faderift | Kingsway Rifter Arrival

WHO: New rifters & their rescuers
WHAT: People fall out of a rift and get attacked by stuff
WHEN: Kingsway 8
WHERE: The coast of the Waking Sea in northern Orlais, just west of the mountains.
NOTES: The arrival log is open to all. Solas was able to alert the Inquisition to the general area where the new rifters would be arriving so people could be sent to pick them up.

You were asleep--deeply or fitfully, for the last time or just resting your eyes for a moment-- and then you were not. And wherever you were was not, anymore, replaced by nothing but the sensation of falling, tumbling into endless, bottomless nothing. If this were still a dream, you would wake before you hit the ground. You can't die in a dream, they say. In some worlds.

In this world, you're plunged down through warm, sticky sea air and full-body into salt water. It's shallow enough to stand and keep your head above the rolling waves--but you'll need to do more than that to live. Overhead, there's a flaring, shifting, green-lit tear in reality. Around you, there are a number of ghastly figures: some float above, hooded and rasping, poised to freeze the sea around you if you don't get out of it quickly enough, while others are spindly monstrosities that burst up from the sand and rocks beneath your feet and scream as they emerge from the water. Whatever arrived with you floats in the waves, slowly pushed toward the shore, or sinks beneath the surface. It may be wisest to leave it for now and collect it when the area is slightly less demon-infested.

To add to your troubles, there's a narrow splinter of light in the same sickly green as whatever brought you here, now glowing out of the palm of your left hand. It aches, a bone-deep pain that gnaws even through all the distractions.

But there's help, on the shore.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He likes the sort that fall through a rift and come back to themselves fighting. Thranduil doesn’t have any problem with those that can’t, or won’t—never trained, never needed to train, couldn’t lift a sword—but it cuts the number down of what he needs to fight by, well, cutting them down. Some even hold their own and don’t need to be dragged back to shore. Thus Corvo spares himself of Thranduil’s attentions in the middle of the fight—

Though he’s still subject to them later, while drying off by a fire that night.

Thranduil has stripped down to breaches, and is still soaking wet, recently having seen the ocean for the first time and spent the afternoon after the fight ended swimming in it. He wrings out his hair as he approaches Corvo, confident in how he moves, shoulders back, an effortless grace and otherworldliness in how he moves, how he—is it a trick of the light?—faintly glows.

“You know Duinenor.” A statement of fact; he neatly seats himself beside (perhaps two feet between them) Corvo on the logs set up round the fire. “Or perhaps it is better to say he knows you.”

Corvo would like to think that he is not a particularly proud man, one given to vanity. And he would also like to think that whatever pride in his appearance that he did possess could not be crushed by an ethereal, graceful, glowing, soaking wet man strutting around like he was trying to get selected to be the cover model for the next Young Prince of Tyvia novel.

He decides that the fire is a more worthy place for his eyes to rest.

His first thought is to apologize to the man, he's never heard of anyone with such a name. But after a moment's thought, it occurs to him that there is only one person that matches that description, one person that he could claim any knowledge of in this strange world. "Is--" He pauses for a moment, and decides not to attempt to butcher the unusual name with a poor attempt at voicing it. "--that name what you call the Outsider?" Another nickname, perhaps? Or--maybe his true name, though the idea of the Outsider even possessing one strikes Corvo as odd.

Thranduil smiles, crossing his legs, inclining his head in an affirmative gesture. “’The Outsider’ is a title; adding ‘the’ seems… pretentious.” And alienating. Too bad, buddy, you’re a member of the immortals club here, not the founder, president, and treasurer. The positive of that being that Duinenor isn’t the outsider anymore, not truly—or so Thranduil aspires, seeking to make him seem less alone.

(He cannot imagine—or cares not to—the loneliness of it.)

“Duinenor,” he repeats, slow and long, careful to be clear. “How did he come to know you?”

