Eluvian Scoutin' Somba

[arlathvhen]

WHO: Beleth, Merrill, Kostos, Freddie
WHAT: Shit let's smuggle an Eluvian
WHEN: Slightly backdated
WHERE: Orlais and the Crossroads
NOTES: The crossroads are weird.

individual prompts within

Comments

The Crossroads

[arlathvhen]

The Crossroads are a strange place, and Beleth has already had the opportunity to learn this. It's still a bit of a surprise just how strange it can be--surprising, and occasionally annoying.

Which is what she's currently feeling as she stands next to Merrill, staring down at a sinkhole, in the bottom of which rests the two human members of their group. Spread across the ground are sinister red vines, that wind near the elven women's feet, but leave plenty of room for them to walk. The vines had not, unfortunately, provided the same courtesy to the other two.

"Maybe we could cut the vines? Just--hey! Stop that!--Just tear the thorns off. They might stop trying to trip them if they aren't--Quit it." Attempting to plan the daring rescue of their two comrades is considerably complicated by the fact that a wisp has apparently taken an interest in the situation, and is now headbutting itself against both Beleth and Merrill as they speak, like a cat that really needs to be pet right this instant, or it will die.

"Or maybe--Kostos, can you please--you can talk to wisps, right?" Beleth peers over the edge, the wisp affectionately smacking her in the face. "Can you get it to, I don't know--go away? Come to you? Maybe it'll help you." Or, maybe it'll divebomb them instead. It's a risk Beleth is willing to take.

[chainlightning]

"Technically," offers Merrill, even as she peers down at the two humans, "anyone can talk to wisps. It's just whether they care. Or understand."

She's rather bemused; as lost as she's gotten in the Crossroads, vines deciding to trip people into holes was new. Then again, the vines had only tripped the humans. Merrill lists a hand to idly wave the wisp away as she looks.

"I might be able to do something with magic, but I'm not sure how it'll react with these plants."

Keeper magic, or almost; the Dalish had a relationship with nature, and Beleth might be familiar with some of what Merrill could do. The Crossroads was a new variable, though.

[exequy]

"I'm trying," Kostos adds, overlapping (rudely) with Merrill's much less irritable responses, and despite the fact that he's been silent up until now. He has been trying. The wisp can sense him, too. Usually that's enough for them to care, understand, and square up to dance a cotillion, if he's polite.

This one is disinterested, currently, in anything except making friends with the elves, and it sort of figures that like everything else in this place the wisp has some sort of grudge against humans for—whatever. Being too broad and hairy, though that doesn't quite explain the Baroness. Maybe all of the conquesting and Exalted Marches. Who knows.

Anyway, the wisp: even from the bottom of a sinkhole, looking up into vines that seem to want him dead, Kostos is a little endeared. Not that that's visible on his face at all.

"It likes your skin," he offers up, the only result he's managed to get so far from probing at its little fragment of consciousness.

Trolls on the Bridge

[arlathvhen]

A group of suspicious characters attempting to extort money from Beleth would be annoying at any period of time. Right now, with an angry red rash across half her neck, an arm, and half her torso, and trying not to too obviously itch it while she argues with them, it seems like the worst thing to have happened to her in recent memory.

"You don't even look like actual toll collectors, they have a uniform and everything. You haven't shown us your license, either--Of course there's a license to collect tolls, you can't just do it willy nilly."

Her voice has reached the point of exasperation that, for anyone familiar with it, is fairly close to crossing over into 'fuck this shit' territory, which is probably why the hand that isn't scratching irately at her neck is drifting towards her bow.

[exequy]

Fortunately for everyone in Thedas, Kostos’ sour moods don’t make him murderous. Otherwise he would have a much higher body count than the reasonably high one he already has—or dead, more likely, executed in Cumberland’s Circle for murdering a blonde apprentice named Portentia who called him stupid when he was ten. Instead he is alive, though his rash and stuff nose are making him wish he weren’t, and not especially interested in killing these people if they don’t absolutely insist on it.

To that end, he leans in from where he's standing behind Beleth, ahead of the cart with the eluvian, so he can murmur into her ear at a volume too low for the obvious thieves to hear.

"If you make us fight right now I will sneeze into everything you eat for the rest of the trip."

When he straightens up, though, his eyes are trained flintily on their potential murder victims, as if he'd said something about how easy they would be to dispose of. Solidarity despite dissent. It's important.

[chainlightning]

The problem with not wearing shoes, Merrill has found, is that itchy plants seem to gravitate toward your bare feet. It's why she's currently leaning on the cart, trying to discreetly scratch the tops of her feet on the wheels while it isn't moving. Of course, she's also keeping an eye on the eluvian, but- well. She itches.

Maybe, she idly thinks, there's something to be said for boots after all.

In any case, Merrill mostly manages to frown at the 'toll collectors'. She's still got her staff in hand (it's helping her balance while she tries to scratch) and is well aware of how quickly Beleth can likely off a bunch of stubborn shems trying to extort them. At the moment, she's not too worried about much save the cart and its proximity to her feet.