"Vait, no, hold up, fucking vait," says Raab Idiotking, taking off his hat and waving it and removing the bow and arrow from Joone's hand. "Ve're not shooting arrows at people, vat are ve, idiots?"
"Idiot Kings," says an unidentified voice from the hedges. Raab spins and points the arrow in its general direction.
"Ve're de Kings, YOU'RE de Idiots! My Joone, for vhy you're idi-ing? You're supposed to be a King!"
Joone shrugs. "It voulda been fine? She's got on armor."
"And I'm fast!" argues the target [paging @clown-femme it is Our Yolly aka J'hola], who has not been shot at even once yet, so look how safe she is!
"And you shoot her in de face, de armor helps how?"
"I vasn't aiming at her face?" Joone shrugs again.
"Joone, my brother," Raab says. He reaches to place his hands on Joone's shoulders but he's got the bow and arrow and he has to stop and set those aside first. Hands free; Joone patiently waiting; hands on Joone's shoulders. (They're both like 5'4, Raab stockier and hairier, Joone dark-eyed as a junco.) "Joone, my brother, de fuckin Emperor holds your hand ven you shoot. I know dis. But it's still your hand. You can't be shooting arrows at our shipmates."
Roger Konway's parental instincts have been firing off and he arrives at this time to ask "What's going on out here?"
Raab looks at him and says "Ve're making out." He looks at Joone and looks at Roger and removes one hand to gesture between himself and Joone. "For duyvers dis is making out. Please don't vatch."
J'hola, if put in such a situation as Mr. Konway and Mr. The Saint Templar are discussing, would simply not die in the event of an arrow entering her eye socket. It would be as easy as that! All the same, her shaggy head has wandered from the conversation to see where the bow and arrow Joone was using has gone to. The ship's dear Yolly is about to go retrieve it when she comes across a word she's never heard - which isn't an uncommon occurrence, really - and her ears go all cock-a-twitchy with curiosity and fresh distraction. "What's 'nerf?'" Whatever it is, they don't have it in grassy forest towns where bards raise daughters just northwest of the old mill by the lavender patches and teach them to shoot, a skill she's trying to use today to pass onto a duyver. Or maybe they do, and she simply didn't see one. Her immediate thought is that it must be some type of fungus. How she might have landed on such a conclusion is anyone's guess. (Though, Colonel Fointeaume would likely balk at this demonstration just as much as Mr. Konway is, because the old man has a modicum of sense that seemingly didn't drip down to his adoptive daughter.)
" " Less-lethal rounds "," says Roger with both literal both-hands and tone-of-voice air quotes around the phrase, "only for non-ballistics weaponry. Foam melee weapons, those fencing swords that wiggle - "
"Those are epées and they are a very real weapon with a long and glorious history," Simon says chidingly. "Saint Oscar threaded several weiners upon one in the Battle of - "
"They make nerf arrows but less is awfully load-bearing, eh," Roger continues ever-louder. "They'll still put an eye out."
"But hardly penetrate to the cortex!" Simon shifts merrily into this new different sentence and topic as if he were never interrupted at all. "If they put an eye out they'll get a new eye, whoopsie doodle, they'll be able to pick out the color and get upgrades in it and everything. Jolly-doll, what will your new eye look like if our Joone shoots one out?"
J'hola thinks on this, first closing the blue eye, then alternating to having the brown one closed and the blue one open, two and fro quickly until she loses track of the order, as if she really has to mull on this, and somehow doing this has helped the process along. "I reckon," she says, "that depends on which one he shoots out! But I'll be okay, Mr. The Saint Templar! Mr. Joone's doin' great since I started giving him lessons. I think when I was singin' for him earlier I helped rally his spirit real solid an' strong, so he's not gonna hit my eyes. Like I said - I'm fast! And if he does hit me in the eye, that means his aim's true, just like it oughta be!" "His aim," Pea Shooter laughingly points out from her comfy position on the sidelines, "ain't true if he wasn't goin' for your eye, Jols." "Eyes are hard to hit," J'hola's smile is unwavering as her hands land confidently on her hips. "I know from experience! He'd have to be tryin' to hit it. Otherwise he'd likely get me in my temple or the cheek." She pokes her cheek for emphasis. "You know what they say! If you're out lookin' for berries and you find a fat hog, now you've just got pork to go with the mead!" No one has likely ever said that in history, really.
"There've been plenty of times I've gone hunting for a fat hog and found a handful of berries beside," Simon says with the sweetest, purest, saintliest sort of musing voice. He's not saying anything inappropriate, he's the very picture of innocence. Roger smacks him in the arm.
"My brother holds the Emperor's hand when he shoots," says Raab proudly - he dropped his hands from Joone's shoulders long ago, when the focus of the conversation let him do so discretely - now side-by-side, Joone smacks him in the arm for tempting fate with vain praise. "I'm yust saying, if de nerf arrow puts her eye out, dat's the vork of de Trone."
"I'm not shooting her eye out," Joone states firmly. "De Emperor can find a different vay of doing it if dat's His vill."
Roger pinches the bridge of his nose and square-breathes four times before he opens his eyes and turns around to look for the nearest servoskull and request the delivery of some nerf archery supplies.
"A good bit of pork in the mead goes over right well sometimes - it's just right for springtime when the weather's fair and the mead's a-blossom," Simon is musing to no-one in particular. There's a break in the branches over his head, so a circle of golden sunlight falls just upon him specifically
It's quite well and good that dear Hogarth isn't present, as he'd find the sight marvelous and handsome and disarming, so much so that he'd let all that shit Simon just said fly. One mustn't fear, though, as Penelope is here to cackle at the comment's implications.
J'hola snorts too, but she assumes the innuendo was unintentional on Simon's part, on accounta the whole saintliness thing. "You like to turn your phrases prettier than two pretty things, Mr. The Saint Templar!"
