faderift | [OPEN] no such winds blow hither

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[OPEN] no such winds blow hither

WHO: Diwaniya and anyone who'd be in the vicinity of the garden.
WHAT: Plants vs. Rifters
WHEN: At...some point after Di's arrival.
WHERE: The Gallows herb garden
NOTES: None atm.

It's been a long time since Diwaniya last stood under the shade of a real live tree. It's been a long time, come to think of it, since he even saw any sunlight strong enough to produce shade. Or flowers, or stone buildings, or people who looked at him with anything but mingled fear and loathing.

It's nowhere near enough to make up for the way this place has crippled him. He can't shake the feeling that no matter how green the garden blooms, it's all a facade, a sterile simulacrum of life and health, frozen and unalterable and doomed to stagnate with no Shapers to tend it. But it's something, if a very small something.

The herbs are all distressingly foreign to him. He could identify any one of the eighty-seven plant species unique to the Ashen Isles from across a room, fresh or dried, but even something as ubiquitous as elfroot looks utterly alien to him. He reaches for a plant growing in a pot, meaning to pluck a leaf for further examination. It doesn't occur to him that he might not be perfectly entitled to manhandle the flora.

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The garden isn't much at the moment-- they've barely had time to cleanse the red lyrium from it, and for the most part everything is dead and ugly. There are still herbs, to be sure, but they don't look like much, and it's caused Sina some distress since she first started digging into it.

This is what she's doing now, wrapped in shawls despite the warmth of the air, her thin hands ensconced in enormous leather gardening gloves. She's filthy, in the way one gets when one is messing with dirt all day, but she hardly seems to mind.
"Are you here to help?" she calls to the human, sounding a bit harried. Nothing is growing the way she wants it to, and if he's here to be an amateur all over everything, she'd rather he just go.

His head snaps up, but he doesn't pull his hand back just yet. Diwaniya is not a man accustomed to being asked to justify his presence anywhere. The herbalists back home might have resented it if he'd barged into their gardens and sheds and started pulling leaves off anything he pleased to, might even have silently glowered at him if they thought his back was turned, but nobody would have dared say a word about it.

But this is not his island, and the question deserves an answer. "I'm here to learn." He can't do one without the other, but phrasing it in such a way as to acknowledge his present uselessness is something he's been trained never to do.

His eyes linger on her ears, and then on her vallaslin. Surely the ears must be some kind of extreme cosmetic enhancement, like the tattoos. Nobody would design a non-human to look so much like a human as to be able to pass for one if they tried.

Sina is in the process of standing, and brushing the dirt from her hands off onto her apron, but she pauses when she notices him looking at her that way. Her expression becomes half-exasperation, half-anxiety, and she freezes there like a little deer assessing a threat.

He's all too familiar with that kind of look. Humans don't usually look at him that way, even the outsiders who owe him deference as a Shaper.

But there are no Shapers here; that's been made abundantly clear to him already. How can there be creations without anyone to create them? His eyes narrow, more in confusion than anything else. Is it worth asking what she is? There are, after all, other priorities at the moment.

"Did you not hear me? I said I was looking to learn about the herbs you have. I'm--" 'Rifter' seems like such an alien, uncomfortable word. "--new here."

"I see that," Sina replies, her voice quiet and formal. She's used to seeing the marks by now, and being that she has one of her own, there's a certain kinship she feels with the Rifters, at least if they allow it.
"For what purpose?" she asks, guarded. He may be of another world, but he still looks, for all intents and purposes, like a shem'len.

Diwaniya, to his own detriment, is not a big fan on kinship with anyone. But he's uncomfortably aware that he'll have to get over that, one way or another.

"I don't believe in idleness," he says, a bit stiffly. "If I'm here, I want to be of use. And I have a good head for herbs and alchemy." It's better than mucking stables, which is where he fears they'd assign him if he brought up his zoology credentials.

Edited 2017-05-17 03:50 (UTC)

So be it, then. Sina looks him over, gives a small shrug, and gestures to some empty pots sitting off to one side.
"The winter herbs need repotting," she directs, "there's a trowel over on the table. Don't sever the roots." Under the assumption that he'll know what to do with himself, Sina goes back to her own work, already under the impression that he'll keep talking if she keeps provoking him to.

It's been a long time since he had to do anything this menial on his own, but rusty though he is on the technique, he can still do it with a well-practiced hand. The slight clumsiness rapidly ebbs away as his muscle memory recalls his apprenticeship, and he begins to work his way quickly through the batch.

