OPEN

[deceivingly]

WHO: Yevdokiya an Waslyna O Bearhold, Tiffany Hart, Matthias, maybe my other characters + YOU
WHAT: a humble open log
WHEN: Fantasy March
WHERE: the Gallows, Kirkwall, the Wounded Coast
NOTES: bath nudity, butchering a seagull, nothing worse atm

Comments

Yevdokiya an Waslyna O Bearhold || OTA

[deceivingly]

i. Gallows - baths.
Doki, submerged in hot water up to her nose, closes her eyes. She is enjoying this. She looks shorter without her bulky furs and armor. The blue tattoo that starts at her chin continues down her throat and over the dip between collarbone, down between her breasts. She has a nomad's immodesty, someone used to stripping down and having a quick wash in a free moment, or changing clothes in inconvenient alleys. A bath is a very natural place to be naked by comparison. A hot bath is a luxury. Under the water, the glowing of her anchor shard casts a strange wavery light.

Her clothes are in a nearby heap. The armor she has left behind in her room. Water rust. Steam is bad, at least for armor. She has brought a big thick dagger with her, the grip of which is sticking out of her clothes. The pommel is carved to look like a lion. It does not fit with her vibe.

"I won it," she says, if she senses anyone looking at it. "Big contest, very competitive. I pissed the farthest so? The dagger became mine."

She stays late in the baths, as late as she can. She does endeavor to be third-to-last to leave, and maybe passes a little too closely to any other pile of clothes that might be nearby. If a button or brooch or any nice wool socks might be found missing--well, they could have been otherwise misplaced, yes? A half naked Avvar, she would have nowhere to hide these things on her person.

ii. the Wounded Coast.
The mission is an escort mission. A representative from the University of Markham has come to Kirkwall to gather a particular type of abalone shells, with the aim to study their restorative properties on damaged cow hooves. With a scholar's wariness, she had asked for protection, but had quickly split off from the Riftwatch agents dispatched to guard her. She is now down by the line of the surf, digging in the wet sand.

And Doki is eating a seagull. Its neck has been wrung. Its wings lay spread on the sand, splattered with blood and sea foam. The feathers ruffle gently in the breeze. The belly has been split open, and Doki is knuckle deep, rooting around in the body cavity. There is blood smeared on her chin and around her mouth.

With a quiet aha! she pulls out a dark purple shape. She is proud as she holds her prize aloft, blood dripping down her hand.

"A kidney! It is good for you."

iii. Kirkwall.
There is a market stall selling pewter drinking mugs from the Anderfels. Big heavy things, scenes and patterns beaten into the sides, thick handles, lids that open and close by pressing your thumb just above the handle and pressing down on the raised decorative piece.

Doki is sitting across from this stall. There are crowds between her and it--people walking aimlessly, people walking with purpose, people here to buy and people here to sell and people just browsing, enjoying the brief sunshine that spites the cold. Doki is doing none of these things except for maybe enjoying the sunshine.

Twenty minutes pass. Twenty-five. The door to a nearby tavern opens, and a brace of day-drinkers spills out, wandering down the street. Doki vanishes from her vantage point. Then she is beside the stall. Then a mug is gone--one from the back--and Doki is walking with the drunks, swinging her step to keep in time with them, a woman far in her cups.

But then the merchant yells out: "Thief! Thief!" and the crowd breaks apart, everyone murmuring, everyone looking, trying to figure out who he's pointing to.

Doki keeps walking. To the nearest person she casts a look, a smile--and thrusts a cloth-wrapped bundle into their hands.

iv - WILDCARD.

i

[truthtied]

She'll have little luck with Diana's pile. She arrives with the intention of taking a bath and so wears very little more than a linen robe. They're well matched in immodesty at least, even if Diana doesn't quite see it that way, accustomed as she is to communal bathing. She smiles at Doki's story, a little bemused.

"I admit, I can't picture how such a contest would go." For a variety of reasons. Diana is not as naïve as she once was, but there are still some things she's missed in her exploration of the wider world.

[deceivingly]

"First, you must be drinking water. Buckets of water. And beer, too, twice as many buckets. And then it is stance. And making sure all competitors, they are too drunk to participate, or else have tiny little dicks that are not very good for anything."

She lifts one hand out of the water to measure with her fingers, thumb and forefinger pinched very close together. Tiny.

"Of course, I cannot be giving away secrets. What if this is a contest you and I have? And then you would know how it is I win. Very bad for me."

[truthtied]

Diana makes every attempt to not appear like a scandalized teenager. She's partly successful, though her hands do fly up to stifle a surprised laugh when Doki holds out the approximate measurement of the penises.

"I don't think you have anything to fear there. I'm not so daring as to challenge a champion."

[deceivingly]

"Very smart." Doki gives the water a smack with great finality. "But now you know who it is that you should turn to if this becomes a challenge that must be won."

