Chaos Rains (21/9) + The One That Got Away (23/9)
Sept 26, 2021 8:53:51 GMT
Queen Merla, the Sun-Blessed and Anthony like this
Post by Igrainne (RETIRED) on Sept 26, 2021 8:53:51 GMT
Tea at Paradise Frost, third bell after midday was what Jaezred said, so Igrainne went there early to order a chocolate butler and a plate of the fey queen cake (“Huh, there’s biscuit crumble on it now!” she observed). Surprisingly, her lord cousin did not arrive fashionably late as he sometimes liked to do, instead being extremely punctual this time. She heard the pealing bells of the Temple of Waukeen when the door swung open and Jaezred walked in.
“Good morrow to you, cousin,” he greeted her in their shared native tongue as he took a seat. “I take it, from the lack of gossip around town, that you failed to capture Langston Farstep?”
“You guessed right,” she sighed. “Not that we had any hope of doing that in the first place. He’s a slippery bastard, what can I say?”
“What happened? And please, spare no details.”
“Okay, I’ll try...Um, so Aurelia wanted to keep an eye on this guy because of what he’s done in the past — which I think you know about? — but she doesn’t feel like she can justify using Council funds for this, so she used her own money for this. Veridian, Merla, Pieni, Wren, Whistler, and I showed up for the job. We went to Lady Vermillion’s house in Sigil—”
“And who is this Lady Vermillion again?”
“She’s an information broker. Yuan-ti pureblood. Really likes gardening. Anyway, she told us that Langston’s been seen in Sigil at least once a tenday since the past two months. He was spotted doing some shopping, talking to traders, no one important though.”
Jaezred furrowed his brow. He was stuffing his pipe with loose leaves of tobacco and, when he filled it enough, conjured a small flame to light it. The smoke that billowed out smelled of roses. “Shopping? What was he buying?”
“Oh, some random shit. Uh...a crate of eight bottles of wine from a tavern, a ring of water breathing and driftglobes from a vampire dwarf merchant...and those are just the ones we know of.”
He looked slightly confused but nodded his head for Igrainne to continue.
“Where was I? Ah, right, Langston’s kind of a known character in Sigil at this point. Although, Lady V. always lost track of him eventually when she kept an eye on him. When we arrived, she pinpointed his last known location in The Lady’s Ward. Said it was probably his fifth visit to Sigil by now. We found him walking there, looking really conspicuous with a yellow raincoat and an iridescent umbrella. The weather in Sigil was weird that day; it was raining chaos energy, literally. Oh, he’s also got a nice-looking sword on his back, do you know anything about that?”
“No…”
“Alright. Well, anyway, he spotted a couple of us following him, and then he challenged us to some sort of game, to keep up with him as he ‘went about his day’. I wish we hadn’t gone with it. He just ended up making us look like fools.” Jaezred raised a brow at that. “So that Langston turned out to be an illusion. No idea where the real guy is. The illusion left a poem behind, that was our clue to finding him. It’s kind of like a to-do list.”
“Do you remember what the poem was?”
“Yeah! I wrote it down before I could forget it. Here.” Igrainne took out a small, folded piece of parchment and gave it to Jaezred, who struggled a little to read her chicken scratch.
Apple for the archway, a rose head for the Gate
Scales to pass the clock face, each door to activate.
Think of home at centre hedge, think of brine at Gun’s
And in the Dragon’s taproom, bow twice before the sun
The cellar must be mocked in dwarf, the cedar door cajoled,
The order you must find yourself, to reach your goal so cold.
“Well done,” said Jaezred. “He certainly has a penchant for the whimsical, doesn’t he?”
“That’s one way to describe it, I guess. So these are actually instructions on how to activate certain portals in Sigil, just out of order. We figured them out as we went, went through a series of portals and talked to a few people who know him. Didn’t find out much, only the stuff he bought as I mentioned earlier. But like I said, he’s becoming pretty well-known ‘round those parts. People there have mixed feelings about him; they probably think he’s a bit of a nuisance, to be honest.”
