capeandcowllogs | in and out of stages

Entry tags:

in and out of stages

WHO: Zevran (

niceassassin) and OPEN.
WHERE: Around the City.
WHEN: The night of Saturday, May 14th.
WARNINGS: Terrible references to sex. Anything else on a case-by-case basis.
SUMMARY: Zevran goes out to try to make up for the lost time during kid week. Come help him out, join him, or try to foil his plans: whichever is your fancy.
FORMAT: Whatever you prefer!

By noon on Saturday, the memory of the past week is clearly stretched out in Zevran's mind like a poisoning victim, and by late afternoon, he can no longer tolerate it. It has been a very long time since that kind of vulnerability and sentimentality was so fresh in his recall. Oh, yes, moments of it escaped during his journeys with the Grey Warden, but they were mostly controlled. This, this is different and unwelcome.

Fortunately, by the time dark is falling and the artificial lights that seem so excessive to him are coming on around the City, business as usual has mostly picked up again--at least in some places. The denizens of the City, newly freed from the spell, will be seeking contact with other adults. So the most popular of social places are scrambling to be ready for them--be they parks or clubs. Zevran's usual haunts are still getting their feet back under them: the gaming stores, the fantasy bookshops, they remain closed for now. But he's determined to take a positive view of things (all the better to forget how frightened and deluded he was before the spell ended). This is an opportunity to try out new grounds, to find out if the less nerdy demographics in the City are just as willing to enjoy the company of an attractive elf with a foreign accent and a ready smile.

And so begins this night's adventure: drifting from bar to pub to club, idly attempting to seduce the bouncers outside the latter, investigating the people within. And maybe keeping an eye out for anyone interesting outside, as well. It is a moderately cool night; he has an excuse for a jacket. Which means he can bring his dagger along, just in case violence enters the equation. He is not averse to that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Half...of you?" Zevran's expression is openly dismayed now. He is clearly imagining a body cut off at the waist wandering around the City. Even he can't derive any pleasure from that thought.

"Oh. Uhm," Here she looks a little dismayed by the slip, chagrined, but -- well, Zevran is obviously not human himself, and seems to come from a world with more than just humans populating it, so maybe he won't flip out and try to kill her? Not that he'd succeed, she thinks. "The human half."

He'd be vaguely hurt if he knew that she's so confident he couldn't kill her. But he doesn't, so he just nods in understanding. "You are part spirit, then? I doubt such a thing would be possible in my world, but..." He shrugs. "I am learning many things about possibility, here." A smile. He can't help it, even when he's been squarely turned down. He has to keep up with at the very least vague innuendo.

"Not spirit, no... something else." For a conversation between two strangers chancing in a bar, the conversation is strangely serious, and for Terra, unusually open. Maybe it's the slight alcohol loosening her guard, or perhaps simply the bottled up desire to talk about it with someone who didn't already have preconceptions about who or what she is. The next drink finishes off the poor alligator. "There's nothing like me in my own world. I doubt there would be in yours."

But here she tries to shake off the melancholy, changing the topic abruptly. "You never told me your name."

"Zevran, Zev to my friends. It is up to you whether you wish to be one of them." It isn't, really. He has very few friends even back home; the entire concept is new to him on some level. But he can pretend. He's good at pretending. "I'm not bothered by spirits or strangeness."

Remembering the last time such an offer was made to her, Terra smiles easily. "Zev, then. I'm Terra. I should warn you... there's not much you can call 'normal' about my life."

The sincerity of that smile is almost discomfiting. Zevran pushes the thought of it away. "A pleasure to meet you, Terra." Albeit not in the way he would have hoped, but oh well. "Be careful, my dear; I will take that as an invitation."

Oh well indeed. Her smile ebbs off toward her more common inquisitive look, the tilt of her head birdlike. "An invitation?"

He sighs ruefully. It's so hard for him to remember that his innuendo goes right over her head; he's too used to it. "To activities you have already expressed no interest in. Ah, what I mean to say is, my life has become other than normal as well."

She'll get used to it eventually -- perhaps when she's more used to the company. It's been ages since she's known anyone who flirts even half as much as Zevran does. It's getting too used to it that will inevitably prove the hazard.

But that is the future. For the now, Terra seems understanding. "You're still getting used to this world. It gets easier... but not easy."

He's certainly not going to stop. Even if he stops making actual passes at her, well, he'll still be dropping not-so-subtle references to his own activities.

"Not just in this world," he hastens to add. "Things were very interesting for a while back home as well. But they will wait while I'm here, yes?"

"So I'm told. I've never gone since coming here, and... the only person who's come here that's known me, it--" she shakes her head, brushing bangs from her face. "I didn't know him, and neither of us can tell if I should have or not."

