open | your baddest behavior

[cozen]

WHO: Alexandrie, Bastien, Byerly, and their captive audience
WHAT: Mandatory etiquette and dance lessons
WHEN: Justinian 15, 9:45
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: See the OOC post and IC announcement for more information! If you didn't sign up, you can still participate in Parts A and D, and just handwave the other two, without needing to sign up or get an assignment. If you want to do B and C, you can find your own dance partner/seating group OOC, or you can sign up now and we'll dole out new assignments if we get enough latecomers to do so. If you signed up and are missing from the lists when you shouldn't be, I'm sorry and please tell me!

disclaimer: event less fancy than pictured

Seating Assignments
— Table One: Gwenaëlle, Iorveth, Matthias, Athessa
— Table Two: Flint, Ilias, Darras, Med Seller, Yngvi
— Table Three: Julius, Thranduil, Anders, Brienne
— Table Four: Benedict, Colin, Valentine, Six, Derrica
— Table Five: Teren, Salvio, Bartimaeus, Osana
— Table Six: Freddie, Petrana, Kain, Merrill, Silver
— Table Seven: Yseult, Cosima, Steve, Inessa
— Table Eight: Sidony, Fifi, Nell, Fingon
— Table Nine: Thor, Nathaniel H., Solas, Skadi

Dance Partners
— Cosima & Nathaniel H.
— Athessa & Anders
— Teren & Flint
— Freddie & Bartimaeus
— Yseult & Darras
— Nell & Julius
— Merrill & Colin
— Skadi & Benedict
— Gwenaëlle & Solas
— Petrana & Salvio
— Osana & the Medicine Seller
— Sidony & Matthias
— Six & Thranduil
— Brienne & Valentine
— Fifi & Steve
— Thor & Fingon
— Ilias & Iorveth

Comments

osana (open)

[radiosa]

She'd like to be able to dance. She definitely isn't too good to try. However, if the dance lessons themselves weren't enough to prove she's a fairly hopeless case, she makes it about five steps through a subsequent attempt before literally tripping over her own feet and banging her knees hard enough to bruise.

It's fine. Bruises are nothing, and she laughs about it, in a pink sort of way.

But it's also enough of that, for her, for today. She retires to the edge of the room with a glass of wine, instead, where she alternates between watching everyone else with a wallflower's open interest—she's new, she doesn't know any of them, she'd like to know the ones who aren't too awful—and looking at her own hand, and its glowing green mark, with a dissatisfied frown. That's fairly new, still, too.

[inkindled]

She's looking at her hand, so she misses the threat that is Matthias, crossing quickly to leave the room. He's got a cup of wine in each hand and a jug besides, crushed to his chest by his crossed arms. He is also finished with this for the day. Possibly forever. If there ever is a diplomatic mission that requires diplomacy and knowing how to get tiny bones out of a fish without using your hands, he'll go along and stand out in the garden where he's not likely to muck anything up, except maybe his boots.

His boots, which are new, purchased with the money he's saved since being awarded housing and meals. The peasant wisdom of buying a bigger size so you can grown into them means that the boots are, in fact, a little too big, and Matthias is walking a little too fast, and then he trips and falls and the wine falls like dirty wash-water thrown over the stone floor and Osana's feet and the bottom of her dress and--

"Shit!"

The goblets and jug clatter loudly as Matthias lets them go. His ears are very red, almost as red as the wine pooling on the floor and staining her dress. He scrambles forward to start dabbing at the wine with the sleeve of his coat--then realizes that he's pawing at a woman's dress, and the red of his ears spreads to his face, blotchy and horrified.

"Sorry-- about it all, really--"

[radiosa]

“That’s,” Osana says, and pauses, for a moment.

Her dress is nothing too dear to her and nothing compared to some of what’s on display in the hall. Mostly linen, the skirt a color hovering between cream and brown and forgiving of life’s daily smudges. But not of wine, no, and it isn’t anything special, but it is the only dress she owns anymore.

So the pause is heavy with dismay, but it’s the dismay of an unexpected inconvenience, not of heartbreak, before she emerges on the other side with a smile.

