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[Wild Blue: The Queen's Wardens] Grand Soiree


Gabe OOC

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A party in the Blue Palace would seem beyond you three normally. Packed with nobles and gentry, squabbling over the most mundane slights, power shifts and fashion. Which speaking of, cost pretty much more than you'd ever paid for in your life, elegant dresses and suits and clothing of rich make and color.

Fortunately, the dour dress uniforms of the Wardens remind you why the place matters. The Queen, Her Majesty Aurora V, had stepped forward after each oath of loyalty and personally pinned the Cobalt Stars to your breasts. After all this time, your time of service and glory was now.

Whitehorse, your stiff, future-seeing teacher, offered you smiles and congratulations after this all, though it was a moment of leniency in the wake of the actual missions you would take on.

Lord Windhammer himself was more stiff and formal, but you knew he was glad to have ten more Wardens in defense of the Blue Lands. The feast has begun, and you can celebrate your new status - you probably earned it in training!

OOC
Feel free to invent details for the characters and describe and make up more... socializing time for now. :)
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The star felt heavy. She knew it was all in her head, of course, that cobalt wasn't that heavy and that the amount of cobalt in the star wasn't that much. But... still, it sat heavy on her lapel.

Not for the first time, she wondered if she'd made a mistake, but the Wardens paid very well and her family had needed the money. And besides, she had to admit: it was nice, having something that rich people never would. Even at the party, she'd boosted her height subtly, just enough to not need those damned heels to look people in the eye.

So she mingled, and accepted everyone's congratulations, and let a few of the kids present touch the star. One of them asked how big she could get, and she politely declined to demonstrate, since she was out of her special cobalt-weave field uniform that grew with her and felt no need to traumatize a child for life. She had replaced the ceremonial ropes across her chest and over her shoulders with her cobalt-weave lasso, though. Just in case.

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As a young boy drew back his cake-crumb-besmirched finger from Highbrow's badge, his face lit up with a wondrous grin, the new Warden heard a high pitched noise getting steadily louder. She had just enough time to look up when a missile slammed into her violently and...hugged her?

The missile had a tuft of red hair attached to a much smaller dress uniform worn over a commensurately smaller body. The high pitched squeal of delight she was emitting was now mercifully muffled against the front of Highbrow's uniform. She finally released the taller girl and beamed up at her...almost seeming to vibrate with glee, as if she was about to explode into little streamers of colored paper and tiny fireworks.

"Carol, we're Waaaardens!" she exclaimed, completely unnecessarily, given the cobalt badge she was cradling...pulling it out from her lapel to do it. She wasn't that much taller than some of the taller kids that had gathered to clamor around Highbrow. Slung over her back was her oversized, self-designed rifle. Mercifully, she'd been asked to leave the volatile 'rocket boots' behind for this event.

"This is the best day EVER!" Deezy gushed, then seemed to notice the kids. "Oh. Hi."

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"Oof! Hey Deezy. Yeah." She smiled, a bit more widely than she normally did. "I guess I'm officially Highbrow now. Ha, do you remember how much time we put into picking names? I think I emptied out a dictionary." She looked around at the other graduates. "Wonder where we're getting stationed..."

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"I had mine all picked out, but mine's pretty easy," the shorter, scrawny girl let Highbrow know. "Easy Deezy."

She looked around as well, abruptly curious about that as well.

"Dunno! Wherever there's trouble, I s'pose! Maybe they'll just turn us loose and let us go wherever we want, and we can stroll into towns and right the wrongs and maybe fix the well...after getting the little boy who fell in out...and then mosey on out without ever sayin' who we are."

She paused...not so much to give a chance for Highbrow to respond, but because if she didn't, she'd have passed out.

"And the'll all say...who was those folk with the shiny blue stars? And we'll just say..." she dropped her voice a couple of octaves, clearly working hard to do it. "...we're the Wardens."

Her eyes focused on a table across the room, and she abruptly beamed. "Oh hey, they have those little pies. Tarts. I'm gonna get one. You want one? You seem like a tarty gal."

Deezy looked up at Highbrow eagerly.

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"Sure, grab me one. Easy Deezy, huh? People are gonna say you're a Certain Kinda Lady with a name like that, but hell, you DO have a gun and rocket boots to tell 'em no."

Highbrow looked around at the other guests at the party, to see who she recognized.

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Deezy laughs. "No! That's just me being silly. No, my name's just Deezy. That's been my codename all along. I didn't have to change it or nothing!"

She gave Highbrow a 'bossy little sister' eye-roll and darted off to get one of those sweet-lookin' tarts over there. Deezy had two apparent gears; 'pause' and 'zoom.' And she didn't seem to pause for long at a time.

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There were certainly a massive amount of faces about at the Investment. Naturally, Lord Windhammer, Whitehorse, the Queen, her long-suffering but serenely patient Royal Chamberlain Martin Thoss, even of all people, his daughter too, looking radiant in a elegant but not too ornamented opal colored dress.

And Highbrow could notice with some amusement that Miss Thoss was surrounded by an entourage of blue-blooded young men, cleared taken with some admiration for her... something that combined with her eager smiles and responses added to the pinched and strained quality of her father's expression.

All the great noble houses were there.... the Boutads, the Jhaniels, the Mitchell. As ever, the Queen was a locus for hanger-ons and sycophants, though She generally displayed only limited attention to their games.

Deezy, rushing to get tarts, found herself colliding with the heir to the Boutads, Nathaniel Boutad, a corn-haired, green-eyed rake of a youth her age. It was not much of an impact, but some response was required.

