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"Call it a keen sense of observation," she replies automatically, and then seems to think better of it for she pauses, does what Richard had not - which is to say, she glances down the stairwell and also to the corridor she had hooked and reeled him in from -, and then adds with a certain air of sotto voce delicacy: "I'm rather good at seeing things. Which is to say actually seeing. Of course Kirkwall and the activity of the Gallows is so suffused with magic that it is all but impossible to say where one strange bit of enchantment ends and the other begins, and at first I hardly recognized the difference. But over the course of our conversation in the Hightown house, it slowly became apparent to me that something was different. It is something like drinking wine, you see. At first it all just tastes like wine and one cannot begin to easily describe the varietals."

Their elbows are still linked together.

Their elbows are still linked together.

Richard is attentive after the fashion of a hawk with a snake in his talons, even if more of the reverse is true -- marking every pause and glance without looking away from Poppell, lest she juke him with some whisper or gesture sleighted between them. He is not tall or broad enough to loom -- just watchful, and suspicious to his bones. What an odd introduction to a conspiracy.

When he answers, it is at first in a quiet, sibilant tongue, the language unfamiliar to her ears.

There is magic stirring at his shoulder, slender along the back of his neck. It winds down his sleeve, away from the constriction of their joined elbows, and out around the heel of his thumb. Wysteria will feel or see or otherwise sense keenly the grass blade tickle of a little black tongue forked against her wrist before the garter snake behind it weeble-wobbles in search of a pathway through her fingers.

In trade, in light of her two way glance, Richard asks her: “Is this a random stairwell?”

Edited (for some reason feeling a need to clarify that it the snake isn't asking questions??) 2020-07-14 06:13 (UTC)

It is a perfectly reasonable question undercut promptly by a honking sound of dismay as Wysteria processes what exactly owns that little questing tickle of tongue and is sliding free of Richard's sleeve after it. Her elbow jerks in his, threatening - if the word might be so misapplied - to separate from the force of a brief but visibly powerful wave of alarm.

The last time she'd seen a snake so close, it had been in the company of a few hundred others like it at the bottom of a pit. One develops certain disinclinations under such circumstances.

The hilarious contortion act involved with keeping his arm trapped and her hand bent away from the snake mercifully slows her down long enough to give him a distracted answer - "I believe it's a shortcut to a courtyard." - before gingerly, gingerly, Wysteria untwists her pretzeled arm to allow her fingers to stray back for the little garter snake's inspection.

The instant he feels her recoil, Dick twists his own wrist protectively up and away from hers, guarding the little serpent up close at his breast. It (she) s-curves through the rings tiered on his knuckles, and Richard gives Miss Poppell his most severe look yet, exasperation tight in the lines around his eyes.

They are, of course, still linked.

“She’s harmless,” he assures, only once Wysteria has started to settle her own nerves, and with patience he’s used the delay to dig deep for. He further waits for her to outstretch her fingers to turn his hand over next to hers.

The snake is slender and unassuming and no more than a foot long all told, her dark scales ribboned with lines of pale gold from tip to tail. As before, the barely-there wisp of her tongue precedes a (cautious) attempt to bridge herself up into the splay of Wysteria’s fingers from Richard’s. This time, he is ready to lift her away less theatrically in the event of overwhelming horror.

“I hadn’t spoken to many of the other rifters,” he tells her (more amicably) in the meanwhile. “Apart from one meeting with Madame de Cedoux. Did you mean for us to have this conversation here?”

She has a wiggling tongue attached to a wiggling body Wysteria's hand is very stiff as the snake cautiously crosses into it. Somewhere behind the rictus set of Wysteria's features passes a further irrational surge of disquiet. And though her arm (linked as it is) remains perfectly still, the intensity of her focus on that delicate little body is so pointed that—

"What? Oh. No. It simply seemed to be the first turn which— Madame de Cedoux is lovely. And I would very much like to discuss this matter with her as well, but— Well."

