OPEN: Bloomingtide Rifter Arrival

[faderifting]

WHO: New rifters & helpful Inquisition volunteers
WHAT: Welcome to Thedas!
WHEN: Bloomingtide 7
WHERE: The Imperial Highway near Sulcher's Pass
NOTES: This log is slightly backdated, so it's safe to assume safe arrival at Skyhold and begin RPing there as soon as you're ready OOC. It is open to any characters who would have volunteered to go welcome the rifters, whose arrival sites can now be predicted, thank you Solas.

You were asleep—deeply or fitfully, for the last time or just resting your eyes for a moment—and then you were not. And wherever you were was not, anymore, replaced by nothing but the sensation of falling, tumbling into endless, bottomless nothing. If this were still a dream, you would wake before you hit the ground. You can't die in a dream, they say. In some worlds.

But there's no waking here, just a flare of green-white light and a jarring impact onto cold dirt and long grass. When your breath returns and the light's after-image fades from your eyes you will find yourself lying flat on stone, squinting up into sunlight and a shifting, blinding green tear in reality.

You are also not as you were: in the palm of your left hand there glows a narrow splinter of light the same sickly green as whatever brought you here. It aches, a bone-deep pain that gnaws even through all the distractions. Like the fact that you're being attacked. Surrounding you and the rift through which you arrived are five massive beings made of fire and molten, veiny flesh, rearing back to throw flames at anything that breathes. But mind your step, getting out of their way: the stone beneath you is the ruin of the Imperial Highway, elevated high enough that dropping off either side or the crumbled gap ahead will not be much more survivable than the fire.

Luckily, you are not on your own. Around you others are rising from the ground, equally confused, with the same green lights flaring from their hands. And help is already here—prepared, this time, unsurprised by your appearance, with armor and a few extra weapons to hand off if you've come empty-handed.

Comments

[extramural]

"Not physically, but I could create some." From memory, from thousands of years of experience, from seeing every gun in creation thought of and invented and made. They would work, he has no doubt of that.

This information is some of the most interesting and most relevant to date. Even if she cannot tell him about abominations, there is a great deal of knowledge in knowing the religion of the majority. "Similar to Overseers of the Abbey of the Everyman, in my own world," he tells her, since they're sharing. "Save they kill every magic user they come across, and condemn others for use when they simply wanted them out of the way."

Yes, he knows what power often does -- yet he does so love to see how the more interesting use it.

"The majority do hate it when the oppressed rise up."

[foxsays]

"I don't know how I would repay you, but I would." There's nothing but sincerity in her voice coupled with delight in her smile, just a hint of mourning for her pretty pistols handed down from Marjani left at home, and for the array of pistols and muskets in the palace waiting for her to return.

"The Abbey of the Everyman, that would be the religion where you come from?" Is religion everywhere? Don't people just worship the sea like dirty heathen hippies like her people? Anyway, even if Araceli doesn't keep notes for the benefit of the rifters, she's studying to become a bard. That means she's immersing herself in Thedas, in all the things people take for granted, and it sticks with her because any part of it might come to save her life one day, and she needs to be able to fit in and play the Game. "We have no such thing as magic to stamp down, just common people that might rise too high and think they deserve to eat every day, or that the nobles might be held accountable for what they do."

And she does enjoy doing that. Holding them to account, then walking away when she and the rest have left their standing in the dust, when they have to go grubbing in the dirt for their social standing, when everyone knows who and what they are.

"And fear it. Either alone cut deep. Together?" Well, her parents let the sea move through them to have her, and she is perfectly capable of being a shark.

[extramural]

"I like the unexpected, the interesting. This world seems to hold plenty, at least until I get to know it better." It won't be hard for her to repay him if she can provide those, and if not- well, perhaps the introduction of firearms will be interesting enough to consider the debt gone.

"The current main religion of the Empire of the Isles, at least. Pandyssia, the Far Continent, has its own -- and other faiths have risen and fallen with their cities." Some do, at least; there are those dedicated to it in Pandyssia, and those who consider worship of the Outsider essentially the same thing. Yet the Abbey reaches out and strangles such thought, leaving them as lifeless as driftwood.

The plight of the classes would be consistent between worlds. Humans, at least, always desire power, and the good rarely receive it. "The angry, the terrified, they make mistakes."