Stavanger Bay when it’s just you and me and the english channel

My work week is about to start, which is going to slow down my response time significantly. Do you guys want to just fade this with everyone heading to the Den Night? If you’re cool with that, this’ll be the last post for me and you can both round out your characters’ responses and archive this! ^^ If not, feel free to poke at me on Slack. I am also just going to powerplay Coelacanth in this post, because she is mine, my own, my p r e c i o u s s s s s .

For the most part, Szymon was content to observe the three unlikely companions in silence — but Chusi’s question gave him pause. “The Sea,” he told her truthfully, “takes what She w-w-will. You should be w-wary and r-respectful of Her, b-b-but not afraid of Her. Do you understand?” The Cairn children had never feared the Sea; what they felt for Her was a deep respect and occasionally a harrowing need. He turned his attention then to the Vessel of the Sea — who was apparently not actually a Vessel of the Sea — and regarded her with auriferous eyes that glinted with hard scrutiny. She appeared to be an odd hybridization of lynx and wolf, if her tufted ears and tiny size were any indication — and she was watching him with bright, limpid eyes that hinted at the bioluminescent plankton that swarmed the bay’s shores from time to time. It reminded him that he wanted to make a gift of the plankton for his girls — namely, Doe and Qilaq — but he was swiftly brought back to the present when the odd creature shrank back from his musing stare.

He wondered at her silence and her namelessness — and correctly surmised that the latter was a direct result of the former. “N-Names are s-special,” he ventured, adding her without qualm or question to the list of Important Creatures to Protect. If she was important to Doe, she was important to Szymon simply by association — and that meant he, too, would have to think up an original name for the strange wolf. “H-How do you keep t-t-track?” he muttered without expecting an answer. It was his instinct to call her simply “Vessel” — after all, that was what he thought of her. Yet upon its utterance — “V-Vessel?” — she wrinkled her nose in sheer rejection. Tattered ears fanned out to the sides of his skull as he settled on a word that was near enough and oddly fitting: “V-Vesper,” he said. “the evening s-star.” This, at least, seemed to meet with her finicky approval — the typical Cairn grumpiness kicked in and muttered cruel things about beggers and choosers even as she touched the tip of her nose to the sand and flicked it over his paws in an odd show of gratitude.

It occurred to him then that Skellige would not be pleased at the prospect of adding another cub to their ranks — not with Qilaq being so new and Larkspur the Deserter causing both the witch queen and the sea king to be mauled by a bear.