RP:From One Bodyguard to Another
Summary: After Quintessa and Karasu's fight, an unconscious Karasu is carried by Krice at Quintessa's request to the healers in Cenril. When the spell-blade regains consciousness, Krice questions her on what transpired over the fussing of some sassy nurses. Karasu hints to him some information regarding possible corruption in the Mage's Guild in the form of her sired father. His line of questions make Karasu realize that perhaps Quintessa is not the enemy her paranoid mind had led her to be.
Safe House
Spidery vines and budding flowers hang from the ceiling in potted baskets, giving the air a sweet scent. An iron kettle rests beside a hardened clay firepit, pots and pans neatly stacked nearby. A barrel of fresh water sits in the corner, recently filled and soothingly cool. A large, fur rug covers the central flooring, with several soft pillows setting about for comfort. In the back, a door is partly open to what seems a store room.
Time moved curiously for the spell blade in her unconscious state. The sensation of being lifted off the ground just barely registered beneath the painful jolts of the lightning still coursing through her. Various images flashed through her mind of the fight, distorted through a murky filter, as if she were looking through it from beneath the water. Karasu reached out for the images, thrashing against what she thought were binds, before her eyes shot open. A healer stood on each side of her, trying to hold her arms down. Her throat felt raw, as if she had been screaming. "Where am I?" Karasu breathed, spinel eyes darting around the rustic room. The steel armor lay on a table opposite the room where sparks of electricity still danced around the edges, a mocking reminder of what had just transpired. "Let go of me, I'm fine!" The half-feline protested indignantly, pulling down any exposed clothes to cover the fresh lightning-patterned burns across her body.
Krice had returned to Cenril after a short time away for reasons that were his own, once more dressed in his usual black garb--he had to toss the blood-soaked shirt he wore when last he was in the port city. He stood in the doorway of the clinic, just a metre back from Karasu's little annex as the nurses tended to her wounds. In their attempts to calm the feline, they seemed to be aggravating her. Stepping to the side to reveal himself to the little feline, still well beyond the nurses who attempted to help her, the warrior hoped to offer her some kind of calmness just by being there. If not because of his own calmness, then because she might be embarrassed to carry on in front of a seasoned warrior. Who knows. " Let them help you," he coolly remarked, which earned one nurse's attention enough that she spoke to him by name. "Hello, Krice," was her fond greeting, though she kept her attention thereafter on Karasu.
Karasu stopped moving when the man side-stepped into view, already out of breath from fighting the well-intended nurses. Her lips purse as she gives him a quick once-over, seeming to gauge how much of a threat the warrior is. It only takes a few heartbeats for her to conclude that he was not a threat to her in the moment, but that this was not someone she would want to take in a fight. The name is familiar enough; there had been whispers of him through those who knew of warriors, and by association, associated him with the appropriate Guild. "Krice. Of the Warrior's Guild?" She considers him for a moment and jerks her arms inward. In a show of little shame, Karasu pulls the bloodied shirt over her head, though an equally bloodied undershirt remains, and sits up to let the poor healers work. The young woman looks at Krice, the around to the other figures in the room, none of which look nearly as out of place as the two of them. "Where is Quintessa?"
Krice wasn't -of- the Warrior's Guild, per se, but wasting breath and time on an explanation of how he was connected to the group didn't seem relevant. A nod in the affirmative would suffice for now. He casually glanced away while Karasu pulled her shirt from her body, just in case she wasn't covered beneath. Presented still modestly, the warrior returned his gilded stare to the feline and responded to her query with a truthful, " Who knows. Why were you guys fighting?"
Karasu looks down at the bloodied shirt in her hands. She pulls a hand away to examine how much comes off onto her fingers and how congealed it is. The woman had been unconscious for no more than an hour, it seemed. There was still a few hours left until the departure, then. His question is considered all the while. He had known that they were fighting, at a minimum, which was more than most would know. "She's a vampire now. Probably working alongside the same one that enlisted her as his accomplice while she was still human, and who wants to kill one of the last family members I have left." She said as though she was recounting the gist of a history lesson. "Were you the one that brought me here, then?"
