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 Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 12:33 am
---
Up Came a Magpie
---
with
Reynard Irving and the Magpie (Snifit), and Coyotl and Lucky (Hedjrebl)
on
a brisk fall afternoon. The salt air is crisp, and the late-day sunlight casts everything it touches in orangey-gold.
in
Persea, Imisus.
--------------------- Coyotl liked Persea.
He'd only been there for about a week, but found that it suited him just fine. The day's delivery was as mundane as they came- a packet of one dozen glass phials for a chemist whose experiments were apparently far too sensitive for him to leave them alone for a supply run- but he was making good time, so he'd afforded himself the luxury of slowing down to take in the sights. The streets were bustling and full of people, a welcome change from travelling for miles on end without seeing another human face. Being stuck in the middle of Shyregoed until earlier that year had made him forget how lively port towns could be, and Persea was large, a proper city, which made the contrast even more dramatic.
Further from the docks, the streets were less crowded, though far from empty; it seemed many folks had already gone home for their evening meals. The sounds and scents of cooking from the residences lining the street were evidence enough of that. An especially savory-smelling gust of air from a nearby window set Coyotl's mouth watering, and he knew he ought to get down to business; he would make his delivery, polish off the last of the stale bread he'd been picking at for days, and set his mind to finding a place to bed down for the night. An uneventful end to an uneventful day, but it was better than unlooked-for excitement, as far as he was concerned.
Something squirmed inside Coyotl's scarf. With a few of the faintest grunts imaginable, a small Phasmas wriggled his head free from the depths of the lumpy woolen muffler, where he'd been stowed by his Grimm in an attempt to keep him from falling out. He gulped at the air a bit, tasting it, before turning his face upward.
"Where is food?" he asked. "Smell good."
Coyotl huffed, but said nothing. He'd learned better than to ask whether Lucky was hungry, anymore; the answer was "yes", every time, even if the Phasmas had just wolfed down more bits of bread and cheese than should have been able to fit in his pea-sized stomach. Instead he busied himself with the parcel in his hands. The place he was looking for ought to be on the western side of town, which meant he would need to keep the sea at his back...
"We go get food?" came the gurgling voice next to his ear again.
"No, we don't," Coyotl replied, with a hint of annoyance. "We've got food already, we don't need to buy more."
Lucky went quiet for a brief period. "But it smell good," he murmured to himself. It didn't make any sense to him at all; why wouldn't they want even more food than they already had? More food was always better. The Excito addressed his Grimm again, patting at the side of his neck to get his attention. "Why we don't buy food?"
"Why don't we," the postman corrected him. "And I already told you, we've got food, even if it don't smell so good anymore. 'Sides, we don't have money to be throwin' around like that. See?" He dug around in his satchel and pulled out a small handful of coins, looking them over and making a face. Not too bad- he was damned good at stretching a shilling as far as it could go- but not as much as he would have liked either. (What else was new?) "We're savin' this. Now shush and sit down, seems like you want to fall out a' there again." With his free hand, he pushed the Phasmas's head gently but firmly back into his scarf, and with the other, he made to slip the coins back into the bag at his side--
but distracted as he was, his coordination was slightly off.
"Ssssshhhit."
A chorus of jingles and jangles rang out as five of the coins spilled out onto the road. Grumbling, Coyotl scrambled to pick them up, hoping none of the other pedestrians on the road would spot them first. One of them had rolled a bit further than the rest, but he was confident he'd get to it before anyone else did; the sunlight glinting off of their metal surfaces made them easy to spot, at least.
So much for not having money to throw around.
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Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2012 6:47 pm
Persea was a good place to be a magpie. Of course, if the bird in question was resourceful and clever enough, anywhere could be a good place to be for a magpie, but this particular bird, in the limited way it was capable of understanding such things, was quite at home there in the city. It had been a long, fruitful summer, and the magpie was as healthy as it had ever been. For the most part, it had prospered, its only hardship being shooed off by the more superstitious residents from time to time. It was surrounded by food and by interesting things to investigate, and on sunny evenings there were plenty of cats lounging in the open, just waiting for determined bird to swoop out of the sky and dive-bomb them. Life was good.
