The Life and Times of Quentin Quigley Moore (Warcraft)
So there was this whole contest thing where Blizzard wanted people to send in stories. Well, I sent, and while I never checked who won, I never heard from them so I'm guessing it wasn't me. :D But, because I'll let it languish in my harddrive for all time if I don't put this somewhere, have a short story.
And if none of you get the joke I'll be really annoyed. ;D
Title: The Life and Times of Quentin Quigley Moore
Universe: Warcraft
~*~
When Quentin Quigley Moore was a young boy, he wanted to be a Princess when he grew up. His mother, a herbalist of little renown, would smile vaguely when her son brought up this aspiration, and would airily declare, "You can do whatever you want, my darling," as she stirred potion additions that were not generally recommended by most health practitioners but which were very popular with her customers.
His father, a more practical man, had simply taken on a hunted expression when confronted with a son whose tufted blonde hair was highlighted by a cheap tin tiara. The last thing he ever said to Quentin had been when the boy had turned up in front of him in a pink petticoated dress, and he what he said was: "Doesn't suit your complexion, y'know."
Not long after that, his father was spotted with his pack slung over his shoulder, heading in the direction of Stranglethorn Vale, muttering about spending time 'communing with the beasts'.
None of this information is particularly relevant, but does tend to explain a lot about Quentin himself.
**
As Quentin grew older, and he came to realise that the life-goal of Princess was not only biologically improbable, but somewhere outside his income bracket, he had to find new heights to aspire to. As he came rather late to the concept of 'job-seeking', his early attempts at finding a suitable career path were inspired more by nursery rhymes than any true desire to work in a particular field.
It was not, then, very surprising that Quentin ended his first day as a baker having started a fire that would have burned down more than the bakery and the tailor's shop next door if Stormwind hadn't had such a ready supply of water to douse the flames with. His attempts at candlemaking were cut short after a complaint from a customer nearly resulted in an arrest for indecency. The city guards, fortunately for Quentin, accepted that it wasn't his fault that the candles had come out the way they had, and he hadn't meant to scandalise old Mavis Enderby and give her heart a turn that at her age she really couldn't afford. The fact that young Eliza Enderby had found his work quite enthralling hadn't been enough to save his job.
The local butchers, fortunately for all concerned, pre-emptively barred Quentin from working in their shops, and so he was forced to look further afield for work. It seemed to him that the life of a travelling rogue was, obviously, for him, and so one day, declared,
"Mother! I'm going to seek my fortune."
His mother had been busy pulling a back of her herbal brownies from the oven and had waved an oven mitt vaguely in his direction when he spoke. "Bring me back some fresh milk, dear," she told him, "We're all out."
So Quentin tucked his battered sword (freshly purchased for a few coppers that he'd dug out of a fountain when no one was looking) into his belt, and slung his bag over his back, and made his way to the gates of Stormwind, whistling merrily to himself, eyes bright with visions of the future as a rich and feted hero of Azeroth.
Six steps outside of the gates, he was held up at knifepoint for his sword, his bag, and the two freshly-made brownies he'd stolen from his mother's baking tray before leaving. He was forced to go back, his heart heavy but undeterred.
On his fourth attempt to seek his fortune in far-off lands, Quentin made it as far as the edge of the Westfall region before he was clubbed over the back of the head by an unseen assailant. By the time he woke up, everything he had with him had been taken, including the very shirt off his back. Quentin generally accepted, however, that it was his own fault for wearing such a fetching shade of turquoise.
**
"It seems to me," Quentin said to his very dear friend Berthold Stoutbeard (known more commonly as 'Berty'), "That I must be going about this the wrong way."
Berty, who up to that point had been trying to win a bet by attempting to fit his head into his beer stein, scoffed and shook his head. "I don't know why you're so obsessed with working, lad. It's a chump's game." He waved his stein illustratively, and the little mead that hadn't ended up in his hair slopped over the side. "See, all ye need to do is figure out a little system."
Quentin looked at him sceptically.
"Fer example," Berty slurred, "If ye takes the pelts of say, oh, five wolves, you'll get a fair half dozen coppers a piece for each of them down at the tanner. You could go out and get 'em yerself, risking life and tin-"
"Limb," Quentin corrected. "Life and limb."
"I know what I said!" Berty barked, slamming the stein on the bar and bellowing, "Wench! More mead!" at the beleaguered barmaid.
"For the last time," she said, with an annoyed sigh, "My name's Welch."
