Interlude con Roscoe

Roscoe sat in his favorite seat, at his favorite orcish diner. At his side sat a small bowl of broth, extra pungent, made just for him by Qapla, the cook.

He had been thinking about the question Monti had asked them at the end of their last mission - why did they want to be adventurers? He had a small pad of paper in front of him, and had written it large across the top. So far, his list looked like this:

WHY I AM AN ADVENTURER

- I AM GOOD AT IT
- ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE ADVENTURERS
- I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO?

So far, he didn't think it was the best list. He sighed heavily, resting his head in one hand, and tapped his pencil idly against the table. Looking at his list, he felt like he had when he had first come to Highmark. Everything was confusing, there were people everywhere, and he had no idea what he should do. As he stood on the street, openly gaping, with only a walking stick and a small bag of books to his name, a gnome deckhand carrying a crate had bumped into him and shouted 'Oy, ironface! Go back ter ya damn guild and get outta tha road!'.

It had seemed like as good an idea as any, even if he'd happened upon the Union first.

Roscoe frowned back at his list. Maybe he was going about it in the wrong way? He flipped to the next page, and wrote:

LIFE GOALS
- PERFECT PIE CRUST
- HAVE A FAMILY
- READ HIGHMARK LIBRARY
- HELP PEOPLE
- FOUND CITY
- PUPPY?
- MEET IOUN
- VISIT AKHAS
- LEARN TO RIDE BICYCLE

Tilting his head as if it would knock his sense back into balance, he circled PUPPY, put a gold coin on the counter for Qapla, and started walking back to his new apartment, smiling the whole way.

Vedran was still kicking himself for having declined the last mission. he hadn't felt really ready to go back, but listening to the stories at dinner the other night, he realized that, of course, his father was right - he was clinging to responsibilities that really weren't his and missing out on great opportunities in the meanwhile. He could almost feel the disapproving look boring into his skull, even though he hadn't actually *seen* his father in weeks.

On the upside, the side classes in Warlord he'd been taking seemed to be going well, so at least his time hadn't been completely wasted. And he;d been thinking about other ways he'd been under-using himself in a fight... All in all, now, after that last kick in the pants, he really was feeling ready to get back out and face the world. He'd planned to stop in at the guild to chat with Monti, about where he thought things were all going, and also see if she had scheduled the rest of the level four tests.

He'd taken a carriage down to Undertow, but had developed the habit of walking in the subdivision proper. After the disaster, it had been simply practical ntil the streets were cleaned. But he enjoyed it, and if there was an echo of his father's voice saying that it was good to *be* seen, he honestly enjoyed seeing how things were taking shape again, knowing that he'd had some part in that, and having the chance to smile and say hello to the numerous contacts he'd made.

Today he was extra lucky, it seemed, as he rounded the corner to see Roscoe coming down the street towards him, looking pensive. He waved at the war-forged (or forgeborn, he sort of suspected), smiling earnestly.

"Good afternoon, Roscoe! Out to enjoy the winter air?"

Roscoe looked up, and smiled. "Oh hey, Vedran! How've you been? I was just at Qapla's, have you eaten yet?"

For someone who hadn't been designed with much in the way of facial features and articulation, Roscoe was one of the more expressive warforged he'd met - it was something in the eye, maybe. "Things are looking up, I think! And yes, I had lunch before I left. I was just going to wander off to the guild - where are you headed?"

"Weeeeeellllll, I was going to head home to work on an idea I'd had - I'm thinking of making a puppy - but it might need some more time percolating before it's really ready to come down on paper. What are you up to?"

"Oh I just wanted to talk to Monti about a few things.... So you want to *make* a puppy? Why a puppy?"

"Well, okay, so I was thinking about adopting an orphan, but then everybody got all worried about it, because they weren't sure if I could take care of something that important, who's also so different from me, I mean, with needing to eat and sleep and breathe and all that stuff. So then somebody suggested I get a pet first, I forget who, and I thought man! A puppy! That would be awesome!"

Roscoe began walking quickly in his excitement, flipping pages around in his notebook that were covered in glyphs and graphs, blueprints of knee-joints and ear floppines calculations, ratios of eye size to tail size to internal gyroscopic regulators, and a small list of cross-out, circled, and annotated names.