The corvid wheeled across the sky, keeping its single eye trained towards the ground as it did. Gulls were something of a problem out near the docks, but the magpie was as bold as brass, and not afraid to give a bird a few times its size what for… though more often than not, fleeing with whatever prize it managed to snatch from them proved to be the most prudent course of action. Out here, there was no reason to watch the sky, so when the sun glinted off the coin far, far below it, the magpie saw, and it did what such birds do. It half-folded its wings and began a looping descent.
It crash-landed a minute and a half-later, bowling across the pavement in a riot of feathers, leaving black specks in its wake. It scrambled to its feet, shuffling its wings and giving its half-blinded head a few proprietary flicks. By the time Coyotl would have looked over to see what the ruckus was, it was already eyeing the coin, having hopped over to it.
He’d have time to maybe loose a single syllable of speech before, with birdlike abruptness, the magpie scooped up the coin and then flapped heavily into the air.
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Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 11:50 am
Five coins had fallen, and Coyotl picked them up off the ground one by one. With his left hand at his neck, to make sure the tiny Excito in his scarf didn't tip out accidentally, his efforts to pick up the coins were hampered by having only one set of grubby fingers (and chewed fingernails) to work with, but he made do. One, two, three, four... four... The small handful of pence clinked in his palm as he hunted around for the remaining coin, which, by process of elimination, must have been the tuppence he'd been holding not long ago. He'd seen it as it fell, but where had it gotten to after that? No one seemed to have picked it up, but he couldn't recall just where it had landed...
A number of things happened very quickly.
First, there was a brief burst of feather-sounds as a blobby black shape streaked to the ground off to Coyotl's left. He gave a wordless exclamation of shock at the sudden movement and jumped away from it instinctively, nearly dropping the coins in his hand as he did so. Less than two years ago, black birds tumbling out of the sky had been a fairly common sight around Panymium-- and no good had come of that for him or anyone else. But it didn't take long for him to realize that this wasn't a crow, though it was shaped a bit like one and moved like one. There were patches of white in the bird's plumage, which gave it the appearance of wearing a bib, or maybe an apron.
Next came Coyotl's sudden realization, as he stared at the bird with mingled surprise and suspicion, that the creature was standing in front of a small, round, shiny object on the ground. A coin. His coin! He started toward it, hand outstretched, with a single "hey" that was the beginning of an attempt to shoo the bird away-
-but it was too late. He had turned just in time to see the bird snatch up the coin in its beak and, casual as you please, just fly away with it.
Coyotl's mouth hung open as, for a long moment, all he could do was watch the bird flapping away from him. Was that something birds normally did? Take money from people? What would a bird do with money anyway?!
"Hey... hey!" he cried finally, and as soon as he coaxed his legs into motion, he began to sprint after the magpie. "You get back here!" He didn't expect that to do him any good, but it felt like the right thing to yell. What a bird would do with money was beside the point, which was that a bird HAD taken his money; realistically, chasing a bird down on foot might have been a bit of a lost cause, but he wasn't about to give up a whole tuppence just like that.
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Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2012 4:38 pm
The magpie, for its part, was discovering the technical difficulties of carrying a shiny coin through the air under the following conditions:
1. Being a small bird and weighing only about two hundred grams.
2. Having a beak not really designed to pick up slippery bits of metal.
It wasn’t long before it dropped its prize, and the shilling went bouncing off the corner of a nearby roof, making a light tink sound as it hit the cobbles below and rolled along. The magpie twisted in midair, dove, and skidded along the ground, keeping airborne primarily through momentum rather than any degree of skill or control. Somewhere in the middle of the storm of feathers and pin wheeling bird, it managed to scoop its prize up once more. Poor Coyotl had to watch this unfold probably about three feet in front of him.
It nearly lost the coin twice more (once on a roof and once more in the street), but the bird didn’t flag or lose interest. If anything, it seemed energized by the game. At long last it veered down a broad boulevard, altering the course of its rather haphazard flight to make straight for an enormous building jutting from the side of the road. The building was almost comically large, every aspect of it oddly out-of-scale with its surroundings, and it commanded the immediate attention of the eye.
