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kotaline
Vice Captain

Deathly Darling

PostPosted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 10:28 pm


"How do you refer to it, then?" Hopkin asked, perplexed. "Everything needs to be called something, otherwise how will they know what they are?" He looked down at the fish for a moment and announced, "I'll call it koi until you know what you refer to it as, because it is one." He frowned slightly as Coyotl explained how he got it. "Oh, you took it from someone," he concluded.

Wickwright shrugged. "From what I've seen, they look like him, but they certainly don't act like him. They seem to each have their own personality, much like you or I." He eyed Hopkin thoughtfully as he made the remark, but Hopkin, still staring at the koi, was hardly paying him much heed. "My primary concern is with my own Plague though," he admitted, "The things are interesting, to be certain, but Hopkin is my life's work. In times like these, with people sending threats by crow, I'm less concerned with finding out how his kind work and more concerned with finding a way to make sure I still have him at all tomorrow."

He brandished a hand at Coyotl after he made his offer, saying "Deal. By the bone, I could use someone to speak to who isn't the size of my hand and living in a book bag. There's always room for friends like you in my wagon, especially in difficult straits such as the ones we're in now." The announcement of the deal made Hopkin look up from the koi for once and smile. Coyotl was not the most pleasing guest to the eye, but he didn't seem terribly bad to be around, and his koi was enchanting to watch. Hopkin would be glad for the company, especially since the tense mood of the wagon as of late might be alleviated. For a moment, he thought it might be easy to forget what had happened to them over the past few days. In the comfort of the wagon, among friends, it was hard to be haunted by crows' eyes.

He went back to the desk to find a feather to give to the fish, figuring that new traveling companions were something to be commemorated. There was a red feather like the koi's forehead near the window, and he scampered over to get it, but stopped now that he was close to the shutters.

"And if you say you will find the man to deliver my letters, I have implicit trust in you..."

"Wickwright."

"Furthermore, I will do my Finch best to ensure that we stay safe. I'm sure I can outwit a few Cultist-"

"Wickwright!" Hopkin pleaded.

"By the bone, what is it, Hopkin?"

"The snow,"
Hopkin replied hoarsely.

Outside, it wasn't snowing flakes, but rather, page upon page of empty letters, which melted away soon after they hit the ground. Wickwright flung the shutters open and watched them fall, a sick, threatening sort of precipitation. "Rotting, cursed corpus bones," he swore under his breath, looking at the sky for the crows that he already suspected to find. "Coyotl, I think it's high time we take your advice and keep moving."
PostPosted: Sat Apr 02, 2011 12:59 am


"I 'spose I just call it 'fish'," said Coyotl, scratching his head (and nearly dislodging the feather there). "You can call it what you please." At the insinuation that he'd taken the koi from its rightful owner, he bristled a bit, though it was hard for him to be really properly offended by something so much smaller than he was. "I didn't take it from anybody, wasn't anybody there. And I couldn't rightly leave it to die, could I?" Huffily, he resolved to say no more on the matter. Under normal circumstances, he'd have had no qualms about defending his stance long past the point of its significance to anyone, but there was something very embarrassing about getting into an argument with someone whose head was smaller than a large onion.

Until Wickwright mentioned it, Coyotl hadn't honestly considered the fact that since Hopkin was the man's book, or had been at some point, that meant the book as it had been was now gone, forever. He had no real concept of how much effort had gone into its creation, but the mere thought of something like that suddenly becoming no more was slightly staggering. He could certainly understand, then, why he was so concerned with protecting the little Plague above all else. "So you're throwing your lot in with the Council," he said, half to himself, turning a bit to watch his fish orbit the center of its jar slowly. The Scientist faction had always been inscrutable to Coyotl at best and completely uninteresting at worst; they were searching for a cure to the Black Death, and that was noble enough, but to him they seemed far too proud of being such a pack of clever-britches when, after years of work, they had nothing at all to show for it.

But such a group would undoubtedly have some manner of resources on Plagues: what types there were, what they were capable of, and how to care for them, if they were the type of beings that required tending to. Coyotl had heard plenty of rumors about the creatures, snippets of second- or third- or fourth-hand information, and he was tired of them. What he wanted, no, needed, was an idea of what he had gotten himself into with this fish, and what he would have to do to keep the both of them out of harm's way.

All of that could wait, though, for the moment. With a wide grin, Coyotl clapped Wickwright's hand between both of his own in a brief, firm handshake. "We're decided, then!" He seemed about to say something else when he heard Hopkin's tinny voice from the window, clamoring for his keeper's attention. At Wickwright's alarmed reaction, he craned his neck to see what the matter was, and drew in a sharp breath between his teeth as he realized that what they had all taken to be snow at first was, in fact, something far more sinister.

"s**t," he hissed, scrambling for the cork to the koi's jar. If the wagon began moving soon, it would be best to keep the cork in place, at least to begin with, but more than that, it was an instinctive reaction to the threat implicit in the sight of those fluttering bits of parchment. As for Wickwright's assessment of things, well, he couldn't have agreed more. "Let's be quick about it," he murmured, a hand on either side of the jar's wide neck. Whether this was meant to steady the vessel or himself was not entirely clear.

Hedjrebl

Anxious Nerd

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PANYMIUM ❧ RP + world information

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