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

[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?"