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Save Point: Campaign Notes

The women are remarkably free in these parts, thinks Cleo as she admires a cute miner girl, topless and dripping with sweat, working her hammer against the volcanic glass and shattering off huge chunks that are less dangerous when they aren't caught up clothing and can be washed free easily. The men and the women both go almost bare, and you'd think the girls wouldn't have much up top with how muscled and wiry they are, but the local ladies are stacked to begin with and the harder working ones tend less to fat. She catches herself licking her lips and carefully hides it in case they get the wrong idea before she can try her subtle approach.

Earlier, she'd seen the raising of a house, roof levered up and walls lifted, and the same principle seemed to be at work, hugely built women laboring and hefting on the rooves as they slung tiles to one another, swilling huge mugs of recreationally light beer brewed that way to avoid interfering with the work, and not a glance edgewise. She supposes that when you get to view magnificent tits on a healthy daily basis, everyone's a little more relaxed about it, but it honestly wasn't what she was expecting from a culture renowned for being touchy, obsessed with honour and personal pride.

When one of the older roof girls poured the remainder of a mug over herself, shook it off and then stretched in the sun before going back to work, there was a distinct touch of creaming. She felt the insides of her thighs get nice and slick.

And besides the local women-folk, there's the culture. She can wander about in part-armour, leather skirts swishing and her sword openly strapped to her back and it's just plain common sense. 'Always wear your armour!' is the catch-cry of the local smiths and she takes ruthless advantage to explore the edges of impracticable combat fashion, trying on all sorts of things. She spends so much time at the local smithies (all that blazing hot fire always burning all night to embers, mmmm yummy) that she's got herself a sort of smithing and forging outfit, a kind of robe made of selectively thick and thin leather to conceal the fact that she doesn't really need to shield herself from burns and scorches. The robe has been dyed a dark shade of black-wine red to make it more fashionable, and has a set of matching gauntlets that she's 'improved' by removing most of the inner lining so she can dextrously handle hot metal.

A side-effect of the mining going on is the manufacture of 'elf-shot' arrows with tips of volcanic glass. The actual mining is for valuable minerals encysted in and around the flow channel, where an intrusive dyke once forced its way up through a fracture plane in the rock, but by sorting through the discarded shatter it is possible to find larger fragments suitable for arrow-heads and single-shot murder daggers. The arrows do not survive impact and most certainly cannot be retrieved from the remains of the target, but their penetrating effect is simply horrifying and then they break up like shrapnel.

The makers of the arrows attribute this to magic, chip and carve them in the special ancient way and with reverent care, painting swift concise vengeance-patterns in red ink onto the scallop-flaked edges so they can be distinguished from normal shot, but Cleo knows that it is the mono-molecular breakage planes that gives them this unique characteristic. She took one to the lung once and so has first-hand experience of coughing up the fragments (privately, hidden, in a camp by the river, wounded cat gone to a secret place to die, bits of black glass coated in red oxygenated lung-blood and tangled-chain protein deposits designed to thwart those very edges). Ever since, she's disdained such weapons herself, buying her conventional arrows from the same fletcher who supplies the deep wilderness hunters, who want to make a clean shot and observe full arrow-discipline.

She can actually make quite a good quarrel when she wants, but she finds it boring. Doing anything several hundred times rapidly gets dull, and the arrows sell by weight when purchased in bulk, since counting them would take way too long. It therefore follows that bad arrows which are very heavy will make you more of a profit than efficiently reusable ones, a fact of which she disapproves. So rather than dwell on it, she lets it be someone else's problem and supports the cause by buying the more over-priced recyclable ones on a per-arrow basis. It can't really be considered eco-friendliness, since it involves hunting down and killing the more delicious portions of the ecosystem, but for the current state of civilization it's certainly a precocious move, and she's attempting to raise awareness. It fills her with a happy irony every time she sights along her stepped-down bow and takes the shot, dropping reindeer and vesta in their tracks.

~*~

Wittmanstatten armour, made from nickel-iron pieces carved out of a meteorite but still with that peculiar texture, burnt lamp-black in places with rectangular criss-crossing patterns in the metal. The plates are enormously heavy and, unforgeable, have been carved back from the solid chunks they started out as to a more manageable thickness.

She shifts and tries the weight on for size, missing her armour of bone already, but it got torn up badly in the last fight and was leaking living marrow in a couple of places by the time she finally pried it away from bruises that hadn't even finished healing yet. She wrapped the damaged spots in old bandage and placed it in a small forest pool with clear water and sunlight, to encourage regeneration - it will sieve materials out of the water and the forest substrate, molecular osmosis powered by the light through the leaves overhead - but that's going to take a while, the bone armour being a simple organic system engineered for maximum failure tolerance. She heals faster than it does.