"Pretentious." Corvo repeats, and looks...a bit amused, truthfully. He hadn't thought about it like that, but there was certainly truth to it, now that he did. And it suited the Outsider, really. The odd part was that this man seemed to think that the pretentiousness of the name wasn't fitting.

But he has questions, and Corvo focuses his thoughts on those, instead. It certainly wasn't an easy one, because he truthfully...isn't entirely sure.

"The same way he knows...everyone, I suspect." That's not a good answer, and Corvo squints at the fire, absent-mindedly worrying his lip as he tries to expand on it. Certainly, it's nothing he's ever had to explain before. "He simply knows. He's seen our pasts, he can look at the paths of the future, and he watches the present unfold. Like a child with a jar of ants." There's a pause, and a small, annoyed look.

"A jar which he enjoys shaking, on occasion."

It's hard not to laugh at that image, and Thranduil does the Thranduil-equivalent of laughing- he smirks, and turns back from Corvo to look at the roaring fire, letting the light throw shadows across his face that make him look both more and less human as they move.

"He had no one to hold him accountable." Which implies Thranduil is the one playing parent to him when no such thing is true. He corrects- or clarifies- himself easily. "He had no kin. You act as if you are not ants to him. You cannot love an ant. You cannot build a relationship with an ant. Could they understand you, your truest thoughts and speech? And if they could, what then- they are ants. They will die."

Lonely, but for his whales. It was unacceptable for someone so old to be so alone, so uncombed and unsung to.

He rests his hands in his lap. "Though, Duinenor is young."

Corvo has heard a great many things as of late that are hard to wrap his head around. Incredible things, that he never could have imagined. And yet, none of them were quite as personal, and deeply baffling as everything that has just fallen out of Thranduil's mouth. He sits there in stunned silence as he tries to process everything, and pick out just how to possibly start pulling that apart.

"You have a fair point, but I still doubt that he sees us--me--as anything more. An ant that may entertain, for now, but an ant nevertheless. And one day I will stop entertaining, and one day, I'll die." Maybe at the same time, maybe not. It hardly matters. He shrugs, staring hard at the fire. How the Outsider viewed him was a mystery that Corvo rarely dwelled on, but the idea that he was anything more than a passing diversion had never crossed his mind. A fleeting entertainment that would pass. In a hundred years, he'll be a few sentences mentioned in passing to the next person to catch his attention.

"That's not to say that I'm not grateful for his help," He adds, as an afterthought. "But he didn't give it to me out of goodwill. He was just...curious."

"I did not say he does." No, the Outsider might build something approaching friendship with Thranduil- at least they were comfortable around one another, thought in the same ways about many things- but the Outsider might wish to return home once the chance was offered. They might know one another for but a few, fleeting years. Thranduil reaches up to unbraid his hair, combs his fingers through it and wring the water free.

"Curious or otherwise, he aided you." What did the whys matter, in the end? There is a bit of seaweed in his hair; he flicks it into the fire. "Perhaps it is better that it was not done out of goodwill. Attachment will bring only sadness when you die."

"I suppose so." Corvo can think of little else to say on the matter, and isn't one to prolong conversations any longer than necessary. Particularly when the conversation is so...odd, in a way beyond the other odd conversations he has had since arriving. Most of them involved very little talking on his part, it was all explanations, telling him about this world. Talking about his own world is. Strange.

But he does have to wonder about these questions, and after a few moments, he turns to size the other man up, face solemn. "What do you want to know, exactly? I feel like I'm not answering the questions that you have."

Thranduil is content to wait and dry, allowing Corvo to dictate the bounds of the conversation, so the silence is comfortable enough for him. Thranduil turns his attention from the flames to Corvo, and gestures with his palms open.

"I do not think you can. I do not think any can." And they'd be too revealing, if asked. Instead, he settles his hands in his lap again, and wishes for a comb.

"Did you make a bargain with him? A deal of some sort?"

Kingsway Rifter Arrival

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