WHO: six, marcus, marcoulf, barrow, matthias, laura & derrica WHAT: escorting some stranded orphans back to ostwick WHEN: firstfall 9:45 WHERE: on the road to ostwick NOTES: n/a.
A handful of orphans in a cart and seven Riftwatch agents heading out into the wide world, what can go wrong?
Present dangers veer wildly between potential bandit attacks, inclement and chilly weather, and plaintive demands to hear the itsy bitsy spider for the twentieth time this hour. How are we handling these challenges, folks?
Matthias glares at the side of the cart. He's walking along with it, one hand on its side to keep pace. The road is basically a track, with ruts carved by thousands of wagons and carts that have gone this way before, made their way through soft mud, which packed down, and baked in the sun. It makes their way easy, and predictable, and it means bandits can wait beside the road and get the jump on them, so Matthias is trying to keep an eye out ahead of them, but--
One of the orphans sticks her head around the side of the cart so she can look back at Matthias, with narrowed eyes. "What song?" she demands.
"Any song." Matthias hops over a large hole in the roadside. "Any song at all. Anything good."
"Yeah," the orphan says, petulantly, "but what song? We're not going to listen to any old song."
Er. Matthias, put on the spot, looks around for help. "The, er... The Manky..."
Don't need to ask Barrow twice. He's got one orphan's arms wrapped around his neck in a piggyback ride, two more giggling and gripping at his wrists as he swings his arms.
"OH Calenhad clad in kilt left a bar one evening fair, And one could tell by how he walked that he'd drunk more than his share, He fumbled round until he could no longer keep his feet Then he stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street!"
He pauses. "Now everyone has to sing with me on the chorus."
Rocking his arms in a little dance, he sings it slowly, glancing from child to child: "Ring ding diddle diddle I de ohhh, ring di diddly I oh-- He stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street!"
Even the choosy orphan joins in for the singing the chorus, with great gusto. Matthias pinches up one corner of his mouth and does not sing--but it's not an easy thing to resist.
"Where d'you reckon those songs come from?" he says, addressing Barrow directly. He's got to talk over the heads of the gambooling orphans to do so, but that's all right. He's here as an escort. That means he's allowed to talk over the heads of children. He's got a higher status than them. "Like, was there even a Calenhad?"
"Probably," Derrica chimes in. Sat in the bed of the cart, she's been playing string games for the past hour. Right now the overworked bit of yarn is laid across one knee where Derrica can attempt to untangle it into working condition. "A passing minstrel might have carried the song from one town to another until it caught on."
The tow-headed boy tucked into her side mumbles something around his thumb, and Derrica pauses to stroke his hair before going back to the knotted yarn. Her eyes cut sideways to Barrow before returning to Matthias, one shoulder lifting in a shrug.
"Whoever he was, it seemed he couldn't hold his liquor."
Guess what it's pretty cold, so miserable camping is go.
Orphans are being split between everyone's tents, so let's here about bedtime stories and who's keeping watch and which kids are prodding folks awake in the wee hours of the morning to whisper about having heard a noise that was probably the horses but now everyone has to get up in the cold to make sure it wasn't bandits.
Six's childhood was not regular, she is aware of that in an abstract sense, and she grew old very quickly. To see young people now inspires a rather desperate urge to protect them, but caring for them? She is unsure how to do that, and it leaves knots in her stomach. She does not know how to care for a child, other than make sure that they are fed and given water and blankets, should they be cold.
Adalia would be better at this. Six would make a terrible mother, even if she had the inclination.
Instead of caring for the children properly, Six decides to keep watch, brushing down her horse and trying not to seem as though she is panicking as severely as she is. One of the children has already asked her what she is wearing around her neck and another asked her why her armour is so heavy and another asked why she is so big, she's so large for a woman -
It means she has to grit her teeth, leaning to rest her forehead on Sir's flank.
Who knew that children were as exhausting as a battle?
