A Schönling for Your Thoughts

[Aurin]

East End, Zaichaer
50th of Searing, 124 of Steel

The Grymalka at the Clinic were sworn to secrecy. Aurin liked it that way. He was skittish around healers, even professional ones, given an early experience with one of Ioniri's Mystics. Granted, he wasn't likely to find one of those here—coven witches being given licenses by the Order was all well and good, but being a devoté of an actual draegir was yet another. Odd, though; he thought this place was ripe for Arry's bondage gods to pluck. He was rather happy with the demigod hiding among the covens, however. They were a local god, at least.

No longer in the Coven Market, he was making his way through the East End, just minding his business, when he espied Reiner Dornkirk and (gasp) unescorted. He looked hither and thither but so no Kämpfer glowering possessively after him, and it was just too ripe an apple not to pick.

He trailed the hapless soldier for several blocks, but it wasn't until he turned a corner and found him relatively alone, and nobody likely to intercede on his behalf when Aurin finally stalked up silently behind him, wound up, and slapped him hard on the arse.

"Schönling!"

It had been a while, but Aurin was incorrigible and horrible and many other bad adjectives. He danced back a few paces, sure to avoid any knee-jerk punches in the face. When Reiner spun on him, though, he laughed delightedly.

"Oh, I knew I recognized that nancing gait. How the mists have you been, you pretty bastard?"

Certainly, Reiner could probably still punch him. Aurin had a very punchable face, especially when he was smirking like that—and he was usually smirking like that.

The dog on Aurin's trail was most definitely not a witch.

[Reiner Dornkirk]

Reiner's pace was leisurely. He tended to walk on the faster side, but he tended to be busy and this was a rare day off during which he was spending a few hours window shopping. With commerce returning to the realm and Reiner with a better income than he'd known prior, along with all the social safety nets that made indulgences easier to hazard, he was starting to develop his own sense of style. There was a burgeoning subculture, post-apocalypse, that leaned into darker themes that verged on the macabre. Those seemed to be the styles that gave Reiner pause as he wended his way through the streets of his recovering city.

Based on what he was wearing at the moment, Aurin might indeed infer that his tastes tended toward grim themes and darker hues that swallowed light and surely, on this Searing afternoon, at least accounted somewhat for the beads of sweat glistening on his brow. As he whipped around, some of those droplets leapt free of his pale face and, though Aurin didn't evade a punch with his parry, he did escape a drizzle of perspiration.

At the ill-begotten nickname and the all-too-familiar effeminizing ridicule he scowled at the ginger and, though his fists did clench, he kept them firmly at his side. Nostrils flaring slightly, he bounced once on the balls of his feet before settling back onto his heels and taking note of the dog sidling up to the foreigner's side. His scowl gave way to a wry smirk the which he didn't even need to force as he gestured down to the hound.

"Well, don't be rude, Aurin. Aren't you going to introduce me to your girlfriend?"

[Aurin]

A punch would have been his due, but his reflexes kept him from the spray. Reiner wasn't glowing; he was perspiring. He laughed with wicked delight, then pulled a faux moue of displeasure.

"Show some respect, Dornkirk. This is Fraulein Kavafis." He laughed again. "Offered her a scrap of my lunch and she's been following me ever since. How are you?"

The question was sincere, and his eyes were curious, his smirk not so sharp as it could have been. He wasn't entirely sure Dornkirk didn't actually hate him. It was more fun not to cheat, use a trick, and know.

When his indicating hand fell back to his side, the dog sniffed at it, then whined. It was a mite strange to see a relatively healthy stray dog in Zaichaer, even now that things were getting back to normal. Between the mists and the year of winter, there had been feral packs and strange abominations, but having what could be called a pet, that was new and rare. Perhaps he was parading her around hoping for a reward.

It was hot and Reiner was sweating. If he chanced to run into Kuno, he would have to figure out a clever way to tell him to go take his pretty young friend to the river to swim without crossing that unspoken boundary they both seemed to see and silently acknowledge. Well, it was good to have contacts in the military.

"Can I buy you something cold to drink? Was going to try to find her some clean, cold water."

[Reiner Dornkirk]

"Man, she took your name and you didn't even make on honest Frau of her? Schade." He tsked as he crouched down to pet the dog and scratch its neck. He didn't notice that Aurin's question was more than a rhetorical salutation for long enough that it was awkward when he realized and glanced up from the eyes of the canine to the more vulpine pair above.

"Huh? Oh. Fine, I guess. It's a clear day, not a Dreadmist in sight so, y'know. Can't complain." With a final pat to the head, Reiner rose from the dog and stepped out of the middle of the sidewalk into the shade of an awning. He pursed his lips and nodded at the offer of a drink.

