faderift | OPEN | they've given you a number

Entry tags:

OPEN | they've given you a number

WHO: Open to all, plus a couple specific closed starters
WHAT: Moving into the DH quarters, general routines, and kicking off some particular intel-gathering ops
WHEN: Now-ish
WHERE: Around the Gallows, but if you'd prefer somewhere else hit me up on plurk and we can work something out.
NOTES: n/a, will be updated if that changes

Yseult's move into the Scouting office and Division Head quarters isn't immediate. There are Beleth's things to be packed up and new chosen to replace them, options scavenged from unused quarters or dusted off after years in storage. Gallows staff come and go, bearing away rolled-up wall-hangings and grumbling about how to get the old desk back out through the doorway (they got it in here so there must be a way without sawing it in half), and Yseult can be found "overseeing" the minor commotion. This appears to mostly involve her ignoring it, except to shift from perching on this windowsill to that end-table or crate corner as needed, rotating around the emptying rooms as she reads through a stack of files, occasionally making notes with a stub of pencil otherwise tucked behind an ear or rolled absent-mindedly between knuckles.

When she runs out of reading material she might instead be found even further up the central tower in the aerie, visiting with the griffons. One of the adolescents, a white female with grey-tan markings on face and wings, seems to delight in prowling on tip-toes behind her, attempting to discreetly sidle up and steal things out of her pockets as Yseult pretends not to notice, only to coincidentally shift out of reach just at the key moment. When this game grows old there are others: a version of Find-the-Lady played with three wooden cups and a hidden treat, or catch played with bits of food or a leather ball and other random objects tossed around the aerie, griffons darting between rafters and racing to beat their siblings to catch it.

The training grounds are another common haunt, though she prefers odd hours--at dusk or dawn, or during mealtimes--when they are at their emptiest. She trains most often empty-handed or with knives, obviously a favored weapon whether thrown or wielded against one of the straw-filled bags hung from the ceiling. But sometimes it's a long staff, or two short ones, a whip-fast rapier, occasionally even a regular longsword or mace if she really wants to sweat through a challenge. Most sessions begin and end with her scaling the walls of the training hall building up to the roof, light on her feet across the ridgeline to a far corner within leaping distance of the isle's outer wall and from there across parapets and rooftops and forgotten banner-line ropes back to the main towers. She usually chooses her moment carefully to make this climb without being spotted, but can occasionally be caught dangling from a gutter on her way up or down. With the Scouting suite in flux, she can still be found in the common baths in the Templar tower afterwards.

After a couple days, the dust settles on the eighth floor, and from then she can be often found in the re-fitted Scouting office, its door always cracked open to ~~eavesdrop on the hallway~~ invite a knock unless she is in conference with someone. The space has been rearranged, but some of the spirit of Beleth's office remains in the pair of armchairs and tea-table now set in front of the fire and in the bookcases that still line the walls. The desk, large but simply carved on its solid front, is already accumulating files and missives neatly collected in stacks around the central blotter and pewter inkwells. The walls are bare, but that seems likely to be temporary, a few rolled tapestries in a corner and paintings in frames propped against the wall. When not bent over a report, pen in hand, she might be found flipping through them, or contemplating the merits of a seaside landscape in various positions on the wall, frowning thoughtfully over a cup of tea late into the evening.

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It's too late for tea. Darras goes to the sideboard to examine the bottle instead, see if it's worth pouring out. Of course it is. Yseult has good fine taste that could make tavern rum feel the sting of shame. He rubs his thumb against the label, then the raised stamp pressed into the glass, the mark of its maker.

"S'ppose as scoutmaster, you had intelligence enough to know I was gone. And then enough left over not to be concerned." He flashes her a little grin, somewhere between self-deprecating and hang-dog. After the way their last conversation had ended, the grin is maybe a little too familiar, making light of what stands between them. Then again, after the way their last conversation had ended (the way all of their conversations seem to end these days), it's maybe a bit too much to hint that Yseult might have worn anything like concern in these last weeks.

But she must have. Because he was still thinking of her. That's what has put him here.

"I met the Fancy off the coast, near Ostwick. Sailed to Brandel's Reach from there. The Inquisition is middling in its popularity, once you get out of it. I'm sure you knew that as well, even before you got the scoutmaster's files handed over to you."

