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She grows suddenly very pale. And then just as suddenly, flushes very hot up the back of her neck, into her ears, and well into her face with the effort required to subdue the hot spark of elation that rises up. Like a bottle under pressure, her eyes get very bright.

"Oh, yes. Well of course. I wouldn't want anyone to be unduly endangered by the course of our research." She does not sound as light and airy and casual and perfectly poised as she believes she does. "But how kind of you to offer, Mr. Dickerson. I would of course be most grateful for your assistance and happily accept. Tell me, do you have any ready friendships among Riftwatch's mages? Perhaps you might have connections I do not that we might first explore the possibility of studying."

Richard Dickerson hardly moves, resignation borderline sympathetic in a fine bristle of tension at the backs of his chops. This feels very much like an undue level of excitement.

He looks away from the brightness in her eyes, and back to nod reassurance in the same beat he proffers disappointment, matter-of-fact:

“No. I prefer not to speak to anyone here if I can avoid it.” While they’re being honest. “Outside of a select few, I’m confident the aversion is mutual.”

"Damn."

A thump of her fist on the tabletop punctuates the sentiment, and then is waved away. Never mind the Thedosian mages. The simple offer of his collaboration is more progress than she's made on this subject in months.

"No matter then. We'll make do. In the mean time, let us arrange a short series of studies of your Talents. Casting. However you prefer it referenced. Naturally, I would be more than happy to do the same in reverse should you care to observe, although I would warn you in advance that by comparison they will be quite unremarkable indeed. Will you need much space to practice in? In the past, Leander and I have used the Harrowing chamber in the Mage Tower for such things, but if it can be contained and you prefer discretion then the Hightown house shall be open to you. Have you a piece of paper that I might borrow, Mr Dickerson?"

It tumbles out of her seemingly all in one prodigious breath, a veritable exhaled tidal wave.

(Perhaps Salvio has gone so gray due in part to the frequence of her company?)

Richard ratchets down reflexively at the thump, his flinch contained to a hard blink and short breath, nerves successfully steeled short of flattening his hands to the table. The garter snake across his shoulders is less composed, but also less visible, the only trace of her a whip snap of disturbed magic under his collar.

He does not actually say Wysteria please.

The sentiment is carried instead in the break before he manages a, “I would very much like to see your work,” politely, in spite of himself. It helps that his curiosity is earnest. He does have paper.

“I prefer discretion whenever possible. Nothing I can do here requires much in the way of space or -- safety equipment.” The chair under him grates against the drag of his scoot back from the table; he stands and crosses back for the desk, where he’s able to shuffle a clean (but creased) sheet loose from the stack of books it was lost in. “On the subject of paper,” he begins as he returns, and retakes his seat, “who would I speak to about procuring more of it?”

This particular sheet is hers now, smoothed out and passed over.

She takes it from him gratefully, producing from somewhere behind her ear - in the twist of her hair, perhaps? - a pen for writing with, which she commences with immediately, making a series of quick shorthand notes for her own reference.

"I would inquiry with the Seneschal's office. I'm certain it could be supplied to you there, or at the very least requisitioned. Myself and Seneschel Pizzicagnolo usually have a few rolls in storage so they might be cut for the writing of new reports, and the logging of personnel and the various receipts and so forth required by an organization such as this one. The house in Hightown will would be best then, I think," she continues, as if the two thoughts are remotely related. "We can arrange for something of a mutual demonstration there. Would you mind terribly if Mr. Fitz were in attendance as well? It's perfectly all right to say you would prefer he wasn't, but he and I have been working rather closely on the questions of Rifter... let us say, continuity? And the information may be to the benefit of our work together with respect to that as well."

Richard cocks into an odd pause after the appearance of her pen, teeth parted to make some comment -- this is the second time she’s sleight-of-handed one from out of the aether in front of him -- only for her to beat him through the door to dialogue. The moment has well passed by the time she’s finished speaking.

