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

[bookish_lioness]

Hermione appreciates questions, both asking and answering them, and so she'd be the last person to judge if he chooses to interrupt her to ask her what she'd talking about. It will especially be helpful later on down the line when she's talking to other people, as she doesn't want to take for granted that certain topics aren't universal.

"I more or less can figure that much out," she replies, shifting to her knees to help him set everything he's brought her. "But I'd appreciate learning what sort of things work here. I just know how to keep a wound covered until the person can go and see a professional. But there's no use holding onto what I used to know if I'm not going to augment it with what can be helpful here."

[justice_is_blond]

"When the plague's passed, I can teach you the main uses of various herbs, their primary applications, and then permutations can go from there if you turn out to enjoy it or be good at it."

He pulls out the sugar and puts it between them, adding his before raising an eyebrow to ask if she'd like any.

[bookish_lioness]

"... you'd really teach me that?"

While Adelaide is certainly a competent enough teacher when it comes to magic, those classes tend to be more tailored towards native mages. For someone to offer to teach her something she can learn, and to teach it to her on a one-on-one basis... she's truly appreciative.

Moving forward to take a bit of sugar, Hermione decides that he probably doesn't understand the true value of what he'd just offered, at least inasmuch as it means to her. "I'd like that, Anders," she tells him quietly. "Maybe I wouldn't feel so out of my element if I could actually be useful."

[justice_is_blond]

"Of course."

Why wouldn't he? A willing student was a Maker-send. Someone familiar with herbs and their uses would ease the work on the healers during a crisis, as well as come at the plants with a new perspective.

He lifts his cup and blows on his tea, nodding.

"It feels good to be useful, to be helping out. Not only that, a great deal of magical knowledge has been lost or suppressed by the Chantry. Whatever they felt they didn't need, or they didn't want us to have knowledge of, was censored. Gotten rid of. You bring a fresh mind to what we have here, which means there's a chance for you to think of something that we haven't, simply because of how we've been taught things are done. The key word when teaching Circle mages is control - and it's not simply control over our abilities. It's control over us, what we think, how we do things."

She doesn't have that conditioning. He can help her, and she can help them.

[bookish_lioness]

Chuckling absently as she wraps her hands around her cup, Hermione shakes her head and tells him, "Don't place too much faith in me. I could simply end up being a terrible student who gets stuck on asking questions about minutiae without progressing too far." Unlikely, but far from impossible. Her inquisitiveness can work for or against her, after all.

"The Circles are gone now, aren't they? That means that it's not just the rifters that can think outside the box. It might be harder for those of you who grew up here, but surely there's already a new generation of mages learning how to make do without Chantry intervention."