faderift | OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

WHO: All
WHAT: WINTER IS HERE
WHEN: Haring 15-Wintermarch 1
WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall
NOTES: You can use this post as an event-style mingle log, or just use it as background information for your RP elsewhere!

It's been a chilly month already, but in mid-Haring the temperature suddenly plummets. One day it's merely cold, and the next morning the Inquisition wakes to frost on the inside of the window panes and an icy draft whistling through every crack in the tower's masonry. Downstairs, the pipes that feed the bathing chambers and the kitchens creak in the walls, loud enough to be heard even out in the courtyard, where they run beneath the stones, and around midday, when the sun has failed to raise the temperature above freezing, a blocked pipe finally gives, cracking open to spill water across the central court and send it running down side passages. The whole area floods several inches deep and almost immediately begins to freeze, presenting at first a gigantic, treacherous slush puddle and, after a few hours, a sheet of sheer ice.

Melting a safe path from door to door and laying down sand or wood to keep it from becoming slick again is a simple enough undertaking, but before the entire courtyard can be thawed, someone appears with ice skates—and that’s a better idea, surely, for at least a few days. Anyone who complains about the frivolity can be assured it’s good exercise, not to mention good training for a force that may have to travel or fight on ice in the future.

Temperatures remain cold enough that even some parts of the harbor begin to freeze, first just at the calmest edges of the shoreline, and then the more protected nooks and crannies of the bay, inlets and the spaces between piers and beneath docks. It snows most days--not real storms, just a couple inches here and there--little enough for the window to blow most of it off the icy plain of the courtyard and other wide open, paved spaces, accumulating on branches and in alleyways, and creating growing drifts in corners and against walls.

After a week or so actual chunks of floating ice begin to fill the narrow channels of the harbor, threatening smaller and less-sturdy vessels, and the situation in the poorer parts of the city begins to grow dire. With the Viscount's blessing, Inquisition teams (particularly mages) are called in to help. Some are assigned to the docks, to clear ice that makes landing and unloading treacherous, others to help escort ships into harbor by melting a path ahead. Others are sent into Lowtown to clear ice and snow and to provide warmth and medical attention where needed. At least one mage is sent with each team, and while many neighborhoods are pleasantly surprised and grateful for the quick work fire glyphs make of cold hearths and frozen streets, a few are unable to overcome their distrust, and refuse the teams entry, determined to take care of their own without the help of dangerous outsiders.

In the last week of the year, a true blizzard strikes, snow falling steadily for more than a day, blanketing the city at least three feet deep. Digging out the Gallows will be a group effort, and most non-essential trips outside the base will be cancelled for a few days until travel is less difficult, while those who reside in the city or elsewhere may be encouraged to stay a night or two in the fortress so they might continue to work without traveling through the storm. But on the first day of Wintermarch the First Day feast goes on as planned, with modest but plentiful food and ale served in the Gallows' dining hall for anyone who wishes to celebrate the new year.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's been years since Simon last got to skate along the frozen Minanter, racing the other Starkhaven children and getting snow shoved down the back of his shirt as punishment when he won too often. His memories of it are blurry-edged now, but still fond--and muscle memory knows no lyrium fog; the moment he straps the skates back on, he knows he won't want to take them off again until the snow all melts.

He whisks along the outside edge of the courtyard, wishing fervently that this could be a viable method of transportation throughout the whole city. Maybe if he were a mage.

Edited 2017-12-14 06:33 (UTC)

No way Ellana is passing up the opportunity to skate everywhere, even if she's new at this. She has determination and that's the right path to success right there, isn't it? Well, whether or not it is, she has little fear of falling and is using the "skate fast until you run into something to stop" method of movement. Unfortunately, Simon has just skated into her path and she hasn't figured out how to turn just yet.

"Incoming!" she calls, as if she's a projectile about to be launched from a trebuchet at castle walls. Because she's coming in fast, arms held up to brace herself for the hit, should it come to pass.

This is one of the hazards he really ought to have remembered, but it seems that it'll take a literal blow to the gut, or something with the force of it, to remind him.

Were anyone else to ask for advice in his situation, he'd tell them to get out of the way--but he's confident in his own ability to handle the impact, and better him than someone else.

"It's all right, I've got you," he calls, bracing himself and extending an arm to block her careening path and catch her, lest she run into something that might do her more harm.

And catch her he does, as she continues in a straight line for him. She hits his arm, but the multiple layers she wears means he isn't hit by her bony body so much as by a pillow-like creature. Shirts under a sweater under a scarf under a big coat result in her not freezing to death right now, and a woolen hat is pulled down over her big ears, a single plait resting over one shoulder.

"Hey, you did!" she praises as she comes to a stop. "Simon, right? It's been awhile. I didn't mean for us to 'meet' so literally again."

Simon has the shape and inertia of a wall no matter what he's wearing, but even he is more bundled up than usual at the moment, the extent of it is a slightly too small scarf and a threadbare woolen jacket over his usual off-duty flannel. Ellana probably has the right of it, but it keeps him from immediately recognizing her until she gets close enough for him to make out her vallaslin.

