[OPEN]

[nonvenomous]

WHO: Richard Dickerson, Ellis, YOU?
WHAT: Dirty jobs + some closed starters + catch all.
WHEN: Cloudreach
WHERE: Docks/Lowtown/Gallows/Wildcard
NOTES: Additional starters pending. Action spam and prose are both fine.

Blending in if at the Viscount’s Head Tavern

Alternatively:

Scouting with or bothering him while he’s at Any Other Tavern

Richard has brought his journal with him, as if he expected to be here alone. The fact that he isn’t here alone has not deterred him from opening it and getting to work -- short, sharp strokes of ink on the paper at the point of his quill.

The tavern is as noisy as it smells like it should be, crowded, sticky tables and the stink of salt in the air.

“What would you like to talk about?” he asks, without glancing up from his work.

This doesn’t have to be awkward. If nothing else, the rate at which they’re drinking to keep pace with the local color should see to that.


Wildcard

Throw us somewhere or HMU and we can brainstorm.

Comments

[unshut]

Fitcher has not brought a book with her. Candidly, she's brought very little outside of her sparkling personality, a small belt knife, and a modest sum of drinking money (she has stopped carrying more on her person, as the temptation to indulge in dice or cards tends to be ever present in certain Kirkwall taverns and boredom makes a willing victim out of just about anyone). With only the subject of drink to occupy herself, she has promptly forged ahead and contrived to already be on her second cup of suspiciously flat ale.

"Anything but news of the war, I suppose. I don't know enough about boats to keep up with the dockside gossip, and I've never been to Orlais and so can hardly be expected to know anything about the front line effort there." There is a bard - the playing kind - there on the far side of the cramped tavern. It's too loud to hear what performance they're attempting, but she's trying very hard to read the lad's lips. "We could always play a traveling game. 'I see something starting with the letter T'; 'It's that terrible beard over there,' and so on. Something like that."

[nonvenomous]

“Is subjectivity allowed in this game?” Richard pauses in the scratching of his pen, brows briefly knit in doubt of his own spelling. He leans back a few degrees to better see. “I might rate the same beard as ‘passable,’ or even ‘mediocre.’” A single match could take hours.

When he finally looks up to her, it’s in mock challenge of the logistics.

He strikes through what he’d just written, lays the pen across its well, and reaches for his cup.

He’d kept up with her well enough for the first round, but is already falling behind in the second, breathing deep before he sips. It’s fine.

“I was thinking it might be interesting to catalogue the nature of the unusual dreams experienced by some among our number over the winter. To review for any throughlines of concern.”

Definitely not just to have a three ring binder of everyone’s personal baggage.

[unshut]

Her head comes eagerly around as if on a swivel. The cup is set aside.

"I had no idea you were so interested in arcane scholarship, Richard."

[nonvenomous]

Oh, ok.

“I had no idea you were.”

He pauses the beat necessary to unhitch himself from the thought of pressing into that instead, and sets his cup aside also.

“I wouldn’t consider it arcane study so much as an attempt to identify the intent, if there was one.”