( closed ) player plot: the stars go waltzing

[eviscerates]

WHO: Adelaide, Araceli, Avery, Bellamy, Bruce, Ciri, Cosima, Daenerys, Jamie, Korrin, Lexa, Martel, Merrill, Ruby, Sabine, Teren.
WHAT: catch all log; the capture of shardbearers, their rescue, and related shenanigans.
WHEN: Gently timey wimey for flexibility, Team Rescue arrives at the outpost on the 10th.
WHERE: Orlais/Nevarra borders (roughly halfway between the Fields of Ghislain and Trevis), and then a Creepy Place.
NOTES: Log for the missing shardbearers player plot; ooc here & here. Only the travel threads for teams one and two are going up for now, the rest will go up on Friday :]b And to clarify - when I say party style, what I mean is subthread to your hearts content!
WARNINGS: HORROR THEMES. Abduction, experimentation/torture, forced ingestion of lyrium, implied past deaths/murder, violence.

SPEEDY LINKS

• TEAM ONE: travel to Craintellier
• TEAM ONE: rift two attempt & Venatori attack
• TEAM ONE: dungeons
• TEAM ONE: escape attempt — Cosima, Jamie & Lexa only
• TEAM TWO: travel to Craintellier
• TEAM TWO: post rift investigation — Adelaide, Bellamy & Sabine, Bruce, Korrin & Teren, Ciri & Merrill
• TEAM TWO: take the outpost — Attack & Distract & Stealthy & Stealy
• TEAM TWO: regroup & into the dungeons — plus a Lexa-shaped guest star
• ALL: finding your shardbearers
• ALL: boss fight
• ALL: epilogue & return to Skyhold — tba

click for bigger version. full map of Thedas here.

East of Perendale and south of Trevis, next to a river's winding course, there lies the bones of a fortress. It is an old and almost forgotten place, a dramatic, clawed seeming thing reaching up into the sky, harsh against the the rolling hills.

It is an ancient place, dating back to 660TE, a testament to an Empire suffering after civil war and grasping to restore its wealth and influence after it had been so shaken. It stands as a memory of grandeur, rather than an icon of it, and bears the marks of devastation and scarring that so much of the land suffered during the First Blight. It was all but abandoned thereafter, host only to the desperate and the greedy, and never for long. Once ornate mosaics now only hold flecks of gold, flakes that stubbornly resisted the hands of looters trying to pry them away. Other colours, reds, whites, greys and blacks, they all remain.

The site was chosen for its riches, sitting atop a mine that once held immense wealth, seams of gold that would bring wealth back into the Empire and help restore stability. Opulence, the central Tevinter staple (aside from slavery and blood magic, some might say).

But they dug too deep, and when the First Blight came so too did the darkspawn.

It has a new master, now, and he serves the Elder One. Parts of this stronghold may be in ruins now, but remember: it is not what lies on the surface that counts, but what lurks beneath it.


AD VICTORIAM, AD GLORIA.

Comments

[gatheringstorm]

Korrin cries out, as damn do those shards hurt, but that golem seems to be on its last legs. Healing can come afterward; for now, she refuses to stop her momentum unless actually rendered unconscious. And good fucking luck with that, golem.

Using Fade Step to blur in close, Korrin strikes with her spirit blade as viciously and deeply as she possibly can. "Fucking DIE already!" If she never has to fight a flesh golem again, the Vashoth mage will be perfectly content. As it is, she'll settle for destroying this one.

[amygdalae]

Having to protect the unconscious rifter at where he is the only thing Bruce can do is to cast a barrier around himself right before the ceiling crashes onto him. The barrier manages to shave off the worst of the damage, but it still makes contact and Bruce grunts as he feels it scrape down painfully at his back. Nothing that'd cause bleeding, probably, all the same Bruce reaches behind with a wince and casts a quick healing spell to cover the surface wounds to stop any more chances of bleeding. Nobody really needed that.

With that taken care of Bruce focuses back to the fight, hearing the warden shout for them to take it down. Calling upon whatever mana he still had Bruce conjures up a large fireball and flings it right towards the flesh golem with a shout. That thing had already been causing trouble for long enough - now it was time to finish this.

[thecookery]

"Take it down with what??"

