Pages and pages of tome after tome on subjects ranging from the art of Far Eastern cuisine to historical uses of seige warfare laid on the young Hume woman's bed. Her age just shy of 22, she had spent most of her life cooped up in her gray brick room in the industrial juggernaut of Bastok. Occasionally, she'd stare out her dome-shaped window up at the blue skies above or down at the people bustling about below. The people consisted of two main categories: townspeople, who usually walked -- or more like plodded -- to their daily lives and adventurers, who generally ran as fast as they could to wherever they wanted to go, filled with a seemingly inexhaustable amount of energy. She dreamed of becoming an adventurer but it seemed, if her parents and grandfather had their way, she'd become a townsperson. After all, her family used to be one of some measure of fame and, though their influence had long since waned, it wouldn't befit a "lady" to gallivant across Vana'diel swinging a sword around and uttering battlecries.
She was at the window now, her arms crossed against her chest in her usual Hume-style clothes, long golden blond hair streaming down to her buttocks kept in a large-weave, neatly arranged braid. But the sky wasn't blue today. It was dull gray, more gray than the bricks that formed her own personal prison. Years later, she would look back on this day and think the sky fit the day perfectly.
Closing her crystal blue eyes, she took a moment to steel herself in her resolve. Today was the day she was going to tell her parents that she was to become an adventurer under Bastok's flag.
There was a knock at her door, then a muffled feminine voice said, "Honeykins, lunch is ready. Won't you come down?"
"Mother...!" the young Hume woman called as she opened her blue eyes and turned around sharply, determination on her face.
The door opened and a kind Hume woman's face peeked through. She wasn't the most attractive of women, but her eyes shone with the happiness and contentment that she felt with her life, which is more than most people can claim.
"...I...well, I...you see..." the young Hume woman began before her mouth hung agape for a full minute. Her mother smiled at her, silently urging her to speak. When the young Hume woman finally spoke up again, she said firmly, "I'll be down soon, thank you, Mother."
Okay, tommorow was the day she'd tell her parents she's going to become an adventurer under Bastok's flag.
The door closed again and the young woman was left to her thoughts in the silence of her clean, neat room. After a moment, she slapped her forehead and groaned. Exhaling loudly, she just shook her head and stood there in silence. It wasn't long before she heard a long, penetrating wail, and only milliseconds before she recognized the voice as her mother's.
In no time at all, she ran out of her room, flinging the wood door open carelessly, and raced down the wooden stairs to see her mother sobbing in her father's arms and Sparrowwhite, her Galkan teacher, standing in the open doorway looking somber and sympathetic. She froze upon seeing this, one delicate hand gripping the wooden railing tightly, her long golden braid carried forward by inertia alone as she stared in shock at the awful scene. Once the braid swayed and settled, the fact fully sunk in that something horrible had happened and, though she didn't know what, she knew it would change her life forever.
Toning down her sarcastic demeanor for once, the young woman spoke in a gentle tone as she asked, "Sparrowwhite, something tells me you're not here to give me another flute lesson or basic swordplay lecture... what's going on? What's happened?"
Sparrowwhite's large oval eyes swiveled up to see the young woman in the stairwell and, collecting itself, it said in an equally gentle tone, "Jessy, it's--I--"
Jessy's father finished whispering some comforting words into her mother's ear before looking back at his daughter and saying, "It's your grandfather. He's passed on."
Jessy furrowed her brow immediately, something just didn't seem right about that: Telemain Brody, vibrant old man with more vigor in him than most middle-aged fellows? Former scholar that had studied in both Bastok and San d'Oria, famed tutor of great men, who during the Crystal War was forced to learn the art of hand-to-hand combat as a soldier for the Nation? He was dead? Never sick, never faultering in his advanced age, but now suddenly gone without so much as a last goodbye?
"No, it's not true," Jessy protested, bolting down the steps and towards the door. Sparrowwhite stepped out of Jessy's way and let her go -- experience had taught it that some people needed to see the truth, no matter how painful, to believe it. Still, closing the door on its way out, it followed after her. It also knew that she would need someone to hold her when she did in fact accept the truth.