In the interim, he’s furrowed his brow at her sketching down notes, girded his disapproval into benefit of the doubt, and caught the breath he’d drawn in immediately to object to the involvement of Leo Fitz.

The look he finally lands on is inscrutable accordingly -- one compromise after another just to keep up. That he’s doing half the legwork on his own to convince himself is a testament to his level of interest.

“To adequately demonstrate healing I would need a -- willing victim.”

He says this like it’s a concession.

"Excellent! Then it's sorted."

What's sorted? Wysteria, go back to the semantics of--

"I suspect that once we have completed our trials, the information will naturally lead in one direction or the other so I don't wish to jump to any conclusions too early. But if you have any particular line of inquiry you most wish to pursue, then I am of course all for it. Being a student of Oghma, I trust you will, and while one should always have a specific question they wish to investigate when conducting our tests, I see no issue whatsoever with keeping our theoretical interests rather broad."

Snagged on middle distance distraction off to one side, Richard half-listens to the rest -- enough to nod on cue when she’s finished. Critical thinking skills and an academic mien have carried him this far in life without a single research methods credit to his name.

“How much of this do you intend to write down?”

The note taking is what he comes back to, focus centered back on the present.

Her pen doesn't pause. Whether it be a product of working in the company of similarly distracting individuals here in Thedas or in the place she'd come from, or be it simply a natural apptitude derived from a certain inability to Stop, Just Stop, she's evidently quite good at writing and conversing all at once.

"Oh, most of it I should think. The important parts, to be certain. Given the sensitivity of the subject, I imagine I will divide everything between two records - questions and answers, so to speak - so that one without the other would be quite useless." A pause (of her mouth, not her hand), in which she gives him a swift second assessment and clearly is either unconscious that she's doing it or means to do so subtly.

"You'll be doing the same with your notes, of course. I doubt I even need mention it."

“I don’t write anything down that I don’t want other people to know about.”

He says so firmly enough that this could be a point of contention. Eye contact, when it resumes, has taken on a warier clarity.

She’d warned him against such looks earlier.

Tragically, that look has even less effect in this context. She scoffs.

"Then you may have my guarantee, Mr. Dickerson. I am the very picture of discretion. But records must be kept, if only for our own benefit. Who can be expected to recall every little detail of a thing from months prior? I find it unlikely that this will be an abbreviated study."

Wysteria scoffs and Richard sighs in tight aside to himself, thoroughly Tried.

“Please don’t use my name.”

Which might as well be real, so far as this plane is concerned. This will all be fine, Miss Poppell is ‘the very picture of discretion.’

“I will requisition paper,” he adds, because he might as well have a fallback explanation that will require other people to assist in covering for him if the seneschal becomes suspicious of his crimes. “For recordkeeping.” Not for a giant ant.

"Excellent. You may feel free to use my name as a reference on the form should you feel you require it."

From the long look she gives him, there can be no doubt what she thinks about this whole anonymous record keeping business. But to her (very limited) credit, she scribbles out a line in her notes, then caps the pen and tucks it back into— her hair, surely. The freshly written note is folded over and tucked into a pocket.

"Well then, Mr. Dickerson." She offers her hand out to shake. "I look forward to working with you."

“Thedas is a dangerous place for talented individuals.”

And Richard Dickerson has made a career of flying under the danger radar, insinstence cut clear blue in his eyes, unwilling to be ashamed about the added precaution. His eyes refocus momentarily to follow her pen over her ear.

…

He reaches out to grasp her hand, and takes the opportunity to get a good gauge on the state its in by the light of the lamp when he does so. Tilt, turn, and then a firm shake. No judgment.

He’s just curious.

“I could send the snake with you, if you like.”

A very kind and earnest offer, in parting.

The hand in question is rather inkstained, neither so soft that it spends all day in a glove nor so hard that it does much work without one. On the back of her hand, between her thumb and forefinger is the slightest freckling of pale circular scars- some kind of burn, there now forever.

Her hand, shaking his, stops very abruptly but doesn't release him. Instead, her grip tightens. Wysteria's attention swivels toward the collar of his clothes where last that little glinting dark eye was seen staring.

