Quoted By:
It will soon be last light, but dithering was never your style. You tell the twins to lead the way.
Mabel is sitting outside her broken cottage, her usual spot, looking out toward the sea. Her soft red hair is woven with little shells but stray strands of it gently shiver on her cheek from the wind. Her ruined hands are busy mending a net, work she has done so often that it no longer requires her attention or even her eyes, her golden eyes, the eyes of her mother, which elevate her comeliness to something otherworldly. Even you cannot help your heart from beating harder when she turns them upon you, despite all you know.
She begins with sympathies for your late father. She was not at the funeral but she knew him to be a kind and decent man and feels "the world is less for the loss the him". You don't know how to respond to that, so you bring up the fruit and Gordon. You are calm, reasonable, and logical. It was wrong of her to take advantage of your friend and since you've spent the better part of the day making things right, she owes you an apology. Gordon too, of course, but you first.
She laughs. She actually laughs. You, for one, fail to see the humor. Gordon could have been seriously punished and it would have been all her fault. She stops laughing. Her response is calm, reasonable, and logical. The lord would never have laid a hand on Gordon, at most he would have been fined, and his father, his wealthy father, his father that owns his own land and all the buildings upon it, would have paid the fine without the least disturbance to his fortune. All you've done is kept her mother, her ailing, dying mother, from satisfying what may well be a dying wish. All she wanted was some apples, you brute. There are the beginnings of tears in her golden eyes.
You feel ashamed, guilty--until you remember that her mother was at the funeral. And she looked the very picture of health. At this revelation, she laughs. She laughs and clutches her knees and brushes away her false tears. You don't know how to respond to that, so you begin calling her names. Very soon neither of you are calm, reasonable or logical. She admits she wanted the apples for herself, but who are you to interfere? Who? You are Gordon's friend! So is she! No, she's not a friend, but a parasite, a succubus! If she's a succubus, then you're nothing but a bully. She's the bully, leading on Gordon like that. So what? He enjoys her company, and why shouldn't she get something in return? What does she have, compared to Gordon and his father? And it was only a basket of fruit for God's sakes! It was fruit today, yes, but tomorrow it will be silver, you know her kind. You know her mother.
She goes silent. She won't apologize, not to you. She'll speak to Gordon herself, in private.
You decide to:
>Leave it be, you wash your hands of this
>Demand that she leave Gordon alone
>Try and negotiate some sort of deal with her
>Write-in