She starts pushing her hand just over the surface of the water, enjoying the little waves that it makes. The warmth of the water and the steam in the air, both are very good. If only someone could be living in the water full-time.

"You have found a job here with Riftwatch?"

[truthtied]

"I will keep you in mind." And she nods in answer to the question, "In the Diplomacy division, yes. As much as I can given my status as stranger to this world. Though," she adds with a grin and a slight splash of water, "I haven't been neglecting the stables, if you're concerned."

Cleaning stables isn't enjoyable work, but it is grounding and she likes animals, so.

[deceivingly]

Doki grins back. She lets herself be splashed, without flinching.

"But I am in Diplomacy! This is good, that we are with the same. We can do many great things together. And when I bring my horse back to the stable, you will be there to make sure he is taken care of right. This is good, too, all of this. We are like," she lifts her hands out of the water so she can smash her index fingertips together, "fate."

[truthtied]

"Far be it from me to defy the sisters of fate," she says. And she likes Doki anyway, even if the woman seems at best a trickster. "How do you like the division? I haven't met many from it, or I've forgotten to ask."

[deceivingly]

"Of course I am liking it better now that you are in it."

Very obvious. Doki's smile is a cat smile, all pleased. She pushes her hands through the water, wrinkling the surface and sending a gentle wave across the way. The steam from the water wreathes in the air around them, heavying the damp air.

"But," brisk, as Doki tips back her head and lays it on the lip of the pool, "I liked it okay before. I have not been doing very many missions for them. This is surprising, because I am very diplomatic by nature. I am always making arrangements with people, and getting them to understand what I am asking of them."

[truthtied]

"You flatter me." A dip of the head, lashes brushing against her cheek demurely. And it's entierly possible Diana has never gotten entierly accustomed to flirtation. She lets her fingers play over the wave Doki pushes to her, listening.

"I wouldn't presume to know the Ambassador's mind-" Though from what she's gleaned, she expects that Doki's diplomacy would not be the sort that comes immediately to mind. Still, "You should be out more. I imagine you someone who has more connections than many a diplomat. Surely there is good that can be done if people are willing."

[deceivingly]

"Oh, yes?"

Flirting complete (at least for now), Doki's bright eyes are now for this vote of confidence. She scoots forward a little, eager to hear more.

"This is true. I am very connected. I wonder how it is I should be convincing the Ambassador of this. What do you think? You seem to be very clever."

[truthtied]

And this is an easy thing to turn to. Diana is not by any means a life coach, but pondering how to help people with the gifts and tools one is given could almost qualify as a hobby. It's not difficult to extrapolate that out to what she knows about another person.

"You seem very clever yourself," Diana says, smiling, "You seem sharp.
When we've spoken, you strike me as someone who thinks very quickly on her feet and wields her cleverness like a sword. I've known other women who were like that." One of them was a jewel thief, but that was neither here not there, because- "It's very admirable."

ii

[nonvenomous]

The Wounded Coast is not the Gallows, and it’s not Kirkwall, and nobody on this mission roster is anyone Richard Dickeson managed to kill or betray in a dream. So he is here in the salt wind and cold spay, seated on a barnacle-crusty boulder in scruffy black furs, peering after the progress of Doki palpating through the sticky cattail fluff and wet bone of a dismembered seagull.

There’s an air about him familiar to anyone who’s supervised a puppy tearing a squeak toy to shreds. Better this than those wicked little fingers finding their way into their scholar’s pack, left up on the back of a mule up the beach.

Flecks of blood and offal speckle his boots, carried by the wind. A feather flags across the sand and finds a place to stick at his toe.

“Are you offering?”

He puts out his gloved hand, polite, palm up.

[deceivingly]

She narrows her eyes. Then she shoves the kidney in her mouth.

"Next one," she promises, mouth full. Not very full. The little kidney is so little that it is gone in that one bite. Very warm still, very good on the way down. Doki goes back to digging in the bird's body cavity, her head bent industriously over her work.

Some of the down feathers have pulled loose from the wing's underpinnings. The next gust of wind fluffs them, pulls them aloft. They form a brief and amorphous kind of halo around Doki's head, stick to the flyaway hairs that have escaped her elaborate braids.

"You like the Coast?" Squish, squish. Fingers in guts.

[nonvenomous]

Next one.

Dick drops his hand loose from the wrist, willing to hold her to it.

“As much as I like anything.”

He’s been more interested in the squelching of her knuckles in offal, but looks up at her prompt to take in the churn of the surf sucking grey at the shoreline, birds perched on a cliff face looking on in concerned silence. Others wheel out over the scholar’s work, unawares, their cries carried thin on the wind.

“What about you?”

[deceivingly]

There's blood on her teeth when Doki grins.