"Oh, all right, sure. There's a biergarten that just opened just a block from here. I'm friendly with the tapster and I'm sure he'd put out a bowl for the pup. C'mon." He didn't wait for approval on the venue before stuffing his hands in his pockets and heading in that direction, head down and silent for the brief walk to the establishment. An ivy-strewn archway led into a courtyard arrayed with long tables lightly populated with Zaichaeri citizens, drinking and dining under a large pergola of stained, dark wood.

He waved to the tapster and held up two fingers, then gestured to the dog. That seemed to be enough for him to catch Reiner's meaning, as he nodded and started tending to something behind the bar as they found a seat at the empty end of one of the tables.

"I hope you like dark beer, because I ordered a doppelbock for you. It's what I always get here."

[Aurin]

"Ugh, fucking Kathalan. Frau Kavafis."

But he strolled along gamely beside the emo soldier, his own hands swinging as he walked with a looser gait, catching what breeze they could. He nodded approvingly at the biergarten as they entered. This was the sort of place he could relax for a bit.

As for the dark beer, he grinned. "The darker the better, dark as is my soul. You know, if you believe in those."

They were real; almost anyone with a magic trick could tell you that. But they were just patterns of aether, more complex than most, but not rare. Others considered them holy. Aurin didn't know about all that.

"How's tricks, Private?"

However the young Dornkirk felt about him, Aurin liked him well enough. He wasn't good at forming meaningful connections, although sometimes he drunkenly stumbled into them. And, of course, because Aurin couldn't rightly think about people without thinking about what they could do for him, Reiner Dornkirk was an easier connection than his more prominent cousin and the soldier was unlikely to tell him to fuck right off because he knew that Stefan Dornkirk made use of his talents. Rubbing elbows with the First Minister could surely help Aurin out, but he figured it was best to be strategic and sparing in that. It reduced the risk of running into Dornkirk's brother-in-law, who was the Grand Poobah of the Magic Police. Valencia was running point on the Order; Aurin was content to be entirely mundane in his skills, at least in the public eye.

That being said, he was curious how Reiner would react if he got him into the Menagerie and let the Myshalarai get him out of his lederhosen...

[Reiner Dornkirk]

"Oh yeah, I'm sure Singscript is much easier for your featherbrain..." The origin of the young soldier's malapropism was an honest one. Having never been formally schooled nor seen the proper term, 'Synskrit', written down, Reiner had always inferred it was called 'Singscript'. It stood to reason, in his mind, as the language of a race of feathered bird-men.

At the flippant metaphysical question of whether or not souls existed, Reiner merely grunted, but to the broader question he was quick to correct:

"I'm actually a lieutenant now." He reached his hand up to tap the pips on his collar, before realising he was in his civilian clothes. Fortunately the beers were arriving, so he was able to elide the motion into accepting his hefty mug rather than awkwardly dropping his hand back down to his lap.

"I've been fine. I don't know. Trying to acclimate to a life without the constant threat of mutants and other monsters... trying to find the balance between prepared and paranoid. Like, I don't want to forget that anything could still happen, but I'm trying to remember that the worst probably won't come about at any given moment. Just... figuring out how to live versus survive, I guess. Prost." Obligatory and unceremonious, he limply lifted his liter of beer to tap against Aurin's.

"Anyway, how have you been? Back and forth doing whatever shady shit you get up to or have you settled here to fuck with us full-time?" He wiped a bit of froth from his mouth with the back of his black sleeve, and glanced down at the sound of the dog lapping up water from the bowl that was delivered with the beer.

"...What's her name really, though?"

[Aurin]

"Well, fuck... to be fair, the only way to get ahead in Kalzasi is to kiss a little feathery ass, so I hear a lot of it there and get more practice. Speak Kathalan and people start giving you funny looks, so I only get to practice here." He let the malapropism pass; he hadn't had formal education either, but had tried to learn as much as he could so he could at least pretend and get more powerful, affluent people to follow his lead.

"And fuck, well done. Good on you." He raised his glass once more at the promotion and drank. "Lieutenant Dornkirk has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" He grinned. "Prost, prost, prost."

Aurin considered. "You're what, twenty-something? You just spent over a year under horrible conditions. You're traumatized. Everyone around you is traumatized. Recovering from that, learning to be normal again when you had to be anything but just to survive... that takes time if it's even possible for everyone to get back there. Be patient with yourself, Dornkirk. Be kind. Mists know, most fuckers are like me and won't be patient and kind. People depend on you, so take care of yourself, or you won't be able to take care of them, of your responsibilities. Or the people you love, or whoever you end up loving when you get around to it."

