faderift | OPEN | the grand tourney!

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OPEN | the grand tourney!

WHO: All Y'all.
WHAT: It's the Grand Tourney! Like a normal Tourney, but grand.
WHEN: August Now.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: Sports... injuries?

Every thousand days, the Grand Tourney is organized in the Free Marches, and all the City States-- and even challengers from farther abroad-- come together to celebrate the freedom of the Marches. This year, the event was intended to take place in Tantervale.

When that, uh, fell apart, the tourney was hastily moved to the relative safety of Kirkwall.

Festivities begin early, with musicians and entertainers coming from all around to entertain lords and ladies as they set up tents. Food vendors complete the picnic atmosphere-- you may not be able to get a seat in the stands, but the hills around where the field where it all takes place makes the event easily viewed by all. Jesters, bards, troubadours, food vendors, all are happy to serve and make the event lively and lovely-- for a price.

The first event is the Joust. The announcer goes through everyone's names, their origins, the part they play, so the crowd knows who to root for and who to boo. Before the individual bouts begin, the jousters are expected to ride around the field collecting favors.

The second event is the Quintain. A similar setup to the Joust takes place, with announcements and cheering, gaining favors, etc. The major difference-- besides the content of the event itself-- is the hastily erected judge's stand, where they can view the skills of each comptetitor. Some scores are met with cheers, some with boos. Some competitors schmooze with the judges before their bout. It's all very classy.

In the intermission guests are invited to play a game of tug-of-war over two large piles of flowers and flower petals. As the loosers will discover, there's a pit of mud underneath the flowers. Hopefully you brought a second pair of clothes, or maybe you just don't care ~~Edgard~~.

If tug-of-war isn't your game, there's drunken archery. Darktown's very best (worst) booze has been generously donated (appropriated) for the event. One shot to begin, and more shots for every subsequent shot of your bow. Landing closer to bullseye garners more points, and prizes can be collected for high point scores. Nothing particularly valuable, it's more like carnival fare-- stuffed toys, shiny gems (they are colored glass), wood carved in various shapes (some lewd). The most expensive prize is a hangover cure potion (it does not work).

The final event is the ever-popular Melee, where several one-on-one matches take place simultaneously, until someone is either undefeated or the least defeated. As with previous events, each combatant is announced to the crowd and expected to walk around the stands, receiving favors. However, they're expected to do this between every match in the melee, as their popularity rises... or falls.

During all of this, the ever-noble Pas d'Armes event is taking place. If you wander away from the event at any time, Gabranth will be there, at a nearby bridge, judging and / or fighting anyone who wishes to pass. Of course, if you wish to pass without issue, he will accept a favor from you. At the end, he'll be crowned with a white wreath of flowers, in a 'peace offering', and that is the sign that the tourney is done.

Not counting the partying into the night. No medieval camping trip is complete without waking up half clothed in a field, right?

JUST TELL ME WHO WON ALREADY.fine, fine, jesus.

THE JOUST

1st Place: Tony Stark, The Iron Man (Erroneously called 'The Man of Iron' at least once by an announcer. Several people in the stands asked if he was made of iron, why he was called that, what is he doing, why.)
2nd Place: Weary Winona of Wycome (Never took off her helm, which was shaped like a woman's face and painted like she was crying.)
3rd Place: 'Sir Sullivan of Bonneville'(Who might just be Edgard in disguise, however legend has it he's actually an undead noble trying to reclaim his family's honor in the joust. This legend was started by Jone.)
Crowd Favorite: Ellis, The Bachelor (He was, at one point, mostly just a mass of favors, which may have been why he didn't rank. The crowd screamed his name repeatedly and at one point threw flowers at him while he was riding past.)

