A Little Gossip
Location: Oshisyth's Ledge and Weyr
Time: Afternoon on Day 12, Month 13, Turn 1
Players: Roa and Issa
Scene: Roa arrives to give Issa a gift and stays for some chit chat.
The slightly swirling and somewhat melancholy thoughts of golden Tialith touch upon the green dragon's mind, ** Is now a good time for Roa to meet with yours? ** An image of a dragon silohuette landing on Oshisyth's ledge.
Welcoming warmth breaks through a mild warning about chilly, whipping winds as Oshisyth answers the queen with a deferential **She is not busy right now. I'll tell her you and yours are coming.**
Oshisyth is arranged in waiting on the ledge, preening a talon as Tialith wings in. The customary greeting bugle seems overzealous, and the small green seeks to scoot closer to the wall to make room for the gold on the ledge.
The sound of wingbeats heralds the Telgar gold's arrival, her rider perched on the dragon's neckridges. Tialith swings down to land on the jutting side of the large ledge as frigid drizzles splatter against her hide. The landing, of course, causes whatever rain that falls on Tialith's wings to spray outwards, but once she is as settled as can be managed, the gold swivels her head to offer a low warble of greeting to her green hostess while Roa begins to dismount.
Mental sprinkles are sent back for the real raindrops that are flung her way, a trickle of amused forgiveness already present. **She waits inside.** Oshisyth informs the queen. **I would offer you cover, but it might be small.** A cramped sense of squeezing accompanies this, along with a definite note of how uncomfortable it would be.
There is, alas, no sense of apology to match the generous forgiveness Oshisyth projects. Instead there is a sort of mopey, long suffering tendril of thought that shares many instances of Tialith patiently enduring rain and then, at the end, adding the picture of her sitting on this ledge as the final one in the chain.
Roa slides down from the gold's neck, her boots sloshing in a small puddle as she lands. A glance over at Tialith and a light touch to the gold's elbow. Then she hurried into the weyr and out of the rain, shaking herself as free of water as she can in the entryway before stepping inside. "Issa? Ma'am?" the girl calls.
From somewhere in the green-sized weyr, Issa's voice emanates with a fast, "Come in, Roa, come in! Have a seat." One assumes she means on the couch with it's back to the entrance, or one of the chairs that is crowded around it. Then, Issa's head suddenly pops to peer over the back of the couch. Apparently she's on the floor, piling in some tiny wooden gadgets into a trunk set in front of the couch. She throws the final one in, closes it, and stands fully. "Sorry about that," she continues with a sheepish grin. "What can I do for you?"
Roa heads towards the voice and the evident seats but, once arriving, her attention moves first to the vanishing wooden gadgets before gliding more politely over to Issa herself. "Oh, it's nothing really ma'am. It's just, well, I was sent to Boll. For Caucus. And so, well, I brought things back. For people." As she talks, she fishes into her riding jacket to pull out a small hide-bound package that is held out towards the other rider.
Issa sinks to sit on top of the now-closed trunk, crossing her legs at the knee and leaning forward to accept the package from the goldrider, head atilt and mouth smiling softly. "Sit, sit, sit," Issa chatters, waving her free hand at the couch she faces. Her other hand is busy turning over the package over in her lap, the firelight from the hearth playing over the brown packaging. "Well," she starts, a curious squint to her eyes, "That was much too nice of you. I haven't gotten you anything at all." The joke earns a widened smile from Issa herself as she then asks, "What is it?" beginning to peel back the string tied around it.
Roa smiles a little as she does, indeed, sit, sit, sit, sinking into the couch rather than the chairs. "Well," she says with a bit of reason and a bit of humor, "You haven't gone to Boll." Within the package is a long gauzy scarf that's used by Bollian women as a head-wrap. The colors are a rich verdant green and pale, sky blue, dyed in such a way that the two colors resemble one liquid just dripped into another, amorphous curls and swirls sometimes melding and sometimes separating the two hues. "It's a headwrap," she explains. "I can should you how to do it up, if you like."
Issa catches sight of the color before she hears Roa's explanation and lets out a low, "Mmm." The fabric drapes and dances as she lifts it up from the hide, making it fall first across one hand, then across the other, like a sinuous snake's coiling. "It's gorgeous," Issa murmurs, rolling the edge between her fingers, then accepting Roa's offer with a, "Yes, please." Handing the headscarf over to her, she continues. "It's absolutely perfect, Roa. My wardrobe has suffered ever since Thread started falling. So kind of you to think of all of us Reachians while vacationing in Boll, really." The words, though a mite formal, are delivered with immense sincerity.
