Difference between revisions of "Logs:Subtle Searching"

It's not a pouring rain that fills the air here at Tillek Hold, but rather a pervasive drizzle, too thick to be mist but not distinct enough to be a shower. Everything is wet and the gray sky feels close overhead, like reaching a hand up could just about touch the low hanging clouds. But that isn't the case and when a blue dragon appears in the sky, he offers some perspective, putting the sky up high again where it belongs. The blue wings down in a wide arc, landing hard outside the main doors. The little woman who climbs down from his back looks barely dressed for this kind of weather -- no resistant slicker, just a tan wool coat -- and so the misty air is already darkening her jacket and making her hair hang limp and wet. She has a bundle under her arm; at least its contents are better protected from the dampness than the rest of her.

A pervasive drizzle at Tillek. This just in from the Department of Redundancy Department. Long-term inhabitants seem little fazed by the nuisance weather, except to huddle a little more beneath the overhanging front patio while they do things like stand guard-duty. The young man, with his smart Tillekian-blue jacket buttoned up and his broad shoulders and his closely cut crop of hair, looks the part of a guard well, albeit a guard with too little to do today. Few come and go on a day like this, and he's not called to attend the door much until that blue arrives, causing him to straighten up from where he'd been slouching and sharing a wineskin with the young woman next to him. /She/ doesn't look like a guard, and she definitely doesn't respond like one to the arrival. He's quick to call out a cheerfully brisk greeting. "Afternoon, dragonrider, Tillek's duties to the Weyr." She looks on in curious silence for now.

The bluerider wipes the cuff of her jacket across her brow, trying to keep some of the water from her eyes, a behavior that strikes her as strange since there isn't actually that much rain in the air. She casts her eyes upward to question just what is going on with this weather. Anyway! Vienne is not going to waste too much time in conversation with the sky. Her pace is quick and clipped, heeled boots sounding across the stone as she approaches the guard with a smile on her face, easy and friendly. "Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm looking for Master Analke." She shifts the package forward a little, plenty of explanation there. Meanwhile, still waiting where he's landed, Oswinth inhales a bit of water and the resulting tickle has him snorting repeatedly to clear it.

The tell is in the overly helpfulness of the young man, the way he hastens to get right to the bottom of whatever this dragonrider needs, definitely not like he's been slacking around all afternoon and doesn't want to get caught. "Sure thing, ma'am, I'd be happy to go get him for you. Master Analke, hummm." He peeps hopefully toward Vienne, hemming without being totally firm about this getting right to it plan of his. "He's a... fishermaster?" The guard even shoots a look toward the sneezingsnorting dragon as if there may linger a clue in that direction, but no. The girl is just waiting to see how it all turns out, looking on placidly. And a /smidge/ amusedly at how the boy flounders.

Vienne watches that display, the way the young man is so very attentive. She smiles up at him rather indulgently. "Harper," the bluerider corrects easily. "I haven't met... Actually, I don't know if it's him or her. I'm just doing a favor." She admits it with a light laugh, a crinkle of her nose, all meant to put the guard at ease; she's not going to report him for slacking off. However, Vienne does have a side glance at the girl beside him, catching that hint of amusement about her and returning it with a conspiring glint of her eye.

Some gestures are universal, and the shrug from the girl is one of them: beats me. Troubled but trying so hard not to show it, the guard nods distractedly, then more firmly, then draws himself up like only a man on a mission can do. "I'll find Master Anaky-" "Analke," the girl corrects benignly. "Analke for you!" He marches stoutly into the Hold, turning his back on the two women and the weather both. "You might want to wait inside," Linae submits once the sound of his footsteps has faded, letting that subdued amusement show in the tone of her voice and the breath of laughter on the end of her words.

Vienne might have had something to say to the guard, like 'here, take this with you' but she doesn't have much of a chance to do anything other than open her mouth and close it again. With the trickle of water from her hair, the violent little shiver that runs through her is just emphasis for her gratitude when the girl invites her to step inside. "Thank you," she sighs with relief, brow twisted pitifully as she starts in. There's a backward glance for Oswinth, who seems to have sorted himself out and is now staring toward the entrance like he would rather prefer there was somewhere dry for him to wait, too. Vienne adjusts the bundle beneath her arm, apparently content to stand just within the doorway while she waits. "Do you think he'll be long?"

Linae's nod starts off slowly but gains momentum before the end, so she's really nodding pretty firmly by the end, not unlike the way her friend just sorted himself out a moment ago. "Finding Master Anaky," she smirks, "might take him a while. I hope it's not perishable?" She pulls one hand out of the fold she's had her arms in the whole time, pointing a finger at the bundle that Vienne is protecting. "Or alive." For a few seconds, she watches it more intently in case it moves.