"They're still back there," Matthias says, helpfully, as he comes up around the side of the large horse and large woman. His arms are full of firewood, and he's on a return trip to the fire, having decided to do what he's best at: burn things.
He comes to a stop just a few steps off from Six, taking refuge in the moment of silence, away from the gaggle of orphans that are gathered in the camp proper. The horse is between them and the children. That's good. Matthias is too tall to be a child child and would, if asked, insist that he is definitely not a child--but he might be easy to mistake, at a glance, for one of their charges. Just a particularly tall orphan.
"If we stay really quiet, they might forget we're here. Go off and get themselves lost."
Six doesn't startle - she is not quite that unaware of the world around her - but she does turn sharply, her eyes flicking over Matthias. It might be easy to mistake him for one of the orphans if she wasn't certain she had seen his face before, even if she cannot place where. Her eyes flick over him before she gives Sir another brush, fingers scratching at his flank absently. It's something he likes and she indulges.
Behind her comes a quiet whine, a Mabari lumbering over, clearly envious.
"I think that is the opposite of what we want," she comments finally, even if it is a little wry. "If they get lost we will simply have to find them again."
The Mabari puts Matthias a little on edge--it's dogs, in general, it's not the fault of this particular one--but he bears its appearance without any tells more obvious than a tensing of his shoulders. It doesn't look as if it's out for blood or anything. Then again, with dogs, who can say, really.
"If they get lost, we can make finding them the job of someone else. We already had a go at it, didn't work out, no hard feelings but we've got to be getting back to the Gallows. Doesn't have to be us that comes back out here to look for 'em."
Though he has no children of his own (THAT HE KNOWS OF), Barrow spent his childhood as the elder brother of a sister whose entertainment he took as his own personal responsibility. He's well-equipped with stories and jokes, and can often be seen surrounded by the orphans when they've stopped to camp. There's a game to see who can gather the most firewood, who can do the best nug impression, who can be the quietest when it's time for everyone to turn in.
His tent seems to accumulate orphans over the course of each night, split up as they are throughout the campsite, and he's growing increasingly tired as a result-- he's never going to turn them away, but each time someone new comes in, everyone already there has to rearrange themselves and Barrow takes up nearly the entire tent when he isn't piled with children.
It doesn't seem to dampen his spirits, however, and he catches the occasional snooze during the day when they stop for water or other necessities.
Barrow's patience for the children seems limitless. Laura's is not. At some point, in some night, she appears at the tent flap along with one of the youngest children--a little boy looking to sneak in with the others.
"This is not your assigned tent," she informs the sleepy children, piled in around Barrow like wayward puppies. "There is no longer room for Barrow."
The conversation doesn't happen until one of their last nights on the road. Derrica sits up on watch, listening as Barrow's tent grows silent. Maybe she doesn't need to discuss this with him at all, but Derrica can't let it pass. She can't raise the issue of what she suspects about Barrow with Matthias, though maybe that would be an easier talk to have.
She likes Barrow. (Had liked Barrow.) That means she talks to him about her suspicions, which apparently entails ambushing him when he extricates himself from his tent to take his turn on watch.
"I can sit up with you," she volunteers. "There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about, after what happened in Nevarra."
Which could mean literally anything, but she would be that Barrow knows what she means.
If there's one thing she's certain of, it's that they will need to keep watch at night. Many of the orphans have the hard faces of children who have survived on the street, but they aren't so capable that they can be relied upon to defend themselves.
(Besides, if she keeps watch, she doesn't have to attempt to entertain their charges.)
So she sits at one of the edges of their camp, curled up inside her cowl and a cape she borrowed from the Riftwatch stores, and tries to stop the children from coming to speak to her.
"No. Your mission is to sleep," she tells the one who is supposed to sleep in her tent. "You will be safe--there is a knife in the tent."
"A knife in the tent, she says. Do you know how to use a knife, little one?"
