[OPEN]

[nonvenomous]

WHO: Richard Dickerson and YOU
WHAT: Open/catch all prompts.
WHEN: Winter
WHERE: Lowtown, Gallows, Invading Your Personal Privacy
NOTES: Looking to make friends and influence people. Will add CW as needed.

Robbery - Lowtown

[ How often does Richard get shaken down in Lowtown? Tonight he’s a lean-armored figure standing with his gloved hands raised patiently out and open near the center of the street, while a dagger point picks its way through the beard under his chin.

Initially it looks like it’s just one guy doing the robbing, dagger-holding with his one hand and patting through pockets and over leather plate with the other. Filthy snow dams meltwater into brown pits in the shapes of hooves and boots over the cobble at their feet, catching wet flecks of sleet.

But Richard is looking up and to his right, and a voice hisses out from the rooftop shadows on high: ]

The fook you lookin’ at?

[ Before Dick can reply, Knife Groper (pats escalating into slaps) cuts in: ]

WHERE’S YER FOOKIN’ PURSE??


Astronomy - Gallows Tower

[ It’s a clear winter night over Kirkwall, stars pinned out sharp and cold in the velvet sky. Richard is an abominable bundle of wool and furs beneath them, gawky frame little more than a skeleton for the bear hide humped over his shoulders, gloves more akin to mittens, splayed clumsy and thick across the spread of an open book of constellations.

This would be easier with a partner native to the world, no doubt, but that would require asking anyone.

Instead, he’s built up a small fire in the brazier behind him and is piecing it out himself, breath streaming thin over the pages. The uneven wobble of orange light it provides shouldn’t be enough to read by, but he doesn’t seem to be having any trouble with the volume spread across the parapet before him.

It’s freezing, and it’s late. He isn’t expecting company. ]


Semi-Wildcard* - anywhere you wouldn’t want to find a snake

[ This is a place. It’s a place Dick shouldn’t be in. It’s a supply closet, or a records room, or personal quarters. It’s dark or it’s light, it’s too late or it’s too early. The door was left unlocked, or maybe it wasn’t.

The important thing is that he is here when you arrive -- an unremarkable man of average height and lean build, bearded and balding and holding a clipboard. He looks to the open door with cool, clear eyes, and waits a beat before prompting: ]

Hello.

[ expectantly. ]


True Wildcard

[ Try me with whatever or hmu and we can brainstorm. ]

*OOC notes: If you WILDCARD pls help me out with the description/any important Implications in your reply so I can adjust accordingly.

Also prose or action spam is fine I can roll with whichever.

Comments

[nonvenomous]

The wedge of torchlight that widens over the floor at the man’s feet sees him straightening slightly in the semi-dark, and going still.

His back is to the door; his left hand is planted across the end table. The right is frozen where it’s been caught stirring through the table’s contents, if there are any to disturb at all. His leathers are dark -- thieves’ leathers -- and his clipboard lies where he dropped it absently aside on the bed.

This looks bad.

In this scenario, he does not have time to say hello.

He doesn’t even have time to turn around.

But he twists eel-like over himself beneath her grasp, long in the shank, quick to move when she moves. Her steel is at his throat when they stop, pulse skipping against the edge, with his hand closed over hers. Two of his fingers are curled around the blade itself, protesting its proximity with polite (but steady) pressure.

His other hand is out of sight entirely, but she’ll feel where his knuckles are bit in tight around something between them.

The breath he forces out sharp through his teeth has all the making of a scoff, self-deprecating. Unfortunately, the subtlety is probably hard to read. It’s dark in here, and she’s angry.

“Sorry,” he tries, stilted, strained, starting to sweat, “is this your room?”

[whatthefuckami]

"What the fuck's it matter to you?" she asks with a snarl, pushing the dagger in just a little closer, maybe just enough to draw a bead or two of blood up to the skin.  His fingers're in the way, but she doesn't give a damn.  If he loses them in the process, it won't be anyone's fault but his own.  "Ain't yours."

He's got something in between them, and she's going to have to mind that--more likely than not, it's a blade itself, and she's got no interest in getting skewered by a fucking burglar right when she's poised to slit a new smile into his neck.