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"Well." She tugged at her collar to make sure it was straight. "Time to go mingle a little bit."

She didn't particularly like this part - give her a book any day - but she represented the Star now; she had to give it a good face. So she decided to give Martin Thoss's daughter a little backup in case any of those men crossed the line from "flirty" to "scummy."

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  • 2 weeks later...

"Bwah!" Deezy exclaims as someone abruptly appears out of nowhere in front of her. She windmills her arms and tries to hurl herself to the side, and succeeds in merely colliding with his right shoulder instead of smashing directly into his face. Fortunately the impact is not enough to do more than twist him around and make her nearly stumble and fall.

Right away she turns, beet-faced, and hastens to apologize, "I'm awful sorry about that, mister; I didn't even SEE you until you stepped out on account of wanting one of those tarts so bad. Like a blinkered horse, I swear!" She puts her hands up to the sides of her eyes, making a narrow corridor that blocked her peripheral vision to illustrate the principle.

Then she sort of shrugged and melted into a bright, dimpled smile as she stuck one of those hands out to shake.

"Anyway, I'm Deezy. Warden. Warden Deezy to...non-Wardens. Cept you can call me Deezy even if you're not. Are you? You look kinda familiar."

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Charles Goodnight was every bit as uncomfortable at this ceremony as his fellow newly-christened Warden, Hightower. The longer he hung around them, the more Goodnight came to realize that the Five Points simply didn't suit him. He'd been born in the Outlands, way up in the northwest territories, nigh on the edge of the Folklands in fact, and it was there he'd been raised and it was there that suited him. The Five Points - especially Cobalt - were too noisy, too crowded, too civilized for him to ever feel comfortable in them.

But Goodnight hadn't left the Outlands and traveled first to Ressen and now to Cobalt because it suited him or because he'd thought he'd be more comfortable, he'd come here to become a Warden! Life was hard in the Blue Lands, and harder still in the Outlands, and just about the only folk Goodnight had ever seen trying to make a difference out there were the Queen's Wardens. Charley was more than willing to subject himself to the noise and smells and crowds of the Five Points if doing so was a part of the price for being allowed to wear the Cobalt Star.

Although this party, and all of its blue-blooded, sycophantic politicos and hangers-on, was beginning to test his resolve....

He'd somehow been dragged into a conversation with the group of aristocratic young men who were now showering the young Ms. Thoss with so much attention, and had only just managed to relegate himself to the status of "unobtrusive fly on the wall" through a careful combination of polite indifference and Very Boring Answers to all of the questions he'd been plied with. At first it had been the young men themselves - hardly more than adolescents, really - who'd been taken with Goodnight, wanting to know all about the hardships and adventures that men must face in the faraway Outlands. How curious they'd all been! But then Ms. Thoss had taken an interest - Charley's rugged good looks had always attracted more attention from the fairer sex than he was entirely comfortable with, truth be told - and suddenly he was an enemy to every man present!

Charley'd been equal parts bemused and satisfied to find himself briskly, if subtly, shouldered out of sight and out of mind by the very murder of blue-blooded young crows who had only recently taken so vested an interest in him, and to see Abigail Thoss quickly forget all about him. He was now a conversational outlier, still a part of the crowd, and therefore officially "mingling" like a good Warden of the Queen, but just barely. This was a situation that suited him very well.

Goodnight dipped his head in greeting when he saw Carol approaching. "Highbrow", he said, by way of simple greeting.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Doctor Grue wore a sleepy smile through most of the ceremony. If the gravity of the occasion struck him he didn't show it, though his smile brightened and his eyes grew more focused as he recited the oath. His voice soft and sincere and he grinned outright at the moment when the star was finally put in place.

,,

After the official pleasantries were done with he shot across the room toward the food and filled his plate with the meticulous efficiency only a skilled surgeon could muster. Then he began meandering between the knots and cliques, lingering, listening, occasionally tossing a thoughtful comment into the fray and munching on his dinner. It wasn't that he fit in with the nobles, he certainly hadn't met many before, but he didn't seem to register the distinction and thought nothing of poking into conversations that were extremely high above his pay grade or offering folksy medical advice to people who could buy a hospital if they saw fit, which they sometimes did.

,,

Eventually perusal of the party brought him past Highbrow and Goodnight. He waved as he approached. "Congratulations again! Try the crawdads if you pass by the buffet, they're just like mom used to make. Oh, that must be young Lady Mitchell. Word is she's expecting! Excuse me..."

,,

And with that he went zipping off in another direction, targeting a small and unusually giggly bevy of noblewomen.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Suddenly...

,,

A great boom sounded from above, make people pause in their conversations. And again and again more sounded. Suddenly, it was clear to you newbies as it was to the experienced Wardens and the Royal Guard that those sounds seemed far too suspiciously like cannon fire...

,,

A soldier rushed into the the grand banquet hall, his expression and uniform clashing with the luxurious surroundings... "Your Majesty! The-"

,,

Then a great skylight section set into the upper roof of the hall shattered, raining glass down as men with pistols and cutlasses rappelled down! It was clear now who they were: sky pirates! The Royal Guard acted immediately - to hustle away the Queen, but that said nothing about the panicked gentry and merchants.

,,

But this rogues had to be dealt with, most certainly. Several of them started angling your way, hooting and grinning.

,,
OOC
It's Combat Time! Please await the Combat thread, we will handle all dice rolling and resolve actions there first, and then we can post the fluff results of each person's turn as they wish to describe it.
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