THE QUINTAIN

1st Place: Derrica, the Rivaini Raider (The chant 'carry me home' began during her bout, and continued whenever she walked near the field.)
2nd Place: Derek, Son of Derek, of the Ostwick Dereks (The 'carry me home' chant continued during his bout, as some confusion arose over whether Derrica was a distant relation of the Ostwick Dereks.)
3rd Place: Madame Noir of Hasmal (A ghostly pale woman wearing only a black gown during her match, there were rumors she'd bribed the judges with money or a low neckline.)
Crowd Favorite: Beth Greene, The Lady of the Green (Rumor has it that she was a wild woman who came from the forests just to compete. This rumor was also started by Jone.)

THE MELEE

1st Place: Pierre the Virtuous of Hambleton (On a particularly sunny day, some suspect he only won because the reflection from his bald head.)
2nd Place: 'The Dark Jaguar' (Who may be Erik Stevens in disguise. A nighttime assassin, he appears from nowhere during a fight ~~usually with the aid of a conveniently placed piece of hanging black fabric but shhhh~~.)
3rd Place: Laura, Lady Nightshade (Rumor has it she threw her fight to get third place, but everybody who knows Laura knows she'd never do that... right?)
Crowd Favorite: 'The Acolyte' (A young man of roughly the same height and build as Benedict Artemaeus, the crowd really responded to how nervous, yet trying to be brave, he looked.)

THE OVERALL WINNER OF EVERYTHING:
Ser John 'the Anointed John' Pembroke of Tantervale
...who trained for this every day and is a professional Tourneyman, and whose win for Tantervale really lifted the spirit of the game to a high note, so how can we be bitter, really.
(Note to 1st placers in other events: this means he beat you in your event.)

[ooc Also final reminder that you don't have to have signed up for an event to have your character participate!!!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I expect you alive," she says. She's pretty sure he's doing that thing where it isn't really a joke, but close enough that it's not worth arguing over. She's tripped over that line before. Still, it bears repeating, especially with a war creeping ever closer.

"Four hours' time," she says with a shrug. "The Joust and the Melee, unless I get too cocked up in the Joust to keep going. D'you need me to bring you anything?"

"I have stood sentry for countless centuries." Spoken in that typical unyielding fashion: a testament to his age, when both appearance and voice might otherwise paint him differently. "I need nothing."

He could stand for days and suffer no weakness for it. His mood might sink into bitterness, or his irritation turned to talons— but it is doable. And he has weathered it before for worse.

“I regret only my absence. That I cannot be there to witness your success.”

She rolls her eyes. "I'm still going to bring you food when I can."

At what passes for well-wishes, she snorts and shakes her head. "Some folk train all their lives for this-" She looks around. No one is in earshot. "Noah. I doubt I'll get very far. And I'm not doing the Melee."

“I do not refer solely to your performance in eventing, but the tournament itself, Jone. Perhaps not to have taken root if not for your want of it.”

And throughout, he will remain here, satisfied with his role in it. Pleased to have a place suited to him in the strange spectacle he could not have strained to picture before now.

That does not he will go easy on anyone that seeks him out; game or not, he is a creature without half-measures.

“There is pride to be wrested from that.”

With her hair tied back like this, she can't hide her smile when she tilts her head forward. She doubts he's right. Still, it rates highly in the list of the kinder things to be said to her.

"Won't tell anyone," she says softly, "what a sweetheart you are. Swear to that, I will."

She will think as she cares to, he will do the same. Somewhere in between might lie something of the truth: that hushed urging in Hightown weeks upon weeks ago, and dragon fire, and a perfect sense of timing has led to this.

Has brought them here.

To the sight of her grin half-covered, and the stiffness of his own posture before her, clutching a trinket to his palm.

If misery knows interludes, then this is one of them, undoubtedly.

“I expect nothing less, elsewise it would be unfair to the girl, Beth, and all her sworn secrecy.”

Jone smiles, grin widening. She reaches out to tap him, and finds her hand once again snaking under his armor, a true touch.

"Must be pleased about this," she says, "telling jokes."

Somewhere beneath the helm lives a scoff for the implication she sends his way, and somewhere beneath the armor lies entirely human warmth, easily detected through the roughened catch of her fingertips.

