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pangolinheart · 1 year

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FFXIVWrite 2023 DAY 1 - ENVOY

It's a beautiful day in Old Sharlayan, and you are a horrible catte.

Rating: General General: Fluff/Nonsense Characters: Z'rhiki Irhi (Warrior of Light), Erenville, Fourchenault Leveilleur, Alisaie Leveilleur, Alphinaud Leveilleur, G'raha Tia, Urianger Augurelt Word Count: 1955 Content Warnings: None

Splash

Erenville lunged forward, catching his quarry gently but firmly between his two hands. The frog squirmed in this grasp, but was unable to wriggle free.

“May I ask,” Erenville started as he lowered the frog delicately into the rectangular tank that sat between him and his self-appointed new friend, “Why you wished for me to teach you how to catch frogs? Do not tell me that your time masquerading as one has instilled you with a new fascination form them?”

“Something like that- Oh, wait!” She too dove her hands into the shallows of the pond, but unlike him emerged with empty hands while an agitated frog hopped away from its would-be captor.

“Drat!” she muttered, drying her hands on her trousers. “Anyway, you did say you were an expert on frogs. And since you collect things for the Studium, I figured you must be pretty good at catching them.”

“You are not wrong,” he agreed. “Though perhaps it would have been easier to ask your magically inclined friend to conure them for you?”

She flashed him a sly grin. “Oh, I definitely couldn’t ask Y’shtola for help with this.”

Erenville hummed. “And what, if I might ask, is ‘this’? What use is it you have for these creatures?”

“I have a really boring meeting at the Forum later today.”

He narrowed his eyes slightly.

Her expression morphed into one of unconvincing innocence. “I’m just going to take them to do a little sight-seeing! I won’t let them get hurt, I promise!”

“I see.” He regarded her for a moment, wondering idly if he should really be assisting in this endeavor. He was starting to have an inkling of what she might be up to.

“I’ll take good care of them! And I’ll feed them some nice bugs and bring them back home after!”

Then again, it really wasn’t any of his business what went on at the Forum.

“You must be careful not to lose track of any – greater Sharlayan is too cold for them, and if they can’t find their way to water, their skin could dry out.”

Though still kneeling by the pond’s edge, she gave him something of a mock salute, one fuzzy ear twitching as she did so. “Yes, sir! Oh, look, there’s another one over there!”

His gaze didn’t follow the trajectory of her pointing hand, remaining fixed on her while she eyed her next quarry. “You are quite interesting for a diplomatic envoy, aren’t you? You do not remind me much of the other delegates to Sharlayan I have met.”

“I would argue I’m the perfect ambassador to Sharlayan!” She quipped without removing her eyes from the frog plopping through the reeds.

Erenville wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so instead he edged gingerly over to her and took her hands in his. “Here, you are holding your hands wrong. And you should lower your upper body, or the frog will notice your shadow before you have a chance to strike. Like this-”

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“What’s in the bag?” Alisaie nudged Rhiki with an elbow and looked pointedly down at the large and oddly square sack in her arms. She noticed the beginning of a smile on the Warrior of Light’s face before the woman caught herself.

“Oh? This?” Rhiki asked, adjusting her grip on the sack as the group settled onto some of the benches lining the corridor just outside of the Forum’s main chamber. “It’s just some books. We always have to wait ages for an audience, and since I don’t know much about Sharlayan I thought I would try to read up on it while we wait.”

“Really?” Alphinaud piped up, voice incredulous but eyes sparkling with excitement.

He’s going to be so disappointed, Alisaie couldn’t help but think. Alphinaud may have been naïve enough to believe that their friend had turned over a new, more studious leaf, but she certainly wasn’t. No, Rhiki was like her, and she was up to something.

“Oh, you brought books? A terrific idea! Might I borrow one? It would certainly help to pass the time,” G’raha Tia interjected.

“Uhhhh, you’ve probably already read all of these ones,” she heard Rhiki lie.

Was that bag… making noise?

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“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!”

Fourchenault’s bellowing voice ricocheted through the forum’s halls, echoed by numerous footsteps rushing down the hall towards him. The shouting summoned several of his colleagues, a smattering of staff, and the Scions of the Seventh dawn – all eager to find the source of the commotion. They all crowded around him, peering over, under, and around him into his office. All was quiet for a few seconds, before he saw the “Warrior of Light” double over in raucous, cackling laughter.

“Fourchenault! I didn’t know you liked frogs so much!”

His grip on the doorframe tightened until his knuckles were white. Her.

The rest of the assembled crowd broke out into murmurs (and, to his aggravation, chuckles) as they took in the sight that had greeted him upon opening his office door.

A large frog sat placidly on his desk, croaking. Somehow it seemed to be looking directly at him, its black beady eyes boring into his soul.

Another frog hopped from around the corner of the desk, while yet another leapt down from a shelf on one of the many bookcases that lined his office. One scrambled aimlessly across the paperwork and notes he had carefully laid out, and another had contented itself wallowing in the soil of his potted plant. They were everywhere.