The orphan in question, some snub nosed boy who can't be older than seven, makes a face as his hair is ruffled and his head wobbled around on his thin neck before Marcoulf withdraws his gloves hand, spins the boy about by the shoulders and swats him back in the direction of the tent he'd crept from.
As the boy grudgingly stumbles back toward the tent, Marcoulf turns his face toward Laura in the dark. His tone drops by a few notable degrees. "You ought not to give them knives."
Using a knife is simple. He must know how. That certainty colors her answer as she looks up at Marcoulf, stone-faced. "We are supposed to protect them."
If they don't have weapons, they will not be able to protect themselves. And if the adults are overwhelmed, they will have to be able to protect themselves. The logic of it is obvious.
There's a clear awkwardness to Six as she begins to usher children here and there, trying to get them into bed and settled. Her Mabari does his best to help as well, wiggling here and there and trying to herd them as if they were sheep, but it seems that she's closer to exhausted than she'd like to be by the time they're done.
She remains terrible with children.
All the same, she is the one who has to come and quite literally lift children over her shoulder to take them back to bed, tucking them in with an awkward pat - she might be an older sister but she hardly grew up with Adalia - and return to settle down and watch, a frown on her face.
"I did not think they could be as exhausting as fighting."
"They are worse," Laura mutters, which is unfair of her. She does not dislike the children--but neither does she know what to say to them or which things she should expect them to be capable of doing. After a moment, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders, she asks, "Are all children like this?"
Incapable of defense but aware of things Laura only learned in the last few months, by turns desperate for attention and insistent that they want to do things for themselves. Every time she thinks she understands one, it turns out she is wrong.
"You'd better listen to her, mate. She knows knives. And if she says you'll be safe, you will be."
Matthias has a cape to match Laura's. Mere coincidence. He'd raided Riftwatch's stores just as she had. Stands to reason that something as simple as a cape would be there in bulk for them to take and use. It fits him well enough. Capes are difficult to get wrong, even on someone half-grown half-done-growing as Matthias is.
He grins at her orphan as he unbuckles the strap that keeps his staff fixed to his back. Doesn't like kids very much, mostly as he has to try really hard to distance himself from them, so as to remain wholly and very visibly separate, lest he risk being mistaken for a kid. He's not. Neither is Laura. They're in charge here, and that aspect has given Matthias a certain authority to be the bigger one here.
Physically, and, you know. Metaphorically as well.
"Tell you what. If you're particularly lonely, you can kip in my tent, and Laura can come by after her watch is up and take you back. 'Course, you'll have to wake up, then, and go out in the cold... and it'll be cold by then. So maybe you'll want to just stay. Dunno."
"But it's dark--" the boy starts, as if it is not dark around them at this very moment.
"Do not argue." Laura looks at him steadily, her mouth firm, and while she has no idea what she has done to convince the boy to turn tail and go back to the tent, it seems to have worked. His expression seems to her like a mix of displeasure and worry.
And then it is her and Matthias, and she realizes she doesn't want him to go to his own tent quite yet, if the alternative involves him sitting down beside her.
"I do not think they like me," she tells him quietly, reaching up to take one of his hands and tug at it. Stay.
The children are developing their favourites. Matthias's youthful energy is inevitably a draw, as are Barrow's stories. Marcus, a quiet presence who prefers to keep his own company far forward of the group in the interests of guaranteeing safe passage, is not one of them.
But nor has he avoided his duties in guardianship. Before sundown, he shepherds his allotted group of children to his tent, inspects their hands and their faces to check that they've cleaned up after supper, cancelled appeals to stay up a little later with quiet, stern instruction, and for the most part, even the most precocious of urchin is disinclined to disobey.
It's very late when one of them is caught whispering.
Then, a few moments later, Marcus emerges from his tent, followed by a skinny boy of the younger end of the spectrum, who is wide eyed and reluctant to leave the warmth of the tent. "Come along," Marcus says, keeping his voice hushed. "Here, take my hand." There's enough patience there to sound like kindness, and so, the boy does as asked, and follows along with tentative feet as they move to the edges of the camp, past quiet tents and extinguished and cooled firepits.
