faderift | [CLOSED] Hundred thousand changes, everything's the same

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[CLOSED] Hundred thousand changes, everything's the same

WHO: Gabranth + Jone
WHAT: two rowdy fightclubbers on a mission
WHEN: current...ish (do I ever do anything 100% current?? probably no)
WHERE: Nevarra, spanning the trade routes
NOTES: NA so far, potentially violence, will add as needed

The orders are straightforward, shared in detail on the stretching journey northward, long before heavy hooves trot a steady pace atop dirt roads stiff with fainter chill compared to southern humidity: thieves, in guise of roaming dead, are to be removed from their current efforts in order to spare the people of Nevarra further troubles. In success of any sort, esteem will no doubt weave itself into the shadow of Riftwatch's efforts, if only in some small, definitive amount.

Yet they lack allure to hungry eyes, the two of them. Visibly they are no simple prey— and so they will need to set a trap of their own, Gabranth asserts, by way of tailing a caravan as it passes along its course.

“You have experience with...the unrefined,” Gabranth starts, his gaze falling across Jone's high-set shoulder where he's seated on horseback behind her. She is the better rider, and one horse makes for a far more discreet shadowing of the merchants they follow at distance.

“Do you think yourself capable of persuading these thieves to join our cause?”

His disdain is palpable, more so when he speaks. If it were his choice alone, he would cull the cutthroats down to the last— but these roads are rife with information within territory he vaguely knows to be valuable. For the sake of their cause, he will endeavor to forego his own instincts.

It would not be the first time.

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The unrefined, Jone mouths. If she didn't know Gabranth, she'd likely push him off the horse just then. She isn't offended, not really, it's just fucking odd. Then again, that's Gabranth. That's most people worth knowing. If they fit into the horror of war and pointless death that was Thedas, she doesn't think she'd like them near as much.

So she breathes another unrefined sigh and listens. "Can we promise 'em more money than they're making here? About investment, this is."

“That may depend on the depth of their success so far, and the frequency of it.” To trade a feast for meager rations makes even the most virtuous of men glass-willed and soured.

“But we can offer them regularity. Reliability. I do not know if that will tempt them more than the satisfaction of the hunt.”

That they have slain no one thus far in their mischief means nothing to Gabranth. A thief is a thief, a pirate a pirate, a problem a problem.

He fits a gloved hand across his thigh, fingertips resting near enough to her side to brush when hooves and horse alike shift.

There is the urge to call him a flirt, just to see what happens. She doesn't, because then he might launch himself off this poor horse.

(Carrying their extra gear, Loghain lopes behind, a tireless and unbeautiful creature. There's a reason they get along.)

"So it depends on how unrefined they are. They could have heaps of refinement. You could have tea with 'em."

“Many men are they themselves capable of taking tea. It does not make them distinguished, nor dignified.”

He would indeed throw himself from horseback had she so much acknowledged that brief point of contact. Yet in willful ignorance, it persists. Nothing. Nothing. Faint as the scuff of his cloak in the breeze.

The necessities of travel.

“Dressed as dishonored dead, these men thus make themselves parasites. Is there honor in such conduct?”

That is a rhetorical question, Jone.

It's generally best to be rhetorical around people who can spell the world rhetorical.

"Parasites? I doubt they've better choices, Gabranth, or they'd not be risking themselves so. Takes a special sort of bravery, that."

“Bravery?” He spits, the concept curdling on his tongue. Hoofbeats keeping time in the space between one thought and the next.

“To dress themselves in ghoulish adornment, and snap their teeth at merchants and their daughters along barren stretches? If that is where the measure of bravery is dictated, then I name the fledgling recruits of Riftwatch a beacon of it.”

She looks over her shoulder, face positively shriveled with laughter held back, her smile cutting sharp into her cheekbones. "Cor, Gab, you're just full of praise today."

A breath of laughter. She doesn't let herself whinny too much. Eyes back on the road.

"They're risking their lives every time they try. Risking more'n than that, if what I've heard of Nevarra is true."

Her laughter— her ease and surety in praise of her own for these people whom she has never met— is precisely why he looked to her for this task, rather than grasp to bring along a true-blooded diplomat. She does not hold grace, she hunches in her posture, and shows her teeth when she talks.

She is also confident, and forthright, and quick to see straight into the heart of those he would naturally oppress.