"I know what I said," Berty repeated, in a grunt, but the fact that Welch did, in fact, refill his stein seemed to mollify him somewhat. "Now, eh... where was I?"
"Life and tin?"
"Ah yes!" Berty leaned in towards Quentin conspiratorially. Quentin leaned away. Berty could fell a dragon at fifty paces with his breath. "So you find yerself some bright-eyed young thing with a pointy stick and buckets of optimism, and you tell them you'll give 'em two coppers each for every wolf pelt they bring you..."
Quentin gasped, drawing back. "Isn't that dishonest?"
Berty laughed like it was the best joke he'd ever heard. "It's business, lad! Business! You only get the really new adventurers, the ones who haven't had the shine worn off 'em yet, but here I am, drinking in the middle of the day, and it's not because of family money that's for sure. Heh heh!"
Quentin was suddenly wondered where exactly his few coppers that had been repeatedly taken from him had gone. "I don't think it's the right thing for me," he said, dubiously.
Berty pondered that, and while he was pondering, he finished off his mead. He called for a refill, and after he'd finished that, suggested, "Well, why don't ye go into real estate? There's always a sucker looking for a plot of land in the Swamp o' Sorrows."
Quentin sighed in a put upon fashion. "If I were going to do something illegal, I rather think I should go the whole way. Do something really illegal, rather than just 'a bit shady'."
Berty belched loudly and slapped him on the arm. "There y'are, my lad! Seems to me like you've got a plan. Told you your old friend Berty'd help ye!"
Quentin opened his mouth to protest that Berty hadn't helped at all, unless one counted racking up a bar bill as 'helping', but Berty was sliding off his tavern stool, asleep before he even hit the ground. Quentin stared down at him, and thought that Berty perhaps did have rather a good idea there. He was distracted from his contemplations by a stomping of heeled boots, as Welch the barmaid came to stand over him, fists on her hips, glaring.
"You'd better be dragging him out," she said, indicating the snoring Berty with a jerk of her chin, "I'll not have him cluttering up my tavern."
Quentin, however, had decided that he was going to pursue his dream of the last few minutes, and enter the glamorous world of crime. In that vein, he decided, he should start as he meant to go on.
"Never!" he cried, in what he thought was a daring tone. "You'll have to catch me first!"
He'd barely gotten off his stool when Welch's hand snapped out and grabbed his ear, bringing him to a sudden and painful halt. "You'll drag him out," she said, "Or I'll tell your mother you were here in this den of iniquity, trying to run out on payment."
He whimpered, and quickly acquiesced.
**
It wasn't easy to start up a criminal enterprise, as Quentin quickly found out. If he'd been so inclined to offer illicit candles for sale Eliza Enderby would have happily obliged him by buying the whole stock, but it didn't have the ring of truly ingenious schemes that all great criminals should have, to Quentin's mind.
At first he tried plain thievery. He was of the opinion that you shouldn't run before you could walk, and stealing was about as basic as criminal behaviour got. His career as a cat burglar was cut short after he tripped over a flower pot, fell off the balcony he had taken three attempts to climb up to, and landed in the canals.
After that, he tried to join the Defias Brotherhood, on the grounds that, if nothing else, the red face masks would match his favourite dark brown jacket. After the leader of the local gang had stopped laughing, they stole his boots and made him walk all the way back to Stormwind, saying he was far too entertaining to kill.
He tried running an underground gambling operation, but came a cropper when it turned out that enthusiasm did not make up for the fact that working out the mathematics of odds was slightly beyond him, and after his first round of betting he was in debt by several gold to a heavy set man most of his underlings only called 'Boss'.
Given that the alternatives were to either go to the Stockades or to lose a hand or two, Quentin agreed to work off his debt as Boss's hired muscle. While he was initially enthusiastic about this new job, it didn't end well when he became more upset over his activities than the shopkeeper he was supposed to be extorting, and Boss agreed to release him from his debt if he would just stop crying.
Finally, he accepted his mother's offer to sell her brownies off the back of a wagon tucked down a side street. This he didn't so much consider criminal behaviour as helping her out, after all, her brownies were tasty, but hardly the sort of thing they arrested people over. The last thing he remembered before regaining consciousness on the tramway platform with a plastic duck glued to his head was that it wouldn't hurt if he just had one single slice...
**
"Oh darling," his mother sighed, as she dabbed at the strip of raw skin on his forehead where the duck had been forcibly removed. "Perhaps the working life isn't for you."
Quentin winced. Whatever she was using on his forehead stung like crazy. "I just haven't found the right job yet."
