open | intro log.

[murderbaby]

WHO: Mhavos Dalat, resident newbie, & YOU.
WHAT: Mhavos takes stock of... all this... weird fucking shit.
WHEN: Aug 1-3ish, presumably everything in here doesn't happen the same day.
WHERE: Various places around the Gallows and Kirkwall proper.
NOTES: Poetry, discussions of slavery, a nerd whining about religious authenticit. Will update if anything intense happens.

a. OUTSIDE THE CHANTRY.

It's All Fool's Day. Mhavos has read of this holiday, but he's never been given leave to witness the celebration. He fins himself curious, and a little daring; he's got nothing else on his schedule, anyway.

Outside the Chantry, a play is being put on. In front of a respectably sized bonfire, play actors dance about, mimicking the sacred immolation of Andraste. Mhavos stands in the crowd, watching intently. At one point, he almost flinches, before crossing his arms and shaking his head. To himself, he murmurs, "That's not what happens."

b. GALLOWS LIBRARY.

Among the rows of long tables, Mhavos has collected around him a fair pile of books. He pages through one, writes something down in a ledger, scoffs, and returns it to a different pile, before selecting another. This pattern repeats, complete with Mhavos moving his lips to read each word, several times. Coming close, one will find the books are written in both Orlesian and Trade, and detail a large range of subjects.

Occasionally, one may hear Mhavos murmur, "terrible, terrible," under his breath, his Orlesian accent thicker than usual.

c. THE STREETS OF KIRKWALL.

You are presumably minding your own business, wandering aroun town, doing whatever it is you do with your day. That's fine. That's fair. Allowed.

A gentle hand taps your shoulder, or, if you're particularly tall, your elbow. Turning around, you'll find Mhavos Dalat, an elf with an Orlesian accent. He hands you some coin, or an object that's definitely yours.

"Excuse me," he says mildly, "I believe you were pick-pocketed."

d. LOWTOWN.

After memorizing a map of Kirkwall, Mhavos is set and determined to explore as much of it as possible on his free time. Lowtown is inevitable, and Mhavos isn't much afraid of it. He's just an elf, after all, and he elects to bring none of his belongings. It's easy enough to pass through without making any waves. Any ripples.

He watches a street performer, an elf juggling a series of hard wooden balls. The performer is a bit clumsy, and their clothes are tatty, and the balls are chipped from old paint, dented from years of use. It's clear why the performer hasn't moved their act to Hightown yet.

The performer drops two of the wooden balls, and they thud on the dirty ground before Mhavos deftly kicks them up into his hands, balancing them gracefully in his hands before throwing them back. The entire maneuver is quick and fluid, betraying far more grace than Mhavos had meant.

The performer thanks him, and Mhavos quickly makes his exit from the scene, walking fast, face down.

e. HIGHTOWN.

There are street preachers in every part of Kirkwall, but from Mhavos' survey of the city, the worst are most certainly in Hightown. He listens silently, walks by them, ignores them, until he can't stand it anymore.

On matters of faith, Mhavos has little care. But being uninformed...

You'll find him standing before one such preacher, an annoyed look on both their faces.

"That's inconsistent," Mhavos says, voice mild despite his expression. "Either we are bidden to choose the direction of our lives-- as you say, to be with the Maker or against Him-- or we are all acting in accordance with his will, but you cannot have both. If you preach, you are asking us to choose. If you preach that His will shapes our lives in every aspect, you are contradi-"

He's cut off by a loud shout from the preacher, and the words 'knife ear' are heard. Mhavos massages the bridge of his nose. "You clearly haven't read the Messendrine Epistles..."

f. WILDCARD.

[yo i'm down for anything, mix and match prompts, come up with new stuff, whatever. hmu @ wehwalt (i'm open to adds!) or a dm if you want to discuss anything!]

Comments

P E R F E C T I O N

[notched]

Cheap. Not directed at her, but can be traced back to its origin. It would be fair to say she's not particularly thinking any longer. She's focused down and in, the only thing on her mind: kill, don't be killed. She shrinks up tight to the wall and moves, picking her steps carefully until there's really no other choice but to jump and roll to the rooftop. She does so, a streak of ruined leather.

The acrobatics don't detract from the speed and accuracy of the whip.

[murderbaby]

Mhavos is moving from his hiding place as soon as he throws the pen; waiting around is just imbecile. He slides down a tilted roof, and catches himself on a rampart, skulking quickly into shadow. He waits there, listening. A whip is not a quiet weapon; he hears it crack, and his head pops up once more, searching.

