[attr=class,absolute-holder]

[attr=class,bulk]
The man in front of her was not an esper. That in itself made her feel a little silly. It had been an insensitive question, hadn’t it? She’d been so caught up in her own shock that she’d asked his race before she’d even asked his name. Still, she felt something sink at his answer. Here was yet another thing held over her head to remind her of home only to be stolen away.

Or was it?

”D-Doma?” she repeated, staring at him. ”Well, no. The person I was thinking of wasn’t from there, but are you really from-?” Doma. The kingdom that had been besieged and poisoned for sadistic dreams of conquest. Doma. The city she’d been unable to save.

She suddenly felt uncomfortable telling him her name.

”It’s nice to meet you,” she said as the man, Mu, introduced himself. Would he have heard of her if she didn’t use her full name? Would he make the connection with a general from the empire which had eradicated his people?

”I’m Celes,” she said simply, watching what she could see of his face for a response. His nose and mouth were covered by some kind of mask so she watched his eyes instead. Was there any recognition there? Repulsion? Suspicion?

Cyan hadn’t held her past allegiances against her after a while. They’d gotten to know each other, after all, and there had always been a great threat to fight against, but that could not be said of another survivor. She wanted desperately to ask how he’d escaped, but that was far more forward than asking if he was an esper. It must have been a painful memory.

She tore her gaze away and looked at the house instead. ”I really hope it’s not actually haunted. I’ve never liked dealing with ghosts.” She glanced back at the man beside her. Mu was almost intimidating with his towering stance and heavy armor. She wondered if he was really as big as he looked or if the platemail added to the effect.

The worker at the door called them forward and, in a rather bored tone, went over the rules again. They were all very concerned with touching and being touched, weren’t they? With that, the worker rang a bell and ushered them inside. Celes glanced at Mu with a nervous smile. ”Well. I suppose we ought to give it a try,” she said. Then she stepped over the threshold towards whatever was waiting within.

[attr=class,ooc-notes]Enter, Haunted House!

[attr=class,absolute-holder]

[attr=class,bulk]
Just when she was starting to wonder what would happen if she didn’t have a partner, someone came up in the line behind her. It was a strange someone, certainly with white hair and heavy armor though what struck her was the sheer size of them. Celes was not a short woman by any means, but this man (she thought it was a man?) dwarfed her by comparison. She looked up at him, eyebrows raised.

”Oh. Yes. I think they’re having us go through in pairs.” Just as she said it, the couple in front of them was ushered inside, and Celes shifted forward to the next place in line. She had a lot of questions about her new partner starting with why he was wearing so much armor. The cut of it reminded her somehow of Shadow. It was not a comforting comparison.

The worker at the front booth asked them for their tickets, and Celes handed hers over. With that done, they went on about the rules of the “haunted house.” The actors wouldn’t touch them and they couldn’t touch the actors. That seemed…strange.

Was this some kind of theatrical production?

”I don’t really know what to expect,” she said, glancing at the strange man beside her. Now that she was looking at him closer, she could make out the strange symbols painted onto his armor and noticed the sheathed sword at his waist. She looked up past his face mask to find red eyes and…

Wait, were those horns.

She stared at him, dumbstruck, as her mind tried to catch up to her. He wasn’t human, that was for sure. As for what exactly he was, the only thing she could think of was…

”I’m sorry. Are you an esper?” She didn’t have time to question whether or not she was being rude. The words fell out of her mouth on their own accord, driven by shock and curiosity. ”It’s just…you look like someone I know.”

[attr=class,ooc-notes]Hello, big red-eyed horn man!

[attr=class,absolute-holder]

[attr=class,bulk]
She’d thought that the room was loud enough that her muttering wouldn’t be overheard. She’d thought, at the very least, that the room was too crowded with the kind of boorish type who wouldn’t care what she said even if they did. She was wrong on those counts, apparently, because the words had hardly left her mouth before there was a kind of grumbling from the bar and a drunk man booed her.

She was so taken aback by the display that she didn’t say anything at first. She just looked up, surprised, and stared at him.

Her heckler was blonde. He had overlong windswept hair down to his chin and yellow eyes, and he wore strange, black armor. He was currently hunched over the bar, nursing some liquor or another, and then he went on.

Team…Kill ‘Em All?

”Excuse me?” She squared off against him, arms crossed, eyebrow raised incredulously. She had no idea who this man was. Apparently he knew Caius.

”Caius isn’t here,” she said. ”And his ’fucking dragon’ isn’t either. I came instead. What have the Dragonblades done to you?”

