#eranehn

HA! Thanks, @eranehn, I will put the blame for the below ridiculousness squarely on you. And just because I’m like that, this is now going to be part of the next chapter of Fine Print, because I just couldn’t pass it up.

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Fae’s assessment of Anise’s oddity had been an understatement. They found her by an outdoor hearth, stooped over a simmering cauldron that wafted pungent steam into the too-still air. 

The old woman straightened from her stirring and squinted at them from the shadows of her hood. Her eyes traveled from Vera to the merc, back to Vera, and then she scowled and thrust her spatula back into the cauldron with a bit more enthusiasm than the task seemed to require. “First things first, weapons down, over by that chopping block, if it pleases ye.” She waved her gnarled hand at a chipped tree stump. “And don’t just stand there, come closer so I can take a look. So, which is it?”

Vera traded a glance with the Dunmer, who looked as nonplused as she felt. “Which is it…what?” she tried.

Anise adopted a teapot stance and brandished the spatula, dribbling drops of brownish sludge onto the dusty soil at her feet. “Bit late in the season for coy, aren’t you? Always the same with old Anise, two sides of the coin, flip, flip, flip, see where it lands, hmm? If you’re here to get rid of your mongrel, girl, I’ll do it, but it’ll cost you. And if it’s the other problem, then I suggest you look at the moons and do some counting before you spread ‘em, eh? Though seeing how that Dunmer trailing you is getting a bit long in the tooth, maybe the fault’s with the seed, not with the soil, hmm?”

Vera ignored Sero’s sudden, completely unconvincing coughing fit, and shook her head. “Just looking for someone to sell us some healing potions, or a few ingredients.”

The old woman’s lips pinched in irascible distaste. “Going adventurin’, are ye?” She spat into the dust. “Adventurers. Always traipsing through here on their way to Brittleshin, stomping ‘round like mammoths, clanking louder than a pile of pots after a feast day, stepping on my carrots. Healing potions, I might have, but nothing else, ye hear? And it’ll cost ye, but I’d wager less than that Imperial swindler in the village would charge ye for the pleasure of gawking at his pretty sister. Not much gawking at old Anise, but best yer eyes stay starved than yer bellies, I say.” Nugget of wisdom thus delivered, the old woman released the spatula into the pot and turned towards the cabin. “Wait here, don’t go wandering ‘round. Mind Mika, she’s pollinating, and don’t go antagonizing Cort, or ye’ll be regretting it.” 

The door to the cabin creaked open, then banged shut, leaving Vera and the Dunmer alone in the courtyard.

“Hags,” Sero said, in the same tone Anise had reserved for “adventurers.”

Vera scanned their surrounding, but the pines stood still, only the quiet gurgle of the river and the distant, shrill trills of a thrush filling the silence. “Who is Cort?” 

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” The merc drifted towards a nearby boulder, no doubt to sit down and roll a smoke while they waited. “If I were to guess-” He never finished. The boulder—a mossy, muted grey behemoth half-buried in the scraggly grass—trembled, stirred, chirped, and began to rise.

They scrambled backward. Vera groped for her new bow, but her hand closed on empty air. She glanced between the tree stump and the gargantuan mudcrab emerging from its torpor. It was grotesque in its enormity, and, judging by the craggy, oyster-covered carapace, absolutely ancient. Leathery eye stocks rotated asynchronously, taking their measure. It screeched—a bassy metallic sound—before pivoting to the merc. It froze for a moment, its oversized antenna swaying, tasting the air. Then it chirped again and lifted its claws. Vera stared in vague revulsion at the creature’s pale lichen-mottled abdomen. 

Fire crackled as the Dunmer gathered a flame spell. 

“Wait!” Vera cried out, before he could set the oversized crustacean on fire. “If that’s Cort, then we probably shouldn’t kill it.”

“I don’t think it’s in the mood to chat, hlakhes.” 

The mudcrab screeched, stretched upward, and waved its monumental claws in odd, repetitive circles. Vera cocked her head to the side, panic giving way to incredulity, and then to an absurd sort of hilarity. “Sero, it’s not trying to attack. Though I think you might want to see if it’ll buy you a drink first.”

“I beg your pardon?” 

“I think it’s trying to make a good impression.” She chanced a glance at the merc. “Must be your chitin armor.”

“It’s wh…” His face twisted in a mixture of disgust and alarm. “Sheogorath’s mangy beard.” He took a step backward.

An old, craggy fruit tree extended its branches along the western wall of the cabin. Vera motioned with her head. “On the count to three. One, two-”

They were half-way up the tree when she risked a look back. The crabtrosity had scuttled closer, waving its pincers energetically and belching forth a string of vexed-sounding chirps and clicks.

“I think you’ve hurt its feelings,” Vera managed, shaking with laughter and trying not to topple off her branch.

Below her, the merc snarled a “I’ll send some flowers to apologize,” and pulled his feet up, out of reach of the pincers.

The door creaked, followed by the dusty shuffle of wooden shoes. “Met Cort, have you?” 

