Orianna’s Expression

(Approximate story word count: 1500 words. Estimated reading time: 15 minutes)

No challenge seemed to faze the vanguard expedition into the Underdark. A collection of Magmin were dispatched with relative ease, a pack of Gricks fell in succession to a mix of fire and steel, and a Drow hunting party quickly found that these trespassers were not simply wayward tourists.

Advancing further into the depths, the party and their guides decided to take a short break, more to catch their breath than heal any wounds. In this brief moment of a calm, Orianna du Fior took a moment to enjoy a passtime she had not partook in for a while: drawing.

However, Juliet Alderbrand lurked around the young fighter, trying to see what she was doing.

“Hey Dartfly,” she said, sidling up close. She had removed her armour and was wearing a simple red dress shirt with a somewhat deep V-neck, her blonde hair still mussed and matted from the amount of sweat her own fiery fighting style produced, “whatcha got there?”

“Nothing!”, Orianna said, holding the paper close to her chest, “I’m not doing anything at all nope nothing suspicious going on here you can go now!”. 

“Uh huh… hey Orianna… boobs!”

“WHAT WHERE?!”

In that brief moment of distraction Juliet managed to grab the piece of paper off of her, “on one hand, could kill us all, on the other, so easily distracted…” 

She looked closely, furrowing her brow slightly as she took in what was drawn on it. “It’s… us? Crudely drawn I admit… well, tell a lie you’ve captured me perfectly but yeah this is a bit like a child’s drawing.”

Orianna flushed as red as her dress, nervously stammering out her words. “W-well yeah it’s supposed to be everyone here,” she said, fiddling with some lace detailing, “but yeah I’m not so good at drawing my parents tried to teach me but it never went well.”

“Parents, huh? What kind of people raised a hyperactive wind of destruction like you?”

“The kind that left you estranged at age fifteen after not living up to their expectations.”

An awkward silence descended between the two, Juliet realising that she might have made the conversation weird, before Orianna chimed in again. “Sorry that might have came off a bit heavy it wasn’t them it was me choosing to live life on my own terms.”

“Oh phew,” Juliet said with a sigh, looking relieved that she had not brought up painful memories, “still, kinda sucks you had folks like that.”

“Comes with originally being a noble I gu-”

“FUCKING KNEW IT!”, Juliet said with glee before knowing she had made the conversation weird now, “…sorry, carry on?”

“As I was saying yeah I was originally born a noble but it was never the life for me,” Orianna said, anxiously crossing and uncrossing her fingers, “all these lessons on art music board games deportment and all other uptight stuff just never get through to me I always found it hard to focus.”

“Nobles get taught how to fight though, so you must’ve picked up something.”

“Oh yeah I got taught how to fight it was one of the few things I was actually good at although my trainers… and my brothers… and other male family members were always taken aback at how well I fought.”

“Probably shocked how someone like you could kick so much ass, given your size and style.”

“Didn’t dress anywhere close to this back then the whole family heavily disapproved of my ‘radical and unbecoming’ life choices as they called it or ‘inappropriate behaviour for an heir’ later on.”

Juliet went wide-eyed for a moment, learning so much about her travelling companion in a single sentence. “So uhm…”, she said, trying to figure out where to go from that point, “what happened in the end to push you out the door?”

“Stole some stuff from one of my sister’s wardrobes stole some ancestral weapons to enter into a pit fight,” Orianna said, using her hands to act out charades of each point, “won the entire thing obviously but then I got home and my dad was pretty mad so with the money I had won that night I knew I could survive by myself for a while leading to me telling him where to shove his noble lifestyle before shattering his nose with the crossguard of the sword I took.”

There was no hesitation in Juliet’s next action, which was to pull Orianna into a close, tight hug whilst she said, “I’m so proud of you”. Orianna on the other hand became extremely flustered in short order, making random “ah” and “buh” sounds as her arms quivered in an attempt to reciprocate the gesture.