It was a good enough question, shot at the man like arrows made of ice. One the one hand, he was likely nothing but a drunken fool who had gotten himself on the wrong end of Caius’ work ending crime rings and clearing bandit camps. On the other hand, it was possible that he had good reason to hate them, and that Caius had been busy dragging their name through the mud when she wasn’t looking. Either way, she hoped he would answer. She needed to know where exactly to direct her anger.

”We don’t generally burn anything,” she said. She, for one, preferred to freeze men alive.

[attr=class,ooc-notes]Oh good. You got her mad lol

[attr=class,absolute-holder]

[attr=class,bulk]
It was a long road from Torensten.

Celes had known what to expect when she’d chosen to bypass an airship ticket between the two cities and had rented a chocobo instead. She’d known because she’d completed this trip dozens of times both with and without company, and she knew that the journey could take anywhere between five to eight days if all went well. It was worth it for the money she saved on airship tickets, and the experiences she could have along the way.

That had been a lot easier to tell herself before she’d left and there was nothing around her but corn fields and grass.

Now she was in the thick of things, just past the Provo border, three days deep into travel. The air smelled uniformly of dead leaves and chocobo dung. The sky was an overcast gray. The wind was biting in a way that made the already cool temperature even worse. Celes shivered and drew her cape around her to block the worst of it though it did little to protect her stinging nose. She knew what she must have looked like right now – blotchy, hair tangled, hunched over on the back of a bird that had no interest in speed, elegance, or basic dignity – but she decided that she didn’t care. Travel by chocobo had one more unique point in its favor over airship travel, and that was that she could multitask.

Before she’d left the Wyvern’s Rest, she’d made sure to check through their current list of requests to see if there were any jobs to take along the main road between the cities. There was as it happened, and she’d taken it despite it being generally under her skill level. Something about clearing a colony of griffons that had taken to harassing the local trade routes. Generally, this road was one of the most patrolled in all of Zephon, but since the griffons had taken to hunting on the border between the two territories, neither the forces of Provo nor Torensten had jurisdiction. That left the job to mercenaries, and a nobleman in the caravan business was willing to pay top dollar for it.

Why not take the request? It wasn’t like she had anything more important to do.

She came into the trading post which served as the mission’s rendezvous by midday. The post itself wasn’t much to write home about. A few traveling vendors here. An inn there. There were watch towers made of wood stationed on either end with the road stretching between them like a snake. Celes found her way to the chocobo stables, paid fifty gil for the bird’s greens, then started towards the inn. She had the request in writing in her bag. She knew more or less what to expect. Or she thought so at least. She’d hardly shaken the sleep out of her legs before she realized that there were far more men crowded around the outside of the inn than there should have been. And they were all carrying swords.

Her first thought was a bandit ambush. Her second, more rational thought turned out to be true. The men hardly spared her a second glance as she approached – not until she’d stopped in front of one of them and asked him, ”You’re mercenaries, aren’t you?”

The man was grizzled and sweaty with half a beard that he was clearly quite proud of. ”That’s right,” he said. His voice sounded like gravel.

She sighed. ”Well, that’s just great.”

The man watched her for a moment before he swished something around his mouth and spat on the ground. “Can’t say I caught your name,” he said.

She looked past him towards the door to the inn. There had to be over a dozen men lingering outside let alone however many waited past the doors. ”Celes Chere,” she said. ”With the Dragonblades.”

”Haven't heard of you. Though the Dragonblades…That’s that Dragelion guy, right?”

She turned her eyes back to him and kept them there for a beat longer than she should have. Then she turned on her heel and muscled her way towards the door. ”Excuse me,” she muttered as she edged her way past a man that smelled of equal parts campfire smoke and body odor. ”Coming through.”

She hated when this happened.

Usually, her jobs were straightforward and simple. The client makes a request. She completed the request. The client paid her for her work. Simple. Sometimes, however, said client was too eager for the job to be done and decided to hedge their bets wherever they could place them. Only after their meeting point was swamped with hired swords would they question the genius behind placing multiple requests with every stray mercenary they could find.

And it was quite the group of strays this client had managed to gather, it seemed. Once inside, she saw a few ex-soldiers lounging by the piano, at least three dozen thugs crowding the bar, and what she swore were a band of pirates lingering by the window, muttering to themselves. Celes took in a deep breath to steady herself – one which she immediately regretted. It might have been cold outside, but there were too many warm bodies in here to tell, and they all reeked of dirt and booze.

Celes opened her bag and pulled out the request form to check the name of her employer. ”Percival Garnier,” she read aloud. Then she shook her head and placed the paper back where it belonged. ”I’ll just need to find him and talk to him myself. Then we can clear this up once he knows the Dragonblades are involved.”

[attr=class,ooc-notes]Hope this is a decent set up!