“It’s cute that you have so many of them, but you really shouldn’t let them wander freely around your office. They might get stuck somewhere! Or escape when you open the door!” The delighted smugness in the Warrior of Light’s voice made him seethe.

“These are not my frogs, as I suspect you well know,” He managed through gritted teeth.

This was her doing. He knew it. It had all been her doing. He almost hadn’t noticed when it started – small, inconsequential things not being where he had left them, or an inkwell he could have sworn he had just refilled being empty upon his return to his office. He thought the weight of his duty was simply taxing him, making him forgetful. But then there had been his wobbly desk chair, which he had spent more than an hour shifting about in trying to get comfortable in before flipping it over in frustration to see that someone had glued a small, flat stone to the bottom of one of the legs. That had clearly been someone else’s doing.

Then there had been the day he had continuously bumped into his office furniture and décor. He was not a clumsy man, and he had spent half a day ruminating on his sudden lack of coordination before noticing the indentation of a table leg in one of the area rugs and realizing that every bit of furniture in his office had been moved an ilm and a half to the right. A week or so after that he had returned to his office to find that the contents of all of his desk drawers had been rotated twice counterclockwise.

He didn’t know why she was doing it. Worse, he didn’t know how – he always locked his door behind him when he left his office. But he knew she was doing it, somehow.

And this? This was a clear escalation.

“Oh, you mean they’re not meant to be in here?” The Warrior asked in a saccharine voice.

“Obviously not.”

“Oh! Well, it’s your lucky day, then!” she exclaimed gleefully. “It just so happens I’m excellent at catching frogs! And, coincidentally, a friend of mine asked me to pick up some amphibian cages they had ordered, and I was planning to stop by after we finished our business here, so I have them handy! The Twelve must be looking out for you!”

Fourchenault was certain the Twelve had nothing to do with this.

The miqo’te slipped under his arm and into his office before he could protest, and began removing a series of small, single-occupancy terrariums, like those gleaners used to transport specimens, from her bag and onto the stone floor of his office. His irritation flared.

“You will not get away with this! It’s obvious to everyone here that you are the one who released these creatures into my office! This is not behavior befitting of an emissary of the Students of Baldesion. I swear I will have you-“

“What, you think I did this?” The woman asked indignantly. She gingerly scooped the first frog from his potted fern.

He took a deep breath, hoping to control the tone and cadence of his speech. He wouldn’t be dragged down to her level. He would compose himself in a manner befitting that of a celebrated orator. “It’s the only rational conclusion I can come to, based on the evidence. Why else would you have brought so many frog tanks into the Forum.”

“I told you.” She carefully placed the first frog within its containment vessel and affixed the lid. “I was delivering them to a friend! Besides, these are clearly salamander tanks, not frog tanks. Obviously you didn’t study herpetology in the academy.”

“It hardly matters what variety of amphibian they were intended for!” He barked. “And if what you say is true, I suppose you wouldn’t mind me sending an assistant to accompany you to deliver them to your friend.”

The Warrior of Light shrugged. “You can if you want. I am going to have to take a detour to Labyrinthos to rehome these poor frogs after I’m done rescuing them from the prison you’ve been keeping them in, though. Oh, I suppose after that I should probably take the tanks home to wash out before I drop them off…”

He couldn’t believe this was happening. He opened his mouth to retort but she cut him off.

“Besides, I couldn’t possibly have set a bunch of frogs loose in your office. I was waiting with everyone else to be granted an audience with the Forum. You can ask the other Students of Baldesion if you like.”

“It’s true!” He heard his daughter’s voice chime in, and he looked over his shoulder to see her standing with her hands on her hips. “Rhiki was with us the entire time. We would have noticed if she had disappeared long enough to set a load of frogs free in your office. It couldn’t have been her!”

He could feel his blood pressure rising. Alisaie had always been the more… difficult of his two children. He loved her dearly, despite what people might believe of him, but she could certainly be strong-willed when it pleased her. He had half a mind to reprimand her for lying on behalf of her… playmate, when one of his father’s favorite students = Urianger, was it? - spoke up.

“My lady speaketh naught but the truth, Lord Fourchenault,” The man, dressed in the robes of an Astrologian, said calmly. “I can attest that Z’rhiki ventured not beyond the limits of mine sight for the entirety of our repose.”

The Warrior of Light beamed. “See? What did I tell you? I’m sure any of the others would say the same! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have frogs to collect. There’s no need to thank me – I’m doing it for their sake, not yours.”

By this point he could feel a pounding headache coming on. Perhaps this was the gods’ doing. It was beginning to feel like this woman was an envoy sent not by the Eorzean Alliance to beg for Sharlayan’s aid in their futile war, but by the Twelve, specifically to punish him.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #auggie writes #rhiki tag #erenville #alisaie #fourchenault #fourchenault leveilleur #this is a few hours late because I was so busy yesterday #and i had trouble coming up with an idea #but at least there's no deadline this week #Hopefully I'll do shorter blurbs in the future #it's hard for me to post things like this knowing that they haven't been sufficiently edited #but I suppose that's the whole point #anyway everything is under the cut so as not to spam people's dash

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