And in his other hand, Marcus carries his mage staff, bladed and ornate and catching the moonlight oddly where precious metals and stone embed in polished wood. Marcus himself is not exactly prepared for battle, boots unlaced and coat left behind. The cold in the air is bracing, and the child soon shivering as they go.
"Good evening," he says, to the person on watch, headed their way.
The movement draws Derrica's attention. As quiet as the night has been, there's nothing ominous outside of the camp to worry her. It's good luck. Derrica had been worried about bandits, but so far the biggest issues they've come up against are running out of stories and song, and struggling to gets the children to sleep.
And speaking of that particular trouble—
"Hello," Derrica answers as she turns to watch the pair of them approach. She's draped in a cloak, but her fingers are bare where they hold her staff in front of her like a walking stick. Her gaze travels from Marcus to his little shadow. "Can't sleep?"
Pulling the collar of her own cloak up slightly, she refrains from staring at Marcus' staff. She has questions about the stones, about the weave of metal and the seamlessly attached blade. But instead, she prods: "You'll need cloaks if you plan to stay out very long."
The boy doesn't answer, having pivoted his attention to the treeline in a very apprehensive manner, pulling his hand free so he can best tuck his arms around himself. Marcus places a shepherding hand near the crown of the child's head while his other balances his staff, blunt end down, against the damp earth.
"Some of the older boys were telling Hamish, here, that they spied something in the forests around supper time. Eyes, I think it was."
"Glowing yellow ones," the boy chimes in at a mumble. "Wolves. I was hearing 'em."
Marcus looks back up to Derrica, nodding to her. "That's why we have guards, keeping watch. Isn't that right?"
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road trip.
Present dangers veer wildly between potential bandit attacks, inclement and chilly weather, and plaintive demands to hear the itsy bitsy spider for the twentieth time this hour. How are we handling these challenges, folks?
matthias | ota
Matthias glares at the side of the cart. He's walking along with it, one hand on its side to keep pace. The road is basically a track, with ruts carved by thousands of wagons and carts that have gone this way before, made their way through soft mud, which packed down, and baked in the sun. It makes their way easy, and predictable, and it means bandits can wait beside the road and get the jump on them, so Matthias is trying to keep an eye out ahead of them, but--
One of the orphans sticks her head around the side of the cart so she can look back at Matthias, with narrowed eyes. "What song?" she demands.
"Any song." Matthias hops over a large hole in the roadside. "Any song at all. Anything good."
"Yeah," the orphan says, petulantly, "but what song? We're not going to listen to any old song."
Er. Matthias, put on the spot, looks around for help. "The, er... The Manky..."
Someone. Please. Anyone. Start singing.
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"OH Calenhad clad in kilt left a bar one evening fair,
And one could tell by how he walked that he'd drunk more than his share,
He fumbled round until he could no longer keep his feet
Then he stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street!"
He pauses. "Now everyone has to sing with me on the chorus."
Rocking his arms in a little dance, he sings it slowly, glancing from child to child:
"Ring ding diddle diddle I de ohhh, ring di diddly I oh--
He stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street!"
[get it stuck in ye head]
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"Where d'you reckon those songs come from?" he says, addressing Barrow directly. He's got to talk over the heads of the gambooling orphans to do so, but that's all right. He's here as an escort. That means he's allowed to talk over the heads of children. He's got a higher status than them. "Like, was there even a Calenhad?"
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The tow-headed boy tucked into her side mumbles something around his thumb, and Derrica pauses to stroke his hair before going back to the knotted yarn. Her eyes cut sideways to Barrow before returning to Matthias, one shoulder lifting in a shrug.
"Whoever he was, it seemed he couldn't hold his liquor."
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camping.
