Birds of a Feather

Post from a Dragon Age roleplay. TL;DR - A blood mage, disguised as a bard, is tripping on mana potions - which have very harmful effects to the embiber if used in the long term - and finds himself atop the church roof, thinking he's an eagle. Hilarity ensues. More than anything, this was an exercise in dialogue and describing character interactions, as opposed to the scenery.

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She had seen many a peculiar thing on her travels across Thedas. A man living amongst a pack of wolves in Antiva; impractical shoes spawned by Orlesian couture, complete with soles that elevated their wearers far above the dirt of the street, provided the wearer didn’t snap her ankles trying to walk in them first. But never in her whole life had Fianna seen anything quite like the display of lunacy that had perched atop the Chantry roof.

Flanked by a pair of The Maker’s finest, she stood at the foot of the steeple, her mouth hanging slightly ajar in what was best described as an expression of amazement. Whoever stood atop the roof, shrieking at the top of his lungs, had managed to turn drunken mischief into an art form. All but the most obvious of words failed her.

“Aye, boys... that’s definitely a bard on your roof.” Her eyes squinted in defiance of the morning light, and sure enough, Fianna regained some semblance of mental clarity, but only after she invested a few more moments in watching the silhouette of a man gnawing upon his own shoulder. “How did he get up there, anyway?”

“I-I’m... sorry?” Stuttered the red-haired templar to her left, the kind of man who knew that the sky was blue, but daren’t say so out loud.

“Well, contrary to what he is probably thinking right now, he certainly didn’t fly all the way up there, so how on earth did he manage it?” She flicked a gloved hand to the steeple, and their eyes followed its skyward path like a pair of dogs following the arc of a well-thrown stick.

“He climbed, Ma’am.”

“He climbed?”

“Yes, ma’am. Up the front of the building.” He answered, tracing the drunk’s path up the house of The Maker with an armoured finger, which Fianna followed with great interest.

She took one long look at the pair of them, a gentle sort of inspection that neither knight knew what to think of. The redhead shrank away from her scrutiny the moment it fell upon him. It was as sweet as was amusing. “You boys wouldn’t happen to have a ladder lying around, would you? For fixing the roof and the like?”

“That we do, ma’am.”

Her tongue absently picked at a dry flake of skin at the corner of her mouth. There was only one way to scale the outside of the building safely, and the rungs of any self-respecting ladder would splinter at the thought of supporting a Chantry knight and their portable fortress. A small smile cracked itself across her lips. “Well then.”

There was a pause, which would have evolved into an awkward silence if not for a screech from above. The sound of the penny dropping never arrived.

“... pardon, ma’am?”

“The ladder, if you’d be so kind, Ser. I’m sure you were stationed here to do more than stand around looking pretty.” She watched the blush bleeding across his freckled cheeks before he turned away. It was as though he suffered from an allergic reaction to compliments.

“Y-yes ma’am. Right away.”

The brown-haired bookend to her right continued to stare at the silhouette of the drunkard, a disaster that he simply could not tear his eyes away from. A disaster that left him blind to the pack that was swung with care at his chest and nudged against his breastplate with a dull and unexpected clang. By the time he figured out what he was holding to his chest, and turned to regard the lady who threw it at him, she was well on the way to turning him into a pack mule. She gently draped her cloak over his shoulder before a single syllable of protest could leave his lips, without so much as a second glance at him.

As she set to work unfastening the many buckles that held her cuirass to her chest, Fianna eyed the zenith of the steeple like a mountaineer would eye the Frostbacks. She had arrived in Lothering on the back of a wagon, with a view to renting out a room in the tavern. Instead, she took one look at the outskirts; at the rows of tents and bedrolls, and realised that she would be lucky to find a patch on the floor that had not been claimed by another traveller.

But it wasn’t all bad luck, she thought. There would - at the very least - be a story to make out of the day that she could share over a few pints, and for that she was grateful.

The story about the bear raiding her tent was getting stale.