Cyril of House Saelac (saelac) wrote in thedas, @ 2010-08-26 11:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! thread, & before 9:45, @ cyril saelac, @ ordhan wyland |
Backscene: Decent human goods, improved by a somewhat twitchy Dwarf, for sale
Who Cyril of Saelac, Ordhan Wyland
When 9:26, Frumentum
Where Cyril's armory and shop, market square, Denerim
Summary Decent human goods, improved by a somewhat twitchy Dwarf, for sale, how could Ordhan say no?
Rating E for everyone
Cyril dragged the sack behind him as he moved about the store. The contents of the bag clattered at the abuse, but he figured that they could not become even more damaged. The real problem was the lack of space in his store. No matter where he tried to stow his latest project, he ended up tripping over it not two minutes later. Cyril did not have the patience of the stone, so he was growing understandably frustrated.
After his shop had burned down, an occurrence that he begrudgingly recognized as partly his own doing and partly the fault of whoever placed a forge in a wooden room, the rebuilding had taken longer than expected. As a result, the whole affair cost more than he expected and he dismissed the workers before the building was complete. While he did finish it himself, the end result was lacking a proper storage room. Cyril made the mistake of assuming that he could use the shop as storage. But with that full, he needed to resort to drastic measures. At least, it was considered drastic by most denizens of Denerim, but he personally considered long past due. It was time to start digging.
The nobles had their dungeons and lower levels, so he knew that the ground around here was amenable to such constructs and it was something he had been positively itching to do for a long while now. That only left one question - how to do it? He was not of the mining caste, he was not even a proper smith, and structural integrity was not something they stressed in his training as a warrior. Quite the contrary. As eagre as he was to get himself underground, he did not want his shop coming down to join him.
Until then, he dealt with the clutter in his own way.
He gave the bag a particularly harsh shake and told it, in a firm voice, to stay right there. It might seem crazy to some, but he swore it had more autonomy than a nug and was twice as slippery. The forge itself was sparse out of necessity; it would be a fool's folly to have things that catch fire nice and quick next to a smoldering forge. His forge was smaller than a true smith's forge, and his anvil was horrendously sub-par by Dwarven standards. He had bought it off a human while keeping his eyes open for a proper one.
The forge was the back room to the shop. He would open the door that connected the shop to the forge in the winter, keeping the building toasty warm and welcoming to any who stopped by. In the summer months he opened the back door of the forge, releasing the heat into the city. Either way, his building was kept warmer than most by proximity, but Cyril liked it better that way.
No matter what hour of the day the forge smoldered or blazed. It was too troublesome to rekindle the flames every day so he made sure they never went out. It also meant that he could work on forging whenever the mood hit him. If he was in the mood for something else, then he would remove some of the fuel and cover a bit of the fire in ashes.
As evidenced by the goods in his shop, he had been in a trap-making mood recently. None of the armors he bought on his own (ideas of improvements danced in his head, some more feasible than others) caught his interest for any length of time.
So the shop was full of traps, some basic (disgustingly so in Cyril's mind) and others more elaborate. He had even set a trap on his door, although it was more aimed at letting him know when someone entered rather than on harming or injuring the customer. Although the latter had happened on occasion. The overly complicated mechanism went off whenever anyone opened the door. The force of going off also reset the trap and he had spent almost a whole year working on that trick. It was too tedious to reset the trap anytime the door was opened, and having had to do so used to make him cranky – resulting in his current reputation of being a touch cantankerous if people wandered into the store and did not buy anything. The result of opening the door jerked at a string that tied to the clapper of a bell, swinging the clapper back and forth against the lip of the bell. There was a much easier way to know if people entered the shop, but when had Cyril ever done things the easy way?
As the resonant clang of the bell sounded through the shop and forge, Cyril called out that he was coming before pulling the bag of armor as far away from the forge as he could. That done, he headed back into the shop. The dense shelving lining the walls, once used to hold books, were filled with unarmed traps. In the farthest corners near the door to the forge stood an armor stand and a weapon stand, each displaying some of his work. The armor he had worn as a member of the warrior caste and his greatsword were displayed behind the counter, although it was generally understood that they were not for sale. In opposition to his vocation, he had not repaired his armor following the battle of Denerim, displaying a streak of sentimentality that he would deny to his grave. While it had been meticulously cleaned and kept polished, each nick, dent and gash meant something to him – he had a corresponding scar for a good many of them. His sword, on the other hand, was kept wickedly sharp and he was not afraid to take it down and use it at a moment’s notice. The counter itself covered only a small portion of the shop, but the top of the counter was disproportionately cluttered. Traps were displayed in various stages and at least one of them was primed and ready to take a limb off. It was less a statement of how Cyril felt about his customers and more a commentary on his lack of safety measures, legendary forgetfulness, and spastic attention span.
He almost looked like most of the merchants around here, excepting the fact he was a Dwarf. Although not unheard of – his cousin Gorim was just opposite on the square – Dwarves tended to be traveling merchants rather than settling down to one location. Why that was, Cyril could not say, especially since he had little problem with staying in one place. Cyril moved behind the counter, absentmindedly disarming one of the traps with dexterous fingers, “Atrast vala,” he greeted in the traditional way before following it up with a more Human greeting, “Hail.” It was something of a sight, as the counter was a decent compromise between Cyril’s short stature and regular furniture height, and it made Cyril seem shorter than usual as a result.