Roa carefully takes the scarf and settles it around her own neck so that Issa might see the motions needed to secure it. It's wrapped once around the back of the head, tucked, wrapped again, until the final result is a fully covered head and enough of a tail trailing off the back to be drawn across the face in particularly scorching sun. "I suppose I felt a little guilty when all the rest of the people I knew were caught in a Reaches winter and I wasn't." The scarf is undone and handed to Issa. "Give it a try. What have I missed since I left? Besides the murder of poor Sully, I mean. How have falls been? How has, well, how has everything been?"
Issa watches with a careful eye the motions of Roa's hands, then reaches to take it back and repeat them with her own. As the green and blue gets wound around Issa's dark curls, she looks up at Roa's face. "Everything has been... well, dreadfully redundant, I guess you could call it. Flying 'fall, executing some... rather narrow misses, keeping up the leather, drills, diatribes of the impending disaster if we don't shape up. The usual and far too much of it." She sighs and the corners of her mouth tense a bit as she tucks a bit here and there, then lifts her hands away from it with a sense of 'ta da' about it, though the final product is lopsided. Her hands drop to her lap casually, and she picks up on something said earlier with an intrigued lift of an eyebrow. "Sully? Have they found out who it was down there?"
Roa leans forward and lifts her hands to correct the lopsidedness, thogh she pauses to look at Issa with brows lifting in a questioning expression, not actually touching anything until she gets an all clear. "Oh. Erm, yes." There's a moment of hesitation, but it's too late now. Hopefully she's not revealing anything that was supposed to stay in confidence. "He worked in the kitchens," is all she adds. "Things feel, I don't know, almost desperate around here. Maybe the Turn's End celebration will break the tension." Hopeful? Sure. Likely? Not so much.
Issa nods ever so slightly and leans her head just so to allow for the necessary corrections from Roa. "Mmhmm. Unfortunately for us, I suppose tension has become ingrained in the usual routine these days." Leaning her head over, Issa picks at the roughened edge of one of her fingernails, the end of the scarf falling down over her shoulder. "But I'm also not sure if Turn's End will give us the /benign/ break we need. With this murder," she says, noting subtly that she already knew it to be murder, "and everything else, I'm afraid that a huge crowd will only allow something worse to come out of the cracks."
Roa returns to her usual posture, offering a small nod of approval for the head wrap. "I...oh. I hadn't even considered that. But don't you think, I mean if something else were to happen, it would occur when things were quieter? Sully's absence wasn't even noted," and here there is a bit of a struggle to keep her expression neutral, "until his was quite dead. Seems a very different act than endangering someone in the middle of a crush of people."
Issa abandons the nail to its own devices, looking up with a minute sigh and then leaning back, using her arms to prop her up. With a tilt of her head, looking more exotic in the headscarf than ever before, she says, "Perhaps. Chaos can be just as good a cover as an abandoned room, sometimes, however. Hopefully everyone will be aware enough after that man's... Sully's death." There's no struggle evident on Issa's part to keep a serene composure about all the grisly stuff. "I just wish we knew the /why/ of it all. It'd be much easier to prepare for then."
"Prepare for?" the goldrider queries. "You sound so certain that it's going to happen again. There will be guards posted, won't there? Sully's death seems to have made the rounds already, so I expect people will be particularly wary." She looks down at her hands, loosing them and then reclasping them in her lap. "I wish we knew why too. Jensen and his men are working on it, I know."
Issa blinks up at Roa, laughing shortly before saying, "Call me a pessimist, Roa. No, I'm not sure... it's probably even highly unlikely... but prudent planning seems a safer bet than another dead body sitting in the stores." A slight wrinkle of her nose, a crack in her calm demeanor about it all, shows briefly before it disappears, covered by a smile. "You've talked to Jensen? Any other details that he happened to divulge at all?" Curiousity of the cat-killing variety seeps from her very pores, it seems, her tone confiding and trust-inspiring.
"I'm afraid not," Roa says easily enough. "Or at least, none that he's divulged to me. Just that they know who he is." Which would be because she told him, but let's not bring that up, shall we? "I was in the stores shortly before the body was found. Besides the smell, things seemed particularly out of order. A distraction maybe? Or somebody looking for something?"
