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

Making two trips out of the Gallows has been enough for an Yngvi in all of this when there isn't the promise of Avvar mead since winter weather loses the magic when you're not doing it living for free where you've got guest rites but getting spare pelts to his lady, agreeing to saunter off in a Darktown direction because Snorri, fuckin' Jim, Hulda, they don't deserve to freeze, well he's done that.

Besides he has twenty nugs to ease across the ice back to the Gallows proper, slip-sliding all over after Foie Gras who will indeed take your fingers if you go near that beak so please don't.

It's miserable. Distressingly miserable and it's why he's poking through rooms in two coats, either a bear or wolf slanket draped over him with his face peering out from under an animal's face, trying to find grease or salve or oil. No, excuse you he has every right in the world to be in this room, office, storage space, whatever you're calling what the door he opened leads to he has things to do and what are you hiding in there search him for the permit his fingers fell off this is a gross violation he will have the authorities at your door when they've rolled themselves here.

(Bet you didn't miss the Skyhold tent inspections did you, well now it's worse, you've got doors for him to fiddle with.)

[If you'd like to wildcard or do something else, grab me on plurk or discord and we'll figure it out]

Just because it's freezing everywhere doesn't mean Rey's work stops. In fact, it means she's even busier, being called all over the place to try and plug up holes. She's entirely miserable doing it, but if the drafty Gallows will be slightly less drafty due to her efforts, she'll take it.

When she walks into the latest room that's typical occupant has vacated and spots Yngvi, she isn't even that surprised. She's not going to shoo him out or call anyone on him. It's a space used as an office, it's not really private. Even if it were somewhere private, she'd probably just help him.

"What are you looking for?"

Ah, the helping. He'd done that to the best of his ability - someone has the keg, it moves things safely over the ice - until Darktown laid him out flat in a way he hadn't liked. Besides, Yngvi isn't a good padded dwarf. No meat on his bones.

A hinge groans in an echo of the pipes that had burst at the start of all this as he turns to peek at Rey from behind the fur shrouding his face. Too cold to shave too so the stubble is a beard by now, adding to the whole Avvar dwarf aesthetic he's got going for him.

"Rey! Brilliant, just in time to lend a hand - I need some grease or oil, or greasy, oily salve. All the traps and hinges are struggling."

Rey's brow furrows for a moment as she shakes her head slightly.

"You're raiding an office for oil or grease?" the look on her face suggests that she thinks this is one of the last places you'd find it. "You could have just asked me. I have some in my workshop."

Look we all have reasons for doing things, Yngvi is cold, trying to keep warm, this is hucking one stop then watching it ping between a good half-dozen birds.

"Who am I to say what they have in their drawers? I just want it and judge? 'sides didn't know where you were off to and I've done my good going outside deeds now I'm back in here. Darktown can burn and Hightown is sorted. You managing?"

"Did you lose your crystal? You could have called me." She raises her eyebrows at him, before shaking her head at his question, shrugging her shoulders.

"I'm from the desert. I'd never even seen snow until shortly before I arrived here. I was fighting for my life then, so I didn't have time to enjoy it. Now that I've had time, I've decided I don't really like it." It's pretty enough but the bone-chilling cold that comes with it isn't something she has learned to tolerate.

"It's somewhere," Yngvi flaps a hand then regrets that because it stirs the cold air around him, reminding him of just how damned cold it is. "Think I stuck it in a drawer so the goose wouldn't eat it because the goose just thinks it's something to eat - ever tried taking something back from a goose? He's a fighting goose, it's a hassle - and the drawer is now a bit. Frozen."

The truth: Yngvi has mostly parked the sending crystal in the drawer after he decided to read excerpts of a book to the Inquisition, and certainly after he moved to a new room because things are real, things are getting bad, and last time he embarrassed himself too much whilst also just flaying a few layers off for the amusement of folk who think dwarves are funny. That tend to get weird when the dwarf won't. Who want to stuff him back in the box.

"Next time the Inquisition has to go off to the Approach or up the Anderfels way, you should volunteer, you'd be right at home. Western Approach is just a big terrible sand desert haze of heat and the Anderfels is hot and terrible and I hated any time I went there. Also hate this sort of snow which is only good when I don't need to do things. When we went to a hold you were mostly all wrapped up. Drinking. Eating. More furs than a bear has." Because they took them from the bears y'know? He didn't need to walk on his stubby legs. "How do people live in a desert though? We almost died once when the stream on the map got diverted since we'd last gone through."