Orphans are being split between everyone's tents, so let's here about bedtime stories and who's keeping watch and which kids are prodding folks awake in the wee hours of the morning to whisper about having heard a noise that was probably the horses but now everyone has to get up in the cold to make sure it wasn't bandits.
six | ota
Six's childhood was not regular, she is aware of that in an abstract sense, and she grew old very quickly. To see young people now inspires a rather desperate urge to protect them, but caring for them? She is unsure how to do that, and it leaves knots in her stomach. She does not know how to care for a child, other than make sure that they are fed and given water and blankets, should they be cold.
Adalia would be better at this. Six would make a terrible mother, even if she had the inclination.
Instead of caring for the children properly, Six decides to keep watch, brushing down her horse and trying not to seem as though she is panicking as severely as she is. One of the children has already asked her what she is wearing around her neck and another asked her why her armour is so heavy and another asked why she is so big, she's so large for a woman -
It means she has to grit her teeth, leaning to rest her forehead on Sir's flank.
Who knew that children were as exhausting as a battle?
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He comes to a stop just a few steps off from Six, taking refuge in the moment of silence, away from the gaggle of orphans that are gathered in the camp proper. The horse is between them and the children. That's good. Matthias is too tall to be a child child and would, if asked, insist that he is definitely not a child--but he might be easy to mistake, at a glance, for one of their charges. Just a particularly tall orphan.
"If we stay really quiet, they might forget we're here. Go off and get themselves lost."
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Behind her comes a quiet whine, a Mabari lumbering over, clearly envious.
"I think that is the opposite of what we want," she comments finally, even if it is a little wry. "If they get lost we will simply have to find them again."
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"If they get lost, we can make finding them the job of someone else. We already had a go at it, didn't work out, no hard feelings but we've got to be getting back to the Gallows. Doesn't have to be us that comes back out here to look for 'em."
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Barrow ota
His tent seems to accumulate orphans over the course of each night, split up as they are throughout the campsite, and he's growing increasingly tired as a result-- he's never going to turn them away, but each time someone new comes in, everyone already there has to rearrange themselves and Barrow takes up nearly the entire tent when he isn't piled with children.
It doesn't seem to dampen his spirits, however, and he catches the occasional snooze during the day when they stop for water or other necessities.
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"This is not your assigned tent," she informs the sleepy children, piled in around Barrow like wayward puppies. "There is no longer room for Barrow."
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"Please," he says wearily, "if they all shuffle around again it'll take hours."
Help Him
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deposits this extremely late tag here
She likes Barrow. (Had liked Barrow.) That means she talks to him about her suspicions, which apparently entails ambushing him when he extricates himself from his tent to take his turn on watch.
"I can sit up with you," she volunteers. "There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about, after what happened in Nevarra."
Which could mean literally anything, but she would be that Barrow knows what she means.
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“What’s on your mind?”
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Laura / ota
(Besides, if she keeps watch, she doesn't have to attempt to entertain their charges.)
So she sits at one of the edges of their camp, curled up inside her cowl and a cape she borrowed from the Riftwatch stores, and tries to stop the children from coming to speak to her.
"No. Your mission is to sleep," she tells the one who is supposed to sleep in her tent. "You will be safe--there is a knife in the tent."
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The orphan in question, some snub nosed boy who can't be older than seven, makes a face as his hair is ruffled and his head wobbled around on his thin neck before Marcoulf withdraws his gloves hand, spins the boy about by the shoulders and swats him back in the direction of the tent he'd crept from.
As the boy grudgingly stumbles back toward the tent, Marcoulf turns his face toward Laura in the dark. His tone drops by a few notable degrees. "You ought not to give them knives."
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If they don't have weapons, they will not be able to protect themselves. And if the adults are overwhelmed, they will have to be able to protect themselves. The logic of it is obvious.
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She remains terrible with children.
All the same, she is the one who has to come and quite literally lift children over her shoulder to take them back to bed, tucking them in with an awkward pat - she might be an older sister but she hardly grew up with Adalia - and return to settle down and watch, a frown on her face.