“How surprising…”
“Yeah, he’s a real shit-weasel,” she muttered with a small smile. “So in the end, we finished his stupid puzzle and confronted him in a tomb. We exchanged some words. He said that he and Jack are ‘kindred spirits’ or whatever, that they both want freedom. He said that it was him who casted the mass modify memory spell on the Twilight Court palace, but since he and Jack were there on the day of Sarastra’s assassination”—Igrainne sliced a chunk out of the fey queen cake with her fork and popped it into her mouth, the biscuit crumble crunching loudly as she chewed—“they couldn’t have been the culprits. Which is a shit alibi, considering she was poisoned!”
“Unless he knows something about the murder that we don’t,” Jaezred pointed out.
She simply shrugged in response. “Anyway. The Langston we were talking to was actually a simulacrum made of ice all along. That’s what the last line of the fuckin’ poem meant. According to Merla, the real Langston was spying on the conversation the whole time, but who knows if he was even in Sigil? I casted locate creature and got nothing. By the goddess, he’s irritating. No wonder he got on everyone’s nerves.”
“What happened to the simulacrum? Did you kill it?”
“Yeah. It left behind the colourful umbrella and a heavy soul coin. Um, Whistler took the soul coin to the Order of the Crimson Fist to be destroyed and Veridian kept the umbrella.”
“I see.” Jaezred rubbed his chin. The smoke from his pipe clumped together to form the silhouette of a tiny beholder. “Anything else I need to know?”
“Hmm. Merla said that it seems like he’s got some kind of plan and is set on it, whatever it is. But other than that, nothing important.”
He nodded approvingly. “I see. Thank you, cousin, sincerely. I owe you a favour for this.”
“I gotta ask, why are you so interested in this dickhead? Is it because he gave you the slip in Havertash? Wren told me about that…”
“Partially. I am after the bounty on his head.”
“Who’s got a bounty on his head?”
Jaezred pursed his lips. “Certain parties in the Feywild. It’s not official, but if you know the right people, as I do…” he replied after a few moments of consideration.
Igrainne blinked. Her mind immediately threw her back to the brief exchange she had with Belladonna Thorpe last week. “Oh...so you’re working with the fey? Gotta say, that’s pretty surprising. I thought you hated that lot!”
She should’ve predicted that this would get nothing but silence out of him. The expression on Jaezred’s face was hard to read. For a short time, he seemed to be ignoring her presence, looking away as he sipped from a teacup.
“Well, your business is your business, Jaezred. I won’t pry, promise,” she reassured him, pushing the nagging curiosity to the very back of her head. “I guess, if you’ve got no other questions, I’ll get going? I’ve got a cartography lesson to catch…”
Jaezred didn’t speak up again until she had gathered her things and risen from her chair. “Wait,” he said.
Igrainne looked back at her cousin and, to her absolute surprise, realised that he was blushing deeply. “I...have something I need to tell you.” He paused to clear his throat — a shoddy attempt at disguising the embarrassment in his voice — and readjusted himself in his seat. “I’m seeing someone.”
“Oh. Wow. That’s. Um,” Igrainne stuttered. “Wow. Congrats? I guess? Uh. Who is it? Is this serious? How long has this been going on?”
“Technically only a few months now, but the flow of time is strange in the Feywild, so it feels like we’ve been together longer.”
“Oh! Someone from the Feywild, huh?”
“Yes. The Witching Court, specifically.”
“Well, that’s uh…” Somehow, she was still at a loss for what to say, so she just nodded. “That’s great, Jaezred! So were they, like, born there or were they from the Underdark originally?”
When the question — the same question she’d asked Belladonna a week earlier — stumbled out of her mouth, Jaezred was taking a deep breath, as if he was about to make a spiel about something. He then stopped, fixing her with a wide-eyed stare. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said, were they born in the Witching Court or were they originally from the Underdark?”
A long, awkward pause followed, but before she could ask if he was alright, he answered at rapid-fire speed: “Underdark. Aeschira. She’s from Aeschira.”
“Oh!” Igrainne grinned. “Okay, cool. Hey, I’m really happy for you, Jaezred. I’m glad that you found someone, even if she’s from the Feywild,” she joked.
