[closed]

[heirring]

WHO: Flint, Bartimaeus, Wysteria, Fitcher & misc. guests
WHAT: Misc. socializing.
WHEN: Firstfall
WHERE: Kirkwall, etc.
NOTES: Catch all for closed starters. If you want something, hit my up by PM/discord/plurk/whatever and we can make it happen.

Comments

ELLIS.

[heirring]

"--Which is precisely why I asked for two members from Forces to assist with all of this."

All of this being transporting a series of rather heavy trunks down multiple flights of stairs to the ferry slip where their visiting third daughter from a prominent Antivan family with ties to such and such and so on and a sympathetic ear for blah blah blah intends to alight into her private dinghy and make her way to her cousin's merchant ship, homeward bound once more. The details don't really matter. What matters is that the woman has over packed by a rather considerably margin. Between that and the kerfuffle happening down in the baths (something has gotten into the piping and half of them are being drained by bucket brigade), the effort to see her off in a timely fashion has turned up short handed.

Which means Ellis is carrying a series of rather heavy trunks down multiple flights of stairs while Wysteria supervises, clinging to the opposite end of whatever box they have between them and only just managing to keep the bottom from scraping the whole way down to the courtyard.

[heorte]

"It's alright."

After all, Ellis did bring this on himself somewhat. When Commander Flint had asked what he was good for, Ellis had said lifting and carrying. Who knew that would eventually lead to him having to tote an unreasonable amount of bags down the narrow staircases?

It could be worse. He could be charged with assisting with whatever had gone wrong with the baths.

"Maybe next time we'll have a visiting dignitary who doesn't need so many trunks."

Hope springs eternal.

"Can you be sure I don't clip the vase on the way through the second floor door again?"

Because of course it was Ellis' fault that he'd been abruptly left without guidance on their last trip down.

[heirring]

"Yes of course." She'd already been planning to carefully navigate the poor man around it. It isn't his fault he can't do two things at once, even if it is a little irritating. "Only remember that you must pivot farther right then you expect and I believe all will be well. Why, give it a few more trips to and from and you may postively become an expert on--"

Avoiding destroying mid-grade decorative pottery? Fitting through doorways? It's hard to say what Wysteria means to finish that otherwise very encouraging sentence with, as at that moment she either steps on her own skirts or kicks the edge of the trunk hard enough to trip over her own feet. Girl and chest both come overbalanced, toppling down into Ellis with the force of a kicking mule.

[heorte]

The good news: the trunk is undamaged, and the vase has escaped their tumble through the doorway unscathed.

The bad news: Ellis might need a healer.

In hindsight, if it had been just the trunk or just Wysteria, he might have had a fighting chance. But the combination of being lower on the stairs and beset by a sudden shift weight knocks him backwards. He might have heard something crack. (Possibly his head, possibly his ribs. Who can say?) It strikes him as a little ridiculous to be injured in the midst of something as mundane as moving luggage. He coughs out a laugh that ebbs into a groan as he shifts the trunk slightly, trying to give himself some room to you know, breathe.

"Are you hurt?" He asks, upon realizing that Wysteria is still draped across the top of the trunk.

At the very least, he'd manage to break her fall. Accidentally and through no intention of his own, but he'll take it.

[heirring]

She's only just managed to save her face from striking across the hard edge of the trunk as she and it had fallen, but at what cost? A bashed knee, a smarting elbow which will almost certainly be bruised once given time to ripen, and she is distantly aware of a tearing sound that had occured at some point during their graceless descent.

By the gods, she will make Salvio pay for them if her petticoat have been torn.

But that's a problem for when she is not sprawled over the trunk, and in turn her over her assistant. She twists to right herself, sharp knees jabbing indelicate or battered selections of anatomy in the process.

"Perfectly fine," Wysteria assures him smartly as blood pours out of her nose, down her front and over the trunk and so on.

So maybe she'd struck her face after all.

[heorte]

The trunk clatters as Wysteria starts getting to her feet. The momentary reduction in weight is immediately punctuated by several short, pained grunts from Ellis as Wysteria's knees dig into his thigh, his stomach. It's an accident, but still—

"Tilt your head back," Ellis instructs after drawing in a wheezy breath. "Pinch your nose to try and stem the bleeding."

