open.

[cozen]

WHO: The ex-bard currently known as Édouard & you
WHAT: Moving in, making friends
WHEN: Mid-Haring
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: :V

I. CENTRAL TOWER

Another casualty for the Inquisition's records: a type case belonging to Édouard Almary, which, after scandalously bumpy journey from Val Royeaux that wore without mercy on its rickety old joints, expired in the corridor of the Gallows' central tower in an overdramatic explosion of rune-stamped tiles, mere feet from its final destination, leaving its owner holding only two narrow pieces of its frame.

Très tragique.

He is sure that the various pieces of the type case are now pieces small enough he can carry them himself, however, and the printing press is already where it's meant to be. So he drops the two sticks in his hands onto the wreckage, flips the dockhand who'd been waylaid to assist him him a silver for his service, and sends him on his way.

The he stands there for a short while, frowning at the riot of sorts and splintered wood. One of the long, shallow drawers has skidded several yards back toward the stairs, like it was making a break for it. Is this a bad omen? Does he believe in omens? No, he doesn't. Yet—possibly.

But there isn't anything to do about it now. He's here. He isn't carrying the damned press back down the stairs. So after that short while of frowning he begins picking up the pieces, beginning by pushing the drawer that made a break for it along the floor toward the rest of the mess with one foot, sweeping tiles along with it, and humming "Girl in Red Crossing" to accompany the sound of skittering metal bits on stone.

II. DINING HALL

"Were you there, in Ghislain?"

The question is Orlesian-accented and aimed at whoever is closest: someone he sat down next to for lack of empty seating elsewhere, someone he sat nearby because they looked like they could use the company, someone who is left in his vague proximity after the other people around them have finished their meals and left. When he asks it, he glances up, long enough for a flicker of a friendly but appropriately muted smile for the subject matter.

Many deaths, as he's heard it, and a disheartening degree of chaos. Asking about it is possibly not the best way to go about making friends. But on the other hand, they are soldiers and spies; it might be the only way.

III. TRAINING GROUNDS

It is not so cold here, in his opinion, especially in the fortress, where the walls break the wind. On one of the brighter days during his first week he spends midday outside, watching those who don't have the luxury of letting their training lapse for the winter practice swinging swords or loosing arrows while he reads through a short stack of documents.

He's a safe distance away, but not so distant he can't make a single pitying tsk when one of the cloth and straw training dummies is thoroughly obliterated.

"Brutal," he says. "Did it have a name?"

IV. WILDCARD

Comments

ii!

[faithlikeaseed]

Myr looks up at the question--from his meal--then over at the man asking, then down at the arm he's not using to spoon up soup, still bandaged over livid-red scars. (As if to ask: Did that give it away?)

"I was," said not unkindly, and he looks back at the bowl to fish an errant pea out of the broth and set it aside with a little pile of its fellows. "Didn't go down well for us. Looking for stories about it?"

The man looks and sounds unfamiliar; the former's not so strange (half the Inquisition at Kirkwall still looks unfamiliar), but the latter is.

[cozen]

"I suppose so," he says, which means yes, though that isn't how he would have put it. It makes him sound a bit like a gawker, is all, when that's only a third of it. The second third is that he works here now, and has a job to do. The last is that he's Orlesian to his marrow—never mind whatever dingy Marcher rookery his parents grew up in, he's never seen it—and the loss makes his bones hurt.

But there is the gawker part, or more romantically the part that's hunted and collected stories since the first time a tale of Remi Vascal set fire to his nine-year-old heart, and he smiles a little wider, in a way meant to encourage, before the smile vanishes into something more serious and he sets his spoon aside.

"It is why I've come. I had not thought—I am not a soldier." He gestures to himself, in the fleeting way of someone who doesn't actually want to draw that much attention, just illustrate a point. "But the time for us to wait for fighting men to save us seems to have passed by while we were not looking."

[faithlikeaseed]

He returns the smile, his own native cheer encouraged despite his brooding; nudges his bowl away from him and turns more toward his table companion. "It has, hasn't it? Though I don't know this was ever something that could've been won by force of arms alone."

Though Myr had hoped, something in his tone seems to say; Ghislain was a graveyard for many a hope alongside all their dead. "For all the time I've been here, we've had as much need or more of those who aren't soldiers. What do you do?"

[cozen]

"Diplomacy, now, I have been told. But I am a printer by trade," Bastien says, which is true, and holds out a hand to add, "Édouard Almary," which is not—

but neither is Bastien, by a given measure of truth.