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.

Threaded | Flat

[ Byerly, Colin, Bastien, and Jenin have all received instructions on where and when to meet: a cellar several levels below the central tower, where there is little danger of interruption or curious passers-by unless you count the occasional mouse. The wine racks that line the walls are, sadly, empty, a few stains and shards of glass all that's left of the collection formerly housed here. (Meredith probably didn't have any taste anyway.)

Several chairs are arrayed around an empty barrel that Yseult is using as a desk just at the moment, a small notebook unfolded atop it and a stub of pencil used to scratch out notes as she waits. It's shut and secured with a few quick coils of a string as the invitees begin arriving, dropped into a discreet pocket cut into her skirt. She doesn't rise, but greets the first of them to enter with a polite nod. ]

Good afternoon. If you'll all take a seat.

Edited 2019-04-05 00:29 (UTC)

[ Fifi and Nikos are directed to a spare office room in one of the towers along the Gallows' outer wall, up several flights of tightly-winding stairs. The sound of the sea lapping at the cliffs below travels up even this high, to what appears to be a guard office, long disused. The worst of the dust has been cleared from a few mismatched chairs, and Yseult sits perched on the edge of a battered desk. She gestures at the chairs once all three of them have filed in. ]

I apologize for the excessive secrecy. The office is not available at present and we do require discretion. Are you two acquainted?

[ The chapel at night is cavernous, the soaring vaults disappearing into the darkness, statues shrouded in shadow. The eternal flame provides most of the light, burning away in the hollowed center of the altar, and scattered candles illuminate the pillars and pews. Yseult sits in one, not down on a knee or even bent over a copy of the Chant, but back straight against the bench. The book is in her lap, hands loose around it, and her head is tipped back to face the ceiling, eyes closed. ]

( it isn't quite so odd to come here absent beleth as it had been to first present herself to herian in what had once been her own office—still, she finds there's a certain wistfulness to regarding the changed space, that she might work closely with the scoutmaster and it isn't the one she knew better. but, ah: change is the only constant.

the new scoutmaster is competent, she understands. that is the most important thing, and the reminder to herself is less stern than it has to be when she is regarding the office of forces. )

Scoutmaster? ( a light knock against the doorframe as she pushes the door from ajar to open. ) Mme de Cedoux. Chief Cryptographer, for my sins.

( just her little joke. )

Iorveth had signed up with the Scouting Division because of Beleth Ashara. At the time, she was the only individual he would suffer taking orders from, as he hadn't yet met Thranduil, and the people (humans) of Thedas reminded him too much of his own world. The latter is still mostly true, but some of those in the Inquisition he's come to regard more like he does Triss, Dandelion and Geralt's other collection of well-meaning dh'oine. Some he'd nearly call friends. A couple he might actually consider treasured.

This woman he's only ever seen around the Gallows, never spoken with, and while he's sure she's competent, that says nothing of the kind of person she is, what her limits are, what values matter to her, what she'll tolerate and what she won't. It puts him ill at ease, and he wanders by to watch the parade of Beleth's things being toted away, frown etched to his features.

"A long term mission, was it?" He asks, when he spots the woman inside the room, "Was any estimate given of an end date?"

[The hide ball skitters across the doorway just as he's ducking through it; he nearly kicks it with the toe of his boot. An instant later as two of griffons come diving out of the rafters after it, nearly coalescing on top of him, Flint could wish he had if he weren't so occupied with twisting out of the way of their talons and clacking beaks, ducking under sprawl of one flapping wing and letting the momentum carrying him around the pair as they go rolling paw over claw through the straw with the ball battered between them.

The dust doesn't settle so much as it simply follows the two animals, sucked along by the beat of their wings. An instant later, one of the griffons has caught the ball and heaves itself back up into the rafters - flouncing along the rafter as its brother pursues her. Flint, picking kicked up straw out of his shirt, follows the motion of her as she traverses the beam then drops back down with a heavy thump. The ball is dropped. It comes to rest within arm's reach of--]

Ah.

[The 'fancy meeting you here,' is implied.]

As Griffon Keeper for the Grey Wardens, Inessa spending time with them is a given. Almost daily, unless circumstances dictate otherwise, she arrives to feed and groom Potato and any others who don't yet have riders. Potato, a light grey adult, takes to following her around and watching from a higher perch. When she feels Inessa is paying a little too much attention to someone else, she'll plummet down dramatically and claim Inessa's lap...nevermind that she's far too big to make that comfortable for the small elf. But Inessa puts up with it as good-naturedly as she can while ensuring that she doesn't meet her death via affectionate crushing.

