OPEN LOG: Establishing a Base in Kirkwall

[faderifting]

WHO: Many People
WHAT: Cleaning up Kirkwall
WHEN: Cloudreach 1-21
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: This log post is for characters who go early to Kirkwall to assist in preparing it for the rest of those assigned there. We strongly encourage IC discussion of things left to character discretion—someone should definitely do a crystal post to discuss what to do with the personal belongings left behind in the Gallows or what new form the statues should take!

Kirkwall once lived on the edge of the Tevinter Imperium and was home to nearly a million slaves. Stolen from elven lands or shipped from across the sea, all slaves fed the Imperium's unquenchable thirst for expansion. They worked in massive quarries and sweltering foundries that produced stone and steel for the Empire.

The city's complicated past is not easy to forget, history having earmarked many corners of the stone city. A ship approaching the harbor spots the city's namesake: an imposing black wall. It is visible for miles, and carved into the cliff side are a pantheon of vile guardians representing the Old Gods. Over the years, the Chantry has effaced many of these profane sentinels, but it will take many more years to erase them all.

Also carved into the cliff is a channel that permits ships into the city's interior. Flanking the channel are two massive bronze statues—the Twins of Kirkwall. The statues have a practical use. Kirkwall sits next to the narrowest point of the Waking Sea, and a massive chain net can be erected between the statues and the lighthouse, closing off the only narrow navigable lane. This stranglehold on sea traffic is jealously guarded by the ever-changing rulers of the city as the net trolls taxes, tolls, and extortions in from the sea.

—From In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of a Chantry Scholar, by Brother Genitivi

---

Establishing a presence in Kirkwall is a delicate matter. First, there's Provisional Viscount Bran Cavin—a man so used to batting back friendly offers of entirely harmless occupation of the battered city-state that his first three responses to the Inquisition's leadership appeared to be slightly personalized form letters. Proving that the Inquisition is here to work and not to conquer will be a process. The first step in that process is the second reason the move is delicate: the only building the Provisional Viscount is willing to part with is the Gallows, left quarantined and unoccupied since Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard's famous crystallization into red lyrium in the courtyard. The Gallows have since overgrown with red lyrium. If anyone is going to live and work there, there's a lot of work to do.

↠ Cloudreach 1-3: The Journey There
↠ Cloudreach 3-4: Arrival
↠ Cloudreach 4-14: Haunted
↠ Cloudreach 14-21: Spring Cleaning

Comments

[paladingus]

That's the part that makes him nervous--the expectation of patience, that is, not the geriatric criminals lurking around every corner. Simon does not think of himself as a patient man in the slightest. But perhaps the bar is set just a little lower now than it has been in the past.

"Yes," he says, a bit uncertainly, "although I haven't had a good enough reason to try and use it. It works fine for receiving, anyway." He can't help but be a bit suspicious of the technology, for no other reason than that it is Fancy and Magic, two things that have never inclined him to give the benefit of the doubt before. He will grudgingly admit that it's useful as hell, though.

"I understand there's...debate about what's to be done with the statues."

[limier]

"Yes," Her eyes slip briefly shut, hand moves free in a small betrayal of frustration. "I am told that the intention was to bring fun to the process."

Perhaps Beleth's intent shouldn't surprise her. The girl's a born bureaucrat, and raised in the woods —

"It is a window, yes? Tensions run high." Wren shakes her head, recenters. "You may reach me by them at any time."

[paladingus]

"Fun. Yes. There's a priority." If there must be fun--and with Simon, that's never a given--why can't it be the standard drinking-and-mild-debauchery kind, rather than the kind that apparently involves wasting perfectly good scrap metal in the middle of a war?

"I suppose if it's really a matter of keeping the peace, there's worse we could do with them, but then wouldn't we be even better served asking the natives what they'd like before we put the big eyesores back up? If it's regaining their favor we're after." He shakes his head. None of this is his forte. If Wren's joining the ranks of the diplomats, though, he'll defer to her expertise.

"Thank you, Knight-Lieutenant. Advice usually wouldn't go amiss."

[limier]

Her mouth twists sardonic. There's nowhere more fun than the Gallows.

"It is nothing. We must stick together, yes?"

"I can understand the desire to... establish boundaries, as it were, between the Inquisition and the local population. We do not wish to appear occupiers — neither can we afford to seem as though our presence is a choice."

Another wry look. She's quite aware of how that sounds.

"Were this your own home, what would you have done of them?"

[paladingus]

The contradiction there is not lost on Simon, certainly, but it's still more subtle than the usual templar 'our way or the highway (upon which we will hunt you down with your phylactery and bring you back so that you can keep doing it our way)' MO. That was never really the part of the job Simon took issue with, but things are different now.

This is not a perspective he's considered things from, and he takes a moment to do so. "I'm not much for sentiment, truth be told," he says--honestly, Simon, one would never have guessed. "If it were up to me, I'd use them for something constructive. Metal is metal. If it wouldn't look right to forge it into weapons, then hell, mend fences with it. That's about as metaphorical as we can stand to get."