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[indent][indent][indent][color=gray][sub][right][color=92278f][b]Location:[/b][/color] The Wayfarer’s Retreat -- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria[/right][/sub][/color]
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This was quite a gathering. 

Seele was used to large groups. Plenty of the raids she’d participated in were full-house clears, and she’d spent a considerable amount of time around strangers, who had only really remained strangers as long as it took them to get acquainted. 

Still, this wasn’t her normal gig. Seele had never trailblazed new content before. Sure, she’d never been far behind, but arriving on day one to raid alongside seasoned veterans was out of her normal wheelhouse. In a way though, it was at least a [i]bit[/i] familiar. None of them were new, but in the same way, none of them had ever encountered this dungeon before. Progression raiding was different, but perhaps it could still be exciting. 

With graceful steps, Seele entered the Wayfarer’s Retreat and surveilled the players present. Sure enough, she didn’t recognize a single one, at least from personal experience. Plenty of them she’d seen plastered on various leaderboards for all sorts of content, both PvE and—she shuddered—PvP, but as best she could recall, Seele had never partied up with any of them. 

[color=92278f]Good,[/color] she thought happily. [color=92278f]New faces. New friends.[/color]

In the back of her mind she had doubts, still, about coming to something like this. She wasn’t normally welcome at new content, especially [i]brand[/i] new content, and it unsettled her a bit. Already she could hear the complaints. [i]“Where’s your off-damage?”[/i] [i]“Wait she doesn’t even have any healing spells!”[/i] [i]Bro if this chick doesn’t start actually playing she’s getting kicked.”[/i] 

No, no. No. She was being pessimistic. Seele was more than capable of contributing to this raid, and that aside, there were likely plenty of healers as well. This was going to go just fine, and if it didn’t, she was sure they’d get it eventually. 

Not far away, a few of those distantly-familiar faces were converging. She recognized a couple of them as tanks—with somewhat unsavory reputations, she thought, but oh well. Others she didn’t know at all, but they were quickly making themselves memorable. One titan of a woman was making a show of drinking and cajoling with the red-headed girl. With them was another girl who seemed to be something of a chatterbox. That was nice, Seele loved listening to people talk. All of the wayfarers here probably had mountains of stories to tell, and were she a woman with less self-control, she might have just gone around asking after all of them.
[color=#2E2C2C]Mi...ssy...[/color]
But there would be time for that later, maybe even in the dungeon itself. Perhaps they’d be split into smaller groups, which would certainly make getting to know her team easier. For the moment though, she took a seat at a longer table and set down a small woven box atop it. From within she pulled a small stack of sandwiches, along with a little hand-drawn sign that said: [u][b]“Lesser feasts! All it costs is a smile!”[/b][/u]

The buffs her food offered would be negligibly-minor, and might not last very long into the dungeon if they didn’t depart soon, but she liked to offer them anyway. Food could taste just as good inside Pariah as it did outside, and while Missy herself wasn’t much of a cook, Seele…well, alright, Seele had bought most of the recipes from low-level vendors, but darned if she hadn’t put the sandwiches together herself. [/indent]

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