PREVIOUS: 003: Trekking Through the Swamp
Tanvir's House
Tanvir's house is surprisingly... well, there's strange stains in the floor and dust in some corners, but it's painstakingly organized. Books of all shapes and sizes line the walls, and there's a healthy fire stoked in the hearth. It'd almost be charming, if it weren't for everything that's already happened tonight.
Lucya heads straight for the fire, but Tanvir's hand on her shoulder makes her freeze. He's smiling, but there's a slight cringe to it.
TANVIR: "Ah, ah. Take your shoes off first, would you...? And give me that cape."
LUCYA: "..."
Lucya looks over at Jagal like 'is this allowed??'
JAGAL: "Name's Jagal, or The Jackal, by the way. Thank you much for your hospitality."
Jagal still yoinks something clipped to his boot before he parts with his shoes. He scans the walls for anything of interest (read: stealable for resale at a good price), then meets Lucya's Look with one of amusement.
JAGAL: "If he decides to make off with it, I'll steal it back for you at half-price, how's that?"
LUCYA: "That's not what I..."
Tanvir barely seems to acknowledge Lucya as he pulls the cape away from her and drapes it by the fireplace, well away from his precious books.
TANVIR: "Stealing? What sort of hooligans have I let into my house?"
JAGAL: "Heyy, 'stealing' and 'stealing back' are two very different things."
TANVIR: "Oh, but I do love some animal symbolism. So you're a jackal, and she's, what... Mother bear? A capybara?"
LUCYA: "A capybara?!"
Lucya doesn't know what a capybara is, but feels like she should be offended anyway. Jagal has a vague concept of capybaras but is probably confusing them with some other obscure rodent. He laughs anyway.
JAGAL: "Kinda fits the color scheme, doesn't it? Why, what animal were you hoping for?"
LUCYA: "I-I don't know—I'm not an animal!! Me name is Lucya!"
TANVIR: "Humans are animals too, you know.~"
JAGAL: “Guess you can be The Human, then. Missing the spark, though, really.”
Tanvir flits over to a cupboard and puts on a kettle of sassafras tea.
TANVIR: "I've always liked the fishing birds myself, cranes and herons... And my name is Tanvir. But I imagine you know that already."
TANVIR: "And I imagine you've heard all sorts of horror stories from Celery, hm?"
JAGAL: “Seems like you’re in the right place, then. Not a whole lot of, uh, raptors comparatively, yeah?”
TANVIR: "There's a hawk or an osprey every once in a while, I suppose... Why do you ask?"
JAGAL: "Just once in a while, huh." (shrugs) "Eh, I whittle some, and they're my favorite subjects, so if you've seen any around... Hm. Wonder if I have any herons in here, actually."
Jagal digs rather idly through one of his bags.
Lucya huffs.
LUCYA: "What's this about...? If we're tae talk about birds, shouldn't we be talking about the exploding ones?? Outside Mx. Eleri's house, there were..."
TANVIR: "Oh, yeah, that was me."
Tanvir stirs the pot calmly.
LUCYA: "Ehh?!"
TANVIR: "Pretty funny, right? ...Oh no, don't tell me they didn't even dispel it for you?"
LUCYA: "Ye ruined me dress!! Me lovely dress..."
Lucya's set on the floor next to the fire, looking down mournfully at the flowers embroidered along the hem, now stained beyond recognition. Jagal gives her a brief "then why did you wear a lovely dress to a swamp" look without feeling it's worth voicing.
JAGAL: "There was no dispelling, no. Was there a point to those besides the, uh, very unique surprise? Seems like the townfolk aren't too keen on it as decor, either."
TANVIR: "Ah, but that's the point, I like my privacy! My field of study tends to make people ask questions, and I get tired of answering them... so I put on a little show to keep out the riffraff."
Tanvir starts to pour the tea, but Jagal's little figurines catch his eye. He saunters over to inspect them more closely.
TANVIR: "It's not my fault Celery moved in without researching the neighborhood... ah! You're quite good with your hands, little jackal.~"
Lucya watches the two of them interact with an incredulous look on her face.