Anise emerged from behind the cabin, carrying a large frying pan, swinging it like a mace. She strode forth, entirely undaunted by the mudcrab’s size, and brought the pan onto its carapace with a resounding clang. “Shoo, you old lech, shoo, now! No way to treat guests, is it?” 

The mudcrab wheezed in protest, but, with a few more pan-shaped encouragements, slowly brought its pincers down. 

“Shoo, I said!” The hag thrust the frying pan in the direction of the river. 

The crustacean lumbered down the embankment, somehow managing to look both peeved and contrite. A loud splash announced its retreat into the water.

This ask, tho...I have outlined five chapters of this randomness and of course, this is what has finally broken my writer’s block (through much grinding and gnashing of teeth). Here’s the first chapter (it’s way longer than it has any business being)...you’re welcome (and I’m sorry)!

The salty, fishy stench hits Jadzia first, shocking her olfactory system awake before she even realizes that she’s no longer in the engineering bay of the Defiant. Her eyes open begrudgingly, almost fearful of locating the source of such an offensive odor -- worse than anything she ever had to endure in all of Curzon’s dealings with the Klingons, even worse than congealed room temperature Cardassian tojal with yamok sauce -- but all she sees is darkness.

She taps her combadge.

She hears nothing but the ringing in her own ears.

Her eyes finally start to adjust, playing an infuriatingly slow game of catch-up with the unwelcome acuteness in her sense of smell. She can just barely make out trace amounts of light swimming blurrily above her, but it’s not enough to make any kind of sense of her surroundings.

She tries to sit up, but everything is wobbly, she realizes, and there’s a sharp shooting pain behind her eyes whenever she tries to move or look or do much of anything, really. She manages to reach a hand up to her temple, tracing a trail of dried blood to a cut there. It stings when she touches it, but it’s mostly superficial and mostly done bleeding, nothing a dermal regenerator can’t handle, anyway. She moves her fingers gingerly toward the back of her head. “BaQa'!” she hisses as she touches the large tender lump she finds there...this one might be a bit trickier to deal with. But it’s not the first time she’s been concussed. And it probably won’t be the last.

She takes a deep breath through her nose and tries to focus through the pain, the sharpness of it renewed with every fresh whiff, every sound, every attempt to look or move or think.

In seven lifetimes, she’s endured far worse. In this lifetime, alone. Figure it out, Old Man!

Thank you for the lovely (complicated) one! I’ll cheat a bit and use the Gabinia/Undnar ficlet to answer this one :-D

He comes to her in the dark hours, when the town crier has fallen silent. He is not one of her ordinary supplicants, for such regularity would presuppose a habit. With time (though she does not calculate such things) his visits multiply, accumulated into repetitions too unpredictable to form a pattern. He has the merit of arriving between the whispers of her Goddess. 

With him, the signs fall silent.

His purse is full, his smile is empty, his words shapeshift, though through no Daedric gift—this talent is all his, and she lets him hone it over months and years counted by the clinking of coins deposited under her floorboards. She waits in Solitude, though rarely lonely, for her Divine speaks softly between each syllable. His ears are trained for harsher sounds, but only silence greets him. When she was younger, she would have pitied him, but she is not one to lay a claim on others’ dignity.

He does not seek her wisdom, nor does she offer it, for unwelcome gifts accrue a debt that suffers no repayment. She does not allow for their arrangement to be one-sided, but what she receives in exchange, she does not keep. 

He trains his teeth on her tenacity: a bard, he says, with a writ to prove it, with adulation waiting for him in every capital. He is not a man to sing of others’ heroism, though he does know not his yet. 

He does not seek the Goddess’s guidance, as he claims, nor satisfy much simpler needs, and it amuses her to point this out, and what passes between them is what passes between all rivals: the subtle tug-of-war of language. When they are done, in the faint glow of the auroras, his words are nothing but mundane, but on his tongue, they gain new alienness. She adds them to her cup, a bitter tincture. 

He is an upstart, and his devotion falls accordingly.

Edited because, in my rush to self-deprecate, I forgot to say thank you for the compliment! ❤️Oof.

The answer to this is neither educative nor very entertaining, I’m afraid...I almost always write dialogue first. My WIP drafts are just conversation after conversation that I want characters to have. They look like scripts, with like zero stage direction or plot or purpose. Some go absolutely nowhere for literal pages while characters bullshit and tiptoe around each other because I just love hearing/imagining people talking in my head. 

This is a direct result of having spent far too much of my life studying conversation on an infuriatingly micro-scale. I write eye contact and nods and hand gestures/interactions with objects in the immediate environment next (because this was my dissertation, that’s why, and also because that stuff, imo, is what begins to connect words with their actual interpersonal meanings, blah blah blah...yadda yadda yadda). Then maybe, if I’m feeling particularly in tune with what a character is thinking (or if it’s very different from what they’re saying), I will add the layers of introspection/internal dialogue. I am a shifty bastard about POV, but I do try to keep to at least one character’s words/actions/thoughts per paragraph break. ;)