faderift | In the summer, I remember

WHO: Thranduil, Legolas, anyone good with a bow or who enjoys the wine on offer.
WHAT: ROOTY TOOTY POINT N SHOOTY ARCHERY CONTEST
WHEN: 8th of Bloomingtide, midmorning until sunset.
WHERE: Valley
NOTES: log for a friendly wager!

The eighth of Bloomingtide began as a chilly morning; not quite cold enough to leave frost on the budding flowers and fresh-sprouted plants in the heights of Skyhold, but nearly, nearly.

By the time the sun was been in the sky for a few hours, most of the early-morning chill had burned off, leaving a day that promised to be nearly too-hot for those who would be stuck in full-plate and in direct sunlight. Thranduil wasn’t expecting any to come clanking down to his little fete, but had none the less secured a spot in the shade. Varric had apparently found him while he was still working on organizing—the target launchers are set neatly in line with everything else. Along the clay pigeon launchers were the standard, stock targets, blindfolds—and on a table off to the side was a few bottles of sweet wine beside loaves of brown bread and hard cheeses.

The contest did not pretend to be anything other than what it was; a chance to meet, and mingle, and possibly show off archery skills. The purses wrested next to the wine and cheese and Thranduil himself. He had found a chair to rest in while waiting for the contestants to arrive, dressed plainer than he had so far allowed himself to be seen. On his fingers, four rings glittered—but his confidence in Legolas was so absolute, he doubted he would lose even one before the days was out.

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Well, all right, that was impressive. He kept his gaze on Sherlock this time as he spoke, and as he did something began to niggle at him. The more he stared, the more he thought he knew this man, or had known him. That he had seen -

Shit.

He looked like Khan. For the briefest moment Kirk's eyes widened and his lips thinned, fingers twitching. He forced himself to relax though, reminding himself that this man was not Khan. If he had been, he was sure Khan would have made himself known to him much sooner.

Even so, his heart thumped inside of his chest a bit faster.

His mouth twitched into a little smile and he inclined his head to Sherlock. "Mostly right. I'm a captain back home. As for being a soldier - not so correct. I work for an organization called Star Fleet, and while we do use a command structure and we do have survival and combat training, it's because our mission is one of exploration and aid. The universe is a dangerous place. We need that kind of training to keep us alive no matter what kind of situation he find ourselves in."

He motioned around them idly with his hand.

"Like, say, falling through a Rift into a medieval world."

Sherlock noticed the staring, but didn't think much of it. People often started staring when he went into one of his explanations, and this didn't seem any different.

As for the corrections - he took those with a small shake of his head, a roll of his eyes, which might have been self-directed (There's always something), or a way of scoffing at the semantics.

Still. Captain. He'd gotten most of it right. Not bad, for someone from another world entirely.

"Your organization has more foresight than most who set out to explore." If people in Thedas went exploring - usually for academic or diplomatic purposes - they weren't typically trained in combat themselves. They tended to hire people who were.

And then, Sherlock's nose wrinkled. Because the man had come up with a word he'd never heard before in his life.

"Medieval?"

He's been around a Vulcan long enough not to be bothered by the explanation or the way he went into it. More than anything it sounded like observation and logic - exactly the things Spock used, though perhaps not with quite so much accuracy. He caught the roll of eyes, and there he found the difference between Sherlock and Spock - Sherlock was definitely human. Spock would not have displayed such a motion, but it made him smile a little all the same.

"Space is a far reaching place, and full of unknowns. If we don't know how to defend ourselves, well, likely most of our ships would never come back at all." It was just a reasonable thing to do, really.

He pursed his lips a moment, wondering how to explain the term.

"In my world, we are more technologically advanced than Thedas. We had a period in our world that strongly resembles Thedas as it is now. One of the names for this period is the Medieval Age."

The concept was, admittedly (if only to himself), a little difficult to wrap his mind around. Star Fleet — a fleet among the stars? Sherlock had taken it for poetry at first, but then the man had said universe as if it was something that could be traversed, and space like it wasn't just a word for the stretch between two points. A small part of Sherlock wondered what it meant.

The rest of him tried to dismiss it as irrelevant.

Medieval, though. That provided a touch more context. If this level of technology was somewhere far in the rifter's past... no telling the sort of things he was used to. Sherlock nodded, comprehending at least that part of it.

"So, you've found yourself stranded with a bunch of primitives." His expression was all seriousness, but it was delivered so dryly that it might have been meant as a joke. Maybe.

Kirk wasn't surprised it was a hard concept for the people here to grasp. Normally he would have tried to hide it more, but given that other Rifters were appearing here, and they were being exposed to other cultures of more advanced worlds already, hiding it didn't seem a worthwhile effort. He was one man, not the entire Federation, and in all likelihood his stories of his world not spread far, or in most cases not be believed.

"I didn't say that," he shook his head with a little grin, though the term had crossed his mind from time to time despite himself. "But it is definitely not what I'm used to," he admitted. "But, I'm taking it as a learning experience."

The phrase learning experience suggests a limited time frame, which is... incredibly optimistic, really. Unless Star Fleet has some knowledge of the way rifts function that the rest of Thedas lacks.

"You expect to make it back?"

That was a loaded question. Or perhaps not loaded, but difficult. Yes, he did have hope, but he had also resigned himself to the idea he would be here for quite awhile too. But, at the end of the day, he always had that flicker of hope that he would find a way home, that all Rifters would, and he couldn't abandon that hope.

"Someday," he shrugged. "I'm not expecting tomorrow, but I don't expect to die here either."

Far be it from Sherlock to say exactly when or where someone was going to die. All the same...

"Unless your fleet has some knowledge of the Rifts that our mages lack, that outlook may prove to be dangerously optimistic."

"Well, I have my own theories on the Rifts, though there's not a real way to test it here," he shrugged. "And maybe it is - but it's better than being pessimistic, isn't it? I like to look on the bright side and hope for the best instead of moaning about my situation and being miserable."

In the summer, I remember

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