The man-- woman? Person, it's impossible to tell in what they're wearing-- is clearly human and formidably trained, from her stance. Her weapon of choice is unusual-- or maybe it's common in Kirkwall, Mhavos wouldn't know-- and versatile; long range and short range doesn't matter, and it will be difficult to guess her reach unless he courts it.

...And, honestly, what other bloody choice does he have?

He slides out from his hiding place and moves as quickly as he can, throwing the sharp, tiny knives (regrettably not poison-dipped; he wasn't expecting this) in her direction from a variety of angles as he runs for another shadow to fold himself into. He doesn't intend to catch her out. He just wants to see what he's dealing with.

If he's being frank, he wants to see how fucked he truly is.

[notched]

Knives. She processes that with care. Only so many knives, but that many could be plenty if even a single one is poisoned. Not something she can determine in the midst of things. She takes them as seriously as they need to be taken, allows one or two to hit when the dodging isn't worth the effort. The Hunt was about balance, about dodge and weave and strike and weave and strike.

The whip is her favored weapon, built for both speed and range. The true goal of her approach is both the ferocity of swing after swing after numbing swing, and then to have rolled out of range again. Getting in on a ranged fighter without taking a knife to the face was its own challenge; and she had turned over her vials to Commander Flint.

She steps back, takes the eyeball from her pocket and sends a burst of arcane energy shooting after him as swift as a bullet. To make it clear she can play that game as well.

[murderbaby]

And then she does magic and Mhavos is fighting a mage and he's going to die. The odd thing is, it fills him with a sense of clarity. The certainty of how very low at the bottom of the well he is banishes fear to the edges of his thought. Everything is clarity, hard logic.

And in that empty space, he finds what troubles him most is the prospect of dying and not even knowing why.

He's outmatched, utterly, completely, so there's no point in further offense. It's just wasted energy. He pulls down the cloth over his mouth and walks with louder footsteps than he needs to. Facing the other fighter, he slowly lifts his hands.

If he isn't attacked in that span, he'll say "truce," in Trade, and then again in Orlesian.

And then he waits.

[notched]

She has round, dark eyes. They narrow at him, bristling up to a taller height as he approaches. He even looks like another hunter to her. In the dark, nose full of the smell of leather and char, it's hard to think clearly. She could simply blow on the eldritch eye again, at this range the bullet would slice right through his chest.

She puts it back in her pocket before she makes a mistake she can't take back. She does, however, snap the whip between them with a low growl to keep him back. Lucky she's heard enough Orlesian to recognize it; it makes him local. Not a hunter. Not a hunter.

"You aren't what I thought," she concedes, even though her stance does not relax.

[murderbaby]

He is, fully and entirely, expecting to die. For some reason, it means he doesn't flinch when the whip cracks. If anything, he feels a strange sort of disappointed surprise that it doesn't go further. The thing seems sharp enough to cleave him in two. The thought sits very clinically in his mind, like an autopsy, a pale cut opening with no blood, no gore, just... emptiness.

His opponent's voice-- a woman, then. A very deadly one.

Still, no time for formalities. He drops his hands, but that's the only change in posture. "Who are you here for?"

[notched]

If anything, someone should be here for her. She's wondered often enough who was going to take her down if she lost her mind. She's already confessed it once, but the other rifter who had reminded her so much of a hunter was gone. This one didn't seem quite up to the task.

"Not you," a rough rebuke from behind her leather mask. "Shouldn't I ask the same?"

If he assumed she was here for someone, shouldn't she assume the same mindset of him.

[murderbaby]

"Myself," he says, unbidden. "I live here."

Why hasn't she killed him yet? Something seems wrong, could be very wrong, and he needs to figure it out. He still has no answers.

[notched]

She frowns behind her leather mask. What else had she expected, really. It wasn't like she was in a hurry to admit that she was one of the Riftwatch's visiting demons, keeping vigil over a city like it was crawling with beasts and assassins. Now who's the beast? Now who's the assassin? As though that bitterness were any revelation.

"You shouldn't crawl around up here," her voice, but not her words, just what she's been told. "Someone is bound to shoot you down."

[murderbaby]

Mhavos rolls his eyes, because he has nothing to lose. "I will go where I please, as you do. Kirkwall is a free city."

