faderift | [closed] if you're here and I'm here then who's flying the plane

WHO: Flint & Yseult
WHAT: Trust exercises
WHEN: Immediately pre-hasmal invasion
WHERE: Near Hasmal
NOTES: will include content warning in subject lines if applicable

It's almost guaranteed that their contact has utilized the flow of refugees across the border and toward Hasmal as a cover to pass into the South, though they aren't meant to meet them in that. Doubtless every breed of intelligencier currently peddles their trade there, for if an agent of one secret network might slip in that direction then why not agents of all?

Rather, after crossing the broad width of the Minanter on one of the point-nosed ferries (in the company of a pilot with a near supernatural skill for weaseling extra coin out of pocket, but who tactfully neglects to intervene in the debate his passengers are engaged in), they hire a pair of horses and turn west toward what is allegedly an all but forgotten trading post by the name of Drake's Landing which is said to boast such luxuries as a nearly empty inn and the cheapest drink in the political tri-corner.

At some point—perhaps after the fourth or fifth narrow bridge that they have to coax the horses across, for the landscape is threaded through with twisting offshoots of the Minanter—Flint remarks, "If we come this way again, it would be faster to row in."

Maybe that's how the Venatori beat them to the Landing. Or maybe the ferry pilot had a raven in the little cabin at the back of his boat who had carried word of a certain notable captain of Riftwatch swiftly North.

Regardless—

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"If I survive to get there, I will have earned that," she says, with a low vehemence that's slightly out of sync with their conversation, as if she is responding to someone else's remark, hearing some harsher tone than he took. Whatever corner that comment turned she steps back just as quickly, facing the rest of his response with the same muted exasperation.

"And I never said tyrant. I've already admitted I don't understand what you're after. Stop making me guess so that you can be offended instead of answering. How do you make an island full of pirates ready for people? How do you make that a place better than any other place? I've been to Estwatch. I've lived in Llomerryn. Unless you are a pirate they have no advantages on Lowtown."

"It doesn't have to better. It just shouldn't be hostile to the people trying to—" He stops himself, a check on some flaring frustration. It's a short beat. When Flint continues, it's measured like a leash wrapped short around a hand.

"You make an island full of pirates ready for people by making them legitimate. Not by making them not Seheran, or not mages, or not whatever other kind of person might find themselves in such a place. You do it by making them strong enough or convenient enough that somewhere like Nevarra—the Van Markhams, the Pentaghasts, who gives a shit—sees the benefit in respecting what they already are."

And then, as if abruptly irritated with either himself or the trajectory of this conversation or some combination, he is abruptly more direct: "What do you want me to tell you? I don't have figures. You don't care for the people in question. That island doesn't even exist anymore."

"Not figures. Not politics." Maybe she is half-delirious already, and that is why it feels as if they're speaking two entirely different languages. Maybe somewhere along the way she confused him with someone else or dreamt some exchange that never happened and has been talking nonsense ever since. "What did you want it to be? After all the business of legitimizing. What would the place be that would make it worth starting another war? Another Llomerryn isn't."

Maybe she is delirious. That might account for why the whole shape of this feels like trying to blindly grab a snake out of a burlap sack without knowing which end has the fanged mouth. The beat in which he doesn't have a ready answer for her is one in which he struggles to think of some version of this he hasn't already said outright.

"Farms. A port. Trade. A real place made self sustaining where those people can be what they please and earn"—chafes—"What they can't elsewhere."

A beat, like trying to chew sinew.

"I don't know how to put it more plainly. Someone once had the idea or performed the politics for making the place you would choose to live in."

"That's it? A place like any other, except you allow mages to be farmers too?"

She sounds incredulous. Surely not. All of the years of machinations and secrecy and cryptic philosophizing must be for more. Something grander, more radical, more troublesome. No one foments civil war and plots to wedge themselves between the Qun and the Imperium for the chance to turn a few pirates to shepherds. Or did she imagine all of that, too?

More than just mages, but that thought strays awfully close to politics.

"Why not? Is that so unbelievable?"

In any other circumstance she would find a better way to say this. Or, better, a way to not say it at all. But here is where they are. She says: "I expected more."

Should that cut? Maybe in some other place under different circumstances, it would. And maybe if she weren't gut stabbed and dying and there weren't no point to it he might say, You should consider why that is and who it benefits that she would expect the world to be so very dangerous.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you."

She sounds more puzzled than anything--and perhaps still not entirely believing.

"Why do you behave as if it's some grand secret you must scheme in shadows and burn the world for? Half of Riftwatch demands more every week."

"Because a place like that where someone might look to it and see some alternative to what they've been handed is a threat to whoever told them otherwise."

"You overestimate how enticing living among pirates and mages would be, whether they've turned shopkeeper or not."

"Orlesians having been fighting at their Empress's pleasure for half a decade. You've a dozen towers' worth of mages wild scattered across the whole of the south, and a nation of slaves and half-citizens in the north. I don't think the concern would be that a few might travel elsewhere. It would be over those who might prefer to stay exactly where there are and demand something more from it."

"Why would its example have any effect on your average Orlesian or Tevinter?"

"Show people that they have the capacity to rule themselves. That doing so not only doesn't require them to sail off the edge of the map, but could be accomplished anywhere and validated with safety and influence and the power with which to defend it. Who would be satisfied to be subject to a master or an empress or a Magisterium dictating their lives for them then? Would you?"

"Rule themselves? You said-- Pirates have ruled Estwatch themselves for most of the Age and it's nothing you've described. The only improvement it makes on the Imperium is that its agents have not succeeded in killing me."

[closed] if you're here and I'm here then who's flying the plane

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