Well. There is a difference between Madame de Cedoux and the two of them here, is there not? She can hardly imagine herself in the same room as the woman in question, much less in intimate conversation with her.

"What is she? Other than a snake, I mean."

But -- well.

“One meeting was enough for me.”

The snake is cool and dry, muscle working beneath soft scales as she probes her way along the curve of Wysteria’s palm, and eventually to the lattice of her fingers. Richard keeps his eyes down on that progress rather than study Poppell’s face, familiar enough with visceral aversion to file it away for what it is at a glance.

“She was a messenger before,” he explains, “but there’s no one in Thedas to answer.”

Provided she doesn’t lock him in, he uses this opportunity to disengage himself from her elbow -- better able to reach and turn her hand lightly with his own to allow for easier snake-slithering.

“Here she follows my commands, and keeps me company.”

And just like that, Richard is ostensibly free of her. Wysteria's arm remains at that slightly awkward angle, retaining the memory of where they'd been hooked together, though she allows the rearrangement of her hand without taking her eyes from ex-messenger snake. There is something transfixed about her attention - as if she is at once studying the muscular undulation of those linked dark scales and also looking beyond them. Like the snake is a magic eye puzzle, and she is slowly drawing the picture back from her nose.

(And like she doesn't quite buy the claim that any such creature is harmless, but that is neither here nor there.)

"Who did she talk to before?" Her focus breaks. She blinks at him. "—Any command?"

Satisfied -- for the short term -- that Wysteria is less likely now to flinch and cast his serpent friend down the stairwell than she was a moment ago, Richard withdraws to let her handle her as she will. He tacks on a warning in parseltongue that deters a speculative fix of beady little garter snake eyes towards Wysteria’s sleeve as he does so. Don’t.

“An overseer.”

There’s no particular inflection to indicate how he might have felt about that arrangement, or feels about it now. It’s the answer to her first question; he lifts his chin to look up at her at the second, and furrows his brow.

“I -- suppose.”

The answer to her first question hardly warrants so much as a batted eyelash, but the second? Now there is something worth dissection. Wysteria's hum sounds like My, how interesting, as her attention swings back to the garter snake, the angles of her arm adjusting slightly in an effort to give the reptile's body some sense of support without inducing it to, say, slither up her arm.

"Is she alive? I mean in the sense of the nature of the enchantment. Mr. Ralston keeps a spellbound bird, but it still needs seed and papers changed and so on. They are quite rare in Kalvad - living things bound to magic. Constructs are uncommon and trend toward being temporary due to the power required to manifest them, but they are a far simpler thing by comparison."

And then, most ominously, she suddenly brightens and turns all her attention onto him.

"Is she yours, Mr. Dickerson? As in did you assemble the magic?"

“I don’t think so.” The snake is snuggling in as she’s wont to do once she’s comfortable, looped and curled securely between and around splayed fingers, with the wedge of her head centered in Wysteria’s palm. “All of the viscera seems to be present, but she doesn’t hunt.”

Richard’s never really thought about it. He isn’t even really thinking about it right now, busy weighing instead exactly how much he should elaborate, or if it might behoove him for him and his snake to keep a secret or two.

Poppell saves him from weighing the risk by spotlighting him.

“She was a gift.” Easy.

He is measuring her again -- not entirely unlike the inspection she just put his snake through. There is a similarly instinctive distrust at its core, walled up and guarded behind his natural reserve.

“You could sense that I had her.”

On the one hand, a most curious answer. On the other, a satisfactory one - confirmation of a suspicion she'd already arranged in her mind. It is an exceedingly pleasant thing, to be both intrigued and correct all at once.

"I sensed there was something different about your person. That is not altogether the same as knowing what you had. But yes," she says, meeting that measuring look with the willingness of a young lady being fit for new clothes. "I suppose I did."

“Was that something you could do before?”