“That’s all right. It might come out.” She crouches—almost kneels, before she understands what a bad idea that would be, which causes a little wobble—and reaches aside him to right the jug, succinctly and pointlessly, like putting a daisy in the center of a mud pie. “And if it doesn’t, maybe I’ll stain the whole thing. I like red better. Are you all right?”

[inkindled]

Matthias makes a distressed hiss between his teeth. He's staring, hopeless and blank, at the stain--which looks as if it might actually be spreading, somehow, against all logic and reason. A stain does not spread up, does it? How could it?

"Yeah, yeah-- I'm all right, just that I was-- Red's a fine color," he adds, quickly, picking up on the chance that this might not be the worst thing he's ever done, that there's a glimmer of hope down there somewhere, "and, y'know. It'd suit you. The red."

Does that help, at all? He tries a grin. It comes out a little uncertain, the kind of grin that's ready to backpedal and take it all back. He's certainly trying.

[radiosa]

It's working. She wants to keep him forever.

"Red would make me feel less like an old rag doll," she says, voice dropped to something politely and confidingly low. All this finery. Orlesians are awfully colorful—or bright, at least, when they go with white. She hopes no one expects her to dress that way, no matter where she's invited and by whom. She'll wear armor, and polish it up so everyone else can use it to check their hair, or something.

She stands back up, extends a leg for a second to bring her skirt into view for another survey of the damage-slash-art, and offers a hand down to the—man. Boy? He looks like the youngest person here, but that may just be his face.

"Were you trying to escape?"

[inkindled]

"Depends. If I say yes, are you the type to report me? 'Cause if you are, then no, I was fetching wine to--that man. Over there."

Matthias points out a random face in the crowd (it might be anyone's, he's not looking, he's focused here. He'd felt his fortune turning. It was all locked in when she'd sort of joked back at him--then the offer of the lift up had been the final seal. He knows how this works. He takes her hand, his grin going a few notches more toward confident.

Once he's on his feet, he dusts himself off, then crouches to gather up the lost cups and empty jug.

"Or maybe I was bringing the wine over to you and did a really shit job of it. Which one're you more likely to believe, d'you reckon? I'm Matthias," he adds. A bit of a tack-on, but there's nothing to be done about that. "So you know who to blame if anyone gives you trouble over your skirt."

[radiosa]

"Osana," she responds, and begins to hold out a hand, and then decides that's redundant when she's just helped him up and lowers it, and then decides no, actually, a handshake is a separate thing, with a separate meaning, and holds her hand out again. "So you know who to blame when they come for you."

The wine authorities. The diplomacy police. Whoever would be responsible for disciplining young men who run away from dances with arms full of alcohol and destroy young women's clothes in the process.

[inkindled]

Matthias snorts, as they shake hands. It's a good handshake. She's got a decent grip, which is always to be admired. It's how someone first comes to know you, a handshake. Want to be certain you're showing the best and firmest.

"I'd not put any blame on you." Maybe it seems like loyalty--and maybe it is, a little fledgling thing, easily earned from Matthias. He does take some of the power out of it when he goes on: "Don't want to risk getting knocked about by any angry boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever term you'd prefer. It's a danger that comes with spilling wine on dresses and then somehow putting the blame on the person wearing the dress. Not that I've ever done this before."

With a little grin, he stoops to look into the jug. "Barely enough to fill an acorn cap. If I go off for more, d'you want some?"

[limier]

"Bracelets," Her brow lifts, elbow quirks toward mark. She's busy peeling off her own gloves. "For the palm."

Dangly. Fashionable. Or that was the plan — Ashara's been gone long enough, and while Yseult may have contributed to the venture, Wren suspects other priorities.

"Can you spot the others?"

The anchors. The privileges of authority may be short for this world, but she's been content to invoke them for a late arrival. A final tug: Something small crunches; leather pulls from knuckle, air from her teeth. Observation. Wasn't that the point of all this?

(A party. Other priorities, again.)

[radiosa]

Oh shit, a quiz, she doesn’t say.

“Ah,” she does say, which is basically the same thing.

A quiz, and a quiz from Commander Coupe—the first person she asked to have pointed out to her by her tour guide, because knowing a Templar was in charge here was one of the only reasons she hadn’t just cut her hand off the moment it began glowing.