“And what exactly have you heard?” He asks, made bullish by tone, though his own nature in this moment is surprisingly patient. Willing to listen. To be taught.

Unique in that quality in the here and now, for a man so wholly committed to being right in all things.

"Well, all the mages are necromancers." This, she evidently believes without doubt or hesitation. "They had a bad succession recently. Don't know who's in charge, but I'm hardly surprised they have highway robbers. This lot is just more creative than most. And I'd wager," she holds her hand up over her shoulder, a finger extended, eye-level with Gabranth. "They've killed less than those who do so with sword and bow."

She is right. He had explained to her the report, yet left out the details of casualties— or casualty, in fact, as only one soul perished in result of the thieves and their effort. Which means this guess of hers (of course) prompts a stern noise beneath his helm.

He does not wish for her to feel vindicated well before they engage with these ‘ghosts’ and their methods.

“Speculation. Unjustified.” Facts set aside. “I grant you the rest, but they may not have yet needed to bare their teeth. Or...perhaps they are inept. Useless resources, succeeding by luck only at playing games along these roads. I urge you, wait, and judge them objectively only once met and subdued. We shall decide what to do with them then."

It reads as a strange reprise of prior circumstances. How last he’d deferred to her experience with grousing agreement. This time the mission is his own charge, and he stands as more (regretfully) experienced in dealing with criminal assets and their perceived worth. “For I brought you for blade as much as affability.”

She wants to touch him, and sublimates the truth of that desire by reaching back to rap her fingers on one of the huge pauldrons behind her. The only reason they're not digging into her back is because of the strange shape of his breastplate-- which is digging into her back.

If only she minded.

Her wrists make a hollow echoing sound. It's never not funny.

"Gimme some credit, mate. I'm more for swords than making friends. You're the one what wants to recruit 'em."

This time the noise of discontentment is unmistakable, posture shifting in the saddle to puff up in objection.

“It is not my desire to—“

In the distance, where twilight is sinking down in strips of violet to meet the road ahead, there’s the faintest shift in something. The atmospheric mood, or the wind, or perhaps even the previously steady trot of the caravan’s horses, made consistent by lack of anything of consequence— and now just slightly out of sync.

Gabranth attunes himself to it as well, forgetting the rest of his own ire in favor of lifting his helmet and fixing the whole of his attention on distant silhouettes.

Jone isn't made for the gentle approach. It's only going to get darker, only going to make it harder for her to see. She slides off the horse with a practiced ease, and walks slowly alongside. From the pack on Loghain's back, she procures a torch. Lighting it's a slow process, and the shadows it casts are appropriately ghoulish.

Accordingly, she holds the torchlight under her chin. Ooh, spooky. "This oughta be fun.

“Enough,” Gabranth grumbles, once slid off the horse in turn, now close enough to press the torch aside with a heavily gauntleted hand. “You will singe your hair.”

From there he turns back towards the road, and finds it easy for them to gain ground on the merchants they tail: yet another sign of unease clinging to the air (is it simply superstition, or did one of them slow their pace in spotting something?), walking nearer to the road’s edge where grass runs tall as a man’s shoulders— or ribs, as it were, if factoring in Jone herself.

Silence pervades, and then, in the inching dark, there’s a terrible shriek. Inhuman—

Only it isn’t the cry of their quarry, but the joined shouting of horse and man alike as something pale and disfigured stands visible enough in the space where one caravan horse reels back on its haunches, startled. To the left and right of the scene, now visible in the grass, bob skeletal heads adorned with sheer cloth or strips of wrapping, seeming almost to float in their advance with how the blades of grass obscure them.

Gabranth says nothing, casting only a single glance towards Jone, before sinking into that curtain of grass himself— less than silent owing to armor, but the whinnying and stamping up ahead ought manage much to mask his effort.

She will act as she cares to; his own tactics, he intends to adjust to match.

~~you know, like a video game character~~

"Sorry, forgot you're the only one allowed to do that."

Whatever, something's happening. Something better than the sound of screaming horses. Fuck, but that noise will never sit right with her. It births an uptick in anger, hostility ready at her fingertips. Aggression is ever a tool to be used.

