#pttl

Hasn’t jlo’s look been on drag race? Or something very similar to it? I know i’ve seen it before but can’t remember where or who it was.

“My word, Rook, you are as relentless on the board as you are in the field. Wherever did you learn?” Vesper bristled at this, recalling her peers’ condescending tones whenever they asked how she had gained some skill without parents to guide her, money for lessons, instruments or boards or more than a closet full of robes and as much parchment as she could scrounge. “In the orphanage, when I was young. Then Professor Hezenkoss gave me a set in my first year of Vigilia. A hand-me-down. I used to play against myself.” She gave a dark smile, more for the memory than for him. “I was an excellent opponent.” Emmrich returned the smile, warmly, like a spelled mirror that reflected only light. He mirrored her at the board too, placing his bishop at g5, the perfect inverse of her actions two moves back. “Who won?” “Oh, professor.” She kept her voice light, ignoring the bishop’s threat to her knight to push a pawn two spaces forward. “There can be no victory when there are no stakes.” He moved his queensguard pawn forward one space, then paused, as if assessing that second square. Bolder, riskier. He lifted his fingers without further motion and settled back. “It’s moments like these that remind me why you are the rook, and I the mere pawn.” He chuckled at his own joke, and she found herself shaking her head with a smile at the ill fit of the metaphor. She nudged her own pawn forward, knowing his queen would dart out at the easy lure and allow her knight to threaten his most precious piece. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a bishop at least.” “And why is that?” Queen to d4, predictable as an artificer’s clock. Her knight charged, and he retreated a single space to defend. “You’re ambitious,” she said, pushing forward the pawn on the kingside edge. “Point you in a direction and it’s all you’ll focus on. You’re bold enough to cross half the board in a single play.” His knight claimed a black pawn, her knight claimed a white. His rook leapt out to take her queen, but she wouldn’t need it; he was overly confident now, and would choose to press the advantage rather than castle in time. His king needed a rook to protect it, but he had yet to come to the realization himself. “But you see the world as black and white. Good and evil. Moral and immoral.” Her rook came out to join her knight on the hunt, his bishop retreating one square to make room for the king’s eastward flight. “With that mindset, you’re like the bishop - you only have access to half the board.” Rook back, knight forward, black bishop jumping four squares diagonal to check the white king where it huddled exposed at the edge of the fourth rank. “Trapped forever on a square of a single color.”

“I’ve met grazing cattle with more brains than this lot, Volkarin,” said Johanna by way of greeting. She was sitting cross-legged atop her disaster of a desk, long skirted trousers pooling over her legs and off the edges, her eyes staring distantly up at the greenish verdigris of the ironwork that decorated every corner of the Necropolis Halls. “Have you?” said Emmrich, restraining a smile at the thought of Johanna Hezenkoss tramping about the Fields of Ghislain in waxweather boots amidst a herd of lowing cattle. “Obviously not!” she snapped. “Ugh. For a lover of poetry you’re so literal-minded.” “Forgive me, Johanna,” he laughed, the wisp chittering from behind him as he crossed the room to stand beside the desk. “I didn’t realize you had developed an interest in the poetic arts!” “Pah,” she grumbled. “Any interest I had was crushed like a carpet beetle after that blighted reading you dragged me to last month.” She hopped off the desk and strode to the corner of the room, bending over a trunk brimming with bones and crystals and scattered miniature figurines from her beloved Paths of Glory. The wisp pulsed with curiosity, dancing close and bobbing about Johanna’s head as if it were a glowmoth and she the torchlight. “Can’t you control that thing?” she complained, emerging with a filigreed wooden box in both hands. “Control it?” Emmrich leaned forward, peering eagerly down at the box atop the desk where she had begun to unlatch it. “Quite the opposite. I’d like to teach it.” “You just can’t help yourself. These doting dunderheads aren’t enough for you?” “Not as a student, Johanna; as an apprentice.”

“You look like a cow who’s just noticed the moon. The Lucidarium isn’t that thrilling,” scoffed Hezenkoss, and Vesper laughed. “... There’s a boy,” she said finally. Hezenkoss cocked an eyebrow. “I like him. And… I think he likes me.” She suddenly felt unbearably foolish. Why would Johanna Hezenkoss care about her teenage crush? The woman who had invented the beamlight lantern, who had written Enfolding the Fade, who had single-handedly fought off a spirit of destruction that killed seven junior necromancers in its rampage through the Lower Mortuary? Besides, Hezenkoss didn’t even like boys. “Nevermind,” she hurried on. “It’s silly.” To her surprise, Hezenkoss tilted her head noncommittally, as if she would weigh the alleged silliness of Vesper’s feelings herself. The professor set her pen down and gazed at her for a moment. “I’m hardly a model of successful relationships! In case you hadn’t noticed,” Hezenkoss said wryly, folding her arms so that the dark ink of her tattoo was hidden. Vesper noticed that Hezenkoss was pale, like herself, with fine dark hairs and the slender but muscular forearms of someone who did a great deal of work with their hands. It occurred to Vesper that while the professor could never be considered a beautiful woman there were things about her that were beautiful, and that this must be true of all people; that the closer you grew to someone the more those precious features came into focus. “None of us are. And do you know why?” Vesper could hazard a few guesses, but decided it was more diplomatic to shake her head. “There are more important things in life,” said Hezenkoss. For once she did not sound cynical and dismissive, only a plain assuredness in her tone. “Companionship is fleeting, and lasts only so long as one lives. But art, the written word, wisdom shared - those things last forever. Immortality, of a kind!” Hezenkoss’s eyes drifted to the painting of Nevarra City, the Boulevard of Kings cutting a wide statute-studded swath down the center of the city, the turreted towers of the Castrum Draconis soaring like something out of a fairy fable over the magnificent sprawl. “Then there’s actual immortality, of course, in which case you’ve got all the time in the world to enjoy the company of others!” Hezenkoss laughed. “So do what you must, but don’t lose focus.” She rapped the table, and the spell was broken, the shell that guarded any softness in her closing back over. “Now, back to the Lucidarium, or I’ll sniff out this fellow and turn him into a toad to keep your head on straight.” Vesper stifled a giggle at the image, and nodded her head. She bent over the book and continued reading with Johanna until the eighth bell tolled, and went home with a heart as light as the wisps that danced in the air all around.

“I came to ask if you had any advice before we set out for Tearstone Island.” Rook crossed her arms, feeling frail and bared in the god’s presence without the comforting weight of the sword at her side. Solas smiled, a brittle thing. “You seem quite expert at stopping our rituals, Rook. Perhaps you might consider knocking over a statue at an opportune moment?” “Ha, ha. Have you been practicing your jokes aloud in here, or has isolation just naturally made you funnier?” One corner of his mouth ticked downwards. “I see months of camaraderie with your team have not naturally made you more amiable.” “You got me there.” She sighed. “So no advice, then.”