2017-07-17:A Request From Noah

• Log: Noah's Proposition
• Cast: Gwen Whitlock, Noah Hawthorne
• Where: Somewhere in Adlehyde
• Date: 7/17/2017 (ICly takes place during the Attack on Adlehyde)
• SummaryWorn from the past days' events, Gwen is resting in a warehouse when she's surprised by a visiting fatigued Noah Hawthorne. He has a proposition for Gwen: someone needs to manage the stored supplies and make sure they get to the Adlehyde refugees. Could she handle it?

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<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

The first sign that Noah may or may not see when he finally arrived is a grey horse, dappled in coal black markings on his coat, his hooves, muzzle, and hair dipped in the same color. It was the very horse the courier Gwen Whitlock had used mostly in transporting the masisve amount of goods Noah had hired her for, sometimes switching him around for a rented horse or two to keep the wear evenly distributed. As Gwen may have mentioned, his name is Gulliver. By the nervous snort and the tired look in his eyes, he's seen much better days, his usually laidback disposition shattered by recent chaotic events.

Then, there's the cart. It had seen much usage, with Gwen having to rent a much larger one to ensure Noah's commission was completed in time. That rental, if it had the misfortune to be returned in time, would have been destroyed in the attacks on Adlehyde. The original cart of Gwen's still stands here, in a worse state than any commission of the last month could have put it through. There are bullets, scorch marks, and the marks of dried blood.

Inside the warehouse would be the courier herself, asleep on cushion of some sort in the uncontrolled heap that marks a person who has been completely exhausted. A person could see the path she made there, drawing an unsteady line from a hat, the note, and bloodied handkerchief on the table, the two boots discarded, one after another, the socks.

For the most part, she seems to be more or less okay, even beginning to stir.

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Adlehyde burns.

The air is thick with the smell of burning wood and grass, and an ozone tang inexplicable to anyone who wasn't there, who missed seeing the monstrous golems and other creations out of millennia-old myth besieging the city and its surrounding fields.

Noah was there.

He emerged from the dungeons of the castle to find himself looking out over a sky saturated with fire, the darkness of the night stained orange and red. There had been explosions, heavy impacts. The ground had seemed to be alive beneath his feet, thrumming with conflict. The air was thick with screams.

He parted ways with his compatriots in the city. They would all go on to face down the golems and other massive, monstrous foes, and he was loathe to leave them to it -- not to help them, when they'd come that far together -- but he had other things to attend to. He had to be there as the plans he'd laid were set into motion.

Escaping the city took time. Traveling quickly, alone and on foot, he had to avoid trouble and, worse, had to leave people bleeding and suffering in his wake, incapable of helping them beyond telling them to evacuate to the place outside of the city where refugee camps will spring to life over the next days and weeks.

Once free of the city's tangle of violence and tragedy, he'd ridden as swiftly as that destrier of his could carry him to the assembly of hired hands already accumulating: merchants, employees of the Adventurer's Guild hired for security purposes, medical personnel --

They'd watched him arrive with eyes wide to the whites, frightened and in some cases even suspicious: how, after all, had he known?

The crisis leaves little enough room for explanations. He sets to them to their tasks, spends time working -- hard -- to assemble stations for the wounded, setting up cots, erecting tents stored closer to the site. He carries in wounded for hours, and carries out the bodies of those who don't survive long enough to be assigned one of the rapidly dwindling available cots.

When he does finally arrive at the storehouse to begin checking that everything is in order for the distributions the next several days will require -- blankets, oil for lamps, hardtack and water -- he's filthy, dust ground into his clothing and skin, turned to mud through sweat and dried again to a chalky residue wherever blood hasn't congealed into brown, rusty stains and sticky webs.

What he wants is to rinse himself and collapse. Those plans evaporate the moment he arrives and finds Gwen's wagon pocked with bullet holes and other worrisome omens. The paint horse huffs and foams at the bit from that hard, long gallop, and hasn't even stopped before he swings himself out of the saddle, boots a dull thump in the dirt. He flicks the reins over its ears and lets them drop to the ground, and leaves the animal ground-tied, drawing one of the ARMs in the holster at his hip and edging up to the door with caution. One stained hand extends, presses in a splay against the leading edge, and with his back to the wall beside the hinges he uses that hand to press the door aside, leaning only enough to look around the edge of the frame.

Clothes in a trailing pile, leading inward into the cooler dimness. Hazel eyes glint, flicked from one shadowy corner to another in the cavernous space. No other signs of violence. No indication of a struggle. Some of the tension in his shoulders eases. He keeps the ARM low near the outside of his thigh, but leans in a little bit more: "Whitlock..?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

"...?!"

