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open | and now that you don't have to be perfect,
WHO: Gwenaëlle Baudin, et menagerie, and you?
WHAT: Baby got a houseboat, and it's move-in day. Find her at the Kirkwall docks as things are unpacked into it, or after that across the harbor at the Gallows slip where it'll be secured for the foreseeable future.
WHEN: Shortly after the return from Cumberland.
WHERE: Kirkwall harbour.
NOTES: Y'all I have coveted that houseboat since it went up on the rewards page.
WHAT: Baby got a houseboat, and it's move-in day. Find her at the Kirkwall docks as things are unpacked into it, or after that across the harbor at the Gallows slip where it'll be secured for the foreseeable future.
WHEN: Shortly after the return from Cumberland.
WHERE: Kirkwall harbour.
NOTES: Y'all I have coveted that houseboat since it went up on the rewards page.
Originally some manner of riverboat not intended for the purpose it presently serves, the houseboat that is for now moored perfectly in line with the anchored Walrus in the harbor is— something of a monstrosity, an eccentricity built up over time, not impossible to move under its own power but more commonly affixed to a more purposeful vessel and tugged along behind it. Having won it in a game of cards from a local who'd been tired of the lifestyle and tired of Kirkwall besides, it's taken some time for the Duke de Coucy to consider it sufficiently worthy to relinquish his granddaughter into—
which is to say, the interiors are now substantially finer, even if she'd put her foot down and insisted she didn't want anything done to the exterior that wasn't absolutely necessary. No need to turn it into obvious thief-bait, for a start, and besides: she rather likes the aesthetic. It's shabby and shambling but it was in otherwise good repair when it came into her hands, surprisingly sturdy and featuring beneath the water a wine-cellar kept cool by the ambient temperature around it where she's spent much of the morning while the rest of her belongings are brought in by de Coucy footmen and servants packing her stockpile of only slightly stolen Vauquelin wealth in the locked store-room behind the wineracks.
With only slightly stolen de Coucy wine, naturally.
Gwenaëlle emerges from below as trunks and furnishings are still being unloaded from carriages come down from Hightown, Small Yngvi the cat sleeping in a pinned up portion of the front of her skirts and Leviathan, the nug, doing laps of the exterior in an effort to understand his new environs. Hardie sits sentinel on the deck in front of the door, supervising the efforts of the de Coucy men (who are, in fact, being supervised by Guilfoyle—) and upon consideration Gwenaëlle sits down beside him, fingers in his fur, occasionally answering questions about where something needs to be put and if she would like it unpacked, also, or left to her (or Guilfoyle) to manage later.
Once everything's been securely stowed, a boat waits to haul it over to one of the empty slips surrounding the Gallows, where Gwenaëlle will finally have significantly less of a commute. The last thing to be done before that, of course—
“I have always wanted to do this,” Gwenaëlle says, and smashes a champagne bottle against the balustrade, just above the brand-new sign identifying the vessel as La Souveraineté.
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Now the weirdest boat she's ever seen is being towed right to the dock, where she's been sitting and staring out at the water. Can she even call it a boat, since it mostly just looks like a fucked up house and doesn't seem to be able to sail on its own? Something to consider.
It's such a strange sight that Clarisse doesn't even notice Gwenaëlle until they're close enough to either have to acknowledge each other or very obviously pretend not to see each other. She considers doing the latter, for a second, but it's not really her style. Instead she makes eye contact with the woman, raises her eyebrows, and says "You have a... boat."
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The last time they saw each other, Gwenaëlle had been dressed to work — all slim-fitting leather and openly carried weapons, her bladed coat and tightly braided hair. Now, standing on the deck (porch?) of La Souveraineté, her curls besides those pulled back from her face occupy nearly as much space as the rest of her and she looks nearly harmless in a light-weight, tightly-laced summer dress of green and grey, the skirts pinned up around her knees for ease of motion and the bishop sleeves pushed up to her elbows and tied in place with black velvet ribbons. No obvious weapons in evidence, deceptively petite.
A sleepy cat rolls over in the apron pocket created by her pinned skirts, casts one yellow eye over Clarisse, and goes back to sleep. It is, in its mostly-hairless state, almost more alarming than the nug.
“A houseboat,” after a moment, mild enough, “she's a new acquisition. Some work still needs doing.”
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"You going to live in there?" She sounds skeptical. The thing doesn't look exactly steady, from the outside.
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Stark had been stubborn for long enough to start looking feral, but that man likes to be an outlier. And then there are those that dissipate back into whatever Fade stuff they were made from before it matters,
so it goes.
“That's right,” she says, rolling her shoulders in a shrug. “She needs a little work still doing, on the outside, but the previous owner was living in her before any of the refurbishment work done on the inside.”
