faderift | OPEN: Cloudreach Event

OPEN: Cloudreach Event

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.

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Even with everything going on and with how generally awful she's feeling, Hermione hears that sigh of his and can't help but feel as though she's disappointed Sam. Even now, she doesn't like the idea of disappointing anyone, and she wilts a little bit, wondering if she really is being stupidly stubborn about all of this.

Wiping at the remnants of tears still on her face, Hermione looks down, unable to look up at Sam. "You don't have to worry about me," she murmurs softly. "Just go do whatever you have to do. I'll be all right." Assuming she can even bring herself to move from the fire if Sam leaves her; otherwise, she might just be camping out on the stone floor and resigning herself to a sore back whenever she's well enough to feel that sort of thing again.

Honestly she was being ridiculously stubborn, but Sam wouldn't say that he's disappointed. There are too many of his friends doing the same thing, and besides it wasn't like he wasn't doing the same thing. Difference we he was being careful and considering it.

"You know, telling me not to worry just makes me worry more." He smiles slightly at Hermione, even if she isn't looking at him, and he continues to hold that look until she actually does. When it doesn't look like she's going to move right away, Sam lets himself lay back on the floor, getting comfortable. "Just... let's just take some minutes to get back up to speed, alright?"

She's about to apologize for telling him not to worry, in that case, but then she notices him lying back, and she's a little surprised. The floor might be good enough for her if she happens to doze off, but if Sam has the means to get a more comfortable sleep, he should go do that.

Hesitating for a moment, Hermione awkwardly moves to lie besides him, a hand reaching out for his arm. "You don't have to take care of me, you know," she tells him, though given the wry quirk of her lips, even she understands that it isn't as though he's the sort to abandon anyone who looks to be in trouble. "Besides, spending all this time with a sick person just makes it more likely you'll get sick. So either you should take care of yourself, or you have to admit that I'm not as sick as you're making me out to be."

Sam gives a hum in response to the touch on his arm, signalling that he was listening. The floor wasn't his preferred place to rest, but it was warm by the fire and he's slept out in the woods and the like before - he'd live.

"I've been spending days around sick people, Hermione. I don't think spending time with one more is going to change that." He doesn't look at her, eyes closed, but there is a grin pulling at his lips tiredly. Not going to get out of it so easily, but good try. "And I do take care of myself, but I just go about it differently. It's a little bit more demanding for me though, as it is for a few others. Being a Spirit Healer, you have to push yourself more than others. So it's easier if everyone takes care of themselves, and doesn't push themselves too much, because then there is less for us to take care of." He's trying to tell you to get some sleep and get better, Hermione.

Hermione's hand slips away, mostly out of petulance as she turns to lie on her back. "I'm not sick," she insists once again, though even she can't help but notice the childish tinge to her voice.

Her attempts to carry on a conversation could well simply be a sign of her stubbornness, but more likely than not, Sam just keeps making the mistake of telling her things that incite her curiosity, even under these less favorable conditions. "Why does being a Spirit Healer make things more demanding?"

Hermione isn't the first person that's he's met or dealt with such a stubborn streak, especially during all the illness/sickness going around.

There's no mistake in saying what he does. Even if Hermione isn't getting rest, at least she's staying by the fire, and laying down, relaxing. "Well it's mainly because we have spirit partners to help us with our spells, primarily healing. We can heal better and more efficiently because of them. So of course a group like the Inquisition will put that to use."

Hermione is usually much more reasonable than this, at least. At this point, it's the illness more than the principle of the thing that's making her so bloody stubborn.

"I thought-... aren't spirits... bad?" It doesn't make sense to her; she knows ghosts, and Nearly-Headless Nick is about as harmless as they come. But nothing she knows from back home is exactly the same as Thedas. "People are afraid of them. But then, they're also afraid of mages. It's silly to be afraid just because you don't understand something, I suppose."

