"sent shivers down my spine / body's aching all the time"

Well, I believe I'm done writing for the day. The back of my head is weighty and dragging, so I'm fairly sure I shouldn't be doing something as complex as stringing words together for public consumption. You, fair readers of my blogging, are exempt, as you have certainly seen me in worse condition.

Anyway, here's the final fancy meter for the day:

8,312 / 80,000 (10.4%)

Let me look up a vaguely interesting bit of writing. Let me know what you think eh?

~~~

The Abbey was, technically, public, so taking a walk up it wasn't illegal. Derik took advantage of Danielle's foisted-on presence by linking arms with her and kissing her cheek whenever someone passed them by, which was frequent at that hour of the mid-evening. This was causing vibrations and tremors to shoot through Danielle Derik could feel these, but knew she had enough sense not to shout at him in the middle of something. That is, he thought, provided I don't insult something she's read, and he winced at the images that flung themselves on the shadow screen of his memory. He took in a lungful of spring air, laced as it was with the decaying chill of winter passed.

The walking path ground underneath Derik's feet, as it always did outside a heavy rain or snowfall. The hill was primarily a kind of obsidian, more permeable than what one might find near a volcano or so Danielle had rattled off once told what the hill was called and topped by a layer of topsoil and dirt. This meant the whole mess was stable enough, but the surface bits tended to shift around, either under one's foot or climactic weather. Most of the mansions built on the site reached all the way down to the blackglass, a fact that had settled into Derik's mind and wouldn't leave well enough alone.

Hello, sirrah, Derik said to some well-dressed passerby with a tall hat and shiny buttons on his waistcoat. He could see gloved hands tighten around a walking stick, but he swept Danielle, still attached to Derik's side by their intertwined arms, to the left, putting her in the gentleman's line of sight. Then he started running and laughing; Danielle was forced to keep up, for once, and nearly broke her neck because of her long skirt. Derik laughed at this, until she slapped him, at which he sobered just a bit, grabbed her hand, and peered around through the cooling air. He spotted two guards in the red and white livery of his target and pulled Danielle toward them with both hands. Here's a good spot, he said, in a practiced kind of whisper that probably carried down the hill and into Triton Square. The guards jabbed each other with elbows, looked at the sky in a way that just happened to put Danielle and Derik in their line of sight, and laughed, great guffaws of raucous laughter.

Danielle squeaked when she noticed them, and clenched Derik's arm against her with the tensile strength of steel with its good name being dragged through the metaphorical mud though Danielle's skirt was festooned with a bit of literal mud, as the air was quite damp and her skirt unmanageably long. This didn't help her attitude much, and each round splatter-weight on her clothing added to the force behind her squeezing. Derik's hand tingled, and he pulled her along, leaving the guards out of sight as they rounded one end of the ellipse of Pinkeye Parlor.

As soon as they did round that smooth wall-space, Danielle pulled herself from Derik's clutch really, released him from a clamp of great strength and threatening aspect and slapped him. His hand went toward his face, but his probing fingers made the stinging worse, so he lowered his hands to his waist, hoping to look unthreatening. He tried to smile in a comforting manner, but the excitement of the moment, combined with his good humor at the joke he'd played, served to stretch the smile too far and reveal far too many teeth. Danielle pulled a hand back as though she meant to punch Derik in the nose, but she crossed her arms under her breasts and glowered at her friend. Well, she said after a moment, what do you have to say for yourself, you smarmy little jerk, you.

Several replies romped about in his skull, tugging at various nerves to catch his attention. Getting back at you had a ring to it, and Taking you for one of those romantic evening walks one reads about was a strong contender, but the slowly lessening pulse of pain in his face curbed these. Finally he slapped a hand against the cool marble exterior of the building and said, Slipping past all the guards so we could break into this place. With that, he scrambled up the wall, through a window that sat at least two stories about the ground which, itself, was high and tilted just in the way that a falling person would probably bounce and roll straight into Triton Square, or the adjoining fishmonger's stand, before stopping.

Derik was through the window and prodding everything in sight with his fingers before Danielle could figure out quite how he had scaled the wall in the first place. He hadn't stopped to check if she were following, didn't bother about a piece of advice for her first, mentored-session as a thief. There was a small knife jammed between two loose stones, but this wasn't a particularly enlightening piece of evidence, as it was eight or nine feet from the ground.