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

cw: violence

[dressmaking]

Around Skyhold

It takes a while, for Lacey to really start to feel ill. Out of all her family, she'd always been the one who rarely got sick, maybe twice a year at best. Even then, after her brother had died in the 50th Games, she'd had to be the strong one, the one who stood up straight and didn't let it get to her. She'd been to the reaping sick before, of all the inopportune times. A cough, a cold or a little fever didn't bother her.

By the time the fever rises high enough to make her begin to feel it — the chills, the dizziness, the pain sensitivity, the exhaustion — she has already decided she's going to put on a brave face. No one needs to see her lose her composure.

Except that she is plainly, obviously ill, flushed and bright-eyed — and there's something wrong with her vision, because she keeps seeing things from the corner of her eye, flashes of light that are gone when she manages to turn her head. And there are voices, like being in one room and overhearing snatches of indistinct conversation from the next room over, but... surely it's just the fever. She's tired. That's all.


Dreams

Lacey is, in fact, so exhausted that she can't keep her head up, no matter how hard she tries. Wherever she is — in the garden, on the upper floor of the tavern, the library, somewhere else in the hold — she can't help but occasionally simply drift off to sleep, a fitful, fevered sleep.

There are flickers, fragments of people, places. Glittering glass towers in a city far more strange, advanced, than anyone from Thedas could ever imagine. Short brown grasses, tiny wildflowers, snow-capped mountains: an unforgiving landscape full of echoes of death, terror, children shouting and screaming. A sword, long and thin with a single wicked glinting edge. That sword used to cut off a girl's arm, to slit a boy's throat. A chaos of falling rocks, crushing to death those not fast enough to escape.

A man (tall, dark, gruff) and a woman (light, slim, red-blond) being shoved to their knees by people in strange white armor, people holding strange objects made of black metal that they point at the pair kneeling on the ground. There's a loud noise — bang — louder than a thunderclap, and then the man and the woman aren't kneeling, but fallen onto their sides, each with a perfectly round hole in the forehead red with blood, crimson starting to pool beneath them.

[wontforgetyou]

Thedas is not Jamie's home. Or, at least, it wasn't until recently. Most of the people here know some of the truth, the strange young man who wears a kilt and sounds like he comes from Starkhaven but claims that he's from a place called Scotland instead. Far fewer know of the part of his life after he left that land, traveling through time and space to alien worlds and futuristic cities and places that defy description, or the monsters that seem to turn up everywhere they go.

When he winds up drifting off in the corner of the garden, his own dreams are of those places, making the first glimpse of those glittering glass towers seem new and different and strangely familiar all at the same time. It may not be a place he's been before, but he could've easily wound up somewhere like there, and he's turning in place, looking for a glimpse of that familiar blue box that he's surely just stepped out of, or the funny little man with the kindly eyes whose ship that "box" really is.

But then there's the familiar sound of what must be gunshots, and he's running towards them heedless of the danger, and then... he snaps out of it, sitting bolt upright in his spot and looking around in confusion. The glass city and the brown grasses are gone, along with the all-too-still forms he'd gotten no more than a glimpse of, leaving him alone with the benches and the plants and the figure of a fitfully sleeping woman nearby. Groggily, he pushes himself to his feet, wobbling slightly as he reaches out to try and shake her awake. If she's anywhere near as sick as she is, she shouldn't be sleeping in the garden any more than he should. Maybe if he can get her awake he can get them both to the healing tents.

"Hey, miss? Miss, can you hear me?"

[dressmaking]

If Lacey were really thinking clearly, the garden was the last place she would have chosen to fall asleep. But the stone bench was cool compared to the heat in her skin, and she had had the thought that if she could just lay down for a few minutes, she'd feel better. Of course, within a few seconds she'd fallen asleep, heedless of anyone else in the vicinity for once.

Which, among other reasons, was why she jerked awake when he shook her shoulder, almost falling off the bench in her haste to try to get away from whoever this stranger was touching her, eyes wide with shock and an instant of terror. Unfortunately, her body was being extraordinarily uncooperative; dizziness overtook her the moment she made her feet, and she closed her eyes, swaying, reaching for something to steady herself and finding only the back of the bench she'd just stumbled off of, her free hand halfway held up as if to ward him off. If this were the Games, she'd be as good as dead, not from the sickness itself but simply from being too ill to defend herself.

It wasn't the Games, though, she tried to tell herself as her sluggish brain tried to separate nightmare from reality. She was in Skyhold, in the garden. Whoever this man was, he was probably not trying to kill her. Lacey looked back up at him, slowly, reluctantly starting to lower her arm. She had to swallow twice to get her throat to work. "What— what's wrong? What's going on?"