"Yes." With sticky fingers, she points down the beach. "There is a cave close, there, very big. When the water comes in, the cave fills up. When the water goes out, there are things to find in there. Swords and bones and bags. Once, a diamond."

She raises an eyebrow at him as she sticks one finger in her mouth, and cleans the blood from it.

"I want to go and look now."

[nonvenomous]

His eyes tick distinctly down to the blood on her teeth, and stay there when she points away down the beach. He hms to himself when her finger emerges clean. ‘Clean.’

This cave, close, very big sounds like a good place to murder someone and smack on their larger and juicier kidneys while leaving behind minimal evidence. Or simply to be caught inside unawares by the tide, drowned and broken on the rocks. His expression doesn’t change, curiosity mild as the rest of him.

YOLO.

“May I join you?”

[deceivingly]

Someone else would at least ask, should we say we are leaving? Should we leave our guest alone? Should one of us not stay here in case death and danger comes?

Doki says none of these things. She pushes her fingers into the seagull and, with a great final squelch, draws out the second promised kidney.

"I am glad you are no coward."

She stands with a creak of leather, an easy and surprisingly graceful move, and holds the kidney out to him, just as she'd promised.

"Eat, and follow."

No second looks. The moment she's relieved of the kidney, she's off down the beach, heading for the bend in the coastline, where the strip of sand meets staggered rock.

[nonvenomous]

Surely there are others to attend to an emergency in immediacy; Richard isn’t even in armor, traveling clothes fastened up neatly beneath the ruff of his cloak, all dark in shades of black and grey. He does glance back once he’s stood, measuring distance, raw kidney rolled hard between thumb and forefinger to tear the tissue open.

A cursory examination as he falls into step behind Doki reveals no wormy squiggling, and he rakes the mess off his thumb with his teeth.

His footfalls are quiet behind hers in the sand, a damp handful scooped up along the way to scrub the blood from his glove before it cools into the leather. He doesn’t chew much before he swallows either, clinging sand dusted aside, a flask twisted from his belt.

“What do your tattoos represent?”

[deceivingly]

Doki wipes her arm over her mouth as she walks. Her boots scuff in the dry sand. There are marks like veins that trace the shape of old dried waves, rising and falling and rolling like hills in a painting. These she takes a particular care to scuff over, erasing the marks, destroying the evidence.

"Why do they represent anything?"

She rubs her fingers over the bridge of her nose. The tattoo is old. The color is still good but the mark is as flat as her skin. No one can scuff it out.

"I am not Dalish. Maybe I am just liking blue. What does your beard represent?"

[nonvenomous]

Dickerson’s skepticism rings through his silence for the supposition that she likes the color blue enough to have permanently marked up her face with it. His stride is longer than hers, leaving a line of boot tracks pressed in clean across her scuffwork.

Presently, he spies the edge of an abalone shell poking up from the sand and stoops out of line to scoop it up mid-step.

“It helps me to pass for human.”

[deceivingly]

Doki's focus snaps to him, keen like a razor. There is a sparkle in her eyes. Her legs are short, so she's lagged a little behind his big long strides. She's quick now to close that short distance. Who gives a shit about a shell?

"Then it is a very good beard, for a bad beard." She angles her head sideways, as if this will help her see what is beneath the beard. "You are looking very boring, very lowlander, very human. What does it hide?"

iv Dinner for three - lmk if either of you want any adjustments

[wearyallalone]

Although sending crystals don't transmit images, the man waiting near the docks at the agreed-upon time looks like he fits the voice; tall, lean and muscular, he has the air of a man who spent decades standing ramrod straight who is now trying and failing to slouch a little. He's dressed plainly, no sword on his hip, though his boots are of a style such that there might be a blade in one of them.

He's watching people go by. Since he doesn't know what his dinner companions will look like, it's more to pass the time than scanning for anyone particular.

[deceivingly]

"You are ready for dinner?"

Doki appears and steps in close to loop her arm through the man's, with a sunny smile. She is the kind of short that gives the after-the-fact impression of tall. She's slightly stocky, though that might be the layers of fur and hide that she is swathed in. Her cloak is heavy wool and also trimmed in fur. In honor of dinner, she has made an elaborate braid crown of her hair, interwoven with red-dyed cords of leather. They make a pleasing contrast with the blue of her tattoos.

If she has tried this on several unsuspecting strangers waiting at the ferry dock, well, that hardly matters. This time, it has worked.

[wearyallalone]

The inch he'd slouched vanishes, long habit kicking in as his attention moves elsewhere. Still, he manages a small smile. He's reserved by habit, too, but the expression isn't without some warmth. "I am. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance in person." The somewhat low, Nevarran-accented voice matches the one from the sending crystal, further confirming success. "Is your brother about, or are we meeting him at our destination?"