"Spit it out.  What're you in here for?"  Nothing good, she'll lay money on it.  The fact that he's unfamiliar is the worst of it: she hasn't got the first clue what the fuck he's here for, can't tell who he'd be working for.  If he's working for anyone and not just here to poke through the shit she was stupid enough to leave out for inspection on the little table next to the bed.  (Specifically, there's a few copper coins, a handful of beads, a feather, two shells, an empty cup clearly stolen from the dining hall, and a letter from a your Jack.)

[nonvenomous]

Richard Dickerson stifles a hiss against the burn of the blade through his glove, into the creases of his fingers; blood wells through the leather, and he chokes up his death grip. The skin under his neck is thinner, and nicks easily, sending a trickle along the roll of his throat when he swallows.

It pricks some clarity back into his eyes -- focuses up the (concerted) effort he’s making to drag himself out of the adrenaline-fueled dumpster fire that is the human experience.

He risks a glance to the table. The coppers, the cup, the shells. The letter has definitely been disturbed, however slightly.

“Somebody took something from me,” he says, and locks back into eye contact, level in what little light there is. He hasn’t shifted his left hand between them, steady at his own middle with the panting pace of his breath. “Something personal.”

[whatthefuckami]

Her eyes flick over in the same direction as his, trying to see what he's seeing. Looks like the answer's her shit, so fuck him for that. There's nothing there that'll make a real difference for his having poked at it, even the letter (if it might've, she'd have tucked it into her coat and kept it with her) (though she probably will now, after this), but the knowledge of his fingers on any of it still galls.

When he talks, her attention snaps back to him. There's all the intensity of a bird-dog on the hunt in her eyes, though with more rum tinging her breath than most dogs get near to.

"Yeah. What is it?" She doesn't add any pressure to the dagger--takes a little away, even. Just enough so it's not actively cutting into his flesh at the moment. Answering questions with something like truth in his voice ought to be rewarded.

[nonvenomous]

He swallows again when the pressure gives -- however slightly -- his chin tipped down from the stink of liquor on her breath. Richard has wine on his, also sharp, but significantly fewer parts per million.

“A journal.”

Sweat thins the thread of blood down his throat, seeps in dark at his chops and into the tall scoop of his collar behind his ears. His level of honesty is impossible to discern. He’s watching her very closely, and hardly moves save to spare himself the direct blast of her rum breath, but she has a knife to his pipes. There’s nowhere else for him to go, and nowhere else for him to look.

In the sweat and the shadow gathered behind his neck, a set of beadier eyes peers out at her, the little snake that owns them still save for the flicker of its needle tongue.

[whatthefuckami]

"Ain't any journals in here." He might be telling the truth, might not. Hard to say--she doesn't know him from Maferath, and he doesn't feel or sound anything but nervous to her. She jerks her head toward the endtable and the nothingness beyond it, though, as if to say see, shitall here. "So what're you doing standing around in the dar--fuck!"

He's got a fucking snake--a fucking snake--around his neck. Anne starts as she swears, eyes sharp on the creature's narrow face. She's not afraid of snakes as a general rule, they're a bootstomp away from not being a probem most of the time, but they aren't usually staring her in the face. Fuck, is that thing poisonous? She doesn't know a damn thing about snakes.

"The fuck's that," she mutters, more demand than question. Her eyes flick up toward the intruder for a second, then back, pointedly, at the snake.

[nonvenomous]

“I was looking for it,” he says, a little more forcefully in the face of accusation. Gaining confidence. “If it’s not here, then our business is concluded.”

The snake -- and it is a snake -- is slender and dark, lighter racing stripes just visible in its poke from the depths of his armor. The head is narrow and the pupils round. It can’t be more than two feet long.

Richard is hard pressed to follow Bonny’s glance -- he has to twist at an odd angle to crane a look down and aside, careful not to nudge any closer to her blade than he has to. Still stapled to the wall as he is, he holds at that odd angle, eyes ticked back to his captor. They're the only parts about him that've kept their polish in the mire of his panic sweat.

“She won’t bother you if you don’t bother her.”

It is definitely a garter snake.