Now it is Mr. Dickerson’s turn to ask probing questions in this strange corner of the gallows, after a glance to her palm in search of the same sliver of green that’s lodged in his. His have a way of coming only one at a time, with his focus zeroed in on the one answer.

"That's right," she says, turning her hand very slowly so the angle of her wrist might be marginally less awkward without disturbing the coils of the settled snake. She glances back to it, then looks back to him. For all that she seems unlikely to fling his friend off her hand, her attention is clearly still being actively divided by the garter snake's presence - or by the shape of the magic surrounding it. From the corner of her eye, it feels like sun glinting off the surface of water looks.

"It is not an entirely uncommon talent in Kalvad for those with a little ability."

Richard nods, slowly, against some unseen, uphill resistance of his spirit, or better judgment. He has another question. Rather than ask it, he stalls to offer his hand (politely, helpfully) back out to hers -- you know. For if she’s had her fill of one on one time with the snake.

No pressure.

“Have you noticed,” he asks, very casually, “any change in functionality since your arrival here?”

She surrenders her possession of the snake almost without thinking, her hand moving automatically to meet his so she might carefully extricate herself from its coils. It's only after she's motioned to do so that she thinks to regret it - maybe the snake will disappear back up Mr. Dickerson's sleeve and so elude further examination -, but by then it both seems too late to change her mind and she is already invested in turning over his question:

"It's difficult to say. The magic in Thedas is unlike the magic in Kalvad, as is the enchantment on your snake is different from both, and so there are things— well, it cannot be studied the same way, and where at home I might be able to touch it, as it were, I haven't quite sorted how to interact with spellwork here yet. But—"

Here, she stops. A brief hesitation as the garter snake unwinds from her hand. "—my own, er, work I suppose seems as it ever was. Why? Does she work differently here than she did where you came from? Have you altered somehow? Your companion mentioned having changed in appearance, did he not?"

Single questions are apparently not within her capacity as a conversationalist. And then, before he can answer any of the half dozen she has proposed to him, she adds, "Mr. Dickerson, I would greatly appreciate it if this were to stay between us. This is of course all within my records, but I have no interest in being involved in the debates which sometimes occur in the Gallows with respect to Circles and mages and so on."

It’s an easy transition. The little snake periscopes up to intercept Richard’s reach, scales brushing down to the point of her tail as she cycles herself out of Wysteria’s fingers and into his. He gives her a lift to his lapel from there, and she winds oily slow into the turn of his collar against his neck, lacking the urgency of a cockroach or centipede caught out in the light. Before it vanishes from sight, the end of her tail curls to catch on the collar’s edge, and holds there, unmoving. Speaking of:

“He used to have a tail.”

Somehow this is the one answer he chooses (or manages) to give, amidst the tumble of other questions around it.

Technically Loxley’s tieflinghood is a matter of public record.

He listens to the rest with a notable reduction in intensity from his moments-ago resistance to every implication. Still a little too heavy on eye contact -- the look of a man trying very hard to read her mind.

“Nor do I,” he assures her, in the end. The brush of his contempt for local politics is keeled subtle and as dry as the scales she just freed herself of, tight in his chest. “I am a healer, Miss Poppell, but I would like for you to tell me more about your studies here before I submit to interrogation.”

Which is, naturally, a perfectly reasonable stipulation. The fact that he is intent on her whatsoever seems, as in the moment preceding this one, to bother not in the slightest, given that-- "I will most happily oblige you. I don't know if you've charted similarly troubled waters, but discussing the nature of Thedosian magic with anyone with any intelligence on the subjects - mages, I mean - has been as like throwing myself on a series of sharp rocks in hopes of finding a suitable place to sleep for all that anyone cares to discuss the subject with a Rifter. Nevermind that I might be perfectly willing to answer any questions or prove the merit of my interest to them. Did you know I attempted to conduct a study and Matthias demanded that I pay him for it or else would say nothing? Honestly."