"Oh--yes, of course!" he says, remembering the circumstances and the discussion well, if concerned now that his ever-patchy memory for names might fail him. He'll get it in a moment.

"Don't worry about that. Nobody ever teaches the newcomers how to brake. Crashing into something's a rite of passage back in Starkhaven."

"Is it? Am I an honorary Starkhavener now? Or whatever someone from Starkhaven is called." Ellana doesn't notice that he doesn't call her by name in return. Her blood is pumping and her breath is coming out in big puffs that hang in the air as fog. She's far too energized to worry whether or not he recalls her name like she did his.

"But is there an easy way to brake? Because I'd rather not knock anyone down if I can help it. Not everyone will be able to take it like you."

It's easy enough to set that little hurdle aside, and he laughs. "We've got to see how you do with the accent first," he teases. "Then we'll evaluate. But all right, it's like this. When you're going too fast and you need to stop, what you want to do is just move your legs apart and then quickly turn your toes inward a bit, like so--"

He demonstrates, skating a little ways and then coming to a gentle halt. It takes him a moment to recall the technique, as long as it's been since he was a beginner.

"You try it."

"Oh, that's really all there is to it?" she asks, pushing off to follow him, then doing the technique he showed her. And Ellana does slow down, though her balance is a bit thrown off. Waving her hands to adjust, she manages to regain her balance as she slows to a stop.

"Huh, that's easy!" She turns her skates back out again. "What if you're going really fast? Does it still work then?"

"There, you've got it!" As well-executed a stop as one could ask of a beginner, he thinks. The question, though, takes some thinking.

"Honestly, it's been long enough since I tried it that I really don't recall. I was always in the habit of doing it like this instead--"

He skates in a circle around her, building up speed, and brakes with a sharp turn to the side in a spray of ice.

"But that's a bit more complicated. I suppose the way I showed you would work all right if you had a lot of room to slow down, but the problem around here is that you probably won't. You might need some padding instead."

"Whoa!" she says, majorly impressed that he can stop himself in such a way. "I think I'd break an ankle if I tried that move. I should definitely practice more before I attempt it, and padding would help. It's not the greatest feeling to fall on such a hard surface." Especially when she's as bony as she is.

"How long have you been skating?"

Kaisa isn't quite as gleeful as Simon is, but after weeks of practicing roller skates, she's doing pretty well switching over to ice skates. She's also out to make sure that if she has to suffer from going from the Western Approach to this freezing cold, everyone else will suffer right along with her.

And, she just wants to have fun.

Which is why, when Simon breezes past her, she decides that he needs to be taken down a notch, and taken off his feet. "HEADS UP!" Is the only warning that Simon gets before he has a large Warden slamming into him, gleefully laughing as the two of them hurdle into a nearby snow drift--she's not mean enough to shove someone into the hard ice, after all. That shit hurts.

He had not envied her the climate of the Western Approach, to be sure. Why would anyone prefer scorching sunburn and sweat over lovely soft snow like this? (Except if they aren't fortunate enough to have heat, or if they're trapped in their homes without food, or...well, all right, there are any number of very legitimate reasons to have a problem with the snowbanks everywhere. But Simon himself doesn't have any.

Until he gets tackled into one, his expression embarrassingly comical in its shock before a mouthful of snow renders him unable to comment. In lieu of that, he whacks at her shoulder.

"That wasn't a proper heads-up!"

The heat was probably as bearable as it was because, in the long list of things that really sucked about the Western Approach, it being hot enough to fry an egg on the cobblestone was honestly near the bottom. Besides, that's what those qunari rope bikini armors are for.

But, back in Snow Hell, Kirkwall, Kaisa is still laughing delightedly, and only redoubles her laughter when he whacks her. But she does calm down, enough to start speaking, at least. "Hey, you gotta be prepared, no matter where you are. I spent a month drilling that into people's heads, and now it's in yours, too." Not that she went around tackling them. But she leans forward, a cheerful grin on her face as she reaches over to give Simon a good-natured pat on the shoulder.

"But look at you! Pale and cold. But alive! When I heard you guys went off to Nevarra, I expected to come back t' half the Inquisition shambling around."

As much ice as there was in Skyrim - and there was, there was more ice in some of the holds than Brónach had seen in her entire life - the skating thing she's been watching hadn't ever been done. Not that she'd seen. And she'd blame it on a war, or the dragon crisis but Thedas is in the same boat (so she's told) so--

Here she is.

Watching. Until she's not. Might as well make the most of her trips (she doesn't want to be indebted to this new thing yet) and a knife which is why her blade look a little too much like bone. And why she looks about as comfortable as the deer she took them from would on the ice.

"Do it. Try it and blame it on this if it works, if it doesn't--" She's muttering to herself, looking to her feet and s'up Simon hope you like shady elves with too many bones clattering too close for comfort.

They'd made do, back in Starkhaven, with whatever was on hand to serve for skate blades. Simon and his brother had been the fortunate ones, hoity-toity and well-to-do with their actual metal, scraps salvaged from their father's forge. The butcher's children had gone about on their choice of sturdy cow bones; the leaner and less well-shod children of the hunters and the poachers had let deer suffice.

