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acetheabnormal · 4 months ago

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OCs are a bit harder to post here but I adore this little freak and must show him everywhere

#dnd oc #oc #cornelius caterwaul

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frenchy-and-the-sea · 4 years ago

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OC Kiss Week 21 - Talents

Day 3 still goin’ strong! Today features @elalavella’s Cornelius, who they made for the Seven Cities universe and who I take great delight in tormenting just a lil bit. Every new character in SC goes through a brief initiation of dealing with the main characters and their bullshit, so next time I promise to give him a bit of an easier time. For now, I hope you enjoy!

~1000 words, set in the middle of a crisis

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"Ah, Cornelius," said Alex, like she hadn't just sent Finn halfway across the ship to fetch him. "Please, take a seat."

Cornelius crossed the floor of the great cabin at her gesture, stiff-backed, scowling. This was a tremendous waste of his time, he fumed to himself. There was no screaming coming from the lower decks, no cries or shouting or the unmistakable caterwaul of a man that thought he was dying, which meant that he wasn’t being called in for his usual talents. He had no long term patients to report on either, no supplies to collect, no particular fondness for the captain to put himself in her company for longer than he needed to. Short of the dinner bell or an all hands call, there wasn’t a single reason why he should be pulled from the sickbay, from his search, to stand before her like some sunburnt ordinary, whose highlight of any day was to answer the summons of his captain. By all rights, he ought to stalk right back out of the cabin and return once he decided that he had a moment to spare for her.

But Alex held her crew together with a garrote made of their purse strings, and Cornelius had already seen one man lose a full quarter of his pay to her wrath at being disobeyed. He wasn’t in quite enough denial yet to think he didn’t need every drop of gold that the captain could scrounge up for him. So he bit his tongue, straightened the edges of his coat, and settled himself in the chair that had been dragged in front of Alex’s great beast of a desk for him, trying to seem less like he wanted to scream.

On the other side, a woman sat perched on the arm of Alex’s chair. Cornelius recognized her face, vaguely, but all he could remember about her was that she had been recently acquired in their last stop in the Main, and that she had apparently made it her job to be involved in everyone's business. He hadn't gotten around to learning her name yet; his wasn't a business she had gotten around to getting involved in. She smiled at him, and something about the look made his innards curl. He sniffed and turned pointedly back to Alex.

"What can I do for you, captain?" he asked, conjuring the bland voice of a doctor on a house call to his aid. Alex’s mouth twitched up at one corner.

"Very little today, I'm afraid," she said mildly. Something in her voice set Cornelius's teeth on edge. He couldn't tell if it was irritation at her grinning or the mounting edge of his panic, but he suddenly wanted to vault over the desk and shake her violently by the shoulders. It's gone, he wanted to shout. It's been lost, vanished, stolen from my care, and I need to find it, don't you understand?

Instead, he clenched his fists into the fabric of his trousers and stared daggers as a reply. Alex seemed to consider that answer enough, somehow; nodding, she reached beneath her desk and withdrew a slim leather package from the lowest drawer. A journal, Cornelius realized with a start.

The journal.

He was on his feet in an instant.

"That's mine," he blurted before he could stop himself. Alex turned back, arching an eyebrow.

"Aye," she said, and the woman beside her giggled. "So we thought. Adelina found it tucked in a pile of clothing that had been brought from the sickbay in need of patching. Few enough people on this miserable bucket know their letters enough to keep one, so we made a guess. Here.”

She leaned forward across the desk and held the journal out towards him. Cornelius only just managed to restrain himself from descending on it like a carrion bird, striding up instead to snatch it away with a huff.

“Yes, ‘found it,’ I’m sure,” he muttered. A fresh wave of panic, this one tinged at the edge with sour dread, rose in his stomach as he smoothed a hand over the worn leather cover. They had read it. They had to. They had stolen it, or they had not, and in either case, they wouldn��t have restrained themselves from a look through. Bile pressed at the back of his throat, resolutely defying his attempts to swallow it down.

Across the desk, Alex’s face darkened like a thundercloud.

“Found, yes,” she said, in a voice as much like a warning as he had ever heard before. “As one does when something gets misplaced by its owner. I’ve let Adelina stay so that you might thank her personally."

The steel in her eyes said that this wasn’t a request. Cornelius’s urge to leap across the desk and shake her returned, doubled now, but the weight of the little leather book in his hand was reminder enough of all of the reasons that he couldn’t risk the captain’s ire again. Setting his jaw, he tucked the journal carefully - firmly - beneath an arm and stepped around the desk to where the woman sat. She offered a hand, smiling.

“I didn’t read your book,” she assured him in a conspiratorial whisper as he took it. “We only looked at the writing on the first page. To find you, you understand?”

“How very kind of you,” Cornelius ground out through his teeth, and then stooped to press a kiss into the back of her hand. It was as brusque a thing as he could make it, barely a brush of lips against skin; then he stepped back, offered Alex the barest sketch of a bow, and fled out the door before either of them could speak again.

As the door of the great cabin swung shut behind him, he heard the captain huff.

“Shame he's such an ass,” she said. “His poetry’s rather good.”

#ockiss21 #my writing #seven cities #other people's ocs #alex sheffield #cornelius #i can't remember if you settled on a last name IF YOU DID I'LL TAG IT SORRY #but yeah hopefully this touches some part of what you imagined for your boy!!#i love him what? so so much #cornelius skelton #original fiction

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acetheabnormal · 3 months ago

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He'll find it again