Avery may be fast right now, but she's still flailing to hold herself up here, avoid the golem's attempts to grab her, and stay clear of the worst of the fire and ice it's stumbling around in all at the same time. Once most of the chains she's been trying to tie it up with (and the ceiling they were attached to apparently) have been torn down as well, she's thinking maybe it's time for Plan B. Which is, um... She hasn't thought that far ahead yet actually, and before she can, all of the beast's flailing somehow causes her to lose her grip on the chain and get spun around until she's dangling off the front of its shoulder instead of the back. Her eyes go wide as she realizes she's pretty much staring it right in the face, and she breathes out a quiet, "Oh, shit," before letting go and dropping roughly to the ground as it grasps the empty space she had occupied a second earlier.

Then Bruce's fireball explodes above her and Avery scrambles under the golem's legs while it's distracted. She takes a hit from the section of its body that could debatably be called a "foot" in the process, but her speed lets her at least turn a potentially deadly crushing into a glancing blow. It's still nearly enough to knock her flat on the ground, but somehow even bruised and battered and lightly scorched she manages to get around behind it again and grab for some sort of shiny object on the ground that she is hoping is a discarded sword or something??

Except, well... She's not sure exactly what it is, aside from an oddly-shaped pair of scissors that is presumably used for surgery, but it's sturdy enough to give her an idea. Quickly clambering up to grab the chain still dangling from the golem's back, Avery slips the scissors through one of the links, then rears back and slams them as deep as she can into its flesh... essentially tying its head to its own ass, yes. And--

Wait. How many dozens more of these knives, needles, and other various surgical tools are lying on the benches and floor down here again? Maybe she could disable this thing's movement completely and bring it down to size a bit if she used what was left of her Haste to stab its legs with those! Like. With every single one of them. In rapid succession. Pincushion style.

...well, she'll never know if she doesn't try, right?

[doneisdone]

Teren watches all this with weary interest, still hanging from the golem and drenched in its blood. "That'll do," she concedes.

[chainlightning]

Thank you Bella, Merrill would appreciate it if she knew. She certainly appreciates still being alive. She appreciates the flying rocks and shrapnel much less, casting her own set of barriers on anyone she can reach. It doesn't stop the bit of rock flying toward her, which cheerfully embeds itself in her thigh.

Merrill screams, hand clasping over the injury while the other grips her staff, which may be the only thing holding her up for the moment. With the scream comes an upsurge in magic, free vines and roots lashing at the golem and any other enemies still standing, lightning from the Fade crackling between thorns. Someone other than her may want to help people get out of the way. That fucking hurt, and earth and sky are responding to it, reacting to Merrill's desire to take that thing down.

[eviscerates]

Jamie, thankfully, awakens and scurries (heroically) to go deal with Maris. Exit dashing Scotsman.

The surge of vines and magic, the spiking heat of lightning and fire, the vicious cuts; they make it rage all the more,  even if it is futile.

It struggles, muscles and flesh bulging against the the vines, body thrashing against the heat and finally--

it bursts.

Explodes, almost, with the energy and magics poured into it and struggling against the vines, so that viscera and decaying flesh spray across the room with the wet splatter and slap if it hitting the walks,  and sharper clatter of bone. The vines go slack.

The Golem and the undead are defeated, the Wolf is Ruby once more; and Maris is downed. The ceiling also looks like it could  come down, though, just as a thought.

[thecookery]

The ceiling already did come down, man. At least for Avery.

Standing pretty much directly under this thing when it decided not to stay in one piece, many of its new, smaller pieces come blasting down on top of her, knocking her to her knees. Where for several seconds she just stays, in shock, as blood and flesh and other bits that are distinctly more recognizable as former human drip from her onto the floor.

She's not even sure she's breathing as she just stares down at it all in mute horror, and then she gasps as she remembers there was something else. Another threat she's not sure has been taken care of. Mages, maybe? Is that what it was?

She tries to grab for one of the knives still on the ground nearby, but her hand is shaking and everything is so fucking slick here she can't hold onto it. "Come on," she mumbles to herself. "Come on, come on..."

[doneisdone]

When the golem explodes, it launches Teren several feet away and onto the floor, where she proceeds to lie on her back with one arm feebly covering her face as chunks of the enemy rain from above.
Then, quiet at last. She's covered in blood and gore and ceiling dust and pieces of vines and acid and burns from magic, and now, she decides, it is time to just lie flat and close her eyes.
Wouldn't it be nice to travel, Mother always said.