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Character(s): Shura & Daud
Status: Closed
Location(s): City of the Free Peoples
Date(s) May 9-ish
About: Daud pays Shura a visit to discuss
Warnings: Possibly mentions of cannibalism

Someone's broken into her little shack again. Of course they had. Shura expected her more-than-humble abode to be broken into, but she wasn't expecting two break-ins in such a short period of time. Things were calming down, why was someone bothering to break into an occupied home--

Oh. It's Daud sitting at her table, looking as constipated and grumpy as ever. Shura should have known. Billie had to pick up her habit of breaking and entering from someone.

"What do you people have against knocking, jeez!" At least she had taken Aconite with her, hidden under the guise of a winged kitten clinging to Shishi's back. If Daud isn't going to give her the heads up that he's coming by for a social call, then Shura isn't going to give him any sort of formalities or courtesy in return, closing the door behind her motley lot and setting a bag full of green herbs and other plants on the table and beginning to unpack the bag. The winged kitten stares at Daud, mostly quiet, but completely intrigued by the stranger.

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It's a two month old baby, Daud can't expect too much out of her! A sheltered baby, at that. For all that Shura isn't much of a nurturer, the dragon seems entirely comfortable with the situation, tugging at Shura's boot and reaching up with her forearms for another piece of fruit once she has the first swallowed. Shura gives her another piece.

Shura, though, doesn't quite know how to take what Daud says. He was the one who should have died, don't hold it against Billie. Her own student had always been able to pull himself out of trouble; she never had to do this for him. But this--

"Does she know you're here?"

Meanwhile, Aconite is still watching Daud, carefully trying to figure out just what his deal was. She waddles to him on her hind legs, holding her snack out to him. It's a very generous offer, one that she'll give in spite of Shura calling her name in low warning.

What a polite little dragon. You’d hardly think she was under Shura’s care at all. Gravely, Daud leans down to take the fruit he’s being offered, murmuring a quiet thanks before he accepts it and straightens up. He won’t be as quick to pop it into his mouth as Aconite was.

“No, she doesn’t.” And he doubts she’d be happy if she knew, likely to consider this to be unnecessarily meddlesome, but he won’t tell if Shura doesn’t.

"I see." She never had to kowtow for her student's sake, but it wasn't as if she hadn't taken preemptive measures without his knowledge. Whether or not Billie ought to be told about what Daud was doing, Shura would leave that matter between them. Shura purses her lips, keeping an eye on the dragon.

It's amazing that anything could grow up to be sweet tempered under Shura's care. But the dragonet just happens to be good natured, and Shura's given her a safe place to be sweet in. Mostly sweet. Daud taking her present and telling her thanks is totally giving her permission to start trying to climb up his leg.

As the little dragon clambers up his leg, Daud will allow it, largely because he's not in favor of finding out if Shishi will interpret any form of contact with the 'kitten' as an attack. It's probably about time that he admits he's got a pretty good idea of what's under that illusion, so...

"Does it have a name?"

Shishi is indeed watching Daud very carefully. For all that he is prepared to pounce if something happens, both Shura and her animas are really just anticipating the dragonet's first heartbreak and the ensuing bawling that was bound to happen after being rejected.

"Aconite," Shura replies, trying to decide if he's merely tolerating the dragonet or if there's something else. She doesn't doubt that he could guess at what was actually trying to get into his lap. The illusion spell wasn't hard to spot, and besides, Billie was likely to have told Daud about her. "But only Strange calls her that."

Edited 2019-06-02 03:19 (UTC)

"A poisonous plant also known as wolfsbane or monkshood," Daud muses, shaking his head. Strange choice for a name, but then again, it is literally Strange's choice. Fitting for a former assassin's dragon, though, after a fashion. He won't shove Aconite off, but he also won't necessarily be welcoming, look down at her and frowning slightly.

"Can you take the illusion off?" If it's the same mechanism as Billie's, he could probably puzzle it out, but on the off chance he might break it if she's modified it... best not.

Edited 2019-06-02 22:00 (UTC)

“It seemed to fit.” And it wasn’t as if Shura had better ideas herself.

At his request, Shura will move to unclasp the collar from the dragon’s neck, and just like that, there’s a scaly lizard looking up at Daud. She seems fascinated by him, particularly focused on the horns on his head. That’s definitely not anything she’s seen before, and she makes a soft trilling sound as she stands on her back legs to get a better look. She’s just a baby, too young and inexperienced to realize that getting up on Daud’s head and playing with his horns might be incredibly rude. But Shura knows better, and she knows that Aconite is curious and dumb enough to try.

“She’s going to try gettin’ on your head in a second.”

Daud takes his time looking over her once she's been revealed, taking in her size relative to Red in his mind, noting how she holds herself. Climbing on his head, though, that certainly can't be allowed, so he'll finally move to shift her, taking advantage of the fact that she's freed up a set of her claws to scoop her efficiently off his lap and deposit her briskly onto the table.

