open | neither snow nor rain

[nadasharillen]

WHO: Nari, Lexie, you~
WHAT: Guardian catch-all for some ladies. (Well, one Lady and one elf.)
WHEN: The Present!
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: prompts I have promised people will be appearing below as I get to them!

Nari

I.

With the sleet keeping everything near-constantly coated with ice, Guardian is hardly the right month to be jaunting about between the Gallows towers and the towers that hold the massive machinery designed to raise and lower Kirkwall's immense chain net. The massive machinery that hasn't been used in two decades, ever since Viscount Threnhold had used it to strangle Orlesian trade and the Divine had ordered the city's Templars to 'convince' him to lower it. Threnhold's successors had been loathe to use it with such a tangle in the recent past, and so its mechanism is full of two decades of largely untended metal shifting, weathering, rusting in places.

The winter seas are rough enough that an assault by sea isn't likely, but the thin dark Dalish woman had shrugged and said that the Archon's Palace raising into the sky above Minrathous hadn't been all that likely either, and so here she is, on her way to the Chain tower, a pack of tools slung over her back. A pack that has been repaired several times, and by the look of it is about to need one more: something heavy looking is inching its way out of the back of it with every step she takes. Won't be long before that's lost. Hope it's not important.


II.

What Guardian is the right month for is being here near the hearth in the Hanged Man's taproom with a hot mug of mulled wine and a mallet, tapping chairs back together and listening with quiet amusement to a harper on one side and two tipsy men one-upping each other outrageously in order to try to take the same woman home on the other.

The important thing, really, is that the weather is outside, but the entertainment isn't unwelcome.

“Are you listening to this?” she asks, looking up briefly with a crooked grin spreading across her face, “The taller one has gone from fisherman to ship's captain in the space of five minutes.”


[ or something else! ]


Alexandrie

Winter here has not brought the lovely romantic fluffy pristine snow she'd dreamed of. It's desperately horrible in Kirkwall, and what work she can do from home she does from home with great relief. Unfortunately there are still meetings to be had, new correspondence to discuss, and every so often new books, scraps, and sheafs of paper arrive for the Inquisition that are in need of translation. All these things are in the Gallows, and so, begrudgingly, is Alexandrie.

She can be found now, looking far less disgruntled than she actually is, sitting at a table in the library with a letter in one hand—at which she is frowning with extreme delicacy—and a painted porcelain cup of tea in the other, her maid doing a spot of embroidery close enough at hand to refresh it when that becomes necessary.

“Ah!” she exclaims quietly, her glance warm and pleased over her painstakingly painted smile, “C'est parfait. Have you a moment to spare?”


[ ...or something else! ]

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

Delighted, she matches his Antivan to do some low murmuring of her own. "What luck that I have never found my persistent interest in you to be drying in the slightest." Alexandrie folds her arms about Loki's shoulders and nips very delicately at his ear while she thinks through the words she has at her disposal. The languages of the world had been a large portion of her studies--after all, it is easier to charm people in their own language, especially as a foreign guest. And easier also to feign ignorance while gathering information.

She giggles quietly and breathily, and reaches for the folded paper she had been using as a bookmark and a nearby pen to carefully draw the Dwarven rune for the opposite and lay it beside his book.

...Which she is beginning to wonder whether or not he could borrow and bring home to rest on a different horizontal surface to explain to her. Like, say, her back.

[hwaaaitsme]

He regards her where she leans over his shoulder and smiles. This is not necessarily something best done in the Library, but to leave now would be disadvantageous. He required access to other books, those that remain here, but not for much longer.

He leans to the side and smiles, his head tilted as he blindly picks up his pen and his bookmark and scrawls a title on it. In runic.

"Then I shall merrily explain, if only you would fetch this tome from behind you." It is Rivaini and it suits him less well, but he doesn't sound overly harsh in it.

[coquettish_trees]

Blind scrawling, she thinks with amusement as she retrieves the marker, is more a test of whether or not she can decipher his handwriting. Easy enough when it is not runes: he has the hand of a scholar, albeit sometimes the scrawl of a lifelong one who thinks and writes both simultaneously and quickly. He had been more careful in their written correspondence, although she had cheekily bid him allow his script to suffer should... inspiration... strike whilst writing. (She had in fact passionately snapped a nib halfway through that very letter and left the resultant ink stain, annotated as to its improprietous cause, to prove herself quite willing to do the same.)

