faderift | open | and now that you don't have to be perfect,

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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.

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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Gwenaëlle briefly considers offering him assistance, but he seems to be doing alright and doing it with great determination, too—

“Mind the stairs,” she says, “—there's sort of a lot of them,” more considering, looking back toward her home. The entrance has a short stairway up to its porch and front door, and given the size and shape of her from the outside...well, it can't come as a great surprise that she's mostly twists and turns inside, too.

La Souveraineté is, when he reaches the foyer, far more luxurious inside than she appears from the exterior; polished wood, hanging silks, velvet upholstery and brightly twinkling lamps of various colours, fashioned in metal and glass by local craftsmen. The general effect is a stark difference from the inhospitable appearance from the outside of the Gallows.

"Oh, yes." While he watches his step, his head takes an angle of wry, long-suffering humour—the kind reserved for when something is funny, but also not a joke. "They probably counted them before you were admitted to port. City of Chains is a misnomer."

And it's still early enough in the day that he can manage a few more without immediately having to rest for very long, though it remains to be seen how the vessel's relatively gentle play within its degrees of freedom will factor in. Not a bad thing to try out while his schedule is still light.

When he reaches the foyer,

he stops, with one hand braced lightly on the wall, and surveys the indulgent decor with slow sweeps of his eyes, his head pivoting after them.

"You weren't kidding."

The perks of being both an ill-gotten bastard and the Duke's own favourite grandchild: the benefits of his favour, and almost none of the responsibilities. (And if she feels some sort of way about not having the responsibilities, it isn't because she was good at or liked any of them, so there's that.)

“Why spend my money when I can save it and spend bon-papa's?” is probably rhetorical. She tips a hand to encompass the passageways from the main foyer, where there is space for a portrait to hang but nothing there, yet. “The gallery,” is a room directly off the foyer itself, a narrow loop of hardwood floor, cabinets and selected pieces of art encircling a deep, cushioned depression, “the below-decks,” a closed door, although she briefly opens it so he can see that the immediate view is simply darkened stairs, “through to the rest of this floor,” a hallway, which is a little wider, “and up to the rest.”

...stairs. She wasn't kidding about the stairs, either.

With interest he attends whatever she points out, the gallery, the nothing where something might eventually be (he can see a few of those), leans to see the spooky stairs, gazes up at Even More Stairs. Truly a house of horrors. Looks comfy, though. Definitely looks like someone's bon-papa paid for it, he's seen a few of those, and the resemblance is

—not exact. More undercity than topside. One would be hard pressed to achieve Piltover's unyielding symmetry in a shell of this character—given measuring tools, he reckons he would find a scarcity of perfect right angles—but some might try to force her into shape.

"It... reminds me a little of home. These especially," with light gestures to the nearest table lamp, to the one hanging just there, led by his finger. "The coloured glass. You see it everywhere, lit up like this... usually with," how do you explain neon lights to a person, "rarefied gases," no, "which... are visually similar to, eh. To glowstones."

Nice.

Most of the stairs spiral, for the sake of conserving usable space — and she's certainly made the most of that space, some of the rooms that various doors and stairs lead off to quite generously appointed. She touches the lamp he gestures to with the kind of absent fondness that she has usually applied, previously, to horses and dogs.

“Like veilfire,” she offers, after he's groped around his explanation sufficiently that she's more or less confident of having ascertained the shape of what he's grabbing at. “I've seen mages light veilfire torches, in elvhen ruins usually. And I've a dress that uses enchantments that look like candles— true fire would be a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

It's more of a wearable chandelier, and she's worn it both with and without an appropriate under-dress. Considerate of her to so expertly light the angles of her arse if it's going to be on display of an evening.

“These lamps are throughout, anyway, I rather fancied them.”

It's not like a torch, he wants to say, and almost says, and doesn't, though he wouldn't feel bad about circling back for a correction specifically because of the dress she's just described. That's a growing streak of bitterness, relatively new, and regrettably enhanced by his transplantation to Thedas: even here, worlds away, people are using miracles to make their evening wear a little fancier while the undercity suffers below.

But that's a footnote of its own, just a sour tickle somewhere in the periphery of this otherwise promising visit, so he can bite his tongue about it for a second and lean on this instead:

"You've seen veilfire," and that is interesting as hell. "Torches only? Or... did they discover any runes?"

And did they light it, and did it trigger an ancient spell, and did you feel it, and what was it like—

“Only in torches, although if you could make lamps with something that sounds like veilfire I don't see why it couldn't be done here, with these ones— except you'd really need a mage, more or less all of the time.”

Not a deal-breaker, necessarily, although it's like to put anyone in mind of Tevinter, the wide streets of Minrathous, and the rest of Thedas is still afraid of all the wrong parts of that nation.

In her view, at least.

“I don't recall seeing it other than on a torch, though, but we're constantly falling arse-first into complex ancient magics, so it may be that a veilfire rune just didn't stand out amongst whatever unhinged bullshit was happening around it at the time.”

It's almost too bad this conversation isn't happening after Arlathan—they could share a grim laugh, then. Or at least a laugh-adjacent acknowledgement of the concept of humour. But as all his fondest memories are yet intact, and she doesn't yet have a striking golden eye for him to try not to stare at,

"Whatever it was must have been truly unhinged. I can't think of much that would distract me from unanticipated ancient magics."

He's now clutching his crutch under his arm to hold it, releasing the grip to lift his hand—the left one, with the strange crease in the palm.

"I've been wondering if there isn't some way to store the energy produced by these anchors. It goes without saying a lamp wouldn't be the objective, but... perhaps a convenient side benefit."

“You'd need to find someone prepared to risk accelerating the deterioration around the anchor-shard in order to experiment enough to find it out,” Gwenaëlle notes, which is an incredibly casual way to refer to that, “which is not to say that such a person doesn't exist.”

Brave idiots are not in short supply, generally, and even besides someone who might just be game—

well, any benefit they can turn these things to before they kill them.

Viktor will take incredibly casual over knee-jerk concern any day—but then, he's his own first and only choice for such an experiment. As to an early, agony-laden demise, the anchor will have to compete with the rest of his body for that privilege.

But he's just here to check out her house.

"I suspect most people might consider it extreme to weigh one's own mortality against inventing a new lamp."

Then again, that's pretty much how he and Jayce met—

"Let's put that one on the back burner for now."

New rifters are ideal test subjects, because no one's really had time to get attached to them yet and they still might dissipate back into the Fade before anyone does— it's a practical allocation of resources, if someone were to ask Gwenaëlle, which is almost certainly a large part of why no one does.

“It isn't urgent. And the behaviour of the anchor-shards over time is less predictable than I think we all expected it to be, anyway.”

Unnecessarily messing with that probably needs a more compelling motivation than sick new lamp if it might involve trying to hustle some of Stark's budget.

"So I've heard."

Read. He'd have been forced out of his shell much earlier were there not so many writings in which to conveniently bury himself.

"Actually, I'm... I'm looking forward to tracking its development." He opens his palm, works the big joint of his thumb to watch the meat of it bulge and the skin bunch up around that strange greenish crease. "Should it decide to develop."

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