About a day after the return from the Jaunt

[amadine]

This is certainly the clearest message we've had from our delightful hosts in quite some time. Maybe they actually intend to make us aware of which of them is winning after all, instead of leaving us to guess and grope after everything.

Tell me, I'm curious: was it the intent of our Investigators that the Hermit should win, or was it just left to chance?

Comments

[amadine]

That only makes it more foolish to believe the creature's fables.

[naturaltwohands]

You said I was too trusting.

[amadine]

You are.

I'd say I hope this has taught you better, but I'm not quite that blindly optimistic.

[naturaltwohands]

I cannot so easily change who I am.

[amadine]

Who said anything about ease? The most necessary things are often the hardest.

[naturaltwohands]

No, my ability to trust is not something I wish to change. If I must distrust all I meet until otherwise, the world will become quicksand beneath my feet. I lived that way once, on the "edge of readiness" as drow like to call paranoia, and it nearly destroyed both myself and my father. I cannot and will not live like that again.

All I can promise you is to be wary of the word of those I have not met in person, and to be more cautious when we are in a new world. That is all I am capable of without giving my heart a mortal wound. I would rather die due to a sudden betrayal rather than live my entire life in fear for the dagger in my back that never comes.

[Also Drizzt doesn't care if this is public. He refuses to hide this.]

[amadine]

[There's a moment of strained silence.]

Gods, were you an imperial playwright in another life?

I LOLed.

[naturaltwohands]

[There's a pause on his side before the tension seems to ease in his mental voice, and there's even slight amusement.]

No, but I read constantly and write often. Perhaps if this hero business does not work out for me, I should take it up as a career. You should see some of my reflections that I write for myself.

[He's the equivalent of a fifteen-year-old with an enormous vocabulary. You can only imagine how much verbose and even purple prose he can fit onto the page. It grows on you, really.]

:D

[amadine]

You know, when the sages decreed that the pen was mightier than the sword, it wasn't an inducement to write yourself a bludgeon.

[Her psychic voice is sharp, but it's an amused sort of sharpness - and probably the closest to an offer of truce as she's going to give.

Which doesn't mean she won't circle back to the problem from another angle in the future, but for now, at least, she relents.]

[naturaltwohands]

[Drizzt can see the truce for what it is, and he is grateful. Even though he suspects this will not be the last time they speak of this subject.]

I suppose I do have a tendency to be too hard on myself at times.

[amadine]

Who says I was accusing you of assaulting yourself?

[naturaltwohands]

I am the person I bludgeon the most often, so I simply assumed....