As he moves about the room, Yseult watches. She's been settling in, now that the place is fully furnished--sturdy desk, dark patterned rugs, a couple armchairs opposite the couch she and Rosana are occupying. There are tall bookshelves along one wall half-full of volumes Beleth left behind, and a long narrow table with maps unrolled across it, half piled on top of each other and pinned down with odds and ends. A functional space, everything handsomely professional, but not severe. It's nothing like anywhere she's lived before but it seems to fit, or at least this side of her. It's novel, seeing Darras traipse around it, incongruous.

She didn't not worry, a little bit, and maybe he can see that in her attention, somehow, or in the hint of a smile that forms, inevitably, when he grins. (Maybe he ought to see it in the fact she's let him in the door at all.)

The folder gets tossed onto the coffee table, and she draws her legs up onto the cushion, settling back into the crook of the couch arm. "I'm aware," she says, after a sip of rum, tone prompting him to go on with this story, since surely there's more of a story here. "I can't say we're very concerned about the opinions of Brandel's Reach at present."

"And here I thought the Inquisition was eager for allies."

Rum in hand, Darras stays across the room from Yseult and Rosana. He goes first to examine the books on the shelf, studying their bindings--and then the maps, one of which he half-unrolls, studying the shape of the coastlines, the spread of the land and the sea, the sprawl of rivers and roads and boarders. He's always liked maps, and studying them idly is like how someone else might fiddle with a stray thread, or chew on a hangnail. Irresistible, like.

She's waiting for the next part, for the rest of the story. This has a familiarity to it, too. A pattern to fall back into. Darras doesn't try to resist it.

"There's an island in the Amarithine. Gets to about half its usual size when the tide is in. And most of what it is, is beneath the surface--of the water, and the land itself. Caves that flood, which makes getting in a trick. And the man that told this one to me promised there was treasure beneath." He looks back at Yseult again, another grin tugging at his mouth, and cocks an eyebrow at her. Challenging her to challenge the tale. "Rare and precious treasure."

Beside Yseult on the couch, Rosana finishes her bath and settles her head back onto her paws. Her eyes are already closed. She could care less.

Yseult lets him go, as she does, waiting for the inevitable pause in the tale. It comes with that look, that grin, and there's something undeniably fond in the roll of her eyes.

"And?" she prompts, not perfectly patient at this end of a long day, "Did you find the treasure? Or have you come to ask me to quit and help you go on a wild goose chase to search for it?"

"No, 'cos you'd never agree."

And he's not even mad about it. See how not mad he is? Darras turns so he's half-sitting on the map table, facing Yseult directly, that grin not quite gone from his face. Is it possible to have moved to teasing on this topic? They used to talk about it, nearly. Tease about it, these other lives they could live, get right up until the part where they'd have to consider abandoning what they'd built for themselves, and then they'd leave off, skirting the depths like they were swimming along a reef. Kicking out over the drop-off, never diving.

"I didn't find the treasure. Yet. The fellow what told me of it--you'd not have liked him. Smelled of cheap rum, nothing like this stuff you've got here. Lice in his beard. Nearly inconsolably drunk, and I thought him for a liar at first, 'cos his sort usually is. Exaggerating what they know, trying to sell you on a song. And they just so happen to have a treasure map about their person, which they'll give to you, for a price. Only it turns out," and he shoves away from the table and crosses back to the door, hefting the bag he'd dropped, "what he had was better'n a map."

Playing it up, selling Yseult on his song, Darras holds out the bag in her direction. There's something weighty in it, pulling it down.

Edited (clarity) 2019-04-25 15:46 (UTC)

"If you've brought lice into my new rooms no amount of treasure is going to make it right," Yseult warns, with a long flat look. That she is skeptical goes without saying. It would not be the first time Darras had spun a tale of treasure that ended in a punchline. What's better than a map? Two maps, a book of maps, a bottle of expensive wine, a large pie, a very large oyster, a very small dog, any number of other things.

It is in this spirit of familiar disbelief that she rises with a grudging sigh and crosses the room to open the bag.

