Altria Jital

((BACKSTORY CURRENTLY BEING REVISED. Keeping this up for posterity for now.))

"What about you?"

The boisterous young girl glances up from her half-empty mug to the patron opposite her, across the heavy wooden table.

"Eh?"

"Where you're from, your history. Can't just lemme buy you a drink and then blabber on about meself the whole time, haha!"

He takes another huge gulp from his mug, seemingly unphased by the drink. The girl, in contrast, can already feel her senses being muddled, her judgment slipping. She puts on a carefree smirk and waves him off.

"It's boring, boring. Don't sweat it."

"Can't call a person's existence boring, can ye lass? Gimme the short n' simple at least."

He leans in just ever so slightly closer, while Altria leans ever so slightly away. A small sigh, and another sip of her drink.

"Alright, alright. Truth is, I don't remember anything from before a few years ago. I lived by myself in the Shroud for a while, and now I'm here. Boring."

"Nothin'?"

Dammit, he still seems interested.

"Nothing."

Her eyes shut, and the miqo'te keeps her gaze turned away, as if to subtly cue him to stop asking. Another sip of her drink.

She wasn't nearly drunk enough to confide her actual past to him. The lifetime of growing up as a second-class citizen in Garlemald. The childhood dreams of being a hero, an adventurer. The resignation to a studious life as she began her training as a Garlean engineer.

The glass is raised to her lips again for another hefty gulp of swill before Altria realizes that he'd kept talking. She stealthily rolls her eyes as she turns away and rests her chin in a palm, disinterested.

"Can we be done talking about it? I told you it's boring."

He seems to take the hint, and an awkward silence falls over the conversation, even as the other patrons around them more than fill in that vacuum with their own noise.

That's right, it was boring. She could wax philosophical and moral all she wanted about how she didn't believe in the Garlean's extermination plan, about how her position at the Castrum Meridianium was that of a murderer. Though those things were true, the shameful truth deep in her heart was that she simply didn't want the boring life of a soldier, of an engineer. It was a hobby, but nothing more. The true fire in her soul yearned for adventure, to discover and explore lost ruins, to battle voidsent and rescue helpless men and maidens from certain destruction. If she had to choose a side in that legendary battle between Ultima and Eorzea, she would gladly have chosen to raise a blade against the monster she'd partially helped to create, solely because the side of the underdog was the side of the hero.

Her hand absentmindedly moves to her pouch and gently grazes the notebook she now kept, the one containing her writing, her stories, her dreams. They were just fantasies before, dead before ever being given a chance at life, but ever since that day, when Ultima fell and the Immortal Flames raided her Castrum, ever since the day that little Garlean girl officially died, those fantasies had been given life in her place.

She sets her glass back down onto the table and rises from her seat, casually stretching.

"Well, if you're done then I'm done. Here's a few gil for the drink." The muddled clack of metal on wood barely sounds out above the roar of the patrons around them. The man across from her half-rises as well, as if to stop her.

"Wait are you going alre-"

"Yeah." She doesn't wait to let him finish as she cracks her knuckles, the contemplation not leaving her in much of a mood to talk. "That's it for me."

And if I have my way, she thought as her mind's eye traveled the Castrum Meridianum once again, it always will be.