HereComesTheSnow

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Gerard Segremors

@Crimson Paladin@VitaVitaAR

The Stingray openly preened at his words, tilting her head back and regarding the young knight with a smile that might have been charming, had he not been overwhelmed by the sense he was being appraised by a hunter in the forest. It was almost chilling. He couldn't relax around this person, not fully and not yet. He'd treat her with the care one ascribed to a dangerous beast— never to show fear, but to maintain healthy awareness of capability.

His search through the Captain's quarters, by contrast, was roughshod and almost irreverent in the name of thoroughness. Where surprisingly little had been disturbed prior, Gerard all but turned the room upon its side in search of evidence, but to no avail. Whomever had incited things had, for all The Stingray's opinion on their technique in slitting throats, taken great care to cover their tracks. Save for the pointedly empty desk drawer, mocking them in its question-raising, he had found nothing until they came across the corpse, hidden in the shadow of the door next to a blood-drenched mound of linen.

"Well, much cleaner here." he chuffed plainly, dropping to a squat and reaching out to examine the wound up close, steely hand staining slightly red as it traced the crimson line across the man's neck. If there were any fragments of the blade that caused this wound, he'd pry them out. Anything would be a step up from what they'd been working with thus far.

Then again, such a wound would surely be the Shard's doing, no?

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Same situation for me man, no worries

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

heh heh

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

I imagine Gerard's searching technique to essentially be "barely restrained from outright ransacking" lol

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Gerard Segremors

@Crimson Paladin@VitaVitaAR

Even through the stern cast of his face all throughout the pleasantries exchanged between his knightly senior and former peer amongst mercenaries, Segremors found himself compelled to draw out a low whistle, awed by what the former had suddenly proposed. Though he doubted his education was anything more than fragmentary, one could hardly live long as an Iron Rose without hearing tell of their honored founder's duel with Orodrunn, how her divine favor granted her the might to shatter his accursed weapon, a sword of shadow. If the curse was to spread its darkness by darkening the hearts of man with merely a touch... Yeah, little wonder that picture of composure, rivalled only perhaps by Sir Nicomede, stood plainly wide-eyed before him.

At the tilt of Sir Fleuri's head, Gerard nodded and stepped forth, more alert than ever. "Gerard Segremors. Pleased to be cooperating rather than meeting the Stingray on the field. Heard a lot about your toxins." He'd long been familiar with the rumors surrounding the ethereal figure that stood before him, and now having the association of deadly toxins coating the edges of all the knives on her person made him quietly relieved that her company's reputation had preceded them.

He doubtlessly would have run himself onto a swift death had he fought them unknowingly, at the behest of all those who had seen him expendable. And ended life that accomplished the mission was noble sacrifice, one he figured himself still willing to make, but suicide through ignorance was beyond even he. As Sir Fleuri spoke, he made for the door, deferring to his elder comrade for much of the conversation.

While for it to have affected the entire garrison this shard needed to be somewhere that all could touch or at least feel its presence, Gerard didn't deny his better's point— something so valuable, so dangerous, surely must have warranted record, assuming it was passed here through standard procedure. Captain's quarters were as good a start as any— overseeing the entire fort meant he would have a hand in all forms of administration, even if only as a signatory.

As they traversed the stairs, Gerard's mind was awash with possibilities regarding where the supposed shard could have ended up. Mess hall? Public, certainly, and likely would have allowed for it be in the immediate vicinity of a lot of soldiers. Likewise the barracks. For how it would get out of storage... Well, the same question could be extended to how it even afflicted more than a handful of men. Either it took less than touching it, or the first soldiers, in a maddened frenzy handling the slivers of an immensely powerful sword... used it to attack eachother?

No, they died from what looked like their own weapons. What the hell? Did it get crushed up and mixed in with the food that had been sent down their gullets?

This is going to give me a fit.

Why would such a dangerous object be transferred here to begin with? Surely the crown would not have been so careless...

As the somewhat unlikely trio gazed upon an undisturbed room, nigh-pristine from when it was lived in, and a cleanly cut gullet of the Captain of the base, a thought occurred as Gerard wordlessly began to search, scouring the man's desk for any charters or documents regarding a black shard that was not to be directly handled.

"What if it was planted here by another party?" he ventured after a few moments of searching, breaking his silence as he felt around the bottom of the desk. "By people further trying to destabilize things around Thaln, I mean. Feels like a concerted effort with all the recent stuff we've been through, Knight's Doom aside."

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

sunday at the earliest, but don't worry about it overmuch

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

In that case I won't be able to make it this cycle

Secundi Lux

---

"S'right," came the reply from the verdant monolith seated to the right of the pair, opposite Crystal and Rivka. A small bandage had graced her brow in the whirlwind aftermath of their initiation testing, a result of the otherwise sterling medical examination. It was telling of their newfound potential that the practitioners weren't terribly surprised that a scrape and some bruising was all she had earned for her meteoric descent— Selma had to admit, even she was a bit concerned after she'd felt her bones shake a little with the impact. "We just took our first steps today. Only goin' up the mountain from here."

Biting deep and heartily into a drumstick, her emerald eyes slid over to regard the two newer arrivals as she mulled over their conversations a while longer. Rivka and Crystal weren't always terribly much for idle chatter, but she'd managed to pull them into some friendly nonsense before they'd showed up— and it had stepped away from the forefront after this had taken root. for her part, she hadn't really given too much thought to whether or not she was really ready to acknowledge herself as Ars Magi...

How did it feel to use your powers, Miss Rosmarie?