He can understand Hermione's confusion. It was kind of complicated if you weren't used to it after all.

"People are afraid of things that are potentially stronger and dangerous to them. They don't quite like the idea of someone who can throw fire just because they can." Being afraid of things you don't know makes sense, everyone does it even instinctively. So he can understand the wariness of the masses on mages, but yes it does suck.

"Yes and no. Anything from the Fade is a spirit, they are meant to stay on their side of the Veil. Good spirits generally want to help, but don't generally want to come over. Then you have the bad spirits that we call Demons. They seek to 'live' on this side of the Veil, which often means tricking people, mostly mages, into giving them a body. A spirit moving into a body is a possession, but when it's the body of a mage they become an abomination - a spirit capable of using the mage's abilities and then some."

Most of that goes far over Hermione's head, but she struggles to hold onto what strands she can. Luckily, she's heard bits and pieces of the same song before, so it isn't too hard to keep herself abreast of what Sam is trying to explain to her

"So the good ones don't want to come here? Why? And how do you know the good ones from the bad ones? A bad one can say it wants to help and pretend to be good, can't it? And if it does help.. wouldn't that mean it's good, in its own way? It's not always black and white."

"Generally," he repeats at the first question, shifting a bit in his spot to get more comfortable. "There are cases that a good spirit does come over or wants to, but it would have to be a compelling reason. There isn't much here that interests them." Cole was such spirit, but Sam doesn't bring him up because he isn't sure that Hermione knows of him or 'remembers' him if she did.

"Knowing the good ones from the bad ones is... difficult at times, because the bad ones will indeed try and trick you. That's kind of why it's dangerous for a mage, especially one that is becoming a spirit healer." At the black and white comment, Sam turns his head and opens an eye to look at her properly.

"Sure, you could get help from a bad spirit, and you can believe that it is good in some way, but it's only doing it for their own benefit. They are willing to do things to get to their goal. Likewise a good spirit could be potentially dangerous when trying to uphold their ideals, they see things differently than us. For them things are pretty black and white. They can be very simple and very complex at the same time."

As far as Hermione knows, she'd recognize a spirit if she'd seen one. After all, how many times had she eaten in the Great Hall with Nearly Headless Nick, warily watching the way the Bloody Baron stalked about at the Slytherin table? The idea that, like elves, Thedas' spirits may not be like the ones she knows back home briefly crosses her mind, but like most things while she's in this condition, it's fairly fleeting.

At Sam's explanation, Hermione finds herself letting out a chuckle, turning her head to look at Sam as well. "What makes them any different from people, in that case?" she asks, smirking just a little. The expression falters as she looks down for a moment before turning to look back up at the ceiling.

"I knew a man once. He wasn't a very nice one, and he took every opportunity to be a mean-spirited, unfriendly snake. But during the war, he helped us. He pretended to be a double agent, working with our enemies and reporting their plans of attack. But the thing is, in war, you can't really pretend to be a double agent. You have to actually be one, or else the side you're lying to will know you're lying." Hesitating, she needs to swallow back her emotion before she can continue. "He killed someone I loved, that we all loved, and we assumed he'd been betraying us the entire time. We hated him because he kept hurting us, kept making things harder for us. And in the end? It turned out that he'd been on our side all along. I didn't learn that until after watching him die. You don't have to be a spirit to be both simple and complex, nor to do something for your own benefit. And you don't have to be a mage to get hurt by someone's motives, hidden or otherwise."

At the chuckle, Sam smiles, just slightly, humming lightly at the question. "Spirits don't live like us first off. They can live for a very long time, don't need to eat, sleep or drink. They don't think like we do most of the time, and they don't have emotions like us. Lesser spirits might seem like they do, but it is usually something they remember from when they passed on. Powerful spirits that have names, like Faith, Compassion, Fortitude, embody an ideal or virtue. They strive to fulfill it. Demons though... They were once good spirits, but something corrupted them, corrupted their purpose into something else."