Yeah, finding Master 'Anaky', that gets Vienne to laugh brightly, her head dropping forward as it shakes side to side, a bit of melodramatic 'woe is me'. "No, I don't think it is," she says, eyes rolling upward to wonder as she gives the bundle a gentle squeeze under her elbow. Eventually all the play-acting falls by the wayside and she just smiles at the girl. "I think it's just strings and reeds and such. Some scrolls maybe. I didn't look. Though now I'm wondering if I should have..." She has another chuckle that fades as the joke does. "Are you a guard too?" Her glance flicks over the dark haired stranger who does not look anything like a guard. Vienne's light skepticism is probably understandable.

After a little laugh and a few more seconds of eyeballing the mystery package, Linae inhales around the change of subject and exhales with her answer, "Uh uh." Her grin hangs on for a few beats, long enough for her to remark, "Tillek would have to be in bad shape to scrape that far down in the barrel." Her arm lifts into a showy posture of flexing non-existent muscles before she refolds them the way they were before she pointed to Vienne's bundle, easing resolutely back into a lean against the doorway. "Bad day to be a messenger," she concludes, looking out at the bleak weather while, somewhere inside, a guard keeps nervously asking if anyone knows where Master Analke/Anaky/Annie/Anka is.

Vienne has a knowing grin for that display of awesomely useless girl arms. "I have a pair of those," she says, eyes narrowed and lips pursed as she gives a definitive nod. Her own elbow swings out, not the one with the package, referencing her own skinny arms. At least Linae has a few inches on her, even with Vienne in heels. As the girl settles back against the doorway, the bluerider shifts her wait, attention draw outdoors after Linae's, though her own eyes seek out the waiting dragon and his dour body language. "He misses Igen," she sighs. It is, in it's own way, a comment on the weather. Oswinth is still looking this way, and he also unfurls his wings to give them a wave, as if he can chase the drizzle away. "So what do you do?" the rider asks, sweeping damp hair from her forehead. Might as well get to know each other while they wait.

"Can you blame him?" The sun struggles to shoulder through the clouds, but that only makes things worse, throws the grayness of the day into sharp relief against a few shafts of sunlight that quickly get smothered once more. Linae shivers; it's gotten no colder in the last few seconds and no wind has come up, but it seems appropriate to do so right then, her arms tightening around her trunk. "I'm just goin' somewhere, waiting around for the right ship. You're from Igen?" She blends one thought right into the other, where she's going and where Vienne's coming from. "Long way from home, huh?"

With eyebrows high, Vienne can only draw in a breath and turn her head a bit in regard to blaming Oswinth for his preference. It's a neutral reaction with only a little leaning toward the 'no' side of the spectrum. The blue, meanwhile, lifts his head hopefully for that cruel hint of sun, and his attention stays up in the air even after there's only gray clouds to look at. "Me? Not really." From Igen. "Him, yes." The bluerider grins a bit for the way she answers those questions. "Do you want to go to the Weyr?" she wonders of the girl. "High Reaches, I mean. That's where we're from now. Though..." She pinches her mouth and glances aside, then back. "I suppose I could take you anywhere. If you wanted. After." After the package is delivered. She gives it another squeeze to make that clear.

Breathless reverence when Linae confesses, "I've never been to Igen." She sighs wistfully, thoughts of places warm and dry and sunny dancing like dust-devils through her head, and just as abruptly spinning into grit and nothingness when she laughs a small laugh. "To High Reaches Weyr? It's a lot like here but without the ships, huh?" She sticks her hand out from under the entryway to the drizzly rain, turning her fingers over till her hand is nice and cold and damp, then she drags it back in. "After, heh. Do you want me to go look for him? Maybe he got embarrassed and isn't coming back at all."

"Well..." Vienne starts, but her breath catches sharply as she looks outside. "It's not unlike here," she has to admit with a grimace. "More snow." But she can spin that! "Really, though, I've been learning that the snow is better. You can brush it off. It doesn't seep into everything and it doesn't give you that damp chill the way rain does. Plus it's really pretty." Though she realizes after saying this that it's unlikely Linae doesn't know these things about snow, so she covers up that lapse with: "We didn't get a lot at Igen. Not piles of it." Her smile is still a little apologetic when Linae makes her offer and Vienne is quick to pause. "Oh. If you want to? I'm not in a big hurry." She's not sending the girl off, either. However, Oswinth chooses this moment to let out a loud huff in the yard. He's not looking this way, but it still has the vague sound that he's in disagreement about there being no hurry. It's probably just the timing of it, though.

