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[slaveking]

WHO: Marcel Gerard & you!
WHAT: Open and closed log for Marcel kicking around Skyhold. The closed starters will be down in the comments, the open starters in the entry below the cut.
WHEN: February to March 2016!
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Potentially some PG-13-rated violence or language, nothing else.

[open] tavern

By now, Marcel has moved on from lifting heavy boxes. Not that he had any particular objection that work-- he still does sometimes, lending his better-than-human strength to the early morning task of shifting supplies. However, he has also managed to insinuate himself in the more bureaucratic management of the Tavern, making some use out of his education with letters and numbers.

Every few nights and a couple of mornings, too, he is the one in the back office, pouring over ledger. Quill in hand, a piece of scratch paper laddered with numbers. His writing is impeccable, pausing only now and then to correct his hard-won cursive into something a little easier for Thedosians to interpret. His errors are far and few between, marked out with a single line that's as straight as a ruler. Come in then, and you're wont to interrupt a reverie, but a break is welcome.

Other evenings, he's at the bar. He laughs easily, offers to buy you an ale. The bartender jokes with him about where his paycheck goes-- first ham for the Rifter meet, and now free drinks for anybody who happens to wander by? But it's an easy ribbing, and he doesn't mind.

[open] sparring forever

Other times, he has a sword in hand.

There's one Vahshoth that he's been squaring off against consistently, and they've changed it up from wrestling as of late. The two men can be found in the courtyard, sun sinking low over the rooftops. They charge, and metal rings from metal, snaps sparks into the brisk mountain air. Sometimes they laugh. Occasionally, there's a grimace-- the tip of a sword slipping through skin, called break, the healer standing by rolling his eyes. But perhaps more interesting than that, is the banter about the Inquisition.

Marcel has had more questions since the Rifter meeting, but the only one his Vahshoth friend has to ask, between drinks of water and the stretches for cooldown afterward, is always: "When will you join the Inquisition?"

And the vampire's answer, easily overheard: "Like the Good Book says. There's a time for everything." Punctuated with a wag of his eyebrows, playful, but not insincere.

wildcard

choose your own adventure \o/

Comments

[foxsays]

No matter how self-contained a person might strive to be, they will always be taken as part of a larger thing; in this case an order, in Marcel and Araceli’s case, as rifters, despite the impossible number of differences between their own worlds, between the worlds other rifters come from. Small wonder she still tries to find the time to write down whatever might be helpful to the others.

There were new arrivals after all, she doesn’t know if they’ve remained in Emprise du Lion or if they’ve made it to Skyhold but already she’s concerned. Concerned sounds better than worried. Less invested in some way even though that’s far from the truth.

“You were not afraid that it could be taken for inaction?” Her smile softens it; it’s not a challenge, she doesn’t know him well enough and she would prefer an honest answer, if she is to get one, and he says ‘we’ not ‘I’. “I know in some circumstances there are times when silence can be taken as a sign of assent, and I am not entirely sure which of your political systems the Inquisition is most influenced by. Your Grand Cathedral is in Orlais, as was your Divine - my sympathies and condolences of course - but we are between Orlais and Ferelden in these mountains, two countries that could not be more different. I understand though that politics and religion are kept more separate than they would be where I hail from but the Game all sounds so very insidious.”

It all sounds so much like home but less bloody, where they don’t act like children calling it a game and instead treat it as what it is: politics, cutthroat and fast and deadly, where those with the quickest minds in a crisis or with the patience to wait for plans to come together prosper. Where a secret sells for ludicrous sums. She takes a sip of wine to steady herself though because Marcel’s words has her stomach falling. What has he heard this is worse; the job he has here is a good one, a place to hear all, to be the sympathetic ear, to be able to catch a person when the tongue is loosened and the inhibitions left behind.

“I only learned about it after it had happened,” she beings, setting the glass down. “Sina and I are friends, but I was in Emprise du Lion helping to free those taken as slaves for the quarries by the Red Templars. I had heard that she was close to death. I suppose some of us are lucky; we have our shards in safer places than our chests. She is the last one I would ever suspect of wishing to inflict harm, I cannot recall ever meeting a more gentle person in my life.”

That’d be more impressive if she was older than twenty but neither party actually know her age here.