Surprise passes across Issa's face momentarily as she repeats for clarification, "You were in the stores that day? I didn't know that. How odd that must have been." She settles her eyes on the floor for a bit of pondering, tapping her nails onto the wood of the trunk in an even, four-part rhythm. "For something in the stores?" she asks vaguely, shaking her head and looking up to meet Roa's eyes again. "I can't imagine what. Unless the cooks are running a black market along side their stews... but I think that's just T'zen's conspiracy theories getting to me." She throws one hand up to dismiss it with a wave and a slight chuckle before leaning back onto that same hand again.
"Oh, no. Not the same day. A few evenings earlier. I, well, maybe the overturned items weren't anything at all. I don't know. It was just something I noticed when I looked around to see if I could spot the source of the smell." Roa blinks slowly, brows lifting at the idea of drugrunning coming from the kitchens. "That might, at least, explain a particular rebellious bluerider's obsessive need for meatrolls."
"Oh, I see," is the quiet recant from Issa, paired with a single nod of understanding. Then, a laugh, deeper now that the subject of death is further removed from the immediate conversation. "That T'zen is a character. Handsome, though," she adds as a side thought. "Any bewitching young beaus catch your eye down in Boll?" Commence the girl talk.
And cue the flush as well, because even darkened by tropical sun, a pinker hue creeps along the Telgari's cheeks. "I made a fair number of friends at Boll, but no one I should call a 'beau'. I think perhaps I may have met one of those a bit closer to home, however." The smile is a little shy, and the subject changes quickly enough. "T'zen is...is the fine line between enchanting and exhasperating. And you never know what side he's going to be on at any given day." The girl seems about to add more, but then closes her mouth with a small frown. "Tialith informs me that she's gotten wet enough now. I, well, I suppose I'd better go. Thank you for the conversation." And matching word to deed, Roa does start to rise up from the couch.
Issa rises too, out of good hostess protocol. "It's not T'zen, is it?" She queries, quickly, just having to know. That whole curiousity thing again.
Roa's eyes widen a little in shock and then, after a moment, laughter bursts forth from her lips. "*Shells* no," she enlightens. But there seems to be another impatient remark thrown Roa's way from her sodden dragon as she quickly turns and with another, "until next time!" thrown over her shoulder, the Telgari is hurrying out into the rain.
Is that relief writ on Issa's face? Perhaps. Or just plain amusement. "We'll continue this later," she agrees. Or perhaps threatens. Who knows?
Time: Afternoon on Day 12, Month 13, Turn 1
Players: Roa and Issa
Scene: Roa arrives to give Issa a gift and stays for some chit chat.
The slightly swirling and somewhat melancholy thoughts of golden Tialith touch upon the green dragon's mind, ** Is now a good time for Roa to meet with yours? ** An image of a dragon silohuette landing on Oshisyth's ledge.
Welcoming warmth breaks through a mild warning about chilly, whipping winds as Oshisyth answers the queen with a deferential **She is not busy right now. I'll tell her you and yours are coming.**
Oshisyth is arranged in waiting on the ledge, preening a talon as Tialith wings in. The customary greeting bugle seems overzealous, and the small green seeks to scoot closer to the wall to make room for the gold on the ledge.
The sound of wingbeats heralds the Telgar gold's arrival, her rider perched on the dragon's neckridges. Tialith swings down to land on the jutting side of the large ledge as frigid drizzles splatter against her hide. The landing, of course, causes whatever rain that falls on Tialith's wings to spray outwards, but once she is as settled as can be managed, the gold swivels her head to offer a low warble of greeting to her green hostess while Roa begins to dismount.
Mental sprinkles are sent back for the real raindrops that are flung her way, a trickle of amused forgiveness already present. **She waits inside.** Oshisyth informs the queen. **I would offer you cover, but it might be small.** A cramped sense of squeezing accompanies this, along with a definite note of how uncomfortable it would be.
There is, alas, no sense of apology to match the generous forgiveness Oshisyth projects. Instead there is a sort of mopey, long suffering tendril of thought that shares many instances of Tialith patiently enduring rain and then, at the end, adding the picture of her sitting on this ledge as the final one in the chain.
Roa slides down from the gold's neck, her boots sloshing in a small puddle as she lands. A glance over at Tialith and a light touch to the gold's elbow. Then she hurried into the weyr and out of the rain, shaking herself as free of water as she can in the entryway before stepping inside. "Issa? Ma'am?" the girl calls.
