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closed: onboarding with hr
WHO: Talin Shira'nehn, Bene, Stephen, Gwenaëlle, Clarisse
WHAT: Talin (finally) completes his onboarding
WHEN: Hella backdated to his arrival at the end of September
WHERE: Various area of the Gallows
NOTES: Individual starters in comments!
WHAT: Talin (finally) completes his onboarding
WHEN: Hella backdated to his arrival at the end of September
WHERE: Various area of the Gallows
NOTES: Individual starters in comments!
After helping get the fennec family relocated, Talin is finally free to actually go about signing up for Riftwatch. It's mostly a boring affair, giving his name for records, making his mark on this paper and that. Who would have known saving the world involved this much paper?
It takes a long while, but the end result is this: he's an official member of the Riftwatch now, with all the protections and responsibilities that provides. His first mission: meet with the various leaders and answer any questions they have for him.
It takes a long while, but the end result is this: he's an official member of the Riftwatch now, with all the protections and responsibilities that provides. His first mission: meet with the various leaders and answer any questions they have for him.
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New Forces recruit?
( she does keep track; it'd be annoying to have missed one. )
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[ surely that is someone's business here, right, not just the little blonde? she was very clear that she supplies the weapons, she doesn't tell anyone how to use them. ]
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It's useful in general, and I like to know who I don't have to prioritise in an evacuation. But I don't handle new recruits for other divisions and you are not mandatorily obligated to inform me. If you specifically want to have a particular discussion, voluntarily, I'm on the houseboat near the ferry landing and knock first.
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I don't mind signing up for guard duty. I'll be at your door shortly.
[ which he is, with a brisk knock, mostly because she told him to. ]
action.
“If that's not the confused scout tell them to fuck off, we're busy,”
—is also from over his shoulder, further into the interior, and immediately recognisable, so probably this guy isn't Captain Baudin.
Definitely not Captain Baudin says, unfazed, “Are you expected?”
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(assumptions are foolish but wouldn't it be nice if that was the Captain and not her lover, or her servant, or her mistress, or)
and he gives the man a sort of self-depricating smile.
"Confused scout, reporting for volunteer watch assignment."
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It strikes Guilfoyle, a step ahead of him ushering him through, a blow that he has become accustomed to.
(There are worse things she might have grown into than her mother's daughter.)
But the face is wrong and the ears are round where a kerchief is holding her hair up and out of her way, and she's missing an eye (covered by a patch, today, plain black), and scars that that woman did not have scrape down her chest where her bodice is cut habitually low. She doesn't look like much of a captain of the guard; she presently looks like a better class of washer-woman, gesturing Talin out onto the balcony,
“This is a fucking nightmare to set up,” she informs him, “so we'll talk while I work. You come out here and you,” pointing at Guilfoyle, “go and eat something, for pity's sake. He'll spot me, it'd be a bad look if I fell into the harbour and died his first day.”
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His pause in the doorway lasts only a moment before he steps the rest of the way past the servant, dropping his pack and rolling up his sleeves.
"I can see why you wouldn't be able to come to the office," observed in the lilting accent characteristic of the Dalish. To her man, he promises "She won't fall," and though Talin's tone is perfectly serious there is a glint in his eye that suggests he's as like to ensure that by clambering out the window with her as anything else.
"Talin," less talon than tah-lean, "here to sign up for watch duty, Captain."
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“Gwenaëlle,” she says, in turn, because if he's only ever seen it written down with the rest of her name he is unlikely to guess guh-nayl, the w in her name entirely absent in pronunciation. “I can make a note of your volunteering when I'm in my office and running the roster, and you can inform your division, but obviously if the Scoutmaster needs you elsewhere, your actual work will take precedence. Just try and make sure I don't hear about it thirty minutes before I need someone on your shift.”
She works as she talks; she has the particular painstaking scrutiny of someone who has not grown up performing menial, physical labour, feels the need to check her work slightly too much, only to be right to have done it because she has to go back over something. This does not discernibly slow down her approach to the conversation.
“Generally, I like to know what weapons you already have and what you would benefit from in the armoury, as well as anything else I need to take account of in where to assign you.”
clearing my inbox, feel free to drop!
"I'm best with daggers," he says, "brought my own. Not a spectacular shot, but I'm familiar with bows, don't have one. I have some leather for armor, could do with a full set. Do you have room out there for a helping hand?"
He smiles at her, a little mischievous, but mostly in an adrenaline-junkie way.
"Looks fun."
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“I’d let you,” she admits, “but the purpose of the exercise is that there’s not always going to be anyone else to help.”
This, Gwenaëlle states casually as fact, not an excess of caution for a possible ill-outcome but something impending, inevitable, as one prepares for anticipated changes in weather. There’s plenty that Stephen, too, can help to manage about their home; some things his hands are not up to, and the finicky nature of getting up and down the exterior is almost certainly one of them.
A tilt of her head in the direction Guilfoyle had left, “He’s very bossy about it,” with real affection.
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"Your man seems spry enough," he says, though it's at least half platitude—he came here to sign up for the watch, this has nothing to do with that, how do you be polite about some aristocrat's beloved but decrepit help? This was not in the Dread Wolf's handbook.
"Has he been with you long?"
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“He joined me here when he retired. I find it’s useful to find him things to do, or else he starts finding them for himself and he also thinks he’s a good deal spryer than he is.” ‘Sitting down tasks’, she calls them. “He’d not think much of me calling it pride, probably.”
He also doesn’t think much of it when she refers to the bequest that funds his lifestyle now his jointure, but where she’ll bluntly share her life story with a stranger, sharing that particular jest would feel like an invasion of his privacy and the peculiar relationship he has shared with her family for so long now.
