faderift | [open] gentle impulsion

WHO Sina and friends
WHAT: She's back from getting murried and trying to get the garden to stop sucking!
WHEN: Justinian
WHERE: Generally either The Gallows or the old Qunari compound
NOTES: She's looking unusually robust lately.

I. Hangin' Around

Sina really hates to be inside, but she's learned to accept it while living in the compound, in the small shared room that now only she and Nari occupy. If there were a decent place to set up their tent that's certainly what they'd do, but there's barely any unpaved ground to be found and... frankly, it's a bit depressing.
As a result, she sits outside most evenings, on a low wall or stack of crates, watching workers make their way home and sipping a cup of tea. She's hardly gotten more metropolitan, but at least in contrast to when she first arrived, Sina seems much more comfortable in human-made territory.

II. Gardening

Having taken it upon herself to ensure the memorial garden in the Gallows is up to speed, Sina spends most of each day overseeing the care of its young plants. It's more than a little discouraging that, between the magical destruction and the red lyrium and the overall badness that have dominated the Gallows in the last few years, nothing seems to be growing easily, and that which does is sickly.

When left alone at the end of the day, Sina will often try to spot-heal various patches, siphoning life from the lost vegetation and pushing it into the dying. It always works temporarily, then the next day, it's like it never happened.
She's at her wits' end.

III. Infirmary

Though not there as often as she used to be, Sina still makes deliveries of what herbs she can coax out of the ground and offers medicinal assistance when it's needed. Every so often she can be talked into sticking around for a quick checkup, and whether it's the warmer environment or being closer to home or just time, the shard's effects on Sina seem less painful lately.

IV. Alienage

Sina is trying to befriend the elves of the city, admittedly at a disadvantage both due to her visible facial markings and the fact that there is a glowing green hole in her sternum. Whenever she has the time, she brings gifts from the garden and offers assistance with minor health concerns.
She can sometimes be found by the vhenandahl, talking to the children who have come to associate her visits with interesting stories, and periodically to adults whose trust she's beginning to win.

V. Wherever!

Probably not at a hot dog stand in Hightown, but one never knows!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sina drops down to sit beside her, idly kicking her heels against the surface of the crate, and leaning back on her palms. "...but something did--" she begins, irritably, and catches herself with a sheepish smile. "Oh. ...I suppose you're right." She looks down at the cobbles. "But we weren't responsible for that."

"Since when did a silly little thing like responsibility matter to shem'len feelings?" Nari cracked--perhaps she hadn't become entirely egalitarian. She did pause though, leaning her head back on the crate to relax her neck.

"...We aren't much better though. How many of the patrols, merchants, hunters, or poachers that strayed too close to our camp and got an arrow in their chest for their trouble d'you think actually had anything to do with what happened on the plains?" The hunter laced her fingers together, clasped one knee to her chest, and rolled her head to the side so she could look at her clansister contemplatively.

Sina smirks in response, but can't help but think about what Nari says. She bites her lower lip, drawing one knee up to wrap her arms around it, pensive.
"Perhaps none," she says, and pauses. That may be the end of the thought, but she can't help but feel there's more. "...but how can we be sure?" All it takes is one cruel shem to take out a clan, as Sedi's history has demonstrated.

Nari sighs, rolling her head back again to look up at the sky. With the lamps of a full city burning everywhere, the stars weren't nearly as clear and bright as they had been in the Frostbacks. Nor as those above the Planasene. "We can't." she said.

"And history has shown over and over that as a whole... even shem by shem... they don't care for the People. I figure they have every right to believe we wouldn't piss on them if they were burning." Nari snorts briefly with laughter to hear the phrase come out of her mouth--it's every bit as Kirkwall as Sina's "hooray" had been, albeit picked up from less innocent souls than children.

"So I figure it's natural they wouldn't trust us to build their houses--the shells they rely on to keep them safe. They know we see what their people have done." And what they keep doing, as Sina had seen in the Alienage. "It'd make more sense to them if I joined wood in such a way that it'd collapse at the first gale than to join it to last a century."