"What are these used for?" he asks, holding up a potted embrium blossom as an example before relocating it.

"Comfort to the sick," Sina replies after a glance, with which she both observes what plant he's holding and how he's holding it. No mistakes! "It can help bring down a fever, in a pinch."

A bony hand snakes out to swat his.

"Shit, you think all this grows on trees?"

Bushes, yeah, but that's the point — isn't it? Going to be a real bitch of a time getting anything much to grow here. For some of these, the pots are all they've got. (Does she give a damn about that? No. But it's going to be harder to filch her own if he's at it too.)

"You want to smoke, you buy your own."

Where'd she come from, anyway? There wasn't anyone there, just a moment ago, and now there's a scowling woman drawn up in ragged array.

Edited 2017-05-10 05:23 (UTC)

His hand jerks back out of reflex, and he immediately regrets it. Backing down and failing to scorch the earth in retaliation the last time someone dared to lay a hand on him is what got him into the mess he was in back home, and while scorching anything is not really an option here, he shouldn't let this weird displacement make him spineless.

Even if this woman is scary.

He's about to sneer something in response, something he wouldn't be able to keep from sounding petulant and impotent in equal measure, but his gaze catches the shard in her hand--it calls to his, subtly, in a way he doesn't yet understand--and his belligerence fades as if flicked off by a switch. His mind races.

"How do you know that's what it's for?" he asks, at length. If the shards come from the rifts, then so must she have, he reasons. And if she's a foreigner like him, where did she learn about the native plants?

"Wasn't raised blind in the dark?"

She snorts, and it throws her off her attitude just a touch; she seems genuinely amused.

"You really ain't never seen elfroot before?"

Seems pretty fool, even for a Rifter. Why wouldn't they have the same plants? They mimic the rest of the Maker's world close enough.

"Why would I have? I've never been anywhere it exists, until now." It is important to Diwaniya that it be made absolutely clear that his inability to recognize elfroot is no reflection whatsoever on his competence, as a botanist or otherwise.

"Are you not in the same situation? Your hand has the mark from a rift on it."

"What, like the desert?"

She reaches out to cup a leaf in her own hand, casually strips it from the plant. If this guy doesn't even know what elfroot is, he certainly doesn't know what an Inquisition herbalist's supposed to look like.

Official business, this. At least it is now. She'll just blame him if anyone brings it up — guy's got a face for it —

"Shit, does it?" She pockets the leaves (just a few more here and there), waves her hand in vague dismissal. "Hadn't hardly noticed from all the glowing goddamn green."

"No," he says, with withering impatience. "Like a foreign world. The kind I was presuming you must also have come from, but evidently not." As if he'd know the ins and outs of how that all works, when the existence of worlds beyond his own is a brand-new concept to him as it is.

He watches her pilfer the leaves, debates momentarily whether to comment, and decides he's got better things to worry about right now. Clearly she doesn't have his excuse for doing so, but he has no personal investment yet in keeping the garden well-stocked.

"Your sarcasm is not appreciated. How did you come to have one of these marks if you're a native?" That's a useful kind of outlier to know about, if he wants to study this pain-in-the-ass shard business.

Edited 2017-05-17 06:30 (UTC)

She listens — looks for half a moment, almost amused —

Abruptly, Melys steps forward to close the distance between them, shoulders pressed forward. A remaining shred of green crunches between her fingers as her fist curls hard.

"You know what I don't appreciate?" The jerk of her chin up towards him. "Reckon I don't appreciate your tone. You wanna fucking rephrase that?"

Edited 2017-05-20 05:32 (UTC)

He flinches just-perceptibly as she steps close--thinking of Lankan's hard closed fist, of the rebels bashing down the door of City Hall with spears and batons at the ready--and immediately hates himself for doing so. A Shaper neither fears nor flinches. Not under any circumstances, not even in a place like this.

This woman is nothing to him, just a dirty common outsider like the swamp-grubbers he should still be ruling over, and he will show this world what Shaper authority is meant to look like, damn it, he will.

"Why," he asks her, "do you think you would merit a courtesy like that?"

It's less than a polite response.

There's no warning, just the swift, sharp slam of a knee into. Less than polite areas. Her hand yanks up to snatch at his collar, drag him low.

"Because this ain't the Fade, and you ain't king of nothing here," She spits. Translation: I, too, am unsure how I came by a mark as a native. The experience was unpleasant, my lord, and I don't process anger particularly rationally. "Now why don't you try again?"

