Caisidhe took a moment to glance up at the sky as she crouched on the ornate, tiled rooftop. The sun was just rising - she would have to be quick. She would have preferred to get this done earlier, but an altercation with some self-proclaimed 'vampire hunters' had taken up a precious few minutes of her busy night. Oh well, the assassin thought to herself. At least I got some sustenance. Looking down into the skylight, Caisidhe planned her attack. Mistress had sent her to acquire this relic for unknown reasons, but she was determined to do the job well. The item in question was an ancient ring with a black jewel set into it, displayed on a pedestal in the museum's exhibit on ancient Essyrni culture. It was certain to be guarded by magic of some kind, so she would have to grab it and get out as soon as possible. After listening carefully for a moment to make sure no guards were near, Caisidhe dropped nimbly and silently through the skylight and approached the ring. It was separated from idle passersby with a low cord barrier, which Caisidhe merely stepped over. As she carefully moved towards it, however, she froze. A heartbeat was approaching.
She instantly blurred across the room to hide behind a pillar in a shadowed corner. Peering out from behind it, her vampire eyes allowing her to see the room as if it were in the brightest daylight, Caisidhe saw a blond-haired man in unremarkable clothing. He was unarmed, so probably not a guard...if she killed him, he'd probably be missed. Even so, if she didn't get out of here before daylight, she'd have to hide in a broom cupboard or somesuch all day. She'd had to do that once before, and by the time she got out the Thirst was so bad that she ended up eviscerating an entire street gang. Á dhiabhail, she cursed under her breath. There was no easy way out of this...
"Those goddamned peabrained assholes! By Kia's beard, they can claim all they like, all they think they know but it doesn't change one damned thing..." Caelwyn wasn't always one to prattle on to himself, at least not always when there were others to hear him. It wasn't that he was self-conscious perse, it was simply that people often made the mistake of thinking he was talking to them. Especially when the more obvious reason was perfectly clear: that he was mad.
He walked briskly through the washed marble floors of the quiet museum. Museums were usually quiet, especially when closing down for the evening, but tonight seemed particularly silent save for the winds that rattled through the trees outside. He knew he could have very well saved the trip for the morning, but he also figured he might as well drop off his parcel now rather than waiting. It was a fantastic find. To think he uncovered a map to one of the ancient mage fortresses trapped beneath the rubble of those Darken Vei mountains.
Gods that meant... Caelwyn's thoughts paused abruptly when he thought he saw one of the pedestals alongside him move. He stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, eyes surveying the shades and light that relfected from the hanging lamps on the cieling. He scowled at the thick shadows behind pillars before slowly, quietly, and much less briskly, moving along. "Sodding pisspots..."
Caisidhe finally exhaled as the man passed her hiding place, looking back towards the ring as she heard his heartbeat move away. Stepping cautiously back to the pedestal, she watched him for a moment. His throat seemed to pulse red, drawing her eyes hungrily towards it. No, she chided herself. Not now, at least. Maybe as a treat on the way out. Returning her attention to the task at hand, Caisidhe eased closer to the ring. It was held in place by a leather strap - yes, there was no stealthy way to do this. It would have to be a hit and run. Fortunately, she was very good at running. Shrugging aside her worries about whatever magical alarm systems were in place, Caisidhe's arm shot forward with lightning speed and grabbed the ring.
The parcel flew with expert precision. Caelwyn had his own fair share of experience with rock throwing. Enough to know how aim a small object at a much larger one, or how to appear as small as possible with as minimum amount of impact as possible. In this case, the parcel was huge and the target, of relative size to it, and it went spinning into the air like boomerang, smacking at her with devastating accuracy. "Aha!" Caelwyn bellowed with gleaming eyes, his voice echoing loudly out toward the high ceilings. "I knew there was someone else here! Stay down, theif! If you know what's good for you."
Caisidhe spun round at the noise, her hand an inch away from the ring before she was distracted. As her vampire instincts kicked in, time seemed to slow. A large object flew through the air towards her at a crawl, and she calmly ducked out of the way and walked into cover. As the world returned to its normal pace with an audible hiss from the speed of her movement, she heard someone shouting. Hearing where he was without seeing, she blurred back out of hiding, sprinting towards the man who appeared frozen in place by the relative speeds she was moving at. Superior vampiric strength and speed were on her side as she darted behind him and held him in a tight headlock, her fangs mere inches away from the coursing veins of his throat.
