[center][h3][color=C0392B]Rudolf Sagramore[/color][/h3][/center]

The assignments didn't shock him. He was damned sneaky in his own right, and had plenty of tracking experience— but more than once had proven the odds stacked against him in the endeavor in recent memory— be it Izayoi feeling his eyes on her when he'd tailed her to Kurogane's Smithy, despite his best impression of how Esben moved (which he had since attempted to continue refining, because failing bugged him), or just days ago, when the world itself had seen fit to conspire against him when he moved in a much more familiar element than city streets, among crowds. Even in his best condition, trees were all but falling on his head at this point. The vaunted skills of Osprey's shinobi were always a better pick, even before the black cloud that hung around him— one that likely would have given him away to any of the targets no matter how well he hid. 

They'd just smell the twisted aether.

[color=c0392b]"Mm. That makes sense to me. Galahad, once we're inside we should beeline for where we tooled those deserters— a whole fight in there didn't really draw any attention that I remember. Plus, it'd have to be fairly close to where they themselves were lying their heads— probably somewhere empty we can set up without too much issue."[/color] 

Another sound of tearing parchment covered the silent interplay between their two Skaeller representatives, and as the discussion broke down from group to between individual cells, one withering glare being endured surely lead to two[sup]1[/sup], as the young swordsman shifted to face the newcomer's direction. He didn't meet her gaze with his own, with good reason— the dark stick in his grasp was moving across the fiber, beginning with a steady arc that became an orb, then casting carefully considered lines atop it— construction principles, each as thoroughly beaten into his muscles as the arcs, whirls, and lines of his swordplay[sup]2[/sup]. His brow furrowed, conjuring memories to take the place of life reference, which he always preferred— it was easier to capture the intangibles of emotion, expression, gesture when you [i]saw[/i] them.

Granted, the last was irrelevant for this first page. But to that end, the impressions he pulled forth were not of their enemy, spitting bile at whatever devil she believed Cid to be, but of the kindly mentor he'd sought at camp— regardless of how he or the party now saw her after they'd cast themselves on either side of that line in the sand... that would be the person Isolde would show her flock. No reason to think it would even be ingenuine in Brightlam and for the people of her homeland, but at the very least, she would need to keep playing that role so long as she held it.

As he let the charcoal glide along, he addressed the viera in a clipped tone, not [i]hostile[/i] but pointedly all business. In his experience, the best thing you could do when met with someone like her was meet them at their level. Friendliness would have to wait for the day his accent didn't knot her brow from the jump. 

[color=c0392b]"I'll have your references done for you in a couple hours— this'll be a headshot at 3/4ths, then I'll map out another one for full body. Won't be comprehensive, but I have the silhouette and most of the louder details of her robes and frame down fairly well."[/color]

A momentary pause, as he raised the charcoal stick to his temple, mulling something over. He liked how a lot of his hatching turned out when conveying value and dimension, but when it came to identifiers... monochrome was something to work around.

[color=c0392b]"Given the medium, I'll leave notes as well, for gaps in what I can portray. Hair color, eye color, gait, so on. If there's any part of your process that needs that kind of specific detail covered, please let me know now. I wanna knock this out while the idea's fresh."[/color]

[hr]

Blightbeasts. Bears and wolves, mostly, but he noticed the odd gorilla in the mix— warped and monstruous as they all were, a tier above most wildlife even at their weakest, he was surprised at just how numb he had become to their howls over the past seven months. The first few days of their spread into Edren's borders had been nightmarish for everyone, even the Sagramori who had cut their teeth taking down their noncorrupted counterparts. A coward like him had only escaped the scorn of desertion by being scared too stiff to run in the first place— then forced by fear of death to defend himself.

And then, as some of the most storied exporters of hirable muscle in the country, those days rolled into weeks, into months, and then into nearly half a year, constantly on call to try and fight an eternal war on these invasive pests that didn't even have the grace to be good eating, for all the fury in their flesh and blood. By the time he had joined the Kirins, the protests that his village were more than monster hunters seemed to only be for his own sake— even he had pitched one of his strengths as being an old hand at dealing with the Blightbeasts up close and personal.

So. Three days on the trot, slowly stripping away the distance between them and Brightlam, mile by brush-chopping, sweat-drenched, and hard-fought mile. The roll of thunder and crack of lightning had called them here, as though Himstus's war drums— and who was at the center of it but mighty Ramuh, Dhinas's chosen... and Cid himself? Man, they had to stop meeting like this. Would that tiny church be the only time a fight wasn't hot on their heels when they ran into this guy?[sup]3[/sup]

Rudolf breathed deep, and cleared his mind of the idle chatter. The heat was sticking to them even worse as they trudged south, and when they were caught in the denser jungles it felt like each broad emerald leaf overhead was the roof of a sauna. Smoothed the brain over if you let it, as did mindless traveling. Maybe it was a lucky thing that they had a horde of these malcontents to fight— the rushing blood would resharpen the mind, and with it being a favor for Cid and another eidolon, maybe they could get a little more in the way of answers once it was through— or at least perspective.

[color=c0392b]"Nothing crazy. Not for us. Regular blightbeasts, just a lot."[/color] he reported with a breath, fishing his materia from its twice as roomy pouch before drawing his twinned Wings in close. Was he still nervous? Of course. He always would be, really, were the monsters real, imagined, or made more vicious than they were ever supposed to be. But, if they had been a familiar foe [i]before[/i] the quest, by now...

[color=c0392b]"I'll set the table, if nobody minds."[/color]

... He barely needed to work up the nerve, especially since he wasn't staring down the business end of the eidolon in the mix. Ridiculous sentence. Funny how life worked.

The materia flooded with will, and in a surge of purple energy he was gone, springing forth into a mighty leap that carried him, blades whirling end over end, into the midst of the clearing. The world spun around him, and he spent that moment of flight relishing the cooling touch of wind that velocity granted, a reprieve after the long hike— before the whiff of storm's passage on the air told him his arc was about to terminate, as he was passing close to Ramuh. The tightly held swords swung out into a spinning, whirling slash at the very end of the journey—

And he crashed into the Blightbeasts' midst, the impact knocking a good chunk of them off balance, or even off their feet as the tightly commanded Gravity was cut loose.

[hr][hr]
[list]
[*][sub]1. Blatant assumption on his part. He really does live like everyone he can't see gives him the stinkeye unless they beat him in the head with a hammer the notion that they're alright. As an aside, I regularly feel like a hungry man being slipped a juicy, paranoid steak despite being more or less disembodied. It's great.[/sub]
[*][sub]2. I know it's generally accepted between us to not be my place beyond serving as eyes in the back of the head during a brawl, but I enjoy having opinions on everything under the sun. If he really wanted to cart out this metaphoric comparison, he'd be served well to be smart about taking it further than just shapes. If he was as [i]relaxed[/i] behind a sword as he was behind a piece of parchment, he'd be a lot more like what he's wanted this whole time— I guess that's why they say the pen is mightier.[/sub]
[*][sub]3. Yes.[/sub]
[/list]