"I went to the Approach. It was more humid than Jakku," she replies somewhat blithely, though she has a slight smile on her face. She shifts her arms a little under her cloak, absently rubbing her hands together as she'd taken to doing fairly often during this cold.

"There were moisture farms on the more temperate parts of the planet, and water was typically imported to where I lived. You always carried water with you, but... I also got used to being thirsty. It wasn't easy living, but I... didn't have much of a choice."

"More humid. The Western Approach where I almost died because someone or several someones diverted the water marked on our map." The mind boggles. "C'mon, my room has a small fire and lots of nugs and a goose. Don't have a slanket that'd fit you but got spare furs that'll be warm."

Yngvi can nod to some of that though, maybe not a moisture farm because when he opens his mouth first, he gives that away. "Water isn't like wheat or pigs though, can't harvest that. It's there or you get it there somehow. Darktown was damp, you always had water even if it wasn't good but I remember hungry. Like...the hurting kind of hunger. When eating hurts too."

"Moisture farms collect the moisture from the air, and then distill it," Rey offers as an attempt to explain it, although it can be more complicated than that, given the technology involved. She nods her head as he talks about being hungry; she knows.

"I had to trade pieces of scrap or things that I fixed up for food. It was never enough. I used to go days without eating, because all the better scrap had been picked clean. Life wasn't meant to survive on Jakku... but it did, somehow." She thinks of the wild flowers she used to collect, signs that even though Jakku was a harsh place to live, even delicate things could survive.

"Oh, I know distilling. And collecting rainwater. Just. Just weird, so, like any day but especially damp days...bet there's some dwarf round somewhere that could do it. Not that most places need it but if you say it to them it'd be the principle of it." Dwarves are the ones with all the skill which he'd maybe like folk to remember better, even if most (all) of them are or were Orzammar dwarves.

Heading out of where they are with care to shut it up as if no one ever came disturbing it, Yngvi can knows the same life. The things growing in Darktown that padded meals or made potions. "We had to earn it growing up. Please your elders, make sure you get a dinner. Not saying it was a lot of dinner or a good one but it's better than no dinner. "Obviously I'm here, Gunnar is but he's off elsewhere."

She is somber as Yngvi talks, her eyes distant, thinking back to a hard childhood and harder adulthood. She'd had to grow up so young, though part of her had never grown up at all. She still longed for her parents, even if she knew that, at least now, they were truly lost to her.

"I suppose that's a universal truth, no matter where you are. There's always those poorer than the rest who have to learn young how to survive by any means required."

What is it about longing for parents even when you look at them praying to whatever there is that might listen to whatever half-formed devotions and offerings a gutterborn dwarf might make that you don't become them even when you want them. Desperately, down in the darkest heart of your heart that never sees the sun, you still want them. Yngvi still wants Einar to tell him well done, no matter how that fills him with shame.

"The Carta fills up the ranks by getting people from Dusttown, it's meant to be better now for the Casteless since they got a new king in Orzammar but people still turn blind eyes because it's how it always was, because traditions. They got things like noble hunting if you're a girl. Teach you how to be just what some noble dwarf wants, then hopefully you give him a son." Not that it's tasteful, Yngvi doesn't know how to feel about it other than embarrassed in some sort of strange strained way since if it's your only way out, as Rey just said, it's the only way out.

Rey grimaces at the description of noble hunting, if only because she's heard of similar things. Not on Jakku of course, they didn't have anything like nobility on Jakku, but other worlds. Despite the New Republic's efforts, slave trading was alive and well in the Outer Rim.

"What happens if a girl goes to all that effort and... has a daughter?" She imagines it can't be good, if he specifically mentioned son.

Some of the women Yngvi knows now had been noble hunters once. The Carta was there and there are multiple ways to get out of Orzammar with them, but some didn't want to leave, they wanted to stay because it was home, it was where your family were, why should you have to leave because some rules made by other people said this is all that we've allowed you to have, this is your space, this is where we don't have to see you. Yngvi personally can't wrap his head around it unless it's in two parts: a better life for you, your family, and the ones after who won't know all the same things, and a way to thumb your nose at those same people who'd put you down there. That baby boy they were beaming at? That longed for boy? It came from the dust beneath all the art.

