- Seyda Neen Harbor, Dawn
On the docks of Seyda Neen, in the swampy yellow sunlight, the Imperial soldier's wide smile looked nauseating. He was standing there in a human can of sparkling silver, with a scroll and board in hand, scrawling down the details of Baltis' transfer that he, the Imperial Errant, was apparently unable to recall himself. Baltis found his good humor return, if only for a brief moment, as he informed the Errant that he was a "Grey Bosmer" who had been transferred from an Imperial prison on Summerset Isle. Baltis laughed to himself as he watched the smiley soldier's beaming grin falter slightly, and his quill scratch out the words Dark Elf and, underneath that, in smaller script, t.c. Blacklight, Morrowind.
"Thank you," he said, still with an almost painful-looking smile on his face, "I'm sure you'll fit right in."
Baltis wondered whether it had been an attempt at small talk.
As he followed the Errant's jaunty, proud walk, his eyes caught a brief movement to his right. He did a double take as he saw a huge, six-legged insect, tall as a two-story building, loitering alongside a rugged cliff face. Its long, spindly legs lazily prodded the surface of the water which, in relation to the creature's amazing height, appeared very shallow. Such a large body on such thin legs appeared to be almost physically impossible, and Baltis almost wasn't sure to believe his eyes. He knew it must be a silt strider, like the stories of the Vvardenfell Ashlands described. He gazed at it, stumbling sharply as he reached the angular, bleach-white marble stairs leading to the Census and Excise Office. The proudly striding Imperial Errant didn't notice, and turned around just in time to see Baltis standing upright again.
The Errant had reached the door, and knocked twice with his gloved fist. The quill, resting precariously against the scroll and board that was tucked under his arm, jostled and fell, wafting out and down to the white marble doorsill.
"Come now, don't leave them waiting," the Errant said briskly, bending down nonchalantly to pick up his missing quill pen.
Baltis finished clambering up the treacherous stairs, the leather soles of his sandals clacking on each step, and approached the doorway. It was heavy looking, with lots of paneled inlays, the whole thing stained a dark, bold shade of brown. It stood out against the bleached façade of the Imperial structure in a very intimidating fashion. The whole building could have even passed for a fancy mausoleum, were it not for the elegant square windows – one on either side of the door. The view inside was marred by pale yellow curtains.
The Errant tapped his booted foot once, still maintaining a pleasant face, and Baltis obliged and lifted the wrought-iron latch of the door, and stepped inside.
The room in front of him was a perfect balance of shades – not too dark but not too light. Dark wooden walls were interrupted by crisp beige tapestries, displaying the stylized Imperial Dragon in bright red. The carpet was thin and tightly-woven, colored a pale off-white color. Baltis felt extremely self-conscious as he stepped across the floor – he was sure that he was tracking in a terrible quantity of dirt and muck from the grimy dock outside, but he daren't look back to his tracks. The carpet looked so clean, though, that he was sure it was bleached every day. The fireplace crackling in the corner made the room just a tad too warm for his taste in the already humid swamp climate, and lit the space in a warm yellow.
He crossed the floor nervously, approaching an elderly and utterly-bored looking man in a bureaucratic brown robe, holding a small, leather-bound book and lounging in an expensive armchair. The man flitted is eyes up and sighed, draping a thin red ribbon down over his page and clapping the book shut.
"Here you are," the man said dryly, "at last." He shifted in his chair, but didn't stand up. He tucked his book between the seat cushion at his hip.
The Knight Errant ducked around Baltis and set his scroll and board on the table next to the bored looking man, where a clerk was waiting ready with quill in hand. As the board clacked onto the desktop Baltis watched the young man scan over it with his eyes and quill, and nod in approval. He unspooled the scroll down over the length of the board, and signed at the bottom, right above where he locked the roll in place, and indicated for the Errant to do the same. He stepped over and withdrew his quill and inked his scrawling signature with a flourish.
The bored agent in the brown robe stroked his silver beard, and nodded as the Knight Errant ducked back out onto the dock and closed the door behind him.
"I just need a few more pieces of information before I send you on through," he said, "We'll try to do this as quickly as possible." He itched the outside of his capillary-laced nostril with one slender pointer finger, and slid a bundle of papers towards himself across the nearby desktop.
"First…" he started, and then made a face and shuffled through the stack of papers. The young clerk looked up from his scroll and gestured for Baltis to take a seat. Baltis obliged gladly, but reluctantly, and was still trying to take up as little space as possible as he sat on the cushioned wooden armchair. He felt uncomfortable in a room of such refined Imperial fashion, himself being a member of the Dunmer Great House of Redoran.
The thought occurred to him then, that he very well might have already been expelled from House Redoran for his crime. He frowned. That was no good.
"First," the agent continued, having found his proper page, "I need an occupation to write down. Class, trade, job – whatever you want."
"Well I've been in jail for two months," Baltis sighed, "I don't think I have a job anymore."
The agent nodded, as if he had heard this response before.
"Just tell me what you did before you were arrested."
"I was a clockmaker's apprentice, to Wense E'Goul in the city of-"
"That's good, thank you," the agent interrupted, waving for the clerk to jot it down. The clerk had, however, already finished, and was waiting with his quill ready again. The agent didn't notice, and instead was raptured with his sheaf of papers, trailing with his finger down the page to the next order of business.