He was only too happy to change the subject. "No... I do have a job in Kalzasi, but I have learned how to delegate. I make the big decisions and let accountants to the figuring for the most part. That way, I get to see Zaichaer, Gel'Grandal, and other places. I think about moving sometimes. Perhaps to Zaichaer just to harass you with more regularity... Or perhaps anywhere else. Never really felt like I had a home, you know? Or maybe you don't. You grew up with family on the East End, right?"

As for the dog, he looked down at her and then back at him, shrugging. "Seriously, she was whining. I fed her. She followed. I have no idea what in the mists her name is. Do you want a dog?"

[Reiner Dornkirk]

"That must be... humbling." One could hear in the breadth of Reiner's pause that his initial thought had been passed over in favor of a kinder word. For a race as proud of worthy as humanity to debase themselves before beings manufactured by mages for the sole purpose of serving a natural-born species was an unacceptable aberration, in Reiner's reckoning. If he didn't say so aloud, his expression broadcast it clearly enough as he snarled into a swig of beer.

"If you want me to speak Kathalan to help you better yourself, das könnte ich machen." He said, as he lowered the stein to the table with a sigh.

"I'm not the first Lieutenant Dornkirk..." That acknowledgement softened him somewhat and palpably so. "As a matter of fact, I probably took the longest out of any in my generation, but I didn't go through the Battle Academy, so..." He shrugged.

"Yeah, I'm twenty four." Reiner confirmed and clarified, listening quietly as Aurin summarized his lot of late aptly enough that he only nodded along. As he waxed a bit didactic, Reiner smirked and chuckled softly.

"Thanks for the advice, Uncle Aurin." He offered, batting his eyelashes and exaggerating his natural boyish attributes for the sake of teasing the red-headed unsolicited advisor. His smirk gave way to pursed lips as Aurin went into talk of his work. It made him think of his late uncle Melchior- the upwardly mobile mercantile mogul who'd turned his life around in spite of the odds.

"Yeah. Kuno and I grew up near the 'works..." He looked to the dog, leaned down to pet her and then shook his head. "Nah. She chose you. I've got enough to worry about, but I can babysit from time to time if you need."

[Aurin]

Aurin snorted, rolled his eyes.

"Look, we both know I'm a... a Fotze. I take the piss out of people I like. If I didn't like you, I wouldn't bother. And you could have just told me to fuck off when I invited you for a drink, you know." He paused, shifting focus. "Es ist die Sprache des Imperiums, nicht wahr? Sie wollen dich erobern."

Hazel eyes tracked Reiner's response, words and facial tics. He understood the cultural connection between the Imperium and Zaichaer, but he thought they ought to focus more on their own culture and linguistic identiy if they didn't want to get annexed. It seemed as though they had tried; thankfully the Eclipse or something had sent them home to manage their own affairs.

As for the dog, he was going to have to find it a home. He didn't think Torin's Huntress would accept a dog when she was mostly wolf, and he didn't think Arry would find it a funny joke. They probably ate dog in Solunarium, anyway. Perhaps he could take it back to the covens and it could become a mascot, or something. There were young enough little witches in the Whispers that they would probably fall in love with a dog. There, problem solved.

He would not be introducing Reiner to his pet coven, though. For all the Dornkirks knew, he was pure of all magic, and that was how he wanted to keep it.

But Aurin did wonder whether Reiner only put up with him because Kämpfer had enjoyed drinking with him. If so, it might take a different tack to confirm him as a reliable source of information. He didn't know if Kämpfer and Dornkirk would remain hand in glove, but they could both be useful—and fun. The ginger liked to have fun while he worked.

[Reiner Dornkirk]

"I'm glad you like me, I guess, but I don't really know you. I can be a dick to my friends, too, but I don't really know you like that. You've done some nice things, we've fought together, you work for... or with my cousin and leader, but I find you difficult to read, so what may seem playful to you can just feel abrasive to me." He shrugged, "I'm honestly not sure why you try with me, unless you think I could be useful because of my last name or... Well, you spend a lot of time in Kalzasi, and I know what the bird boys get up to in their nests and, if that's what you're after, you're barking up the wrong tree... No offense, girl." He said, turning to scratch the dog's neck.

"Ach, verpiss dich." Reiner grimaced, "It's the language of our shared Vorfahren spoken by humans first before the Imperials used it to train their slaves. We're not some wannabes, you know, we just come from the same tribe as them and have some common values. At least they use pidges the way they were meant to be used, but if they wanted to conquer us they had a prime opportunity recently and they didn't. So maybe they're not interested or maybe they're shitty strategists, but I'm going to observe my culture wie ich wollen, if it's all the same to you, featherlover." Observations of his tone and tics would reveal that he was, indeed, more irritated than amused by that particular line of teasing coming, as it did, from an outsider who resided in a realm he believed genuinely did seek them harm and exact it to great effect.