Meanwhile, lunch cooled -- dhalmel stew and sweet baked apples -- on the maple table, abandoned save for the first rays of sunlight that chose to shine through the square glass window on that otherwise murky day. Bright sunlight reflected off of the abandoned meal as steam that would never be recaptured escaped into the air. Such a waste.
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A pale, pasty gray Hume body in an advanced stage of decomposition laid in a plain bed, garbed in purple, loose-fitting casualwear meant for nighttime use only -- garments some casually called "pajamas". The deceased Hume didn't have a blanket over him, which made it easy to see that every inch of him from his pedicured, calloused toes to his neatly trimmed beard had been carefully arranged. His hands were folded over his chest, a letter loosely held beneath them, and his eyes were closed. He seemed neither sad nor happy in his death, but merely was.
Jessy stood in the doorway, tears streaming down her blemish-free, youthful face, staring at the body of the elderly man lying serenely in his bed. "Oh gods..." she whispered as she lowered her head a bit and closed her eyes, putting a hand over her nose and mouth in an attempt to mask the stench emanating from the corpse.
She gathered her courage and, as Sparrowwhite watched in the hallway behind her, she stepped into the room. On each footstep taken, she couldn't help but feel that she was somehow violating a sacred place, trespassing where she didn't belong. In the years that she had known him, her brilliant but eccentric grandfather had had many a harsh word to say to her about going into his bedroom and how she didn't belong there. On some level, it hadn't fully sunken into Jessy's head that Telemain Brody was dead and very likely didn't care anymore.
Her delicate hand trembling, she reached forward for the letter lying on her grandfather's body and attempted to carefully tease it out from beneath his hands without touching him. When it became apparent that that wouldn't work, she put her hands over her grandfather's and tried to pull them up far enough to edge the letter out.
When she had finally succeeded, she didn't hesitate to look the letter over. The first thing she noticed was her family's seal, a silhoutte of a coeurl's head facing forward with the long wispy ears rippling backwards. The second thing she noticed was to whom the letter was addressed. "To..."
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"Althaia!" the blond-haired Mithran young woman shouted, slamming her fist into the workbench at which she sat, her greenish-hazel eyes blazing with barely-suppressed wrath as she stared up at the armor-clad Elvaan woman standing in front of her. "A-L-T-H-A-I-A! How do you expect to become my perrrsonal assistant if you can't even spell my name!"
"Um...I just wanted to see what's in your Bazaar..." the Elvaan woman protested, putting the parchment and quill that the blond-haired Mithra had handed her back down on the workbench.
"...oh. Well, nothing, as you can see by examining me," the blond Mithra said, surprisingly calm all of a sudden. After a moment of silence between the two, the blond Mithra said, "Are you surrre you don't want to be my perrrsonal assistant?"
And the Elvaan woman ran off without saying another word into Windurst Woods, a district of Windurst, having regretted stopping to see what was going on here on her way out of her Rent-A-Room. In her wake, a young Hume woman with shoulder-length brown hair stood before the blond Mithra sitting on the green grass at a workbench. The Hume was garbed in full scale mail and obviously had the look of an adventurer about her.
"Welcome! My name is Althaia and I'm looking for someone to be my perrrsonal assistant."
The female Hume gave the blond Mithra an incredulous look before sitting down in front of her at the workbench. "Just what is a 'personal assistant'?" she asked.
"Oh, you know, someone to fetch and carrry and move my stuff to the Auction House wherrre it's to be sold--" the blond Mithra began.
"So, a mule," the Hume interrupted.
"Pfft, 'mule' is a four-letterrr word arrround here," the blond Mithra responded quickly, waving dismissively at the notion.
"... 'mule' is a four-letter anywhere..."
"Uh, oh, you know what I mean! So, ANYWAY--"
"I'm not here to be your mule."
"Perrrsonal--"
"Whatever."
"Arrr, fine, then why be you wastin' me time and the time o' all the eagerrr applicants behind ya?" the blond Mithra implored, her tone slipping a bit into pirate-speak in her exasperation.
The young Hume woman looked annoyed and a bit disgusted with the blond Mithra as she turned around to see a whole lot of empty, grassy space behind her.