(Don’t worry about the future. She’ll be fine.)

“My dance partner—the Medicine Seller,” she says, which is cheating, “and one of the men at my table,” which is also cheating, “and the tall woman.”

(Wait, she won’t be fine, she’s going to die of the quiz.)

She folds her own anchor into her fingers and drops her hand to her side, looking at Coupe’s gloves and then her face instead of at the crowd and its possible trove of unnoticed hands.

“It’s nice to meet you, Commander,” she says, which is a little bit trying to be polite, a little bit trying to get out of naming any additional anchor-bearers.

[indissection]

Sidony has been milling, now, making her way here and there; she looks stunning in her dress and she's well aware of it, well aware of what attention it is going to get her - isn't that why she chose it in the first place? Once she has done her fair share of training those that clearly have no idea how to dance whatsoever she takes her own glass of wine and wanders here and there, smiling and flirting and being as coy as she can muster.

She would settle in a corner with Byerly, if she thought that she might steal him for long enough, but he seems far too busy for her.

What does catch her attention is a woman staring at her hand - and, ah, another Rifter, perhaps? Sidony has not known many of them (and has tried not to, since Jester had left) but she cannot help herself. Walking over, skirts dancing around her heels and a smile on her face, she leans down to peer deliberately.

"Does it hurt?"

[radiosa]

Osana sees her coming—the dress is very bold, never mind the woman wearing it—and stops gawking at her hand, at least, though it’s still conveniently held up when the woman leans in to look.

The impulse to hide it, because it’s weird and she hates it, surges up, but it’s met by the suddenly-allied need to be considerate and desire to be interesting, and their joint effort is enough to defeat it. So her hand stays at convenient observation level, and she manages to smile under the scrutiny.

“Not anymore,” she says, and her accent is Antivan—not that a rifter couldn’t have an Antivan accent. “Not like it did at first. Mostly it is strange.”

[indissection]

It's enough for Sidony, who drinks in the atmosphere and takes the chance to examine the woman while she can. She's handsome enough, even if she might be foreign, and her eyes flick up and down quickly; examining, registering, memorising. She knows. She knows lords and ladies and nobles, and this girl is surely none of them.

Perhaps that is for the better.

Leaning forward, Sidony examines it just a little. It's her first time looking at one up close and she drinks it in, curious and interested, obviously a touch enraptured by it before she tilts her head up and looks. A shardholder with an accent? Interesting. She recognises it, even if she thinks it doesn't quite make sense.

"I have heard that it hurts less the closer to the Inquisition you are - though I suppose we're not called that any longer." A sigh as she stands up straight, then offers her hand - dignified, regal, as if she expects it to be kissed but doesn't particularly want it all the same. "Sidony Venaras."

[radiosa]

For a beat she just looks at the hand. She's aware of the expectation in the gesture; she's aware, too, that she fought alongside nobles' children in the Inquisition army and curtsied to none of them, and that they're equals of a sort here. Between those two awarenesses she's left completely unaware of what she should actually do, and compromises by taking Sidony's hand and dipping her head down only a few inches, rather than all of the way, like the suggestion of a bow.

"Osana," she says, and then, "Are you from Nevarra?"

Clearly so, with that accent, but asking is better than assuming

—and she's still holding Sidony's hand, for several seconds longer than manners demand. It's just that she's very pretty, and it's a little distracting. But Osana realizes, after those several seconds, and slides her fingers away from Sidony's at a speed that's a little lingering, maybe, but mostly because jerking her hand away would be awkward.

[indissection]

Sidony comes close to raising her eyebrow - not in judgement, but in curiosity - before her hand is taken and the woman is leaning down to greet her. It's perfectly charming and there's a moment where her eyes widen, something making her feel as though the wind has been taken out of her completely. Being looked at by another woman, especially one as handsome as this...

No. She forces herself to lean back, taking her hand away and settling, breathing out. Her hand presses against her stomach and her eyes dance away for a moment before she finally, finally gives Osana a small, soft smile.

"I am. Is it so obvious?" Her accent gives it away, surely, but it's always fun to poke, tease and prod at others, breathing out gently.