Krice stared at Karasu as she spoke, listening attentively to the revelations in her answer. Quintessa was a vampire...? He'd have to train his senses on her more pointedly next time to confirm that. At any rate, the warrior seemed ready enough to answer whatever question Karasu threw his way, because he responded to her latter one with an easy, " Yeah." Of course, this was followed with another question, which he spoke in a quizzical tone while pocketing his hands into the folds of his slacks; his katana's sheathed tip visible past his right wrist. " She asked me to take you somewhere. Maybe the most important question is... Do you know who her sire is?"
Karasu shakes her head simply. "From what I've heard, there was an announcement made in The Hanging Corpse. Lady Larewen of House Dragana did it in order to have Quintessa watch the House in her absence. From what I understand, Lady Dragana may have also sired the elder Provost of the Mage's Guild too." This was less of a secret than it was common knowledge to everyone except the spell blade. Her face turns downward into a scowl, partially in thought, partially from the treatment being applied to minimize the damage to her body.
Krice regarded the nurses briefly, to gauge their reactions to the words shared between himself and Karasu, to take note of how they were caring for her. Just as briefly, his focus diverted to the crackling shield nearby, still alive with energy. Lady Dragana... The warrior's reaction to that name was subtle, as was everything he did, but he seemed relatively familiar with it. Returning his gaze to Karasu, he asked, " Quintessa was fighting you, but she asked me to ensure your safety. Know why she'd have a change of heart?"
Karasu presses her lips into a thin line and averts her gaze, looking down at the bed. "The obvious answer is because she does not consider me an enemy, right?" Her eyes flicker back to the swordsman and follow his gaze to the armor. "Or, she still needs me to lead her to the person she's looking for. She is not a fool, though, she knows the girl is still somewhere in this city. I'll have to draw her away." Karasu lets out a wince as the nurses lift her hair. The two healers pause and look at each other, then back at her neck. Feeling the tension, Karasu throws a hand onto the back of her neck with a scowl. "That's a birthmark, don't worry about it." She all but snaps at the healers without turning towards them.
Krice was ready to ask yet another question, but the reaction of the nurses to something beneath Karasu's hair, and her subsequent defensiveness of it, waylayed him. " Be nice," he muttered, gilded eyes fixed squarely on the feline. Without waiting for her to acquiesce or refuse, he continued on with their conversation by inquiring after the apparent target of Quintessa's interest. " Who's she looking for? Maybe it's someone I know."
Karasu scowls at him, her cheeks turning pink. "I -am- nice." She says defensively. At the question, she seems to falter. "You don't know?" A pause, and a roll of the eyes, and she leans forward, propping her chin in her hand. "Oh, if you met her, you wouldn't be standing here. You're exactly her type. Cute girl that looks like me, but ah, thicker." She makes motions with her hands in front of her chest and hips for emphasis. "Singer, has a hideous wolf that always follows her around. Answers to 'Kanna.'"
Krice wasn't going to refute Karasu's defensiveness, but his expression told that he wasn't entirely convinced of her niceness, either. Regardless, their conversation moved on and he arched a brow at the feline's description of the mystery girl. 'Cute girl that looks like me'... He probably could have made a joke about how it followed that Karasu must have thus thought herself cute, but the stoic warrior only adopted an amused glow to his gaze, which faded naturally with the progression of their talk. Judging by the description of 'Kanna', she was apparently dangerous. Still... " Never met her. What's Quintessa's interest in her?"
Karasu smirks. "I know you haven't. Until now, I thought Quintessa was after her because its what the Provost wanted." She pauses a bit before nodding her head in remembrance. "More than one Provost now. The eldest one, Provost Tsuji. It seems that he and Larewen were conspiring against myself and my sister since we were children." A sigh. "If I am to trust what she said when we met now, she has no interest in actually assisting him, but she does want her for something else. It cannot be good, though." Karasu turns her head back to the healers to examine the progress. The burns are little more than pink markings now that disappear under the black-violet leopard spots on her pale skin. "Somehow, it all relates back to Vakmatharas."
