Post by Ammy on Mar 15, 2011 21:53:57 GMT -5
Location: Bodden Town, Cayman Isle
Characters: Geary Duffy, Dierdre Duffy
Rating: PG-13 (violence)
[Posts really, really don't have to be this long. This was my test post for my application, Geary's intro, and the actual rp post]
The woman, dressed entirely in night, swung up from the bowsprit on the small sloop, landing on the wooden pole silently. Stealthily. She wore all dark blue to blend into the deep shadows in the crevices of the ship, her face half-covered by a bandana and her hair tied tightly at the back of her head instead of worn loose. For convenience’s sake, she was dressed in tight breeches tucked into thin leather-soled boots that hardly made a whisper as she sprinted across the deck. Her hands were covered in gloves despite the unusually warm temperature, one gripped the hilt of the dagger at her belt while she moved past the sentries. Pirates were pirates, and even in Bodden Town their code of ethics made them sloppy. No one expected to see her, so she went completely unseen.
This target was a long-time coming – a lesser pirate captain under the lord of the South China Sea with potential for greatness. She knew little about her employer, as was her policy, but she knew absolutely everything there was to know about Sais Liu. He was the type of pirate who did it more for the money than out of his enjoyment for killing. He was quick to partake in the extravagancies of life, from women to food to rich clothing and even richer consorts. There was a line of dead bodies that trailed in a wake behind his equally ostentatious ship, dead because of some imagined slight or made-up thievery to solidify his position as ruthless Captain. He had promise. And he had a heavy price on his head.
She moved through the companionway like ink on black paper, barely discernable in her motions. If any of the crew saw her, she knew they would believe it to be a trick of the light or, in more eccentric cases, the spirit of one of their dead comrades haunting their beloved ship. She did not smile to herself at the thought; that was for later. She needed focus. She found the Captain’s quarters effortlessly and turned the key that she’d copied just hours before when the good Captain had found himself in her company at the local lounge. The lock clicked over and she slipped inside, knowing that the calamus root she’d slipped into his tea would have taken its effect.
There was nothing between her and the target; She’d stopped thinking of him as a man long before her plan had solidified. As mute as a shadow, she pulled her dagger from her belt and pressed it into his throat, her mind elsewhere as she listened outside for any crew members happening by.
Her job finished, she wiped the dagger off on the dead man’s silk sheets without remorse, and then opened his window to let the heated night air into the cabin. The stench would quickly start to draw attention from the crew, who would find their Captain dead among his treasures. Taking nothing, the Orchid slid out of the window and dove to the black water below.
---------
Geary slipped back into her bedroom window so as not to wake anyone else in the house, swinging from the sill up inside with a gentle ‘thump’ on the creaky wooden floor of her attic room. She stood for a moment to make sure nothing else in the house stirred, and then started forward to her dresser.
And nearly jumped out of her own skin when a light flared on her bedside table.
“And here I was worried I’d have to turn away some poor boy thinking you asleep in your bed.”
Barnabus sat in a chair by her bed with a wry smirk curving the side of his mouth, as regal as any dignitary’s son in his tail coat and tie, despite the late hour. She stared at him, dumbstruck, for a beat longer than necessary before continuing her path to her dresser to get dry, warm clothes to replace the soaked ones sticking to her at every angle.
“I’m not a young woman, Barnabus Duffy. If a man wishes to see me in the middle of the night, he may call on me during the day and propose as such. I won’t have anyone climbing into my windows.” She paused to consider that last statement, not looking over at him before amending it. “Besides myself, of course. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Mhm. And I suppose you’ve just gone for a pleasant midnight swim?”
“That’s none of your business either. Turn around.”
He did turn around and she waited until he couldn’t see her before quickly changing into a dry cotton nightgown, toweling her hair dry and leaving her wet clothing by the door to hang later during the day when the sunlight and breeze off the sea would dry them. Barnabus turned around again and just watched her, waiting. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she rounded on him.
“What do you want, Barny?”
“I was in town, figured I’d stop by. What a shock to see my little cousin climbing down from the second-floor terrace like some cat burglar, dressed all in black.”
Geary was glad for the dim light, feeling the blood run cold out of her face and drop straight to her toes with her heart and the rest of her vital organs. “Did you follow me?” she asked with a calmness she didn’t feel.
“Of course I didn’t follow you. As you said, you’re no longer a young woman and due some measure of privacy. But I admit to curiosity as to your whereabouts, especially given the nature of your return.”
