Member
ScreenAcne
Sp00ki
ctrlsaltdel
Snowdrops
Bartimaeus
BurningCold
Stern Algorithm
Mcmolly
Apollosarcher
vietmyke
Ingrid Lucentia von Draph
Interacting with: Wormwood @Dark Cloud
The Bridge || Fishing? || Victorious?
It was rare for Ingrid to not wear her armour. After all, armour was the symbol of a knight (even if her armour felt more like a childish attempt at making a soldier less frightening; lipstick on a pig--or literally a goat on a helmet). Common belief would hold that a guard should always be on guard. However, Hearth was not a place in which such a stern outlook on one's duties mattered. She did more work repairing waterlogged and rotting planks on bridges and docks. Besides, Ingrid without her armour was just as imposing. Even if her loose-fitting undershirt and pants hid her physique with draped cotton, her height couldn't be hidden. Most conflicts could be solved by standing above and looking down on someone.
As for why: today was Market Day. That meant that Ingrid had a craving for seafood. She was always on a see food diet, but something about the these days that she craved fresh fish. Perhaps it was the fresh bread. Maybe it was the lack of seafood in the market as it didn't keep besides via obscene amounts of salt or smoke. It could have just been some strange craving that she got. Most likely it was that she spent most of Market Day watching the roads and fishing gave her something to do besides wave hello to the regular handful of visitors. Ingrid herself never thought about why. In fact, she never thought too deeply about anything.
Fishing was not a pursuit of a noble, but it was a noble pursuit. Stately matters and governance may protect one's land, but it did nothing to quell one's thrice daily hunger pangs (in Ingrid's case: eighce daily). In this regard, fishing was perhaps one of the noblest pursuits of them all. After all, proverbial wisdom often involved fishing. Probably because there was little to do while fishing besides thinking up proverbs.
Ingrid enjoyed fishing, yet she couldn't fish for shit. It always ended up the same way. Perhaps her lack of skill related to her inability to think up pithy little bits of wisdom while she fished. More likely it was her trying to muscle her way into every catch rather than use any level of finesse. If the fish in the river were 6ft behemoths of oceanic virility, that strategy would probably work. Unfortunately, the fish at the bridge usually remained snack sized. Well, Ingrid-sized snacks.
"Skeutan!" Ingrid yelled as she felt her rod slipping out of her hands, something that happened because she zonked out looking at the horizon. With a quick fumble, she found herself leaping after the rod as it descended away from her grasp and into the river. Incidentally, that is why she didn't wear armour on Market Days. After the third time she had to clean, dry, polish, and oil her armour, Dalton reminded her that she could just not wear it when she tries to fish.
With an inglorious fall, Ingrid flopped into the water. Her instinct took over as she plummeted the few feet between the bridge and waterline. Her knees tucked into her chest and her body shrunk into itself. One's body doesn't quite forget the feeling of jamming into the bottom of a riverbed, especially for someone as dense as Ingrid. Tightening into a ball made it so that her legs didn't touch the riverbed until her momentum was mostly stopped. Of course, this had the side effect of creating a large splash of water. Said splash would usually be meaningless. After all, there was usually a keen lack of people in the immediate vicinity. Unfortunately for the lizard man under the bridge, he was mere feet away from the violent knight-powered geyser of water.
In any case, it was two fish with one cannonball. Two fish were stunned and floated to the surface alongside her fishing rod. In all honesty, Ingrid should have just ditched the rod all together and started with jumping into the river. Switching to that method would mean that Ingrid would have an out of character moment of introspection, so it was unlikely that she would ever do so. Hands from the depths grabbed all three: both fish in one and the rod in the other. Everything sunk down into the refraction of the river.
A normal person would have, perhaps, intuited a way to float their way to the riverbank. Unfortunately, such an act was impossible for Ingrid. As was usual when she fell into water, Ingrid had to get out the only way she knew how: by walking along the riverbed until she climbed out on her own feet. Thankfully, the river was never quite dangerous enough to sweep someone as dense as her away.
As she rose from the riverbed mentally unfazed from the ordeal, Ingrid was in a good mood thanks to her newly acquired breakfast. Well, her post-breakfast snack. The thing that she ate that came before brunch.
