This is the first time in a while Erik's been on a mission with a group of people where he can just shoot the shit with whomever and not worry about who they're taking out at the end of the day. It's a dragon, for fuck's sake; his life has gotten thoroughly weird since he died.

Anyway.

Traveling by horseback in a group? A little boring. Especially when one person does not take off the helmet for any reason, and two of them are having some kinda fight that Erik, at least half on purpose, knows very little about.

"Do y'all... play games or tell jokes or any shit while you do this or is it just hoping some wild animal breaks the monotony?"

So this is nice, actually, though Erik is spending a lot of time in the products section of this experience, Mostly he's looking for something thick enough to be used as a binding for his locs. Months in a different world and his hair has gotten longer than he's used to, and a little messy. So he picks up bottles, reads them, opens them, sniffs them, and puts a little on his fingers before he settles on something that seems like it'll work and not have him smelling like night-blooming jasmine or whatever.

The last thing he needs is his hair to get attacked by pollinators or to be sniffed out by something else unpleasant.

Erik is in black and dark blues, his mask of nothing in particular but set in the same colors; he'd felt conflicted about that detail, but there aren't many large cats in this part of Thedas and he didn't know what else to do about it, so. Here they are. No one knows it bothers him anyway, so he's going to pretend it doesn't.

He's really good at pretending.

This is probably part of why he's with Diplomacy, actually; he's good at this part of things, anyway. He has on gloves, but doesn't hide that he's with Riftwatch; his accent places him as foreign and he plays that up. It doesn't hurt that he understands more Orlesian than he speaks at this point — he knows enough to explain himself but the rest has to be conducted in Trade. This means that people talk around him like he doesn't understand, and he smiles and nods and dances in just the right places to be seen as an enjoyable company for the evening.

These folks are the worst, quite literally. They keep talking about picnicking and it raises his hackles for unknown reasons. But he smiles, and nods, and eventually makes his way over to someone he knows.

"I think we're gonna have an audience tomorrow."

[ Do your best or your worst, I'm not in charge of you. ]