She spread her arms and beamed at him expectantly. Jaezred was frozen in utter confusion, so she playfully groaned and brought the hug to him instead. He sat there completely still, stiff as a plank.
Igrainne just laughed as she wrapped her arms tighter around him, blissfully unaware of the look on Jaezred’s face — the look of a man who’d just dug himself into a deeper hole.
“Good morrow to you, cousin,” he greeted her in their shared native tongue as he took a seat. “I take it, from the lack of gossip around town, that you failed to capture Langston Farstep?”
“You guessed right,” she sighed. “Not that we had any hope of doing that in the first place. He’s a slippery bastard, what can I say?”
“What happened? And please, spare no details.”
“Okay, I’ll try...Um, so Aurelia wanted to keep an eye on this guy because of what he’s done in the past — which I think you know about? — but she doesn’t feel like she can justify using Council funds for this, so she used her own money for this. Veridian, Merla, Pieni, Wren, Whistler, and I showed up for the job. We went to Lady Vermillion’s house in Sigil—”
“And who is this Lady Vermillion again?”
“She’s an information broker. Yuan-ti pureblood. Really likes gardening. Anyway, she told us that Langston’s been seen in Sigil at least once a tenday since the past two months. He was spotted doing some shopping, talking to traders, no one important though.”
Jaezred furrowed his brow. He was stuffing his pipe with loose leaves of tobacco and, when he filled it enough, conjured a small flame to light it. The smoke that billowed out smelled of roses. “Shopping? What was he buying?”
“Oh, some random shit. Uh...a crate of eight bottles of wine from a tavern, a ring of water breathing and driftglobes from a vampire dwarf merchant...and those are just the ones we know of.”
He looked slightly confused but nodded his head for Igrainne to continue.
“Where was I? Ah, right, Langston’s kind of a known character in Sigil at this point. Although, Lady V. always lost track of him eventually when she kept an eye on him. When we arrived, she pinpointed his last known location in The Lady’s Ward. Said it was probably his fifth visit to Sigil by now. We found him walking there, looking really conspicuous with a yellow raincoat and an iridescent umbrella. The weather in Sigil was weird that day; it was raining chaos energy, literally. Oh, he’s also got a nice-looking sword on his back, do you know anything about that?”
“No…”
“Alright. Well, anyway, he spotted a couple of us following him, and then he challenged us to some sort of game, to keep up with him as he ‘went about his day’. I wish we hadn’t gone with it. He just ended up making us look like fools.” Jaezred raised a brow at that. “So that Langston turned out to be an illusion. No idea where the real guy is. The illusion left a poem behind, that was our clue to finding him. It’s kind of like a to-do list.”
“Do you remember what the poem was?”
“Yeah! I wrote it down before I could forget it. Here.” Igrainne took out a small, folded piece of parchment and gave it to Jaezred, who struggled a little to read her chicken scratch.
Apple for the archway, a rose head for the Gate
Scales to pass the clock face, each door to activate.
Think of home at centre hedge, think of brine at Gun’s
And in the Dragon’s taproom, bow twice before the sun
The cellar must be mocked in dwarf, the cedar door cajoled,
The order you must find yourself, to reach your goal so cold.
“Well done,” said Jaezred. “He certainly has a penchant for the whimsical, doesn’t he?”
“That’s one way to describe it, I guess. So these are actually instructions on how to activate certain portals in Sigil, just out of order. We figured them out as we went, went through a series of portals and talked to a few people who know him. Didn’t find out much, only the stuff he bought as I mentioned earlier. But like I said, he’s becoming pretty well-known ‘round those parts. People there have mixed feelings about him; they probably think he’s a bit of a nuisance, to be honest.”
“How surprising…”
“Yeah, he’s a real shit-weasel,” she muttered with a small smile. “So in the end, we finished his stupid puzzle and confronted him in a tomb. We exchanged some words. He said that he and Jack are ‘kindred spirits’ or whatever, that they both want freedom. He said that it was him who casted the mass modify memory spell on the Twilight Court palace, but since he and Jack were there on the day of Sarastra’s assassination”—Igrainne sliced a chunk out of the fey queen cake with her fork and popped it into her mouth, the biscuit crumble crunching loudly as she chewed—“they couldn’t have been the culprits. Which is a shit alibi, considering she was poisoned!”