There's a sound of shifting cloth, an exhale of breath, and a pair of startled grey-blue eyes staring at him, the courier's pale red hair ruffled into confused tufts from her position on the bed. She's raised from her sleeping position halfway, her right upper arm extended rigidly, with the elbow cushioned against the side of her abdomen. At least, that's what's visibly through the blanket slung over it.

It'd be easy to deny that those eyes belonged to the same young woman that laughed and joked as she was hauling items around the times their paths crossed. She was expecting the worst.

Whether she tried to hide it or not, it was in moments like these that Gwen's origins were made clear: she was from the Badlands.

"Hawthorne." A blink, and she slowly drops the blanketed right arm, her bare left hand shifting underneath the blanket to adjust something. "Sorry to greet you like that." She flashes him a small grin. "You were caught up in it too, looks like. Sorry for the mess- I kinda... hadn't slept in a while." The tips of an old scar peek from underneath her blouse, extending up her neck where it would normally be hidden by the handkerchief deposited at the table.

The redhead takes a moment to stand up, her gloved right hand rubbing her face as bare feet step on the floorboards. "Looks like you had it worse than me. If you trust me enough, I can keep an eye on things if you need to wash up or whatever. I would've gone ahead and done that myself, but." She motions to her own mess. "... I know some first aid, if you got any wounds."

She never thought she'd have to get to know a client like this.

She never thought she'd have to listen to a king's regrets, either.

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

The last few weeks have been brimming full of exceptional incidents.

Her reaction, snapped upright that way, is half of the reason he's not standing square in the doorway as a clear silhouette of shadow, rife for the shooting-at. In Ignas it doesn't pay to surprise anyone, friend or foe.

"Yeah. It's me." There's a liquid movement in the cliff of his barely-visible shoulder as he reholsters the ARM, and then he slides through the door and pivots, showing her his back while he closes and locks the door behind him. There's a dark wedge of grime and damp painting the cloth of his shirt from nape to low hem, narrowing as it descends.

He half-turns back to her as she apologizes for something, and it takes him a moment of standing, looking, to understand that she means the littered clothing. As compared with the scale of his concerns for the last forty-eight hours it takes full seconds for that to sink in, so far outside of the realm of things he's thinking about that it doesn't immediately register. "The-- oh. Forget it. It's fine." And she seems to be in one piece, he decides, after some moments of looking her over -- what there is of her to see, blankets and all.

One last glance through the peephole in the door later, and he pivots to make his way further into the space, bringing with him the acrid scent of smoke, the tang of gunpowder, the earthy mustiness of sweat and the copper-iron of blood.

"It's not mine," he says of the latter, with a gesture loosely at the places his clothing is stiff with darker stains. "Other people's." When he reaches the table he pauses, flicking a glance her way, and then he tilts just enough to pick the note up off of the tabletop, and skim it.

Speaks, as he does: "There'll be a few of Newkirk's boys coming out this way soon. Should be here in the next hour, two at the outside. They'll keep an eye on the place. Make sure we don't get rolled by desperate people if word gets out we're sitting on stockpiles."

Nothing yet about trust, or about washing up, but the moment she mentions it his skin is crawling with the urge to soak the filth on him out of his pores. Even then, the thought of trying to scrub it clear exhausts him to think about, muscles weary with exertion and the last several days' lack of sleep. "You alright?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

The way Noah enters tells Gwen a story- his back to her, the sweat and dirt on his shirt, the sound of the door locking. He knew her enough, it seems, to realize that Gwen drawing her ARM was a side effect of the situation at hand.

That, or it didn't even register with him. She never did tell the man she was armed. It was probably implied, but not with what. She has even less of a reason to reveal her source of defense now, with Metal Demons roaming the streets, many of them humanoid enough to pass as a fellow refugee.

"The- Yeah." Gwen stops herself as Noah realizes what she was indicating, as well as how inconsequential it all was. The metallic scent of blood makes Gwen's lips twist; Noah's already on it, letting her know. "Yeah. Same here." Even as she stands up and walks over to the table, a hand reaching for the handkerchief to tie back around her neck, Gwen's physical health seems to be relatively well, compared to the sights they've both seen.

All except for the front of the courier's blouse and vest, stained in much the same fashion as Noah. "Adlehyde Castle was attacked," she says, a bare foot scooting her sweat-soaked socks and boots underneath the table where her hat lies. "The princess and the king got away. We held everyone off. Morgan was there. Me n' a friend got the king out to a nearby forest. My friend managed to get the princess n' some guards. They collected the king n' brought him back."