From somewhere in the green-sized weyr, Issa's voice emanates with a fast, "Come in, Roa, come in! Have a seat." One assumes she means on the couch with it's back to the entrance, or one of the chairs that is crowded around it. Then, Issa's head suddenly pops to peer over the back of the couch. Apparently she's on the floor, piling in some tiny wooden gadgets into a trunk set in front of the couch. She throws the final one in, closes it, and stands fully. "Sorry about that," she continues with a sheepish grin. "What can I do for you?"
Roa heads towards the voice and the evident seats but, once arriving, her attention moves first to the vanishing wooden gadgets before gliding more politely over to Issa herself. "Oh, it's nothing really ma'am. It's just, well, I was sent to Boll. For Caucus. And so, well, I brought things back. For people." As she talks, she fishes into her riding jacket to pull out a small hide-bound package that is held out towards the other rider.
Issa sinks to sit on top of the now-closed trunk, crossing her legs at the knee and leaning forward to accept the package from the goldrider, head atilt and mouth smiling softly. "Sit, sit, sit," Issa chatters, waving her free hand at the couch she faces. Her other hand is busy turning over the package over in her lap, the firelight from the hearth playing over the brown packaging. "Well," she starts, a curious squint to her eyes, "That was much too nice of you. I haven't gotten you anything at all." The joke earns a widened smile from Issa herself as she then asks, "What is it?" beginning to peel back the string tied around it.
Roa smiles a little as she does, indeed, sit, sit, sit, sinking into the couch rather than the chairs. "Well," she says with a bit of reason and a bit of humor, "You haven't gone to Boll." Within the package is a long gauzy scarf that's used by Bollian women as a head-wrap. The colors are a rich verdant green and pale, sky blue, dyed in such a way that the two colors resemble one liquid just dripped into another, amorphous curls and swirls sometimes melding and sometimes separating the two hues. "It's a headwrap," she explains. "I can should you how to do it up, if you like."
Issa catches sight of the color before she hears Roa's explanation and lets out a low, "Mmm." The fabric drapes and dances as she lifts it up from the hide, making it fall first across one hand, then across the other, like a sinuous snake's coiling. "It's gorgeous," Issa murmurs, rolling the edge between her fingers, then accepting Roa's offer with a, "Yes, please." Handing the headscarf over to her, she continues. "It's absolutely perfect, Roa. My wardrobe has suffered ever since Thread started falling. So kind of you to think of all of us Reachians while vacationing in Boll, really." The words, though a mite formal, are delivered with immense sincerity.
Roa carefully takes the scarf and settles it around her own neck so that Issa might see the motions needed to secure it. It's wrapped once around the back of the head, tucked, wrapped again, until the final result is a fully covered head and enough of a tail trailing off the back to be drawn across the face in particularly scorching sun. "I suppose I felt a little guilty when all the rest of the people I knew were caught in a Reaches winter and I wasn't." The scarf is undone and handed to Issa. "Give it a try. What have I missed since I left? Besides the murder of poor Sully, I mean. How have falls been? How has, well, how has everything been?"
Issa watches with a careful eye the motions of Roa's hands, then reaches to take it back and repeat them with her own. As the green and blue gets wound around Issa's dark curls, she looks up at Roa's face. "Everything has been... well, dreadfully redundant, I guess you could call it. Flying 'fall, executing some... rather narrow misses, keeping up the leather, drills, diatribes of the impending disaster if we don't shape up. The usual and far too much of it." She sighs and the corners of her mouth tense a bit as she tucks a bit here and there, then lifts her hands away from it with a sense of 'ta da' about it, though the final product is lopsided. Her hands drop to her lap casually, and she picks up on something said earlier with an intrigued lift of an eyebrow. "Sully? Have they found out who it was down there?"
Roa leans forward and lifts her hands to correct the lopsidedness, thogh she pauses to look at Issa with brows lifting in a questioning expression, not actually touching anything until she gets an all clear. "Oh. Erm, yes." There's a moment of hesitation, but it's too late now. Hopefully she's not revealing anything that was supposed to stay in confidence. "He worked in the kitchens," is all she adds. "Things feel, I don't know, almost desperate around here. Maybe the Turn's End celebration will break the tension." Hopeful? Sure. Likely? Not so much.
Issa nods ever so slightly and leans her head just so to allow for the necessary corrections from Roa. "Mmhmm. Unfortunately for us, I suppose tension has become ingrained in the usual routine these days." Leaning her head over, Issa picks at the roughened edge of one of her fingernails, the end of the scarf falling down over her shoulder. "But I'm also not sure if Turn's End will give us the /benign/ break we need. With this murder," she says, noting subtly that she already knew it to be murder, "and everything else, I'm afraid that a huge crowd will only allow something worse to come out of the cracks."