Her hand makes a loose, dismissive roll. "Anyway. What was so interesting?"

He shrugs. "Even if it's not true, an absence from my world can only do me good. There are people there I should stay away from." And people he wouldn't mind seeing more of, but he won't talk about that for now. Friends? In his life? Again with the awkward. "You were asking what was so interesting. Well, I took a job assisting a foreign politician..." Euphemisms: not just for the bedroom. "Let us say I underperformed and made friends with his enemies instead. They had adventures. We had adventures."

"... huh." Though minor, the momentary recognition of similarity -- of switching sides, presumably because the other side was a friendlier sort -- was an unexpected thing, a subtle change in her eyes. "What sort of adventures? I'm curious now."

It would be more accurate to say that the other side was a more merciful sort, but again: Zevran is leaving certain things out of the story. "Oh, we saved the world, I think. After many stops along the way."

"The stops are what make it an adventure," she punctuates with a more amused smile, rapping fingertips against the bar. "You're pretty tight-lipped."

"There are so many who would disagree with you on that, my dear," is his immediate response. When in doubt, innuendo. But after a moment, his expression softens slightly. "What do you want to hear about? How we found the golem? The dwarves and their politics? The lovely little village full of mad cultists and dragons? The werewolves in the forest? The town besieged by walking corpses? I wasn't there for the mages' tower, I'm afraid, or some of the others."

It's getting easier to identify the innuendo, if only for the saturation of it in the conversation; she's learning not to question it. As for the actual question, she thinks over the options for a short moment.

"The golem."

He's okay with that. It's one of the less personal tales by far. "Ah, yes. A merchant up near the Frostbacks gave us a control rod for a golem--said it had caused him nothing but trouble and he wanted to see the last of it. He may have been right to do so. The town it led us to was overrun with darkspawn. Monsters, I suppose you would say. And as for the golem itself...the command phrase we had been given did not work. We had to search the village for survivors to learn the correct phrase." A beat. "And because the Warden was the sort of person who rescued survivors. The rest of us, we followed her."

She listens attentively, chin balancing on one hand. She doesn't know much about golems, especially not of other worlds, so the use of 'it' doesn't quite hit her, but the rest of the story does not seem too unusual to her. Monsters were common in her own world, though they didn't much venture into cities; a scenario like that didn't seem too fantastic.

"The Warden?"

Oh, Zevran may get to the part about the golem's reaction to being called it all the time. That might be good for a laugh. For now, he pauses to address the question. "The Grey Wardens are an elite order formed thousands of years ago to fight the darkspawn." He lifts a hand and waves it vaguely. "It's complicated. Not my sort of thing. I am not the heroing type. She is. We were all in this in the first place to stop the Blight, you see--an invasion of darkspawn led by an archdemon. But we needed all the help we could get first, and so we went to find the golem and learn how to activate it."

He pauses to get back into that part of the story. "There were survivors in a basement, and one of them knew the correct command phrase. But he wouldn't give it to us until we saved his daughter from a demon. Typical, really."

She's from an RPG, too. She should know what he's talking about.

Or something else entirely. Though Terra herself managed to avoid most of the more roundabout adventures, she heard some tale of Celes' stunt doubling as an opera singer in order to hijack an airship. And Sabin's whole trek across the Veldt throwing out scraps of meat to get the help of a thieving wild child.

Meanwhile, she tended to wake up in strange beds in men's houses and no idea how she arrived there. It is probably not a topic she should broach, lest the elf get ideas.

Though she's curious about the darkspawn and all the rest, it's probably best to finish the story they're on now. "You saved her, right?"

"Of course. We are, as I have said many times in the past, ridiculously awesome." Because he has the best battle quotes. "The demon wanted our help freeing it from wards set up by a long-dead mage so that it could possess the young girl--instead of being forever trapped in the body of a cat locked in a basement, as it was then. So the Warden assured it that we would free it and let it possess the girl. Then we took down the wards--" He shrugs in irritation at the memory. Ugh, puzzles. At least it wasn't sudoku. "And at the Warden's command, we all killed the demon before it could possess the girl. Mmm, what did she say? 'I promised I would set you free. I didn't say I would let you live.'"

Not exactly the ending she was expecting, but in the same position, Terra could see herself doing the same thing. "She sounds like... quite the leader," for that at least was true that she can tell. "And the golem?"

"She is." He sounds, momentarily, more serious than usual. In another world she might be, but the Warden is still perhaps the only person he would truly call friend. But he prefers to speak of other subjects, so on he goes without hesitation. "The golem, well. We activated it, and it insulted us, called the Warden 'it,' and introduced itself--introduced herself as Shale."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject