HereComesTheSnow

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

Yes.

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

Name: Liam Haggerty

Age: 20

Gender: Male

Job: Chief Gunnery Operator

Country of Origin: England

Appearance: Wiry, brisk, and brimming with furious purpose. Liam is a young and frankly small man, standing only 170 cm or so even in ramrod naval posture, and he carries little in the way of extraneous bulk on his person, having neither need nor wish of living lavishly at altitude. Whatever blubber a fuller diet might have given him to insulate his frame from the outside world is burned away by the heat of constant motion on the gun decks of the mighty airship, as he loads, aims, and fires heavy comets of lead unto his hated foe a man possessed. In so doing, he often looks more the part of a engine worker than a uniformed soldier, topcoat stripped to hang around the waist as both his pale skin and white undershirts are constantly stained black by gunpowder. It too carries in the short head of mahogany hair he's topped with, never quite getting the odor out free from his follicles or pores. His eyes are a dark, stormy gray, as though cast from the same iron as his holy airship's namesake— and the vessel that saved his life, five years ago.

Personality: A stern, focused gunner, Operator Haggerty is a brash, outspoken individual on the floors of the cannonade decks, a man singularly focused: If there are Martians to rain down God's Judgement upon, he will see to it that they are tried. He is fiery in his passion for the craft of artillery, stating simply that "It's no coincidence that the Thunderchild—the First One— was the best weapon we had against those damned squids! The shells put them down! I was there!" when questioned. His anger at the demons from Mars, as a young man who survived the initial invasion of the British Isles, runs deep enough to touch his core. He was a boy who lost family, lost friends, lost his home, lost his nation— and watched many of them burn, screaming, beneath the devilish rays of heat. He hates none of his fellow men and women, and would call himself a friend to all mankind, regardless of their heritage— and on the other side of that coin, would gladly do whatever necessary to wipe the Martians that took his world away off the face of the planet— and theirs, too.

In the rare moments that he allows himself to be away from the mighty guns (and the thankfully less rare moments where he's forced away by outranking officers), he retreats into a quiet shell, keeping his words tight and controlled and close to his chest. At times, one wonders if part of him might realize that he was twisted irreparably from the joyous young man that lived in Hull up to the Summer of 1897, and that he needs to keep himself tightly wound and locked in place when he has no demons there to Hate so fervently. In these cases, socialization seems almost an unfamiliar chore, if not necessarily unwelcome. A few beers (or if you manage to steer a conversation somewhere he knows how to get going within) can sometimes change this— bringing out a ghost of the boy who died on the steamer's deck, in time with the valiant heart of the Ironclad.

History: A coastal lad hailing from the port town of Hull, Liam's origins are by necessity humble, the Haggerty family settling on the lower end of the newly birthed middle class post-Industrialization. His father was a hardy steel mill worker who moonlit as a fisherman and enjoyed jellied eels and meat pies with his daily pint at the local pub. His mother kept the house and routinely enlisted her boys— Liam and his older brother James— with the more labor-intensive work in the years of his adolescence, slotting cleaning and repair between their studies and ventures into the forests a few miles north. It was by all accounts a simple life— one that the Martians dispassionately tore from him at the age of 15, mere months after his brother had enlisted in the Army. The demons, in their impossible and deadly engines of destruction, cut a swath through the Isles mercilessly, with no warning to speak of. It was all he could do to take his ailing mother, feverish at the time, and hurry her through the streets of Hull onto the nearest ship they could— a small steamer, filled to the brim with similar refugees, that barely puffed out of port as the three-legged monsters loomed high above what was once his home. His father is to this day unaccounted for, and he presumes him dead, likely within the steel mill he was employed by.

The steamer limped southward, only making one daring stop— skirting along the Essex coast for supplies and fuel, its load unfortunately lighter. Those injured in the attacks could often not be adequately treated, and were grimly tossed overboard after they passed by the crew and whatever family could muster the courage. It was on this fateful stop that young Liam saw the shadows of those demons again. This time, his boat wasn't so lucky— small, slow, and surrounded by a trio of the striders, they were to be easy pickings.

And then, one of them fell to a crack of thunder, as a furious horn sounded from an ironclad bravely surging into the fray. He watched, awestruck, captivated, as the roaring ship bore down at full steam, heedless of the heat rays or warbling cries of the war machines. Their only answer came in the form of her mighty guns, her bellowing engine, the scream of metal tearing into metal, and the warrior calls of the men aboard as she rammed the second, defiant to the last as the final walker's heat ray melted her valiant heart. It was here that the shellshocked boy's soul changed forever, casting all his hope, all his hate, and all his sorrow into the single chant the refugees aboard the little steamer repeated, slinking away as the voice of legion.

"Come on, Thunder Child!"

As the ship made port in France, the boy's heart was set upon the one thing he saw that had made those demons bleed.

Five years later, his naval career has lead him aboard a new child of the storm, one that sits in the same leaden skies its sacred namesake fought beneath, each an indomitable testament to human will, in the face of a truly existential threat.

Equipment: A Webley Model 1887 revolver sidearm, opposed by a long, front-curved knife that hangs from his opposite hip to round out his personal protection should things ever become that disastrous— a kukri obtained from a Gurkha, reportedly as some form of trade bargained at some point prior to his stationing aboard the airship. That this is nonstandard seems to be overlooked, given his proficiency with the mapbook, wind charts, protractor, rangefinder, and texts on various artillerist's concerns such as the Coriolis effect, geometry, and gun maintenance. Always seems to have a stout on hand, especially when working.

Fighting Machine: HMS Thunderchild. Knows her inside and out, knows the Gun Decks every which way one can short of "biblically".

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

Stormbringer

Name: Liam Haggerty

Age: 20

Gender: Male

Job: Chief Gunnery Operator

Country of Origin: England

Appearance: Wiry, brisk, and brimming with furious purpose. Liam is a young and frankly small man, standing only 170 cm or so even in ramrod naval posture, and he carries little in the way of extraneous bulk on his person, having neither need nor wish of living lavishly at altitude. Whatever blubber a fuller diet might have given him to insulate his frame from the outside world is burned away by the heat of constant motion on the gun decks of the mighty airship, as he loads, aims, and fires heavy comets of lead unto his hated foe a man possessed. In so doing, he often looks more the part of a engine worker than a uniformed soldier, topcoat stripped to hang around the waist as both his pale skin and white undershirts are constantly stained black by gunpowder. It too carries in the short head of mahogany hair he's topped with, never quite getting the odor out free from his follicles or pores. His eyes are a dark, stormy gray, as though cast from the same iron as his holy airship's namesake— and the vessel that saved his life, five years ago.

Personality: A stern, focused gunner, Operator Haggerty is a brash, outspoken individual on the floors of the cannonade decks, a man singularly focused: If there are Martians to rain down God's Judgement upon, he will see to it that they are tried. He is fiery in his passion for the craft of artillery, stating simply that "It's no coincidence that the Thunderchild—the First One— was the best weapon we had against those damned squids! The shells put them down! I was there!" when questioned. His anger at the demons from Mars, as a young man who survived the initial invasion of the British Isles, runs deep enough to touch his core. He was a boy who lost family, lost friends, lost his home, lost his nation— and watched many of them burn, screaming, beneath the devilish rays of heat. He hates none of his fellow men and women, and would call himself a friend to all mankind, regardless of their heritage— and on the other side of that coin, would gladly do whatever necessary to wipe the Martians that took his world away off the face of the planet— and theirs, too.

In the rare moments that he allows himself to be away from the mighty guns (and the thankfully less rare moments where he's forced away by outranking officers), he retreats into a quiet shell, keeping his words tight and controlled and close to his chest. At times, one wonders if part of him might realize that he was twisted irreparably from the joyous young man that lived in Hull up to the Summer of 1897, and that he needs to keep himself tightly wound and locked in place when he has no demons there to Hate so fervently. In these cases, socialization seems almost an unfamiliar chore, if not necessarily unwelcome. A few beers (or if you manage to steer a conversation somewhere he knows how to get going within) can sometimes change this— bringing out a ghost of the boy who died on the steamer's deck, in time with the valiant heart of the Ironclad.

History: A coastal lad hailing from the port town of Hull, Liam's origins are by necessity humble, the Haggerty family settling on the lower end of the newly birthed middle class post-Industrialization. His father was a hardy steel mill worker who moonlit as a fisherman and enjoyed jellied eels and meat pies with his daily pint at the local pub. His mother kept the house and routinely enlisted her boys— Liam and his older brother James— with the more labor-intensive work in the years of his adolescence, slotting cleaning and repair between their studies and ventures into the forests a few miles north. It was by all accounts a simple life— one that the Martians dispassionately tore from him at the age of 15, mere months after his brother had enlisted in the Army. The demons, in their impossible and deadly engines of destruction, cut a swath through the Isles mercilessly, with no warning to speak of. It was all he could do to take his ailing mother, feverish at the time, and hurry her through the streets of Hull onto the nearest ship they could— a small steamer, filled to the brim with similar refugees, that barely puffed out of port as the three-legged monsters loomed high above what was once his home. His father is to this day unaccounted for, and he presumes him dead, likely within the steel mill he was employed by.

The steamer limped southward, only making one daring stop— skirting along the Essex coast for supplies and fuel, its load unfortunately lighter. Those injured in the attacks could often not be adequately treated, and were grimly tossed overboard after they passed by the crew and whatever family could muster the courage. It was on this fateful stop that young Liam saw the shadows of those demons again. This time, his boat wasn't so lucky— small, slow, and surrounded by a trio of the striders, they were to be easy pickings.

And then, one of them fell to a crack of thunder, as a furious horn sounded from an ironclad bravely surging into the fray. He watched, awestruck, captivated, as the roaring ship bore down at full steam, heedless of the heat rays or warbling cries of the war machines. Their only answer came in the form of her mighty guns, her bellowing engine, the scream of metal tearing into metal, and the warrior calls of the men aboard as she rammed the second, defiant to the last as the final walker's heat ray melted her valiant heart. It was here that the shellshocked boy's soul changed forever, casting all his hope, all his hate, and all his sorrow into the single chant the refugees aboard the little steamer repeated, slinking away as the voice of legion.

"Come on, Thunder Child!"

As the ship made port in France, the boy's heart was set upon the one thing he saw that had made those demons bleed.

Five years later, his naval career has lead him aboard a new child of the storm, one that sits in the same leaden skies its sacred namesake fought beneath, each an indomitable testament to human will, in the face of a truly existential threat.

Equipment: A Webley Model 1887 revolver sidearm, opposed by a long, front-curved knife that hangs from his opposite hip to round out his personal protection should things ever become that disastrous— a kukri obtained from a Gurkha, reportedly as some form of trade bargained at some point prior to his stationing aboard the airship. That this is nonstandard seems to be overlooked, given his proficiency with the mapbook, wind charts, protractor, rangefinder, and texts on various artillerist's concerns such as the Coriolis effect, geometry, and gun maintenance. Always seems to have a stout on hand, especially when working.

Fighting Machine: HMS Thunderchild. Knows her inside and out, knows the Gun Decks every which way one can short of "biblically".

Clad in Iron, War of the Worlds and Mecha

COME ON THUNDERCHILD

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

Gerard Segremors

@VitaVitaAR

"Right," He nodded simply, breathing out through his nose as it seemed any potential offense was avoided. It was good to know she'd not begrudged the idea at all— last thing a man needed was to get under the skin of his commander. Regarding his condition... "I ought to be back up to speed in a few days."

With that established, he returned to folding the concept over in his head, eyes scanning the shelves. If his Captain hadn't considered the sides that lied outside raw legends and academia, that wasn't unforgivable—his own notions of knighthood and chivalry stemmed from the same sources through the majority of his military career, after all. It was a reminder, if anything. Just as he was new to this station... she'd barely had any more tenure under hers.

Two of a suit, if not a kind.

His eyes narrowed as he glanced back to her, shaking off a little color from her cheeks. Probably kicking herself for missing the thread his experiences had naturally drawn him to, if he had to guess— he couldn't count the number of occasions he himself had fumed similarly. But more to the point, that meant his perspective and hers sat in contrast— his way of approaching the issue differed.

Best to share that, too. It might not have helped with her immediate shame, but if fighting alongside men like Fleuri and Nicomede had taught him anything, it was that the tools would give her the means to not blank on that again.

As he ambled between the shelves, ever searching, he spoke.