"Tell me, chreiche," she hissed. "Tell me one reason that I shouldn't kill you here and now."
Caelwyn yelped. Well, this was awkward. And yet...he honestly didn't know what he could have expected. It wasn't everyday he found prowlers hanging around museum display areas in the middle of the night. It wasn't every day either that he found himself delivering important packages to colleagues in the middle of urban cities either. In fact, he remembered his last time in Arca being considerably unpleasant.
Of course, it could always be worse.
Caelwyn was highly off balance, leaning backwards against his assailant and he felt his old instincts kicking in. Well, as well as they could in the situation he was in. He angled his body away slightly in what little wiggle room there was in her hold and smashed his elbow into her gut and proceeded to snatch her arm and vault her weight over his shoulder and throw her onto the floor.
Landing on her feet, skidding backwards, Caisidhe reconsidered her attack plan. This man clearly had combat experience - she had been expecting some weakling scholar. Staring straight into his eyes, feeling the contours and intricacies of his psyche behind them, she spoke with magical authority. Her voice, no more than a whisper on the audible plane, echoed with arcane command through his mind.
"Bí reoite!" Freeze.
Caelwyn did freeze, his eyes widening at the figure of the woman standing in front of him. "Did you just....speak at me in my mind?" he murmured. Well, it was short-lived before he lunged at her.
As the man charged towards her, Caisidhe decided it was time to end this. Nimbly stepping to one side, she used his own momentum against him and sent him crashing to the ground. In a fraction of a second she was kneeling in the small of his back, pushing his face against the marble floor as she dug the point of her bone-carved dagger into his neck. Barely restraining herself from the beads of blood she had set free, she spoke again.
"In a few seconds, I'm going to stand up. If you move a muscle before I say so, I'll cut your spriosain throat before you can say a word. Okay?"
Frankly, Caelwyn was more terrified he'd broken some teeth when his face slammed into the marble floor than he was about a cracked skull or the blade at his throat. He felt it, surely, one couldn't just ignore something like that. He sputtered, spitting out the blood collected from a lacerated lip that he'd bit on the way down, his entire body freezing. It had little choice in the matter with her knee in his back n all. "Gah!" he moaned. "This is boyhood all over again." He wiggled uselessly underneath her weight and could barely look at her from the corner of his eye.
He raised his brows, peering at her just barely. "What is that language you speak? It's quite intriguing."
Caisidhe frowned, surprised - if not impressed - at his audacity.
"Be silent," she growled. "My native tongue, and anything else about me, is none of your foolish human business. You have two options. Either I kill you and leave, or I knock you unconscious, take everything on you - including whatever that package was - and leave. Any more insolence, and it'll be the former. Got it?"
Caelwyn rolled his eyes, clearly exasperated by all the trouble and typical ultimatums that went with roughing up. Bah, if she was going to tell him to shut up and all that followed, she could at least be original! But several key points in her dialogue intrigued him - and alarmed him all the same. He spat more blood and strained his eye as far as he could see her in the dim lighting. "Bah and what good would that do!?" he snapped. "You'd kill me just to take what I have anyway and you'd still be nothing more than a defiler of academia, of knowedge and it'd serve you no better than your wanton bloodlust. Ha! Go ahead, kill me! What makes you no better than a common animal? Nothing that I can see."
Caisidhe hissed in frustration, tiring of this. Swiftly and viciously, she brought the handle of her dagger crashing down onto the man's head, knocking him out in an instant. Standing up, she walked over to the package he had been carrying and cautiously unwrapped it. Some kind of a map, of a part of northern Serendipity...Caisidhe didn't recognise the exact area it depicted, but she saw that there was a building marked on it. It bore a sigil of a hooked, barbed falchion - the same sigil that was embossed on that ring that mistress had sent her to retrieve. Could this be part of some larger plot? She had to get back to mistress as quickly as possible, to find out what was going on. Shaking her head in confusion, she strode back towards the ring, folding the map up and tucking it in a belt-pouch.
Well, he would have been knocked out if he didn't just have one big fat headache instead. Thank the gods he'd always had an exceptionally thick skull. The blow was enough to blur his vision, watching the shape of the woman walking over to his parcel. The more he blinked the darker his vision got; his own hand weakly slipping into the pocket of his trousers and slipping out a ring. He fought to retain consciousness, as his finger slowly slipped into the ring and his body vanished from all sight.