"See, what I want to do, what I really want to do, is--" he stopped short, peering down the street to make sure they were alone, and lowered his voice. "--I want to make another warforged someday. Someone like me, and we can be a family. I know I'm not supposed to, but I just get so lonely sometimes, and I know that my friends aren't going to live forever..." He shook his head, to clear it. "Anyway, a puppy would be the perfect opportunity to practice my crafting skills! He'll have all the parts that a real person would have, only in dog shapes! He won't have a soul, of course, since I don't have a soulforge, but he'll have an animating spirit, and his own personality, and he'll even be able to help us out in combat! Won't that be awesome?"

He couldn't help but grin at Roscoe's enthusiasm, and the brief glances he had of the rapidly shuffled noted. Ear-floppiness? Perfect, and perfectly Roscoe. Still, there was an undercurrent to something more... concerning, somehow, though Vedran couldn't quite put his finger on it.

"Its brilliant! Great practice, I'm sure..." Though not for taking care of anything flesh and blood, and not for negotiating the intimacies of personal relationships, or family. He considered for a moment before adding, "Roscoe, are you friends with any of the other Warforged in town?"

Roscoe blinked in confusion. "Other warforged? No, not really. They tend to hang out with each other, and talk about their time in the war, and stuff. I never did any of that, so I don't really have anything to add. I mean, there are a few that I see walking around at night, like when I'm going to the library, 'cause a lot of them have night security jobs and stuff, but they don't really talk to me. One time one of them called me 'pipsqueak', and now they all kinda call me 'squeaky' -- well, the ones not in the union, I mean. And sometimes 'squeakborn'? I don't really get that one, but I don't think it's supposed to be nice."

He frowned. One of the things that Vedran would probably not freely admit was that one of the things that appealed about being trained as a bard was the opportunity to construct truly cutting insults. It was turnaround on all the nasty things he'd been called himself, to his face, or behind his back, just by virtue of being born. One of the secrets of insults is that didn't even have to mean anything, or make sense at all, to do their job. On reflection, he shouldn't be surprised that Roscoe had experienced the same kind of treatment - he was patently unlike most of the others of his kind that Vedran had met. It explained a lot.

"No, it doesn't." The bard sighed. "Sorry to bring it up, I just thought it might be another option for some longer-term companionship."

Roscoe smiled warmly at Vedran -- or rather, pointed his constant smile his friend's direction. "I understand, I think. I mean, aside from our group, everybody seems to hang out with people like them, you know? Elves with elves, goblins with goblins, that kind of thing. I like our group, though, everybody's so nice! Or, well, not always nice, like Tzesira isn't always nice, but mostly she's just kinda prickly but not a bad person, you know?"

He sighed again, falling back into some of his earlier melancholy. "I just want somebody that I can show things to, and teach things, and not have to start over every sixty years or so, you know?"

"I know - and I think that to some extent that why so many people do hang out with their own. But I also understand that it doesn't always work out. The thing about family is that it doesn't always work out how you want it to either, Roscoe."

He hesitated, not wanting to leave off on too negative a note, then smiled. "Friends may come and go - for all kinds of reasons - but you choose each other, and that's a pretty solid base. You're always gong to be meeting new people, regardless, and its people you can learn *from* too, right?"

Roscoe nodded enthusiastically. "Oh, of course, of course! I mean, I learn new things from my friends all the time! Not like when I was with my dad, of course, I mean, nobody sits me down and tells me hey, go study this set of books, and then discusses different views on the origins of the Change, or how to stabilize the quantum aether for a subharmonic shield, or things like that. Mostly I go to the library for things like that, or write in my journal. I was just about to go over these schematics in my lab, though, if you'd like to join me?"

Maybe it was just his bardic training, but hearing Roscoe talk about his dad always made him itch to hear more about the man - and the warforged himself. On the other hand, he didn't want to pry, and suspected Roscoe had good reason for keeping certain details private. But he was glad his friend's spirits didn't seem too dampened, and grinned.

"Well - your schematics are probably going to go mostly over my head, but I'd be curious to see your set up! The magic, at least, I can follow, but whenever Cael starts getting in to the details of the artificer's trade, he loses me. I expect it would be the same."

"You know, I'd be interested in seeing some of his work - I don't really get much time to spend with other artificers, but I do enjoy it."

