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[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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[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.”