Probably, she shouldn't be starting fights on her first day back. Possibly, there will be consequences for this later. Definitely, positively, it'll have been worth it.

This is a brave new world indeed. The blow comes quickly and more brutally than anything he's experienced before, when even the few people at home who would dare defy every rule in the book to harm him still wouldn't hit below the belt. Diwaniya's combat training has only ever been of the 'put as many meatshields as possible between you and your opponent and blow them to hell from a distance' variety. It has never yet worked for him.

Perhaps he can forgive himself for doubling over with a singularly undignified noise, still breathless from that blindsiding pain when she pulls him down. But he's not at such a loss that he can't eventually catch his bearings, fueled by seething fury and a lifetime of training to keep his wits about him. He has had enough of being flung around like a leaf in a whirlpool, enough manhandling and abuse for things both his fault and not, and it's painful enough to think that he's been forced to surrender his own world to the common rabble and their chaos--he refuses to give in here and now.

Her grip on his collar is tight, unexpectedly strong, but she's left his hands free. He calls fire to them with a burning thought, holding one flaming palm perilously close to the underside of her arm, and raising the other as a promise of more to come.

"Take your filthy hand off me," he snarls, "before I burn it off at the wrist."

Edited 2017-05-22 19:32 (UTC)

Oops.

See, this kind of thing? This is why no one likes mages. When they’re on your side, it’s one thing, it’s a damn sight useful then. But how often are they ever on your side? The world doesn’t stack up that lucky that often. Not with the past few years spent loading the dice.

The flicker of fear across her face is instant, obvious — can’t be entirely swallowed by the fury that follows. She shoves him back free with a snarl, beating the heat from her sleeve with the dangling ends of the other.

"Think you’d be the first one they killed here?" Melys hisses, draws a sharp line across her neck. "Go on, keep it up."

But it’s plain from the angle of her stance (drawn rough now, defensive): She wants no such thing. Perhaps it's not so difficult, to guess what she might fear. Not so difficult, but he's found it all the same.

For a few triumphant moments, that visible fear is sweet. That's how people who cross him should look. At home, it might have been more dramatic, involved a bit more groveling for mercy, certainly wouldn't have included that shove (which sends him stumbling a few steps backward before he regains his balance)--but it's something.

But they are at an impasse. He's thought of his arrival here as a reprieve, on some level, even if he hates it, because his odds of survival here are still a hell of a lot better than what he'd been looking at there--but he's learned just enough about Thedosian magic to know that the shoe is on the other foot now. He's the outsider here, the stranger who could be swiftly and justifiably put to death for being too free with his magic, the way his own people would undoubtedly have done to an alien mage dropped into Terrestia. Whether Melys means to imply that they've done that to reckless rifters before, he doesn't know--but it's not a chance he wants to take. He knows too well the bloody price of keeping magic under control. It's the same everywhere.

But very little of that trepidation shows on his face, even as he lets the flames die down and holds up his empty hands as if to prove himself disarmed. Don't show fear. Never show fear, or you have nothing.

"Then I suggest you save the aggression for when witnesses are around to keep you safe," he says. (His groin seems to cringe preemptively in anticipation of another assault. He pretends it doesn't.) "You don't look like someone whose word people would take on faith."

"You don't look like piss in the sea."

Her eyes are still shot too wide for it to come off properly vicious. The solidity of the Gallows around her, the weight of all that history and stone — it's a silent promise: This fucker won't last, not forever, not like this,

But he could last plenty long enough to be a problem. Loathe as she is to retreat, time's past-due for an exit; if she need do that, best to make a petty little point of it.

Melys reaches out for the pot of elfroot, smacks it deliberately aside from its perch. Ceramic shatters out on the ground below, sends earth and stem sprawling. She holds his gaze, squares her jaw,

"But I guess we'll find out."

And turn, and prepare to flounce —

"I wouldn't do that one without gloves," Cosima calls, the memory of her own misadventure with that particular plant overcoming any hesitation she might feel in butting in to a stranger's business in the garden. It's not like she's here so often herself, so maybe he's meant to be plucking it ... Still. Gloves.

"It's just, that's rashvine, and it's not false advertising."

Prideful though he may be, Diwaniya knows when to defer to someone else's expertise. He withdraws his hand as if burned. He's already got one palm covered distressingly in weird green magic; he doesn't need to add a painful rash on top of everything else going wrong for him right now.

