[MINGLE] Color Coordination: The Announcement

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Inn
WHEN: Morning, 18 April
OPEN TO: ALL - This is a mingle post
NOTES: Details may be found here

---

In the often-bustling front room of the inn there sits a large, old-style chalboard on a wooden stand. Chalk is a precious commodity, but limestone can be found easily, and both sides of the board are often covered with notes and notices from villagers.

This morning, the board has been wiped clean and a much different message has appeared on its worn gray surface:

Jude Sullivan and Francis Mulcahy have been exposed to toxic spores and will slowly drown if a counter-agent is not procured.

A yellow lichen is needed. It only grows on a small stand of trees in marshland two days to the southeast. There is no other antidote.

The following people have coordinates for the lichen loaded into their wrist devices. Only they may retrieve it, and only if they work together. If anyone else attempts this, the expedition will fail.

Peggy Carter
Beverly Crusher
Jean-Luc Picard
Owen Prichard
Margaery Tyrell
Mark Watney

Hurry. Soon it will be too late.

Comments

[king_in_the_north]

"I don't know," Robb replied. "I can't even begin to imagine. If they're sending a message here, I don't know what it is. But she can't go." He turned to Jon, his face pinched. "How am I supposed to allow her to go when nearly anyone else would have been a better choice?"

But if she didn't go, what of Jude? What of the Father? Would their deaths be the sharp lesson they'd all worried was looming for so long?

[tooktheblack]

"But what if they need her and it fails without her?" Jon argued. He didn't want Margaery to go either, of course, but he had been in the village long enough to know sometimes instructions were meant to be heeded even if they seemed implausible.

"There's nothing to say we can't go with her," he said. "I could go with them and make sure she's safe."

[king_in_the_north]

"But there is," Robb replied, and motioned toward the message. "If anyone else attempts this, the expedition will fail. How are we to know if that only applies to replacing those listed, or anyone else at all? Unless a lightning bolt brings the answer from these petty gods, we've no way of knowing." And that meant, of course, that Margaery had to go.

Robb squeezed his eyes closed, pulling in a breath through his nose. "If anything happens to her out there, Jon, I swear..." What? What could he swear? What retaliation could he possibly bring against those who had placed them all here?

[tooktheblack]

"We'll avenge it," Jon said, reaching out to clasp Robb's shoulder. "But let's not have so little faith in Margaery that she might fail. She is going with others and she has been here in the village for a while. She isn't the same as she was in Westeros, I imagine."

Jon hadn't known her there but he knew how ladies were raised, considering Sansa, and Margaery had to have had a similar upbringing.

[king_in_the_north]

"Far from it, I would say," Robb allowed, thinking of Margaery mucking about with her cow and sheep, sewing her own clothing and stoking her own fires. There was no doubt she'd become plenty self-sufficient, but that didn't make the idea of having her tromp off through the wilderness much more palatable.

"There are worse people she could be going with," he assented, if only because it was becoming rapidly clear to him that his personal opinion on all of this was good for absolutely nothing.

[tooktheblack]

"This is true. Many of them are capable and I cannot imagine they'd want to see her hurt. The one thing about this place is that it is not Westeros. We help one another here. It isn't everyone for themselves the way I'm used to having to live."

Jon didn't like having to put his confidence in others to keep Margaery safe but in this, he had to, and he had to rely upon the others going out to keep her from harm. It worried him immensely but he tried to hide it as best he could from Robb.

"They will care for her out there."