She's never cared for a stealthy approach, and especially not now. With her poleaxe in hand-- torch extinguished in a nearby mud puddle-- she is a dark figure moving steadily through the grass. She doesn't greet them with words. Where's the fun in that? She just lets loose a long, thin whistle. In the steadily encroaching darkness, the sound splits eerie across the scene of ghosts and horses.

Now, she speaks. (Maybe she just doesn't like competing to be the scariest thing around?) "The dead ought to stick to unguarded targets."

Her poleaxe's blade shines off the reflection of torches. She makes sure it does, angling it just so.

It is all about positioning. Like the silence of his entrance at Pharos, interrupting soft reverie, Gabranth craves the surety of a swift bite at the heels of unsuspecting prey: Jone draws attention (stiffening the gauze-wrapped ‘corpse’ that’d drawn the convoy to a halt, grease-lined eyes— living eyes, in fact— opening in the dark to gauge what sort of threat she poses), enough that the herd of shambling charlatans condenses quickly, descending from the brush to form a loose collection around vehicle, passenger, and interloper alike.

It is only then, in the heat of that distraction, that Gabranth slams the edge of his conjoined blades down against the earth, sparking a flare of subtlety lit embers, mimicking the way flint strikes stone. Performance over practicality. A demand for regard. Indeed, she was right: he is the only one permitted to act as such.

And then he strikes.

There's posturing, and then there's... whatever the fuck Gabranth did. Some part of her revels in it, the horror this must inspire. Mages don't wear armor. He must look like a greater anomaly than even walking death.

The rest of her is trying to keep up. He strikes, and a second later she is with him. Her first attach is with the blunt end of her poleaxe, sweeping forward, intending to hit hard and non-lethally.

She hopes Gabranth will read her intent. She does not want this man dead.

Murder makes negotiation so much more difficult.

Thankfully, this time their thoughts are seamless, their aims woven in unison: his joined blades— much like her poleaxe— share a lengthier grip, making the matter of lashing out non-lethally far more simple.

Weathering a pair of blows like that takes density as much as strength, and credit is given to the brigand under siege for managing to endure both before crumpling to the ground with a pitching groan, the half skull he’d been wearing tumbling away to reveal a grimly painted face.

Behind Jone and Gabranth, the caravan seizes its first clear opportunity to flee without question, painting the air with dust and leaving behind a lone, flickering torch laid out across the dirt.

For that, suddenly the night is made all the more dark and muddied, the white of ghoulish faces far more difficult to see without being directly upon them. Gabranth, undeterred, lurches forward into the depth of it, chasing after whatever glimpse of cloth or bone or bandage he can find. Determined.

The sound of wrapped metal catching wood and steel in glancing flickers in the dark.

Jone stands over the fallen man. His dress is gruesome and silly, but he's just a person. When Jone balances her poleaxe above his throat, she feels-... nothing.

Sometimes, especially lately, she wishes she did.

"Do you care at all for your fellows?" She tries to speak as clearly in Trade as possible. It's a mixed bag, but her Nevarran is surely worse.

The man’s forearm rises instinctively, ache still scrawled across sweaty features smeared thoroughly with oily paint— his hand bumps just barely against the metal of her poleaxe in absent realization before settling across his chest instead, innocuous. There’s a certain amount of concern that seems focused on the noise nearby, rather than the overt threat Jone poses, as if he’s attempting to gauge whether or not they’re winning.

Or losing.

And then his eyes, a sallowy sort of bright green, flick instinctively back towards her. Brow pinching tight.

“What—?” He asks, as if he hadn’t heard her.

Maybe he didn’t. Then again, maybe he's stalling.

Absurdly, the first thought that rises to Jone's mind involves wondering how bad her accent really is.

The ax lowers a quarter inch. At its current height, it wouldn't kill the man under it quickly. It would just make a very painful mess.

"Would they give a shit if you died, mate?" She says, "if they would, now might be the time to speak up."

Something dazed clicks into place finally, either at her words, or the fact that he’s had enough time now to find his own head after being knocked full bore to the earth; ire settles across his face instead of complacency, visible in the way his eyes narrow into slits.

His accent isn’t any lighter than hers. Just different cast.

“Your employer has abandoned you.” The edges of his teeth are dark with scuffed paint from his lips when he sneers, gesturing thinly to the cloud of dust where a caravan ocne stood. “You should be worried about whether or not anyone will care if you die. There are more of us than you, I think.”

