AU: Our Riotous Defects

[Joshua Bernstein]

Oghma was a god with a diverse range of followers. Lawful or Chaotic, Good or Evil, and anything in between, if you valued knowledge then you were welcomed into his church.

Josh had known that, of course, when he'd first looked into ecclesiastical training. He was so eager to learn and to know, and he told himself that everyone deserved to be treated with respect. However, sometimes he had difficulties with interacting with other alignments. He was largely a pacifist, given to healing spells over anything particularly explosive. And his penchant for equality and fairness weren't exactly universal ideals.

Still, he was going to give the Drow bounty hunter the benefit of the doubt. It wasn't as though she was inherently evil, she just came from a culture that had far different values than his own.

Far, far, far, far different.

And as they had both been hired for the same mission -- retrieving an artifact stolen from Oghma's church, which was why Josh was there. His pacifism was why Rhea was there -- then he really needed to be polite and respectful.

They'd pursued the thief up the coast for several days, but couldn't seem to catch up. She had a head start on them, which was vexing, but she also didn't seem to be making any attempt to hide her presence.

"D'you think we'll ever catch her up?" Josh slumped over his saddle wearily. "She doesn't seem to ever -- what was that?"

[Rhea Hartman]

"That was a squirrel," Josh's companion said from up ahead. Rhea suppressed a sigh and pressed her thumb and forefinger against her eyes. She supposed, technically, she understood why the clerics had wanted to send one of their own with her. It was a holy artifact, after all. What she did not understand was why they had sent this cleric. Oghma must not want his artifact back all that badly, because otherwise he would have picked a crusader who knew what to do with a mace. Or at least wasn't fundamentally opposed to using one.

Given her choice, Rhea would have left the skittish cleric behind at the church. The Drow took her job seriously, and she didn't like having her hands tied by dead weight. At least it was kind of funny to make camp at night and watch the man try to pretend that he couldn't see her jetty skin and snow-white hair. Every once in a while she hurled a dagger at a tree just to make him jump. She gave him points for effort, if nothing else.

At Josh's question, Rhea checked the position of the shadows. The sun was starting to give her a headache. "We will," she replied as patiently as she could, which was not very. "She doesn't know we're following her, or she'd have gone off the road two days ago." Immediately after the church hired her, Rhea had scoured the local thief's network. Thanks to several...interviews that she had pointedly not told Josh about, she knew that their thief was headed for a rendezvous with a potential buyer at the Birch River Crossroads. "We're five miles out from the crossroads. We'll camp outside of town, wait until dark, and catch her before the drop." She looked back over her shoulder and quirked an eyebrow at him. "Unless you had another idea." Like asking around at the Sunday market, maybe.

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh did not, in fact, have another idea. Even his idealism was not strong enough to blind him to certain very obvious realities. For instance, that thieves did not allow just anyone to know their occupation. If most people knew, then they would be out of a job at best, and hanged at worse.

The cleric had no interest in hangings; he did have interest in retrieving his god's relic.

"I'll cast her into a stupor, then we can grab the relic and head out before she knows what happened," he suggested. He wasn't sure how Rhea had planned on getting the item back, but he was relatively confident that avoiding a fight could only be seen positively.

[Rhea Hartman]

Not completely useless then, she supposed. Despite the strong magical bent of her race, Rhea had never been any good at spells. The best she could manage was a sputtery fae fire that made her brother laugh to see it. This usually ended with her brother in a headlock, but that was how they expressed affection. Usually. 

A few dozen years ago, Rhea would have sneered at the idea of putting her target into a stupor before she attacked. Now, several missing teeth and stab wounds to the liver wiser, she was all on board with the unconscious plan. Except for one small detail. "You do know that we're taking her back with us, right?" she added with an impassive cast of her purple eyes.

[Joshua Bernstein]

"We are?" Josh rounded his mouth in surprise at the Drow's declaration. It had not occurred to him that they might retrieve more than just the artifact, and he wasn't sure what to think about this new information.

"How are we going to bring her back?"

He looked between their two steeds as if expecting a third to magically appear. If absolutely necessary, he supposes that she could be tied between one of their horses, but he didn't think this was ideal. And besides, there were other logistics questions remaining.

"Do we have enough food for a third?"

[Rhea Hartman]

If Rhea had been in a better mood, she would have doubled over laughing at Josh's flustered burst of questions. But after three days of daylight travel with a dangerously incompetent bounty hunting partner, his naivete was no longer amusing.

Rhea pulled her horse to a stop in the middle of the road. "Let me get this straight," she said as she turned around in her saddle to face her companion. Her eyes refracted teal underneath the shadow of her hood, and a growl rumbled somewhere behind the forced courtesy of her voice. "You wanted to just grab the relic and let her go? And, what, leave a note asking her not to do it again?" She jabbed her thumb over her shoulder. "We'll bring her back like you bring back any criminal, tied to the back of my horse. I'll walk." She shook her head in disbelief and continued down the road with a flick of her reins. "Of course we have food for her. Think I'd let her starve? We've got to get the drugs in her somehow."

[Joshua Bernstein]

"Ahhh...." Josh stammered in unintended affirmation that he had, in fact, planned on leaving the thief to go free after politely explaining just why stealing was bad. At least Rhea wasn't planning on starving her; given her propensity for violence he actually hadn't been sure she wouldn't have done just that.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a particularly long time until sundown, which meant that he didn't have the time to debate this new plan with her.

Maybe he should have brought it up before now.

"What drugs?"

[Rhea Hartman]

If Josh had dropped that stammer back in the city, Rhea would have thought he was making a rather good joke. Now, even after three days of traveling with the man where every conversation seemed to reveal new depths of his disjunction with reality, she had a hard time believing he was serious. Her mouth stood slightly open for a moment, and a few choice responses flicked through her mind. But in the end, she just shook her head and turned back to the road. "Just cast your stupor and get out of the way when we get there. I don't want to bring two bodies back with me."