The king was still alive. He had to be. It'd be for nothing, otherwise.

'Make sure we don't get rolled by desperate people if word gets out we're sitting on stockpiles.' Gwen's head snaps up at that bit of news, a look of wide-eyed confusion banishing the sober dread that marked her face moments earlier. "Wait. So all this ain't a coincidence?"

There's a series of emotions that cycle through the courier's eyes, ranging from anger, sadness, suspicion, and finally.

Laughter.

She settles on that, a weak sort of chuckle bubbling from her lips, her shoulders heaving from the heavy complusion to cry instead. "So I wasn't the only one tryin' to warn people. You just had a head start, didn't ya?"

At Noah's question, Gwen raises her right hand to smooth out her hair in a self-conscious gesture. "Seen better days, but the thought of this place bein' here kinda made my day a little nicer, y'know? It could've been so much worse."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

She mentions that Adlehyde Castle was attacked, and the corner of Noah's mouth tightens, though it's not clear if, had it gained more momentum, it would have become a smile or a frown. She mentions Morgan, too. "He and I were in the castle when it happened." One last glance down at the note -- a note he's already seen before today, as it turns out -- and then he tosses it aside, coasting on a raft of air back down to the table and a spinning stop. "He must have gotten to you just afterward."

He listens to the rest with tired interest, but not much surprise. The King is alive. The Princess, too. He slots those pieces of information away into the larger picture as he understands it, useful things to have in the aftermath, but they offer him little to act on now, and he's little enough energy to do so, anyway. He's tired enough just lifting his hands to begin shedding the collection of bracelets around one of his wrists, most of these leather thongs, some beaded, and unbuckling the fatter leather cuff with its inset, flattish cabochon, some sort of crystal or clear stone that briefly flickers with a deep illumination in the process of being removed. All of these things are dropped to the tabletop as they come off. The skin beneath the place the cuff sat is starkly clean by comparison with the rest, a single band of tawny flesh unmarked with the filth of the refugee camp.

He's just reaching up for the buckle that undoes one side of the shoulder holsters that contain other smaller pieces of equipment when she feigns her shock, and it captures the whole of his attention. His hands cease their work, hovering, frozen, while he watches. He's tired. Almost deliriously tired, and trying to decide whether or not she's serious.

She laughs in the end, which is good -- that kind of watchful stillness in a man his size is never prelude to a good time. Internally he's relieved; if she'd been about to make problems for him--

But she didn't.

He animates again, unbuckling the strap at his shoulder with surprisingly deft hands, given their size. "...Nah. I didn't want to try to warn them. I didn't know whether or not anything was going to happen. I just...wanted people to have options if the worst happened. Something to eat, somewhere to sleep." He casts his gaze out into the darkness at the edges of the storehouse, massive shapes covered in tarps representing piles of materials that make far more sense as an inventory when viewed within the current context. Lumber and stone for rebuilding. Oil and kindling for fires, for cooking. Clean water for sanitation; raw water for sewage and other uses. Food that'll store. Medical equipment for the injured, for injuries more appropriate to what happened than anything like an expedition -- such a flimsy cover story in retrospect, he thinks. Not that it mattered. No one asked questions.

He shrugs free of the leather harness and settles it atop the rest, the straps also dark with sweat. "I hoped it wouldn't come to this. On the upshot, owning this means nobody's going to be able to gouge the refugees for supplies. No profiteering. On the downside..." He drags his attention back to her, one hand rifling wearily through the tousled crop of dark hair on his head. "It needs managing and I'm not that interested in sticking around. Are you planning to stay in Adlehyde?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

Gwen doesn't. If anything, she seems to slowly ease herself into a rhythm of socialization with Noah, the relative quiet and the quiet exchanges lending a sense of comfort over the scent of sweat, the ache of bruises and too many cuts to name, and the fog of exhaustion laid over everything like a numbing blanket. It didn't matter if Noah was a client before- Gwen seems content to just treat him as a friend, now,

The mention of Morgan causes Gwen to smile and chuckle. "Yeah, we got caught up in quite a few scuffles tryin' to get refugees out and such. He even got a big ol' gear and saved my ass when-"

-she got her ARM neatly plucked off like the head of a dandelion flower, staring at the eyes of a being she believed, at one time, was something close to a friend, even if they had only met once. Kalve was the one who told her about her ARM, granting her peace where Zed's comments had elicited confusion and some measure of panic.