"What advertising? It's not labeled at all. If it's hazardous, there should be a sign." Not that he'd be able to read it if there were, but he is blissfully unaware of that yet.

"Figure of speech, sorry. I think they assume most people who use this garden know what they're looking at. I was out gathering stuff in the wild the first time I ran across it, someone local had to warn me too." She comes over a bit closer. "Were you looking for anything in particular? I'm not the most knowledgeable about local botany, but I've picked up some basics."

While he probably doesn't have the context to pick her out as a rifter on sight yet just by dress and manner, within the Inquisition's facilities, she doesn't bother with gloves; her anchor shard is plain enough to see.

Her accent sounds more like his than any of the other strange ones he's heard here, and that alone is enough to pique his interest even before the glow of her shard catches his eye. Her clothes don't look any stranger to him than anyone else's, it's true, but his hopeful thinking would have pegged her as a fellow anchor even if she did have her anchor hidden.

"Nothing in particular except a grounding in the basics you've mentioned. Where did you learn them?" It certainly gives him some hope, if there are other rifters who know what they're talking about.

"Mostly the library," she admits, "though I've made friends with a few of the healers, and they're generally happy to talk if they have time. I'm actually here to grab a bit of elfroot because it's got some medicinal properties that interest me, but I'm still working with a whole different vocabulary than I'm used to. My world doesn't have anything to spirit healing, but on the flip side, I've had really limited success explaining basic genetics here."

Thedas is, generally, not quite ready for Gregor Mendel.

Diwaniya perks up a bit at the mention of the library--poor sweet summer child--but looks far more excited still as she continues to explain. He knows already that this world has no Shapers--can't possibly have them, doesn't have the raw magical material necessary for their work--but there's far more to his life's work than just the magic of it, and while Thedas may not be ready for basic genetics, Terrestia's elite have been studying the subject for centuries.

They don't call it that, exactly, where Diwaniya comes from, but the translation magic seems to have mercy on him, making it clear to him that she's talking about his own field.

"That's not surprising," he says, "it's too complicated for a layman to be trusted with anyway, but--what do you know of it?"

"Genetics?" Cosima perks up a bit too, almost despite herself. "I'm an evolutionary developmental biologist. I was in the middle of my doctorate work when I ended up here. It's very kind, a lot of people are like, 'Of course you can find a way to do your work here,' but I work at the cellular level on the regular, we don't even have proper microscopes in Kirkwall."

Perhaps it's not the Shaper educational system he's accustomed to, and he's not sure exactly what a doctorate is, but he can already relate to the well-meaning-but-nonetheless-infuriating promise of being able to continue research one no longer has any of the proper materials for at all. The things he's lacking are more magical in nature, but still--that much, he gets.

The rest is new. He has only the faintest notion of what she means by 'cellular,' exactly, and it stirs a memory--he remembers rumors, whispered gossip among colleagues notoriously secretive about their work, nothing concrete, nothing to take and run with, about some staggering breakthrough lost to the passage of time. He'd heard a senile old Shaper rambling once about tiny scrolls in the bodies of living things, invisible without the aid of powerful magic, containing the instructions for every trait ever painstakingly bred into the organism. He'd dismissed it as madness; everyone had--but he never had entirely forgotten it.

"Could you elaborate?" he asks, almost anxious. He doesn't want to reveal his own ignorance on the subject. Not yet.

His interest seems different, somehow, from even the more curios people she's encountered in Thedas. More urgent. (She squashes the thought of Maris, applying pressure to her fractured arm while asking about peptide chains.)

"Okay, well, I don't know what your baseline understanding of biological functions are, exactly, so stop me if I'm explaining something you already know. But cells are small units of living things, usually invisible to the naked eye." If you want to get pedantic, chicken eggs are technically cells, but that's a detour she's not going to take just now.

"My work, in particular, focuses on reproduction. It's easy to understand intuitively that a lizard is more like a snake than it's like a person, but scientist in my world have also figured out that it's more like a bird than it is like a dog. That's because, we're pretty sure, the lizard and the bird had a common ancestor more recently than the lizard and the dog did."

She's watching his reaction, evaluating. Even with non-scientists in her own world, she usually doesn't make it as far as her actual dissertation topic. "Epigentic influence on clone cells" is enough to make most people's eyes glaze unless she really takes the trouble.

