open | now give me something to believe in.

[interroga]

WHO: Cassian Andor & you
WHAT: A liaison from the Shadow Dragons arrives
WHEN: Bloomingtide
WHERE: Minrathous + Kirkwall
NOTES: Some injury description

arrival.

It’s a late spring night when a stranger arrives at the Widow Tavisa’s Boarding House.

Most regular guests would take the front entrance and speak to the innkeeper in the main room; but this one slips through the back entrance and takes an out-of-the-way servant’s staircase, into a shuttered wing of the building which isn’t supposed to be open to the public. But those rare people in the know might be aware that this leads to Riftwatch’s secret outpost in Minrathous —

The darkhaired man slumps against the locked door leading into their safehouse. He knocks on the door in a fixed, staccato rhythm identifying him as an ally. He has a hand pressed to his side with worrisome urgency, jaw tight and teeth gritted against the pain; he knocks again a little louder, in case whoever’s on watch is dozing.

No one’s expecting a new arrival right at this hour. It’s not ideal.

settling in.

After finally getting vetted and officially joining, Cassian tucks the Riftwatch pin into his pocket and starts to get the lay of the land, gathering information, pressing a finger to the pulse of this new city he’s going to be calling home.

There’s a kind of amiable affability to this new arrival, his smile calculated to be inoffensive and mild, even as the gears are very busily ticking away behind his dark-brown eyes.

You might find him at the Gallows bar, pouring himself a drink and smoothly sliding into the chair at your table to pry: “So, what’s your favourite place in the Gallows or Kirkwall?”

Or wandering the battlements of the towers and looking out across the city. Rebuilding is expensive, and so some parts of Kirkwall still bear the marks of the Venatori attack a little over a year ago: collapsed buildings that never got raised again, battle-scars and scorch marks from dracolisks. “What was it like?” he asks. “The Venatori attack.”

He also goes for long walks through the city, right past the alienage (although his gaze lingers), and venturing into the deeper recesses of the city slums. One particular afternoon, he emerges from Darktown blinking half-blinded into the dim light of Lowtown, which is right about when a few thieves assemble around him for an attempted mugging, knives brandished. “I really don’t have time for this,” he says to the ringleader, looking more annoyed than frightened; which is right about when a Riftwatch colleague might turn the corner and encounter the scene.


( Also happy to receive wildcards, or to write up a bespoke starter for you; just hmu @ quadrille if you’d like to discuss! )

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[ipseite]

The woman at her desk when Cassian arrives — the other side of the office is not occupied, presently, but plainly in use — seems absorbed in her own thoughts, enough that the initial knock had not quite stirred her from them. She looks at him with no small surprise, an openness about it that he will certainly come to recognise as unusual; arranges her features into a more measured pleasantness with the ease of great practise as she says,

“I am. And you are, Monsieur…?”

She sounds Orlesian, so long as one is not greatly familiar with the usual cadence of native speakers; slightly too clipped, if one is, something a little more Tevene about the way she shapes her vowels and patterns her speech.

(And yet, to hear her actual accent in spoken Tevene—)

[interroga]

There’s a slight twitch to his expression at the Orlesian title; not enough to quibble about the use of it, however. It’s polite, and he’s answered to worse.

“Andor,” he says, his voice noticeably Tevene-accented. “Cassian Andor. Newly arrived.”

The way he approaches the desk is as if she’s called him in to attention. A straight bearing, professional and obedient, a hound called to heel. He reaches into his pocket, retrieves the piece of folded paper, and sets it on the nearest clear spot at the edge of the woman’s desk.

“Leadership will need to see my credentials, but they’re in the form of an encrypted letter from the Lucerni. I hear you might be able to help me.”

[ipseite]

Her expression warms at his accent and this news — and, perhaps, some small amount at this demeanour, familiar as it is — and she says,

“Indeed I may,” in fluent Tevene, the way she speaks it strikingly underlining the similarities to her natural accent (the wrong notes to an Orlesian ear) as well as indicating, as she continues, that the drawing rooms and parlours where she has honed her Orlesian are not where she most usually converses in this language: “I have some familiarity with your ciphers already.”

The way that Tevene had always seemed to rumble out of James Flint’s diaphragm and curl, smokelike into conversation; her prim speech is not that. Still, there is a brisk affect, a particular patter — a specificity to her cadence and even the words she chooses when translating her thoughts — that signposts other habits. She lifts the paper he places down, not immediately unfolding it but instead laying her hand upon the lowest drawer of her desk and opening it with the flare of a cold blue light momentarily aglow in her eyes,

rifling through it a moment, and then resealing it the same way when she finds what she is searching for.

“I expect that you will be obligated to cool your heels whilst I translate your letter,” she says, “so if you would sit, I would be most interested in your introduction. I am Madame de Cedoux.”

[interroga]

Cassian starts to go for the chair to cool said heels, but then he blinks, thrown.

It’s the first stutter in that otherwise smooth demeanour, tripping right over— well, not the fluency in the language, that’s easy and common enough, but the particular lilt to it. A certain hyper-specific regionality to her speech and idiolect which catches him entirely off-guard for how it doesn’t match the package at all. She looks like a perfectly-coiffed blonde Orlesian duchess and sounds like a fucking pirate.

“Where,” he says, his voice faster and more fluid in his native tongue, a little less stilted around the edges as he’s briefly derailed from the original topic, “did Madame de Cedoux learn to talk like a grizzled old sea dog?”

[ipseite]

It’s funny: if she’s speaking trade, it isn’t a very difficult thing to crisp up her vowels, shift the way she holds her mouth, lean into the aspects of her accent that make less sense in Val Royeaux and she can sound as Minrathousian as she likes, months ago stepping easily into the role of a prissy bureaucratic go-between. In her conversational Tevene, though, it is inescapably shaped by the men she most frequently conversed with,

and it is difficult for those sanded down edges to remain that way, when one is likewise inescapably shaped by one’s pursuits.

“Perhaps you’ve heard of the Walrus,” she suggests, “and her captain.”

If her feelings on both ship and man remain complicated — scraps of stolen correspondence are little to the investment lost, even if they are not nothing and even if the frog might as well rail against the scorpion — there is none of that in her voice or demeanour. It is not unknown that James Flint, captain of the Walrus, had loitered in Kirkwall attached to this same company; that he had commanded, for a time, their Forces division. It is probably harder to imagine Madame de Cedoux in his company, although certain corners of Hightown have colourfully elaborated on the possibilities.

“I think he did not intend to be held to the offer made, when he made it. Nevertheless.”