Write clear and hard about what hurts - Ernst H.

[sulahnan]

WHO: Athessa, Bastien
WHAT: Rescuing or retrieving an informant
WHEN: Post-Monster Mayhem
WHERE: Free Marches (Hasmal and the Silent Plains)
NOTES: Athessa and Bastien go on a sad field trip and have a great time.

“You know, I seem to recall having a conversation not too long ago,” Athessa is saying as she inspects the tear in her shirt. Luckily the blade that did the tearing caught only shirt, and not flesh with it. Barely even a scrape. The bandits can’t boast as much, unconscious or worse here on the side of the road to Tantervale. “About how looking for humans was a dangerous prospect.”

Technically speaking, they’re looking for an elf, but they seem to be finding the right sort of humans to enforce their little joke. Athessa is, at least, true to her word that she takes protecting Bastien very seriously.

The road from Kirkwall to Tantervale is a long one, and it’s looking to be just as sweltering as staying in the Gallows has been. Sweltering, tedious, treacherous, a veritable grab bag of unpleasant adjectives stacked like pancakes. But necessary all the same. Word is, an informant was making their escape from Tevinter and hit a snag. (The mission briefing was not brief, and Athessa is not a great reader and only skimmed it.) They didn’t make it to the rendezvous, so now it’s up to intrepid adventurers Athessa Sulahnan and Bastien Last Name to rescue...The Informant.

Look, nobody’s going to hire this particular elf for virtues such as reading or name remembering, anyway.

Comments

[sulahnan]

Waverly lifts his hands, palms forward. "Just directions, I'm afraid. Even if they didn't know my face in Perivantium I have prior commitments here."

"What's the scope of operations for this slavery guild?"

"...Meaning?"

"Do they stick to Solas and Perivantium, do they cooperate city to city, do they cross the Tevinter border into Nevarra or the Free Marches?"

Waverly blinks, clearly processing each of the questions Athessa has just posed. His brows bob once, then furrow while he pours himself another drink. "I'll just address those in order shall I? They do not confine themselves to the cities, and they do cooperate betwixt them, though there is always room for petty rivalries and the like. As to the last...I don't have adequate intel to say whether or not they respect the national borders, but considering they don't respect individual autonomy I wouldn't put it past them to not care where their slaves are, for lack of a better word, harvested."

"Gross, but ok. So then we don't have a confined search radius for finding the informant?"

"Well, no, I didn't say that. We are fairly certain, for example, that they are north of the Minanter, west of the Green Dales, but no further west than the Imperial Highway through the Silent Plains."

Well, that narrows it down. Athessa doesn't say it, but everything in her body language is broadcasting it so loudly that she doesn't have to.

"My advice to you," Waverly continues, gesturing with his glass. "Is to go to Solas, find the Slaver's Guild there, and see what you can extract from their records. If they don't have anything on the books from the past fourteen days, there's a good chance you'll be able to narrow your search down to two areas: The Silent Plains themselves, or the area between Perivantium and The Hundred Pillars."

[cozen]

Bastien listens carefully to the information and to the shape of Athessa and Waverly’s vowels. (Now and then his mouth moves a little in concert with one of the words—simultaneously, or close enough, rather than shadowing behind them. It would be a neat party trick, if he ever did it out loud.) He’s only so good at accent mimicry, but it might be good enough to claim he’s from one of the farther-flung Free Marches cities, among Vints, rather than the country they’re currently invading.

Anyway, there will be time to work on it on the ride to Solas. He’ll make Athessa tell him stories.

Still playing Marcher, he says, “Ah, I love the Silent Plains,” which is not true. He somewhat-recently spent a very long time trying not to die of exposure there, fairly recently, and searching them for a single prisoner doesn’t sound like a good time. Hopefully it won’t come to that. “Do you know what Rinne looks like?”

[sulahnan]

Waverly clicks his tongue against his teeth and holds his hand flat to measure a height very close to Athessa's. "About yea high, olive skin, curly-wurly brown hair, green eyes, pointy ears..."

Then, seeing the flat stare he's receiving from the elf in the room, he ammends his description. "Yes, yes, when put like that it seems that she bears a remarkable resemblance to Athessa here, but rest assured, we're not dealing with a long-lost twin or a doppelganger. For example, her hair is bobbed at the shoulder."

--

"Do you think it's really a coincidence that Rinne and I apparently look similar, or did they have that in mind when they assigned us to this mission?" Athessa muses aloud, adjusting the scarf on her head for what seems like the fifty-millionth time since they passed Hasmal, heading north. They had to have a change of attire, not only for adequate protection from the weather in the Silent Plains, but also to better blend in.

For her part, Athessa has donned a headscarf and sandals, both of which she hates, a simple shirt with roomy sleeves, and trousers. Not the height of fashion, by any definition, but she looks less immediately elfy.

[cozen]

"They couldn't possibly have had it in mind," Bastien says—sounding, by now, almost completely like a Marcher, as long as he's allowed to be a Marcher who's on the tail end of recovering from a cold—"because the only way for that to be useful would be for us to do something incredibly stupid that puts you in danger."