"One of the things I learned was the landscape's role on the field," he spoke with a tone more of recollection than declaration or teaching. He didn't have that much presumption in him, even after the reassurance that his help was favorable. "How a battle can be shaped by it, how it directs troop flow, how you can use it to narrow your expectations ahead of time. All stuff I'm sure you know as well, but... from the perspective of a single soldier, I guess. Knowing where not to step, where our unit might get bogged down, how to read for signs of ambush. If you know a field's full of sinkholes, you skirt the edges unless you know the path."

Here, he found a potential candidate: Thaln's Locales— The Many Faces of the Homeland. A little general, and not necessarily exactly what they were going to find their information in, but he had to imagine even an overview would mention areas of hostile terrain. Places hard to reach that a shard might be hidden, or perhaps...

"My thinking's along similar lines here, I mean— That the land itself could end up being a clue. We know exposure to the shard can drive men crazy enough to kill one another from Fort Daelantine, right?" He slipped the book into the crook of his arm within the sling, wincing minutely but soldiering on. "So I'd imagine one sitting in one place for a long time... might have that curse similarly desecrate the area around it, be it a temple or a valley or whatever you like. Such places that inspire madness ought to be warned away from, even if the rest has nothing to do with the shards."

Humble origins only mattered if they turned out to lack effect. Even a stick's a weapon, if you can beat a man over the head with it.

"Anything you've come up with so far, ma'am?" he asked idly, pausing to peruse the tomes above head height behind his squint.

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

gerard soon, just tidying up other commitments

Secundi Lux

---

Thunder cracked in her face, as she was awash with the nova of blue and white cast off by the harmless flames, too far from her skin but not far enough from her space. That one had been close... if she breathed in deep, she could taste the explosives on the air— acrid cordite and phosphorous, like if she'd burned a packet of her fertilizer and mixed it with dust. They sure weren't pulling any punches for a training exercise...

Guess they expect big things. Far be it from me to say they're wrong!

She couldn't make eye contact to show her appreciation to her dear feuer fraulein thanks to the swath of drones fast approaching, in no small part thanks to the selfsame explosion she'd caused. Unfortunate, and she hated not getting a chance to see her purple clouds poking out from beneath the scarf, buuuuuut she'd have to make do.

Feeling a big ol' brawl coming wasn't a terrible problem to have.

She flashed a thumbs up high in the air, her grin carrying through the bellowing voice that echoed through the street.

"Nice shot! I owe ya!"

As she was about to hunch low and gamely growl a line about being all tied up at one-all, a flash of light caught the shattered glass of the windows she'd sent her kill tumbling through, stemming from the sky high above. It wasn't the brilliant blossoms of explosive amber, azure, or scarlet that they'd all just created here... Then what the hell was—

"More coming down the intersection— prepare to engage."

She felt them coming, only second away at the furthest, but was already quizzically looking up when her earpiece had crackled to life with its electric whine. In that span, she saw a dark, unnatural shape— and perched on the roof adjacent, just shy a line of smoke tipped by a crimson, molten edge to the balcony,

"Crystal—!"

Before she could finish the thought, let alone a sentence, she was interrupted by the luminous snap and eye-searing cascade, blued white filling her view as a symphony of floodlights clicked on from either side of their not-exactly-a-formation, casting her girls in stark relief against the ruined concrete. It was impossible to be truly surrounded in this terrain, but this was as close as you got in lieu of that.

Not good on either front, not if you looked at it from plain tactics... she had to do something to consolidate the threat.

Selma stomped roughly, sending out a pulse of vibration that rushed through the ground and felt for what came back, looking for— there.

She burst into motion, Nox-infused legs carrying her to the ruined office where her first kill lied, torn and twisted.

It was a snap decision, the kind she felt came the easiest. These guys they could handle, they'd proven that without a scratch to show for the first wave. That thing up there...

After hunting down a suitably large hunk of debris, a block of rebar and cement only slightly smaller than a dumpster, she gripped it tight. With a mighty roar she pulled it around, wrenching her arms—

...She just didn't like the look of that stinger. Why not swat the bug?

—and sending it hurtling, end over end, towards the flyer.

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

Gerard Segremors

@VitaVitaAR

"Been better," He hedged, bluntly honest in the tone of his self-assessment. A thousand battles behind had bored it into him, well before the aspirations of knighthood, always pushing him into the next, had even a chance of being realized. In the ghost of a smirk that flitted across his features, there was a darkly cavalier edge to his words as he began to explain thoroughly. "Been worse too. I was more worried about the nicks—"

Here, he presented her his cheek, showing the white square of gauze that was complaining to his face about moving his mouth so carelessly.

"Felt woozy the whole ride back. Think for the arm I just wrenched an oberhau too hard onto a shield, or yanked too recklessly in a grapple— tough to tell." The knight shrugged his shoulders. "I was lost in the swordplay. Whomever the new Quartermaster is for the Boars, he's definitely kicked their training up a notch. I won't say they're suddenly amazing fighters, far from it, but they're better than I remembered... Makes their hiring all the more interesting."

Mercenaries are an economy. Asking fees had to go up with the quality.

The raised eyebrows of impressed hindsight faded, a contemplative furrow taking their place as he looked over the tiny Captain's choices in literature. In lieu of a concrete title or direction... these guesses were as good as his, all told. Direct understanding of the legend's text and body aside, they all sounded like they'd have the sort of background upon which the history was couched. Information like that could prove useful in hunting down the shards for certain.

... Fees. Hunt. Hold on.

"I'll be honest, Captain, I'd be lucky to even be in the same boat as you." he chuffed with a touch of self-effacement, backpedalling through the shelves, squinting as he searched through the rows at head height. He'd just passed this one... "I'm only here as a favor, or if I'm hunting down the old training manuals. I'm too simple for the literature; even your novels'd be wasted on me."

His eyes lit for a moment, and his free hand pulled a spine, then an old navy tome loose from the shelf. He looked over it momentarily, as if double-checking the cover for the words that had caught his attention, before placing it upon the stack Fanilly had already procured: Lost Treasures of Thaln: For Legendary Collectors.

"That said, we know they're in demand. Artifacts that powerful have to have all kinds of treasure hunter and adventurer hunting them down. 'Least I'd think so."

What else did they know about them? If he had to narrow it down from this ocean of books, what would he look for in search of "things that suit a Shard to hide in"?

He frowned openly now, throwing his mind at the problem in spite of his previous admissions of thoughtlessness.

"...Maybe a travel guide too..." he now murmured beneath his breath, cupping his chin. "...Since they're corruptive influences like in the fort... Look for areas warned away from..."

He blinked, then looked back up, meeting the blue and gold blur that sharpened and clarified back into the form of his commanding officer.

"Pardon, ma'am. Not presuming to overstep. Your investigation."

Secundi Lux

---

"That right? We keeping count, Aoife?"

If a sequoia could purr hungrily, then Team Kheper's tree shook the world as she crouched low beneath tight, focused brows. Within her, churning in the emerald depth of the fusion reactor embedded into her navel, her stores of Nox coalesced and channeled, much akin to her peers, her comrades, her teammates. It pooled into the soles of her feet beneath the leather of the boots and steel of the greaves, in the palms of her hide-covered gloves as they pressed upon the wet soil beneath— heedless of the muck. She had nowhere else she felt more at home— that her connection with the Earth she called her Elementum was written in fate far earlier than the Nox could ever have graced her with.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

In the distance, she felt them. Hulking masses of steel and silicon, artifice and technology that she could never hope to understand how to dismantle correctly— their workings were as alien to her as a void's was. In a sense, that made it so much the better for simulation, for the spirit of this exercise. She was fighting the manifestations of something that took from the Earth, twisted it, and made it into something Other than the grand understanding transforming had given her. Were she truly a tree as her teammates claimed... than these were just as Nox-borne demons.

Constructs that her roots did not touch.

But yet.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

They trod upon them. In a trio of heavy, lumbering gaits, the rhythm of searching, she could feel their strides upon the earth. Imperceptible impacts to the other four, yet clear as the midday sun for her. She followed them closely from their path deep into the city out towards the street where Chie's gravity well lay, noting their canter, weight, and position long before they reached the girls' field of view. Already a natural in the unsubtle aspects of this— shows of force, leveraging her prodigious strength, carrying her power for destructive upheavals— so instead, her instructors almost to a head had spent their time with her in specific hammering home the importance of the finer details.

One such was this seismic sense. It was already prudent to be actively listening through her feet for them, knowing where these points of resonance had originated and locating friend and foe alike, but she had been pushed to go deeper— analyzing weight and density by depth of the impact, composition by the tone of the resonant noise, number and stride by the cadence of the footfalls. The importance of knowing ahead of time what her team would face, so she could be best used to brutalize the specifities of the opponent.

For instance—

"Hoooooooh." she let out a low exhalation, almost a warrior's throaty bellow, as the walkers finally came into view, skirting the edges of the gravity well with clear trepidation that belied their artificial origin. Their onboard systems weren't entirely dumb, then? No matter. They could only work against what they could detect, and only were it not too, too late.

—She'd long known that the drones were bipedal, and that they were heavily armored 'round the legs to compensate for attacks trying to ground them. The designers understood a crucial weakness of the layout— but they could never have anticipated it to face the earth upon which those two crucial legs walked.

Kleinbruder manifested in her right hand, raised high into the air above her as her brilliant eyes, alive as a forest, traced a line through the pavement to the base of the rearmost walker. As she'd been dowsing the incoming drones those same vibrations had gifted her a rough picture of the ground beneath, all of its strong, reinforced earth... and all of its weak, easily broken soil.

She dashed the silvery axe's bearded edge against the earth, and from it, a rush of cracking ground erupted forth along the length of this ad-hoc "fault line". A plume of dust, stone, and soil rocketed free and into the air as the directed impact traveled through like all the seismic footfalls before it, tearing, tearing, ripping up the street—

Until it exploded beneath the armored boot of her quarry, sending it off-kilter and into a nearby building.

There was a chance, she supposed, that it could right itself yet.

"One." she declared in triumph, before rearing back to strike the earth again.

But that was only if she let it.

A meteor from the Academy's finest hit the deck, and in response to that call, a jagged spike of earth erupted forth, tearing through the foundations of the former office building as it stabbed deep into the cuboid central body of the stricken machine, grinding against armor. Juno making fairly quality robotics, there was little telling if it was immediately punctured by stone rising to meet the force of its own careening weight.

Heedless of the result, a green and silver blur rocketed towards the fray them moment she wrenched her axe free.

"Let's get cooking!"

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

Gerard Segremors

@VitaVitaAR

"You hunting something, Captain?" called a low voice that, to its meager credit, was only just too loud for a library, rather than the trumpeting horn one would expect from its owner's prior profession. If Fanilly deigned to turn, she would find a rare sight for the many tomes of history, literature, and myth ensconced within the vast, eerily still hall deep within Candaeln— a man of coal-colored hair and clothing, right arm limply hanging in a sling of white cloth and bereft of the sword it seemed incomplete without. "Four eyes are better than two."

In the end, Gerard's better sense finally won out. The simple fact of the matter was that he ran too much risk aggravating the pile of injuries— and more to the point, working in the open air of the training fields meant he would run far too much risk of being spotted and hauled off back to his bed in chains.

Metaphorically, anyway. I hope they wouldn't do that for real.

So, his thirst for betterment took him instead here, to a rare haunt. While the Library was impressive in the size and scope of the knowledge contained within, Gerard admittedly felt far too simple to be trying to wrap his head around most of the esoterism— and as such, his ventures here usually manifested in poring over Fechtbucher, old manuals for training and swordsmanship that he'd doubtlessly spend the rest of the day putting into practice on the fields. If he was laid up, his thinking was simply that he may as well frontload his bored skull with new things to try once he was back to full strength.

His golden eyes slid over the many shelves as they left the form of his small blonde commander for a moment, squinting to pick out names of authors and titles upon each carefully-bound spine. Owing to the sporadic frequency of his visits, he wasn't entirely sure which section he'd wandered into upon coming across Fanilly— only that it probably wasn't the one he'd personally been looking for.

But that was fine. There was satisfaction in a hunt even if it wasn't prey you necessarily chased, and moreover, the erstwhile soldier for hire could count on one hand the times he'd had a conversation with his leader. He had to wonder what went through the mind of one taking up the mantle of command at such a young age, preordained for her by the threads of fate woven by the Goddesses. Helping her'd... Be an interesting way to spend the forced rest. He'd spoken before on the importance of getting to know the man or woman you were faithfully raising your sword for— might as well follow up on that idea here.

"Not like I'm up to much."

The banner of the Roses was one thing. But it'd pay dividends to demystify the Knight-Captain.