Krice frowned pensively at Karasu. He obviously knew next to nothing about this feline, or the 'Provost', or anything that had led her and Quintessa to fight amid Cenril's trees so recently. In order to get to the crux of the issue, to make sense of it all, he'd need to investigate further. Instead, he opted to shift the focus of their talk to something hopefully a little less... miserable. " Haven't seen you before. Are you new here? Running from the Provost or, whatever?"
Karasu makes a face at the small talk. "I'm here as long as she is. Leaving at dawn, though. And it's not so much 'running' as it is being a bodyguard." A complete lie, as the spell-blade's cowardice partially created half of these problems. "And yourself? Is there something in Cenril worth being here for?"
Krice arched a brow. Karasu was a bodyguard? He seemed disbelieving of that fact - or maybe it was something else she said. When she turned the question onto him, he nodded in accompaniment of his own reply. "Also in Cenril as a bodyguard." Scanning what he could see of her injuries as the nurses salved and bandaged those that required it, he asked, " How're you feeling? You seem... spritely, despite the situation."
Karasu seemed not to notice the arch of the brow. If she did, she makes no comment of it. Though she would never speak it in a million years, the little flirt of a bard was much better suited to the rough and tumble of street fights than the feline was with her strict soldier-like training in mock arenas. "Oh?" Her eyes review the room again. "Bodyguarding the healers? And I'm completely fine! I'd go back out there right now if I could!" The little feline's eyes light up with the spark of a puppy that just wants to fight. A healer gives her a smack with a washcloth. "You will be doing no such thing, lassie, not until we get that putrid thing off of ye. A lady of your age should not be smelling like brushfires and death. And you--" The woman points at Krice with the cork end of a bottle of something bright lavender in hand while Karasu makes a thousand protests or excuses or both. "Unless you're family or a boyfriend, back to the other side of the curtain with you."
Krice almost smirked. Hardly bodyguarding the healers, but Karasu didn't need to know who he was in Cenril to protect. His eyes drifted to the nurses as they interacted more directly with the injured feline, expression contemplative, though once attention turned to him with the direction to retreat, he shook his head. " I'm done, anyway." Glancing at Karasu, the enigma afforded her a casual, " Take care," before he turned to move to the other side of that curtain, and beyond for the clinic exit.
Karasu almost misses his intent to depart while arguing for whether her clothes should be washed or burned with the state they're in. "Wait! How do I find you again? I owe you for bringing me here, I guess." She tilts her head a bit.
Krice paused upon Karasu's request that he do so, glancing past the edge of the curtain - he was halfway beyond it, already - to regard her once more. " You owe me nothing," he said, honestly, and though his features were as reserved as they had been through the entirety of their interaction, something in his eyes reflected that truth. He hesitated, just in case she had more to ask or say - though the nurses were spared a brief look equally in case they saw this as an opportunity to sass him out of the clinic again.
Karasu smiles, the first that the swordsman sees, though there's a hint of mischief behind her eyes. "Fine. Then I'll save you once, and we'll be even, then."
Krice scoffed quietly. " We're already even. I brought you here because Quintessa asked me to. If anyone owes me, it's her." Though, really, he didn't expect anything from the apparent-vampire, either.
Karasu gives a discontent hum at that. "Fine. Then I suppose... thank you for listening to her." Karasu turns her head towards the window, where the orange lights from the park's flames finally begin to dull.
Krice lingered a moment longer, considering Karasu's gratitude. Possessed of his own mind and stoic in nature, he wasn't one to follow requests of near-strangers--Quintessa was still one despite their mutual link in the Warrior's Guild--but there he was, helping this injured feline because someone asked him to. He dipped his chin in a vague nod of farewell before turning to continue outward, along with a grumbling stare from one of the more impatient nurses waiting to tend to her patient.