Jagal raises his eyebrows a bit at the field of study thing, but apparently questions are unwelcome. Thankfully he's not characterized by his burning scientific curiosity.
JAGAL: "That I am."
Jagal does a split second's sleight-of-hand to change the sparrow in his hand to a goose. With the usual grin on his face, it's hard to tell exactly what kind of response that's meant to be. Lucya is even more baffled than before.
Tanvir laughs and hands Jagal a cup of the amber tea, then pours a second one for Lucya.
TANVIR: "Do you take requests? I could call a heron for you, if you like."
JAGAL: “Call one? Got your own, or just a frequent visitor?”
Jagal is sure he’s made some herons at some point, but there’s no telling if, when, where, or how they got handed off along the way. He stops searching and unsheathes one of his daggers to inspect the edge.
JAGAL: “Sure, though. I’m not the absolute fastest, but we’ll be here all night, anyway, yeah?”
TANVIR: "Ah... something like that. Let's see who's out there..."
Tanvir moves over to his desk by the window and reaches for the penholder. Instead of a pen, though, he grabs a letter opener and twirls it in his fingers... then forcefully slashes the blade across his hand.
LUCYA: "AUHH?! Are ye okay—what's going on—"
Lucya jumps to her feet in a panic, but Tanvir waves her off, then starts drawing patterns in the blood on his palm.
TANVIR: "What, they didn't even tell you about the blood magic? I'm going to have to get a new rival who can spread proper rumors about me... Oh, looks like it's Hilda tonight."
The heron from before lands on the deck just outside the window, its jerky, unnatural movements now all too visible in the firelight. It freezes like a statue, and Tanvir does a mock bow.
TANVIR: "Take all the time you need!"
Jagal is only briefly taken aback before looking on with some interest. Huh, to think you could actually do things with a motion he already made pretty casually. The movement and ensuing lack thereof of the bird is more unnerving, but he just applauds.
JAGAL: “Well, pleasure to meet you, Hilda."
JAGAL: "Yeah, seems like they could come up with better rumors for you than swiping a book nobody's heard of. You even do scrying, or just the blood stuff?" (nods at Hilda) "That's gotta take a lot of practice."
TANVIR: "Ahahaha! It's a rare fellow who reacts so coolly to hemomancy."
Tanvir's laugh is almost a giggle—it's a deeply unsettling sound to be coming out of this man.
TANVIR: "Some of it depends on the blood you're born with, of course, but there is quite a lot of practice involved. I've got no time for scrying—I just mind my own business like a normal person."
Jagal is definitely creeped out at this point, but he figures staying on this guy's side while he can is the best strategy. He needs a hot second to piece together what "hemomancy" means, and his vision skims the fresh cut he made just a little while ago.
LUCYA: "What is wrong with ye people...?"
After assuring herself that she doesn't really care all that much about the well-being of this creep, Lucya grumbles under her breath and starts browsing the shelves for anything of notice...
JAGAL: "Huh. Well, I am a rare fellow, I'll admit to that." (flicking some shavings into the fire as he goes) " 'Minding your own business' mean you wouldn't nab the book for another fun joke, either?"
TANVIR: "Little Celery is plenty capable of making a fool of themself on their own. Have you seen their house? It's probably just hidden under some papers."
🎲 Lucya rolls Gather Information, and gets a weak hit.
The books are all to do with anatomy, natural history, thanatology, and other things Lucya hasn't got much use for. Just barely peeking out over the top of one of the bookshelves, though, are some loose papers.
There's some strange marks and lines, and the words "Forge of Fate"... but Tanvir is staring at her, and she moves on to another book in the hopes that it didn't look like she was paying real attention.
Tanvir stays close to Jagal, but he's watching Lucya carefully.
TANVIR: "It is strange if it's actually missing, though. 'For the Advancement of Scrying,' that's the thing, right? Their Zurssan first edition?"
JAGAL: “That’s the one.”
TANVIR: "You see, it may be their pride and joy, but outside of academia it has absolutely no value whatsoever. If you want to learn to scry, go apprentice a scrying mage. If you want money, scrape the gold off the cover—that'll be worth more than the book."