The pause is notable in how Gwen's mouth stays slightly open, the opening syllable hanging over her tongue for a brief moment.

Her mind doesn't want to stay on it long, treating the memory like a piece of hot coal that it throws to the side in favor of something far more palatable, even if it falls randomly from her mouth.

"You're Morgan's friend. The one that nearly got him killed. Again." Gwen blinks at this revelation- maybe she had made the connection before and forgotten it, but in the face of everything that's just happened, the recollection is enough to break her away from those tense memories.

It all worked together. And it made sense. Noah's behavior when Gwen asked about this 'exhibition'. The supplies, far exceeding anything any exhibition really needed. The 'little town' Gwen had joked about but seriously pondered over being real in those more exhausting trips back and forth.

A refugee town.

"I was hopin' it wouldn't, too." Realizing the blood on her clothing, she takes off her vest, throwing it to the cushion and sitting beside it, the furniture squeaking slightly from the motion. "I only got a tip from someone that something was up after the exhibition. It was vague enough that I had no tellin' if it'd happen the next day or what, so I just kept hogging the Memory Cube everywhere I could get to, sendin' messages to anybody I knew. I figured, hey, if it all was just a trick or a misunderstanding, I could just admit to it and deal with the consequences."

She wished she could have told more. Could she have helped more people, that way?

The young woman watches Noah take off harness, her eyes moving back to the glint of the bracelets littering the tabletop. "I doubt I'll have plans to do anything else, for a while. I don't think anyone's gonna need much of anything delivered for a while."

She lets out a slow breath, then flops back on the cushion. "I don't think any one of us could've guessed, but it all came together, in the end, didn't it? Even if we didn't know it would." Her eyes close. "Maybe that's the reason so many people survived in the first place."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Crisis has a way of stripping the formality out of things. It shreds the envelopes of polite fiction and status that people project as some means of determining who gets to boss around whom, and leaves only the raw humanity beneath: that everyone is, at the end of the day, just a body, flesh and blood, fragile and vulnerable and strangely strong at times.

The sudden pause in what she says draws his gaze, but he doesn't ask about the sudden left turn in the conversation. Instead, her allegations draw a tired smile out of him -- one wry enough that it seems as though it would've been a brighter, flashier thing if he weren't so threadbare. "One thing you'll quickly learn about Morgan Newkirk is that he could no more resist sticking his nose into trouble than he can a cold drink or a woman in a low-cut blouse. He'll blame me for the trouble he winds up in, but if it weren't me he'd be looking for his own. At least with me there it's less likely he's going to wind up with his fuzzy ass full of lead."

The belts are next. Not the one holding up his pants, but the pair cross-slung to carry the weight of the holsters to either side of his thighs, and the strange, bulky ARMs they contain. He doesn't need to look down to do it: he could do this in his sleep. He lives in them.

"There's always risk in telling people about the possibility of serious trouble. That's why I told you that you could use the warehouse to rest up during the job. It'd get you out of the city. What I didn't say was 'we think there's going to be apocalyptic trouble,' because then what if you had told everybody in the city? As dangerous as it was, it could've been worse if there'd been a panic in the days beforehand. The merchants I bought from would've been cleared out of everything, and it wouldn't have done any good -- it would all have been in the city and burned up anyway. Sometimes you've got to walk a fine line between caution and charity."

The table creaks as he sets the arms down on it, still holstered. This is the first moment that gives him pause: he wants to wash up a little, change his clothes, but it means leaving his weapons with someone he hardly knows. That's not something he ever does.

And he's just...too tired. Too tired to care if she picks them up and decides they're valuable enough to kill him for -- and they probably are, at that. People on Filgaia have been killed for less.

Too tired. At least if he winds up dead he can rest.

So he turns, then, and makes his way back into the darker parts of the warehouse, in search of the barrels of water for bathing. There's a bag with things of his stashed here that are too unwieldy to keep in his saddlebags: towels, changes of clothes, other personal effects -- and he stops on the way to rifle through those.

Lifts his voice so she can still hear him while he goes about his business: "I was going to leave this mess in Newkirk's hands. He's got manpower with the Guild. I might hand it off to the two of you, though."

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

The words about Morgan cause Gwen to snort a surprised laugh as she agrees with Noah's assessment. "Yeah, that's about my view of him. He's a good guy, but I wouldn't mark him as cautious. Sounds like you two get in all sorts of trouble."

She would have liked to stay on that subject, but, for all they know, Morgan himself is wounded someplace, ferrying refugees to safety. He could be dead.