The trouble with combining magic and science is that often, when the magic is allowed to do some of the legwork for you, you wind up with the right answers without ever having known what the question was. Most of this sounds basic enough to Diwaniya, who's spent his career tinkering with the expression of different phenotypes in magical creatures, learning what he can through a sort of magic-enhanced animal husbandry. It's just...the notion of cells. That's the elusive breakthrough he's never come close to getting at before.

"Of course I understand how things evolve, or can be made to evolve, but...let's revisit what you were saying about these invisible units. How can you prove their existence, then? How were they discovered, and...what do they do?"

"They're not invisible with sufficient magnification. That's how they were discovered, actually. We invented a tool called a microscope that uses lenses to magnify subjects many, many times. A guy called Robert Hooke was looking at ... um, cork, I think, and saw it was made up of a bunch of tiny building blocks. Of course, in a cork they were dried out and not alive, but he identified the basic structure. As for what they do, it depends on what kind they are. Complex plants and animals are built of a ton of different cell types -- cells make up your skin or your hair or your blood or whatever. Some organisms are just one cell - organisms that give people food poisoning, for example."

Ugh, gardens.

Not that Gwenaëlle dislikes them; no, when they're her own or similar, she's rather fond. These gardens are a bit pathetic to look at, even before you broach the subject of the sort of people that frequent them -

It is safe to say she isn't here to help. She casts a jaundiced eye over what she sees, mouth set in a disappointed moue, and the attendant maidservant at her elbow starts slightly when she turns suddenly, shaking her head.

"You're going to have to go to the market," she says, "this won't do."

Even if they had what she needs, she thinks, she'd not in good conscience take any. They'll just buy it. Fine.

Human (or elven) maidservants are, like damn near everything in this world, a bit of a novelty to Diwaniya. At home, anyone of sufficient rank to be followed around by the help would have a servile doing that, not a person. And there hadn't been anyone else of rank on Harmony Isle.

The frown he directs at Gwen has nothing to do with her, really, only with his temporary difficulty in slotting her into the confines of his worldview and figuring out what exactly she is. He's never met a noble.

"What is it that you're looking for?" he asks. Not that he'd be of any use whatsoever in finding it for her, if the garden had it, but he wants to know what the plants here are used for, and her expectations of them would be as good a clue as any.

Gwenaëlle pulls her shawl tighter about herself as she scrutinises him frankly, a measuring gaze not spectacularly impressed by what she sees before her. That will be a rifter, if she's any judge, which she is. Poorly dressed, presumptuous and bearing an anchor-shard to mirror her own...he is not from these parts.

"Ingredients for tonics and salves," she says, seeing no immediate reason not to answer. There's still time. "Sleep aids, among other things."

She doesn't often have cause to use the kit she keeps for emergencies, but that might change soon, and besides, it's wiser to have it stocked than not. And she always needs rest.

Kirk would be the last person to declare they had a green thumb. Hell, he had grown up on a farm, and he thought it was a miracle they produced year after year. One might have considered it cheating anyways, since what they planted was all genetically enhanced to work in the changed environment of Iowa - yield more, need less water, all of that.

He found Thedas' plant life refreshing and new - alien, even. It was all more familiar now after having been here a year and change, but he still found new things to see or smell or taste and it was one of the attractive parts of this strange land he found himself in.

He had come to the herb garden to deliver some supplies, haggled for as part of another bargain. Dropping them, he glanced around, smiling at the budding place, finally spying Diwaniya and his sticky fingers. "You one of the gardeners?" he asks him, not seeing anyone else around for the moment.

What Kirk might consider 'cheating,' Diwaniya would consider 'the purpose and obligation of a capable biologist' and also 'Tuesday.' But the difficulty of mixing magic with your science is that while the latter is universal, the former is decidedly not, and Diwaniya's powers of genetic enhancement are now almost entirely useless.

The alien plant life is intimidating in its unfamiliarity, hard to appreciate when it only reminds him that he's no good to anybody right now, and he rounds on Kirk with unwarranted irritation at the question.

"Do I look like a gardener? I presume you can't find one either, then. There's no excuse for whoever's in charge here to be making themselves so scarce."

Well see, that's the problem isn't it? Mixing science and magic. Balderdash. And clearly a headache waiting to happen, if you asked him. But he expressed those views often enough with Samouel that he usually kept that back from anyone else when he heard of it.

"The excuse would be there's at least eighty other things that need doing, and plants can manage on their own for a day. They managed well before people started tending them," he said with little more than a slightly cocked head at the vehemence, looking the other over. "So you're not assigned to the gardens then?" he hazarded.

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[OPEN] no such winds blow hither

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