"You hold no proof that I am."

In other words: yes, he is enjoying exercising his fledgling grasp of rigid humor, and no one will ever believe you if you dare to speak of it.

She laughs again, sure she understands the situation. What an odd, odd man. She adores him.

"Keep a tally of the favors you win." Hooking her fingers around the horns of his helm, she draws him in close enough to hear a whisper. "You earn a kiss with each, wherever you like."

He has grown fond of the sound of her laughter. Sharp and bright and far from pretty.

There is no resistance to her grip on adamantine horns, to the way she uses it to draw him nearer— though the sound he makes is hitching and low, a sure sign he's far from immune to the game she plays. Had his duty already begun, he might be obligated to return the locket she'd bestowed in favor, won already with shameful ease.

"—enough." Noah manages at last, when all other responses fail him, toothless as ever in regards to her teasing. His helm slips free of her grasp only after a moment where it rests pressed against the span of her forehead.

The potential interpretation of this gesture as rejection of her offer unmistakably undone when he adds, stiffly, "Return when your efforts are finished, to measure the sum of my own."

To count the hoard he'll have acquired in her name.

They're close enough, alone enough-- and she's feeling more shameless than she was, bolstered by his encouragement. She kisses his helm, for the first time on the lips, or what passes for them.

"My only regret is that I can't watch you the whole bloody time," she lets his horns go. "Come back as soon as I can."

Another pat to his shoulder, and she turns to leave him.

He catches her. Glancingly, a sharpened grip across the underside of her elbow— a fleeting, missable sign of his own momentary faltering for that contact. It is a brush of a thing, and she slips from his grasp easily. Nothing more.

Though her lips meet metal, she is not kissing an unfeeling statue.

“Show them no mercy, Daughter of Denerim.”

Whether she does or she doesn’t, he cannot tell: his work is filled with empty stretches of waiting in silence— where he can only faintly hear erupting cheers or resentful boos from a desperately excitable crowd.

And by the time the first scattering stars begin to descend, Gabranth’s armored form is quick to buck the final attacks of a young, gilded gentleman— checking the lovesick noble’s advance with a single plated shoulder, knocking the man aside with enough solidity to send him tumbling headlong into the muddy slope lining the bridge’s descent.

“No more.” Gabranth calls, the tip of his sword snapping against stony earth.

The young man, however, indignant as he pulls free of the muck, half-crawls his way back up to try again.

It has been this way for the better part of an hour.

When Jone reappears, it's a bit early. She's clearly failed to win anything-- her arm is held in a sling, and one side of her face is decked in bruises and light cuts. Yet she's bright eyed from the exertion, even cheerful. Under her good arm is a basket of various victuals, and she's no patience for this boy in the mud making a real show of tempting death.

She sets the basket down to throw a rock at the lad. It doesn't land, but it does frighten the lad. "Shove off; you're getting nowhere."

The boy's scampering away evokes a throaty snort from beneath the helm, now the color of nightfall even in its glossy reflection— the color of the sky overhead. About his heels lie strewn a number of favors, trinkets, tokens and treats.

"You interfered." Gabranth puffs roughly, at last moving to sheathe his longsword rather than continue to play graven image in her presence. She looks happy. Flushed with spent energy and spare wounds alike.

"And you are injured."

Not insignificantly, from the look of it.

"Oh, g'wan," Jone says, opening the picnic basket she brought. She pairs some salt pork with bread and beer, setting it out for Noah. "I got off light. One lad, guts everywhere. Healers are working on him."

He moves closer without floundering, helm pulled from his head, easily— relatively easily (his armor, though flexible and comfortable to him now, is a cumbersome thing regardless)— taking up a seat at her side in the first stretching shades of nightfall. Still bright enough to see by.

And she is, beneath the bruising and the swelling, a welcome sight.

“I did not think the events would be so deadly in make. How many did you bring to ground?”