His mother patted him on the head. "Perhaps you'd be better off finding a nice girl and settling down. A nice girl with a lot of money."
Quentin scowled. "You'd prefer I was a kept man?"
"What a splendid suggestion!" his mother said, with great enthusiasm, and she clasped her hands together. "I think you should get started right away!"
"But mother-"
"No buts, darling," his mother sang, as she fussed about the room. "You know, I think I have that lovely yellow shirt somewhere. You always look delightful in it."
He let her bustle about with clothes, reminding himself that she meant well and, really, what was the harm? Maybe she would even be right, and he might find the perfect girl for him. Feeling more enthusiastic, he suggested the green shirt instead.
**
His mother, in the spirit of being helpful, set him up with the daughter of one of her friends, a moderately successful jewellery student who, while fairly pretty, laughed frequently at her own jokes and couldn't stop talking about her crafting business.
"Of course," she told him, "If you gather all the materials yourself, it's a much more profitable endeavour, but, I don't have the time to go traipsing all over Azeroth, and, you know, some of the places where you find the richest veins of ore are dangerous."
"You don't say," he said, and wondered if he could get up on the pretence of ordering a refill at the bar, and somehow slip away when she wasn't looking.
"Yes, and of course, the fact is that one must maximise skill and profit. The more complicated the design, the more I learn, of course, but I must balance how much it costs and how much I'm likely to get by selling it on the open market..."
"Uh-huh," Quentin said, "Oh, would you like another drink?"
So, after the jeweller didn't work out, he met a Draenei woman with an axe half the size of her on her back. He thought that the 'warrior woman' thing was rather hot, horns and hooves or not, but after she kept challenging him to arm wrestle, he decided that she wouldn't have been good for his long term health.
It was, in fact, whilst getting treatment for his fractured wrist after his aborted date with the Draenei that he met a Priestess, who seemed nice, until she started talking about piety and the light of Elune, at which point he realised that steering clear of religious types would be a better idea. He was forced to listen to her sermon anyway, as she wouldn't finish bandaging his arm until she'd completed her recitation.
He tried dating a mage. It all went very well at first. She was genuinely funny, attractive, and was interested in talking about something other than how good her weapons were and the monsters she'd killed lately. Quentin started to let himself believe that maybe his mother didn't have such a bad idea with the whole 'finding a girl' matter, but somewhere after the second drink she caused his shirt sleeve to spontaneously combust. It might have all ended in tragedy, but Welch, whose tavern they had picked for their date, thought quickly, and dumped the contents of the drinks tray she carried over him. Quentin watched, singed and smelling like a brewery, as the mage stammered some sort of apology and fled before Quentin could say anything.
In desperation, he even asked Eliza Enderby out one evening. He returned home to his mother with a faintly haunted expression on his face and refused to talk about what happened.
**
During the post-lunchtime tavern lull, Quentin sat on a stool in front of Welch, and laid his head on the bar. "I never realised that the fairer sex presented such a health hazard," he admitted.
Welch smothered a laugh behind her hand, but he could still see the corner of her mouth twitching, which provided no comfort whatsoever.
"I thought bartenders were supposed to listen to men's woes and not judge," he groused, pulling his head off the bar and picking at the nuts that had stuck to the side of his head.
"That's only bartenders who care," she told him, but pushed a stein of beer over the bar to him anyway.
She'd actually given him a decent mug, rather than just giving him the dregs of the barrels. Quentin looked between Welch and the beer and back again.
"Marry me," he said.
Welch's mouth twitched again, and clear surprise crossed her face. "Excuse me?"
"Why not?" Quentin asked. "Give me one good reason."
Welch rolled her eyes, and sighed with fond exasperation. "Quentin, I am not going to marry you just like that."
Quentin wilted slightly, and stared moodily into his mug.
Welch sniffed, and maybe she felt sorry for him, because her next words were, "On the other hand, the Midsummer Festival starts next week."
He looked up at her hopefully.
"I suppose," she said, "If you were really desperate, we could go to some of the festivities together."
She was clearly only offering because she felt sorry for him. Quentin was quite happy to take that.
**
It would be very easy to say that Quentin lived happily ever after. Of course, being Quentin, he was not nearly so lucky. He eventually married Welch, although when they finally tied the knot, she had threatened to leave him after he and Berty started a barroom brawl by making fun of an Imp, nearly resulting in the whole tavern burning down. They were reasonably happy together, which is all that most people can hope for, and ran the tavern together, if together meant 'keeping Quentin as far away from the business as possible'.