Ignoring the implied question, Geary climbed into her bed and sat against the pillows, summoning an air of superiority akin to his own. She’d played this game with Barny before and, eventually, his need for peace would override his curiosity and he would leave her alone. The last thing she needed was to have him prying into her business while she was just beginning to make enough money at it to pay Dahlia back. If he would just leave her alone, she could go to sleep and collect her payment in the morning after the Captain’s death was confirmed by the local physician. Barny was intelligent enough to put two and two together when he found out, probably from Dustin Duffy, but no one in Bodden batted an eye at the death of a pirate, no matter how high his rank. It was only because of the military’s occupation in Jamaica and their ignorance of the Cayman Isles’ pirating problem that they were even docked there, and everyone believed them a nuisance.
“How is Julian?” she said, changing the subject without the smooth ease of conversation she usually had with people. Something about Barny set her nerves on edge.
Barny looked at her with a wry sort of humor. “He is well, sleeping currently. You didn’t answer my question.”
“And what question was that?”
This time he sighed, and very nearly rolled his eyes, she could tell. He got the look of patience held by a thin leash. “Where were you tonight?”
“I went for a swim, as you said. It’s terribly hot these nights, I could hardly sleep.” Her face became the picture of innocence, though she knew he didn’t buy any word of what she’d manufactured. She was an excellent liar, but it was always hard to fool her cousin. Though, it wasn’t entirely a lie.
Barny sat watching her, gauging her, waiting for some sort of indication that she wasn’t telling him the truth and finding none. She was getting much better at lying, he noted silently, very nearly concerned for the woman that she could lie so well without remorse. He stood up, grabbed his cane from where it rested against the wall and his hat from her bedside table.
“I’ll take my leave, then, and let you get back to your dreaming. You’ll call on me if you need anything?”
“Yes, Barny.” With a relief she didn’t dare show on her face, she bent over to put out the light, glancing up when Barny paused halfway in her doorframe to look back at her.
“Sleep well, Megaera.”
“I always do.”
The light was snuffed out and the door closed, plunging Geary Louisa Duffy into the darkness she’d grown accustomed to.
“I always do,” she repeated in a whisper to the unseen monsters lurking in that heavy darkness.
---------
“Geary! Geary, wake up!”
Megaera groaned and rolled away from the pair of feet bouncing on the mattress dangerously close to her face and away from the light streaming viciously through her window. She silently cursed herself for leaving the curtains open the night before, and for not bolting her door when Barny left. Because she hadn’t, her younger sister now bounded up and down next to her, making it impossible to go back to sleep.
“Fine, I’m up. What is so important that you had to wake me up at this ungodly hour?”
“This ungodly hour is noon, Geary. You slept late again.” Dierdre Duffy sat down next to her, almost regal compared to her very childish bouncing. The woman herself was far from childish, already blossomed into a lovely woman the picture of her mother. She was dressed for the day in a full skirt and bodice the color of plums that, Geary knew from experience, would be squeezing in all the wrong places. Gorgeous as her adopted sister was, Geary never envied her her status as an heiress, and certainly not the clothes that were required of the station.
“Barny left us the name of a dress shop in town he said we should look into,” Dierdre continued when Geary sat up and stretched instead of actually responding to her. “He said you would look good in something green, to make your eyes pop.”
“Barny should be concerning himself with business instead of textiles. And before you give me the lecture about how textiles are your business, please let me get up and get dressed for the day.”
When Geary was up and dressed, in a light blue dress considerably less flashy than Dierdre’s, she was dragged downstairs and out of their dockside home to the bustling street below. She remembered walking this street just the night before, to and from the shore where Sais Liu’s ship had been anchored. Ten hours later, they would have examined the body, appointed another temporary Captain, and fled to their Lord. It was a clean job, and they would assume it was the work of one of the other Lords or a dissatisfied crew member, not the adopted daughter of a trader’s family. The people of Bodden went about their daily business, unaware of the death she’d caused, greeting her and smiling at her as they passed by.
Their male escort – Geary had to keep herself from gagging at even the thought – kept several paces behind them so as not to eavesdrop on their conversation. Dierdre was telling her something about a new trading route that Barny was going to send one of his men to scout in case it was safer than the pirate-ridden ones that their ships had been succumbing to for the past several months. Megaera listened with half an ear while the other picked up on the town’s gossip as they passed groups of women.
There was a new Pirate Lord close by.
There was an uproar in Jamaica.
Some young Naval officer had gotten himself killed in a barfight with some local thugs.
She again had to keep her expression stoic. It was always ‘pirate’ this or ‘Navy’ that. Not that it was ever really dull, it was just…predictable. She was never surprised anymore.
They reached the dress shop and, instead of going in, Geary told Dierdre to go on ahead of her and talk to the seamstress while she lingered outside to catch her breath. Instead of catching her breath, she ducked into a quiet narrow alleyway and pulled pins from her sleeve to put up her hair, tucking it under itself so that it wasn’t in her way, glad for the peace and the quiet. Taking her moment, she closed her eyes and leaned against one of the brick walls.