He thinks he would know a beginner anywhere from that wobble, even if he can't quite make out the start of what she's mumbling, and a flash of what is meant to be charitable inspiration strikes him. Remembering well now how they'd all begun before they learned to balance, he skates over to where a snow-burdened tree has dropped several of its thinner branches into a snowdrift, and retrieves one long enough to use for a pole.

"Here," he says, offering it out to her. "This'll make it much easier, I promise. Just until you get your legs under you, and that won't take long."

There are times she talks to herself when the silence inside threatens to crack open to spill out messily, that she might never seal that all up again; there are things that a blacksmith knows as being beyond repair, fit for scrap, or being tossed, but when it's you, the pieces of you? A little harder that. When you refuse to stop because you have a love of the earth, the things in it. Which is why she made herself come out here. All the strange awkward bits of herself with bone carved out from the deer she'll use every piece of now--

And there's a stick. More than a stick. A man is handing her a stick that she regards with the face of one being handed something not only dead but left to rot several days beneath a baking sun, festering, crawling with insects. (Brónach would prefer something dead, oh how she would prefer to carry death in her own two hands as she has since childhood.)

"Why is a dead tree," moderating her tone isn't a thing Brónach's had practice with lately but here maybe the cold can be blamed for the startled roughness of it, "going to help me." Why did she say dead tree, who else says dead tree with an edge of alarm staring up at a man holding it out to her.

"A child doesn't learn if they don't fall do they? Bit old for that now but everyone falls, I can--" wobble. Alarmingly. Hiss like an old cat apparently good thing you don't have Khajit or they'd all be insulted most likely.

Please. Colin spent two years aboard a ship. He has mastered the art of walking on slippery surfaces without falling, and those surfaces were moving, so.

Of course, the giant, burly men aboard a ship are usually not sliding around on tiny fragments of metal. So Colin has to stop and stare for a little, because what the fuck. And of course, the man has serious momentum, so when Colin starts across the courtyard (slowly), he's having to time things awkwardly. And then the wind picks up and several files in the stack of paperwork he's carrying go flying, and paper sticking to ice will really muck up skates so he's suddenly having to hurry back in the opposite direction to rescue a giant man from paper.

This was not, indeed, a problem Simon had to worry about when last he went ice skating. Dodging the occasional ice fisherman, yes, but windblown paper is not nearly so easily avoided.

He tries, of course, veering first to the side in the hopes of bypassing the one sheet of it, and then attempting a quick halt as another lands in his path, but he's too top-heavy to maneuver so tightly at the speed he's going, and he overbalances with flailing arms and a crash onto the ice. The paper, to add insult to injury, blows into his face with another little eddy of wind.

"--this yours, serah?"

"Sorrysorrysorry! OOPH." That last was Colin slipping and landing on his rear, momentum carrying him the rest of the way on the ice. "Ow," he adds after consideration.

The paper on Simon's face buzzes with his voice, and that combined with Simon's tone get a genuine laugh from Colin. He reaches up and peels the paper off the other man's face.

"We've sustained injuries," he says breathlessly, "but at least this--" he looks at the contents of the paper "--completely redundant copy of a bill of lading survived."

"There we go. That's what matters. I've done my job." Defender of the Chantry, guardian of magekind, rescuer of technically-unnecessary sheets of parchment. It's all absurd enough that he would probably be amused by it anyway, even if he's still winded enough to make mirth painful, but Colin's laughter is contagious and he can't help but join in with it.

"I hope you aren't hurt as badly as all that, though--" He pushes himself up into a sitting position so as to check on this. "S'what I get for going that fast, but it seems a bit unfair to drag people into it who had the good sense to stay off the skates to begin with."

"Not hurt, no." Colin sits up as if to prove it. "Well," he amends, "we haven't tried to stand up yet, so perhaps I should hold off on that assessment." He rolls to his hands and knees so he can get his feet under him before standing.

"Here, let me." He pulls himself up with only a bit of a wince, and reaches down to offer a hand once he's certain of his own steadiness on the skates.

"I think you'll be all right. The infirmary's not far anyway, and I've a good salve for bruises if you'd rather not have to do with all the spirit business."

Colin dismisses the concern with a wave of his hand. "I've had harder falls. I used to work aboard a merchantman." He does, however, use Simon's hand to balance himself as he rises. "Felt like a copper being rattled about in a jar sometimes."

"Really?" He thinks back to Rivain, to the giddy excitement of being aboard a real ship and the delight at all Araceli's stories and songs, and looks both fascinated and envious in equal measure.

"I always dreamed about doing that, as a lad. What was it like? Beyond the...rattling."

"Cramped," Colin reminisces. "Very smelly. No privacy whatever. I wouldn't do it again, but I sort of see where the romantic notions of it come from. Not about the sea, so much, the sea is just the road a ship travels on and I don't hear people wax fancy over roads. It's the wind I loved. A ship is a massive machine, but all it really does is catch the wind a certain way and plough the water. Sometimes I climbed up the shrouds just to be up there and feel like I could stretch my arms forever without touching anything. Nothing but me and the wind in the whole world."

He trails off wistfully.

OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

Ice Skating -- Open

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