You walked away from the vendor with your newly bartered items. A smile was on your face and you couldn't help but feel a swell of pride. You'd assumed you'd worked the price down with your own amazing charisma, though you found that Astarion had stood behind you, shooting daggers at the vendor the entire time. You furrowed your brows and went to give some kind of "chewing out" of him, but you found you couldn't summon up enough anger or annoyance to actually tell at him. With a disgruntled huff, you instead just walked past him, resigned to stewing in your own anger for a while. You knew he didn't mean you any harm with it. If anything he meant the opposite, intending to try and look out for you since he had decided that you apparently couldn't do it yourself. It wasn't that you were scrawny or malnourished, you were simply just small. You came up to Astarion's hip. Astarion had a particular prejudice against really any small races, but he had worked to overcome that in the process of manipulating you to his will. He found that he was faking a smile less and less whenever he greeted you, he spent more time attempting to think over or prepare a compliment to toss your way whenever you set up camp.

This also came with the unintentional consequence of him acting almost patronizingly whenever you did anything. You found that you weren't allowed to do something without Astarion following after to either toss his own charisma around or attempt to intimidate whoever crossed paths with you. It made you feel as if he was treating you like a child, but you had to admit, having a vampire spawn there to threaten someone's wellbeing just to ensure you got whatever information you needed from any given person at any given time wasn't one of the worst things you'd ever had to deal with.