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[Mai'Traya]

Zar'Ahal was many things to many, different, people but to Mai'Traya it was a complicated mess of a place that was almost entirely out of the range of her special interest - so she really didn't care too much about it.

Some people (her mother especially) found it unseemly that her workshop was on the line between the Slave Slums and the rest of the city but she didn't really mind. A plus-side of slaves was that they made for neighbours who wouldn't complain about a lot of thing. Mostly out of fear that they'd be lashed for daring to complain in the first place but Mai didn't much mind that it was clearly due to fear.

All she cared about was the peace and quiet was only interrupted by herself and her own experiments.

It was a quiet day in the neighbourhood and everyone around the workshop likely thought she was only working on something small, something delicate and something that wouldn't cause too much noise.

Ha!

Joke was on them, really, she thought as she travelled through the air - carried as she was by the shockwave of the explosion that she had caused with something small and something very delicate and not at all quiet. Crashing through the main doors to her workshop, Mai'Traya skidded along the paved road in front of her workshop, battered, burned but very much alive.

"Amazing!" she cried out even as she sat upright, staring at the small fire that appeared to have started in her workshop, "Absolutely amazing yield for something so small... I wonder if I reinforce the metal if I might be able to channel the explosive force..."

She didn't even notice that one of her bangs was lightly smoking from being mildly on fire.

Vel'duith Voiryn

 

[Vel'duith Voiryn]

Vel'duith peered out into the lower city from the jutting end of the side chute she had diverted to during the escape from House Suulet-Jabar. It swayed gently from side to side, which really should have been the diminutive drow's warning. But she was exulting in the moment, finally free again after some dozen hours that had seemed a full week - though the formality of a sending-spell would soon be in order. The queen and general were not enemies she wished to make. For as vast as she was learning Arethil truly was, it could seem quite small at times, like when she...

...and then the chute end snapped, collapsing forward, dumping its new tenant face-first toward the ground below. Was that an awning coming up fast? She seized the ends of her lurker mantle, the smelly rag-cloak over it snapping free into the dark as the mantle billowed full. She swung her legs, diverting herself onto the awning just in time. She released the mantle ends as she landed hard with an oof, then slid down and off, falling several yards to catch hold of another awning edge, dropping to the top of a neighborhood wall, arms windmilling for balance. Normally that might have worked, save for the silk-wrapped battleax stuffed into her satchel tugging her a bit more back and leftwards than expected. Her instant reaction was a foot shuffle... just an inch too far, and over she went, grabbing a pole and leverage swinging sideways onto a roof, just as it shook and rose up to greet her, pushed by a thunderous explosion below. She didn't even have time to puzzle about it.... WHAM!!!
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After the now askance lead-tin roof panel resettled, the unconscious, diminutive cloaked figure slid to its edge, which was just enough lever-force to finally tumble it down into the workshop below, rag-dolled drow and all, with the cheap clangor of flimsy lead-tin spranging on stone followed by a soft thuddle and the more solid muffled clank of the silk wrapped adamantine battleax striking a crate-band.

The figure having just landed on May'Traya's crate -one of the only non-smoldering ones- by way of a piece of her roof was a drow woman, abnormally short and thin, wearing spidersilk robes and a lurker-pelt mantle pinned inside out with some manner of silver device-pin, the device it bore hidden beneath. She had a hand crossbow, bolts, a shortsword, and a dagger on a waist-belt, all fine weapons of adamantine and silver with polished darkwood fittings, and the aforementioned silk-wrapped battleax slung in a now ripped from overstretching spidersilk carryall satchel. Half her face was covered by a dented-coned, broad-brimmed spidersilk hat, with a simple but perfectly even snow white braid splayed out and partially dangling over the crate-edge. Her mouth dripped a bit of blood from where her teeth had cut her lip, but her limbs looked more or less correctly articulated, all her fingers still seemed attached within the bloodied, partially rent lizardskin gloves covering them, and her chest softly rose and fell with a faint groan. One odd detail was that while most of her clothes looked like well-kept, well-worn lesser noble house fare, her boots looked nearly brand-new, and were surely of dwarf-make. Surface dwarf-make, at that.

Mai'Traya