In the end, Quentin wound up doing the only thing possible when one is short on qualifications and rich with life experiences: he became a writer.
And if none of you get the joke I'll be really annoyed. ;D
Title: The Life and Times of Quentin Quigley Moore
Universe: Warcraft
~*~
When Quentin Quigley Moore was a young boy, he wanted to be a Princess when he grew up. His mother, a herbalist of little renown, would smile vaguely when her son brought up this aspiration, and would airily declare, "You can do whatever you want, my darling," as she stirred potion additions that were not generally recommended by most health practitioners but which were very popular with her customers.
His father, a more practical man, had simply taken on a hunted expression when confronted with a son whose tufted blonde hair was highlighted by a cheap tin tiara. The last thing he ever said to Quentin had been when the boy had turned up in front of him in a pink petticoated dress, and he what he said was: "Doesn't suit your complexion, y'know."
Not long after that, his father was spotted with his pack slung over his shoulder, heading in the direction of Stranglethorn Vale, muttering about spending time 'communing with the beasts'.
None of this information is particularly relevant, but does tend to explain a lot about Quentin himself.
**
As Quentin grew older, and he came to realise that the life-goal of Princess was not only biologically improbable, but somewhere outside his income bracket, he had to find new heights to aspire to. As he came rather late to the concept of 'job-seeking', his early attempts at finding a suitable career path were inspired more by nursery rhymes than any true desire to work in a particular field.
It was not, then, very surprising that Quentin ended his first day as a baker having started a fire that would have burned down more than the bakery and the tailor's shop next door if Stormwind hadn't had such a ready supply of water to douse the flames with. His attempts at candlemaking were cut short after a complaint from a customer nearly resulted in an arrest for indecency. The city guards, fortunately for Quentin, accepted that it wasn't his fault that the candles had come out the way they had, and he hadn't meant to scandalise old Mavis Enderby and give her heart a turn that at her age she really couldn't afford. The fact that young Eliza Enderby had found his work quite enthralling hadn't been enough to save his job.
The local butchers, fortunately for all concerned, pre-emptively barred Quentin from working in their shops, and so he was forced to look further afield for work. It seemed to him that the life of a travelling rogue was, obviously, for him, and so one day, declared,
"Mother! I'm going to seek my fortune."
His mother had been busy pulling a back of her herbal brownies from the oven and had waved an oven mitt vaguely in his direction when he spoke. "Bring me back some fresh milk, dear," she told him, "We're all out."
So Quentin tucked his battered sword (freshly purchased for a few coppers that he'd dug out of a fountain when no one was looking) into his belt, and slung his bag over his back, and made his way to the gates of Stormwind, whistling merrily to himself, eyes bright with visions of the future as a rich and feted hero of Azeroth.
Six steps outside of the gates, he was held up at knifepoint for his sword, his bag, and the two freshly-made brownies he'd stolen from his mother's baking tray before leaving. He was forced to go back, his heart heavy but undeterred.
On his fourth attempt to seek his fortune in far-off lands, Quentin made it as far as the edge of the Westfall region before he was clubbed over the back of the head by an unseen assailant. By the time he woke up, everything he had with him had been taken, including the very shirt off his back. Quentin generally accepted, however, that it was his own fault for wearing such a fetching shade of turquoise.
**
"It seems to me," Quentin said to his very dear friend Berthold Stoutbeard (known more commonly as 'Berty'), "That I must be going about this the wrong way."
Berty, who up to that point had been trying to win a bet by attempting to fit his head into his beer stein, scoffed and shook his head. "I don't know why you're so obsessed with working, lad. It's a chump's game." He waved his stein illustratively, and the little mead that hadn't ended up in his hair slopped over the side. "See, all ye need to do is figure out a little system."
Quentin looked at him sceptically.
"Fer example," Berty slurred, "If ye takes the pelts of say, oh, five wolves, you'll get a fair half dozen coppers a piece for each of them down at the tanner. You could go out and get 'em yerself, risking life and tin-"
"Limb," Quentin corrected. "Life and limb."
"I know what I said!" Berty barked, slamming the stein on the bar and bellowing, "Wench! More mead!" at the beleaguered barmaid.
"For the last time," she said, with an annoyed sigh, "My name's Welch."
"I know what I said," Berty repeated, in a grunt, but the fact that Welch did, in fact, refill his stein seemed to mollify him somewhat. "Now, eh... where was I?"
"Life and tin?"