She grins, as softly as she ever gets. "If it weren't dangerous, it'd not be fun. I toppled a few, and did meaner to them than they to me."

She passes him some food, little pies she thinks he can manage even in his undextrous armor. "Did you have a good go of it?"

He eats slowly, despite having gone for hours without relief or relaxation. If one thing can be said of his tendency to abstain from everything save for a singular chosen task, it is that the sight of him so willingly resigned to its antithesis is undoubtedly ever his own choice. He cannot be brought to heel easily. Cannot be forced.

And so.

“See for yourself, the proof I have acquired in your name.”

Noah did, in fact, have a good go of it. A vivid collection of trophies then gestured towards with one sweep of his own broad palm.

“Which would you rather hear of first? The hopeful— or the foolish.”

He knows her, after all. She did not come here simply to see to his needs; her own must be met, in all aspects.

She grins so fond it makes her nervous, but no one's watching. If someone comes up to challenge him before the sun sets, she'll be ready to step off. But for now, he's beautiful in the fading light, and she can't help but be near him.

"Oh, the hopeful," she says, "Love a good tale."

He regales her. By his own standards— by any standards: it is more than he has spoken in an age, it seems, the way he begins by mentioning the young lover that left a perfumed kerchief cloying enough to draw wildlife from a distance. Continuing on to the poet whose carefully bound book still sits exactly where it had been set down— his would-be champion having never come to claim it. The wife who whispered the name of a lover that clearly was not her husband, so that it would not be retrieved from him by anyone else, and one whose chosen was clever enough (one of very, very few) to opt to prove herself through deed rather than violent struggle.

Some did well enough to earn piteous respect. Others found nothing but misery, and howled their woes in retreat.

The man Jone had chased off, however, had been unsuccessfully persistent in bouts throughout the day.

“He would have stayed beyond nightfall, had you not stepped in.” Gabranth, however, does not seem to lament this fact.

She grins, leaning into him a little, careful to avoid jostling the arm. "It's not against the rules to tell a lad he's being foolish."

She gives in, resting her head against the uncomfortable metal of his too-big pauldron. It doesn't matter. It's his, a part of him. "Are you ready to lay down your swords, Ser Knight?"

Gabranth has to dust the crumbs from his gauntlets once he finishes eating, fingers scraping across one another as he acclimates to the heavier feeling of her resting against him. A pleasant pressure, though his expression remains unchanged.

In truth, he has enjoyed himself. More than is perhaps obvious, more than he’s known since the streets of Landis lived fresh in his memory, still bright with cascades of color and light. And yet still he finds himself longing for that tower room that smells faintly of aged stone, stale straw. For the divorce of expectation. The solace of isolation in chosen company.

This will be short-lived, all of it. He works in real time to commit every piece of it to memory, for it is the stretching end to an otherwise endless eternity; the last leg of a journey he’d never asked to make.

And it could be spent in no better company.

“I am.” Noah confesses, head turned towards the cooler breeze cutting across shallow hills. It is a simple thing, to shift the angle and set his profile against the rise of her own temple.

Jone stands, kissing him quickly on the temple as she goes. No one is watching. It's fine. This is mostly ceremonial; everyone knows the games are over. If not for Gabranth, she'd not have bothered.

From her basket, she pulls a wreath of white flowers. "The white," she says, "for peace."

She stands before him, grinning down at him, eyes full of affection. "Could you kneel, luv?"

Ceremony lies at the heart of his own nature. From the smallest of his maintained habits, to moments such as this, there is nothing that is not treated as some threaded piece of a larger tapestry— vital only in its existence, and made valid for it.

He pulls his cloak aside as he rights himself before her, one knee to the earth, head bowed as though she were royalty, and the fictile fields themselves her court.

She assumes his posture and poise is to respect the tourney, and that is well; she'd be too embarrassed to continue, otherwise. She settles the wreath around his neck, bright white flowers contrasting dark steel. She leans in to kiss him, lightly, on the forehead, before stepping back.

"Your duty is over."

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