You are in your tent, surveying your desk of sorts. Though a book remains on it, open to whatever latest page you had read, you are not reading it, not now. In these latest weeks, you have come to feel a rather intense sense of boredom. It is weird to say, but you had never been quite as unoccupied as you currently are. In your hometown of Portblanc, even during the winter months, there were things aplenty to do - to oversee the running of the city, to settle disputes, to watch the latest theater play...yet now, outside of those little times of excitement and meetings with the other colonels, you've nothing but your tent and your books, and you've only brought so many.

You had begun to consider simply carousing around the city outskirts when another figure entered your tent - Joan, your lifelong servant. She carried with her a basket of clothing - freshly cleaned, you imagine.

"These clothes of yours have finally dried, sir. I have taken to simply stringing them up under cover alongside one of the bigger fires. It's not quite entirely dry, but with these constant rains, it is the best you can hope for."

It must be said, this manner of dialogue would have seen as preposterous had it been anyone else. Though you've several other servants along with you in this campaign, none other speaks with such irreverence as she does. No, it is better to say that none else speak to you as she does, save perhaps your ownn brother.

As she sets down the basket, she glances over to your desk. "What is it you are reading this time, Sir?"

"The Valcheniad." you reply.

The Valcheniad, of course, is the ancient "epic" of the Straccian people - it is very easy to forget, with how subtle it is, that Straccians are not human. Not entirely, at least. Though millenia of interbreeding had left them with all but the barest of differences, they had once been amidst the Uhren, the "Eared Ones", a race of savage predatory folk from the far north, across the Meringian Sea, in the land of Valschen. During the Great Migration, as they call it, they had departed from their homes, crossing lands and seas until they finally reached Straccia. The Valcheniad, written in the 8th century, depicts all these events, and is a work of no little popularity.

"The Valcheniad? I am particularly fond of that one." she says, as nonchalantly walking towards you, before leaning over you in the chair to look at the book in the deks. Which, of course, leaves her chest pressing into your neck and shoulders, and you not quite able to react properly. You would like to think of yourself as no mere pissant boy, blushing at the presence of another girl, yet you find it difficult to act differently when it comes to the owl-eared woman close to you.

"I do not recognize this language, Sir." she says, after a moment.