<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c4/a2/eb/c4a2eb3622a5fd5f4149b8e094a22fa3.jpg)</div><strong>Name: </strong>Danae Vine-Lott<br/><strong>Location: </strong>The Charlotte, Saloon<br/><strong>Wearing: </strong>White cotton jodhpurs, loose grey muslin riding shirt with collar open and sleeves rolled up, barefoot<br/><strong>Content: </strong>Peering into the mists<br/><strong>Tagging: </strong>Jacqueline, Hannah, Camille<br/><br/><hr/><br/>"An officer, yes," she said distractedly - she usually relished telling tales of her campaigns in the defence of Mordentshire, but the occasion seemed oddly inappropriate, "and the mists came down when I was on campaign, too - for we had a hard time of chasing off goblins and their ilk in the dead of night with no stars and the heavy mists all around us.  Still, this hangs over us like a pall."<em>A funeral shroud, I should say</em>, but there was no sense in frightening the ladies.  Hands clenched to the balustrade, she peered into the waters, and found their impenetrable and inky surface unbroken.  "Have any of you been on this route before?  Have you ever encountered such dead stillness?"<br/><br/>She righted herself again and stepped back from the deckside.  "Lady Rodes-Taving," she said at length, startled by the sudden touch - even though her hand had crept up Garsenda's shift in the saloon with much soldier's aplomb, sudden human contact on the deck, her mind preoccupied with thoughts of witching moons and impenetrable mists, was disconcerting. "Of which spirit do you speak?" Her head throbbed when she uttered the word. The spirits spoke when the winds rattled the roof the manor up in the moors. Her wife never heard them, but she did. Phantasms chained to the will of maleficent sorceresses. "And you, then, how do you sleep, Milady, when the air presses on your chest and settles in your lungs like treacle? What do you take?"  The thought that anyone could lull herself to a natural sleep on the ship was inconceivable.  She had slept poorly since she had boarded, but had thus far refrained from taking her anodyne. Only generous doses of claret cup, cold madeira, and iced rum with lime had kept her in a sufficient stupor to even attempt sleeping.  "Does it bring dreams?" Hers were filled with images of burning wicker men, masked red-headed girls with long, black-painted nails, and demented chanting coming from her cellar.<em>A Black Sabbath in my own home!</em>.<br/><br/>The wood of the ship groaned, a growl from deep within its bowels.  Danae turned and fixed Jacqueline with haunted eyes, "You are Dementlieuese, Lady Jacqueline," she said, and was in no mood for familiarity, not least because soldiering had accustomed her to addressing fellow warriors by title rather than by name, "doubtless you know these seas far better than I do, for I am a dragoon, not a marine. Is there anything to fear in the mists, in the darkness?"  She spoke with steady cadence, though a sense of unease had swept through her. She felt like she needed her carbine or her rapier, or even a knife, but to carry such weapons into the saloon would have been gauche.  Still, she regretted her choice. Nervously, she circled her poesy ring around a clenching finger, before deciding to take it off.  She did not wish to be reminded of Abigail, and was disinclined to answer in detail questions of her troubled marriage. The country club gossips assembled around her doubtless noticed though.  It was not a difficult deduction to make - she was a Morderntish officer of some standing, after all - marriage was a prerequisite for entry into respectable society.