"Not the best sales pitch," Linae answers about there being more snow, looking at the wet track her fingers leave on her shirt while she wipes the cold rain off her hands and onto her clothes. As good excuse as any to go inside and out of the weather, she must mean to follow up on her offer to find the errant guard, saying, "I'll deliver the package if you want. So you two don't have to hang around until..." Her hand waves to suggest the uncertain possibility that the guy will ever get back to them with Master Whoever, and then that same hand offers to take the package for Vienne?

"There are nicer places," Vienne will be the first to admit. Considering she's still a little shivery, this whole wet winter thing doesn't suit her at all. "But, well, I suppose, from there, you could go anywhere you wanted. A lot of ships, just not the sailing kind." However, she doesn't really have any personal investment in selling Linae on the idea. It was just an offer. "Or if you liked it, you could stay. Stand." She shrugs a shoulder, even if her eyes flash a little, no big deal. "Do you know where Master Analke is? Maybe you could just show me to wherever the crafters are?" She doesn't hand the package over. It might be one thing to leave its delivery up to lazy young guard, but something else entirely to a girl who is 'just goin' somewhere'.

Suspicion goes both ways when Linae asks, eyes narrowed, "What do you mean, 'stay, stand?'" She's obviously not ignorant enough to have absolutely no clue, but she's not arrogant enough to doubt her own assumptions, stopping short from her voluntary quest to frown at Vienne. "I'm not a thief," she adds as a sullen FYI. "I kinda know where they are, but explain first."

Vienne plays innocent very well, baffled by the girl's sudden suspicion, by the weight she gives those two words. "Stay? As in, if you liked it there, you wouldn't have to move on. You could work, live..." Yeah, that probably isn't the definition that Linea is looking for. The bluerider shows no sign of laughing, though, she holds expertly to that air of light confusion. "And there are eggs. Dragon eggs. You could stand, if you were interested in that sort of thing." It's only at the end, when she starts to smile, that Vienne lets something wry show through. And also, she didn't miss Linae's comment. "You kinda' know? How long have you been here?"

"Work. Live." Linae weighs those words, too, repeating them with the same inflection of the previous pair, doubtful but /intrigued/. Her hand stops flat on the door into the hall, the weight of her push barely moving it, lingering there with a few extra seconds of hesitation to answer Vienne's two not unreasonable questions. "Not long." She pushes through the door after that, to look for the lost master, the lost guard, and a chance to think about 'stay stand work live.'

Whether it's really Linae's intention to lead the way or not, Vienne follows her now, weight behind her hand as she holds the door open to dart through as well, a sigh slipping out as a bit of proper warmth hits her. "Well," she says, posture straight and eyes ahead and at the ready. "Maybe we can find someone who does know where the crafters work. It shouldn't be too hard." Though there's a dry bit of humor in her voice, because this whole delivery endeavor has already been more complicated than she'd anticipated. "Where were you before here?" Why she asks is anyone guess, since Linae has been a font of specifics so far. At least the vague answers don't seem to trouble the rider at all.

Linae doesn't seem like she's totally lost, moving through the front hall with convincing purpose, around a corner, up a flight of stairs. She looks back twice, the first time to find out that Vienne is following her, and the second time to make sure she hasn't lost her around the first few bends. The corridors of the inner hold all look really similar to each other is the hard part, dim and long and uncarpeted with doors opening on either side at regular intervals. "A lotta places, mostly south of here. I was heading north, but it keeps getting colder, so now I'm thinking - east sounds good, huh?" She stops at an intersection, frowning for a second, then striding off, coincidentally east. She's halfway through saying, "This way," when the long lost guard rounds a corner practically on top of them, flushed from his adventure and startled by their sudden presence. "Hey!"

"Hard to go west," Vienne will give her, a light laugh following. She's distracted, though, trying to keep some kind of track of all these twists and turns, these identical hallways and dim corridors. She's about to make some comment out it -- likely something about how the stuff in her package is not worth all that much so there isn't really any point of mugging her in some forgotten back corner of Tillek Hold -- when the guard shows up again. Vienne is nearly as started as he is, though less flushed, and she smiles cheerfully. "Hello again. Master Analke?" Did he find him? Her? Whoever they are?

The package has been delivered. The guard is relieved that he has not totally failed. The girl has accepted the subtlest of searches in a way equally as subtle, going along with Vienne without much said about it all. One hopes they exchange names in the process of transport.

Comments

Azaylia (Dragonshy (talk)) left a comment on Sat, 23 Feb 2013 09:01:31 GMT.

Woo! Congrats to Linae. :D Vienne's good at subtle search tricks.