Speech | 45th of Winter, 515 AV | Thoughts
The morning had been slow. Awfully, ridiculously slow.
Most of the cargo had long since been taken onto the docks, and orders and the transfer of goods was nearing completion. The Mischief would soon be in preparation to the intake of new trade goods, and beginning to prepares its journey back to sea, and all the hard work and labour the Svefra had thus completed would be done again, in reverse order.
For whatever reason, the Svefra had thought that docking in Alvadas would cause the crew to calm. She was wrong, oh Gods she was wrong. The performers were simply so much... happier? They were active and loud, blissful, but then again, she supposed, the vast majority were ignoring the whispers of the crew, feigning ignorance of the illness of the city. She could have sworn that they were holding auditions every other day, with a new band of hopefuls clamouring themselves on board presenting whatever skills or talents they deemed to be oh so unique, so riveting and brilliant.
Not all of them ended what one would call 'well,' or even vaguely near it.
She'd seen someone run scream-crying down the stairs in full terror a couple of days prior. If only to lose even further face, the poor dear slipped on the slick stairs, and fell head over heel, hitting the bucket Naia was using to swab the desks and drenching herself in grey water. The girl had screamed again, then. Nothing intelligible, just... screaming. At Naia. For a good few chimes before she picked her sodden butt of the deck and continued her sobbing dash off of the ship.
The woman's lips curved delightfully as she further thought on what had become a ridiculously treasured memory, and she tugged on the knot that was supposed to tying to make sure that the line held no slack. The people on The Mischief weren’t awful. For all their Alvad blood, the vast majority could be described as nothing much more than eccentric. The woman had no doubt that the performers had given the woman any ill will, and this she was obviously reacting poorly to a polite decline. She still could have paid her way on board, had she not such a wild reaction. Paid her way on board and work herself until someone accepted her into their performance, but she obviously did not wish to take such an option.
Another sailor slid by her, roused her from her thoughts, and secured the other line, and the woman didn't bother to hide the fact that she was watching him as he went about his work, from the tightness of the rope, to the number of wraps and when it was fastened. Svefra or no, she didn't want to tie the incorrect knot, or let it slip and go slack and cause the item they were securing to the ship move in turbulent waters. It seemed that the man had tied what she’d heard called a clove hitch, but he’d then reinforced it with some other further tie, of which she had no idea, and it was with reluctance that she acknowledged that she would soon need to ask for aid.
Before she had the chance, however, she felt a hand tap on her shoulder, and the same sailor from before cut in and took over, hooking his thumb towards one of the superior deckhands, and it was obvious quite enough that her presence was asked for elsewhere. She didn’t make a fuss, and flashed the man as much of a polite nod and nod as she could manage, before slipping off towards the quite obviously authoritive sailor.
“You’re off duty,” The quirk to her eye brows that followed obviously called for the man to further explain, “Some one’s sick, you’re back on this evening.” That was all he wished to say, apparently, and the man was gone as soon as he had made his presence known. Naia was left to seek her own entertainment for the day, by then too active to consider sleep, and she found herself on the top decks of The Mischief, mischievous grin taking to her as she noted several sailors who were most definitely supposed to be working watching some of the famed auditions - the man, young as he was, seemed poised to play the fiddle.
