View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
It's an ordinary, quiet night. The . . . patrons, or whatever they are, of the lab equipment shop downstairs, took off about forty-five minutes ago.
There's silence, mostly. You can only be out at night in Sothis if you have business. But there's some business. Every so often a party passes under Katie's window. Their conversation is mostly what Katie has become accustomed to thinking of as "focused", though occasionally some is just downright tense or revelrous.
Wind. Distant insects. Dogs.
Something shuffles downstairs.
And continues to shuffle.
"Are we good?" The voice is insistent, alto, and right underneath Katie. And it's female.
"Yes, fine". Higher. If Katie knows what female halflings sound like, it sounds like that.
The shuffling moves deeper into the shop. A glass clinks. Laughter starts, whispering at first, then merely hushed.
"Oh my god." A third voice.
"All this stuff is fake, you know. This and this and this used to be one bespoke fixture."
"Fuck."
Whoever it is is going through the merchandise.
Expensive, heavily regulated merchandise. Katie's parent have only been in Ulunat for two weeks, but she's picked up that the proprietors of this place have gone to a moderate effort to secure it against thieves.
"Anyways, I just want... to confuse people, as soon as they look at me, because I don't fit into their categories. Because they can tell from my tits and hips that I'm obviously a woman, but also from my biceps and the fuckoff huge weapon on my back and the way I carry myself that I'm dangerous and powerful and not to be trifled with, and those two things aren't supposed to go together. I want them to not know how to interact with me because I break the core assumptions of their worldmodel."
Mouthkiss.
Snuggle. [ Katie is a dumpling! ]
Lazily, drifting off, she says, "Yeah they don't like that in Cheliax. The convenient part is, anywhere sufficiently Lawful, they also can't notice it for the life of them, in the first place."
Right right right what the fuck does she do now
don't use any spells it's too early in the morning you don't know what's gonna happen it's not worth it
Not worth it to send the crow out, either. Someone will hear it and wonder why.
She'll just have to wait to leave a message at her usual drop-off location. She feels so helpless, but she can't act without approval from higher up here. She's got no idea what's going on. Maybe Katie is a plant, and Tiar just didn't rank high enough to be worth notifying, which would be offensive but understandable.
She writes the note in her head. [ She'll translate it into code, of course. ]
Commander Doe,
——————— — ——— ———— ———— ———————— routine looting mission ———————— unidentified female wizard, claiming ——————— River Kingdoms ————————— — ——— ———— ———— —— — ——— ———— ———— ———— ————— Zaftig Arrow ——————— — ——— ———— ———— ——————— 'romantic-love' ————————— — ——— ———— ———— —————————————— explaining Moth ontology ———— ——— ————— ——— wants to take her with us into Cheliax —————————————— personality is disordered, but ————————— —— —— ———— ————— "natural slaves" ———— "they'd be fools to think of you that way" ————— — ——— ———— ———— —— ———— ————— security————— ——— ——— ——— Victory—————— ———— ———compassion. Orders?
Forever with the many,
Fawn
She goes over and over it in her head, rolling over a couple times after she's first drafted the whole thing.
She's a little tempted to start fingering Taz while she sleeps just to see what happens, but she's too damn tired herself. She cuddles up and dozes off alongside her.
Shoulder boop.
"Are you slept? They're making the wolf, I didn't even have to help."
"I'm as slept as I ever am. Wolf sounds nice. Probably got a lot more room in my gut now."
Is this true on Tazich's sly method of physical inspection by slightly wiggling her own body against Katie's tummy?
What stat does she need to grind to be able to determine organ fullness on skinny people with gross-somatosensory skin areas alone?
Hhhgh Katie doesn't seem as bloated, so that's probably a good sign. She's probably still marginally lying about having room left though. Tazich knows slippery when she sees it. Katie is slippery.
She helps Katie up.
People are spread out around the house with [ admittedly modest ] bits of breakfast. Somayyeh is wearing nothing more than a small sheer nightgown, her posture relaxed but her eyes still sharp. Teg is standing in a corner, facing into the walls, gnawing on a piece of meat. Tiar is reading something.
She brings Teg a rare but strangely dry cut of meat larger in circumference than Ran's own ribcage the big way around, with extras for the stranger.
She supplements Katie's plate with some sour berries stolen off Ran's haul where it's dumped on the table.
All except Tiar are eating with their hands but there are some forks clearly available if Katie wants one.
In fact something tells Tazich it would be wisest to bother with a knife and a fork in front of Katie, at least for the first 60 seconds of breakfast.
"So?" she asks Katie, "what do you know?"
It's not a rhetorical question, but neither does it hold the imminent threat of death behind it.
"Well uuuh, I know you worship Urgathoa. And you rob the local Nethysian library for books. And you're weird technical edge case undead. And I know Tazich's crazy about me". She pats the tiefling's tummy affectionately. "Hey, the blonde one is a vampire, how is she eating solid food?"
"Do you have much experience with vampires? Aren't you undead yourself, at this point?"
"We think Urgathoa might have picked her and not even needed to make that improvement. Chaotic Neutral, or so she thinks. She wasn't very attached to her previous life, and as you might have noticed she was already very us-like."
"No, I just read a lot of books, though not many about vampires specifically. I only know the basics. Undead, drink blood, burn in the sun, can hypnotize people, weak to garlic, yadda yadda yadda."
"There's a weird amount of misinformation about vampires. I guess they're not very common, but even so, why would you write a book saying that they can't digest solids or be awoken during the day or take damage to holy symbols?"