The bird swooped low in a graceful arc, bringing itself under the boughs of a massive tree that grew alongside the building, its branches scraping the roof. The bird disappeared into the branches, observed only by Coyotl and a thin man who was standing outside of the building. He was kneeling on the ground, scrubbing out the interior of a very large clay drip pan, the surface of which was still slimy with half-congealed fat. He glanced up to the bird once, the sunlight glinting off his spectacles, before going back to work.
The enormous building had a single sign on front of it, proclaiming it in large and impressive letters to be the Lady Octavia Inn.
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Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 10:46 pm
It was a good thing for Coyotl that the bird was having trouble keeping a grip on its prize; if it hadn't, he very probably would have found it impossible to follow the thing on foot. He was hard pressed to keep up as it was, and several times he thought he'd lost the object of his chase entirely, but each time, he'd looked up or rounded a corner only to see the magpie regaining its grip on the coin and taking flight once more. It was frustrating going, to say the least-- and on top of that, he found it very awkward to run with one hand gripping his scarf. (He had thought about digging Lucky out of his scarf and stowing him in a pocket or somewhere similar, but had quickly decided against it; there was too much chance of the Excito being squashed or jostled out of whatever hiding place he found, and besides, relocating him would require stopping, at which point he might as well give up all hope of ever seeing his hard-earned money again. So he continued on as he was, with his elbow jutting out ahead of him, looking as though he'd sustained some kind of wound to his neck.)
But frequent stops or no, it seemed as though the bird might get away after all. The postman was flagging: he had been walking all day, he was hungry, and all of the muscles in his legs, including ones he didn't even know he had, were screaming at him in unison to stop and rest. He had nearly resolved to give up his pursuit when the bird decided to take a rest as well-- or perhaps it had simply reached its destination. For as Coyotl jogged to a slow stop, panting heavily, he was able to watch the magpie as it landed.
"Oh, no," he began wheezing as soon as he realized what the bird was doing. "Come on, no, no..."
Of course it was going to land somewhere he couldn't reach it. What had he thought it was going to do? Let him chase it into a dead end, land on the ground, say "you got me!" and drop the coin it had stolen? It was a bird, for pity's sake, he'd been an idiot to try to catch it in the first place. Those and other thoughts, mostly angry, and mostly directed at himself and the thieving creature, occupied him very thoroughly as he rested his hands on his knees, doubled over in an attempt to catch his breath. He could feel Lucky wriggling slightly in his scarf, but was fairly sure all his recent running around would discourage the Phasmas from trying to work himself free of its folds. He barely registered the unusually large building next to the tree, or the fact that there was someone standing in front of it; if he had, he might have been more concerned about keeping Lucky hidden, or at least felt embarrassed about having a witness to his failure. Instead, he heaved himself upright and took several heavy steps toward the tree, legs wobbly from exertion.
Resting one hand against the trunk, Coyotl squinted up through the branches. He could see what might have been the bird, at least ten feet off the ground; the boughs were thick, but even the lowest ones were too high up for him to reach easily. He might be able to shimmy up the trunk, but that would be clumsy and take too much time; the bird would certainly see him coming and be gone long before he reached its perch. And, of course, there was Lucky to worry about, and the package full of highly breakable glass in the bag at his side... No, climbing the tree was definitely out.
"Y... you... ffhhh..." Coyotl had intended to start threatening the bird while he attempted to think of what to do next, but it was no use. His throat was far too dry, and he was still short of breath; all he could do was rasp unimpressively at it. Which wasn't nearly as satisfying as swearing would have been.
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Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2012 11:11 am
At first, Reynard did not pay Coyotl too much attention. He had been working and living at the Lady Octavia long enough to be used to the eccentricities of the people who passed through its doors (the former clerk had assumed St. Cobb to be somewhat uniquely odd, but over the summer he had come to accept that the world seemed to be full of strangeness, and more than that, strangeness of different kinds, and had thus resigned himself to his fate of putting up with it). Besides, there was work to be done, so he elected to focus on it instead. Most of the fat had been drained from his drip pan, and Reynard would need to deliver that to the candle maker’s down the street once he was done here, but even so, cleaning the slick surface of the pan to a state that would satisfy the head cook’s tyrannical eye was no small task.
