#dragonmastergerome

As far as he was concerned, being in Ylisse just meant for new customers. Future gold was still gold all the same. It had taken some time to drum up business in the town near where the Shepherds were camped but he finally managed to procure a map and a couple clients willing to blindly trust a stranger with their packages.

Cherche sat under a tree, passing a sewing needle back and forth through a piece of scrap cloth she had found. Minerva dozed, her scaled body curved around the tree; lazy coils of smoke rose from the wyvern's nostrils and her rider couldn't help but smile at the sight.

After securing the final stitches, Cherche looked down at her hands to see the finished product - a tiny little stuffed doll of black cloth, in the vague shape of a wyvern. It was crude if anything, but held some likeness to her dear Mineyvykins. 

Feeling a tug of maternal emotion in her chest, Cherche realized that she would have sewn such toys for her own child. And she did have a child - a brooding, masked wyvern rider who was in truth closer to a man than a boy. A child from another timeline, who thus far had proven to be battling his own demons and had no want for familial affection.

Cherche stared across camp at the training grounds, where she could see the aforementioned son sparring with some of the other split-timeline children. Even from a distance she had no trouble making out his tall form and red hair, accentuated by the sharp mask that covered a third of his face.

"...Gerome," Cherche said aloud, sighing just a little.

Strange. The idea of stumbling across wyvern armor out in the open was an unusual one. If Gerome were left in Yarne’s hypothetical shoes he may have ignored the pieces in fear of them being a trap. But here Yarne stood, seemingly healthy. 

Truthfully, it had been a while since Minerva had been equipped with new armor. Her current set had grown old and lost it’s luster, and likely some of it’s safety with it. It was worn, and replacement armor wasn’t a bad idea at all now that he thought about it. 

He could talk with the taguel for a while. If not for anything else, for the sake of seeing this armor for himself.

"I’ll be the judge of that."

"Oh! Uh alright, here come on they're back at my tent." He waved a little for Gerome to come, hurrying ahead through the tents "Its uh..only a couples pieces..but I thought maybe you'd still want them."

When Gerome wanted to be left alone, he did a good job at keeping himself hidden. Lucina had searched high and low for his tent but there was no sign of him anywhere. She tried to find some sort of clue to help her in her search.

Gerome was a very close friend of hers since childhood. She feared the idea of them being distant after knowing each other for so long. And after all the trouble he's done to keep her identity a secret for as long as she needed it to be, she couldn't thank him enough for all his help.

Now the mask she has donned in order to hide the brand of exalt in her eye was now sliced in half, shattered with a few bits missing on that day's battle. Since then, she had no further use for the mask.

Her secret has been long revealed by the one person she wanted to keep it from, her own father. All she had left of it were its remains to which she felt slightly embarrassed to admit she has kept this whole time. It served her well, and it wasn't something she was willing to throw away so easily like it was nothing.

At long last, she came across a tent that was far from the rest back at the camp. The princess' eyes squinted to get a better look. Could that be where Gerome has been hiding?