gave away what she was feeling. Whether it was distaste for being addressed as a dear, or whether it was utter sorrow for the fate of Yharnam. It becomes even more obvious at the question of her reliability: a little nauseated.

It was easier to play the stoic Hunter all buttoned and tied up in her leathers. That was why the Hunters wore them, a meticulous facade that helped them to remember they were not beasts, but nor could they really be men while on the Hunt. That was why she bore the whip, to keep the things at a distance. That was why she wore the hat and the gorget and the gloves, to keep their blood from touching her. It wasn't practical armor, it wouldn't protect her from fang, claw, nor magic. Not her body anyway, but maybe a little sliver of her mind.

Even then, how reliable is her mind. Her hunt -- for the truth, for answers -- had ended with her turning tail from the screaming monster on the beach, running back to Yharnam after having seen too much. The Yharnam of the Dream was at the center of a web of nightmares. She had peaked into each and not had the courage to go any further.

"For this," she decides to be the best answer. "Reliable enough if... you need a killer. A scout."

She could creep and crawl like a shadow, usually to the ends of gutting creatures open from behind and revelling in the rain of their blood-- but she could probably control herself. Probably. Although, when was the last time she had to?

[esquive]

"Plenty of use for both those things these days," Marcoulf says, mild as milk while he tucks the stacked bowls away into his travelling bag. The satchel of flour follows after them, then the bag's string is drawn tight and its button closed. "If you'd come ten years ago, the work would be harder to find."

There'd be no reason for her to be here at all then, of course - the circumstances of her arrival having something to do with the way to the work is coming undone like a blighted sweater -, but the point stands. These days, living on your sword or barbed whip or whatever bloody thing you might care for is easily done so long as you don't kark it in the process.

"But good. I suspect there's some fighting to be done ahead of us."