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"And here I thought she might turn conveniently inside out like a purse."

The sidelong look she paints him with is so brief that it's impossible to tell exactly how much of the exasperation is put on for show and how much is secretly true. But luckily, there is no shortage of Kirkwall alleys to be sick in. Even here at the fringe of Hightown, it doesn't take long before Fitcher is veering down some narrow little side street where they might find a particularly dark corner into which Thot can hork up the rich contents of her stomach.

"I'm surprised you sent her away with Ellis."

“Mm.” With the help of a filet knife, perhaps.

Silas narrows his eyes.

With the runaway earring caught up in her snaggled teeth, Thot scrabbles ahead into the pit of whatever dark corner Fitcher has seen fit to funnel them into. There she lurches and chokes and sloughs slimy pearls out through her jaws for Silas to recover from his crouch nearby, a handkerchief produced to tend each damp piece before he sorts them away into his pockets.

He pauses mid-scrub for the question, breath pinched short behind a glance up from below, bony elbows angled out from his work. Is it a question? There’s room in his vest for a gold bracelet.

“He needed a means to communicate his findings on short notice should he have found himself in danger of capture."

Edited (i know how tenses do) 2022-04-24 06:57 (UTC)

Fitcher doesn't assist in the scrubbing. She does however stand patiently over the pair of them with her eyeline (if not the bulk of attention) trained toward the busier end of the narrow little miscellaneous side street while Thot gags out a second earring and a brooch inset with a citrine stone only slightly more modestly sized than one of the the cat's own saucer eyeballs.

"I was under the impression that was the whole point of the crystals."

She tilts her ear slightly toward him, but doesn't actually look at the arrangement of squiggly cat summon and Richard's birdwinged limbs. If a hand is offered for whatever mostly not-damp article might require one of her own pockets then it's done so more or less blindly. Don't put something slimy in it.

“She carried his crystal in her crop, ready to produce it upon request.”

Reasonable.

Thot the cat who is currently a dog and was formerly a finch laps across the jut of her goblin snoot, forked tongue rasping dry after strings of ectoplasm trailing through her jaws. Beside her, still polishing, Silas creaks to his feet. Once he’s finished chasing away the last bit of slobbery gloss through its metalwork, he offers the brooch out to Fitcher -- a gloved tendril at her periphery, glittering at its end.

“The cost of detection would have been high.”

The brooch is accepted with the delicacy of a soft mouthed dog taking a bird into its teeth—all fingertips, the palm of her large hand cupped as if wary of saliva remnants (Fade-touched or otherwise). Her inspection of the piece is less circumspect, turning it in a stripe of moonlight to examine the setting. It's pretty, though she has little use for a yellow stone in her wardrobe.

"He must have told you a little of what his business was then." The brooch disappears inside her cloak. Fitcher flashes him an apologetic look. "I'm desperately curious."

There’s no stripe of moonlight to prick his eyes out from the hollows they’re set in when he looks to her in aside. It’s a dark alley, devoid of lamplight to glance off the retinas. Thot is giving herself a bath.

“It’s not my business to discuss.”

The level of his brow is even, the handkerchief he’s tucking away into his vest by feel is still damp in places and likely to stay that way. Apology seen at 1:19 AM.

“There are documents we may attempt to retrieve from Tevinter, if you’re feeling heroic.”

She oohs. She aahs. She flicks the edge of her reversed cloak back to center. "Paperwork. My favorite."

It's punctuated by a waggle of eyebrows made stark in the bit of light she's inhabiting. Like a turned knife, that casually sharp point of Fitcher's curiosity blunts as it's diverted. She doesn't offer him her arm, but it would ruin the concealing lines of her clothes to do so. Don't look so serious, Silas. Your face will get stuck that way.

"The exciting sort of documents, I hope. Account ledgers. Letters of licence. Something with lots of squiggly numbers."

Visible or no, there’s a clear diversion to the dip of his eyeline after the flip of her cloak. It’s a very nice cloak. He’d said so earlier.

“Research.”

The rest it’s simpler not to engage with, just a hitch of a pause to mark it conscious in a glance rather than a missed connection, one or two feathers ruffled in the night. How many times can one increasingly identifiable fox slip the Venatori’s snare?

He sighs, tight and foggy in the cold, bony knuckles flexed and knotted at his sides to reset. Why are they talking about work? There are other jewels for him to count out of his pockets for her and he sets to that -- the pearls and the earrings and so on.

“It might be less suspicious if you’re wearing some of it.”

The earring he sizes out against her ear mid-sort is particularly obnoxious, pearl in a heavy floral setting. Hard to look at.

Research. Pass, says the tilt of her brow, as if she has any real say over where she goes and what papers she rifles through. Otherwise that too floats beyond the margins of their little cabal without remark.

"Not those. And I don't think any of the rings are likely to fit my— Well." One of the chunkier bands with a flat dark stone, a sigil-less signet ring for the pressing of seals on unimportant correspondence is plucked from his possession and tried on a series of fingers while Fitcher tallies the rest of what is extracted from his pockets. The pearls with the heavy pendant, maybe. And there's a pin that must be a sapphire or some other darkish stone that might do well on his collar.

"A shame you haven't a pierced ear. You should consider it." The one that hasn't been mangled. "Highly dashing."

Research. That she humors him with the jewelry is enough to coax a warmer crook out of him, the gaudy earring pocketed away blind. He’ll find it again a month or two from now if he’s still alive, turning out his laundry in search of loose coin.

“Laceration will have to suffice.”

They’ve surely used Thot to cheat tables before, precluding the need to establish a new code in a dark alley. For all that her current form is conspicuous, it’s also innocuous -- inelegant, knobbled, shivering in the cold or with excitement.

“We’ll follow you’re lead.”

For his part he’s kept his own cloak folded over his arm, more hapless without it.

"Then let's hope that I don't steer us wrong."

But this will be fun—a game of losing the right things and sorting how to reap a little coin in return. By the time they tuck in for the evening, they might be a little richer. And if that fails, they'll at least have had an entertaining evening of disseminating their ill-gotten gains across a dozen different Kirkwall gambling tables. It's the enjoyably laissez-faire sort of wagering—the kind where the stakes are all more or less pretend, and there's no real method by which to come out worse than they are.

Thank you very much to their host for providing such a fine evening.

"Here. Hold still."

With the ring briefly at home on her slightly too small forefinger, Fitcher works the pin's catch free and then turns to him. She runs her hand matter-of-factly under the edge of his vest so as to stitch the pin high on his breast without jabbing Silas through the shirt.

Nothing for the inkblot summon shaped like a bundle of sticks arranged in the form of a dog, but presumably Thot's kept anything she cares to elsewhere.

The static hiss to warm silk is echoed by a shiver he can’t quite stifle behind his breastbone -- another glanced apology for the insubordination of his nervous system, snared into a longer pause while Fitcher works. They could forego the gambling and proceed directly to an inn. There’s the slip of a concealed knife in there somewhere, familiar placement, sharp edges barely there beneath the brocade of his vest.

And now this pin.

He reaches his free hand up to assist with the smoothing of his own lapel and nods. Head in the game.

Gambling was his suggestion.

Some distance aft and aside, Thot waits alert, poised rigid as a caltrop apart from tremor of her tail. Later she’ll dance between feet and around table legs to score glances at carefully guarded hands. Surely not all creatures of the Fade are terrible.

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