"Date of birth?" he asked.
"Eighth of Evening Star."
"Late in the year," the agent remarked to himself.
Baltis considered commenting – he wasn't quite sure what, but just something to break the awkwardness in the room as the clerk scribbled down his response – but he figured he would probably be interrupted again by the Census and Excice agent. So he stayed quiet. If anything, Baltis believed himself to have one good, solid character trait – the ability to know when to stop talking.
"That would make your birthsign…" the agent wafted his hand in the air as if looking for the scent of the answer he needed, "Remind me, I'm hazy on these things."
Baltis made a face, and wondered why it mattered.
"I have no idea. I think my sister told me, at one point, she was always really interested in-"
"Gancielle, could you go fetch that book from the shelf, out in the common area," the agent interrupted again, "The big one with the red cover."
Baltis sighed, and then was startled as a voice responded from the corner behind him. He spun in his chair to see a man in legion armor stand from his own seat with a creak, and walk through the heavy door into the next room. The man's face was chiseled and gallant, and his hair was slicked back in a classic Imperial style, and he was quite large, which made Baltis even more incredulous that he had failed to notice the soldier when he first entered the room.
After a short moment, in which the agent longingly eyed the small book tucked into the cushion by his hip, the large soldier named Gancielle returned, clutching a large tome under his arm. He handed it deliberately to the agent, who took it and nodded. The soldier returned to his corner and sat down, and his chair groaned.
"All right, let's see," the agent said, hastily flipping open the book as the binding crackled and thumbing through the pages, which were filled with small text and sketched drawings of star constellations, until he found the one he was looking for. "The Thief." He said it curtly, and snapped the book shut, shuffling it onto the nearby desktop. "That would explain your predicament," he said, but Baltis knew that he was still just talking to himself.
The young clerk looked up from his scroll expectantly, "Do you want me to add a new line for the," the clerk paused and glanced down, "um, birthsign? Or just add it in parentheses next to the date of birth?"
"New line."
"Right." He scratched out more text with his quill pen.
"I'm just going to group the last few together, to save time. I need your place of birth, religious identity," he paused for a moment, "since you're being released from prison, I'll need your reason for arrest – formality, of course, you've already been punished, not like they can punish you again. And then finally, your old census number, for documentation."
Baltis could only remember the last question – the census number – and while he remembered the question, he did not remember the number.
"Well I'm not sure what my census number is-"
"Start at the first one, if you would," the agent said quickly.
"What was the first one?"
A sigh. "Place of birth."
"Not really sure. I guess somewhere in Cyrodiil, around Bravil way, I've been told."
Baltis wondered if the agent would be curious, as to why he was unsure about his own birthplace. Unfortunately, the wasn't curious in the slightest, and barely broke stride in his questioning.
"All right, Bravil it is. The next question was your religion, if you recall."
"Can't say I really have one."
The agent turned to his clerk and muttered, "Just write down the default," and Baltis peeked and saw him scrawl the words The Nine Divines on the scroll. Bureaucracy, he sighed. What filch.
"We'll just write down nonaffiliated," he said quickly, with a weird smile. He scanned his papers again. "Reason for arrest?"
"Well," Baltis hesitated, "I suppose it would technically be murder."
The agent paused for a moment, not looking up from his papers, but pursing his lips slightly. He obviously had not been expecting that answer. Baltis heard a lull in the clerk's quill scratching, and then the agent blinked and he heard it resume its scrawling noise again.
"Right," the agent muttered. "And you don't remember the census number, so we can just find that out from the offices in Ebonheart, that won't be an issue. Gancielle," he called, "would you take him to bunking for now?"
Baltis felt uneasy – that had sounded like an ominous statement. Bunking.
The large soldier stood from his chair once again, its groan sounding extremely irritated at this point under his constant getting-up and sitting-down, and gestured for Baltis to follow. He did, reluctantly. He felt the grey-haired agent's gaze burning into his back as he left the room, up until Gancielle pulled the door shut loudly. Then there was muttering from behind the heavy wood, from under the doorframe. Baltis sarcastically wondered who they were talking about.
Gancielle led him down a long hallway, past a common room containing several people, all sitting at a long table. They glanced over as the two walked past.
"You're going to be spending the night in the bunks," Gancielle said. His voice was dry, and much more rugged than his trim appearance would suggest. "Just some silly regulation, because of all this fuss about the Blight. I think they really only need to be quarantining people leaving Vvardenfell, but they check the citizens coming back in as well. As if there was some other disease we need to be worried about here." He let out a dry laugh.
Baltis was only vaguely clear on what the soldier was talking about, so he just nodded and said "hm, yeah" and figured that was enough. It was. Oh, small talk. What a fine art.
They descended a long staircase, and arrived at a heavy door at the bottom, which Gancielle unlocked with a key. Lifting the latch, he pulled the door open to reveal a large corridor, with doors on either side, and what looked like a storage alcove at the far end of the hall, full with crates and barrels, and two burly beer kegs. Gancielle proceeded inside, and stopped at the first door on the right, and unlocked that with the same key.
"Here you are," he muttered, and pulled open the door. Baltis, to say the least, was not prepared for what he saw inside. Made apparent by the look on Gancielle's face, neither was he.
A/N: A brief note - Review.
Socucius Ergalla is kind of a jerk, isn't he? He always did seem like he'd be a jerk, you know.