faderift | closed || nothing sacred, all things wild

There are four parts of the plan, and they go like this:

Marisol's part is simple. Get to Fabria. Get in his quarters, his office, anywhere that correspondence might be found. Kostos had told Nikos to look into Fabria, though not in so many words, and Nikos is loyal. It is especially fortuitous when his loyalty might be used for dual purpose.

The grandmother's letters. A cache might contain a word on the movements of Grand Cleric Agathe. A well-connected woman will have made this her business to know. If the letters can't be found, the handwriting might at least be imitated by their clever rifter, the tone copied. After all, how hard can it be, Nikos had reasoned to Marisol and a glass of her Antivan red, to be Ilias Fabria?

The design is up to Marisol. It will no doubt be flamboyant.

And later, in Kirkwall, Nikos brings the code to Carla to copy. Their rifter is not his type. He can deal with her, if she will be as good as she says. And as the plan has started to come together, each piece a fit, he might be found to be less sour in turns. This will work. It has to work.

The code is not an easy one. Caspar had given the cipher to Nikos just last night, delivered straight from the Spider's Sons in Antiva. Rolled into a thin scroll, secreted inside a thin tube like a single strand of pasta or a very long stick. They'd worked out the letters together, with Nikos writing and Caspar dictating, and now their product is here for Carla to look through: twenty pages of letters, to be written in the hand of six Antivan merchants and merchant princes.

"It is chaos," Nikos promises, when he makes the delivery to Carla in the tavern. And he looks tired--darker circles smudged beneath his eyes--but happy, or at least as happy as he ever looks. Caspar might even be with him, getting wine at the bar, or else tucked into a booth somewhere else at the tavern.

[OR anything else connected to the forging part of this can go here!]

No one tends to like her, the idea of it-- if it even occurs to her --rolls off of her like so much inconsequence. She doesn't live for approbation, she lives for her own charming amusements. Those amusements are fewer and further between in this backwards little world. This game of intrigue is the most interesting thing to come to her since she's arrived. She's eager for the letter, snatches them up and sits back to read, drawing her legs up into her seat like a child engrossed.

She touches everything, running her fingers over the impressions of the letters and texture of the paper.

"Anything special in the ink..." she asks absentmindedly.

"It was probably expensive."

That doesn't quite answer the question, but like Nikos will miss the opportunity to shade the rich by calling attention to their stupid luxuries. Expensive ink. Does it write? If so, why spend extra coin, except to say that extra coin was spent?

The letter is written in a neat hand, its code contained within the ruled parameters of the page. Whoever wrote it was taught how to write well, without smudging or obscuring the lines with poor penmanship.

In truth, it is close to how Nikos writes, which is proved when he lays the cipher onto the table, too, for Carla to next look over. His penmanship is good, too. Someone spent a long time with him as a child, going over letters and margins and the rules of composition.

"Otherwise I have ink from Antivan. Someone with a keen eye might be able to tell the difference. Could you, if it was presented to you?"

Like how worried does he have to be. Does the enemy have a forger? Probably. Is there another word for someone who can tell the difference between inks if presented with the opportunity?

"I could, if I took the time," she answers. Her rambling is authoritative as she says: "Whether it's a pigment or a dye, the amount of water and solvent in the solution. If the pH is wrong it will grow fungus, although that would take time to show itself."

She looks up from the papers then, "And I assume someone has checked it for any little magic charms."

As much as she hates magic and finds it an excuse for anti-intellectualism... the idea of encrypting things with its specificities excites her in its own way. Makes her think of the little eleven artifacts they sometimes let her fiddle with like a child twisting a rubix cube. There was the suggestion of some logic in there; geometry and mathematics which in turn built language and command.

Edited 2019-04-22 22:37 (UTC)

"No magic in the ink."

A small benefit to having mages on the side is being able to confirm for that sort of thing, nearly definitively. A small benefit to Marisol being one of those mages is that Nikos doesn't have to worry about someone thinking him an idiot for asking questions of what might be actually impossible to have done with magic.

With the papers successfully delivered, he can pick up his cup of wine and take a sip. It's a small reward, sort of.

"P-H," he says, repeating the initials she'd spoken aloud. "You're first, as far as I know, to have asked after-- whatever that is. Maybe it's not a thing, in our ink." After all, stranger things have happened. "If we have any luck at all, there will be such a confusion in what follows that no one will be so detailed as to wait for fungus to grow. Quick action should follow. Chaos."

"Everything has a pH." She would normally make some comment about how backwards and useless the 'science' in this world is, but she is focused. Now that she has the letters in hand, much of her nettling bullshit has been discarded in favor of focus, sharp and analytical.

