closed.

[cozen]

WHO: Bastien, Byerly, Darras, Edgard, Ellie, Gwenaëlle, Julius, Loxley, Yseult, & Special NPC Guest Stars
WHAT: THE FATE OF THE FOX
WHEN: Shortly post-mod plot
WHERE: Arlathan Forest
NOTES: OOC post! Use TWs in your subject lines as required.

It's a long shot. Bastien returns to the campsite they've all been sharing with only a silver, black-corroded medallion held carefully in his palm. With the dirt washed off, there's no question that the angular, geometric face stamped onto the front of it is a fox's.

"It's dwarven," he explains, more than once. "It's, look, 8:84, that is Ansgar Aeducan's reign. That is around when the Black Fox met Bolek. He came to the surface with them to help with—well, there four or five different things they are supposed to have been helping with. Most commonly it is bringing back the king's wayward daughter without letting anyone find out she had been exposed to the sky. This was over near one of those tower—cliff—cave-things, that way. There might be more."

Again, it's a long shot. But it's not nothing. Even if the medallion is all there is, it's not nothing.

And—for those who notice and care about the subtle differences between his sometimes-artificial chipperness and his stiller, quieter happiness—this is the best mood Bastien has been in since the sacrifices, the longest he's gone without tapping or tugging at his newly deafened ear. By the end of his brief, earnest-eyed it's not far, we could go look while there's still daylight and be back in plenty of time campaign, with no real protest from anyone, he's practically glowing.

The tower-cliff-cave-thing in question is one of the elven structures half-swallowed by earth, accessible through what was once a balcony door, now framed by vines and tree roots climbing in and out of the opening. They have to climb a root-threaded mound of dirt and rock to reach it, but they're rewarded almost instantly by the remnants of a 50-year-old campsite, a pair of leather boots that have only mostly rotten away to nothing in the humidity, and a change in the air (veil? vibe?) as they descend the uneven stone steps (or drop more impatiently through a nearby hole) to reach the next floor.

It's not good, the air-change. It's also not the energy-sapping miasma of shades or the tension of some nearby malevolence. It's the kind of not-good that makes one want to look. When they do, they see the skeletons first—five of them, half-jumbled, partially dressed in what metal and leather has survived the decades—and only for a second, before the thing waiting behind them in the dark reaches out to make them see something else.

OOC | Reply with your character's heroic dream as a new top-level! We're tagging them all at once. No tag orders. Don't boomerang so quickly that people get left completely behind because they're busy/asleep for a day but also skip people as needed—all nine of us don't need to tag every single round. Aim for brief threads!

NPC CAST: DESIRE: Charlie / REMI: Cass / KAROLIS: Brooklyn / SERVANA: Libby / BOLEK: MJ / CLEMENTIS: Ammmy

Comments

Bastien's!

[cozen]

Here, a candlelit and furnace-warmed room, low-ceilinged and windowless and cool. And crowded. Not meant for nearly twenty people—the dreamers and ghosts now dressed, for the most part, the way Bastien and his ilk frequently dress, in muted colors and working-class simplifications of Orlesian fashions.

"This is it," says Antoinette, in Orlesian. In this dream world, she's an odd-looking woman. She's dressed like the Lady Antoinette Maurel, a woman in her forties who has long since turned her sharp mind away from dreamy politics and toward protecting the comfort and modest fortunes of her two twenty-year-old daughters. At moments, in shadows, her face matches the matronly figure; it's a face Bastien's only seen from a distance. But in the flickers of the candlelight that require it to be clearer, it's instead the face of Toinon—sixteen, sharp and wild-eyed, hair falling out of its elaborate crown of braids, a pen behind her ear despite the ink spots it left on her apple cheek. The sort of girl who'd try to teach a gamin to read using pamphlets about the travesty of his condition.

Bastien had loved her with his entire twelve-year-old heart.

That is not why he's blushing. He's blushing because he knows this cellar, and he knows where this is going, and he knows it's a dream, and it's quite a thing to have one's childish dreams laid out for examination by nine people and five ghosts. Especially the ghosts. He would love very much to impress the ghosts.