Juliet broke off, smirking to herself as she watched the elegant fighter continue to try to process what just happened. After she had calmed down, Juliet took a moment to think before saying, “suppose I should share my situation. Y’know we’re not actually that different thinking about it.”

“We aren’t?”, Orianna said, intensely curious about what her companion meant by that.

“Obviously different strokes for different folks but my parental relationship wasn’t the best either. ‘Oh Juliet you must calm down’, ‘Oh Juliet don’t use such crude language’, ‘Juliet burning down someone’s house is no way to get a husband’. It was near fucking constant.”

Orianna took a rare moment of pause, before reaching into her backpack to grab a hairbrush. True to her style it was an ornate tool, cut from a single piece of marble. 

She shuffled over to Juliet gently and went to try to work out the knots in her hair, an act that was met with resistance. “Oh no, no!”, Juliet said, gently pushing against Orianna, “you’ll just pull at my hair and make it worse.”

In response Orianna ran her fingers through her own fiery locks with a reassuring smile, saying, “You have seen my hair right this stuff is smooth and silky whilst I can’t give you a full wash I can at least tidy things up”. 

Juliet huffed slightly still before letting Orianna start to brush things out, slightly exaggerating how much certain strokes were pulling against her scalp until settling into the sensation. “So how did your situation end up changing for yourself then?”, Orianna asked as she worked.

“Same as you, Dartfly,” Juliet said, wincing slightly as one knot took quite a bit of work to get through, “eventually got tired of hearing bullshit every day and walked out the door to never look back. Fell into more stable work than you did, which is how I met Seb.”

“You two do seem quite close and like you have been through a lot with the way you talk about past adventures.”

“Oh definitely, we’ve both caused our fair share of trouble and-hey, hey take it easy with that bit!”, Juliet said, interrupting her own thought to tell Orianna off, continuing to baffle the poor girl that someone who fights at their very limit is made uncomfortable by simple grooming, before continuing her sentence.

“Despite this, Seb and I have stuck together through thick and thin. Always good to have someone who compliments you perfectly to get you out of tough spots right?”

“I, uhm, yeah…”, Orianna said as she finished her work, her hand trembling slightly as she thought about the person who matched that description for her, “a-anyway I’m done, sorry if I hurt you or anything.”

An incredulous chuckle was the response to this statement, Juliet saying, “I put up a fight cause I hate this crap, not cause it hurts. But if it makes you happy, then I guess it’s alright.”

Juliet went to hand back the picture, with Orianna placing it back on the rock she was using as a support, continuing her work. “…actually I do have a favour to ask in return, if you don’t mind,” Juliet said.

“Go on?”

“Can you add some more fire scribbles to mine? Seb is perfect but I feel I need more for mine to be truly accurate.”

Inspiration

So as part of Orianna’s latest session, she ended up getting some +2 studded leather armour. Ignoring the fact this has continued her theme of being a near unstoppable killing machine, it presented me with a random impulse to draw Orianna trying on her new armour. 

However, considering I have very little artistic skill and was doing this in Paint, it obviously did not turn out the most realistic looking. It did give me a new source of inspiration though: Orianna likes to draw but acknowledges she is not that good at it. This also allowed me to introduce a bit more of her backstory from even before her initial piece.

Canonically, Orianna has some form of ADHD. The way this is intended to be portrayed is that her previous noble family tried to put her through classes for all the things that nobles are typically expected to take part in, but Orianna was never able to focus properly on them.

She still enjoys some of the things she was exposed to, but she never had the focus to practice them in an educational environment. And her fighting lessons were obviously where she excelled, for the reason of fights often moving so fast that she did not have time to lose focus she could, for the first time in her life, excel at something.

That said, it was not a case of her not enjoying the other activities she was presented with. It was more the environment and expectations that produced her feelings of dissatisfaction. Hence, when presented with an opportunity to create something without expectation and is actually encouraged by someone else, there is a swell of positive emotion and enjoyment in something that once had negative connotations.

Plus it is kind of fun to just draw silly little things about the game going on in front of me, and having it be semi in character just adds a bit of flavour to the drawings.