"Sometimes she might get another chance, it's...the Carta tends to think of people as investments. A noble might have a bit of rough and tumble with someone beneath them but to make sure you'll actually have a noble when you're a Duster, there's a lot of upfront costs before the pay-off: education, clothes, make-up, speech lessons, probably stuff on how to behave, maybe even some dental work too since it's Dusttown, they'll probably have bad teeth or they get gold caps on them. Music lessons are big too, even different languages to sing or instruments. Things like that. If she doesn't have a son after all that…" He swallows uncomfortably, acutely aware of what it sounds like because there's no way to change what it is even if he doesn't cast judgement on the women (girls, some of them are definitely younger than him, they stand a better chance after all) but because that was him. All his lessons. All of Gunnar's. How much they'd bring in versus how much it'd cost to get them there. "If she has a daughter then either she's left with a debt to repay or she's just left. It's not like she had anything in the first place. Just a chance that's taken away from her, but usually a debt because the Carta gets its cut. And all the good stuff about getting to be in the noble caste with your family, that lasts only as long as that child lives too so...y'know. Terms and conditions."

When is a person not a person, that's always what it comes down to.

If Yngvi were to look back at Rey as she followed him, he'd see her face scrunched up in disgust. She lived a hard life on Jakku, fighting for every inch of what was hers, but once it was hers it belonged to her. She can't imagine living a life where you're expected to learn how to be this thing that someone would want, and then being discarded when it didn't turn out exactly how they imagined.

"That's horrible. To place someone's worth so completely on a child whose sex is completely random." She shakes her head a little, crossing her arms in front of her.

Unlocking his door since he's never so foolish as to leave it any other way, and least of all these days, Yngvi leans inside to disarm the traps he set up just in case as the large angry goose rouses itself at the sight of a stranger until he flaps back. Be quiet, he mutters under his breath, and it settles back on top of a nest of blankets and nugs. Yngvi has also been part of that nest because it's warm if liable to end up with someone or something poking you at weird hours.

"It's how Orzammar's always been, even if Bhelen made it better for the Casteless, he can't change that much or they'd all go fullscale revolt. You inherit the Caste of the same-sex parent, it's how it always is. How it'll be even when the Darkspawn finally eat all of them at last." There's not really malice in him, it's hard to have personal malice at a thing that much bigger, just him, turning back with a resigned expression. It's tiring, it's all tiring. "Aren't there things like that where you're from? Or is it better?"

Rey's eyebrows raise at the goose honking. She'd never actually seen one up-close, and it's a little alarming. Yngvi doesn't seem put out by it so she follows him in, attention drawn back to their conversation.

"There are. Maybe less than there were before the New Republic tried to push out organized crime, but it's not unheard of. I don't think we have anything quite like this... noble hunting thing, but I'm sure there's similar practices." Rey doesn't know how lucky she is, if her parents had left her on a different planet she may very well have grown up as a sex slave. There's not much call for that on Jakku.

"Rey, Foie Gras. Throwing a strop 'cause letting a goose out just now might mean a pillow and dinner for someone. Behave or I'll send you to Preudame." Which is an empty threat because Wren's big dog basically looked after Yngvi for a bit but here we are.

Part of Yngvi isn't surprised, but part of humid a little sad to hear it, banking on other places maybe having more and better somehow.

"Everyone does what they do to survive," he says. Not a comfortable not a comforting thought but the truth isn't like that. So he goes to his keg chariot doubling as storage, rifling through for a fur. "Here, no sleeves or hood but you'll be plenty warm."

The fur is definitely warmer than anything she has and she smiles gratefully, folding it in her arms.

"Thank you, this is great. I'm sure Padawan will appreciate it, too. She doesn't seem to like the cold much, either." She'd thought about trying to fashion a coat of some kind for the mabari, but hadn't really known where to start. She's a passable seamstress, but not exactly someone who can churn out elaborate creations.

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OPEN ↠ HARING EVENT

Yngvi | gallows ota;

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