"Best teach her to be less trusting of strangers," he says instead, unmoved by whatever dragon tantrum being removed may produce.

Aconite lets out a whining noise, the spines on her back raising up. No, the table is not where she wanted to be!! She could get up on the table on her own, thanks! She moves to the edge of the table to hop back on Daud's lap, but Shura catches her, holding her back until she stops wriggling.

"She doesn't get to meet too many strangers, you know." Great backseat parenting, Daud!

Daud's a grandparent now, everyone knows that job is literally to do nothing but backseat parent all the time. Sorry wiggly baby, it's your mom's job to discipline you now!

"Being a commonly reviled species doesn't usually lend itself well to social opportunities." Also, her mom being occasionally dead probably doesn't help. "In another time, she might have been raised like a princess, like Adira's dragon in Didymos. Now she's a fugitive."

Gosh, maybe Daud should use some of the grandparent wisdom on his student so she doesn't go berserk at the mere mention of his name!

"Maybe the next batch of 'em will be somewhere in the middle." But for now, Aconite will have to deal with living in a shithole, stuck in a pen during the daylight hours Shura was gone. The dragonet continues to struggle and whine, and eventually Shura picks her up and dumps her back on the floor, reaching for one of the bare stems on the table and shoving it in her claws. Aconite whimpers again, but when Shura gives her a shove towards the pile of linens in the corner, Aconite grudgingly obeys the unspoken command and scampers off with the stem in claw, but not without a cranky growl.

Nah, you never learn how to manage your kids. That's a joy that Shura's going to eventually discover for herself. While Shura's managing Aconite, Daud will peel off a glove to actually take a bite of the fruit the dragon offered him, watching the scene without comment.

"Or the next batch of them can end up like that blue dragon." It's not an unlikely possibility, given as into dragons as the damned cult seems to be. That, if nothing else, is a reason Aconite should learn to be warier of strangers.

"There's no telling if the cult has some means of locating them or not."

"If they could locate them, I'm sure they would have." It isn't as if Shura hasn't had her own worries and thoughts about the subject. She can't explain why she's bothered to take care of the dragon for so long, but it's becoming more trouble as the weeks go by.

"Or maybe there's just not enough magic in them to be worth their time just yet." Let some idiots raise up a few dragons, then let their dragon snap them up for dinner. Great plan!

"Unless it doesn't benefit to find them now," Daud agrees. "It's the latter that concerns me."

And now a dragon sits at the side of one of Idan's rulers, not remotely hidden in plain sight.

"What made you decide to pick up that egg instead of destroying it?"

That’s a good question. Shura has a terrible answer.

“You don’t approve, huh?” She doesn’t blame him. In retrospect, she doesn’t know if she should have taken it. Shura sits down at the table, arms crossed over her chest.

“I picked it up because I thought it was somethin’ else. I knew it was magic, but it was right on the side of the road and then put it up. I didn’t know what it was until she hatched, honestly.”

"I didn't approve when learned about the egg Billie brought back, either." Daud shrugs. Implicitly, he doesn't approve of anyone else who's raising a dragon, but he's hardly going to rip people's scaly infants right out of their arms and stomp on them.

As Shura goes on, though, Daud just stares at her, expression as neutral as ever.

"What did her egg look like and where exactly did you find it? Near the city?"

Edited 2019-06-05 04:56 (UTC)

Did Daud approve of anything??

“Green and small. Bigger than a chicken egg.” Shura motions with her hands to demonstrate the size. “And it was outside the City. Not too far. I saw some mushrooms growin’, and so I looked closer. Don’t know if someone sat down to rest and it fell out of their bag or what. A kid coulda found it at any time, so it couldn’t have been there long.”

She still has the eggshell, actually.

Daud approves of Shura, really. Or else he probably wouldn't be here. The tiefling cocks his head, mulling it over, then shakes his head.

"I don't believe in dragon eggs spontaneously appearing out of nowhere," he murmurs. "It's odd just how many of them started turning up."

"And I wouldn't believe in people managing to coming back from the dead with their minds in one piece, but it looks like we're here now."

There is a soft sort of thwap sound from the pile of linens. Aconite's discovered that smacking things with the stem is satisfying, and she cheerfully continues to thump the pile with the stem, all signs of her momentary agitation gone.

"Us comin' back might be related to the eggs starting to show back up. But I can't really say. We're not any better caretakers for them than the next person. If they were only going to listen to us, then that Adira wouldn't have been able to pull off that spectacle of hers with the one she has."

"And the cult wouldn't have been able to capture their dragon."

The tiefling frowns, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

"I'm not sure I care for that dragon finding itself in Adira's arms either, but it's too late to do anything about it now." Short of dragon assassination, anyway, which might get them in trouble in and of itself... and it's not exactly like Daud's in that business.

"Hard to say how that's gonna go." Shura shrugs. Fortuna might be another Logistykon in the making, she might not. It was hard to say so early on. "She might be smart enough to not feed the thing magic just to make it strong."

