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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.

“Madame de Cedoux reported resorbing memories from later years of her life some time after arriving here, wherein she might have accumulated additional knowledge.” Theoretically. They could ask her if that’s the case.

Despite the distinctive stoke of his interest behind a beat of sharper focus, he is reserved well short of fumbling his crystal out onto the table and suggesting they call her to ask right now.

“If she studied in that time. Have you experienced anything similar in your two years?”

Dick watches closely for her answer before offering his.

“At one point, I was certain I could breathe life back into the recently deceased, given the chance." And the right motivation. "I could speak with the dead. I was capable of defending allies, of compelling truth, of creating water, or fire. Here I heal in a very -- limited capacity.”

"I have been working on a few things here and there - things I knew the theory of already from Kalvad, if not the practice. If there has been any difficulty in the practice, I would chalk it up to a natural necessity for repetition and not to any challenge presented by Thedas itself," is her easy answer.

It is one she promptly decides she regrets the moment Mr. Dickerson begins to describe his own, ah, challenges. Something in her expression - which until this point has been more or less as open as one of the gossipy pamphlets printed and distributed in Kirkwall's Hightown - thins faintly and the line of her spine slowly takes on the distinctly uncomfortable quality of a ramrod.

She has returned to picking absently at her fingertips.

"And this spellwork - conversing with and raising the dead, truth telling. Are these common magics in Tassia?"

There’s a claw-prick catch to his attention once she’s started to recede -- a departure from the low-burning enthusiasm he’d been building up beneath this exchange of information. It’s clear that he noticed, and that he noticed almost immediately.

He hoods his brow again, puzzled or perhaps concerned if we’re generous, second-guessing as he walks back through the list he just provided. Trained rats are concerned when the bell they’re ringing to receive treats suddenly stops making sound.

Was it the necromancy?

“In a manner of speaking.” Being cagey will definitely help what he has done here. He pauses. Not wanting to lie outright makes reassurance more difficult. “Nothing that would be considered aberrant for a human.”

"How fantastic," is light and bright and strangely at odds with her appearance of being dipped feet first into an ice bath. He has noticed and she has noticed that he has noticed and she is going to continue to talk as it seems the most natural thing to do. "Tassia must be a very rich place indeed with so much latent Talent. In Kalvad, you would have been quite the respected magician with skills such as those. It is very impressive. And I am only sorry to hear that your skills have been so diminished by your arrival in Thedas, for I imagine it must be rather inconvenient to you."

And then she stops. Her smile is fixed carefully into place.

Silence. Richard listens to her as if she’s railing off a secret plan of attack for him to pass on to a superior without writing it down. His expression changes very little, save that his teeth part after she’s finished for him to draw in a breath, deep and slow.

“Miss Poppell, have you ever spoken to anyone about -- ?”

It’s a genuine question, gently posed, and invitingly open-ended.

Edited (tweak) 2020-07-23 09:02 (UTC)

She is quick with an answer. The silence makes her skin crawl.

"Oh, no. Or, hardly at all. As I said, I have written down some general details as to the nature of my skill which I believe might be in my personnel file, but with very few exceptions I don't believe they are known whatsoever. And so there has been very little in the way of comparing notes, so to speak. And to be candid, prior to Mr. Fitz and Mr. Stark's arrival, I had almost no interest in the subject whatsoever. What difference does it make to me where Rifters come from or what they are? There is quite enough in Thedas' arcane history and theory to consume the day. But the pair of them are quite interested in the whole idea, and I will admit that it has inspired what I hope is a natural curiosity in the whole thing. Hence Mr. Fitz's and I's survey. I am very fond of systems, you see. And of modifying them, I suppose. And the more we have studied the rifts and what comes through them, the more compelling the whole subject is. I should discuss the subject with Jenny Lou as well. She spoke of educating herself—"

An intake of breath. She glances up from her hands to him.

"Perhaps it is a question of the strength of the conduit. Like a pipe whose diameter has been throttled. For some people, there is no difference whatsoever for all their Talents fit securely within what is allowed by the separation of the Veil to be conducted through the Fade. But for others, or for some powerful spellwork, they fall beyond the diameter of the thing and so cannot pass through. Were you to travel to the Fade itself, perhaps you might conduct yourself as you're accustomed."

“The Jenny Lou who tried to propagate the word ‘himbo’ and asked what would happen if the Maker ‘fucked somebody’ in a public forum?”

That Jenny Lou?

Richard’s scrutiny falters long enough for him to look doubtful.

“Perhaps,” he allows, late, for the idea of a throttle. “The aether I draw from is not -- strictly speaking -- my own. I had assumed there might be some barrier or filter here between myself and my ‘overseer,’” that’s a word he used earlier in a completely different context, sure, “muddling the connection. If the tether was instead forced to ‘thin’ through this pipe…” His knee bounces for just a few seconds before he catches it, and stifles the movement.

“Regardless, no talent is involved, and there is nothing impressive about it. I have an obligation. I initially believed Thedas might be a place of punishment.”

He smiles for the first time. It’s barely there, and a little grim, like he expects that could still turn out to be the case. Another gathering breath, and he changes tack.

“It surprises me to hear that it took the arrivals of Stark and Fitz to inspire you into the study the nature of your own existence here.”

There are questions there - the magic is not his own? How then is it transferred to him? Does it have something to do with the snake coiled there behind his collar even now? In what way does this 'overseer' manage that? What is he meant to have done? What obligation is so serious that he might be sent elsewhere (this being a rather broad application of the term indeed) for somehow failing to meet it? -, but there is more pressing business at hand.

Namely, justifying what seems very much like an oversight when it's phrased like he has said it.

"Misters Stark and Fitz have, I gather, certain obligations of their own in the places they left behind. I have no such thing, and so Thedas itself has historically been a far more appealing mystery to me than what I am or how I came to be here."

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