dashing: (♛ eigh.)
ᏂᏋᏒᎥᏗᏁ "ᏖᏂᏋ ᏦᎥᏝᏝᏠᎧᎩ" ᏗᎷᏕᏋᏝ ([personal profile] dashing) wrote in [community profile] faderift2016-07-16 10:36 pm

points the faith in higher things,

WHO: Herian Amsel & open.
WHAT: the party don't start 'til she walks in. (Introducing Herian & her recruitment to the Inquisiton.)
WHEN: mid-July & onwards.
WHERE: Halamshiral & surrounds, maybe some Skyhold later?
NOTES: Prose/brackets are both fine!
Open starters in the main post (more to be added), closed starters in the comments, if we've discussed any plans feel free to barge in with a wildcard or prod me via pm or pp @karmacharging and I'll whip something up. If you'd like some information on this problem child, here is her info post.
WARNINGS: Herian's background includes themes of violence, torture and death, as well as discrimination and her own post traumatic stress disorder. While she will not in general be vocal about some of her own prejudices (against apostates, Dalish and nobles as some examples) it is very likely to come up in narrative and could come up in dialogue depending on interactions. Here is an opt out post if you'd rather certain things be avoided, or if you'd like to opt out of interactions with her in general.



Arriving with the Inquisition ( open. )
Herian Amsel exists in shades of winter, even when the world around her is dusty from heat. Her hair is dark, the black of a tree stripped of leaves and colour and grasping at a grey, unsympathetic sky, her eyes a pale, blue that people might foolishly attribute to ice in a fit of romanticism. For all that she appears to carry winter with her, summer has rolled relentlessly through a country already bearing the scorchmarks of war, making the people and the landscape seem to blur together. It is the dirt, she expects, the clouds of dust that have rolled over them on their journey. Even the grass feels dry and brittle. The closer they have drawn to the estate of Duc Hugues Pelletier, the more she has wondered just what difference there will be between the state of the gardens and the grass the common folk can wander on outside. It seems comical, if not downright insane that she be leading a group of elven refugees to the estate of an Orlesian noble for sanctuary, but she promised them she would bring them to the Inquisiton, and if the Inquisition is in Halamshiral then the group will have access to better food and medicine and more protection than she can afford them if she were to escort them to Skyhold as their sole guard.


Option A.
Herian is on foot, leading a palomino stallion with an elven woman on his back, pregnant and exhausted. Mage as she might be, Herian carries no staff. Instead a sword hangs by her side, and something like twenty refugees follow behind her.

"Inquisition," she starts, and her accent is defiantly and perhaps unexpectedly Starkhaven. "These refugees seek sanctuary amongst your number, and to lend their hands to your cause. To where shall I lead them?"


Option B.
Still on foot, Herian accompanies a smaller number of elves, now, heading towards the makeshift Medical Tents. The pregnant woman from before is with her, Herian leading her so that the woman can rest a hand on her forearm, Herian move slowly and patiently.

"This way. The mages here work under the Inquisiton banner, so if your need is dire then they are well qualified to bring you aid. You need not spend any time in the presence of those that set you ill at ease." Her voice is soft, and she has not yet looked up to the person standing nearby. "Can I have the names of your elven healers, for my friends?"


Other Increasingly Ridiculous Prompts ( open. )
Option C.
There is something singularly satisfying about the burn of muscles after exertion. Usually it comes in the form of training, practicing forms over and over for hours on end. Today, though, Herian is chopping wood, ensuring that those she accompanied who are still tired or injured need not worry should they have need, or perhaps so she can be useful to the Inquisition in some form.

Largely she does it because she likes to work, and the steady routine of grabbing up the heavy slabs of wood and breaking them apart with an axe is steadying. Not quite the meditation technique that she was taught in the Spire, but it sets her in the right frame of mind all the same. Her breath, her mind, and the regular thud and splinter make her feel better. Sweat rolls down her back, the thin material of her shirt sticks to her skin, and the tangled mess of her hair seems wilder even than before.

.... Although it is after noon and she's doing it non-stop for a long time in the summer sun, so perhaps an intervention would be wise.


Wildcard me, bro.
youwonscience: (that it was good)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-25 10:24 am (UTC)(link)
"Okay, well, I had a couple different projects," she says, getting to her feet. "The first one I was going to tackle was to see if there's something similar to a plant that grows where I'm from. When smoked or ingested, it causes mild but pronounced euphoria and it helps with pain. Some people take it medicinally, some recreationally for the euphoria part."
youwonscience: (take a ladder to the shadows)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-25 10:57 am (UTC)(link)
The ghost of a smile gets her to raise an eyebrow. "I've run across a lot about elfroot, but no one's mentioned that particular quality, no." Her own smile, while subdued, is a little more evident than the one it's responding to. "And I don't see why it has to be just one or the other. After all, people use wine to dull pain... and also just drink wine because they like it. Right?"
youwonscience: (oh my love it's time)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-25 10:33 pm (UTC)(link)
"Man, the pain dulling part seems like a raw deal. Aren't knights likely to get injured sometimes?" It's a frank question, but not an unkind one.
youwonscience: (take a ladder to the shadows)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-25 11:57 pm (UTC)(link)
"Yeah, I've known one or two of those." Cosima starts resorting her piles, based on the identifications - tweaking, more than anything, as she hadn't gotten it totally wrong.