When it is runes... Alexandrie spends a long moment in consideration. Not because of the content, he'd rather mischeviously written what seems to be the title of a book on herbs that would belong in an entirely different section and on the level below them as well, but because of the myriad little differences in how he forms them. How terribly enchanted she is by even that.

"A curious thing to require in reference, my dearest, but I will go and fetch it faithfully if you truly wish it," she says, smiling brightly as she slides again into the seat next to him, carefully arranging the fall of her skirts as she settles. His own tongue again this time, hoping to lure him back to it. The sound of him in Antivan is a new and deeply pleasant addition which she fully intends to demand in the future, she is naturally very fond of his Orlesian, but she adores him in Tevene.

[hwaaaitsme]

"Ah, merci," he replies and looks at her fondly as she retakes her seat. She is rather singular, isn't she? A woman who would delightedly try to bait each language he parses from him like this? In a jest and game while she watches him work?

His smile becomes a bit softer than is appropriate but he doesnt restrain himself. They are not nearly alone in the library but neither are they being watched. He can behave sweetly if he likes.

"It has component information for this bit of spellwork," he says and slides his open book toward her. His Tevene is natural and swift but he doesn't curb that either. She is fluent enough. "It also contains a few notes required for a few operations I have considered suggesting."

[coquettish_trees]

She raises her eyebrows and peers into the quite literally arcane text. Language is one thing, but vocabulary another entire. All Alexandrie knows of magic comes from him, and she can follow well enough when he speaks of it. Can follow less well on her own, but some of the phrases are familiar enough.

"Do you need such things? I have not seen you require so much as a staff." She in her language again, he in his. Her finger slides along the page, curiously searching out the list. There is a little stubborn pride in the small smile that twitches on her lips for their speaking as she does so. With a good deal of thought she'd turned her worries about the perennial strife between their homelands to simply a problem to be solved, and then, alchemy like, into rebellion. Which, on this subject, has ever pleased her.

[hwaaaitsme]

He preens a bit, reflexively, as she praises his skill in Orlesian. It lingers a moment and, eventually, he conjures a response. it is for brevity that he picks her language--it would be easiest understood in his but the words were very technical.

"I could...perhaps...cast this without the adjacent parts and have the result come out the same," he boasts a bit and slides the list before her. "The elements function as tethers to specific chemicals in the blood of men. It helps rein in mages of less skill if we use a component that inherently causes happiness or sorrow or accelerates focus.

"It is not a technique used often in the South."

[coquettish_trees]

She frowns slightly in thought, careful as always to not let it pinch her brow, and then chuckles softly and tilts her head at him.

"As I might flirt just as well in a Chantry frock, but might find it advantageous to choose some... other manner of attire?"

[hwaaaitsme]

He hums in response and considers the comparison. It is utter nonsense, of course, but not a bad grasp of the overall concept. After a moment he inclines his head and, in Tevene:

"More so it is easier to exploit the whole gamut of your skills when properly...outfitted. Whereas a more austere arrangement would require you to lean too heavily on some skills and not at all on others."

[coquettish_trees]

The temptation to politely inquire after Loki's thoughts on what might make up a proper outfitting for exploiting the whole gamut of her skills is vast, but she folds the question away for later in the evening. Magical research is a great hobby of his, after all, and while it is one she will never share Alexandrie is determined to be at the very least able to take part in some discussion. To know whether or not anything she should find while out in the world is of use to him.

Besides, sometimes she manages to be incisive, and little delights her more than to cause him to pause in one of those little re-evaluating looks he gives her when she surprises him.

"And the proposed operations," she follows him back into Tevene, passing him the lead in her bit of fun for the moment, "are they to acquire such things?"

[hwaaaitsme]

"Some...and some will require others," Loki admits, delighted as she swaps back to Tevene with him.

"Though I work on a myriad of tasks at once, so it is difficult to explain which would be which," he warns and then, looking just slightly more hopeful than he really ought to. "Unless you would care to suffer the length of it all?"

[coquettish_trees]

One opportunity for sauciness she could avoid. Two, however...

"Why, mon coeur, I suffer when I am not provided with the length of it all," Alexandrie says, briefly eyeing him through her lashes with a fox-like smile. She does arrange herself to the very picture of comfortable attentiveness in her chair, though, and waits with genuine interest.

"Do say on."