"It rocked. I wanna do it again. I felt like I was invincible, unstoppable. Nothing in the world could beat me."

"But, hey, we did just start being 'em. They'll still be training us, y'know? It'll probably sink in more once we really put our noses to the grindstone on it. It's like, uh..."

She paused momentarily, eyes floating between the two girls as she searched for the comparison.

And do you, now, feel differently about yourself since the transformation?

"I'm trying not to. But I gotta say, it does feel like I'm a lot closer to what I've always wanted."

That being?

"Protect people from the Voids. Take back home. That kinda stuff. But aside from that I wanna make sure I stay the same ol' me."

Inspiration flashed as the memory faded back out, and as she swallowed, she raised the bone aloft as though a pointer finger, the classic gesture of "Eureka!"

"It's like dancing. You don't really feel like a dancer after you first shuffle to a nice beat, but if you keep working at it and learning how it all works, it starts to feel right."

The bone unceremoniously clattered back to the plate as she wiped her fingers. That made sense, right? It did to her— it should to the other ladies, then. For all their personal misgivings with themselves, all their uncertainties, all their needs of a good solid hug every now and again, Selma was pretty sure that if she could grok something, they could grok it too. They seemed smart. Surely they'd also needed to train stuff from the ground up before— and they probably didn't need to fight stuff like a gangly build, but the point remained.

She made to clap Chie on the back, good-natured and fraternal as ever—

How did you feel your peers performed, in that case?

"I'm glad everyone's okay. It got a li'l touch 'n' go at the end there, but poor Chie still gritted her teeth and fought through her injury like a champ."

And decided instead to venture north, tousling the smaller girl's long brunette locks in between bites of food, favoring her with a confident smile. After a moment, it graced the rest of the table in turn— Aoife, Crystal, Rivka. They'd been through a lot together in the past three days, nobody could deny them such. They'd faced the fire head on even when they weren't meant to— nobody could have predicted that train station going the way it had— and always come out swinging for the fences, even if it wasn't the perfect concertos someone like Sokolov had expected of herself. They'd always found a way.

And for her, their hard work was gonna be a badge of pride.

So regarding your encounter with the Void...

"Heh heh heh. Kicking them around for a change was fun."

That'll be all, Miss Rosmarie.

Congratulations, cadet. Today,

"Just watch. If we could handle all this before we start learning from the best in the business? Before you know it, we're all gonna be cracking their masks like old pros. They shoulda got us on that train when they had the chance."

Her grin passed confident and into wolfish, as she returned to her food with redoubled vigor. Payback Time was a-comin', and she'd long set her clock.

You are an Ars Magi.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Gerard Segremors

...Is now really the time to be humoring this?

Perhaps wisely, the swordsman held his tongue as he watched the scene play out before him in the evening light, focusing instead on the colossus of iron that emerged from the courtyard opposite them. If nothing else, this was better than rising to the barbs in earnest. More importantly, this "Bors" character's appearance answered a number of questions that had floated around within Gerard's skull. "How exactly were those gates blown open", "are we set to run into the rumored member of the Shark's retinue with Giant's blood I remember hearing about", and "what sort of person would Jeremiah's sword have even initially been forged for, anyway", to name three at random. Towering over any man Sagramore had ever seen and speaking with the voice of a distant avalanche, it wasn't hard to see how he served as an equalizing show of force for Alette, given her spending the majority of this standoff plainly surrounded by their number.

Difficult to take down for certain. If he knew of the aforementioned vampire at all in his time with the Order, he'd make it a safe bet that she would swipe up the chance to cross blades with someone of his stature— which would inevitably produce a comical study in contrasts. Regardless, now that he was here and the two parties had more or less levelled out their chest-puffing to a healthy balance... Well, the third body showed the exact same wounds as the rest. The question was why— something he figured would only be discerned further inside.

He floated towards the interior keep, passing the Knight Serpenta and sparing a momentary glance as she bent down to inspect another corpse. The Naga was... hm. In many ways a kindred spirit, in many others a voice of reason to check those such as he. Yet for all her casual demeanor as she flipped a man's body onto its side to find a long slice down his back, he felt the need to reconfirm it for himself before continuing on. She'd gone and encircled Alette— however slowly and lazily, it was all the same a fairly clear message, even to a dim country boy.

Lucky it didn't escalate then and there. Playing with fire, ma'am.

He forged ahead, in the wake of his fellow Reonite, entering the bloodsoaked antechamber to little fanfare aside from the rummaging of the mercenary before them, and his senior's offered greetings. The woman was deathly pale from what he could see beneath her tanned leathers and the curtain of moonlight waves down her back. Adorned with knives seemingly at anywhere that wasn't a joint as she was, a quick examination revealed the wounds of the garrisoned men to be more of the same as outside, rather than anything that would indict her. The blood was too old for that anyway— beginning to brown over, and tainting the air with the smell of metal.

What sort of shared madness could have caused this?

"Must be some sort of magic to drive an entire garrison rabid enough to kill, right?"

He knelt, fruitlessly trying to glean new detail from the same kinds of evidence as before, brow truly furrowed into a tight knot of inquisition. Some poison in their food? Not his forte in the slightest— he neither knew of one that could do such a thing, nor a method of procurement and dispersion.

"Even rowdier soldiers for hire rarely take a brawl that far. We didn't. Men on the royal pay line ought to be much the same."

Where Fleuri wore the friendly mask of a courteous gentleman, Gerard's grimace edged ever closer to a scowl as his mind raced to find possibilities.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

had a little liquor in me letsa see what i can come up with