One of her companions unloads a simple pine-pitch torch into her free hand, reeking of resin as it burns. "Ready to go?" she asks. They tolerate Cleo in a peculiar way, based on the assumption that magic is entirely possible and likely and beyond the stopping-power of ordinary men, so they are unsurprised by her casting flames and armor that heals itself in a fish-tank, although several have tried to steal her sword and come up against the causal weirdness that results. There was one guy she was already fucking when she backed up against the hardness of her own sword pommel hidden in the adjacent bed-roll, which led to much shrugging and denial and embarrassment but in no way persuaded her to stop. Later, one of the sword-maidens took it and then tripped over a loose cobble-stone in the yard after getting distracted by a tray of fresh pastries, which caused the weapon to fall and skitter over to Cleo's very feet as she was practising at one of the surprisingly large number of non-blade-related combat arts found in this corner of the world, using a very-well made and high-end club to bludgeon a free-standing target shaped roughly like a person.

Cleo had quite pointedly slapped the club against her palm at that one, just making the point that she didn't need a pointed weapon to make one. She knew that later there'd be profound apologies and earning of mercy, and the sword-maiden was kind of cute and could perhaps kinda sorta mostly be blackmailed into joining her in a bed-box for everything other than sleep. Of her own free will, of course.... she just needed some help to be persuaded.

She smiles, and grips her torch like a club, resolving to keep an eye on the girl in battle and try to keep her alive. It would be a shame if they didn't get to celebrate surviving the battle together. "You're going to make it up to me in the way a woman does," she murmurs to herself, trying the line on for size and finding it far less weighty than the new armor. It's just the sort of phrase that will do it for this one, implications of honour and obligation with cultural overtones, yet a minor statement of acknowledged femininity as well, something easily overlooked by warriors in dealing with their sword or shield-maidens. She just knows that this will be enough to get her a kiss, and from there, well, she has all the practice in the world.

~*~

"It's nothing serious."

"Look at this! Does this look fine?" Cleo snarls.

The crossbow bolt has come downward from behind her head at shallow angle, caught under the skin of her brow ridge right above and between her eyes, skipped off the bone and then punched back out through through her flesh like some sort of strange and extreme piercing until the fletching got caught up in her hair and bought it to a halt. The steel capped pointed shaft is perfectly clean of blood and lying exactly parallel down atop the length of her muzzle, causing her to go cross-eyed as she tries involuntarily to look at it when it moves slightly as she talks.

"You just need to snick the skin neatly across there," says the girl, pointing to the top off her forehead where the descending weight of the front of the shaft has pulled the skin upwards and outwards an inch or so away from the bone, creating a neat, tight little pulled up fold. "It would be much cleaner and quicker than actually pulling out the arrow, and it'd drain better too."

"It could have hit me in the head," Cleo spells out carefully. "I do not like being hit in the head because this is something that can actually kill you. Which is why I like to wear a helmet of some kind when people are shooting at me. One that is very much like, in fact, the one you borrowed."

She sighs. Relationships with people are just so hard, in the longer term. She's good with quick flings, _great_for quick flings with everyone and even the family dog if it's well hung, but sooner or later people start to wear on her and there's too much complication and shared history.

She finds herself wishing for her Dragon, who would not steal the helmet because the arrows would be bouncing off him as he wandered about the field carefully beating up idiots. Unfortunately he is in an entirely different part of the globe right now.

What is with the people around here constantly stealing things off each other anyway? They quite literally have a fully organised Thieves Guild, with dues and regular meetings, which they run as if it was some sort of social club involving a shared and hazardous activity, like white-water kayaking or mountain-climbing, rather than the criminal undertaking it actually is. They even seem to find the randomly sexually violent and humiliating punishments for getting caught hilarious. Since when is that sort of thing entertainment?

The girl comes back with a small pair of armour repair tongs like a pair of pliers with sharpened edges, gets Cleo to sit down on the edge of one of the beds and then embraces her from behind in an oddly comforting manner. "Hold still," she suggests in gentle whisper into Cleo's ear, then slides one of the edges along the blacked ash-wood of the arrow-shaft until it slides under the raised skin, lines it up carefully and presses it down.

Snikt. The arrow falls free, and she presses the folds of skin back into place and sews them back together with a couple of neat cross-shaped stitches. It isn't really necessary at all and the wound will be gone in under a couple of hours, but Cleo takes it as a sign of love and bends around to give her a little kiss once she's done.

"Not where everyone can see us," hisses the girl quickly. "Wait until tonight and I'll make it up to you just the way you like. I'll kiss you better at both ends."

Longingly, their tongues disentangle, but Cleo is now thinking that she'll have to leave the stitches in until tomorrow at least. Oh well, no-one ever said that love was easy.