She won't think about it.

"It's okay." The courier gives Noah a weak smile. "I get what you're tryin' to say. There's be no tellin' the whens and whys and wheres and hows, and an early warning could very well funnel panicked people into a nice spot to be picked off. If I knew, I probably would have let everyone know, and then the blame'd be all on me if something bad happened." She leans forward in her slouch, setting pale storm blue eyes on the Drifter. "Did'ya think I was blamin' you? Cause I don't. I just feel bad that you had to handle all that pressure."

It wouldn't have taken her that long to give in and tell someone. This man lied to her face with an easy smile and no semblence of any reason for his actions that those any client with big dreams, big money, and little sense would have.

And she bought it all, because he looked the part.

There has to be something she can do in the here and now; something that could allow her to assert some semblance of control. There are many, many people that are unaccounted for still in the wake of the attack who very well may be dead. Worse, there may be more that were revealed to be the enemy all along. And what of the future? How will things fare for people and Drifters? How will people view those who are different in specific ways. Will they be viewed as Metal Demons themselves?

There's only one answer to such impossible questions: cooking.

Gwen sits up from her slumped position, moving over to a small kitchen area, most likely set up for the boiling of coffee and tea and not much else. "Y'think little ol' me could handle such a responsibility?" The sound is muffled- she's sticking her head inside an ice box nearby, filled with some items secured fresh from the markets not too long ago.

Soon, there's the sound of grits, eggs, and bacon frying on a skillet, Gwen having managed to get the stove going from the dying coals that were still inside. "You better eat somethin' before you leave or you're gonna fall over."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Noah's had a lot of practice lying. Almost an entire lifetime of it, in fact.

...But that's a secret, and a story for another day. If it ever comes.

"I don't know if you can or not. I know Newkirk can, but it doesn't hurt to give him help, and having ready access to somebody who knows the ins and outs of moving things around--" Who isn't a smuggler, Noah thinks to himself, and doesn't add, because he'd no more sell Morgan's secrets than his own, "--is useful. Besides..."

He stops behind a tall, hastily-constructed rack of shelves containing jars of preserves and pickled things, and tosses the armload of sundries onto the top of one of the closed barrels. There's a knife in a sheath tucked away in one boot, and he retrieves it to use it to lever the top off of one of the others. "You know better than anyone other than myself what the inventory here is like. Morgan will get a list and has enough security to keep things from disappearing when they shouldn't, but knowing what's here and where it is will cut down on time spent moving things to the camp, too."

Water splashes back in those shadows, a cloth dipped into the barrel and wrung out, then used to scrub as much of that grime as possible off of him. It turns black more than once. It's a rough job of things, but after days of stewing in it, even that incomplete improvement feels like heaven.

He's quick about it, efficient, like a soldier. When he's restored to some state of things less horrifying to himself and to others, he redresses himself, chucks his filthy clothing into a cloth sack, and follows his nose back toward the scent of food: another thing he's been sadly short on for the last three days.

"You don't have to tell me twice." He tosses the dirty laundry off to the side and finally, finally, allows himself to collapse into a seat, shrugging down into it and tilting his head back, closing his eyes. It means listening to the chorus of aches and pains in him, but it's hard to complain: by comparison with most of the others he saw, he's gotten away from the trouble practically scot free.

"You don't have to sign on, obviously, but it's there if you want the job. Me, I've got another job, and it's back west again."

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

'I don't know if you can or not.' Gwen chuckles at that, nodding. "Y'mean someone who's above board and does things legally?" she guesses with a coy smile. "I suppose this is something I can certainly do."

And just maybe, she may be better suited to it that Noah may realize. The connected threads she has seem all the more obvious then, the more she thinks about it. Taking an inventory of items, making lists, remembering- these are all skills Gwen has become quite capable of in her years as a courier.

Besides, to take action means not thinking about what may be missing.

As Noah disappears, Gwen doesn't chance it to peek behind her for extra supplies or to face him as he speaks. The washing of blood and grime after witnessing so many horrors was a ritual that felt like it required some semblance of privacy, which is something the redhead can only give by keeping an eye on her work.

It doesn't keep her from listening any harder to Noah's reasoning.

The actual number of people Gwen'd actually search for and trust with such an assignment? .... Gwen's not sure if she could really think of anyone off-hand, right now. It's hard to stare at the small collection of contacts and realize that, out of all the continent's many clients, Gwen's only gotten to really know people just recently, a process started by being stuck in an area for a prolonged amount of time. Everyone she trusts is in this area.

And they're all doing what they can as it is.