The walk to his apartment wasn't far, and Roscoe led Vedran up the stairs to a small set of rooms in a tenement-like building. The living room was walled entirely with bookshelves, with a sizable writing-desk dividing the room. Near the fireplace, opposite the desk, was two small chairs surrounding a chess board, with a game still in progress. Behind the desk, a generous window seat was piled with knit and crocheted blankets of clashing colors, including one still in progress in a rainbow of bright teals and muddy brown-purples. An open archway to the left showed a kitchen converted to the storage of various chemicals, and a doorway farther back revealed his bedroom-turned-laboratory.

"Well," said Roscoe, gesturing at his humble home, "Welcome in!"

"I'm sure he'd love it too - you'd just need to make sure he remembered to eat occasionally. He gets really wrapped up in things, and I'm sure the pair of you could keep busy for days."

He looked around the place - the chessboard brought up those questions about his father again, but other than a cursory glance to see which colour was winning, he left it alone, smiling instead at the handicrafts and skimming the spines of the books.

"Thanks, Roscoe - it's very cozy! Have you been collecting these for a while?" He paused in front of a set of volumes he recognized from his father's collections on fey magic and the nature of the wilderness, running a finger lightly along the spine.

"Well, that shelf is mostly stuff I brought over from my father's tower when I came to Highmark, and the one over there is stuff I couldn't fit in the bag, so I just got a bunch of blank books and copied them over, and this bunch of shelves are mostly what I've written since joining the guild, and that one over there is all full of my journals. Then in the lab, of course, I've got my work books." He pointed his thumb at the open door. "Wanna see?"

His father again - it was getting really hard *not* to pry! He thought he'd better remove the temptation.

"Sure!" He replied grinning, and made to follow the warforged before a book - no a *shelf* of books arrested his attention. This time he was really unable to stop himself from pulling one off the shelf. It was also a volume he'd seen before, but not for years, and rather than being found in his father's study, it was something he'd desperately kept hidden from either parent.

"...Roscoe, why do you have a copy of Wild Elven Wenches?"

Roscoe looked up innocently. "Well, after what Dheni told me about humanoid mating, I realized I had really had it wrong, so I figured I'd pick up a couple anatomy books. They've really been quite enlightening!"

Vedran tilted his head, as if looking at his friend from the altered perspective might somehow cause any of that to make sense. It didn't help. He looked at the book, flipped open to a memorable page of a raven-haired Elven "druidesss" surrounded by suggestive vines, perched on a weathered stone, her knees spread invitingly.... Oh his 14-year-old self had loved this book... His twenty-six-year-old self didn't half mind it either, truth be told.

"Anatomy..." He couldn't help but laugh. "Yeah, Roscoe, this is pornography."

Roscoe cocked his head. "Ponna-what now?"

"Oh... Dehni...." Vedran couldn't stop laughing for a moment, "You jerk!"

He recovered himself, reverently placing the book back on the shelf, though reviewing some of the other titles nearly had him lose it again. Now how to explain it?

"Its... Well. I guess there is definitely some anatomy on display there, but that's not... No it is the point. But its not really meant as a guide. I mean. Its more like.... Fantasy."

Roscoe frowned, and picked the book back up. "So humanoid women don't look like that under their clothes? Because I'm pretty sure Kallista has these same kinda bulges on her chest, one time she was coming out of Bren's cabin in a robe and they were kinda... out, mostly. Or do you mean the lower bits?"

He smirked - though he mostly tried *not* to spend time thinking about Kallista's tits (and what Brenn might be doing with them), he couldn't deny that her shapely figure would have fit in well with the other models. But his experiences was that women had a lot wider variety than you might expect to see in the art prints, which were often stylized. But how to explain it to Roscoe? or was there really much point?

"Well... No, they do. I mean.... Its *basically* correct. But I'm sure must have noticed, that humanoids have a much wider range of shapes than you see in these books, right? These books are more about showing what men...well, a lot of men, and some women, would find attractive than showing what they really look like. Think of it more like... a cartoon, maybe. Things are exaggerated."

Roscoe pondered this information. "So, this is more like an art book, then. Do they make books on human anatomy, for nonhumans to study? Basically, I mean, like schematics, but for meat-based people." Humming softly to himself, he looked around his bookshelves. "Art, art, art... Ah! There we go, got some space next to gnomish impressionism."