Anyway: "This is it," Antoinette is saying, nodding while she reads the document in her hands. "We are on the edge. This will push us over. Things will change. This is very good work—"

Her tongue is curling for the L that begins his given name, maybe beginning to make an identifiable sound out of it, but he's quick. "Thank you," he says in Trade, cutting her off, and takes the paper from her hands. He squints down at it, with the foolish hope there might indeed be something profound written there, but of course there isn't. A swirl of revolutionary-sounding half-thoughts. The kind of thing one might sit bolt upright in the middle of the night to write down, convinced it's world-changing, only to be greeted in the morning by CHEVALIERS = ALLIGATORS with three urgent underlines and no further explanation.

Fortunately, he is spared the humiliation of discuss this any further by a pounding knock on the door, gruff and muffled voices outside it explained promptly by Maximilien—another familiar face, from more recent history, refined beard gone grey—saying, "Shit. That will be the guard. We have to—"

(Sheet. Zat will be ze garrd. We 'ave to—, technically.)

He hands the nearest person an armful of papers and points toward the furnace. Burn the evidence. Antoinette takes the document back from Bastien to fold it, with reverence entirely undeserved, and tuck it into his jerkin.

"This is the part where we have to escape," Bastien explains to everyone else, sounding a bit weary and gesturing toward the steps that lead to the back door out into the alleyway, "and run for our lives to get this masterwork to—"

"To Gauthier," Antoinette fills in. "He's not expecting you yet, but—go. Hurry. Get it to him."

She is ushering them, all fourteen of them, toward the door. It was silent outside before, but now that anyone's attention might be aimed out of the cellar, the sound of shouts and crashes is growing slowly louder. The edge Antoinette was discussing earlier, via this nonsensical dream logic, already tipped over with or without a final push from CHEVALIERS = ALLIGATORS. There's an uprising out there.

"This is very embarrassing," Bastien says. He knows the drill by now—there's a door somewhere out there, the right one—but he's not yet moving.

[muckspout]

Edgard steps in through the furnace somehow, unburnt, and is greeted with a faceful of papers that burn in front of him. He's fine. He coughs stepping out.

He sees Bastien among people, ghosts?, and a woman gesturing them all to the door. Edgard doesn't know where he is, but Bastien seems to know what he's doing most of the time, so following seems like a good idea.

"What's embarrassing?" He asks. "Our lives? The masterwork?" He says repeating what Bastien said. "Or--it's me isn't it?" He grins. Maybe not the time for a joke, but Edgard's never been one for timing.

[charmoffensive]

Is this a fighting dream or a running dream or a talking dream?

It seems, almost, to be all three at once. Loxley makes for a lanky and somewhat out of place figure in this crush of humans, once again lacking his sword in favour of a hidden dagger he can feel under his jacket. He tugs it free of its sheath, clear tension in his posture and expression at each intensifying crash and shout.

Karolis, likewise, watches the door, a weapon in hand with a loaded crossbow carefully pointed for the floor in front of his feet, but the noises of an uprising, of shouting guards and the working class clashing together, doesn't absorb his focus completely. Bastien speaks again—and there is a glance from Karolis to Edgard for his own last statement that says maybe.

"That's for later," he says, with a kind of long-resigned sense of humour that must have, at some point, been cultivated before he died, or else he would not carry it with him now. You'd think, anyway. "But there was a moment when it wasn't."

Maybe it still isn't. Karolis doesn't know.

"Focus. Remember. They'll turn on us if you don't."

[hassaran]

"Perhaps not how I would might have put it, but the sentiment is admirable," says a compact man of middle height at Bastien's shoulder. His mustache is too well-oiled to match the simple tradesman's clothes and cloth cap this dream has chosen for him, and thought he is moving briskly to the door with the others his eyes are on the page he has somehow plucked back out from his countryman's jerkin with impossibly light fingers.

"And the metaphor, so colorful!" The ends of Remi Vascal's mustache bob as he grins. "Perhaps the author's point would be better delivered through allegory? Say, the invigorating and inspiring tales of a band of dashing rogues?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvEn1u_s5HA

[cozen]

Edgard's entrance and quips earn from Bastien a sardonic eyebrow raise that does well enough to cover for the fact that he's overwhelmed, more than overwhelmed, without the added complication of friends crawling out of cellar furnaces in front of Remi Vascal—

Who is speaking to him. Who has his dream-writing.

"That is," he says, and swerves away from the most brilliant thing I have ever heard, I will do it and anything else you recommend immediately, into a halting, "not a, not a bad idea. Actually. Merci."

But Karolis (Karolis!) is right. Focusing.

"For the next one," with a mindful look at Antoinette, before she can urge them to hurry again, "after we get this one to Gauthier."