[crow]

She blinked, seeming genuinely surprised to see it, and Koh'a wondered whether he ought to feel insulted. He hadn't been so irresponsible, surely...? Well, it was true that he was in a bit of a state now, but he hadn't thought of himself as a particularly frivolous individual up until now.

Her eyes narrowed. "What kind of work are you doing for that coin?" she said.

Koh'a shrugged. "Adventuring, mostly. Look, it's good and it's honest, even if it's not the safest. I'm not stealing it, if that's what you're thinking."

[crow]

He expected her to scold him anyway, but Senah stayed quiet, her expression turning thoughtful for a moment. Then she sighed. "Alright, suit yourself," she said. "I'll be back to check on you later, so don't think about skipping town while I'm gone."

"Wouldn't dream of it," said Koh'a, who was already trying to figure out how he could leave Limsa as quickly as possible. Aetheryte teleportation would be the fastest, but it was so expensive... Maybe he could take a ship?

[crow]

Just as the thought crossed his mind, however, a bright flash at the periphery of his vision caught his attention, and he tensed, his hand reaching instinctively for his bow. It was only when he realized that the flash had been a carbuncle, and more importantly, that the carbuncle was Senah's, that he relaxed again.

"Hmm, I guess you weren't lying about the adventuring," said Senah, giving him an appraising look. "Your reaction time is pretty good."

[crow]

She stood there brandishing what could only have been an arcanist's tome, holding it with a confidence that suggested she wasn't a stranger to using it herself, though he couldn't tell at a glance how good she was at actually using it in combat. Her carbuncle was a bright blue thing that was currently scratching an ear.

"Iri, I want you to keep an eye on him, okay? If he tries to make a break for it, you better let me know right away."

[crow]

The carbuncle blinked at her, and Koh'a stared at it, wondering whether he could still get away with... well, trying to get away. He didn't doubt that the carbuncle would follow her orders. Those things could be pretty clever, and most of them were dead loyal to their summoners. He'd encountered a few... exceptions, but usually it was more a question of skill, and Senah seemed, at least, to have her charge well in hand.

It was more just a question of pitting his own skills against the carbuncle's.

[Wild Pet Found]

[crow]

Koh'a didn't consider himself a slouch in the getting away from things department. He was a pretty good adventurer, by his own reckoning--- and the fact that he hadn't gone broke despite the sudden uptick in his drinking habit was evidence in his favor. It was just that he didn't know how good Senah's specific carbuncle was, and he did spend more time fighting things than he spent running away. Running away was good and all, but it didn't pay the bills.

[crow]

But he'd shot at a carbuncle before, on a lark, with an arcanist that he'd joined up with briefly on a hunt for some monster in some town. The details of the rest of it were hazy, just one more job in a slew of them, and him not sober enough to commit many details to memory. But it hadn't... The arrow had just gone sort of through, and the carbuncle had looked no worse for wear at the end of it.

[crow]

The arcanist, he remembered, had laughed it off, and said there was no use. Something something, aether, something something academic blandishing. Koh'a had never been one for the books;a hunter he had been, but a renaissance man he was not. And so he'd smiled and nodded, and committed only the relevant fact to memory: you couldn't kill those things. The only viable strategy in the battle was to go for the person who had summoned them, and put an end to them.

[crow]

For obvious reasons, that wasn't an option here. He wasn't going to try and murder his cousin just because she was proving to be a hopefully temporary inconvenience. And she was trying to look out for him; this much he understood, even if he rather wished she would just leave him be.

She would probably be real angry if he tried to throw off that little blue pipsqueak.

Koh'a sighed. "There's no trust in this world, is there?" If she was going to monitor him, then he should at least have the luxury of whining about it.

[crow]

"Absolutely none," Senah agreed, her tone rather grim. Koh'a grimaced at her, and she rolled her eyes in response. For a moment, it felt as though they were both children again, and this was simply one of his mother's irregular visits to Limsa to check on her sister.

But there was no mother to accompany him this time, no little brother shadowing him. He was just a sad drunk, and she had apparently grown up in the intervening time into quite the busybody.

[crow]

"Say," he said, "could you..." She looked to him immediately, her eyes narrowed. He held up his hands in a placating gesture. "Peace, cousin. I just wanted to ask you not to tell Aunt Rinh. That I'm... here." And the rest of it, but he thought she would get the gist of it with that. It hurt, a little, to see her features soften in understanding, her ears drooping involuntarily.

"If that's what you want," she said, and for once she didn't sound like she was judging him for his decision.

[crow]

"You betcha," said Koh'a, aiming finger guns at her. The soft expression on her face soured into a frown.

"I don't know why I'm bothering with you," she said, folding her arms. "That's it, we're done here. Iri." The carbuncle snapped to attention as she called its name. "Don't forget. Keep your eye on him, got it?"

"I was hoping you'd forgotten," said Koh'a, though frankly even he knew that was too much to hope for at this point.

[crow]

"I have better things to do than to babysit you, but we'll talk later," said Senah. With a wave of her tail, she turned and walked off, probably en route to whatever those better things were.

... Taking his drink with her, he noted. What a buzzkill. "I paid for that drink myself," he said to the carbuncle, who inclined its head at him. "She could've at least paid me back for it if she was going to steal it, you know?"

[crow]

Except of course she wouldn't do that, since she had been trying to stop him from drinking. And he had explained to her that he wasn't broke and didn't need her money. Maybe he shouldn't have done that. Maybe it would have been better to have her pay for his room and board.

Well, it was too late for that now. And something about it wouldn't have sat right with him. He wasn't above conning a bit of money off the odd stranger, but doing it to family felt different, somehow.

[crow]

Maybe it was just that anything to do with family felt different now, in the face of what had happened to him. Even if he didn't know Aunt Rinh or her kids all that well, he knew enough to say they were good people.

That was why he hadn't wanted anything to do with him.

"It was a mistake to come here," he said to the carbuncle. Briefly, he wondered if it would relay what he said to Senah, but he decided that even if it did, it didn't matter.