"I'm not very suited to austerity, myself. But then again, I'm not a knight. Thanks, by the way." She adds a small smile. "I really do appreciate the help."
youwonscience: (in the beginning)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-26 10:23 pm (UTC)(link)
"I guess I'm not much of a botanist," Cosima says, taking them gratefully. "What would Gregor Mendel say?"

Stop making jokes no one will get, Cosima.

"Are you heading to Skyhold?"
youwonscience: (Still you've been waiting for me here)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-30 12:06 am (UTC)(link)
"I'd like that, as long as it's not too much trouble. I'll get gloves... somewhere. But in the meantime I could use the advice of someone who knows what they're doing."

She shrugs, then adds, "I've probably gotten lazy. Where I come from, there's a way to carry images easily, so I can consult them, with greater fidelity than a black and white sketch and an accompanying description."
youwonscience: (behold it was good)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-30 01:34 pm (UTC)(link)
The last observation makes Cosima laugh.

"Yeah, that device was... useful." Cosima sounds rueful. She could write a blog post when she gets back aimed at the people elegiacally describing a time before the Internet. Something pointed to do with identifying poison oak.

"I'd even settle for a way to take better notes. I was lucky to live in a place where paper and ink were cheap. I'm having to reorganize how I approach things here."
youwonscience: (Darkness was upon the face of the deep)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-30 02:38 pm (UTC)(link)
"Gloves," Cosima says with a grin. "Definitely gloves first, then paper. But thank you. I don't mind working to support myself, either, but my skill set is kind of... the things I do at home wouldn't work here." She uses her wrist to push her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. "I guess it's taken me a few weeks to accept I'm not just going back home, so."

She isn't sure why she's telling Herian all this. Probably just because the other woman seems genuinely interested.
youwonscience: (behold it was good)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-30 02:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Cosima pauses, not because she's reluctant to answer, but because she's trying to think of how best to explain. "Here in Thedas, do you have people who study the natural world? Not healers, but like... people who observe plants and animals and try to figure out how they're related and why they behave like they do?"
youwonscience: (machine pressed stop)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-30 03:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Cosima nods, looking pleased. "Right. So my world doesn't have magic, doesn't have the Fade - that we know of, I mean, I got here somehow - but we have come a long way in how we can look at animals. My field of study is basically... hm. So a dog is more like a cat than like a fish, right? But a dog is more like a fish than it's like a tree. If you study how animals develop when they're born, or even when they're still in an egg or inside their mother, you can see the ways in which some animals are more closely related than others and can make theories about how they split off to become different in the first place."

It's simplified, necessarily, but not inaccurate.
youwonscience: (you know I'm not a saint)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-30 04:19 pm (UTC)(link)
"More the dragon-lizard thing," Cosima says, considering that reaction. "For one thing, we don't have elves where I'm from and we have some pretty scary cautionary tales about people who take too much of an interest in, say, variations in skin color." To put it extremely mildly, but she doesn't really want to get into slavery, genocide and the history of modern eugenics at the moment.

Instead, she says, "I don't want to influence; I want to understand. A problem I'd work on is, um. You'd think a lizard and a snake are more alike the a lizard and a dragon, right? Size is a more important factor than number of limbs. But using tools I have at home, I can compare how they develop. A lizard may be more like a small dragon than it is like a snake with legs, once you have more information."
youwonscience: (You know me better than I do)

[personal profile] youwonscience 2016-07-31 02:07 am (UTC)(link)
Cosima is quite certain the world she comes from doesn't have a corner on bigotry. She wonders if she wants to know what Thedas' cautionary tales are, just yet. (So far, no one seems to have bated an eye at her confession on the network that she romantically prefers women; she isn't sure if this is because it's common here or because rifters are so odd that nothing they do is worth remarking on.)

"Observation a lot, yeah. We have very powerful ways to magnify things, so we can observer stuff we wouldn't otherwise be able to see. A lot of it has to do with genes, which are sort of the blueprints for a new organism that come from your parents. Some things about you are there before you're even born, but lots of them come from your environment and your experiences. It's sometimes hard to tell which is which just by looking. And sometimes it's a mix, like... how tall you are comes partly from genes, but also has to do with how well-fed you are in childhood."

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