Free in trade, free from sovereign rule, but he knows what he means. I am free here.

"Why are you here? And before you ask- I was attempting to make a map, thank you."

It's all spite, now, his voice hard.

[notched]

"You die as easily here as anywhere else," says a lady who may or may not have casually murdered an encampment of elves on the Inquisition's orders. A lady who has died too many times to count only to wake up with a start in the Hunter's Dream.

"You provoked me, mapmaker."

Or that's the story she's going to go with from here on out. Admitting she was a directionless bloodthirsty animal in the night was not something she intended to discuss.

[murderbaby]

"You keep saying things that apply to us both."

He is under no illusions that he could have possibly won their fight. But he is not a spontaneous fighter; if he knows someone is coming... further than that, whoever this woman is, she can only guess at his reason for folding.

Most importantly, why does he care what she thinks?

"I assumed, as any reasonable person would, that you were skulking about with the intention of assassinating someone. I will admit my choice of place and time were odd, so I'll do you the courtesy of believing you assumed the same of me."

He lifts one brow. Will she take it?

[notched]

"I am not an assassin." As if that were the most important part of this whole conversation. She is an assassin. She assassinated people in their beds before they could turn into creatures. She assassinated people in the streets, once they were beasts. Sometimes she did so in stealth, and sometimes she did so in droves. She was not an assassin.

"You are not an assassin," her head tilts slightly, hearing the absurdity of it all. The incredulity heavy in her voice. "Just locals. Out in the night."

[murderbaby]

Mhavos nods, dull. Saying anything is suspicious. People accepting the truth rarely feel the need to make a point of it.

"So this is a grand misunderstanding," he says with a sigh. "And if you're quite decided on not decapitating me, I am going to collect my knives." He makes a move to walk past her, steps weary.

[notched]

She flicks the whip, but this time it condenses in on itself, clicking into a cane that she holsters on her hip. She seems to agree with the sentiment.

Although, she can't seem to help one final dig. When he bends to pick up on of the knives she puts the toe of her boot down on it, gazing down at him.

"I'll keep that one."

[murderbaby]

"Delightful," he says. "They're weighted for me. I don't know what you'll do with them."

He retrieves his remaining few, and holds them in his fist, rather than reveal the secret pockets sewn into his clothing where they're usually holstered.

"I'm sure you'd prefer this incident be kept... private."

[notched]

Custom daggers. She supposes she'll know it if she sees them again, then. She makes no bones at all about putting her prize into one of the many pockets and sheaths within that great burned coat.

"Do what you like," she answers, rather than agreeing. She had no stakes in Kirkwall, no one she particularly answered to. No creed or fraternity to take comfort in. Is that what had been so nice about it all? The simple familiarity of killers in the darkness.

[murderbaby]

He sighs as though he's just been given the wrong answer by a recalcitrant child. Truly, he doesn't care what she wants, but he wants it to be kept quiet. How can he accomplish that, if she doesn't care about... what does she care about?

You can always manipulate people by their wants.

"Am I to assume you work for Riftwatch?"

[notched]

"Do you work for Riftwatch?" Returned as an easy volley. How easy would it be to find out if someone in scouting sent him up here to map the city? How much did she care if Commander Flint took her aside about assaulting their own people? Not much.

[murderbaby]

Mhavos lets out an audible groan. "Are you cursed to be this pointlessly obtuse, or is it a vocation?"

He spins a knife in his hand, idle. "I do work for Riftwatch. Part of my work is not throwing knives. My superiors would be displeased to find that secret had been leaked by a whip-wielding sociopath."

He's no longer going to die. He's just going to be particularly venomous.

[notched]

She actually laughs. "It's your secret you'd like me to keep, then."

[murderbaby]

"You tried to kill me, serrah," he says lightly. "Even if you don't regret it, I have some doubts as to whether attempted murder is an acceptable form of recreation."

[notched]

"I scared you," is what she really did to him. "Perhaps you need to put on more nerve."

Isn't that what Gehrman or Eileen would have said? What's wrong? A hunter, unnerved by a few beasts?

[murderbaby]

"If I was scared," Mhavos says, sounding about as close to anger as he has in a long time (so, rather distant), "I'd not have walked over with my throat bared."

[notched]

She hadn't really thought of it that way, so to have it put in those terms is interesting. She looks at him, her dark eyes not really exposing what she's thinking behind them.

"I don't follow."

Sounds exactly what one might do when their will was broken.