Spoiler: OOC:
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How dare you demand rolls from moi! From Moi! (1d100)[5].


And so you walk. Sir Briant seems content enough to walk as Bella rides. He is pleasant company; affable; chatty, if mostly incomprehensible. Possibly funny - or atleast, Bella seems easily led to giggle when he produces a sequence of words with the cadence of a joke. All in all, there are two things about him that hitch an otherwise very fine first impression.

The first are his eyes; which are pleasant to look at, but, after the surprise of the initial encounter, seem to avoid direct contact with yours or Bellas. He conducts his negotiation with a lot of glancing away, a lot of looking at the left or right shoulder of whomever he is trying to speak to. Typically, a Tilean would associate this reticence to lock eyes as a sign of shiftiness. Is it a cultural quirk? Or something else?

Spoiler: Successful Perception Test (Intuition - Not Hearing or Vision)
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At first you think he might be partly blind, or concussed or something; but then you begin to put together that it comes off as a more social disinclination than a physiological one. When you confer with Bella, she whispers to you after a gasp.

"Oh - do you think it's our hair? Bretonnian women cover their hair in public - those who are marriagable, or married. They only show it on their wedding day, or indoors to their family. Except for little girls, and their holy Maidens, and - oh no! Taalia, does he think we are prostitutes?!"

That would explain his immediate goodwill - but observing the knight as you have travelled, you don't think that's the case. More likely, having grasped that you are foreign, he is simply not heaping upon you the expectations that he would someone local - but he averts his eyes with almost desperately dutiful regularity just as if you were walking around without a shirt. Can uncovered hair really be so... intimate to these people? How scandalized they must be, when they go to other countries and women shake their hair around with such rampant godlessness!


The second is that, in the silences between attempts to communicate, he progresses from walking alongside you with silent confidence and contentment that grades slowly but surely down to quiet, deep sadness. It blows away like scattered fog when you or Bella try to ask/pantomime a question or he thinks of something he would like to communicate otherwise; but it's there.

Spoiler: Successful Visual Perception Test +10%
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With all your belongings strapped up on Cleménce's back, you are inclined to keep an eye out to make sure they are not overweighted to one side or the other to cause irritation to the steed, or to fall off. During one such glance, you see the corner of bright silvery links of fine chain and black leather poking out the corner of one saddlebag. You recognise it as a very fine horse's bridle - the kind of thing that one does not normally carry as spare. The pegasus, you fear, did not make out of the mountain conflict alive - mortally wounded by the orcs before you arrived, after all. Sir Briant must have brought both his destrier and his pegasus to the battlefront, using the pegasus to run messages across the gap and make opportunistic strikes at the orcs high in the mountains - and now, with that critical casualty, he is making his way home.

Another strange country; another stranger to whose defence you were compelled to leap, against the perfidious greenskin; another equine casualty, and its human master in mourning. The young knight's distress at this loss is less raucous than Gaulfredo's. Your more-or-less adoptive father was very emotive, even by Tilean standards, especially when it came to the horse Bartolemi slain by the goblins, or Rocco felled by age. But restrained as it is, you intuit that Sir Briant's greif is just as deep; even if his way is to bind it within himself, instead of release it.


As evening comes on, the cold comes again - and with it comes a very faint dusting of snow. You haven't seen snow up close since Norsca - and there, it was a brutal, everpresent monster of a phenomenon that locked you in your service in that village as surely as did the skaven's cage later. You remember your abortive effort to flee before returning, blue-lipped and shivering, to the Mistress and Master's home for a hiding and a return to thralldom, if only to sit by a fire again and sleep under a roof.

But here, it's quite beautiful. It settles on the road ahead and the grassy hills beside it; not enough to cover the surface, buy enough to add its frosty glow to the palette of the land. Bella is mystified - she has never seen the stuff at all, and from her perch on Cleménce's back, she is compelled to look at the flakes as they settle on her hands and on the horse's mane before they melt away.

This would be the time one would make camp - find shelter or make it before it's too dark, get a fire going, hunker down. But Sir Briant seems keen to push on - if anything, he pulls on the horse's reins a touch faster as if eager to get somewhere. Or else, he intends to make you walk through the night!

Spoiler: OOC:
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You may, if you like, insist on camping and eating now; or you may trust your guide knows what he is doing. Decide!