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"One time," Clarisse says, "my father gave me this old Ironclad. It was almost a hundred and fifty years old. Barely sat in the water, and it blew up before I even got halfway to where I was heading.
That thing looked like a luxury cruise ship compared to this."
It's said conversationally, though. There's no real malice in it. Instead, Clarisse looks more like a kid poking at a wasp nest, or throwing rocks in the direction of a bear. Just... dumb and curious, seeing what happens.
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“She'll be sleeker when the exterior's been refinished, but I think she's beautiful.”
She's got eyes; she's not surprised no one agrees with her. They're all free to hold their incorrect opinions, though; they don't have to live on board.
“The interior is a luxury cruise boat, besides. L'Duc wasn't going to let me move into it without a refit. Was he, Small Yngvi? No, he most certainly was not.”
The cat, who has gone along with an assortment of relocations in the past couple of years, is unmoved in the manner of cats.
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Because it seems like it would be a pressing concern to her, if she had pets. Which she doesn't, for that exact reason. Horses and pegasi don't count, since you can just stable them when you're not around (not that she's ever owned one of those, either), but dogs and cats and that... other thing? Nah.
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which he might be, a shadow passing briefly over her expression. The Carta keep Yngvi on a short leash these days, and she sees him much more rarely than she'd like.
(Small Yngvi doesn't give a shit.)
“But I don't live alone, so they're well looked after when I'm out of Kirkwall. My lord's man is temperamentally incapable of grasping what 'retirement' means, so I inherited him after Ghislain.”
Guilfoyle, the towering statue of stoicism who'd lent his general air of having done enough murders not to rule out doing more to tilting the odds of her first encounter with Clarisse in Lowtown. He's north of too old for that shit, and Gwenaëlle has sufficient concerns about the state of his joints to have pressed upon him a wide variety of salves and remedies, and he's not— precisely a servant. He is no longer in anyone's employ; he had a small fortune settled upon him, out of Emeric Vauquelin's personal coin, more than enough to live comfortably for the rest of his days,
it's just he lives most comfortably here, where he can still be of use. Stewardship is a difficult burden to set down, and Gwenaëlle is his sole surviving charge.
“I left the falcon in Hightown,” she adds, ruminative, “I'm going to regift it to one of my cousins, I expect. And Leviathan is my ex-husband's, only he didn't want to separate them so it's my problem now.”
The nug, apparently, since it looks up at its name.
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It's great. The thought of this weird thing going through the world with a name like that makes her happy, actually. The rest of it, well. It's a lot of names and places that don't mean much to her, but she did ask.
"How many cousins do you have?" she asks after a moment. Just curious, as someone who has a lot of them herself (technically).
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It isn't as if she can't think of reasons.
“Raoul and Thomas,” Orlesian as she is, she pronounces that To-mah, and presumably so does he, “are in Kirkwall now, for safekeeping. Doesn't do to leave all of your heirs lying about an active warzone,” a little dryly.
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"So I guess your family is a big deal or something, huh." It's just the Vibe she's getting. She sounds neither impressed nor unimpressed, just sort of neutral on the question. She's not immune to celebrity, but mortals and their riches and power don't mean as much to her as they might to someone else.
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“I was the sole heiress of the Comte Vauquelin de Vauquelin,” she says, “until the Empress found out I emerged from the wrong cunt and my inheritance was stripped from me some years ago. Vauquelin assets all reverted to the crown, after Ghislain.” The battle of. Not every girl gets to rob her father's corpse. “L'Duc de Coucy is a stubborn old goat; the fact I'm not his granddaughter in truth doesn't mean I'm not still his favourite. But most of them are dead,”
matter of fact,
“my mothers and my lord and the Baudin sisters. I won't return to Orlais, when Raoul and Thomas do. That's their future.”
Not hers, any longer. She tilts her head, shrugs at the boat— “If I live, this is mine.”
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"My grandfather also plays favorites." More often he plays un-favorites. Clarisse is mostly just happy that he's never paid her any attention, good or bad. She has zero desire to ever interact with Lord Zeus.
She sighs, climbing to her feet and stretching her arms over her head. "Well, there's worse things than having your own boat. You don't have to answer to anybody."
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“Close enough, at any rate,” she agrees, still looking up at the towering monstrosity that is her new home with open fondness. “An ex of mine and I, we said once if her himself doesn't make it through the war, we'll get back together and run away and be pirates at the end of it. Absolutely we won't,”
it would be a terrible idea for any number of reasons, not least of which being Gwenaëlle is dear friends with Alistair and would prefer he live, all things being equal,
“but this is good, too.”
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"Besides." This is said with a knowing glance, though to be honest she knows very little about this woman and every story she's hearing has only added to the feeling of being in over her head. "If you're exes it's gotta be for a good reason."