TANVIR: "So whoever would steal such a thing? Either they're a huge Zurssan fan, or they don't really know what they stole..."
Tanvir lets his words hang in the air for a bit, then smiles and calls out to Lucya.
TANVIR: "Hey, little capy... okay, we'll workshop that one. You'll need to tell me what you're looking for if you want any hope of finding it! I've got my own funny way of organizing things."
LUCYA: "Auh! I-I was just browsing..."
Jagal squints briefly, unsure if Tanvir has already figured it out and is offering personal advice, but just mentally notes to scrape off the gold later.
JAGAL: “Guess so… Know any big Zurssan fans around here, then? Or how we could suss one out.”
TANVIR: "Eh? I told you, I've got no interest in the field. All I know is what Celery tells me when they're prattling on about their collection. Now if you're finished interrogating me..."
JAGAL: "Oh, didn't know if they wrote anything else more up your alley. Thanks for humoring us, though, do appreciate it."
Tanvir watches Jagal work for another moment or two, then leaves for his room. He stops under the door frame briefly.
TANVIR: "I'm afraid I don't have any spare bedrolls... but I hope it's still an improvement over sleeping in the mud! Ahaha."
He bids good night and closes the door. Lucya immediately moves to the one couch in the main part of the cabin. Jagal bids good night likewise and stays whittling away where he's seated at the toasty fireside.
LUCYA: "Auhh... Are we really staying here?! He's ginnae do a blood magic on me while I sleep!"
JAGAL: "Ha! Then don't sleep." (shrugs) "Or try elsewhere, if you really wanna go kicking around the muck in the dark again. Apparently there's a fair bit of range on that hemomancy, though, so good luck."
LUCYA: "...I guess he hasn't done anything to us yet... At least not on purpose? But..."
Lucya sighs and tucks her feet underneath her on the couch. As Jagal continues whittling—the heron outside the window hasn't moved an inch—she pulls out some string from a bag and starts winding it into a charm.
📝 For the record, that's a Talisman ritual she's doing.
Jagal glances over at the crafting but isn't interested enough to keep watching. For now he'll keep up his own project and wait for everyone to sleep, if he can.
After an hour or so, Lucya finishes her tiny, homely string doll, then ties it to the cording on the handle of her axe. Despite her misgivings about the situation, she falls asleep astonishingly quickly after that.
There hasn't been a sound out of Tanvir's room since he closed the door.
Jagal may be a bit suspicious of the complete silence over yonder, but greed wins over caution, and he silently removes the book to see about scraping off the gold. Tome defacement isn't something he's done before, though, so there's no telling the best way to go about it.
🎲 Jagal rolls Secure an Advantage... and misses. This is possibly the most we've cheered over failing a roll.
JAGAL: "Hmm."
Jagal turns the book over to see if he's dealing with the back cover, too—heck if he remembers what it looked like—and with all his whittling gear still in hand somehow manages to drop it in the process.
The sleeping capybara awakens.
LUCYA: "Bliddy 'ell, I finally get tae sleep and yer clattering about like—"
She sees the book, reads the title, and her eyes bug out of her head. It takes all her willpower not to scream at him.
LUCYA: "That's—that's—Are ye KIDDING me?!"
JAGAL: "...Think I found it. So if you could keep things down?"
LUCYA: "Give me that!!! And keep yer wee pointy things off it!"
JAGAL: "The 'wee pointy things' are just for me whittling, calm down!"
Jagal does still have the partial heron in hand as well, to his dubious credit.
LUCYA: "I swear if ye've had this the whole bliddy time, I'll..."
JAGAL: "Of course I haven't, why would I come all this way if I—"
She mostly manages to keep her voice down, but she is by no means gentle in the way she grabs the book away from him or inspects his bags. One of them does seem a little less full than usual...
LUCYA: "You!!!!!"
JAGAL: (putting his hands up) "Fine, take it, see if it looks like the right one to you. Heck if I know how to spell 'Zurssan'."
🎲 Lucya rolls Gather Information and gets a strong hit! The full ruse is uncovered...
