CLOSED | Nug Quest

[nonvenomous]

WHO: Adrasteia, Holden, Jone, Joselyn, Sawbones, Val de Foncé, Wysteria, and Dick.
WHAT: Poachers run afoul of a Riftwatch research expedition.
WHEN: Cloudreachish. Time is a flat circle.
WHERE: Minranter River, Free Marches
NOTES: Animal cruelty, some gore.

JOURNEY:

Their trek north across the Free Marches to the Minranter is light and mild: Jone’s mule, Loghaine, hauls the bulk of any heavy gear. The wind stays brisk beneath steady cloud cover, only rarely committing to rain, and there’s an inn to curl up in once they reach the river. Have a drink, rent a bunk with a moth-eaten blanket, splurge on the “luxury” suite upstairs.

For those that aren’t willing to cough up the coin, there’s always the stable.

Further into the wilderness, the white noise roar of the river at night makes for restful sleep and long watches, where the crack and rustle of a bear through the underbrush or the sound of approaching horses might go unheard until it’s too late. At times flashing eyes reflect the watch fire from the treeline, only to melt away without incident. Pawprints pressed into the river sand and traces of bone-littered scat hint at the nature of their nightly visitors -- more fascinating to some than others.

DESTINATION:

Vultures spiral overhead -- an ill omen, easy to mark at a distance. Far below, hoof-beaten grass is streaked with gore where a herd of nugs was pursued out onto the river flats, blood still wet despite the wind, one little body left broken underfoot on the trail. They never had a chance.

Ravens squabble and hop between flayed corpses left to stiffen on the beach. Flies zip from haunch to haunch, spoiled for choice.

There are a dozen nugs here, most of them quite young. Their skulls are crushed, the sand churned with tracks where they struggled.

A few still have their hides. The leather is mundane, for anyone who has the heart to check.

Further west across the river, campfire smoke drifts skyward over the trees where the sunset fades orange to purple. A pained squeal carries across the distance, accompanied by the sound of cruel laughter on the wind. Eventually a few of their voices rise in song.

The killers are close, and night is falling.

AFTERMATH:

An earlier drizzle keeps the fire from spreading into the surrounding wood: by the time the battle is dying down and the nugs are freed, the flames have dwindled to a forlorn lick across blackened canvas and crates of supplies. And the corpses: some burnt, some on the beach, one bobbling slowly downriver.

Something should probably be done about those.

The two fade-touched nugs they’ve rescued need tending. They are wild and distrustful, but they are also exhausted, and injured, and desperately thirsty.

Near the remains of the campfire, a spit-roasted nug still has attracted a fly or two, but still has meat on the bone. There are fade-touched nug hides to be found on the wagon that survived.

A few dazed mounts linger where they were tied off at camp or tangled in the woods nearby -- at some point, a dracolisk had plunged past Jone into the battle-darkened water. Like the armor of their previous owners, they’re rugged and diverse -- beasts captured, won and stolen. A great, shaggy white Avvar horse has taken to Adrasteia, lipping at her sleeve.

Let them roam free or round the others up for an easier ride home.

Comments

[nonvenomous]

It occurs to him at the light’s first register that he could quietly roll himself over and pretend to be asleep. ‘Playing possum,’ as it’s called.

The words blur together on the page while he considers it, and Wysteria is showing him a fistful of kumquats before he clocks that she’s found him. They’re already looking at each other when suspicion fleets late through a crease between his brows, distrust offset by a welcoming croak from his cat. Thot stretches as she rolls over at his side, webbed claws flexed at the rafters.

Dick closes his book, and nods to the stall door for her to let herself in.

“What are they?”

This is a nicer thing to say than you can leave them there.

[heirring]

"They are a kind of fruit. You can eat the skins if you like. I had them last year." Where did you get the fistful of kumquats, Wysteria? Surely you weren't carrying them in your pack this whole time. "They are all debating with the landlord over the state of the rooms, and there is a tree adjacent to the yard so I stole them. I doubt anyone will notice, but I require assistance to be rid of the evidence."