“Unless he knows something about the murder that we don’t,” Jaezred pointed out.
She simply shrugged in response. “Anyway. The Langston we were talking to was actually a simulacrum made of ice all along. That’s what the last line of the fuckin’ poem meant. According to Merla, the real Langston was spying on the conversation the whole time, but who knows if he was even in Sigil? I casted locate creature and got nothing. By the goddess, he’s irritating. No wonder he got on everyone’s nerves.”
“What happened to the simulacrum? Did you kill it?”
“Yeah. It left behind the colourful umbrella and a heavy soul coin. Um, Whistler took the soul coin to the Order of the Crimson Fist to be destroyed and Veridian kept the umbrella.”
“I see.” Jaezred rubbed his chin. The smoke from his pipe clumped together to form the silhouette of a tiny beholder. “Anything else I need to know?”
“Hmm. Merla said that it seems like he’s got some kind of plan and is set on it, whatever it is. But other than that, nothing important.”
He nodded approvingly. “I see. Thank you, cousin, sincerely. I owe you a favour for this.”
“I gotta ask, why are you so interested in this dickhead? Is it because he gave you the slip in Havertash? Wren told me about that…”
“Partially. I am after the bounty on his head.”
“Who’s got a bounty on his head?”
Jaezred pursed his lips. “Certain parties in the Feywild. It’s not official, but if you know the right people, as I do…” he replied after a few moments of consideration.
Igrainne blinked. Her mind immediately threw her back to the brief exchange she had with Belladonna Thorpe last week. “Oh...so you’re working with the fey? Gotta say, that’s pretty surprising. I thought you hated that lot!”
She should’ve predicted that this would get nothing but silence out of him. The expression on Jaezred’s face was hard to read. For a short time, he seemed to be ignoring her presence, looking away as he sipped from a teacup.
“Well, your business is your business, Jaezred. I won’t pry, promise,” she reassured him, pushing the nagging curiosity to the very back of her head. “I guess, if you’ve got no other questions, I’ll get going? I’ve got a cartography lesson to catch…”
Jaezred didn’t speak up again until she had gathered her things and risen from her chair. “Wait,” he said.
Igrainne looked back at her cousin and, to her absolute surprise, realised that he was blushing deeply. “I...have something I need to tell you.” He paused to clear his throat — a shoddy attempt at disguising the embarrassment in his voice — and readjusted himself in his seat. “I’m seeing someone.”
“Oh. Wow. That’s. Um,” Igrainne stuttered. “Wow. Congrats? I guess? Uh. Who is it? Is this serious? How long has this been going on?”
“Technically only a few months now, but the flow of time is strange in the Feywild, so it feels like we’ve been together longer.”
“Oh! Someone from the Feywild, huh?”
“Yes. The Witching Court, specifically.”
“Well, that’s uh…” Somehow, she was still at a loss for what to say, so she just nodded. “That’s great, Jaezred! So were they, like, born there or were they from the Underdark originally?”
When the question — the same question she’d asked Belladonna a week earlier — stumbled out of her mouth, Jaezred was taking a deep breath, as if he was about to make a spiel about something. He then stopped, fixing her with a wide-eyed stare. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said, were they born in the Witching Court or were they originally from the Underdark?”
A long, awkward pause followed, but before she could ask if he was alright, he answered at rapid-fire speed: “Underdark. Aeschira. She’s from Aeschira.”
“Oh!” Igrainne grinned. “Okay, cool. Hey, I’m really happy for you, Jaezred. I’m glad that you found someone, even if she’s from the Feywild,” she joked.
She spread her arms and beamed at him expectantly. Jaezred was frozen in utter confusion, so she playfully groaned and brought the hug to him instead. He sat there completely still, stiff as a plank.
Igrainne just laughed as she wrapped her arms tighter around him, blissfully unaware of the look on Jaezred’s face — the look of a man who’d just dug himself into a deeper hole.