"I did have a wash," Darras says, somewhat indignantly, "before I came here."

Clearly enough to rid himself of any persistent lice hanging about. It hardly matters. She opens the bag, which is tied, loosely, at the top, with a length of rope. Once undone, the mouth of the bag drops open, and nestled against the rough folds within is--

Well, it's a head. Not a human head. For one, it's carved of stone, expertly crafted. Two blind eyes of pale stone, beneath thick eyebrows of that same stone. A broad nose, a thick mustache that ebbs to beard, which ends, abruptly, in the place that the head had been hewn from its pedestal or stone shoulders. The figure's hair ends the same, blunt, but it would once have been a cascade of carefully-carved locks. Dwarven in nature, at least if the sculpture's details are anything to go by. Someone with an eye for art and history might be able to make more of its style, all of the nuances that would mark and date it.

Darras twists his wrist, so that the bag twirls a little. The head within turns with it, slowly, and as it does, the candlelight in the room catches on the circlet on its forehead. Winking, gold, it has been laid right into the stone brow of the dwarf head, so that no one could pick it free and steal it.

No one counted on pirates. Willing to take the difficult way, as always. Darras llets the bag twist back again, and the circlet winks in the other direction now.

"Like it?"

She leans in for a closer look, plucking the bag open to encourage as much of the room's limited candlelight in as possible.

"It looks like dwarf-work," she says, looking up at him, a question in the arch of her brows. "Dwarves on an island in the middle of the ocean?" It sounds mad. But some odd deformity catches the light as she's pulling the bag back around it, and she reaches down to find the the sharp hulls of barnacles clinging to the ridges of the carving's beard. Huh.

"It's interesting," is as much as she'll concede, but she's still half looking at the head even as she straightens up, gazed pulled away only when she turns to go refill her cup. A shallow skim of liquor in the glass, red-black where it catches the light. "Did he give you a map, too?"

"Think I heard a joke about that once. 'Dwarves on an island in the middle of the ocean'."

He sets the bag down once she's crossed away to get her refill. It makes a quiet thunk against the floor, stone on stone, muffled by the fold of the bag. The carved stone isn't quite toothy enough to keep the bag in place. Without the tie at the top, it falls open, and down, draping itself around the remnant like a shawl.

Without the burden of it, Darras is free to go back for his drink, which he'd left behind on the map table. Topical, that. "He wouldn't have been much if he'd not had a map. And imagine the story that'd be told after. No one talks of anyone that almost found the rare mysterious treasure on the unmarked island. 'Course he had a map. And I reckoned it was better put in the hands of someone who wasn't going to be selling it first chance he got, to whoever had coin enough and patience enough to listen to his raving. So I got it off of him."

He settles back so he's leaned against the table again, comfortable and a little pleased with himself. "Granted, it's not the award of an office. Only one of us can claim that one. But it is interesting, isn't it."

"It is," Yseult agrees again, settling on the arm of the sofa again to face him. Her tone adds a 'but' to the words. "I'm not sure it's middle-of-the-night interesting. Please don't move those markers."

The map she gestures at is just behind him, a handful of colored tokens placed across it, spread about the north of Thedas, a small pile of extras off to one side.

She drinks, and twitches her robe smooth over crossed knees. "Are you going to go look for it?"

Insult prickles at the back of Darras' neck. Very deliberately, he raises his hands--one holding the cup of rum, one holding nothing at all, certainly not holding any of the tokens--and he turns around, slow, so he's sitting on the edge of the table once more.

"Wouldn't dream of it. Touching the tokens, that is. The island..."

He shrugs, and takes another sip of rum. The spice of it blooms in his throat, spreads to his chest. It does little to warm him. What did he think he'd get, coming here? It will be the same again. No matter what he does or what he says. Nothing short of martyring himself for the Inquisition's cause will move Yseult.

"I wouldn't want to bore you with my plans. Tell me, what is middle-of-the-night interesting?"

A few things might come to mind, even if she is busy noticing how he's bristled. Understandably, at least about her comment. He'll get no apology for being protective of her maps.