So, right now, with her stomach growling and demanding to be replenished with precious calories, zero.

"I'll do it." The answer comes before Noah has a chance to finish his sentence. "The people I know that are capable of handlin' a thing like this are either on the other side of the continent, currently missing, or just plain more suited to doin' something else right now." When Noah does chance to open his eyes again, there's Gwen there, moving over to offer a plate heaped with food with a fork balanced on the side. "I'd normally season it, but I can't tell what sort of spicy people like. Too used to my auntie's taste buds." There's a plate on her other hand, heaped with the other half of the bounty. "If I could handle the first job, this'll be a breeze."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

She'll do it.

"Good." The word contains relief. Newkirk could handle the job, probably, but having someone there who knows how much of everything there is and is likely to notice if some of it walks off inappropriately is a weight off of his mind, and his shoulders. It gives him that much more absolution when it comes to feeling guilty about bailing out of the ash heap that is Adlehyde. "You'll talk to Newkirk about it directly. He was at the camp when I left, but he'll be traveling between the refugees and the Guild. Had a lot of work done to the Guildhall to secure it, and there are a few displaced people staying there, too."

The sound of the plate being set down in front of him finally opens his eyes, and provides powerful motivation to peel himself up off of the back of his chair, something he does with a mild wince as everything in his chest and abdomen complains.

Fork lifted, he wastes no time tucking in. "I'm not feeling choosy at the moment. I did spend years working out of Dazil, though. Spicy food's a way of life out that way."

Some silence follows, while he eats. He has better table manners than most drifters: he chews with his mouth closed, at least. Eventually: "You hear anything else about the royal family than that they're alive? They have a plan for this mess, or what?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

"Alright. I can brainstorm with 'im when he gets a chance to come on over." Her lips curl in a slight smile as she shifts the eggs further into the grease left by the bacon. "It'd be nice to see him again- gotta thank him for helpin' me outta more than one jam. It'll keep me outta trouble, besides. Nearly lost my ARM once out there." There's no sense in keeping the mere ownership of an ARM a secret, at least, seeing as Noah seems to have one or two(?) of his own. "Can't afford to lose it."

Morgan could attest to just how much of an understatement that is.

"Whoah, whoah, easy there." Gwen can't help but laugh as Noah's body seems to visibly complain at the movement. "I know my cookin' can be good, but it ain't worth pullin' somethin' over."

There's a perceptible change now that the courier has begun to move around, cook, and talk with someone other than a dying king, a Seraph, or a very tired horse. "Oh man, they have the best food there!" Gwen's eyes light up at the mere mention. "Sweet and spicy at the same time! If things weren't so shaky there, I would've made more deliveries there for the food alone! Though I can't imagine workin' there. The Badlands is rough enough on my skin, but Aveh can be a lot worse in some ways."

At least the Badlands is home.

Scooping a fair amount into her mouth, Gwen settles on short barrel as a seat. Chewing and swallowing, she points a fork at Noah. "The king mentioned somethin' about the Teardrop. Also, about a guy named Irving Vold Valeria. That if they had the golems, and something about Irving's plan, but..." She shifts in her seat at the memory of the king's pale face. Is he really... still alive? They wouldn't have just taken him home to die, would they? "King Justin admitted when he came to that they never were able to get the Golems to work, so even if they contacted Irving, there wasn't anything he could do. What seemed to be the important part was the Teardop. That's what the demons wanted, and what the king wanted to keep safe, family and kingdom aside. The Princess wasn't sure. She was thinkin' about trying to convince the demons to leave, even if it meant givin' over the Teardrop to do it." She sighs. "I admit, I kinda started lecturing at her, but it's not like really knew what it was like to be in her position. She wanted the violence to stop."

The fork stills on the plate, with Gwen looking up at Noah. "Can't really say what else. King Justin's condition probably needed to stabilize. He was pretty weak when I last saw him. But he'll be fine. He has to be."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

Two of his own. A paired set. At least, the pale grips of either firearm appear to be identical in configuration, if not necessarily in terms of wear.

As it turns out, Gwen's got more information that Noah's interested in than he expected, and he's quiet while she relates what she knows. It gives him time to put a huge dent in the contents of his plate, anyway, and by the time she finishes up he's reaching for a flask in his pocket and sitting back to take a breather from eating and let his stomach get used to the idea of having food in it again. Head tilted back, he takes one mouthful of the flask's contents and then sets it down between them in case she cares to take it up for herself.