Maker forbid she's broken it. He shoves the trunk to the side, out of range of Wysteria's blood-streaming nose. Someone's probably going to have an objection to the blood spattered across it.

"Let me catch my breath. I'll look at it."

Or reset it. One of those things is gong to be easier for Wysteria to stomach than the other, he suspects.

[heirring]

"It's fine," she says, which sounds more like 'Eez Fawn' as she claps her hand over her face and rocks her head back.

Getting fully to her feet is a bigger ask than she is prepared to answer just this moment, but she has at least extricated herself from Ellis and the trunk and has sat back down (hard) on the lower steps of the staircase they've just head planted down. Everything tastes like copper. Trying not to breath - in, out, or generally in any direction whatsoever -, Wysteria asks the ceiling through her fingers: "Argh yew uhlright?"

AMAL.

[unshut]

There is no such thing as a kitchen without a yard. Even here in the Gallows with all its grim walls and stone and miscellaneous parapets there are staples which do not change. Inevitably there is a scrap of dirt leading to a scrap of garden adjacent to the kitchens were all the chickens and geese fat ducks which will eventually be made into rich suppers or who are in charge of producing the dozens of eggs necessary for feeding Riftwatch can sometimes be found pecking and waddling and quacking.

It smells equal parts of bread and lime here - the laundry isn't far removed, and the haze over the muddy yard is as easily chalk tinged steam as it is smoke from the kitchens. It's not quiet either; between the animals and the hum of work, this corner of the Gallows is more alive than most. Bodies buzz about their tasks, busy enough that they have no time to spare for the young woman in some sheltered edge of the yard.

Fitcher does though. As she steps out from the kitchens, tucking a wrapped packet in the breast of her padded coat, she pauses. There are odder things in the world worth study than the young thing feeding the fattened ducks, and yet here they are.

(Anyway, she's expecting a second packet from one of the girls in the kitchen and so she can hardly leave just yet.)

[wrecca]

It's the first place that Amalathuna Vokos had established herself in the Gallows.

The kitchen, the gardens, the pecking areas: they were refuges as old as childhood. Before she had outright been sent away by her parents, it was where she had gone for company in a large, empty house. For a few years, she was raised mostly by the cook and the groundsman. Taught how to make stews, garden, catch and clean rabbits -- a lesson that she had completed, if in tears. It was upon the discovery of these lessons that she was sent away to boarding school, an overt punishment for... something. Amal has genuinely never quite figured out what offense she had committed in basking in the good nature and care of the staff.

Those memories reside in the depths of her inner wounded child. And she feels it painfully clear now. That she had dared to imperfectly have a family of her own without the interference of her parents, so they had punished her for it. Every time she thinks maybe she's done crying, she thinks something like that and it comes out of her all over again. The grief is astonishing. She sags onto the seat of an upturned bucket, pulling a confused but amiable chicken into her lap to stroke while she cries, ducks circling in search of more bread.

The kitchen girl comes alongside Fitcher with the packet and also takes in this scene. She tsks faint condolence, "She's been like that every day since she got here."

[unshut]

The second packet is smoothly tucked alongside the first, as if its contents are as incidental as the first wrapped packet of hard little ginger biscuits. Fitcher tips her head toward the kitchen girl without turning her attention from the distraught woman with her chicken.

"Has she said what brought her here?"

[wrecca]

"She came back with them, from Nevarra," the girl spreads her hands in a gesture of vague surety. "Lost her husband and her boy in the fighting, I think."

Accurate enough for kitchen gossip, although it doesn't really explain why here. Maybe she'd been helped by some of the Watchers and didn't want to be left on her own, who knew. That was more detail than this particular girl cared to listen in on, but she'd bring tea out to the crying woman sometimes. She was busy, not heartless. Speaking of, she disappears back inside briefly and comes back with a warm mug. Go on then, take it out there.

[unshut]

She has a soft click of the tongue for the kitchen girl in exchange for the mug, indicating the kitchen with a tip of her head. Go on then, it says, and the girl goes. There's no point to be lingering out here in the muck and the dreary grey sheet of the weather overhead without compelling reason to, and gossip - half baked at best as this is - isn't worth being hollered at by kitchen's mistress.