Turning his own eyes to the ceiling, Sam listens to what Hermione has to say, letting out a long sigh once she was done telling it. A lot had happened in her world, and now she was here dealing with their mess. It seemed rather unfair.

"No, you don't have to be a mage for that to happen, but people like to blame them the most either way. Magic lets you do a lot of things and people are afraid of that." There's a pause as he thinks on some things before turning his head back to the mage/witch beside him. "I'm sorry for your loss."

"Then they're like ghosts," she surmises softly. "And not, at the same time. That's so strange. How can this world be so similar to and yet so different from mine?"

It's not the first time she's wondered such a thing, and she's fairly certain it won't be the last. Her head is always buzzing with questions; it just seems to be buzzing that much more loudly now, and she isn't sure how to deal with it.

"Having opposable thumbs lets you do a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that all other animals should be afraid of people," she mutters, just a touch indignantly. "Though... given the way some of us act towards some of them, I suppose I wouldn't be able to blame them."

She's quiet for a moment before nodding slowly. "Thank you." She tries to think of something to say, but whether she'd like to lament over Dumbledore or Snape, she doesn't know and it doesn't matter; the tears well up anyway before she manages to look away, sniffling a little as she pretended it wasn't as terrible as all that.

"Probably because of how our magic works. Similar in the idea that both our worlds have it, but fundimentally different." Strange but fascinating. He's also heard of places that did not have magic at all, and of worlds that considered Thedas to be rather medieval - whatever that meant.

"It's mainly because of power - magic is a powerful tool. In your world they worry about those who use their magic wrong, correct? And you mentioned that you kept magic secret from those who don't." Despite the serious talk, Sam cannot help the yawn that comes from him, raising a hand to cover it the best he can.

Hearing the sniffling he opens his eyes again, giving Hermione a moment to herself before he reaches over and puts a hand on hers. He doesn't say anything, just silently giving a small amount of comfort seeing as he isn't sure how she would take a hug right now.

She still has questions, especially in terms of how magic can work so differently when it was all just energy, regardless of whether or not it was filtered through the Fade. But instead, she only shakes her head, wearily mentioning, "Sentience is a power in its own right. Stifling it is still wrong."

Her arguments are usually much more eloquent, but for now she's just trying to keep her head together, despite the fact that it seems to be actively attempting to rip itself in half. And while she would ordinarily appreciate a hug, accepting a hug from a man she barely knows while lying in front of a fire and not wholly in control of her faculties sounds like a bad idea all around. Feeling his hand on hers, though? She can accept that, and she looks over at him as she grips his hand gently, offering a weak smile.

"Do you think I'm being silly?"

Sentience. She had a point with that, but that was still hard to argue. Demons and spirits were sentient and just letting them do as they liked wasn't always an option. Frustrating for sure.

"I don't think you're being silly. Thedas works one way and you're used to another. There are many things with magic that I'm having to relearn actually since I was taught in the Circle which has different views and teachings than those who aren't part of the Chantry." It made deciding what was right or wrong a bit more difficult.

"I do think you should try and get some rest though." He can see that Hermione was struggling a bit with some of the conversation, as if she couldn't get some thoughts in order. "Just for a bit."

If Hermione weren't so tired, she'd be willing to speak further on this topic, at least insofar as a rifter can really understand any of it. But as it is, it's become a struggle just to keep her eyes open.

At his words, she finally allows herself to lean towards him, her temple just barely grazing his shoulder. "I am resting," she murmurs. "I'm just... talking while I'm doing it."

At feeling Hermione lean against him, Sam gives a sigh and allows himself to close his eyes again, quietly listening to the fire and anything she might continue to say. "Mmm-hmmm," he replies, past arguing at that point.

Unless Hermione made any sudden movements or loud noises, Sam slowly drifted further towards sleep, feeling the Fade already calling for him.

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OPEN: Cloudreach Event

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