Lucya is fuming, but she bites her tongue until she gets a look at the book herself—and it's a good thing she does, too.
LUCYA: "Auh...! Ye didn't do anything t'the book, did ye? This is how ye found it?"
The cover says "For The Advancement of Scrying," but the pages inside are a different, much more grisly matter... And the binding is very, very loose.
JAGAL: "Swear I didn't do anything, yeah. Why, something wrong with it?"
LUCYA: "W-well, the outside, that part's right, but on the inside..."
Lucya opens the book to the title page, where it very clearly says "Advanced Blood Magick" in elegant capital letters. Jagal stares at it and nods slowly like he has any idea what the problem is.
JAGAL: "That does seem... Yeah."
LUCYA: "Seems?! It's obviously—"
LUCYA: "Auh, ye cannae read, can ye...? It's a blood magic book! S-so that nasty wee man, he was up tae something after all..."
JAGAL: [x] "It's what??"
LUCYA: "Aye, look..."
Lucya looks for a particularly gruesome ritual diagram to show him. Jagal is not really catching on at a reasonable rate of speed but nods anyway.
JAGAL: "I see."
LUCYA: "A-and if ye've had it the whole time... then he did this way before! But why—"
Shattering glass interrupts Lucya mid-sentence, as the heron crashes its head through the window and looks directly at them with pale, dead eyes.
LUCYA: "AUH—hide it hide it put it back—"
JAGAL: "I clearly said I didn't—Ack!"
🎲 Jagal rolls to hide the book, and gets a strong hit. It doesn't make too much difference, though, since Tanvir's already kinda guessed he had it.
Jagal swooces that thing the heck back into his bag.
JAGAL: "You, uh, tired of modeling over there?"
🎲 Lucya rolls to quickly search the room for where the actual copy of For The Advancement of Scrying could be, and gets a miss.
The heron opens its beak, but no sound comes out. It steps through the hole in the window on its long, spindly legs, and a door opens... It seems like the jig is up.
TANVIR: "Oh Hilda, I just replaced that window a few months ago! Now what... did you see... them do?~"
He leans in as if the heron is whispering something to him. It's impossible to tell if they're actually communicating or if he's just being a huge weirdo.
Lucya looks desperately over to Jagal, hand hovering over her axe. Jagal eases towards his boots while Tanvir seems busy... Tanvir-ing.
LUCYA: "I-I didn't do anything!! We were just having a spat! Why's it matter—"
TANVIR: "Yes, you were having a spat, in my house, at 1 in the morning..."
TANVIR: "About MY book.~"
JAGAL: “Which is, in fact, also in your house. Doesn’t sound like that should be a problem.”
TANVIR: "And it doesn't have to be a problem, if it stays that way... But things are more complicated than that, aren't they?"
TANVIR: "I don't know why you have that book, but... Well, you can read, girl, can't you? You can see why it'll be inconvenient for me if I let you take that back to Celery..."
LUCYA: "...But..."
TANVIR: "But what? Just leave the book here, and I won't necessarily have to kill you. Seems like a square deal to me."
JAGAL: "'Necessarily'??"
JAGAL: (shaking it off) "All right, let's just talk a minute. Not sure how taking out two people is more convenient than, what? Someone who doesn't like you... not liking you more? 'Sides, we didn't vow to bring them back your book, anyway. How's a swap? Sounds much squarer to me."
🎲 Jagal rolls to Compel Tanvir to do the trade. It's a weak hit.
Tanvir laughs.
TANVIR: "Oh, you people can't take a joke.~ But it is your fault we're in this pickle in the first place, isn't it? How about this?"
TANVIR: "I keep the books until the next sundown. You don't get to ask me any questions. I'll swap the covers back, you can return Celery's little trophy book for whatever measly reward they've scraped together, and in exchange for publicly embarrassing me..."
He twirls his penknife.
TANVIR: "I get your blood samples."
LUCYA: "AUHH!!!"
Jagal has many things he could say about that, but Lucya's reaction derails his train of thought. He sighs and pushes his sleeve up to reveal another good smattering of scars instead.
JAGAL: "Yeah, sure. Least you're being civilized about it."