"Ah yes!" Berty leaned in towards Quentin conspiratorially. Quentin leaned away. Berty could fell a dragon at fifty paces with his breath. "So you find yerself some bright-eyed young thing with a pointy stick and buckets of optimism, and you tell them you'll give 'em two coppers each for every wolf pelt they bring you..."
Quentin gasped, drawing back. "Isn't that dishonest?"
Berty laughed like it was the best joke he'd ever heard. "It's business, lad! Business! You only get the really new adventurers, the ones who haven't had the shine worn off 'em yet, but here I am, drinking in the middle of the day, and it's not because of family money that's for sure. Heh heh!"
Quentin was suddenly wondered where exactly his few coppers that had been repeatedly taken from him had gone. "I don't think it's the right thing for me," he said, dubiously.
Berty pondered that, and while he was pondering, he finished off his mead. He called for a refill, and after he'd finished that, suggested, "Well, why don't ye go into real estate? There's always a sucker looking for a plot of land in the Swamp o' Sorrows."
Quentin sighed in a put upon fashion. "If I were going to do something illegal, I rather think I should go the whole way. Do something really illegal, rather than just 'a bit shady'."
Berty belched loudly and slapped him on the arm. "There y'are, my lad! Seems to me like you've got a plan. Told you your old friend Berty'd help ye!"
Quentin opened his mouth to protest that Berty hadn't helped at all, unless one counted racking up a bar bill as 'helping', but Berty was sliding off his tavern stool, asleep before he even hit the ground. Quentin stared down at him, and thought that Berty perhaps did have rather a good idea there. He was distracted from his contemplations by a stomping of heeled boots, as Welch the barmaid came to stand over him, fists on her hips, glaring.
"You'd better be dragging him out," she said, indicating the snoring Berty with a jerk of her chin, "I'll not have him cluttering up my tavern."
Quentin, however, had decided that he was going to pursue his dream of the last few minutes, and enter the glamorous world of crime. In that vein, he decided, he should start as he meant to go on.
"Never!" he cried, in what he thought was a daring tone. "You'll have to catch me first!"
He'd barely gotten off his stool when Welch's hand snapped out and grabbed his ear, bringing him to a sudden and painful halt. "You'll drag him out," she said, "Or I'll tell your mother you were here in this den of iniquity, trying to run out on payment."
He whimpered, and quickly acquiesced.
**
It wasn't easy to start up a criminal enterprise, as Quentin quickly found out. If he'd been so inclined to offer illicit candles for sale Eliza Enderby would have happily obliged him by buying the whole stock, but it didn't have the ring of truly ingenious schemes that all great criminals should have, to Quentin's mind.
At first he tried plain thievery. He was of the opinion that you shouldn't run before you could walk, and stealing was about as basic as criminal behaviour got. His career as a cat burglar was cut short after he tripped over a flower pot, fell off the balcony he had taken three attempts to climb up to, and landed in the canals.
After that, he tried to join the Defias Brotherhood, on the grounds that, if nothing else, the red face masks would match his favourite dark brown jacket. After the leader of the local gang had stopped laughing, they stole his boots and made him walk all the way back to Stormwind, saying he was far too entertaining to kill.
He tried running an underground gambling operation, but came a cropper when it turned out that enthusiasm did not make up for the fact that working out the mathematics of odds was slightly beyond him, and after his first round of betting he was in debt by several gold to a heavy set man most of his underlings only called 'Boss'.
Given that the alternatives were to either go to the Stockades or to lose a hand or two, Quentin agreed to work off his debt as Boss's hired muscle. While he was initially enthusiastic about this new job, it didn't end well when he became more upset over his activities than the shopkeeper he was supposed to be extorting, and Boss agreed to release him from his debt if he would just stop crying.
Finally, he accepted his mother's offer to sell her brownies off the back of a wagon tucked down a side street. This he didn't so much consider criminal behaviour as helping her out, after all, her brownies were tasty, but hardly the sort of thing they arrested people over. The last thing he remembered before regaining consciousness on the tramway platform with a plastic duck glued to his head was that it wouldn't hurt if he just had one single slice...
**
"Oh darling," his mother sighed, as she dabbed at the strip of raw skin on his forehead where the duck had been forcibly removed. "Perhaps the working life isn't for you."
Quentin winced. Whatever she was using on his forehead stung like crazy. "I just haven't found the right job yet."
His mother patted him on the head. "Perhaps you'd be better off finding a nice girl and settling down. A nice girl with a lot of money."