With that praise that Simon certainly was starved for, the poor thing, she bounds back toward her pupil, tail quirked in a gleeful question-mark shape. "Mr. Joone! I have full faith in you! You can shoot me anywhichwhere that you please. The goal right now's hittin' a moving target, so give it all you've got and don't fret about hurting me. I'm tougher than I look, aye."
Simon's sapphire gaze meets Roger's amethyst eyes. Simon's shining with mirth as he holds up two fingers and proudly mouths the words TWO pretty things! Roger flushes a somewhat unflattering pink and his own eyes crinkle up in matching pleasure just because Simon is looking at him happily; then Roger turns away with a performative snort.
Of course Simon's going to stay to watch his kids demonstrate their prowess - how could he not, now that he's aware of these goings-on? He removes his cloak - which, let us remind our readers, is a piece of futuristic tech which he can easily convert into a frilly neckstock if he doesn't want to wear the whole thing - and which, let us remind our readers, is a gorgeous piece of heavily-bejeweled artwork with a hand-painted silk lining that looks like a twilight sky - he removes it and folds it inside-out so he can lay it on the ground like a picnic blanket and sit on it and pat it for Roger to sit beside him.
Joone accepts the servoskull's nerf-arrows delivery and turns to his archery instructor with an unreadably-formal-type duyver salute, pressing his right fist to his chest and half-bowing. "Faith is our shield," he says scripturally. "And if I aim poorly my vife de plasma rifle vill get mad at me, so I better hit you, no offense."
J'hola gives the arrows a sniffsniffsniff and pins her ears back like a ship's wings at the strange, unnatural scent of these things. Is this what 'nerf' is? Plasticky and almost sour, sharp in a way that tweaks the higher arches inside her nose. Shaking away her disturbance at that, she has to speak somewhat grimly to Joone. "You have to be nice to your wife," she says, as serious as she can say anything, carrying the weight of a genuine warning, "all the time. Even if she's a plasma rifle. Okay," and her smile's back! J'hola bounces a pace backward now, ready to observe and jump in to correct as needed, "draw and nock, Mr. Joone, let's see your stance! Stance up! Stance forever!!"
It's a good thing Joone is nice to his wife the plasma rifle, because Our Yolly speaking seriously carries a startling amount of weight just for that it's the first time Joone has ever witnessed such a thing. Between that and the fact that Konway and the Inquisitor and his brother Raab with his firm faith in Joone's marksmanship are all watching him right now, this situation looms as though it will have Consequences.
Joone reminds himself that it will Not have Consequences unless he accidentally murders Our Yolly. It's fine. He stances up the way she's shown him, and realizes he needs to adjust his feet before she can correct him. The Emperor guides my eye, he prays silently, my brothers are holding my hand. If he misses Raab will be the first to loudly excuse him because this nerf arrow is not a plasma bolt. If he hits Yolly she will be protected by her armor. All is fine.
Simon tries to get Raab to come sit in his lap to watch and Roger surreptitiously gestures don't, which Raab takes as a relief honestly
Eyes all big and curious make merry over Joone's form, before their scruffy weilder clears the gap between herself and him so that she can squeeze his arm, touch the string, prod one of his fingertips properly into place. The arm-squeezy is in service of seeing if he's tensing too much or too little, and she wants to make sure his balancing is just so. With a tap of two fingers to his temple she minutely adjusts the position of his Joonely head.
J'hola is already limbered up, so without further instruction or preamble, she darts into the brush, vaulting herself over Simon and Roger's heads with a soft jingling of bells.
As advertised, she's fast. J'hola seems to be running nowhere in particular, zigzagging and bolting. Sharp turns are taken on all fours, and she seems adept at leaps and bounds and climbing. A giggling housecat with zoomies, hoping to be shot with a blunted arrow. Good luck, Joone.
If he didn't have an audience Joone would feel no pressure at all and his plan would be what it always is when he's sniping: patience. This guy can sit still for so long. Eventually anybody running around will either tire out, stop to rest, or just pause a moment for whatever reason, and that's when you shoot, you know. Even Our Yolly would probably eventually stop and check to see why he hasn't done anything yet, or something, eventually.
There's at least five people watching him right now though and two of them are bosses. The Inquisitor will get bored if Joone plays the waiting game.
He knows the arrow is going to be significantly slower than a plasma bolt and he knows he doesn't have the necessary experience yet to know how much to lead his shots, but he watches Our Yolly bounce around a little and then he does his little best <3 somebody roll a d20, idk what his handicap is <3
While J'hola is not a completely endless font of energy, she has a formidable amount of it stocked up in that weird little shape of hers. Still, he's right to know that everything must tire out eventually, even beastkin like her. Thankfully, J'hola's plan is to almost arbitrarily decide when Joone's time is up and pounce on him if he doesn't shoot in time.
This conclusion, however, needn't manifest just yet. An arrow grazes J'hola's flank before getting itself lost in the wood. She grunts when she feels it, more in surprise and acknowledgement than in true pain. if he'd shot even half a second earlier, this would have been a hit. Oh, nice! Beginning to scale a tree, Jolly knows she should praise him for that later.
Climbing slows J'hola - she isn't completely naked, which means she's wearing boots, so she can use her clawed toes to help her up the tree and her hand-claws are as long and sharp as she needs them for playing instruments but not as much as they'd be if she were a clan hunter and not a bardic archer. Still, she's fair enough to know that Joone's task is not to hit a super fast target, but to hit a moving one, and she is at least still moving. Besides, he has to draw and nock again, but maybe he's already fast at that from reloading his wife -- actually, she doesn't know if plasma rifles need to be reloaded. Do they? These thoughts occupy her as she scrambles.
