Meeting the Neighbors: Arzin, Irene
~No two ways about it -- being outside and on the march again feels good,~ Arzin thought to himself as he trudged along. Admittedly, the fact that the sun was shining and was not so strong as to be scorching his metal breastplate played a rather large part in the ex-soldier's good humor -- had it been rainy with a cold, biting wind that found all the nooks and crannies in his armor, there likely would have been a scowl instead of a smile on his face.
Arzin himself would be the first to tell you that he was no tracker. He had heard tell of men and women in the army who had been assigned as scouts and pathfinders (who had likely been poachers and backwoodsmen in civilian life) who could, as the story went, track a lizard across a bare rock. Arzin thought that most likely such tales had grown with the telling (after all, why let Truth get in the way of a good story?), but there was no denying that the scouts and pathfinders had possessed a talent that he did not.
Luckily, (at least in that respect) no tracking was necessary, for the smoke that they could see made a great smudge in the sky, and gave the twosome an easy aim-point. Of course there was a possibility that Faldra had changed her mind -- military campaigning had taught Arzin that circumstances often had a way of altering even the best thought-out plans -- but he reckoned that he and Irene could not know whether the other mages had indeed aimed for the source of the smoke without first going there and seeing things for themselves.
It had not escaped Arzin's notice that Irene seemed to be a trifle sore-footed (undoubtedly result of her previous day's exertions) and that she was seemingly not accustomed to setting a fast pace. But he knew that she was doing the best that she could, and that was all that one could ask of another.
Unsure of whether the female mage would accept his assistance, he offered her his hand whenever the going became especially rocky or when they needed to make their way down one side of a ravine and up The Far Side OOC: (sadly, not finding any wonderful cartoons there, for their amusement), leaving it up to Irene as to whether she would take advantage of his offerings.
The sun had not yet touched the horizon, although it was definitely on the downside of its daily journey across the sky, when Arzin halted atop a hillock that he had just climbed, and gazed down into a valley laid out before them. He looked on in wonder as the glimpsed the great metal vessel that was the source of the smoke that they had seen, and took in its rust-laden and weathered condition.
"Well . . ." he muttered to Irene, "mystery solved. At least one, although methinks we may well discover more before all is said and done."
"I wonder how it came to be here," he continued, "and how long it has been here? It seems that it had no way of returning to whence it came."
Arzin noted the odd mist that occupied a portion of the hillock where he and Irene stood, and spied a similar circle of mist down on the deck of the great vessel. ~Mage-doings, no doubt,~ he thought to himself. ~Irene knows more about such things than do I, I feel certain.~
"Let's get down there," he said to Irene, "where we shall see what we may see . . . and learn what we might learn."
Once down on the floor of the valley, as the twosome neared the vessel, things became even more interesting -- if one enjoys a frisson of danger as a seasoning to flavor their exploration, that is -- as the two humanoid-looking, animalistic-moving figures burst out of a hole in the vessel's hull and loped towards Irene and Arzin.
"Get behind me," he hissed, quickly slipping the leather straps of his shield onto his left forearm, then drawing his blade with a sibilant, rasping hiss of its own -- not unlike a fast-striking snake issuing from its burrow -- and taking a step towards the new arrivals.
"Let us see if cold steel gives them pause . . . at least, until we see whether they mean us harm."
This message was last edited by the player at 20:02, Sat 09 Mar.