Fitcher considers the woman on the upturned bucket a moment longer, letting the mug and the steam from it warm her hands and face. The packets in her coat won't be harmed by the delay; that's a fact so present that she doesn't even have to decide it before she's crossing the yard. None of the animals bother to rearrange themselves to accommodate her.

"You'll catch a cold sitting out in this weather, my dear. If you are not in possession of a better coat than that one, we should see about having one requisitioned for you. Give it a few weeks," she says, offering the mug out to the red-eyed woman. She's a pretty thing, isn't she? Behind all the misery. "Kirkwall will grow colder than you're used to."

[wrecca]

A scowl crosses Amal's face at the stranger's voice, a quick flash of her illustrious temper. It's almost comical in comparison to her bedraggled state; face blotchy, hair unkempt, borrowed clothes too big. That she might be tempestuous shouldn't be surprising for a woman who has been crying for days. Her expressions softens quickly to little more than pinched brows as she reaches out to take the mug, wrapping her hands around its warmth with pleasure. The lingering pinch is due to the simple fact that her head hurts, relentlessly.

"I'll add it to the list," she mutters into the rim of the cup, hoarse and bitter. All of her clothes were left behind in Nevarra City, more still at her husband's country manor. She still needs to write to the manor. Tell them that no one is coming back, least of all her. Maybe they'd send her the clothes, before they all left the house to ruin.

KITTY.

[reshapes]

The weather lurking outside the Research division's office windows is nearing the comically dreary category, the fire crackling in the hearth is just slightly too warm, and there is some faint pleasant smell in the air from whatever has been burned in it. All in combination, it is an environment somewhat tailor made for falling asleep on the job.

Not that Kitty Jones would ever be prone to such an impulse. No - straight as an arrow and severe as its point, that Jones. So the THUMP from somewhere inside the office chimney should not rouse her at all suddenly from a paperwork-induced stupor.

[rathercommon]

It is coincidence that, until that moment, she'd been slumped low in her chair. (Comfortable, soft, the cushion bowed under the accumulated pressure of many years of rears.) And a coincidence that at that moment, she lets out a snort, and lifts her chin, and blinks repeatedly as she tries to sort out whether someone had actually brought Benedict up from the cells to make popcorn on the stove (right, there's no stove in the Research office) -

Ah. She licks her lips, and pushes her hair from her face, and gives a little shiver in spite of the warmth of the air. She always feels cold when her...concentration is broken. Which is what just happened. Here.

What was it that had caught her attention? Had there been a noise...?

[reshapes]

Had there?

A soft rain of ash, nearly imperceptible, floats down the chimney and into the sweet smelling fire. A small bit of hardened grit or perhaps a little pebble of masonry falls, ticks off the heated stone and bounce, bounce, bounces from out of the fireplace and onto the floor. It's quiet.

And then, with a great unholy bang and a flood of black soot, something dislodges and comes crashing down the chimney. It tumbles through the fireplace and out after the preceding pebble in a hail of grit and embers with the mad flapping of oozing, tar-like wings, somersaulting end over sloughing end like some kind of gooey circus act before splatting unceremoniously in the center of what is possibly a very lovely rug (little holes now being charred into it by flecks of burning minutiae notwithstsnding).

The thing, inconceivably griffon sized and shaped despite the narrow space through which it had just passed and roughly the consistency of a cat dipped in pudding, writhes once and then goes still.

[rathercommon]

Kitty does not, of course, shriek. Shrieks are for girls who don't have nerves of steel. What she does is let out a noise of some surprise, and also she pulls out her knife because what is she, a fool? That's clearly a demon, with its impossible size and its horrifying visage -

Though it seems to be quite dead. Once her heartbeat returns to elevated rather than racing, and her knife-hand stops trembling, and she's able to take a moment to look over the dreadful foul thing, she slowly (slowly) takes a step around the desk, trying to get an angle that will let her see what it is. Aside from disgusting.

[reshapes]

In the grand scheme of words, disgusting is a rather strong one. Wholly inapplicable? Perhaps not. Grossly inconsiderate? Absolutely.