Unlike certain a certain someone they knew. But Alistair Tourmaline was something else, and that reminds Shura of Alice's little "gift."

"Did you see Strange's mirror?"

It's a change of topic that Daud wasn't expecting, but his only reaction to it at first is a slow blink before he leans forward slightly in his seat.

"What mirror?"

“Gimme a sec.”.

And with that, Shura will turn to retrieve a small chest from the top of a shelf, setting it on the table in front of Daud. Aconite stops in her game to watch; she isn’t allowed on that shelf, and so she’s naturally curious. There’s nothing about the chest that stands out on first glance. It is warded, and it takes Shura a second to navigate the spell, unlocking a side drawer and pulling a small bundle of worn cloth from it. Shura slides it on the table to Daud, sitting across from him at the table.

“I got a piece of it, too. A present from Alice while she was in hiding. Look at it for a bit.”

If it were someone else asking, Daud wouldn't be so quick to comply, but Shura's not played him false before, though he notes the precautions she's taken with it. He pulls the bundle closer to him, peeling the cloth apart with care, speaking as he goes.

"A present?" His lips thin. "Did she say where she got it?"

"No. It was her animas that delivered it to me, and I haven't had the chance to ask her about it. But the enchantment on it checks out." Slowly, very slowly, Aconite begins to move from her spot. Shura gives her a quick glance, and Aconite freezes in place. Better to ignore her, Shura decides, looking away. Aconite continues her (relatively) quiet approach.

"I assume it was whole when she first saw it. Whether or not someone dropped it or if she broke it on purpose to share, I don't know."

"If she did break it, that's seven years of bad luck she can't afford," Daud murmurs, without much inflection, careful with the mirror's edges as he lifts it to take a look at his reflection. Like Shura, he elects to ignore Aconite -- visibly, anyway. He'll be quick to move the shard out of her way if it looks like she might be about to pounce, but for now, his concentration's on the image in the glass.

"Maybe a little bad luck could tip the scales in her favor," Shura replies wryly. That's how it worked, right? If Alice had enough bad luck piled up, maybe fortune would take pity on her.

But Shura doesn't have much to say, caught between watching for Daud's reaction when his reflection changes for that bare second and listening to Aconite's claws softly click on the floor. The dragonet is taking her time and being surprisingly quiet.

That's most assuredly not how that works.

"Maybe it doesn't matter since she's living on borrowed time," Daud comments, not adding, like the rest of us. He doesn't want to reflect on that too much, so he focuses on the mirror shard instead. He can sense the enchantment on it, recognizes its general shape, but he doesn't catch onto its actual nature until he blinks and sees, for a bare moment, the flash of scales fanning out on his cheeks.

The reaction is subtle, but immediate. His eyes narrow, and his tail stiffens as he forces himself not to do anything as dramatic as throw it across the room, but he does lower it to the table, shaking his head.

"Fortune has a cruel sense of humor."

"Fortune's a bitch," Shura replies, sliding the piece of glass back towards her and moving to wrap it back up. It isn't a priceless relic, but it has its use and she'd rather it not get shattered again.

"Dunno what exactly it means. Dragonborn hafta to agree to the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure a corpse rotting in the ground for a century couldn't consent to it. But I don't like the alternative." Undead scaleskins, what a great idea.

Aconite stills for a moment as she nears the table, then sprints, jumping from the dirt floor to Shura's chair, then to the table. She reaches her goal, and she's just so amazed and pleased with herself that she just about forgets what she was after in the first place, looking to Shura with what is probably a gleeful dragon face. Shura is less than impressed, turning her head just enough to look at the dragonet, raising a brow. "What do you want?"

"At least we aren't going mad from pain," Daud points out. That has to count for something, doesn't it? His brow furrows slightly, voice going dry.

"But dead dragons can't give their consent either. We know that making a dragonborn requires consent from both; the lack of it creates a scaleskin." He pauses, lingering over the thought. But what if neither of them could give consent? If they were both just functionally objects bound together? He doesn't like the thought of that.

In any case, the dragonet isn't an effective distraction from dark thoughts, but it's one he'll let himself take for once, watching them both silently.

"Not yet, at least." It hadn't even been a year; who knew how long whatever spell this was was going to keep them in one piece.

Still, at this point, it's all conjecture and theory, things Shura didn't usually have much patience for, so she'll take care of whatever it is Aconite wants instead. The chest on the table is fascinating, but so is the piece of mirror that Shura was just messing with. She reaches a little claw out to the fabric and tugs at it. Shura remains entirely unimpressed.

"It's a mirror, you've seen this thing before." Well, maybe not this exact mirror, but Shura had procured a small hand mirror for herself, and the dragonet had spent plenty of time looking at it. Shura's explanation doesn't satisfy Aconite, and she continues to tug at the fabric. "Seriously? Fine. But you better not touch it."

If Daud wants to stay silent, then Shura will busy herself with keeping the dragon entertained. Aconite's reflection fascinates her, but it is something she's seen before, and she'll turn her attention back to the chest to find her next amusement.

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