OPEN: Cloudreach Event

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone at Skyhold
WHAT: Cloudreach showers bring weird shit.
WHEN: Cloudreach 15 onward
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: For information about the illness, its effects, and its cure, please make sure to also read the OOC Post.

This high in the mountains, snowstorms are to be expected. But this one is large and lingering, hanging over the valley and the fortress for days. In Skyhold, with its eternal spring, the snow becomes rain before it hits the ground, leaving inhabitants and visitors to wade through puddles and mud in the courtyards. In the valley, snow and ice accumulate under cloud cover—and worse, when the clouds finally thin, a whole winter's accumulation of snow begins to melt in the sunlight.

Within a day, the ground is sodden and mucky enough to give the survivors of the Fallow Mire (or Ferelden in general) unpleasant flashbacks, and those who live in tents are issued additional hastily-constructed wooden pallets to raise their floors above the mud. It is worse outside the fortress: streams and rivers have overflowed their banks, rapids run twice as fast as normal, and flash flooding has made even road travel treacherous.

On Cloudreach 17 a mudslide buries the pass into Skyhold from the west, and on the 19th a sheet of snow loosened from a mountainside collapses into the shadowed passage from the east. An Inquisition supply caravan is caught in the latter, scattering wagons and goods across the hillside and leaving a dozen people and horses in need of rescue and medical care.

Healers may find themselves stretched thin, as in addition to the usual rash of blisters and sniffles that come from days of rain and flooding, an illness begins to sweep through Skyhold's ranks from around the 16th onward. It's marked first by climbing fever, then by flashes at the edges of vision—green light and jagged formations that aren't there, beings of light and shadow gathering around people or clustering in corners—and distant voices, coherent for brief moments if you're quiet and still and not trying too hard to listen.

Comments

tent

[doneisdone]

Teren has managed to evade the sickness by her own means, perhaps treating the water with more than boiling, but now she is in full crisis mode as she makes her way around to care for the invalid Wardens.

Making a point of visiting every tent from which she hasn't seen anyone enter or exit for a while, Teren pokes her head in just in time to see Velanna boiling tea.
"I wouldn't drink that," she brusquely cautions, "unless it's snow you're boiling, you're like to make yourself sicker."

[failedfirst]

Velanna looks up at the sudden intrusion a little sullenly, she doesn't like uninvited visitors even when she's healthy.

"I've boiled and strained this water to keep minerals from the riverbed from interacting with my ingredients. It's fine." It's probably fine. She usually didn't bother with the extra step of straining, but with what she was working with she didn't want to accidentally poison herself.

[doneisdone]

"...if you're certain," Teren says, an eyebrow skeptically arched, though she's not about to argue the point with a grown and capable woman. "I'll be nearby if you should need more blankets, or what have you."

[failedfirst]

"I'm... fairly certain," Now that Teren has her thinking about it, she isn't totally sure. She frowns at the cup for a moment, before looking up at the older warden.

"What else would you suggest?" She really is sick, if she's actually asking for suggestions.

[doneisdone]

"Boil the snow, if you can. Or take water from my kettles, none of which have touched the well or the river." It's unusually cautious even for Teren, but this situation requires unusual caution.
"Otherwise, yarrow tea for the fever. I'll bring you some packets if you wish it." She doesn't want anyone going out in the cold without good reason.