Confession so made, the hand with the fruit disappears behind the stall door. They must be stuffed into one of Wysteria's expansive skirt pockets, for a moment later she is free to slide back the door's latch and help herself in.

"Hello little Thought. I see you've made yourself quite comfortable."

[nonvenomous]

There is plenty of straw for Miss Poppell to alight upon. Still, some buried instinct for courtesy sees Silas stripping off the thin, raggy veil of his blanket to settle it down aside for her without particular care for neatness. He shifts the lamp, also -- lifting it to a hook somewhere over his head, where the oil is less likely to tip between the movements of both of them and set the barn on fire.

Well displaced in the process, Thot has wormed (still stretching) away to meet Wysteria at the gate, spending half the trip on her belly. Richard pretends not to see, but is too high to hide a sluggish rankle of disapproval as she goes.

Traitor.

[heirring]

Beginning to bend to touch the cat shaped creature between her bat-like ears, Wysteria recalls only at the last moment to blow out the candle and keep the plate balanced lest she drop hot wax or any trace ember down into the hay. "You are much heavier than you look," Wysteria chides as she hoists Thot up under one arm, tucking her against her side like a favorite toy before proceeding to take up residence on the blanket's edge.

Once seated, legs tucked neatly under her and enchanted cat poured into her lap, a remarkable number of kumquats are summarily disgorged from Wysteria's skirt pockets into the space between them.

"This is very cozy."

[nonvenomous]

“Thank you,” says Richard, as he takes up a kumquat and turns it in his fingers. He made it himself.

Belatedly, he looks from the swath of citrus roe Wysteria has deposited between them to her pockets, as if to measure mass against volume. But a fruit is a fruit, whether it’s passed through an extradimensional space or not, and he hooks his thumb to pierce the skin with his nail. Testing the thickness.

Thot is delighted for the lap space, all oily sinew, careful to keep her claws in in spite of the cockroach kick of her legs, every which way.

“How are you faring?”

[heirring]

"Perfectly well. It was not so far a ride, though I will admit to being somewhat out of practice. I imagine I will be somewhat saddle sore tomorrow."

Popping a kumquat whole into her mouth with one hand, Wysteria's other hand—the left one, palm with its sobering green glow embedded in it—busies itself with the juggling the cat oozing in every direction across her lap.

"And you? How is your new friend acquainting itself with Thedas? Does it get along with the snake?"

[nonvenomous]

“She seems pleased to be here.”

Richard glances to her in Wysteria’s lap as he says so, reluctant to follow her example of pushing the entire kumquat behind his teeth. He chews slowly, and with some interest for the tartness of it, low energy.

It is bedtime. And the scent of elfroot cloys faintly to the cloth of his tunic, stable air too still to whisk it away.

“They haven’t quarreled.” He twists a small knife from his belt to apply its edge to a second kumquat, pulling to split it carefully down the center -- just to see. “Is your anchor still painful?”

[heirring]

"It comes and goes," is a purposefully airy reply, untroubled by design. Helpfully, she adds, "The peel is what lends the fruit any sweetness."

Another of the walnut-sized fruits is tucked into her cheek. The cat-shaped creature in her lap is maneuvered in such a way as to encourage the oil-slick shape to show its tummy.

[nonvenomous]

Thot tenses when she’s shifted over, pushing back lemur-like with cold beans and fangs at ready over the trap of her tummy. But she never bites, threatening only in the goggly lamps of her eyes and a flash of puffy white gums, the subtle fork of her tongue rasped out for a conciliatory kiss at the wrist before she cedes fully to Wysteria’s plans for her.

She is just playing.

Probably.

The inside of a kumquat is nearly as orange as the outside, and there are seeds, which Richard spots and navigates out surgically with the tip of his knife.

“With the same intensity?”

[heirring]

Wysteria too is, of course, just playing. She is famously renown for having a fondness for wiggly animals getting their pinprick hairs on her clothes, is she not? Certainly she is not giving Thot—the filament shapes of the magic binding and forming and informing the shape of her—a careful all over examination. Mentally mapping and unwinding the arrangement of it as if it were a thing she could untangle and lay flat on a table to study.