When he heard Coyotl puffing and rasping, though, he spared a glance up, mistakenly assuming that the odd fellow was addressing him. The Lady Octavia was no stranger to messengers, being located as it was at the hub of several major roads, and Reynard’s eye for detail quickly picked out Coyotl for what he was. A postman. He straightened slightly, his thin and somewhat twiggy form half-bent over the pan rather like a mantis in a dark tunic.
“Are you here to deliver a message?” He asked, in his incongruously deep voice.
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Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2012 12:36 pm
“Are you here to deliver a message?”
Right. Someone was standing behind him. Coyotl let his hand fall away from the tree trunk and turned. He was expecting a more solidly-built, imposing presence from the owner of such a deep voice, so he was just a bit taken aback at the sight of the rather reedy man he was facing. Who ever heard of such a scrawny, gingery-looking fellow sounding like that? That was far from being his main concern, though; the bird was still in the tree, and still had his coin.
"Nuhh," he wheezed, shaking his head. His lungs hurt, and God he was tired. If the bird took flight again, there was no way he'd be able to follow. "Bird. Took my money." Coyotl thumbed over his shoulder at the tree as he spoke. His predicament sounded even stupider spoken aloud, but at that point he was beyond embarrassment. It wasn't as though anyone in Persea actually knew him, either, and it was always worse to humiliate yourself in front of an acquaintance. Strangers barely even counted, he reasoned, especially if you would probably never have cause to meet again.
But... if this man was a stranger...
Coyotl straightened his back self-conscously. "How'd you know I was...?" He squinted at the other man, slowly working through a question that probably should have occurred to him earlier. "... We met somewhere before?" he asked finally.
How did the stranger know he was a postman?
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Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 7:32 pm
Reynard stared back at him rather blankly. “If we have, I do not remember you,” was his succinct reply. He paused then, aware of something prickling at the back of his mind. He had the vague suspicion that he was forgetting something… hmm, perhaps his manners? He’d been talked to more than once about his rather frank nature. Sometimes it just slipped past him, and it wouldn’t do to go driving business away. That had been rude, hadn’t it? “We see more than our fair share of messengers,” he elaborated, hoping the statement of fact would serve as an effective apology. “Also, I knew because I can see your package, there.”
He gestured to Coyotl’s parcel, the corner of which was peeking out of his satchel, having been somewhat dislodged in his mad chase across the city. “You’ll need to go through the lobby for that. I wouldn't be able to take it off your hands.” He raised his hands by way of explanation, which were still quite filthy from the cleaning he’d been giving the drip pan. “I don’t think Mr. Campbell will mind if you need to sit and catch y--” The other shoe dropped.
“Wait. A bird? You say a bird took your money?” His impassive face suddenly tensed in an expression that mixed shock and sourness in the most unattractive means imaginable. He looked sharply up to the tree beside them, then back to Coyotl, and then back to the tree, gesturing with one hand. “Did he go up there?”
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Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 12:02 am
"... Oh." The stranger's knowledge of his profession had put Coyotl a bit more on edge than was warranted, but it seemed there was a reasonable explanation for that after all. He poked the parcel he carried back into his satchel and secured the flap with one hand, preferring not to think about what would have happened if the delicate glass phials had tumbled out. That settled that, it seemed-- but for some reason he was still being talked to. Now that he was finally able to breathe without feeling as though his lungs were about to fall out through his mouth, Coyotl was having a bit of trouble paying attention to what the other man was saying, partially because he was still very agitated about the loss of ten pence to a marauding bird, but mostly because he didn't really care. He'd already said he wasn't there to deliver a package... well, what he'd said was "nuhh", but why split hairs? That was close enough, the postman thought as he shifted his feet, looking back over his shoulder to see if the feathered thief was still in the tree; of course he couldn't actually see it, so he would just have to assume that it was there. Either way, he had no business with anyone in the building, so as far as he was concerned, the exchange was at an end.
Then the stranger said something about the bird, and Coyotl's attention snapped back to the would-be conversation at hand.
"S'what I just said, innit?" he groused. "Damn thing comes outta nowhere-" he held out one hand and bounced the other off of his palm, smak, in a brief simulation of the event- "an' there it goes with my money. A whole tuppence, mind," he added, glaring daggers up into the branches.