The blond Mithra raised her head to look over the Hume, her tail wagging around anxiously behind her, to see no one behind the young Hume woman. "Okay, the job's yourrrs!" the blond Mithra said with a huge, friendly smile on her face.
"Huh, what?!" the Hume said, her head snapping back to look at the blond Mithra, annoyance shining in her startling blue eyes, "Look, you and I are going to be spending a lot of time together from now on, but I am NOT going to be your errand girl. Clear?"
"As crrrystal as your blue eyes, assistant," the blond Mithra retorted with a smirk.
"Look, Lady--"
"How old arrre you?"
"Almost 22, but what--"
"I'm 17. Call me Alth or Althy or just plain adorrrable, but don't call me 'Lady'. Got it?"
"Althaia," the Hume stated firmly, barely restraining herself from reaching over and strangling the prissy little puss-in-gaiters, "listen, my grandfather died. And he didn't die of old age, either -- he poisoned himself and you're the only clue I have as to why!" The Hume pulled out a letter from her gobbie bag and slammed it down on the workbench between them.
"Heh, Lady," Althaia began defensively, reaching forward to push the letter back towards the assertive young woman, "I don't even know yourrr--" She stopped when her eyes glanced upon at the coeurl-shaped seal featured on the letter. All hints of offense and anger drained from her face and her greenish-hazel eyes to be replaced with confusion, curiousity, and sadness. An immediate sense of dread filled Althaia as she stared at the sealed letter addressed to her as she struggled to come to terms with what the young Hume woman had said. The letter certainly stank of a dead person and that was Telemain Brody's seal.
The hand that she had lifted one hand from her lap to reach for the letter hovered above it, unwilling to touch it lest the awful truth the Hume had spouted become reality. Without lifting her head, ever so quietly and with a somber respect for the deceased and what he must have meant to the Hume girl, Althaia said, "Thank you. You can go now."
"I'm as likely to leave as you are to step into Shadowlord's Realm! I trekked halfway across Vana'diel to give you that letter, Althaia. Do you have any idea how hard it was not to open it all that while? I've got every bit as much right to know what that letter says as you do and I'm staying until I do."
To the Hume's words Althaia showed no visible reaction. Her hand remained centimeters above the letter as she stayed frozen in position, her eyes betraying all the sorrow and pain that was bubbling just beneath the surface. The Hume, for her part, softened her harsh expression upon seeing how much pain the rude, annoying Mithra was actually in. Finally, Alth blinked. Though her eyes were ablaze with bitterness and fury, her voice was icy as she said, "If that were trrrue...yourrr name would have been on this letter as well."
The young Hume woman was shocked, and hurt, by the callous words uttered by the teenage Mithra. The Mithra, for her own part, didn't seem to give a damn, merely snatching up the letter from the workbench, pocketing it, and then standing up to drag everything else back towards her Mog House.
The young Hume woman got angry and stood up to follow the blond Mithran who pulled her workbench along towards the nearby guards and entrance to the Windurstian Residential Area. Lunging at the Mithran teenager, the Hume yelled, "My grandfather killed himself, I travelled across treacherous lands to bring this letter to you, and that's all you have to say to me? 'Thank you and goodbye'?" The Hume grabbed Althaia by the arm and spun her around to yell at her to her face when she saw the tears on the Mithra's face.
"Shut up! You have no idea what the old man meant to me!" Althaia yelled at the Hume. "He was my mentorrr, my tutorrr...the only good thing in my life for a long time! If it werrren't for him, I'd be a terrrible, soul-less perrrson today."
"What, as opposed to the shining beacon of virtue you turned out to be?" the young woman snapped back at the Mithra in spite of herself.
Althaia shook the young woman off and turned around, continuing towards the steps that led up to the residential area. She knew that the Hume girl was grieving, and she shouldn't take the words to heart, and at the same time suddenly wondered why they were arguing at all. At that thought, Althaia sighed, stopping in her tracks just as she put her foot on the first step up to the residential area.