Characters: Geary Duffy, Dierdre Duffy
Rating: PG-13 (violence)
[Posts really, really don't have to be this long. This was my test post for my application, Geary's intro, and the actual rp post]
The woman, dressed entirely in night, swung up from the bowsprit on the small sloop, landing on the wooden pole silently. Stealthily. She wore all dark blue to blend into the deep shadows in the crevices of the ship, her face half-covered by a bandana and her hair tied tightly at the back of her head instead of worn loose. For convenience’s sake, she was dressed in tight breeches tucked into thin leather-soled boots that hardly made a whisper as she sprinted across the deck. Her hands were covered in gloves despite the unusually warm temperature, one gripped the hilt of the dagger at her belt while she moved past the sentries. Pirates were pirates, and even in Bodden Town their code of ethics made them sloppy. No one expected to see her, so she went completely unseen.
This target was a long-time coming – a lesser pirate captain under the lord of the South China Sea with potential for greatness. She knew little about her employer, as was her policy, but she knew absolutely everything there was to know about Sais Liu. He was the type of pirate who did it more for the money than out of his enjoyment for killing. He was quick to partake in the extravagancies of life, from women to food to rich clothing and even richer consorts. There was a line of dead bodies that trailed in a wake behind his equally ostentatious ship, dead because of some imagined slight or made-up thievery to solidify his position as ruthless Captain. He had promise. And he had a heavy price on his head.
She moved through the companionway like ink on black paper, barely discernable in her motions. If any of the crew saw her, she knew they would believe it to be a trick of the light or, in more eccentric cases, the spirit of one of their dead comrades haunting their beloved ship. She did not smile to herself at the thought; that was for later. She needed focus. She found the Captain’s quarters effortlessly and turned the key that she’d copied just hours before when the good Captain had found himself in her company at the local lounge. The lock clicked over and she slipped inside, knowing that the calamus root she’d slipped into his tea would have taken its effect.
There was nothing between her and the target; She’d stopped thinking of him as a man long before her plan had solidified. As mute as a shadow, she pulled her dagger from her belt and pressed it into his throat, her mind elsewhere as she listened outside for any crew members happening by.
Her job finished, she wiped the dagger off on the dead man’s silk sheets without remorse, and then opened his window to let the heated night air into the cabin. The stench would quickly start to draw attention from the crew, who would find their Captain dead among his treasures. Taking nothing, the Orchid slid out of the window and dove to the black water below.
---------
Geary slipped back into her bedroom window so as not to wake anyone else in the house, swinging from the sill up inside with a gentle ‘thump’ on the creaky wooden floor of her attic room. She stood for a moment to make sure nothing else in the house stirred, and then started forward to her dresser.
And nearly jumped out of her own skin when a light flared on her bedside table.
“And here I was worried I’d have to turn away some poor boy thinking you asleep in your bed.”
Barnabus sat in a chair by her bed with a wry smirk curving the side of his mouth, as regal as any dignitary’s son in his tail coat and tie, despite the late hour. She stared at him, dumbstruck, for a beat longer than necessary before continuing her path to her dresser to get dry, warm clothes to replace the soaked ones sticking to her at every angle.
“I’m not a young woman, Barnabus Duffy. If a man wishes to see me in the middle of the night, he may call on me during the day and propose as such. I won’t have anyone climbing into my windows.” She paused to consider that last statement, not looking over at him before amending it. “Besides myself, of course. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Mhm. And I suppose you’ve just gone for a pleasant midnight swim?”
“That’s none of your business either. Turn around.”
He did turn around and she waited until he couldn’t see her before quickly changing into a dry cotton nightgown, toweling her hair dry and leaving her wet clothing by the door to hang later during the day when the sunlight and breeze off the sea would dry them. Barnabus turned around again and just watched her, waiting. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she rounded on him.
“What do you want, Barny?”
“I was in town, figured I’d stop by. What a shock to see my little cousin climbing down from the second-floor terrace like some cat burglar, dressed all in black.”
Geary was glad for the dim light, feeling the blood run cold out of her face and drop straight to her toes with her heart and the rest of her vital organs. “Did you follow me?” she asked with a calmness she didn’t feel.
“Of course I didn’t follow you. As you said, you’re no longer a young woman and due some measure of privacy. But I admit to curiosity as to your whereabouts, especially given the nature of your return.”