She lets her shoulders drop a bit, enough to be noticeable as they slacken, and presses her lips into a thin, wry smile. "That was unnecessary, I'm sorry. This job is very different than what I'm used to, and if I get it wrong people will die. And you want to talk about treasure hunting." She lifts a hand, like see what I mean? but lets it drop against her thigh as she stands, rounding the arm to return to a more comfortable seat on the couch, files dropped onto the coffee table with a soft, demonstrative slap.

"All right. Tell me your plan to find this dwarf island."

"What I wanted, was t' tell you where I'd gone."

Which, once he's said it, feels like a petty quibble. It's just that she's set up his story in opposition to her work, boiled it all down to the bones of the argument that they are constantly having. Self-preservation, selflessness; treasure, the fate of the world. It's unfair to cast it so starkly, refocus so that the spirit of what brought him here is washed away.

Irritated, half with himself, Darras scratches at his beard, trying to get back to where he was.

"It's not an idle tale." Anything he says now sounds defensive, which makes him more irritated. He takes another swig of rum to give himself some strength to go on with it. "And I'm not the only one interested. That's the bit I really wanted t' bring back. After I'd gotten the map off of him, he went back to his muttering, and I went back to my ship. Started to, at least, only a man approached me first. You see, he'd hoped to get the map for himself and was willing to pay for it. He was insistent, followed me halfway back to the Fancy. I practically had to dump him in the harbor to put him off. Most curious of all was that he was a Vint. Trying to play at being something else, but his accent gave him away the more frantic he got."

There used to be clear, simple lines between the two halves of her life. A long ride, a few days' sail, time enough to set things aside, pick others back up. Llomerryn was more complicated, but even there the boundaries were clear: one person here, another everywhere else. And now Darras is in her office, wanting to tell her where he's been and also how he may've met an enemy agent there.

The apology and the confusion never quite make it fully onto her face, there but fleeting, stopped short by the rest of Darras's story. Her attention sharpens, especially at the last, which sees her holding up a finger as she rises to cross to her desk for pen and paper. Quick notes take down what he's shared so far.

"Do you remember anything else he said? A reason why he wanted it, or how he knew of it? Any hint of working with others?" All business, she seems to remember something suddenly, and flips through a drawer for a folder, opening it to fan out a sheaf of portrait sketches across the corner of the desk. "Do you see him in here?"

There's a small petty part of him that's pleased when her attention sharpens suddenly. Not on him, precisely, more on what it is that he's saying--as well she should, considering, and she should have from the start. It's a feeling that is short-lived, drowned when Darras realizes how unsatisfying and ugly it really is. Makes him feel worse rather than better.

He's slow to start considering the answers to her question, as she fires them off at him. Another sip of rum before he crosses over to her desk, just in time for her to lay out those sketches for him. He picks up a few and glances them over before discarding them, facedown, and spreading out the rest.

"Should he be? I don't know what I'm looking at with these. They're all Vints?"

Yseult shrugs, dressing gown tugged back up as it slips from her shoulder. "They're agents or suspected agents we've encountered. This folder is those around ports, along the coast, involved in shipping, pirates, anything like that."

She watches him flip through, settling on the corner of her desk to wait.

"If he's not in there I'd like you to sit with an artist tomorrow and create a new sketch. Do you have any idea why they might want the treasure? Was there anything magical about it? I'm told the enemy is usually interested in elven magical artifacts."

He nods, as he sifts through the sketches, pausing on a few before moving on past. There's a little twist to his mouth at the word pirate, but he doesn't comment on it.

"He didn't mention any magic. I've been told there's nothing particularly magical about that bit of rock," and he nods back toward the abandoned bag, which has fallen off somewhat from around the sculpted dwarf's face, revealing the carved details of the hair and eyebrows, and the top fold of the blank eyes. "I had it checked over. That's not to say that whatever this statue was stood around wasn't magical. He said it was important. To him, at first. Toward the end of our conversation I was getting the impression that there was someone else he was reporting to. Think he was trying to stop himself from saying a name or a title. Perhaps he was hoping it would frighten me."

He's pushed a few of the portraits out from the rest, but there's more to look through. Darras takes a moment to look over at Yseult instead, abandoning the work in favor of focusing on her. "What d'you think the elven artifacts would be for, then?"

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OPEN | they've given you a number

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