Unwilling to undo any of the progress he's made in shedding his tan from the last time he was stuck wandering a desert, he's hiding beneath a hat. But he emerges from beneath the brim to give Athessa the look that this deserves.

"And we are not going to do anything incredibly stupid that puts you in danger."

[sulahnan]

Athessa returns his appropriate look with one of her own, the sort warranted by someone saying it's not allowed to rain when storm clouds are rolling in.

"We might not have a choice," It's not like she wants to play swapsies with a slave, but at this point they have no idea what circumstances will call for. "Anyway, I'm supposed to be protecting you, remember?"

[cozen]

"I will be much better protected if we do not do anything incredibly stupid that puts you in danger," Bastien points out in his most reasonable Marcher voice. "Furthermore—"

Important transition words for important facts. But he pulls the brim of his hat back down. Enough sun.

"—I am significantly older than you are, and therefore in charge."

[sulahnan]

"You're not that much older than me," she grumbles, though she does sound somewhat resigned about it. She doesn't want to be in charge, anyway.

"Fur-ther-more."

[cozen]

"Fur-ther-more," he mimics gamely.

He gets it right, with enough attention, but he'll probably backslide as soon as something distracts him from making the effort. Perhaps it would be better if he just stopped using any words containing Rs.

"You don't have a long-lost twin, do you?"

So far, so good.

[sulahnan]

Giving it some serious consideration, Athessa purses her lips.

"Maybe, but I doubt it. Unless she's a mage, and she was sent to a different clan to be apprenticed because our Keeper already had one," It's not actually a possibility, of course, but wouldn't that be somethin'? She gives it another moment's thought, then shakes her head. "Nah. It's probably just a cousin or something."

Another joke, but even a possibility in jest can lead to unpleasant what if scenarios.

[cozen]

"I've always assumed implying all elves had some family connection—"

Talking around the word related. It isn't too terribly convoluted. This might be the best plan he's ever had.

"—would be offensive."

But her clan disappeared. He remembers. He just isn't going to be the one to say it.

[sulahnan]

"Yeah, about all elves, that'd be offensive," she agrees. "But one who looks suspiciously like me? Not very offensive."

The lack of a certain letter in his new-new way of speaking is starting to become apparent.

"What's her name again?"

[cozen]

Shit.

For a moment he considers dodging it, but most of the words he would need to tease Athessa about her poor memory would ruin things anyway. So he says, "Rinne," with careful pronunciation and a distinct grudging undercurrent of I can't believe you're destroying my dreams like this you monster.

[sulahnan]

She giggles, unable to suppress it. It's so rare to get one up on Bastien, really, that it's simply delightful when it happens. The laughter fades with a sigh and they ride on for a beat without any more prodding, but then she feigns poor memory again:

"And...where are you from?" She can't, of course, say it with a straight face or anything even remotely resembling a serious tone.

[cozen]

Nice try.

"Wycome," he says, "and my name is Wallace."

He looks like a Wallace, he's decided—or could, easily, if it becomes necessary, with sloping shoulders and a tucked-back, slackened jaw, maybe faint hints of overwhelm in his eyes, less precision to his movements and his shirt adjusted to give the appearance of slightly more gut. Unlike the accent, none of that requires any practice to carry off.

[sulahnan]

She snorts, like, actually snorts with laughter because even if she didn't get him that time, it's funny. But then she looks at him askance and thinks about it.

"Hmm...You don't look much like a Wallace, though," she muses, "Maybe an Edgar, or...Earnest. Or Justice McKinnon."

[cozen]

Bastien considers these options and decides: “I have never been so insulted in my life.”

Like.

“Edgar.”

[sulahnan]

"Wallace."

Of course the truth of the matter is that, to her, Bastien can only ever look like a Bastien. Not helpful when they, the two least suited to venture into Tevinter incognito, need cover stories.

"I guess with the hat you could be a Wallace."

[cozen]

“Thank you,” Bastien says with prim airiness, like that’s all he wants in life, to be able to be a Wallace—but of course it isn’t. It isn’t even all he wants from this conversation. He lets the horses’ hooves fill a few seconds alone before he says, “We probably won’t find her, you know.”

[sulahnan]

Whether or not he sees it, she shrugs. "Gotta try though, don't we? What do you reckon the chances are that they keep records like Waverly said?"

[cozen]

"I'm sure they keep something," Bastien says. "Valuable goods. People always keep records. Whether they keep them in a way that will let us track one person down by name or vague description, mmm."

Mmm means he isn't sure.

"And whether we can get to them—mmmmm."

Guess what mmmmm means.

[sulahnan]

“I guess we’ll find out when we get there,” she says. Then she looks at him with a wry, side long glance. “Mmm doesn’t sound like something a Wallace would say.”

—

Whether or not Bastien’s Wallafication is believable to Athessa matters not; both of their disguises and accompanying personas (she let him choose hers, as an olive branch) see them dutifully into Solas without incident. Being that they don’t want to draw enough attention to out Athessa as an elf, Bastien is left to do all the talking, asking for directions, navigating, and so on.

There’s one easy way for Athessa to find the slaver’s guild, and they’ve already established: no fucking way.