Quentin scowled. "You'd prefer I was a kept man?"
"What a splendid suggestion!" his mother said, with great enthusiasm, and she clasped her hands together. "I think you should get started right away!"
"But mother-"
"No buts, darling," his mother sang, as she fussed about the room. "You know, I think I have that lovely yellow shirt somewhere. You always look delightful in it."
He let her bustle about with clothes, reminding himself that she meant well and, really, what was the harm? Maybe she would even be right, and he might find the perfect girl for him. Feeling more enthusiastic, he suggested the green shirt instead.
**
His mother, in the spirit of being helpful, set him up with the daughter of one of her friends, a moderately successful jewellery student who, while fairly pretty, laughed frequently at her own jokes and couldn't stop talking about her crafting business.
"Of course," she told him, "If you gather all the materials yourself, it's a much more profitable endeavour, but, I don't have the time to go traipsing all over Azeroth, and, you know, some of the places where you find the richest veins of ore are dangerous."
"You don't say," he said, and wondered if he could get up on the pretence of ordering a refill at the bar, and somehow slip away when she wasn't looking.
"Yes, and of course, the fact is that one must maximise skill and profit. The more complicated the design, the more I learn, of course, but I must balance how much it costs and how much I'm likely to get by selling it on the open market..."
"Uh-huh," Quentin said, "Oh, would you like another drink?"
So, after the jeweller didn't work out, he met a Draenei woman with an axe half the size of her on her back. He thought that the 'warrior woman' thing was rather hot, horns and hooves or not, but after she kept challenging him to arm wrestle, he decided that she wouldn't have been good for his long term health.
It was, in fact, whilst getting treatment for his fractured wrist after his aborted date with the Draenei that he met a Priestess, who seemed nice, until she started talking about piety and the light of Elune, at which point he realised that steering clear of religious types would be a better idea. He was forced to listen to her sermon anyway, as she wouldn't finish bandaging his arm until she'd completed her recitation.
He tried dating a mage. It all went very well at first. She was genuinely funny, attractive, and was interested in talking about something other than how good her weapons were and the monsters she'd killed lately. Quentin started to let himself believe that maybe his mother didn't have such a bad idea with the whole 'finding a girl' matter, but somewhere after the second drink she caused his shirt sleeve to spontaneously combust. It might have all ended in tragedy, but Welch, whose tavern they had picked for their date, thought quickly, and dumped the contents of the drinks tray she carried over him. Quentin watched, singed and smelling like a brewery, as the mage stammered some sort of apology and fled before Quentin could say anything.
In desperation, he even asked Eliza Enderby out one evening. He returned home to his mother with a faintly haunted expression on his face and refused to talk about what happened.
**
During the post-lunchtime tavern lull, Quentin sat on a stool in front of Welch, and laid his head on the bar. "I never realised that the fairer sex presented such a health hazard," he admitted.
Welch smothered a laugh behind her hand, but he could still see the corner of her mouth twitching, which provided no comfort whatsoever.
"I thought bartenders were supposed to listen to men's woes and not judge," he groused, pulling his head off the bar and picking at the nuts that had stuck to the side of his head.
"That's only bartenders who care," she told him, but pushed a stein of beer over the bar to him anyway.
She'd actually given him a decent mug, rather than just giving him the dregs of the barrels. Quentin looked between Welch and the beer and back again.
"Marry me," he said.
Welch's mouth twitched again, and clear surprise crossed her face. "Excuse me?"
"Why not?" Quentin asked. "Give me one good reason."
Welch rolled her eyes, and sighed with fond exasperation. "Quentin, I am not going to marry you just like that."
Quentin wilted slightly, and stared moodily into his mug.
Welch sniffed, and maybe she felt sorry for him, because her next words were, "On the other hand, the Midsummer Festival starts next week."
He looked up at her hopefully.
"I suppose," she said, "If you were really desperate, we could go to some of the festivities together."
She was clearly only offering because she felt sorry for him. Quentin was quite happy to take that.
**
It would be very easy to say that Quentin lived happily ever after. Of course, being Quentin, he was not nearly so lucky. He eventually married Welch, although when they finally tied the knot, she had threatened to leave him after he and Berty started a barroom brawl by making fun of an Imp, nearly resulting in the whole tavern burning down. They were reasonably happy together, which is all that most people can hope for, and ran the tavern together, if together meant 'keeping Quentin as far away from the business as possible'.
In the end, Quentin wound up doing the only thing possible when one is short on qualifications and rich with life experiences: he became a writer.