OLD YOU IN THE GARBAGE, NEW YOU IN DISPLAY CASE

[bouchonne]

WHO: Byerly, Alexandrie, Petrana, Sidony...and Helena???
WHAT: Going to reconcile a married couple
WHEN: Prior to the battle
WHERE: Orlais, in Val Fermin
NOTES: This post is part of a player plot leading into the Battle of Ghislain

Two months ago, Comte Michel du Val Firmin found a new lady-love. It's a familiar sort of story, one that hardly even raises an eyebrow in Orlais - the Comte and Comtesse have their lives taken over by duties; their relationships cools, their love is forgotten; one or the other or both meet someone a touch more comely, a touch more exciting. For the Comte, that someone was a lively peasant woman named Eloise, an educated literate young lady with curly hair and strong opinions.

Truly, this wouldn't be grounds for any attention at all...save for the fact that Eloise has strong opinions about world politics, and a strong willingness to voice them to the people around her. Including the Comte. Who listens to her. And so now, on the eve of a major battle, he's debating withdrawing his troops, suddenly (under her influence) troubled by the questionable morality of sending common people off to die.

Byerly Rutyer got word of this looming disaster through a dear friend of his*. And so he recruited a few diplomats, friends, and complete oddballs to help him sabotage this turn of events...by ensuring that the Comte's heart is taken away from Eloise and is instead returned to the Comtesse.




*Monarchies tend not to like nobles - even nobles of other countries - turning all democratic. The peasants tend to get ideas. So this info got slipped courtesy of a few attentive folks down south.

Comments

open; de la fontaine estate, post-party.

[ipseite]

Nothing is quite so satisfying as a job well done, particularly one with so many moving parts—as strange as it feels to be essentially congratulating herself on ensuring a married couple copulate, she is glad to feel it might yet all come together. If they do. Good grief, how terribly crass; the wine that she's finally more than just tasting must be going to her head.

The party itself had been a delicately choreographed dance performed by puppets unaware of the pulling of their strings—a guest-list Petrana had methodically tailored to show the Comtesse to her best advantage naturally, without requiring an unsubtle hand. People she would naturally be drawn into conversation with; who share or admire her interests, who admire her, a warm audience to reflect her glow and allow her husband to see her not through the tired contempt of familiarity but instead through their eyes. See her charm and her cleverness reflected in their pleasure in it, and to look closer for what he might have come to take for granted.

With the guests of honour secluded in their guest-room, she sits by the de la Fontaine's pond with a pilfered bottle of wine and takes her shoes off, exhales deeply, stretches her toes into the grass, and thinks for a moment of—

Not home, any longer. But there's a bittersweet taste to it that she cannot quite put aside. At least she might have done some good here, if she could never have saved her own marriage. This is the sort of thing she'd imagined they might do together, lifetimes ago; now she thinks, perhaps one day of Ferelden, of Julius.

Perhaps she should just take the win.

“To all of you,” she says, to no one in particular, and drinks.