"I spent the night before the attack in the castle dungeons. Caught by the guard. If they got their hands on the golems, well..." He props one elbow on the arm of his seat and cants himself slightly to one side within it, slouched into a contained sprawl. "Hopefully they'll have a hard time getting them running. There were a few of us who thought it might be a good idea to make it tough to use them."

...by opening up panels on them and destroying everything they could get their hands on. It had hurt him to do it, looking at the bizarre technology they contained, but there'd been no choice.

"Only time will tell if it did any good."

He uses the hand of his braced arm to scrub through the several-days' growth of not-quite-beard on his face, eyes tightening as his weary mind rolls back over what she's told him. "What in the hell is a Teardrop?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

"-uheh?" It's now Gwen's turn to be surprised at the other's words. Trustworthy, above the board all-around (mostly) law-abiding courier blinks at Noah's news, the fork on her plate clinking as her legs shift ever so slightly. "Wait, why were you...?"

Well, the mention about what happened with the Golems sort of explains a lot. Except, that leads to the next question, which is- "Wait, why were you in the cast..."

Oh. Well. "Can't say I would've been against the idea myself," Gwen admits with a wilted sigh, picking her fork back up. "So I guess that's why I couldn't get ahold of ya before the attacks. You already knew what was up." Scooping some scrambled eyes in her mouth, she chews, swallows, then-

-immediately coughs. "Wait, y'dug into a bunch of old technology and screwed it all up? Man, I ain't lyin', that's pretty ballsy. What made you think about doing that to Adlehyde's golems and not anybody else's?" But maybe, it doesn't matter. Who would try to attack a country while it was down, especially when the Metal Demons were such a big threat? ..... okay, there's a few Gwen could think of.

Gwen's fork stops as Noah inquires after the Teardrop- namely, what is was.

A strange, faraway look clouds Gwen's eyes at the memory. Words try to come to mind- scientific terms she's not all too steady on, that would mean something in terms of physical value.

"... Like a piece of pure clear blue sky, after the rain." The recollection is softly spoken as Gwen closes her eyes. "It pulsed faintly, kinda like a heartbeat. It was set real nicely, but, it didn't look like just some pretty gemstone. I mean, it was palm-sized, so it was large enough to be worth somethin', but." Pausing to eat another fork full of scrambled eggs and grits, she eventually says, "King Justin said that there were legends that it was the source of Adlehyde's prosperity and some sort of tie to the Guardians, even Filgaia itself." The look on Gwen's face, as she says this, seems to indicate that, despite her earlier descriptions, she wasn't too sure on this part. "The king said that handin' it over would be surrendering Adlehyde's future. Which, I guess, could mean somethin', if the Metal Demons were after it. I don't think they really were comin' over for pretty stones."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

"There were a lot of drifters and people from out of town passing through, and with the exhibition happening, everybody was distracted. It was an ideal time for a surprise attack. We weren't worried about golems outside of Adlehyde, we were just..." The sentence drifts off. He lifts his eyes away from her, aims them out toward some non-point in space some distance across the room, his expression neutral save a faint knit of the brows.

Because what were they just..? Trying to fix something they didn't understand the contours of, because doing nothing would have been--

"We did what we could with what we knew about," he says finally, leaning forward and picking at his food again, more slowly now. "There wasn't anything more than that to be done."

Content to leave that thorny issue of overall failure aside, he turns the whole of his focus instead to the remarkable object she describes, though his gaze still contains some distance, as though running the wistful description she offers through some mental catalogue of things he could compare it with.

"Huh. Sounds to me like King Justin knows more about what it is than he was letting on. And maybe the Princess...doesn't."

That the Metal Demons might have some inkling what it's for is unnerving, particularly if the thing is old enough that the King only has the faintest notion of what it is and what it does, handed down that way through his family for who knows how long.

"Shit." Hazel eyes find their way back to her. "So you were there, you talked to him. I don't suppose you could..." Hesitation. Could what, Noah? You want to grill a King about his jewels? Really?

Well...yeah, actually. He does.

What the hell, right? The worst that can happen is a 'no.'

"I don't suppose you could get me in touch with him? He hiding out somewhere?"

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

Gwen cranes her neck when Noah stares off into the distance, momentarily concerned. Did she hit on a sore spot? Aside from implying that what he and his companions did was crazy, that is. That could very well be a very strong sore point.

'We did what we could with what we knew about.' "Yeah." The courier nods, offering a sheepish smile, one gloved have itching the side of her curly head. "I guess that's all anybody could've done. Doing nothing... that would've felt worse, I suppose, if it was me."