Ignoring the implied question, Geary climbed into her bed and sat against the pillows, summoning an air of superiority akin to his own. She’d played this game with Barny before and, eventually, his need for peace would override his curiosity and he would leave her alone. The last thing she needed was to have him prying into her business while she was just beginning to make enough money at it to pay Dahlia back. If he would just leave her alone, she could go to sleep and collect her payment in the morning after the Captain’s death was confirmed by the local physician. Barny was intelligent enough to put two and two together when he found out, probably from Dustin Duffy, but no one in Bodden batted an eye at the death of a pirate, no matter how high his rank. It was only because of the military’s occupation in Jamaica and their ignorance of the Cayman Isles’ pirating problem that they were even docked there, and everyone believed them a nuisance.
“How is Julian?” she said, changing the subject without the smooth ease of conversation she usually had with people. Something about Barny set her nerves on edge.
Barny looked at her with a wry sort of humor. “He is well, sleeping currently. You didn’t answer my question.”
“And what question was that?”
This time he sighed, and very nearly rolled his eyes, she could tell. He got the look of patience held by a thin leash. “Where were you tonight?”
“I went for a swim, as you said. It’s terribly hot these nights, I could hardly sleep.” Her face became the picture of innocence, though she knew he didn’t buy any word of what she’d manufactured. She was an excellent liar, but it was always hard to fool her cousin. Though, it wasn’t entirely a lie.
Barny sat watching her, gauging her, waiting for some sort of indication that she wasn’t telling him the truth and finding none. She was getting much better at lying, he noted silently, very nearly concerned for the woman that she could lie so well without remorse. He stood up, grabbed his cane from where it rested against the wall and his hat from her bedside table.
“I’ll take my leave, then, and let you get back to your dreaming. You’ll call on me if you need anything?”
“Yes, Barny.” With a relief she didn’t dare show on her face, she bent over to put out the light, glancing up when Barny paused halfway in her doorframe to look back at her.
“Sleep well, Megaera.”
“I always do.”
The light was snuffed out and the door closed, plunging Geary Louisa Duffy into the darkness she’d grown accustomed to.
“I always do,” she repeated in a whisper to the unseen monsters lurking in that heavy darkness.
---------
“Geary! Geary, wake up!”
Megaera groaned and rolled away from the pair of feet bouncing on the mattress dangerously close to her face and away from the light streaming viciously through her window. She silently cursed herself for leaving the curtains open the night before, and for not bolting her door when Barny left. Because she hadn’t, her younger sister now bounded up and down next to her, making it impossible to go back to sleep.
“Fine, I’m up. What is so important that you had to wake me up at this ungodly hour?”
“This ungodly hour is noon, Geary. You slept late again.” Dierdre Duffy sat down next to her, almost regal compared to her very childish bouncing. The woman herself was far from childish, already blossomed into a lovely woman the picture of her mother. She was dressed for the day in a full skirt and bodice the color of plums that, Geary knew from experience, would be squeezing in all the wrong places. Gorgeous as her adopted sister was, Geary never envied her her status as an heiress, and certainly not the clothes that were required of the station.
“Barny left us the name of a dress shop in town he said we should look into,” Dierdre continued when Geary sat up and stretched instead of actually responding to her. “He said you would look good in something green, to make your eyes pop.”
“Barny should be concerning himself with business instead of textiles. And before you give me the lecture about how textiles are your business, please let me get up and get dressed for the day.”
When Geary was up and dressed, in a light blue dress considerably less flashy than Dierdre’s, she was dragged downstairs and out of their dockside home to the bustling street below. She remembered walking this street just the night before, to and from the shore where Sais Liu’s ship had been anchored. Ten hours later, they would have examined the body, appointed another temporary Captain, and fled to their Lord. It was a clean job, and they would assume it was the work of one of the other Lords or a dissatisfied crew member, not the adopted daughter of a trader’s family. The people of Bodden went about their daily business, unaware of the death she’d caused, greeting her and smiling at her as they passed by.
Their male escort – Geary had to keep herself from gagging at even the thought – kept several paces behind them so as not to eavesdrop on their conversation. Dierdre was telling her something about a new trading route that Barny was going to send one of his men to scout in case it was safer than the pirate-ridden ones that their ships had been succumbing to for the past several months. Megaera listened with half an ear while the other picked up on the town’s gossip as they passed groups of women.
There was a new Pirate Lord close by.
There was an uproar in Jamaica.
Some young Naval officer had gotten himself killed in a barfight with some local thugs.
She again had to keep her expression stoic. It was always ‘pirate’ this or ‘Navy’ that. Not that it was ever really dull, it was just…predictable. She was never surprised anymore.
They reached the dress shop and, instead of going in, Geary told Dierdre to go on ahead of her and talk to the seamstress while she lingered outside to catch her breath. Instead of catching her breath, she ducked into a quiet narrow alleyway and pulled pins from her sleeve to put up her hair, tucking it under itself so that it wasn’t in her way, glad for the peace and the quiet. Taking her moment, she closed her eyes and leaned against one of the brick walls.