The wretched thing sprawled across the rug of the office remains quiet and rather still as she rounds the desk. If it moves at all, it is to ooze slowly outward in every direction like a too-wet flan spreading across a plate. At the center of the dark once-griffon, burning thin like a candle viewed through a thick window, pulses a slash of green light.

[rathercommon]

That catches her attention. She doesn't understand the significance of it, doesn't tie it right away to her own shard, but she has to investigate. So she takes a step forward - and then steps back, and grabs for a napkin she'd used at lunch, because she really doesn't want to touch it - and steps forward again and kneels close to it.

Carefully, cautiously, using the cloth, she goes to move it, to try to get a better look at that light.

this is backdated leave me alone. or don't leave me alone tag me.

[notched]

She is in the loft of the barn trying to untangle a gangly and displeased black moggy from a skein of rope it has gotten first its untrimmed claws and then its entire body caught in. It wouldn't be half as difficult as it is if the beast would stop flailing about and continuing to wind more and more twists around its body while refusing to let her unhook its claws from where they're caught in the fibers. She is lucky she has on her leather gloves, or it would have bitten her too many times over.

"Fuck's sake!" she exclaims to it aloud in frustration. Not something she'd normally say in front of other people but she hasn't realized he's down there yet.

[esquive]

In the space below the loft, a pause. And then Marcoulf drops the bucket he'd lugged in from the yard, the thump of it against the dusty floor of the stables just loud enough to carry.

[notched]

She struggles with the cat a few seconds longer, a hiss of irritation when it scratches past the edge of her glove, but then it's free and she brings it over to the edge of the loft. She sees Marcoulf there and is briefly flustered that anyone actually heard her swearing up and down, but rather than address that she just evicts the cat from the loft. It goes running as soon as it hits the ground.

She has a more pressing concern, "Can we go see the griffons now?"

A faint smile on her face. She had definitely been waiting around for him to come back.

[esquive]

He assesses her and her small little smile blankly, sucking his teeth in mute consideration. At last - a shrug, a tip of the head toward the doorway leading into the yard. Fine.

Which is how the pair of them end up clambering up the last flights of stairs to the eyrie at the top of the Gallows. He's talking as they go, a careful list: "You must not study her in the eye. She dislikes it. I have been trying different meats to see which she prefers best, but she is a changeable little--" bitch, is the word, but they've arrived in the doorway of the nesting floor.

It smells of hay, like molted feathers, and some denser more animal musk. In the half light, dark shapes shift if their bowers of straw.

[notched]

She leans her head in close as he tells her the secrets of his Griffon. She's already intrigued to hear it is female. She's only just starting to see some of the nuances of gender in the horses, how different is it with the Griffon? How much does it change their attitudes that they are carnivores, predators.

She knows how not to look a beast in the eyes, but she's also not certain how one treats an animal as both beast and companion. It makes her heart beat harder. She's excited like a child.

"Have you named her? Do they care for a name?"

[esquive]

Here, Marcoulf makes an involuntary face and ends up frowning as he rifles through his pockets there in the broad doorway of the eyrie. Almost all of the griffons have, he thinks, rubbish silly names. The trouble with giving the task up to Riftwatch and letting them write down any of thing instead of just having someone attend to the business properly, apparently.

"I don't think they care for names any more than a cat does," he says, at last producing from a coat pocket a few chips of tough, stringy looking jerky.

Blessedly, before he can actually explain what her name is, one of the great big shapes nesting in a bed of straw unfurls itself.

The griffon is large. All griffons are. This one shakes itself, dust floating up from its mottled dun and gray coat. It stretches one wing, a great flutteeing dark silhouette against the bright mouth of the eyrie's open face to the sky, and then lumbers toward them.

From beside Anna, Marcoulf makes a shooing noise and shifts forward to meet the aninal. "No, no. Go back to bed, you fat man--"

The griffon gamely ignores him when Marcoulf catches it by the heavy beak. Instead he ducks his big broad head and shoves it cheerfully into the man's middle, purposefully putting himself into something of a headlock if it means the possibility for scratches and treats is increased.