Or she is avoiding direct contact with the question by wrestling a cat to petting a its tummy. Who can say?

"Oh, very rarely." Is not no. "I suspect that was primarily a side effect of the anchor's adaptation manifesting, and that it will wear away with time as I become accustomed to it. Is she meant to be present all the time like this? There is an instability just here—which I will not touch," she tells Thot directly. "Lest it undo you."

[nonvenomous]

“She can vanish at my command.”

With the kumquat divested of its seeds, he places it into his mouth, one half after the other. And as he does so, filaments warp with redoubled vigor through the portal of Thot’s pupils. She turns her attention more directly to the shard in Wysteria’s palm, her skull flexing back fine over her shoulders to better see, her ears laid flat, perhaps with alarm for the threat of undoing --

all the while eeling innocently around on her back, a paw applied here and there to push back at tummy touches. Difficult, as cats have a way of being.

“But I’ve missed her company.”

[heirring]

"That must be it then," Wysteria says with an air of confirmation as if somewhere in her head she is taking notes and has underlined this particular point. She wiggles her anchor-lit fingers at the cat, its glow reflected in Thot's saucer huge eyes.

Her attention swivels up to Richard then. The lamplight serves to wash warm her sun freckled face.

"Oh but I did wish to say thank you for coming to my aid in the cavern. All things considered, it was very thoughtful of you."

[nonvenomous]

Wysteria looks up, and a distinct beat later, a matching ripple of magic fades from the pierce of Silas’ eyes (fixed sightless through the seeds he has in hand). Still chewing, he looks late to meet her swivel. The overall affect is strangely youthful in spite of grey flecked dull in his beard, lines etched in fine around his eyes.

“Of course,” he says.

“You did most of the heavy lifting yourself.” The path plotted, the gate sealed. He plucks up another kumquat while Thot pulls Wysteria’s fingers in towards the gawp of her jaws.

[heirring]

It's one thing to discuss theory. It's another, ruder thing to ask how a magician conducts spellwork. But Wysteria's attention is keen; she doesn't ask, she watches.

(She also lets Thot have her fingers, either unfamiliar enough with animal or familiar handling to be blind to the consequences of little sense of self preservation around anything cat shaped or simply unconcerned by them.)

"I suppose we might agree that it was a group effort then. In any case, I'm pleased it all worked so well. And I should like very much to develop some way to continue testing the theory. If you summoned Thought through the rift, it follows that other things might be successfully manifested on this side of the Fade as well."

[nonvenomous]

The lock of Thot’s fangs around Wysteria’s wigglers pinches sharp only for an instant, buffered quickly with a gummier chomp and gentler rasps of her tongue. And so on. She’s pleased for the spoil of extra attention.

One would be hard-pressed to say the same for Silas.

But that’s always been true, and the withdrawal of engagement is harder to pinpoint than the presence of open hostility. Above all he is courteous, and apparently very taken in by the vibrant orange texture of this kumquat.

“Do you believe that she was drawn out through the rift, or simply that the opening allowed me more raw aether to work with here in our material plane?”

[heirring]

"I suspect it to be the latter, though can hardly discount the first without further research. Objects pass through the rift with some frequency even without the company of a rifter, and if their appearance is not somehow tied to the presence of rifters—say, native to the world of rifters which are here presently or perhaps, although this seems less likely, were in the past—then that might have interesting implications with respect the a few theories on what rifters are. An object or indeed even you, little Thought, cannot dream itself into or through the Fade. —Ow, gently."

This last is addressed directly to the collected cat shape undulating across her knees.

"But the former would explain how we are able to conduct ourselves similar to how we once did elsewhere despite the arcane properties of Thedas being so fundamentally different, albeit for some individuals in a weakened state. Perhaps the anchor is what maintains the connection in the day to day."

