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

[scuzzy]

Back behind Gavin, his babysitter looks unimpressed.

He also looks fevered. It would be nice if that were the source of his attitude, but no—he's just really unimpressed by the fact that he has to be here at all, by the human falling down, by his charge running off to help him, by the fact that he's being forced to care, etc. Basically everything.

"'Released,' yeah," he says, coming closer despite all of that. "You've been real fucking released. Me, though—" Chained to Dalish. Metaphorically. Ugh. But he slides under the human's other arm and does some ungentle and slightly ineffective (on account of being short) hefting-up. "Good to know people with no blighted sense run in packs."

[dreadinquisitor]

He didn't to notice the pulling and prodding, all of his bleary attention focused on Gavin's face, staring at him as if he expected him to disappear. To flash away like the others, in and out, in and out...

He started to reach out, fingers trembling toward Gavin's face, just as the other elf hauled on him hard. Off-balance his dead weight nearly sent them both back into the mud.

[slipshot]

"Don't mind Dax," Gavin said quickly over the Elf's muttering. "He thinks he's a cactu--" He quickly shifts his weight, slamming his back foot hard into the ground to keep himself up right.

"It's okay. You'll - you'll be alright, I promise, we'll just -" He shot Dax a helpless look. "-- We'll get you to the healing tents."

[scuzzy]

There's a lot of shuffling, a lot of near-slipping, but nobody falls. No thanks to the giant human (why are humans so big) and—some thanks to the Dalish Moron, but not a lot of thanks, because Dax refuses to be thankful. "What are they going to do?" he says. "Stick him somewhere closer and let him sleep it off. Maker."

[dreadinquisitor]

There was something moving past Dax's shoulder, a hulking shape that hissed softly as Maxwell's eyes narrowed and tried to focus on it.

"Watch out for him..." he murmured in warning, still watching even as the elves pulled and prodded at him. "...Not good."