Jone absorbs this, and several responses come to mind. All boil down, essentially, to have you noticed I'm bigger than you? She'd say it, but she's not sure it'd translate proper.

She doesn't turn or change her stance. She just says, "Gabranth, do the fire thing."

She asks, he acts.

No matter the task. No matter the height of it, this is how they work— how they fight— in unison, a successive series of instincts and responses that provide equilibrium even in the most tenuous circumstances.

He isn’t visible through that cloud of cloying dust. Not at first. But the moment she gives word, heat blooms vivid orange within its heart, air pressing down like false wind to reveal a row of burning swords laid out above them in the air, fanned like cards and drooling embers— his fingers curled and drawn back, as though nocking an arrow, taut.

The response to it is instantaneous. Hesitation palpable in the air.

Bewilderment etched across the painted face still pinned under her blade, as much as the disguised men and women that now stand lower, their postures drawn closer towards the back of their footing. Closer to flight.

“Enough, enough— ” the man beneath Jone calls, watching from the corner of his eyes. There’s a limit to the violence. The words that follow are said twice: in one language, then the next. “No more, no more, we yield.”

Jone moves her ax, and reaches down to help the man up. Her smile has an edge of ferocity to it, like an animal barely trained. By her standard, she is being very gentle, but she oughtn't look it. They must think she is inches away from savagery.

"Thank you, Gabranth." Her voice is a polite dismissal. No more fire swords for now. She turns back to the man who she has not let go of. Her hand grips tightly into his. "So glad you've realized the importance of the people you've pissed off. Let's negotiate."

Her hand closes around bandages and oil-rich paint alike, smearing her palm a dismal color of black. Tallow and soot, most likely, or ground charcoal. None of it particularly pleasant.

Then again, they’re meant to be corpses. It probably works well in their favor.

“Not here,” he says, shaking his head with a leader’s insistence. Now on his feet, he’s dwarfed by her towering height, but broad shouldered and straight-backed, if not a touch gaunt in places, and in possession of a leader’s pride.

Or a mercenary’s. Sometimes the two dovetail.

“Not on the road. You come with us to camp, and we’ll talk there.”

(This, somewhere out of eyeshot, prompts a sharp snort of disagreement from Gabranth)

Jone turns her head, turning fully away from the Nevarran. It's a show of trust. It's also an open trap. What's he going to do? Stab her in the back? If he does, the lot of them will be slaughtered before she starts to feel woozy.

To Gabranth, she says, "your thoughts?"

Best to remind them of the man who summoned flaming swords from nothing. This is all a pantomime to get them the best bargaining position possible, and when you've a good hand-- as far as she's concerned-- there's no point in not nailing that home.

There were enough flaming swords in that conjuring to put space between Jone's back and any thoughts of daggers meeting spines. She turns— and she’s fine. And not entirely because Gabranth’s helmet is boring a hole through the figure still visible from just over her shoulder.

Jone is a mercenary creature on her own. She doesn’t need magic to make her point— it only helps.

“Permit me to cull a portion of their number first.” Gabranth says, dismantling the bases of his pommels to split the span of his twin swords once more. An overt threat.

“It would make the matter of setting foot in their lair that much less dangerous a venture.”

Jone pretends to consider it, but not for very long. These people won't negotiate if they believe Jone and Gabranth (or at least Jone) to be more bloodthirsty than intelligent.

Which is a shame, because Jone considers herself, at least, to be rather poor in mental powers. Still, Gabranth wanted her here, not someone of grander intelligence.

A hand on his pauldron, patting lightly. She shakes her head. "Not yet. Let them prove themselves untrustworthy first."

A threat. A good hand nailed to the fucking wall.

She smiles at her other companion, the Nevarran in mummer's garb. "Lead on."

It takes not so much walking as one might expect.

And it leads to an encampment manned by a woman with a scar running along the length of her face, streaks of coarse, scraggly grey in what was once a curtain of dark hair, now beaten by the elements. Her eyes are amber, her features sharp-sloped as a knife. She’s the only one there, left waiting, and not in crude disguise.

Someone might assume she’s a doting wife, or perhaps the camp’s necessary caretaker. The muscles of her bare arms, lined with heavy gold-ringed bracelets (gold colored in fact, cheap metals gone brassy with wear), promise they’d be wrong.