She flicks a glance up in his direction, hesitates, and then puts a kumquat into her mouth to deter herself from asking the question she otherwise might.

[nonvenomous]

“Mmm,” says Silas.

“It felt more like the latter.” Is this the first time they’ve spoken since then? He decides not to reflect on it, past fleeting consideration that prompts a muddled glance from the cat herself. “I’ve resummoned her successfully since the initial doing.

“She was destroyed in our engagement with the Stormrider.”

He’s matter-of-fact in this, as he is in most things.

Thot, belly up in Wysteria’s lap, looks no worse for wear: two eyes, two ears, four long legs, a tail, and a blue tongue, like cats have.

[heirring]

"Was she? How interesting. Perhaps we might experiment with undoing you after all," she tells the cat, and then laughs at her own joke. Ha ha, we have fun here.

Wysteria pats the creature's exposed belly like one might thump-thump a particularly small drum then withdraws both her hands, wipes them on her skirts (do creatures of magic in the shape of cats shed?), and resumes picking through the kumquats.

"What should you like to do with the fade-touched animals once they've been located?"

[nonvenomous]

Thot weeble-wobbles upside-down on the pivot of Wysteria’s ankles while she laughs. A pause from Silas feels a little like restraint -- there’s a low cut glance aside where he might have blinked his cat tidily back to his own shoulder.

He doesn’t.

But after Wysteria wipes her hands, Thot flops over to slither back to her master on her own.

“I’d like to observe them for a day or two before before harvesting any hides. One of the reports transcribed indicated there may be very young animals demonstrating abilities consistent with what we would normally attribute to rift exposure, but there have been none recorded in this area for some time.”

[heirring]

"Do you suspect they migrated from somewhere which had been exposed or passed the traits down to their young? I still have some of the samples we took from the land surrounding Bierstagg, you know. The fungi is coming along magnificently. I wonder if any of those strange eels could reproduce."

This is said tones of a rather hypothetical question as Wysteria picks another kumquat out from the piles and sets it between her teeth. She sucks the sour juice from it with a scrunch of the nose.

"If they can passed the attributes along, we might attempt to capture a few alive and keep them for breeding."

[nonvenomous]

“That’s my hope, though I can’t be sure how supportive Riftwatch will be of a breeding program corralled within the Gallows.”

Forgiveness over permission -- the notes he left for Mister Stark were sparse. There’s a pause where one might imagine him strategically planting the requisition near the bottom of a more pressing stack of paperwork. Perhaps slipped between the pages of another report.

He pulls Thot up into his arms as she crosses into his lap. She hangs like a days-dead octopus through the gaps in his support. Warm.

He is also, for whatever reason, still holding that same kumquat, knuckled up under one thumb.

“Have you told anyone else about what happened? With your anchor?”

[heirring]

Being somewhat of an expert in this practice herself, Wysteria is poised to offer some piece of advice—well Mister Dickerson, the key would be to sequester them in an unremarkable room or perhaps in the dungeons until such a time that discovery of the project would only lead to its validation—, but is drawn up visibly short by the question.

Rather than answer immediately, she eats another kumquat. This is a matter of happenstance and not because she is avoiding the question, as that would be quite silly. After all, why should she care to avoid it?

"The subject has not come up, no."

[nonvenomous]

No change in expression crosses his face in profile. Certainly, there’s no surprise.

“Would you like me to draft my observations for you to expound upon?”

[heirring]

No.

"If you think it valuable. I suppose there's little harm in soliciting multiple perspectives on any rift or anchor related phenomena," she remarks, airy and light and purposefully inconsequential.

[nonvenomous]

“Of course. I can get started when we next stop to camp,” Silas agrees, easily. Thot stretches to nest her brow under the scruff of his chin, one monkey paw webbed across his kumquat. The rumble of her purr is just loud enough to hear over the lift of wind under the leaves outside.

The first sputters of rain won’t be far behind.

“Or you could simply tell me directly which element of what happened has made you incurious.”

He looks over at her, impassive save for the whet of his eyes in the lamplight.