"I did not think they could be as exhausting as fighting."
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Incapable of defense but aware of things Laura only learned in the last few months, by turns desperate for attention and insistent that they want to do things for themselves. Every time she thinks she understands one, it turns out she is wrong.
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Matthias has a cape to match Laura's. Mere coincidence. He'd raided Riftwatch's stores just as she had. Stands to reason that something as simple as a cape would be there in bulk for them to take and use. It fits him well enough. Capes are difficult to get wrong, even on someone half-grown half-done-growing as Matthias is.
He grins at her orphan as he unbuckles the strap that keeps his staff fixed to his back. Doesn't like kids very much, mostly as he has to try really hard to distance himself from them, so as to remain wholly and very visibly separate, lest he risk being mistaken for a kid. He's not. Neither is Laura. They're in charge here, and that aspect has given Matthias a certain authority to be the bigger one here.
Physically, and, you know. Metaphorically as well.
"Tell you what. If you're particularly lonely, you can kip in my tent, and Laura can come by after her watch is up and take you back. 'Course, you'll have to wake up, then, and go out in the cold... and it'll be cold by then. So maybe you'll want to just stay. Dunno."
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"Do not argue." Laura looks at him steadily, her mouth firm, and while she has no idea what she has done to convince the boy to turn tail and go back to the tent, it seems to have worked. His expression seems to her like a mix of displeasure and worry.
And then it is her and Matthias, and she realizes she doesn't want him to go to his own tent quite yet, if the alternative involves him sitting down beside her.
"I do not think they like me," she tells him quietly, reaching up to take one of his hands and tug at it. Stay.
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marcus rowntree. ota.
But nor has he avoided his duties in guardianship. Before sundown, he shepherds his allotted group of children to his tent, inspects their hands and their faces to check that they've cleaned up after supper, cancelled appeals to stay up a little later with quiet, stern instruction, and for the most part, even the most precocious of urchin is disinclined to disobey.
It's very late when one of them is caught whispering.
Then, a few moments later, Marcus emerges from his tent, followed by a skinny boy of the younger end of the spectrum, who is wide eyed and reluctant to leave the warmth of the tent. "Come along," Marcus says, keeping his voice hushed. "Here, take my hand." There's enough patience there to sound like kindness, and so, the boy does as asked, and follows along with tentative feet as they move to the edges of the camp, past quiet tents and extinguished and cooled firepits.
And in his other hand, Marcus carries his mage staff, bladed and ornate and catching the moonlight oddly where precious metals and stone embed in polished wood. Marcus himself is not exactly prepared for battle, boots unlaced and coat left behind. The cold in the air is bracing, and the child soon shivering as they go.
"Good evening," he says, to the person on watch, headed their way.
slingshots extremely crusty tag into your inbox
And speaking of that particular trouble—
"Hello," Derrica answers as she turns to watch the pair of them approach. She's draped in a cloak, but her fingers are bare where they hold her staff in front of her like a walking stick. Her gaze travels from Marcus to his little shadow. "Can't sleep?"
Pulling the collar of her own cloak up slightly, she refrains from staring at Marcus' staff. She has questions about the stones, about the weave of metal and the seamlessly attached blade. But instead, she prods: "You'll need cloaks if you plan to stay out very long."
mmm cronchy
The boy doesn't answer, having pivoted his attention to the treeline in a very apprehensive manner, pulling his hand free so he can best tuck his arms around himself. Marcus places a shepherding hand near the crown of the child's head while his other balances his staff, blunt end down, against the damp earth.
"Some of the older boys were telling Hamish, here, that they spied something in the forests around supper time. Eyes, I think it was."
"Glowing yellow ones," the boy chimes in at a mumble. "Wolves. I was hearing 'em."
Marcus looks back up to Derrica, nodding to her. "That's why we have guards, keeping watch. Isn't that right?"
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