"But that's work for a chemist," lips licked, setting one letter aside to compare its contents to the others, checking between writers for any further little marks or stains that would add to the authenticity. "If no one else is doing it, we should."

Then no one would be playing this same trick on them.

Nikos grunts, which is something halfway between agreement and dismissal. He doesn't easily do we. He doesn't easily do collaboration. Then again, he is interested, despite himself. Wherever this next leads, whatever they would use this PH for--it interests him. There's a competitive instinct in him. Always seeking the next step.

"If no one else is doing it, they can't be looking for it, either. It buys us nothing. If it could somehow prove useful, it might be worth it. What would be needed, to do the work of creating it?"

It's certainly not her enterprise. Maybe one day she would feel differently, but here in this moment it's all just throwaway. Little projects to amuse her lest she light this whole fucking town on fire for the fun of it.

"You would create a custom litmus test," she answers with distraction. "They're made with plant dye that's sensitive to acidity. They turn certain colors depending on the acid level."

She looks up then, and seems to realize it might behoove her to explain herself. "They test for it, in paint. You won't fool any inspector with a counterfeit painting if the chemistry is wrong. Counterfeiting can be as much a game of organics, as appearances."

A little hint of a thing: that she faked more than just signatures. That one, Isaac, had asked her are you sure you're a good liar? Yes. Yes she was.

Edited (I left some weird shit unfinished there my bad) 2019-04-30 01:20 (UTC)

There is a lot to pick apart in there. As it does, actually, pertain to Nikos' interests, he pays closer attention than he might otherwise. Interest also grants him the patience to wait for the rest of the explanation, without interjecting something sharp as likely to end the conversation as it was to prompt more out of Carla.

Counterfeiting. His interest piques that much more. A little smirk twists at the corner of his mouth.

"Is there any ink-based deception you aren't gifted in."

It's rhetorical. Mostly. How many other ink-based deceptions are out there, outside of forgery and counterfeiting? More seriously--

"Who do you work for, where you are from?"

Is someone inviting her to flatter herself? She almost laughs, chokes it off, and just smiles instead. "I haven't worked for anyone since I was an apprentice."

A nasty, prowling teenage girl looking for something, anything to sink her teeth into as she realized that the world disappointed her and there was only so much joy she could out of wrecking the people around her. She'd found Cotnari because he was the type to keep teenagers around, clever or not. He was disgusting in that manner, but he'd had something she'd wanted. Knowledge and finesse and contacts.

"I'm a contract worker. Smugglers, drug runners, art dealers..." she makes a lazy twirling motion with one hand. He gets the idea. "I'm also a con artist, pick pocket, embezzler, hacker, bounty hunter, and when I really can't find anything else to do I, a mechanic."

Perhaps that resume sounded disjointed, but in Carla's mind it all centered around a few key concepts. Details and mechanisms, understanding systems of finely granular nodes that one leveraged to create results. As for the question he'd asked though:

"Organic materials -- inks, paints -- they're much more difficult to fake in the future, the challenge is most of the fun."

He did ask. Sort of. But the list starts to grate on Nikos as it goes on. Useful, all of them, or at least those that mean something to him seem to be. But like his initial objections, how does he know anything about her? It's word alone. The word of a braggart, or the word of someone truly skilled, and it would only be by contracting her that he would find out which, probably.

He lets himself take a generous sip of wine and stares down into the cup. Gives it a swirl, half discontent and half thoughtful.

"This--" The letters; he lets the swirl of the cup indicate them-- "will not involve fake ink, or anything but the forging. But there may be more. What we do will change the outcome of this election, if we are successful. And much will change with that. We will have the opportunity to do more, and contract workers could benefit. And help the cause."

More important is the second part. Nikos' mouth twists a little as he admits it. Ardent speech still doesn't agree with him, unless he's in an argument. Then it comes almost naturally.

"If you don't work for anyone, what do you work for. Money," and while that's a guess, most bounty hunters work for bounties, so it can't be too far off. "Chaos. Does anything else make the list?"

Her lip curls, irritated by this question. She has been working for nothing more than survival for a long time and she taste it in her mouth. Being stuck in that cramped shuttle scavenging forgotten cargo and ship parts out of graveyards when there weren't any bounties to drag down. Even before the ship, she had been clawing at the labyrinthine politics of the space stations looking for opportunities and footholds where she might find the comfort and agency she'd had on Oscyria.

She had tried to remake a life that was dead in an ecosystem that played by different rules. She worries the very tip of her tongue against the point of one sharp tooth. She's changed since then, in subtle ways, the damage of escaping her homeworld's destruction has blossomed in her over time and experience. Her indolence now wears a shade of rage.

"Does it matter?" she finally decides, quirking one of her full eyebrows.

closed || nothing sacred, all things wild

stealing, forging, stuff.

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