"Would you really?"

His own hand is worn more rough in the pad than his appearance would otherwise suggest it should be, with calluses thickest in the crook of his fingers, where a pen would sit. Dick lifts his chin a touch when she locks on -- not quite prepared for the intensity of her enthusiasm. Somehow. In spite of their interaction over the last several minutes.

She was, in his defense, wholly less enthusiastic about the snake in particular.

“Provided you will promise not to attempt to dissect or dispel her.”

Somehow this sounds more like a warning than one condition of an agreement.

“She understands trade. I can tell her to do as you ask, for a time.”

A brief war wages in Wysteria's face with such visibility that she must be an extremely poor poker player. She does not want to carry a snake in her clothes. She does not want to carry a snake at all. She would prefer, generally, not touch a snake or and to instead study a snake through a pane of very clear glass or perhaps for a distance of one or two feet.

And yet, it is not a snake. Not really. She is merely... snake-shaped.

Which Wysteria resolves is a very different thing altogether.

"I would like that very much. And of course would promise to do nothing of the sort. When will you need her returned?"

There it is.

He watches her struggle the same way she’d watch a snake swallowing an especially large egg through a pane of glass, low key fascination for the effort involved. Maybe this will be therapeutic for her.

“I think I can survive without her for a week or two.”

They are still holding hands.

So they are, however she seems to have forgotten.

"Then I will see to her safety for as long as that, and return her to you in exactly the same state which she was received. You have my most solemn oath, Mr. Dickerson."

She sounds very certain. She is going to 'blechk' her way to the ferry with a snake in her possession.

THE PACT IS SEALED.

“I trust you’ll take good care of her.”

Dick pumps his grip enough to remind her it’s there, and gives the order in a hissing abyssal dialect, delivered quietly in aside to his collar. It’d be easy to assume he speaks Snake. He technically does.

She spirals down the interior of his sleeve at a gliding clip, from around the shoulder to the elbow, and around the elbow to his wrist, until she’s ribboned out from beneath the cuff and across the bridge of their thumbs. She noses to scoop the spade of her head in under the lip of Wysteria’s sleeve as a matter of course -- that’s where snakes go -- and will immediately try to burrow the rest of herself in after it, if so allowed.

She’s Miss Poppell’s problem, as soon as Dickerson is sure she isn’t about to be catapulted across the room for overstepping.

He is still holding on.

Just in case.

With the air of a slightly ill child being forced to down a measure of bitter tasting tonic (queasy look included), Wysteria's hand tightens to a vice grip on Richard's in place of flinching backwards. And while the cuff of her sleeve is trimmed rather close, the rest beyond it is of a perfectly welcoming dimension for the little serpent to worm her way into. In short order, the snake has disappeared from view entirely, presumably worked its way up Wysteria's arm and settled somewhere more comfortable.

She has only gone a few shades paler than chalk white in the process.

"Very good care, yes," she says absently. There's a snake on her but it's fine because it's not really a snake. "And if there is any particular thing she cares for - a sunny rock now and again, for example, I would be happy to indulge her."

There, there. Richard pats his left hand over the back of her bloodless right, and also uses it to assist in gently (wincingly) prying it off whatever crunched cartilage and bone remains of his half of the shake.

“If she does, she'll let you know,” he tells her, and stands to lead the way to the door, on the subject of sunny rock indulgence.

“Should you have any questions, you know how to find me.”

As if possessed by the spirit of a rigid stick jammed somewhere delicate, Wysteria rises from her seat and allows herself to be lead toward to the door. Once across the threshold and out into the corridor beyond, she manages to say (to weakly insist), "A week or two. And then I will return her."

Presumably more heartfelt expressions of gratitude and enthusiasm for their newfound partnership will have to wait.

For the first time, Richard crooks a smile at her across the threshold, knowing, sidelong, keenly aware of what he has done.

He closes the door between them.

Bye-eee.

Inbox - Fade Rift

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