And it could have been her, if Noah had told her. Maybe that was a gift, in its own right. Gwen can certainly accept, in hindsight, the gift of being innocent of what was to come.

"Yeah." Gwen grimly nods. "I could try. Me and a friend were the ones to get King Justin out of there, after a good friend of mine came in and distracted the two Metal Demons while we escaped. King Justin was wounded by one of them while trying to protect his daughter. Morgan was there- he probably could give you more details." That was a detail she forgot, and one she should have revealed beforehand.

She suddenly conscious of the blood on the front of her blouse. It could have been from a number of people, but all she can think about, just then, is holding the bleeding king in her arms. "But he's back in the castle, with all the guards and everyone. He should be fine now." A wash of guilt clenches at Gwen's stomach. Did she really need to feel so sad, when she was the one with the least amount of connections to the king? If it had been someone else, a perfect stranger, would she have coldly gone on with her life? What gave her the nerve to feel sorry for herself?

Especially when everything was going to be alright. It will.

She forces a smile. "So I don't see why not. Doin' all this for Adlehyde, well. You'll look pretty damn heroic. Hopefully no one'll talk about the Golems n' all that, but if we wait until all this dies down and ask then, I could maybe see if I could do somethin'."

<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.

And this is why it always pays to ask the crazy question: sometimes the answer is 'yes.' The revelation that Newkirk was involved draws his brow up, and then -- after doing away with the last bite of food on his extremely clean plate -- he washes it down with another pull from the flask, which he then caps, and he slumps back against the back of his seat with the finality of a man many days in constant motion only just now finding that he's ready to stop.

Beyond ready. His eyes close and his hand lifts. He rubs his face, his eyes, splays his fingers back through damp, dark hair. "Not tonight. Not this week. I have a prior obligation to see about. Two people who need to be run through blockade. But assuming I make it and we're not all three caught in the crossing, you can send me that information through the Memory Cubes. I'll check it once we're on the other side and on our way to where we're going. It'll give the man some time to put himself back together, anyway."

For a moment he sits in silence, and then his hand falls away from his face, and his eyes, when he opens them, are glassy with exhaustion. "Whitlock? I appreciate the meal. If you ever get tired of hauling people's things from one place to another I imagine you could make a fine living in some establishment or other. I hope you'll forgive me for cutting the conversation short, but I've got days of sleep to catch up on and not anywhere near enough time to do that, so I'd better get started."

The chair creaks as he uses the arms of it to lift his weight back up onto his leaden feet. "If you're gone when I wake up, you take care of yourself, and keep an eye on Newkirk for me."

<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.

Not tonight, not this week. "Oh Guardians, no." Gwen quickly dismisses the notion with a wave of one free hand. "I don't think they're gonna allow anyone to see the king right now, much less me. I doubt they'll take any chances. It can all wait. I'll throw you a message when I find out anything."

It can wait, when you're a person who tries to believe that the best option will happen while banishing away the thoughts of worse outcomes.

'... I imagine you could make a fine living in some establishment or other.' The compliment earns Noah a pink blush on Gwen's freckled cheeks. Hopefully he meant cooking. He meant cooking, right? "Was one of the only real skills I had back when I was sick," she says with a soft chuckle. "Cleanin', organizin', n' cookin'. But now that I'm well, eh. Settling down somewhere? I gotta run out of horizon first before that happens."

Pushing her plate aside, she takes Noah's own plate and fork and walks it over to a surface next to the wash basin. "And you don't need t'apologize. I'm still beat myself. Just gotta wash off so I at least don't look like I tried to stab you or somethin'. I could've sworn I had some extra clothes in the-"

Cart.

Her shoulders slump in acceptance. "Eh, there's a lot of things that'll clean somethin' good as new. Wouldn't be the first time." Looking out a window nearby the door, Gwen sees the stables beyond, where Gulliver stands, along with Noah's own horse. "I gotta feed Gulliver soon too. I'll check your guy out. Make sure they're good and ready for when you head out, if they're not scared of some strange Drifter tryin' to feed em'."

The sun's beginning to peek through the window then, causing Gwen to squint against the rays. "I will. You take care as well, Mr. Hawthorne. You're a pretty interesting client to work for; I'd hate for our business to be stopped short before it could really get goin'."

She goes quiet then, allowing Noah the peace and quiet to rest. There's not much in the way of sounds afterwards but the soft tink of a fork against a plate and the nonsense hum of a person who finds their peace while working. Eventually, she'll go and tend to the horses, then go someplace and wash herself as well.

Then, and only then, will she feel good about collapsing into sleep again.