LUCYA: "Are ye mad?! He's ginnae do a blood magic on us! I told ye!!"
Tanvir opens another drawer in his desk to retrieve a pair of small vials.
TANVIR: "It's not like I can do the puppet trick on anything bigger than that heron, if that's what you're worried about. This is a purely academic pursuit. Now would you roll up your sleeve like this nice young man?"
Lucya whimpers, but she starts untying one of her bracers.
Despite his penchant for drama, Tanvir collects his blood samples with surprising efficiency. Lucya grimaces and squeezes her eyes shut, but she barely even feels the knife slice her arm.
She opens her eyes in time to see him collect the last few blood drops from Jagal, only to grimace even more as she watches him lift up the vial and... sniff it.
TANVIR: "Oh, interesting..."
Jagal watches the process with some vague interest, at least until that.
JAGAL: "Riiight... I'll just get back to whittling, then."
Jagal does briefly see if he can smell anything off on his side but gives up on that quickly.
LUCYA: "Wh—What the—"
TANVIR: "Ah ah! I said no questions!"
Tanvir cackles to himself and disappears into his room once more. Lucya shakes her head as she rolls her sleeve back down.
LUCYA: "Ye gods... Do ye always attract this type a' man?"
JAGAL: “Well, I am universally attractive. Comes with the territory, I’m afraid.”
Lucya makes a face when he says "universally attractive." Jagal sets up by the fire again and rotates his whittling in his hands for a minute before getting back to it.
JAGAL: “Why, didja think you’d only run into kindly old pushovers in your travels?”
LUCYA: "Ach, I'm just glad he isn't yer type! Ye had me goin' there for a bit."
JAGAL: "Yeah, I generally prefer 'em a little more, uh. Feminine."
She sits back down on the couch, but she's a little too frazzled to sleep just yet.
LUCYA: "I will say, I thought there'd be more hunting and foraging, and less, auh, exploding birds? Like, this is weird, aye?"
Jagal glances out the ex-window at Hilda a little longer than the past few times and keeps carving.
JAGAL: "It's weird, sure, but all kinds of weird things happen out here. There's the Wailing Ones in the Hinterlands that drag you into the shadow paths if you trap the wrong game, some half-Horrors in the Deep Wilds that're still a little human—oh, can't leave out the cannibalistic ritual sacrifices you see on the Coast sometimes—and then there's some guys in the Veils who won't even offer you a drink if you don't wear your hair long enough, which is really unforgivably strange."
LUCYA: "Auhh..."
Lucya tries to follow Jagal's rapid-fire story across the map of the Ironlands hanging on the wall nearby.
LUCYA: "Ach-- the Veils! That's the mountains...? Good thing Brynn never cuts his hair..."
LUCYA: "...How scary is it, in the mountains?"
Jagal was hoping for a better reaction than that, but his disappointment is as muted as most of his non-sarcastic emoting.
JAGAL: "Scary? Eh. Depends on how good of a fire you can manage and how you feel about the dark and the cold. And wyverns. Plenty of other fun things around, but those're pretty brutal." (whistles) "Why, you planning to go or just wondering?"
LUCYA: "Wyverns...? What're those?"
JAGAL: “Oh, you’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.”
Lucya sighs and wraps herself up in her (now somewhat drier) cape.
LUCYA: "I told ye, I swore a vow tae find me friend... And all I know is he said he was going t'the mountains. So, 'less Mx. Eleri scries him somewhere else..."
Jagal doesn’t remember her telling him this, but that’s probably just because he doesn’t care.
JAGAL: “Ha! Goood luck, then. Maybe he’ll even still be alive, who knows.”
Lucya flinches and starts to say something, but decides against it for tonight. Instead she pulls her cape burrito closer.
LUCYA: "...Aye, I hope so. Naught t'be done right now, I s'pose..."
She watches him whittle for a few moments longer, then rolls over to face away from the fire.
LUCYA: "...Good night, Jagal."
JAGAL: "Night."
Jagal just keeps carving away, in almost comically small pieces. He has no intention of falling asleep under this guy's roof, so might as well try to keep his excuse available all night.