[Ariyah – Lady Washington – Deck – BoL – Fame 2 – A]
Ariyah sighed as Yuri stammered his apologises, “It’s fine.”
Now she felt like a bully for even bringing it up. Ariyah wondered who this boy’s Sire was and what was going through their mind when they selected someone this timid for the Embrace. Was it a mistake? Or was it some perverse experiment? To see whether this child would survive, or to see how long it would take the Beast to destroy him?
When the ship started to move, and Yuri’s panic escalated again, Ariyah thought the other Kindred would jump the rails. Some Kindreds can make that jump, and maybe Yuri could too. But the other Toreador stayed rooted on the deck, and instead asked why they were leaving the shore.
“Well, considering how Prince Cross went to the effort of procuring this vessel for Court, I assumed he wouldn’t want it just sitting at the Docks for the whole event,” Ariyah explained.
When Yuri suggested that they went below decks, Ariyah inclined her head in assent. She hadn’t seen any viable seats on deck, and she could only hope that the situation below decks will be different.
While they shuffled behind the others who were also making their way down, Ariyah continued with the earlier topic “And I wouldn’t worry so much; we won’t drown. We don’t need to breathe after all, so if anything happened to the ship, we could just walk back to shore.” She made a walking gesture with the index and middle finger of her right hand. Ariyah wasn’t sure what she said was true, but it made logical sense.
“I mean,” Ariyah couldn’t help adding, giving the other Kindred a sidelong glance, “unless we are so far out that the pressure at the bottom of the seabed crushes us. But I doubt we’d go so far.”
Ariyah was distracted from her scrutiny of the younger Rose by a commotion back on deck behind them. A red-headed Kindred, the same one who tasted her blood at the top of the gangplank, was giving a very public dressing down to another man. The same one, she recognised, that Yuri was stammering in front of earlier.
“Who is that man?” Ariyah asked Yuri, lifting her chin in the direction of the brown-haired Kindred.