There must have been something, for him to wake her so abruptly. Surely it wasn't just because she was sick and fell asleep in a strange place. She was still halfway trying to pretend she wasn't as ill as she was.

[wontforgetyou]

It wasn't the first time he'd managed to startle someone since he'd arrived here, by a long shot, but Lacey's reaction was one of the more spectacular ones. Enough so, in fact, that it takes his brain a few seconds to catch up with what she's doing. His first instinct is to reach out to try and steady her before she winds up falling, and he's halfway to doing that when he sees her hand half-lifted in the air in what's clearly an attempt to warn him not to get too close. It does get him to stop, but the look of concern on his face doesn't go away.

"S-sorry. I'd not meant to startle you. Only..." He looked up at the sky, the clouds grey and swollen, threatening yet more rain, and a grimace crossed his face before he looked back down at her. "Look, I know you've no idea who I am, but you'd fallen asleep, and I don't think it's such a good idea to be sleeping out here at the moment. Especially when you're looking a wee bit, erm, flushed."

Not that he was really looking all that much better himself, and he knew it, but he could ignore that for the moment in favor of reaching up and scratching at the side of his neck, a faintly apologetic look replacing the grimace from earlier.

"Ah, no offense."

[dressmaking]

By the time he's finished talking, Lacey has lowered her arm to her side, realizing, even through her fever-fogged brain, that he's not a threat to her. At least, no more of a threat than any of the other people here. Concern from strangers is always a little bit suspect to her, though, if only because she has come to expect that anybody offering to help her with anything will want something in return. Compassion or altruism for its own sake is a little foreign.

She knows she probably looks awful, but that doesn't stop her from shaking her head, and then trying not to wince when even that movement makes her feel a little dizzy. "I'm fine. Thank you."

And she's just going to... sit down on the bench, because standing up suddenly feels like a little too much.

[wontforgetyou]

She's a stubborn one, it seems. Still, he's met more than one stubborn lass in his day, and he gives her a somewhat skeptical look, his eyebrows arching up and disappearing into his bangs when she sits down again. It doesn't occur to him that his concern could be interpreted as being something more than just worry, however.

"Aye, well, maybe so, but you'd not be the first person who's fallen asleep in odd places lately. Figured at least maybe you'd not want to get wet again anytime soon."

He pointed up at the dark sky - something that wasn't going unnoticed by the other people in the garden. Or, at least, the ones that weren't spirits. He could see those shapes out of the corner of his eye, hovering at the edge of his consciousness and just waiting for him to go and do...well, something, although he had no idea what that might be.

"Or have yon spirits around here talking about it, although I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what they're talking about when they're talking." A faint frown crosses his features, but then he gives his head a the tiniest of shakes. More than than and he suspects he's going to get dizzy. "Not really seen anything like that before, to tell you the truth. What's your name, anyway?"

[dressmaking]

Lacey doesn't like displaying anything that might be construed as weakness in public. Part of it is just her upbringing, and part of it is that she's had to pretend to be confident even when she doesn't feel it for over a decade. A little fever is nothing to be so concerned over. Really, it's not.

She glances up at the sky when he mentions rain; she'd noticed that before, the gray clouds starting to swell with impending storm, but hadn't thought much of it at the time. He's probably right — they've had enough rain already to last them weeks — but at the same time, overheated as she is, she almost feels as if a little rain might be nice.

"I can't say I've paid them much attention," she says, sounding casual, though really the mention of spirits alarms her a bit. Is that what she's been hearing and been seeing out of the corner of her eye? To say Lacey is unfamiliar with the paranormal or magical is an understatement. Even things that seem magical in her world are typically just Capitol technology. Spirits and magic and mages and this shard of whatever it is in her hand... none of that really makes much sense to her yet.

"Lacey. Lacey Harwood. What's yours?"

[wontforgetyou]

"Jamie McCrimmon, but you can just call me Jamie if you like."

Despite feeling as rotten as he does at the moment, it's not at all difficult to give her a smile - one with a touch of reassurance to it as well as a bit of warmth, although there's still a bit of concern as well. But since she doesn't seem particularly inclined to want to move from where she's sitting, he decides not to push the issue. At least it'll give him time that he can use to figure out what the best way to convince her being out of the rain is better than being in it.

Besides, she doesn't seem to be all that bothered by the notion of spirits, if that tone in her voice is anything to go by, so maybe she's not as sick as he'd first thought. It's possible - he's been wrong about that sort of thing before.

"If I didn't know better with those spirits, I'd almost wonder if I'd wound up back in Tromesis again. Think you might have the right idea, though. Trying to listen just seems to make them shut up. Mind if I sit down?"