Almalexia. (arithmeticks) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-04-22 20:59:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, !plot: founders festival, almalexia lliryn, rictor cassul |
Rack 'em up, knock 'em down.
Who: Almalexia Lliryn & Rictor Cassul.
What: Trying their hand at festival games.
Where: Emillion.
When: Backdated to day two of the Founders Festival.
Rating: Tame!
Status: Complete!
There had been little time, or so it had seemed to Lex in particular, to consider or contrast how she had chosen to spend her time during the festival this year in comparison to the last. Drifting alongside Rictor through the many stalls and attractions (or oftentimes at the fore, leading the way to the next interesting subject that proved worth inspecting), the two had eventually found themselves preoccupied with the various games of skill and chance. With one trophy already underneath one arm (some pleasing stuffed amusement handed to her by a surly, unbelieving game attendant who had understood little of the dangers of attracting arithmeticians to absurd counting games, a mistake certainly never to happen again), Lex stood serenely over to one side of the next gaming booth and watched as Rictor attempted to claim a similar victory for himself. “Sufficient odds for your success at this endeavor, I believe,” she observed (without any great hint of amusement, of course). “If there’s one place where I ought to succeed, it’s in this,” Rictor declared—but perhaps the statement was a bit too grandiose, a bit too sure of himself, as another twinge of pain rippled through his muscles, catching at the site of recently-healed deep stitches. The exhibition match against the fell knight earlier had drained him, placing more strain on a left arm that was still relearning its place connected to Ric’s body. But he hefted the fake hammer regardless (entertaining a fleeting thought of sentinels, of Aspel and Caspar), before he swung it high over his head and brought it smashing down on the marker. The counterweight sped up the pole, but drooped and sank before it hit the top. Ric’s brow furrowed. Before he could be deterred, he was already fumbling out more gil for another try. Still stubborn, then, like all the Cassuls. The second attempt went better: the man mustered up the rest of his strength and threw it all into that one strike, and the counterweight immediately struck the bell, letting out a merry, triumphant peal. “Knights,” the attendant grumbled, the implication plain: it’s almost like cheating. “Indeed,” Lex said, welcoming another stuffed prize into her arms with a look and tone of contrasting approval. They really were quite a successful pair at these endeavors, she decided, content with the ratio of winnings thus far (and certainly more so than the attendant, who scowled and turned away). “Shall we continue on this way, perhaps?” A gentle nudge to Rictor’s good arm with hers, affectionate. She had kept a steady amount of her attention pinned on him throughout the day, and the mage had not failed to quietly notice the differences in how he had carried himself, subtler now as they had eventually become. With as much relief as there was by the steady progress of his healing, a lingering amount of concern seemed to be something the mage had little control over. Fortunately, however, the tone of the day remained upbeat and, with a growing amount of prizes between them, there was no profound reason to linger in any solemn moods. Quite the opposite, in fact, as another set of plans had been agreed upon that day as well. As if reading her mind, Ric glanced up at the nearest clocktower in the district, checking on the hour and ensuring that they still had enough time to kill beforehand. “Aye, let’s continue—though you’re in grievous risk of being bogged down by stuffed animals and plush Moogles at this point. We’ll need to put ‘em into storage or something if you don’t want to drown in them before we find some food,” Rictor said, amused. An argument may have formed, but the need to shuffle the toys underarm to a more secure position kept Lex silent on the matter (for now). It was hopelessly normal, sauntering through a cavalcade of games and prizes with his girlfriend (and that term had finally settled, taking its place at the forefront of his mind, fitting to the lexicon and no longer seeming as strange and foreign as it once did). Over the heads of other people in the crowd, he eventually spotted another game that would suit her talents nicely, and nodded towards it. “Shooting?” It sounded more like an archer’s specialty, at first glance—but he suspected that precision water jets hitting targets in moving lines would be easy, for an arithmetician who’d learned to examine an entire battlefield in a quick glance, targeting her enemies with pinpoint precision like crosses on a grid. Distilled to their core, all targets were simply numbers and velocity, after all. “Oh?” Lex assessed the game with some hesitance, but it did not, however, take long before her pride won out in the end—and now that Rictor had suggested it, she had felt strangely determined to commit herself to another victory. The plush toys were replaced momentarily with a water rifle given by the next unlucky game attendant, an object entirely foreign in the hands of the mage. She gave a wary glance to the others participating in the game nearby, wondering to herself how best to imitate their stance (although certainly, such details were less important than calculating distance and trajectory). “I imagine this cannot be terribly difficult,” she mumbled to herself, mustering up a facsimile of a shooting stance and readying herself to fire. “At the risk of undermining my own guild, it isn’t. The concept’s easy enough, and then the rest is all muscle memory and practice.” Ric rattled it off easily and instinctively, like any lecture he’d given Cressida or Morgayne at the range. But unlike all those times, he quickly straightened as soon as he saw Lex readying herself, his professional instincts twitching. “Hang on,” he said, and then slid into the space behind Lex: breath at the nape of her neck, hands steadying her elbows, foot nudging hers into position, fine-tuning her stance. The adjustments were delivered with the casual expertise of a shooting instructor (setting her foundation straight so she could use her own skills properly), but also with the homegrown intimacy that had sprung up between them, his hand drifting against her waist. Any excuse, really. Lex quickly decided that this was not very advantageous at all toward her attempt at stern contemplation of her targets, especially with Rictor’s hand hovering where it was (and her failure in attempting to bat it away as was likely proper), but she took his instruction seriously. Her pride, at least, would not see the mage commit herself to any obvious failure here, and so with a careful intake of breath, and a steadily devised calculation, Lex took aim and fired. For all reasonable circumstances, she assumed she had done rather well—both aided and slightly hindered by Rictor’s attempts at impromptu instruction. With yet another prize afforded to her grasp, and another game stall attendant giving the pair an annoyed glance, Lex raised her chin up and kept them along their easy, natural course along the festival. They meandered off together, like two barrels bobbing along on the current as it carried them through the crowds and onto other things, other distractions, other excuses, gravitating towards the Founders Play as they’d done at another festival once upon a time. |