“I don’t know precisely how long he worked for l’Comte de Vauquelin,” she adds, considering, “but I’ve always believed he and my mother came to his employ around the same time. I don’t know that that’s actually true, come to it.”
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At that point even Talin, disposed as he is to see pride as a virtue, would have to concede its detriments.
But alright, hey, new topic—and a chance to genuinely learn something, this shemlen business of titles has always confused him.
"I'm not the best judge," he says, slowly, "your customs can be difficult to understand for someone born outside of them. But it strikes me as odd that the daughter of a comte's servant has her own boat, and inherited the serving man."
He is not, cross his heart, seeking to offend—though he wouldn't be surprised if he has even so, people get so prickly about status, and doubly so when their parents are involved.
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“He serves at his own pleasure these days,” she says, dry; their dynamic is familiar and comfortable, and the moreso now for the discomfiting instances of his deciding not to do as she wishes.
What once was instruction is now conversation— the distinction messy but necessary. Not better or worse, just different. Sadder if she thinks about it too hard.
“Anyway. My lord father’s father fucked his way into a title; married up, got hers. My lord father, l’Comte, fucked his way out of it. The bastard child of his chatelaine cannot be his heir, so it was really quite profoundly awkward for him to have passed me off as such for as long as he got away with doing— when he died at Ghislain, his titles, estate and assets passed back into the bloodstained hands of that bitch on the throne.”
She says it very casually. Fuck Celene forever!!
“Before that disgrace, I was the favourite grandchild of my lady mother’s father, l’Duc de Coucy, who didn’t see any reason why that should change only because we share no blood. He paid for the boat. He’s also old enough to have personally put the boot in Ferelden, and Guilfoyle not much younger, so—”
An illustrative tilt of her hand. She landed soft, after her fall from grace; she’s not stupid enough to only wring her hands in and over temporary luxury. The ability to send her grandfather her bills won’t last forever. She needs to know what happens after; it needs to be her decision.
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So. A bastard Orlesian highblood who hates Celene with an impressive vehemence—coupled with the portrait downstairs, elf-blood seems a likely enough explanation. Not yet likely enough that he's willing to comment on it (the humans fought a whole war about the Orlesian throne, didn't they, perhaps the Captain's resentment is to do with that) but it is, at least, something they have in common. That's not something he can say often about Orlesians.
"Not that I have much experience with Orlesians to judge by," drily, but with genuine esteem for her implied too, "but I can't imagine many of your peers would have taken this opportunity to do much more than whine about what they're owed."
If the stories he's heard from their servants among Fen'Harel's agents are anything to go by, anyway, and he's inclined to believe they are.
After a moment, he looks to her, assessing, considering what to ask next. He was rewarded for his boldness once already, does he dare to try again?
Stupid question, of course he does.
"I know why my People tend to spit on the Empress's name. Haven't seen a human do it before, though."
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It seems so pointless to be cagey or circumspect about any of it, now. He could hear it from any number of sources if he wished; why pretend otherwise, when she can say in her own words when asked?
(Stephen had found it a little confronting, too, when they first met.)
“You walked past my mother on the way in.” A statement that doesn’t sound like she assumes he realised that, rather establishing a premise she assumes he hasn’t taken for granted, “My sisters were in Halamshiral when Celene butchered it. Baudin is a city elf’s name.”
And fallen out of use among humans generations earlier as a result; her complicated feelings on having claimed it to share with her mother and sisters when it had been given to them by a man she’d never known nor had any claim on are— another story. Another time.
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( screams all around him, or else drunken laughter, smell of woodsmoke and cooked meat. flash of red in the corner of his eyes as bela runs next to him, sulana strapped to her back, slow for his sake. halla scream. his lungs ache, legs burn, can't think about how many bodies he's run past )
because it's not an unfamiliar story. Sometimes it feels as though half of Fen'Harel's agents come from Halamshiral, and the other half have their own stories, their own horrors. If Talin fell to pieces about his losses every time some elf talked about theirs, he'd do nothing else for the rest of his life, even if he were immortal. He has too much to do.
She's not an elf.
His eyes flicker on Gwenaëlle's, looking at her without seeing for a long moment before he blinks. Inhales. Crosses his arms and looks at the wall instead.
"Ir abelas," he says, low and serious. "I'm sorry, lethallan."
He's called elf-bloods lethallin before, but never quite so sincerely.
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Despite her active disinterest — to Thranduil’s ongoing despair, once — she hasn’t avoided understanding enough of the elvhen she’s encountered to not recognise both what he’s saying to her and in its context, its significance. That is is significant. That the average Dalish elf has a far greater reason to distrust her than the reverse, she knows that; knows how much power was in her hands to harm, when she was angriest and bleeding her grief, how little could be turned against her.
And here, a thing that she’s not offered to any Dalish elves, nor been offered in return: kindness.
She fixes her gaze back on her work,
“My ex-husband is a rifted elf,” she says, “and he could go places and ask things I couldn’t. He was able to learn what had happened to them for my mother, before her death. Not everyone even gets to know. I know that. Couldn’t give me any chevalier names, of course, but what’re you going to do.”
Her hand flexes, like the answer to that question might have been terrorism in another life.
“Thank you,” is tacked on with an awkwardness that makes its sincerity obvious, in turn; an unexpected thing.
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He meets her eyes and nods, just once. Thanks accepted. He understands what his words mean, what they signify. It's not about what he said.
His throat burns with an answering grief. I'll never know the names of the men who killed my bondmate. The charred-flesh smell of my people will never leave me. The ones who fell to their swords were the lucky ones, and I the unluckiest of them all, standing here. Your sisters would not have been better off alive, just dead in a different way.
A board creaks outside the room, and Talin looks to the door.
"Is there a roster I need to make my mark on? I think I hear your man coming back."