That he has not rushed down the stairwell available before them is a most optimistic sign indeed. She absently wipes her snake-hand on her skirt, but otherwise her attention is fixed right back up at him.

"Where shall I begin?"

“Did you try telling him having a better understanding of his abilities might elevate them?”

There’s a pinch at Richard’s brow, immediately skeptical of any resistance offered by Matthias. He seems like he should be very easy to manipulate.

“Regardless,” he interrupts before she can clarify one way or the other, “we shouldn’t have this conversation here.” Sound has a way of carrying over stone, they are at the juncture of two blind alleys, and did she just wipe her hand --

The impetus behind his study of her flattens out. Weary.

“We can go into the city. Otherwise, my quarters are unoccupied.”

Somewhere in there is the desperate impulse to indeed provide that clarification, but she clamps down on it just long enough to forget it entirely in favor of methods of effective clandestine secrecy.

"Quite so, Mr. Dickerson. In which case, I suppose your room of residence will have to suffice."

She has no real interest in delaying this conversation for the time it will take to reach a sufficiently private room across the harbor, and they certainly cannot use her quarters. Imagine.

“Terrific.”

To the snake pit.

As they walk, Richard explains that Loxley is often away on business in the city, and prefers to spend nights there, when he can. Loxley has a strong sense of right and wrong. Loxley has a very hands on approach to problem-solving. Once Loxley flipped onto a marauding werewolf’s shoulders and placed a crown on its head that suppressed the curse long enough for them to avoid slaying it.

Richard has a lot to say about Loxley.

Their shared quarters are unremarkable by contrast. It is a place where two men sleep, sparsely furnished and decorated as temporary residence often are, despite their having been here for nearly a full year. There are two cots pushed to opposite walls, each with a trunk at the foot. One has a book halfway under it. There is a table with two chairs and two bottles of wine, one of which looks expensive. And there is a small desk, where more books live, including the one Richard told Wysteria he would take back to the library.

It smells very faintly of elfroot smoke. It is also currently quite dark, apart from light cutting in from the hallway.

That’s it.

He holds the door open for her.

“How long has it been since you arrived in Thedas?”

Edited 2020-07-20 07:23 (UTC)

She is, for the record, most happy to indulge the line of his conversation. In fact, by the time they reach the quarters in question she has asked perhaps only half of her follow up questions with respect to Loxley and werewolves and the mechanics of suppressing curses. But there she hesitates as if suffering under an entirely different sorcery which keeps her temporarily from actually passing across the threshold, through the door he is so generously holding open for her, and into the dark room (where two men sleep) beyond.

"It will be two years come Kingsway."

The toes of her smart leather boots with the floral patterning and the ribbon ties are just barely past the boundary between hall and quarters. For a moment, her hands float up about her middle, the nail of her thumb threatening to pick absently at some cuticle on her other hand.

And then she steps forward, as she has already made the most prudent decision with respect to the locale of this meeting and it would be ridiculous to change her mind now on the basis that she has never stood in a man's room before.

(Byerly's doesn't count. He was practically dead at the time.)

"Mr. Loxley and yourself arrived at the same time, didn't you? That's very odd, you know. Even Mr. Stark and Mr. Fitz and Mr. Fitz's associate all came through to Thedas at different times. I don't know that I've ever known two people from the same place who were so familiar to each other to come together as a pair."

Stood aside with one hand on the open door, Richard clocks her momentum catching at the threshold with a glance down to her boots (which have ribbons), and then the further hesitation at her hands. He looks again to the darkened room’s interior, with furniture set out empty in a museum diorama of transplant loneliness, and takes in a breath, reconsidering appearances. Hm.

Wysteria walks in before he can casually suggest the city of Kirkwall a second time.

So it’s fine.

“Yes,” he answers, easily. “We’d been traveling together for several weeks before we were brought here.”

