EVENT: TRUTH BOMB

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: TRUTH BOMB
WHEN: Bloomingtide 15-17
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC information. Use appropriate content warnings in your subject lines, please.

It’s an ordinary day—so not a very pleasant one. The weather is dreary and muggy, and the day’s lunch is a soup that’s a little too watery and bland. The griffons are being their usual level of noisy and swoopy. The work is its usual level of urgent and difficult.

But in the storage rooms, something wiggles. Then it hums. Then it pops.

Outside of the storage room, there’s no actual sound, no shift in the wind, and no visible sign of a change. But the pop might be felt—like the moment something finally clicks, or two ideas suddenly fit together, except the opposite. In the heads of everyone in the fortress, something is suddenly not connected quite right.

The first sign of what’s gone wrong is that someone immediately stands up and tells the cook how bad the soup is.

A lot of people’s days are about to get exponentially worse.

Comments

[cozen]

[ Bastien hasn't been avoiding her, precisely. Not turning the other direction when he saw her, because that happened very rarely to begin with, and when it did turning around to walk in the other direction would have been an amateur move. Being preoccupied with papers, significantly mustached, and not remotely interested in her familiar face: much more professional.

But the lies have run their course—ran their course nearly the day he arrived. He's known too many talented people in his life, and all of them have shown up here. So he probably would have said hello soon anyway, even without any artificial compulsion.

He probably would have done it differently, though, than by falling into step with her in the courtyard as if invited and saying, ] Do you still play?

[coquettish_trees]

[ Alexandrie is neither unused nor opposed to people falling into step with her. In fact, she much prefers it to the opposite. Why this fellow in particular might be doing so... he's a printer, isn't he? She's seen him about, but always with his face in a sheaf of papers. Why him, why this question, why now? ]

Cards? Sometimes; but this seems an inconvenient time to gamble.

[ She smiles. Returned to sender. They can talk about cards, or he'll simply have to be more specific.

There's something about him, though, at this closer distance. Something that pulls at her a bit like the truth has been. Something around the eyes, or the jawline. Alexandrie tilts her head like a bird and looks more carefully. One can change a face with a mustache, with the cut of ones hair; obscure shoulders and arms with clothing, bearing with adapted posture or a walk, but hands are another story entire. Byerly could have grown a full beard, shaved his head, worn a blindfold, and she still would have known him by the graceful curl of his fingers, the shape of his palm. And the man beside her now? She'd spent enough time in those days watching his dance across a fingerboard too. ]

Non.

[ It's a breathy hush of a word, her eyes lighting with mirth as she stops walking to turn towards the last of their trio of yesteryear. ]

Toi aussi?

[ The laughter that shortly follows is like small silver bells in its delight at... well... everything. ]

[cozen]

[ Bastien answers with a bow that barely counts as one, still walking as he is, just a forward dip of his shoulder and a hand gesture that's a stunted, vague echo of a showman's flourish. ]

Malheureusement. I had been trying to retire.

[ From a role he never disclosed, outright. He was twenty-four, twenty-five, during the years they verged on being friends, a good decade after he'd first been plucked off the streets and weaponized. That was the height of his career, really, emotionally if not financially: the narrow band of years after he'd gotten truly good at it and before he began to hate it. And being good at it hinged significantly on not admitting to it. But he was also more flush than any once-penniless orphan with a cello and a merely adequate singing voice ought to have been—assuming someone was capable of noticing signs of wealth absent open display of it, which much of the nobility fortunately was not—even after accounting for the spoils from the houses he robbed with Byerly for fun, and he never imagined the Lady de la Fontaine to be an idiot. ]

I had an astonishingly comfortable chair and a window that looked out on the Waking Sea. [ He was bored out of his mind. ] So I am taking this interruption— [ invasion ] —very personally.

[coquettish_trees]

C’est affreux! I weep for the depth of your loss.

[ She casts her eyes downwards and shakes her head sadly. Alas.

It is finer even than she expected, to see him. Her step remembers the spring it had on the summer streets of the districts of Val Royeaux where the other brightly-plumed court birds wouldn't deign to travel save for brief jaunts to feel both trespasser and powerful in their sight-seeing. Safe from the viciously amused evaluation of their glances, as if they all bet on whether or not Alexandrie de la Fontaine would give in to the wilt of her leaves and retire to the countryside as so many others had.

But she had laughed again in the streets narrow enough that in some the three of them could span the width of it, a kind clever man on each arm and the promise of music and the promise of being held and unabandoned.

(Heart in it or not, she could always go home to a wide bed and silk sheets and Emile to dress her and comb out her curls. She had been sight-seeing too.) ]

You came, then, in the hopes of avenging it?

[cozen]

In the hopes of holding people's coats while they avenge it on my behalf.

[ Originally. Now, seeing the state of things here and how many people seem incapable of blending in with a crowd, he isn't so confident he can leave it up to them.

But he's not here to worry at her about the fate of the world, really. He could do that at any time, without any strange magical compulsions, when the atmosphere is less suddenly bouyant. ]

And you? I understand you have been here for some time.

[coquettish_trees]

For my sister. She was part of the Grand Tourney in Wycome last summer, and I wished to see her fight. Afterwards I prevailed upon the Comte and Comtesse to allow me to stay with her in Kirkwall for a time, for I had missed her greatly. [ Alexandrie looks a bit wistful. She is ever and always missing Genevieve. ] We had not been together with any regularity since we were sixteen, you see.

It seemed a righteous cause, and I had skill that could aid it. I found other reasons to stay, and so I remained when she returned to Val Royeaux, having achieved her dream of being appointed to guard Her Radiance after acquitting herself well here.

[ a broader smile, turning impish. ]

I regret I have no cloak for you to hold at the moment, but come winter, you may fight Marceau for the privilege if you wish.