Turning back to look at the warrior-esque Hume adventurer, Althaia said, "Look, we both lost someone imporrrtant to us. But this letterrr was meant for me, and me alone, and we should rrrespect yourrr grrrandfather's wishes. If you want to come in, my Moogle will make you some of that awful herrrbal tea he's always trrrying to shove down my gullet. I'll look over the letter and, well, we'll see. Okay?"
Without waiting for a response, Althaia turned back to her task, lifting the workbench up a few steps and then pausing to catch her breath. She was aware of the person moving behind her but, to be polite, she pretended to be surprised when a scale-gloved hand gripped the side of the workbench. "My name's Jesimae," the Hume said with just a hint of reluctance as she took the workbench off Althaia's hands and the two of them began to walk up the stairs to the residential area together, both of them ignoring all the adventurers who ran past them to and from the residential area.
"Jesimae? I've hearrrd that name beforrre, lots of times. You wouldn't happen to be the same Jesimae who--"
"Probably not. It's a common Hume name. It was my grandmother's name too, Telemain Brody's wife's."
"Oh. Yeah, everrry chosen rrrace has a few names that seem to crrrop up a lot among adventurrrers these days. But, I never imagined the old man as the marrried type...he seemed like the eterrrnal bachelor to me, bound only to his love of learrrning."
"Nope...he was married. Had three children, too, including my mother."
After a moment of silence, Althaia turned her head and smiled softly at Jesimae. Holding back a sarcastic comment, she said to her, "looks like we've got a lot we can teach each other, parrrtner."
Jesimae grinned wryly, "Yeah, we'll see... Can't wait to fight beside you on the battlefield and see if you're really all Grandpa made you out to be."
"Rrrow, he talked about me?"
"A little," Jesimae conceded. "He mostly just uttered your name was I was doing something that vexed him."
~------^^------~
Epilogue:
Alth Aaiaa,
I hope that you have been well. I am gladdened to learn that you have found your long-lost mother in the Far East and, though I lost track of you for a little while there, it seems you've grown into a fine young woman.
I know I said in my last letter that I would not write to you again and I am aware that I spoke harshly to you in it. Know that I was only trying to protect you from the one who seeks to destroy everything we hold dear. No, I do not refer to the Shadowlord, a menace that has thankfully left this realm forever, but to the dark knight we both once travelled with for so many years. You know that he has taken much from you, including your beloved friend Ellsie-Wellsie, and I am afraid to say that this will not be the end of his reign of terror.
If you are reading this letter now, know that you are in the gravest of danger, for if you are reading these words, it means that I have been unsuccessful in stopping Khaniadel. My dear granddaughter Jesimae, whom I assume has brought you this missive, believes that I took my own life. It is my express wish that she and the rest of my family continue to believe such, as it may guarentee their safety. I trust that she has not opened this letter and, furthermore, I know that you wouldn't have allowed her do so.
In truth, Khaniadel dosed me with a slow-acting potent alchemedial concoction for which there is no known antidote. I have been dying for weeks now, unwilling and unable to tell my loved ones of any of it should the knowledge endanger their very lives. I have vigorously searched for any signs of hope for a cure.
I have found none; there is no antidote. Khaniadel wanted me to die knowing no hope, but he has failed. For I do know hope: it's you and Jesimae. Alth, you, my certainly most interesting student and Jesimae, my only grandchild, are hope to me. It is my wish that you two look after each other from now on as you continue to quest to find your places in the world. I only wish your fellowship was a guarentee of your mutual safety and longevity.
Fare thee well,
Telemain Brody
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(OOC Notes: according to the Dawn storyline, the Shadowlord has been defeated. People who need to do that mission yet just don't RP it that way. ^_^'' Dawn is a RP linkshell on the Bismarck Server. Our forums are located at the url in my profile. This is a story I wrote up to explain where I got my NPC "Friend" from the Fellowship quest -- my use of the word fellowship is entirely intentional -- and the shift in her appearance is due to her cutting and dying her hair. In a world full of airships and monsters, I don't think a little hair dye is a stretch.
Anyhow, I just wanted to post this here to encourage other roleplayers to think up alternative origins for their NPC.)
It seemed like it was morrre about Jesimae than you, but still, it was one of the best I've seen herrre.