He leaves the door standing open behind them, and speaking quietly while he crosses to the desk and quickly fumbles through the process of striking up a wad of tender and touching it to a pair of oil lamps. One of them, he carries to the table on his way to closing the door.

“I take it the native magic is so fundamentally different you haven’t been able to do much with it in those two years.”

Oil lit, the room doesn’t look any more lived in than it did in complete shadow, but it is substantially warmer in atmosphere.

Assuming possession of one of the chairs comes easily enough, and by the time he brings the lamp to bear all lingering and notable traces of her second thoughts have evaporated. She assumes. In any case, she is not picking at her own fingertips while her hands are her lap which is fine enough. Nevermind the appearance of her hands (for what good are beautifully manicured hands when you're sporting a complexion so soured by jungle sun), but raw cuticles are damnably difficult to keep safe from all magnitude of stinging things in the workshop--

Wysteria forces herself to stop gazing curiously about the room.

"That's right. It was immediately obvious to me that I'm unable to reach into the Fade the same way mages here do, so my studies have primarily been focused on enchanting and the theoretical study of warding and so on. In Kalvad, magic is ordered much more thoroughly than it is here and those two things fall closest in line with the diagramming methods I'm most familiar with."

Nevermind that she has at this point been studying Thedas' magic craft for far longer than she was ever a magician's apprentice. That is unimportant.

"But reading things in books and observing the thing in practice - and I do mean practice, not in the field as we're all running pell mell from demons and Venatori and so on - has been something of a challenge. We no longer have anyone in the Gallows who is capable of working enchantments, and back before Misters Stark and Fitz and I became engaged in our current subject of study it was rather more difficult to convince any mage in the Gallows that an interest in magic didn't secretly come out of the intention of throwing them into the most convenient dungeon."

(It definitely has nothing to do with her personality. That would be ridiculous.)

"Have you experienced anything differently? From your description of the planes, the practice here and in your home seem rather more closely aligned."

“The same is true for Tassia. Arcane magic is ordered and refined into distinct schools of study.”

Richard joins her, folding himself into the second seat with a creak and a very late glance aside to assure himself that there’s nothing scandalous that’s been left out on Loxley’s half of the room. All clear.

“The forces these mages brandish seem chaotic -- barely tamed. I would offer you ‘lemonade,’ but we just have the wine.”

It occurs to him late that he should be polite, in the off chance she’s a day drinker. He pauses, uncertain of how explicit he should make the offer. When was the last time he hosted a guest? A decade ago? His pupils are pinned a little too fine for the low light while he dithers over moving on, sharpened bones in his face the only lingering evidence of any true jungle suffering. The sun wasn’t able to get a firm grip on him in the way Wysteria has. By the elbow.

From the darkness pooled behind his collar, lamplight glimmers faint off of dark scales and the flicker of a tiny tongue.

“I studied arcane magic for a time, and had some very limited talent for manipulating it, but have not been able to replicate that willful resonance with the Fade. What other power I can still channel is reduced, both in scope and -- coherence.”

There is something in there which clearly piques her interest, for her hands float up out of her lap to instead rest on the table and somehow that small realignment sheds what remained had remained of some latent uncertainty. It is like shifting from heels to the toe.

"Reduced how, would you say? Could you give me some example - 'There I might light a bonfire, and here I light candles.' It is strange to me, you see, how so many of us Rifters with some mage Talent, I suppose"—the 'T' is definitely capitalized—"seem to conduct themselves according to so many different series of rules.

"And it is not merely a question of learning the thing differently, as if we are speaking the same language but ordering the words in strange ways. Madame de Cedoux herself claims to have had little education in the subject when she was in her own world, yet was both able to learn here according to the rules of her own home and is unable to teach anyone the same. There are laws to how the world governs itself, Mr. Dickerson. Even the likes of what Corypheus does is bound by them. Yet here we are breaking them."

So not intrigued by the offer of wine, then.

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