Roa returns to her usual posture, offering a small nod of approval for the head wrap. "I...oh. I hadn't even considered that. But don't you think, I mean if something else were to happen, it would occur when things were quieter? Sully's absence wasn't even noted," and here there is a bit of a struggle to keep her expression neutral, "until his was quite dead. Seems a very different act than endangering someone in the middle of a crush of people."
Issa abandons the nail to its own devices, looking up with a minute sigh and then leaning back, using her arms to prop her up. With a tilt of her head, looking more exotic in the headscarf than ever before, she says, "Perhaps. Chaos can be just as good a cover as an abandoned room, sometimes, however. Hopefully everyone will be aware enough after that man's... Sully's death." There's no struggle evident on Issa's part to keep a serene composure about all the grisly stuff. "I just wish we knew the /why/ of it all. It'd be much easier to prepare for then."
"Prepare for?" the goldrider queries. "You sound so certain that it's going to happen again. There will be guards posted, won't there? Sully's death seems to have made the rounds already, so I expect people will be particularly wary." She looks down at her hands, loosing them and then reclasping them in her lap. "I wish we knew why too. Jensen and his men are working on it, I know."
Issa blinks up at Roa, laughing shortly before saying, "Call me a pessimist, Roa. No, I'm not sure... it's probably even highly unlikely... but prudent planning seems a safer bet than another dead body sitting in the stores." A slight wrinkle of her nose, a crack in her calm demeanor about it all, shows briefly before it disappears, covered by a smile. "You've talked to Jensen? Any other details that he happened to divulge at all?" Curiousity of the cat-killing variety seeps from her very pores, it seems, her tone confiding and trust-inspiring.
"I'm afraid not," Roa says easily enough. "Or at least, none that he's divulged to me. Just that they know who he is." Which would be because she told him, but let's not bring that up, shall we? "I was in the stores shortly before the body was found. Besides the smell, things seemed particularly out of order. A distraction maybe? Or somebody looking for something?"
Surprise passes across Issa's face momentarily as she repeats for clarification, "You were in the stores that day? I didn't know that. How odd that must have been." She settles her eyes on the floor for a bit of pondering, tapping her nails onto the wood of the trunk in an even, four-part rhythm. "For something in the stores?" she asks vaguely, shaking her head and looking up to meet Roa's eyes again. "I can't imagine what. Unless the cooks are running a black market along side their stews... but I think that's just T'zen's conspiracy theories getting to me." She throws one hand up to dismiss it with a wave and a slight chuckle before leaning back onto that same hand again.
"Oh, no. Not the same day. A few evenings earlier. I, well, maybe the overturned items weren't anything at all. I don't know. It was just something I noticed when I looked around to see if I could spot the source of the smell." Roa blinks slowly, brows lifting at the idea of drugrunning coming from the kitchens. "That might, at least, explain a particular rebellious bluerider's obsessive need for meatrolls."
"Oh, I see," is the quiet recant from Issa, paired with a single nod of understanding. Then, a laugh, deeper now that the subject of death is further removed from the immediate conversation. "That T'zen is a character. Handsome, though," she adds as a side thought. "Any bewitching young beaus catch your eye down in Boll?" Commence the girl talk.
And cue the flush as well, because even darkened by tropical sun, a pinker hue creeps along the Telgari's cheeks. "I made a fair number of friends at Boll, but no one I should call a 'beau'. I think perhaps I may have met one of those a bit closer to home, however." The smile is a little shy, and the subject changes quickly enough. "T'zen is...is the fine line between enchanting and exhasperating. And you never know what side he's going to be on at any given day." The girl seems about to add more, but then closes her mouth with a small frown. "Tialith informs me that she's gotten wet enough now. I, well, I suppose I'd better go. Thank you for the conversation." And matching word to deed, Roa does start to rise up from the couch.
Issa rises too, out of good hostess protocol. "It's not T'zen, is it?" She queries, quickly, just having to know. That whole curiousity thing again.
Roa's eyes widen a little in shock and then, after a moment, laughter bursts forth from her lips. "*Shells* no," she enlightens. But there seems to be another impatient remark thrown Roa's way from her sodden dragon as she quickly turns and with another, "until next time!" thrown over her shoulder, the Telgari is hurrying out into the rain.
Is that relief writ on Issa's face? Perhaps. Or just plain amusement. "We'll continue this later," she agrees. Or perhaps threatens. Who knows?