She looks back at her clansister with a cheeky grin. "Plus how should I know how to build a house. We live naked in trees, covered only with vallaslin and the blood of shem'len children, didn't you know?"

Sina nods, heaving a small sigh through her nose as she lies back with Nari, frowning subtly at the noticeably dimmer sky.
"That's not fair," she murmurs, "but nothing is." Her mouth quirks into a smile of amusement at Nari's commentary. "It gets cold, but we make do," she says, pleasantly.

'That's not fair, but so it goes,' seemed to sum it up pretty well, or at least Nari couldn't think of anything else to add that would improve on it.

"Speaking of trees," she said, "how is the garden work going?"

SIna's sigh says everything, and even involves a strand of her hair puffing above her face with the breath. "Badly," she admits, "but I have a thought. I've asked Velanna and I plan to ask Pel to help me."

"Oho? What's this thought?" The hunter asked. With Velanna and Pel, it was probably something magical in nature. Nari had some doubts that layering magic upon magic was going to help with the corruption of the ground, but it was a subject so wholly out of her expertise that the only comment she gave was a slight quirk of her brow.

SIna actually doesn't answer right away, chewing her lower lip and thinking. When she finally speaks, her voice is low, almost conspiratorial. "Do you remember... that burned out part of the forest, where we spent a few weeks in hiding?" She and Thalia had pressed their hands to the ground, spurring the mostly-dead plants to new life, albeit not obviously enough to draw attention.

"I do…, " Nari said cautiously, remembering how she and the other hunters had returned to find the space greener than before.

There had been some worry amongst them that they were staying in such a barren place, although it was undoubtedly safe from the prying eyes of outsiders. Thalia had been insistent that it would not be a difficulty, and no one was going to criticize her choice. They had some greens that night along with the meat, which all had been grateful for, although she had never known how. Despite the curiosity, the Keeper had offered no explanation, and no one had pressed.

"You know how to do that, then?" A pause, "is it safe?"

After all unlike the forest there were certainly prying eyes here in Kirkwall.

"I do," Sina echoes, in response to Nari's question, offering a small and pensive nod to the sky. "And... I don't know." She breathes in, a bit shakily as always, and sighs it out. "But it must be done."

Nari was silent for a few breaths--when she spoke again, it was slow, "We could move the garden outside, start a new one where the ground is still good."

But that would still leave the corrupted ground within the city, and who knows what kind of effect that would have over time on the people who lived there. The hunter sighed heavily, and nodded. "No, you're right, it must be done. Just--" Nari reached out in the deepening twilight to take Sina's hand and squeeze it gently once, "--tell me when you're going to do it, so I can be there to stand watch. We don't need anyone wandering in and misconstruing what you're doing. Especially so soon after our arrival, and especially here."

Sina considers. She looks at Nari for a moment, then away again, her eyes narrowed in thought. Then, she shakes her head.
"I don't think I should," she says, "not... because I don't want you there. But it's." She fiddles with one of her fingernails, absently biting off a tear. "You know. Keeper business." Freaky druid shit, which isn't freaky or druidic unless it's a secret.

Nari shook her head as well, raising her hands as if to stop Sina's train of thought herself. "I didn't mean in the garden proper, I meant by the entrance. Or at least somewhere I can see the entrance." The hunter dropped one hand, running the other through her hair with a sigh. She'd spent enough time skulking around herself to know how fully they weren't in Skyhold anymore.

"It's not as if the toughs roaming the streets here at night are going to respect that it's Keeper business."

Nari makes a good point, and Sina has to admit she's relieved by it. In general she wants Nari at her side, even if she's technically on her own. Though she considers to make sure she isn't being hasty, Sina then nods, a small smile twitching onto her lips again. "You're right," she says quietly, "by the entrance." It's a deal.

[open] gentle impulsion

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