She stands, and her brows drop dark over her eyes, and the man returning with both troupe and stranger alike lifts his hands more in surrender to her than he ever did Jone or Gabranth.

“To negotiate,” he says, meandering over to the fire to begin boiling something in a long-armed teapot. Dried leaves, broken nettles.

He doesn’t explain more than that, and it’s clear enough he doesn’t need to, as her attention shifts sharp to focus on Jone and Gabranth in turn. Red hair. Metal armor. Only two of them.

“We have nothing for you here.” Scoffed hard and commanding, heedless of the fact that her companions look like cowed pups as they settle in to lick their wounds beside bedrolls and stacked sacks of supplies. Ill-gotten, most likely, considering the assortment of goods that occasionally peek out from behind satchels and crates. “If you want coin, you go back to the roads; if you want to join us, you need better disguises.”

This is the hard part. With a known entity, Jone is confident in which words to lay down first, second, when and where. She's never known Nevarran mercenaries before, much less peasant country folk. She'll just have to guess.

Cards on the table. It's gotten them this far. "No, no," she says. "We want you to join us. We're... emissaries." In a manner of speaking. "From Riftwatch, down south."

“Strange emissaries.” The woman asserts, the edge of a broken canine tooth flashed when she speaks to them more fully.

Beyond that, she says nothing. It is obvious enough: they bring nothing in their arms as offerings, they are not charming, sticking out like a swollen thumb even here.

“I think we will pass on your offer. The south does not interest us.” Her arms fold as she returns to sit across the raw wood of a stacked series of crates, angled like a makeshift chair. “You can leave, or stay. There is room until we move on in the morning.”

With a glance of her head she barks something in Nevarran, and a few particularly forlorn members of the pack drag themselves back onto their feet, fitting bony guises back in place before slinking off— presumably to head back towards the roads in the hopes more merchant travelers might cross their path.

Jone rolls her eyes. She is not charming, after all. She may as well lean on her strengths: harsh and imposing. "Kind of you," she says at the offer. "I can be kinder. You all get to live," she counts on her fingers, "you get to stay here. The cleverest of your lot send us information. Sometimes we send orders. They get paid-- through you, of course."

So she may distribute the money as she sees fit. So she can take her cut.

"Or I let this bastard do as he likes, starting in the middle of your camp, and we drag the survivors to the magistrate."

Somewhere within that camp, Gabranth’s well-confined heart swells with pride. Outwardly, his posture shifts sharper. As aggressive as a snarling hound making ready to bite on command.

In response, what Jone earns visibly is a hawkish look of disdain from the woman seated before her, arm draped high across her knee. She is clearly not afraid. She is not intimidated.

Or if she is, it doesn’t show.

“What kind of information?”

Ah. A glimpse there, visible enough. Progress gleaming like something half-buried. “We are not messengers. Perhaps your masters already know this.”

"It'll be secure," Jone says. She just has to trust that the Scouting division isn't utterly daft. "We need to know what the enemy is doing. What d'you think? There's a war on, luv."

Jone hopes that isn't too much of an ask, but it isn't though they're asking these idiots to fight. They already risk themselves daily, as far as she's concerned.

"We follow merchants who shiver at the first signs of sunrise. You want us to...watch your enemies? They will be guarded. More careful."

Watch is the key word, it seems, the edges of the woman's kohl-lined eyes fixed on Jone in order to measure her response. The cautious difference between risk and reward. In truth, the only difference between being devoured by a lion and being devoured by a dragon is the view before fangs sink in. Jone threatens to ruin them here and now— a hasty alliance would be no less deadly.

"But if you pay well enough not to insult for this agreement, then we will consider it."

Somewhere behind Jone's shoulder, Gabranth moves to take up the nearest bone-carved mask between his fingers, crushing it into a split near-half, a few broken teeth tumbling to the earth. It might seem as though it is a threat, but from beneath the shadow of Gabranth's helm, he breathes:

"Agreed."

Jone bows, trying not to make it mocking. Most displays of deference just come off as sarcastic, on her. She was never meant to bow, not because she's better than anyone, but because she's bad at it.

Straightening, she pulls hair behind her ear. "Glad we could make this arrangement," she says. "We'll stay in touch, luv."

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[CLOSED] Hundred thousand changes, everything's the same

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when I rearrange my open tabs and my ADD looks only at the spots, not the words

:')

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