DRAGONIA: Age of War

XIV-Competitive Nature

The second event occurred five days later, on the farm in Rijheim. It seemed quite insignificant at the time, but Fred was walking with a sweet girl from the town on one of the fields, along rows of Hirgon plums, a juicy, purple-colored grape-like berry that grew on vines. They could grow to the size of a large man's fist, but these had some time to go before they'd be that large.

The girl, whose name would be forgotten to the texts of history, had been recommended to Fred as a potential love interest by Huggin, who, as usual, had also gone out of his way to set up a date for them. Huggin took it as his personal mission to make sure Fred found love, one day, but he never could find a girl Fred found particularly interesting.

For example, this girl seemed to have no respect for the delicate process growing Hirgon plums could be, plucking one off a vine occasionally and eating it, only to make a sour face at the unready flavor. When she confessed her love to him, Fred had to tell her that he didn't feel the same way, and she stormed off in tears, going passed Gregg, who was actually trying to get some work done in the field.

Fred continued walking along, feeling a little guilty about his bluntness with the girl. As was his custom, he took out a knife and scratched a meaningless symbol on one of the plums, this time drawing a circle with three small dots in it. He carved a mark into one of the crops every time Huggin set him up with a failure, not for any particular reason, but just to mark the occasion. Juice oozed from the scratches; this would be a valuable harvest.

________

Uncle Dyrk was making his monthly visit to the cluttered city, trying to find valuable items he could get for the children living under his rooftop for dirt-cheap. It was Roxanne's turn to accompany him, and she'd made sure to wear her beloved corset, partially to help her father seal the best deals when they were bartering together, partially to tease the boys when she was alone.

She'd made a game for herself that she often enough tested on Fred where the redder she could get a boy's cheeks to be, the more fun she was having. After thinking she'd helped her father score an expensive rock for no more than three potatoes and a carrot (where in fact, the shopkeeper owed Dyrk), she ran along to Crukheim's marketplace, which was really the only thing in the city as organized as Rijheim's. Her father had given her a coin purse filled with half a dozen silvers and nine coppers to spend on herself as she pleased, and she knew that Rijheim girls were getting a just adorable article of clothing from one of the stalls in this town, and she very well intended to acquire it for herself.

She visited every clothing shop she found, trying to identify the attire she wanted, but couldn't find it. It was another corset, but where her current one just covered her breasts and pushed them up, this one did that and confined the waist to a narrower width, and Roxanne thought it was cute.

She couldn't find it though, and began using her feminine charm to investigate the shop's location.

The first boy she asked directed her to a stable house across town, but Roxanne wasn't totally surprised to be needing more directions from there as he refused to take his eyes off her bits. He hadn't even turned the slightest shade of pink.

A young stablehand was both helpful and just a little cute as he turned the color of a piglet when he saw her swaying her hips in his specific direction. He told her to try at the blacksmith's shop a couple roads down, as his sister had gotten one and, after an incident involving a horse kicking a lantern on to a bundle of cloth, burning the leather to reveal an interior plating of iron.