Something struck him, then, about what the other man had said. Calling a strange animal "he" wasn't unheard of, but there was something else in the man's tone- and his expression- that suggested some familiarity with the bird in question. Coyotl scrunched his face once again, as though unsure of just how suspicious he ought to be. "You know that bird?"
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Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 6:51 pm
Reynard inhaled deeply as Coyotl spoke, and as he did his frame tensed in gradually growing agitation, which manifested itself in slight, muted way about his slightly-narrowed eyes and somewhat drawn-up shoulders. When he released the breath at the end of the explanation, he did so in an almost explosive sigh, and though the air left him, the irritated manner did not. "In a manner of speaking. It lives here." He bent then, dipping his hands into the bucket next to his drip-pan, and began to furious scrub at his own hands. The grease wouldn't come off easily, but he would need to at least try and get the worst of it off before he went about doing what he intended to do.
He stood, still having not explained himself, and nodded to Coyotl. Then he turned and walked back towards the building.
He was almost inside when he realized that he had failed to explain anything to the man standing outside (whose name he did not even have), and he turned smartly, trotting back to where he had originally stood. "I'll get it for you. Your money, that is." He looked back up towards the tree. "I would prefer not garnering ourselves any sort of reputation for this sort of thing."
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Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 12:01 am
So the magpie lived in that tree? It made sense, Coyotl supposed, and he nodded mutely at the explanation. An inn would produce plenty of trash for a bird to scavenge from. And judging by the other man's expression- not to mention the heavy sigh- this particular bird probably had a habit of getting up to mischief. As Coyotl watched, the man cleaned his hands, turned, and headed back towards the building. This wasn't surprising, and he'd expected as much; there was only so long you could expect a complete stranger to stand there commiserating with you over having your belongings nicked by a bird. It was a bad piece of luck to be sure, but it was his problem, not anyone else's.
What he had not expected, however, was for the man to return, having not even reached the door.
"I'll get it for you. Your money, that is. I would prefer not garnering ourselves any sort of reputation for this sort of thing."
Coyotl stared, baffled by the frankness of the declaration; for a few moments, he was at a loss for words. By the time he found the presence of mind to blurt out an incredulous "hold on, what?", the man had already headed back toward the inn. "It'll just fly away!" he protested, gesturing at the tree to emphasize his point, but his voice was still fairly hoarse. He wasn't even sure if the fellow could hear him anymore. Coyotl thought about following after him, to see what he was up to, but the still-burning-and-twitching muscles in his legs would just as soon have had him lean against the tree and wait there instead. So that was what he did, looking as though his legs were about to crumple under him at any moment. He fiddled with his scarf and looked back up through the tree's branches once more. If the other man didn't return within ten minutes or so, he figured he'd take his leave, but if he actually had some plan to get the coin back... well, that Coyotl wanted to see.
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Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2013 11:16 pm
Reynard paused as the door shut behind him, listening to Coyotl's last words carrying through just before it shut with a muffled thump. He didn't bother to explain; the other fellow would see soon enough. The bird was a repeat offender, and Reynard knew how to deal with its thievery.
It had a nest (or, well, a messy collection of rags and twigs assembled in a fashion just vaguely organized enough to be considered something like a nest) in the middle-to-upper branches of the oak tree, one that was visible from the windows overlooking Reynard's loft space. This was where it stored its ill-gotten gains, and something as heavy as a coin could probably be shaken out of the ramshackle structure with little difficulty. As he was crossing the overlarge lobby area of the inn and making his way up the ladder leading to his sparse living quarters, the magpie was showing itself once more, outside. It flitted down from the tree to the lawn before Coyotl, regarding him with its single eye.
It reflected not an ounce of remorse for its brazen crime.
There was a creaking sound from above Coyotl as Reynard opened the little round window half-hidden by the oak branches scraping against the sides and roof of the Lady Octavia. he poked his head out and peered down at Coyotl and the magpie below, the sunlight reflecting from his broken spectacles. Doubtless the creature had assumed it deserved to be fed for its crimes... or perhaps its had dropped its prize. He wasn't about to go clambering onto the roof if there was no good reason for it. "He does not still have it, does he?" He called.
Reynard, of course, could not tell, but the gold-pilfering corvid in question was female, and her beak, for the moment, was empty.
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