[OPEN]

[heirring]

WHO: Wysteria, Marcoulf, Flint, and/or Fitcher & YOU
WHAT: Open log for Wintermarch
WHEN: Now
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Mix of open and closed prompts; some threads closed to first come first serve and/or contain a few different prompts. Want something specific but don't see it here? Hit me up on discord/plurk/PM/the astral plane, and we can figure something out (or just toss me a wildcard starter if that suits your fancy; I'm pretty flexible). Action brackets aokay if you prefer it over prose.

[see comments below for character specific starters]

Comments

fitcher

[unshut]

I. card night (one thread please, no turn order; feel free to threadjack as you feel compelled)

Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the depressing state of affairs over in Kirkwall with all those sick and dying leeching out into the air. Maybe it's all the doom and gloom from the northern territories having leaked all the way here like molasses slowly moving downhill.

Or maybe it's just an off night. Either way, the air about Fitcher's card table these last few weeks has been decidedly a little more gloomy that she'd prefer. Which is why tonight she's brought no less than three bottles of wine and an exquisitely battered viola along with the usual deck of cards.

"Look at all of you." Thunk go the bottles as they're deposited at the center of the table. "Grim specters, one and all. Is this what the business in Nevarra looked like up close?" She sets her heel up on on the bench and the viola across her knee. "Don't mind me. Someone deal while I see if this dreary old thing can be tuned."

II. lowtown tavern (closed to whoever gets here first)

A sensible clerk - provided for in nearly every way by the organization for which she toils, and perfectly capable of wiling away the least pleasant weeks of winter warm and content in the Gallows has no reason to be in Lowtown this season. Not with all the sick around. And yet there Fitcher is, occupying some little table in one of the drearier public houses. She is in the company of a nondescript man with hair the color of forgettable. After a short interval, a purse is traded between them and the lad (is he younger or not? Hard to say) slides out of his chair, wishes her a good day, and takes his leave.

Fitcher tucks the purse into her coat, then fetches up her drink. Never let a drink someone else has purchased go to waste if it can be helped.

III. wildcard

bastien;

[unshut]

They are less than half a block from the theater - hardly having escaped the flabberghast crowd of other patrons disgorged into the streets in the show's aftermath - when Fitcher starts to laugh out loud. It's a small sound at first, muffled sensibly behind her gloved fist. And then it is a significantly less small sound and significantly less muffled.

[cozen]

Bastien isn't prone to infection, but it's infectious nonetheless—not enough to make him laugh, too, but enough that his more shell-shocked (pardon the anachronism) forward gaze cracks and animates with several soundless, failed attempts to find and form the first word of an explanation for what has just happened to them.

Eventually he settles, ridiculous and self-aware, on, "It is a metaphor."

[unshut]

Which prompts a fabulously undignified cackle from her. The sound carries, pleasantly loud in the narrow street. She doesn't bother to ask For what?; clearly Bastien has no option but to desperately clarify.

[cozen]

"Each, ah," he says.

Then he needs a moment. Not to organize the bullshit he's about to invent. Just to enjoy the laughing, like a song, in respectful silence.

"Each of les chats represents a period in Orlesian history, with Ancien Deutéronome as something akin to the Council of Heralds, deciding which facet of the Empire should triumph."

[unshut]

"Ah!" It's a singularly delighted gasp — a reaction fit for conjuring rabbits out of fancy hats or a particularly clever card trick. In essence, it is the only suitable response to such an ass pull.

"That certainly adds a rather shocking subtext to the choice of putting Rum Tre Tremper in a lion's mane."

[cozen]

"Truly," Bastien says, and if Rum Tre Tremper is the chat he was most interested in perhaps finding sometime later to buy a drink, he will keep that to himself. "But he is our period of greedy expansion, non? We want Ferelden, we want Nevarra, we want the Marches—in and out, in and out."

Somewhere behind them, in the street, other escaped members of the audience sing several lines of a song and burst into peals of laughter.

"So you see it makes perfect sense."

I refuse to type 'wicked grace face'

[unshut]

"Yes, I see it now. In fact, I should be quite sharp with you for not remarking on it during the production so I might have context for the thing." She shoots him a sidelong look, less cutting due to her grin. For a prodigious gambler, Madame Fitcher's poker face is rather poor. "But I suppose I can allow that there was hardly time or opportunity. And the silks were charming even without."

Charming. That's a word for the barely there, laced tight 'garments' the actors had been poured into.

"Maker. It's a shame Satinalia isn't for months yet."

coward!!!

[cozen]

That was, depending on perspective, exactly the right or exactly the wrong thing to say. He lights up, steps ahead of her to twist and walk backwards, talks with both hands.

"We must. You must promise me. Not the silks; I would die. But the masks."

[unshut]

"Not the silks? Then what good is it. Honestly, Monsieur Val Royeaux. Your lack of commitment is might almost be demoralizing were I a more delicate woman."

This all said breezily as she trails along behind (before) him.

"Which petichérie chat would you like to be?"