At some point, she looks over and smirks to see that mostly-white adolescent griffon stalking and trying to steal from Yseult. She would have warned her, but as the other seems quite aware, it's an entertaining game to watch from the sidelines. Stroking Potato to keep her appeased, she chuckles softly. "You're better at playing that game than I am. That young one made off with my quill and some mabari crunch treats I was saving for Garahel. I'm sure the former remains in her stash somewhere." Potato makes a rumbling noise and Inessa renews her grooming. "Shh, it's alright. I'm not done spoiling you."

[ It's a relatively small thing.

But there was an ambush in the Hunterhorn Mountains yesterday, and a contact in Qarinus has gone silent, and elsewhere there's the Divine, and a bunch of pirates who can't even pretend to be reliable for the sake of making a deal, so— ]

It's not that fucking hard.

[ He means filing—which is a little bit fucking hard, given how much is encrypted—and illustrates that by dropping a foot-high stack of documents on his desk, cutting them like a deck of cards, and holding one up with one hand while he fans one stack of the others out to search through. ]

I assume they teach the alphabet in the Free Marches.

[ Even though it was for an important mission that required Beleth's particular set of skills, the turning over of the position of Scoutmaster from Dalish to human sets Nari on edge. It had given her some sense of security, knowing that Beleth served the People as well as the Inquisition, and with the secretive nature of her assignment, both the rank and file of the Inquisition and the people of Kirkwall were again simply seeing the elves supplanted.

Even having those misgivings, the Scoutmaster is still the Scoutmaster, and the clandestine operations of the Inquisition still need to stay clandestine, and so the craftswoman has dutifully come to what is now Yseult's office to divulge the finer points of the desk she'd constructed for Beleth. She raises her hand to knock on the door, only to have the first rap obscured by the distinct sound of protesting wood.

Not too odd, they've been moving things today.

Her second tap goes uninterrupted, and Nari follows it with a quiet call just in case. ]

Scoutmaster? Nahariel Dahlasanor, Master of Works. Do you have a minute?

The first to find her is Rosana.

Mid-morning, the door bumps open and the little cat slinks in. It's her, a sleek tabby without a collar. The notch in her left ear, earned in a fight, and the crook in the tip of her tail. She leaps right onto one of the armchairs with a brrt, and considers Yseult with a frank gaze.

Rosana sleeps in the chair for a week, on and off. Some days she's there for the whole day, sun up to sun down, waking to wash her paws or reposition herself, or to lap water out of any cup left out. Some days she's gone for half the day, only to reappear, suddenly, bumping open the door with her narrow shoulder and trot right back to her spot in the chair.

And then, it's night, late. In Rivain, they call the hour Soul's Midnight. Poetic, but it's three hours, really, and it comes after midnight, well before the sun comes up, in those gray hours where time doesn't matter. Only the restless and the guilty are found awake, souls haunted by some shade or spirit known only to them.

The scoutmaster's office is in a different tower. A stripe of light spreads narrow and spare from the space between door and doorjamb. It's dark, otherwise; the nearest lantern is halfway down the hall, barely enough to see by. Darras scuffs his boot against the strip of light on the flagstone, like he could wipe it out. Then he knocks, and pushes open the door.

The smell of the sea is still on him, soaked in his coat and rimed on his skin, salt and damp and sweat, all sharp and brackish. He's got a bag slung over his shoulder, and he lets it slip off his arm and drop, heavy, to the floor, hits with a solid thunk.

Rosana lifts her head off of her paws, her ears pricked. Once she marks Darras, she stretches her toes, and goes right to licking determinedly at her forepaw, rubbing it against her whiskers. Getting in a good wash; giving Darras and Yseult a moment, together.

To start with, Darras closes the door behind him, hooking his foot around it and letting it bump closed.

"Heard you were Scoutmaster. Didn't know you were in the business of stealing cats as well."

[ These are not the circumstances under which Alexandrie wished to meet Yseult. These are not the circumstances under which she wished to begin any acquaintance—any day, even. But here they are. A Grand Cleric assassinated, the Sunburst Throne anticipating, at long last, a true ascension, the Gallows fraction of the Inquisition considering something between a diplomatic severance and a diplomatic suicide.

But here they are. She's knocked, slightly muted by her ubiquitous gloves, been admitted, given her qualifications: her name, pronounced with the weight that might still be utilized. (Yet, risk. Here is that woman who has made a name for herself on both her own account and the larger sin of publicly (and enthusiastically, by all accounts) associating with the son of a Magister. She looks pleasant enough for a traitor, the copper of her hair well-coiffed, her waist tight-laced to perfection. ]

A moment of your time?

[ it is said as if she expects an affirmative. ]

Threaded | Flat

closed to bastien, byerly, colin & jenin

closed to fifi and nikos

closed to coupe

scouting office.

scouting office

the aerie

The Aerie

flashback, hostile powers office.

no subject

office visit

after the MURTHERRR of Agathe