At his second question, she closed her eyes briefly and breathed a plea for patience to any god that was listening. "Drugs," she said, in a voice that might be appropriate for speaking to a fifteen year-old, "Are herbs that you give to a bounty target after you catch them so that they don't work out their bindings and gut you in the middle of the night." Without turning around, she pulled a pouch out of the inside of her cloak and held it up so Josh could see. "Pigswool, matlock and ivybine." Two were sedatives and one was a mild poison. General effects were clumsiness, drowsiness, nausea and seeing double. It made spellcasting almost impossible and escape extremely difficult. She tucked the pouch back in her coat. "And it's this or I break her arms, so I wouldn't argue about it if I were you." 

[Joshua Bernstein]

If he'd been walking instead of riding, the ingredients list coupled with the visual of the pouch would have seen the cleric backing up a few steps. He was, as someone who worked spells, familiar with the side effects and found contemplating them unpleasant at best. Using them on another human being and potentially cutting them off from the ability to work magic seemed to him to be a great cruelty.

"She won't gut us in the middle of the night!" His objection was weak, given that she had gutted people to obtain the object. Who knew what lengths she would go to in order to keep it, and to avoid punishment? And her punishment would probably be rather severe, given the circumstances.

"....Are you sure you need to poison her?"

[Rhea Hartman]

"I've been doing this for sixty years, human," snapped the voice from inside the broad-shouldered hood. It seemed the Drow had finally lost her temper. "And I've seen more people killed by bandits than you've got brains in your head. Now if you want to your artifact back," she swung around in her seat, her mouth worked into a sneer underneath her shadowed eyes, "you'll shut up, do what I tell you, and stop coming up with ideas that will get us both killed. Idiot child," she muttered under her breath as she kicked her horse in the sides and cantered ahead on the trail.

Rhea stayed up ahead for the rest of the afternoon, far enough away to be out of the range of his moronic suggestions but close enough that she could hear any screams for help should he be attacked by a fox or a flock of sparrows or anything else he was equally unprepared to deal with. She wondered if he could even cast a stupor at all. Her spellwork was awful and only of the innate Drow variety, and even she knew that human magic was complex. She was beginning to doubt that anyone who suggested letting a bandit go would have the brains to pull it off.

Nevertheless, by sunset Rhea had started to feel bad for snapping at the cleric. It helped that the light, and with it her headache, were fading and she could finally see properly again. They had reached the outskirts of the crossroads, which was little more than a well, handful of shacks, and a thread of an unambitious river. "You don't have any seeing spells, do you?" she asked in an attempt to make the cleric feel a little more useful. It would be nice if they could find out exactly where their thief was, instead of waiting for her to show herself.

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh sulked as they rode, pride wounded but reluctant to further provoke the Drow woman. Instead he marinated in his sullenness, vacillating between mental reassurances to himself that he really was absolutely correct and knew what he was doing and the fear that Rhea was actually right and he didn't.

He hadn't come to a definite conclusion to this mental debate by sunset, but her question snapped him out of his haze.

"A seeing spell?" He whispered as he drew his steed closer to hers, hoping that she wouldn't consider that too forward. "Do you want enhanced vision or would you like more light?"

[Rhea Hartman]

"More light?" She glanced over at her companion with distaste. "Hell no, my headache's just starting to leave." She had finally pushed her hood back, and white hair and jetty skin blended strangely with the growing shadows of dusk. At this angle, her eyes were shining teal like a cat's. "We need to get out of sight."

Even as she spoke, Rhea swung one leg off of her horse and quietly dismounted. She made a clucking noise under her breath as she led her steed off the road and towards a small gully. She gestured with her head for Josh to follow. Whether from experience or some elf-magic, her steps were nearly silent as they ventured into the darkening undergrowth. Once they settled, she continued, "I mean some way we can figure out where she is before she shows herself. A scrying spell, or clairvoyance, a location spell if you have one." She looked dubiously at her companion as she explained. "We can wait for her to leave to meet her buyer, but if we know where she is we can set an ambush," she added in case this hadn't been clear. As she expected it wasn't.

[Joshua Bernstein]

Josh followed more clumsily, without the natural grace and silence of the Drow and her species. His booted feet crunched against the undergrowth and small branches and vines scratched against his legs and face, preventing him from achieving either speed or silence.

"Oh!" He breathed in understanding when she explained what she had wanted in the first place, panting from the exertion as they finally halted. He reached for one of the pouches tied about his waist, pulling out a scroll and mumbling the incantation under his breath. He furrowed his brow as he waited for the spell to work, then began haltingly to describe what he saw to Rhea.

"It looks as if she's at a farm. There are many hen houses about, and the clucking is obscuring the words she's exchanging with her companion."

[Rhea Hartman]

Rhea was surprised to see Josh promptly remove a scroll, and nearly shocked when it seemed to actually be producing something helpful. It looked like he could work spells after all. "Companion?" she asked sharply. "Describe her companion. And describe her as well," she added quickly.

[Joshua Bernstein]

Joshua chewed his lower lip as he examined the pair. It was somewhat difficult, given that neither of them seemed all that inclined to stand still, and the light was dim.

"She's slim, young, brunette. Her hair is short and curly. Her ears look a tad pointed, she might be a half-elf. It's hard to tell in this light. She's wearing close fitting trousers and a tunic with no sleeves, rather nondescript really. Her companion is an older woman. White hair, in a bun. I can't tell how long it would be if she let it down. She's in a dress, looks a bit fancy for anything you'd see on a farm."