Fade Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
faderifting) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
faderift2018-04-11 12:45 am
faderifting) wrote in faderift2018-04-11 12:45 am
Cloudreach 9:44 Rifter Arrival
WHO: New rifters & their rescuers.
WHAT: Welcome to Thedas.
WHEN: Cloudreach 10, 9:44
WHERE: Amaranthine
NOTES: This is the arrival log for all new rifters, open also to current characters who would participate in their recovery. New players can also assume everyone survives and arrives back in Kirkwall within a couple of days, but please note there will be a brief quarantine period when they won't be permitted to leave the Gallows, to get them up to speed while ensuring they're not diseased or otherwise going to kill anyone, before they're set loose on the city.
WHAT: Welcome to Thedas.
WHEN: Cloudreach 10, 9:44
WHERE: Amaranthine
NOTES: This is the arrival log for all new rifters, open also to current characters who would participate in their recovery. New players can also assume everyone survives and arrives back in Kirkwall within a couple of days, but please note there will be a brief quarantine period when they won't be permitted to leave the Gallows, to get them up to speed while ensuring they're not diseased or otherwise going to kill anyone, before they're set loose on the city.
You were asleep—whether deeply or fitfully, falling unconscious for the last time in a pool of blood or just resting your eyes for a moment—and then you were not. And wherever you were was not, anymore, replaced by nothing but the sensation of falling into endless, bottomless nothing. If this were still a dream, you would wake before you hit the ground. You can't die in a dream, they say. In some worlds.In this world, bathed in the light of a flare of too-bright, greenish light you will find yourself hitting mossy cobblestones with an unforgiving smack. You're alive, and you're fine, except for the narrow splinter of light the same sickly green as whatever brought you here that now glows out of the palm of your left hand. It aches, a bone-deep pain that gnaws even through all the distractions.
Above you is a shifting, crystalline tear in reality; beyond that, gray clouds and a sea breeze, framed by the high walls surrounding the city you've landed in. There are people on the walls, some of them armored and armed, all of them briefly and collectively paralyzed by the sight below.
Don't let their terror go to your head. It's not you that has them intimidated, nor is it any of the humans (or Qunari) who are sprawled out on the ground around you, nor is it the assortment of unfamiliar—to them, not to you, perhaps to you it's very familiar—junk that's spilled out as well, most notably some flaming metallic debris and a giant wooden cross.
It's the beings that are coming out after you, almost as if in pursuit. Two are drifting, spindly things with six spidery limbs in addition to grasping skeletal arms, eager to grab hold of anyone who comes too close and fill their field of vision with swirling darkness and corner-of-the-eye glimpses of whatever frightens them. Several more most closely resemble trees, perhaps, with half-melted squids for heads—which might not sound particularly scary, fine, but their ability to dive into the ground and resurface anywhere with rasping screams helps on that front.
All of these things would like to kill you, and the people around you, and the people on the walls, and perhaps the other people screaming and scurrying into taverns and shops for cover. But you're not alone. Out of those same taverns and shops come people who do seem to know what they're doing; many are wearing a symbol that looks a bit like a hairy eyeball being pieced through by a sword, and at least a couple of them seem to know what they're doing. Almost like they've been waiting for you. In fact, exactly like they've been waiting for you.
AFTERWARDS, the grateful citizens of the City of Amarenthine might provide a drink, a meal, or a place to tend to wounds before everyone sets back toward Kirkwall. It's not a long trip, but one that requires boarding a ship to cross a narrow sea. It will be a rough, stormy journey, but there won't be any demons.
no subject
"I thought it smelled of poop," she replies, a little obnoxiously, though she's leaning a little closer (albeit cautiously) to take a look at the drawing. She looks very happy, bouncing on the bed. Helena cannot remember the last time she did that; the nuns would have doled out a vicious punishment, and she has only very rarely had beds like that at all since Tomas took her in. Never so big, though.
Her fingers curiously, cautiously, trace the line of Jester's tail in the picture. Her brow is furrowed. "Tiefling," she repeats.
The drawing is confusing. Whenever she has seen pictures of devils, they are terrible things. Conniving and dangerous, crawling over walls, tormenting and tempting humanity. This little blue devil looks joyous and playful. Her name is Jester. It is confusing, and so much of her life has been pulled apart and restructured that she doesn't know how to respond. She is not the Light, she is not the Original. She has a twin, a family. They have been plunged into this strange world. Creatures from stories are real. People have horns and insist over and over that they are not devils, but is that not exactly what a demon or devil might say?
She holds out the candy, the most cautious and suspicious offering of candy the world has ever beheld. "Are tieflings nocnitsa?" A tap on the blue skintone. "Night spirit."
no subject
"Nocnista? I don't know any noncnistas. Just tieflings. Ummm," thoughtful, as she reaches for more candy, "I mean, technically tieflings are like. Way way way way way way way back, fiends, or something, but way back. Tielfings are tieflings, you know? Not ghosts or anything. I'm blue because it is a pretty color. My mom, the Ruby of the Sea, she is an even prettier. The most beautiful. Why, do you know some night ghosts? Do they sneak into people's rooms while they are sleeping and sit on the end of their beds and watch them sleep?"
no subject
So the tieflings are not nightmare creatures, but somewhere in their history they are fiends. Something unholy is in their bloodline, something... belonging to an abomination.
(Even the thinking of it, though, makes her head tilt a little, guilt twinging somewhere, guilt she'd sooner not think of. All the abominations she had killed, only to learn— )
"Tieflings sound like devil children," she says, slowly, but more thoughtful - uncertain. Maybe Sarah would want her to fight a devil, to protect Sarah from the fiendish. Maybe Sarah would be angry, the way she had been angry about the giantess. Either way, she should confer with her sestra. Sarah might say there are people who are humans who are worse than devils, like Rachel.
"If she is Ruby of Sea, are you Sapphire?"
no subject
Even the qunari version of Jester will smell good, and that's just a fact.
"And don't be so literal," she says, with equal confidence, "I can't be a devil child because the Ruby of the Sea is not a devil." An obvious contradiction. Jester crunches another bite of candy. Now she gets the point of peanut butter--when eaten with chocolate, anyways. "She's just my mom, and a famous singer and courtesan in Nicodranus. And I am just me, Jester! I am also a good singer--not as good as my mom--and good at lots of other things, too. Man, I can't believe you have not heard of tieflings before. It must be really boring where you are from. Have you heard oooof..."
She draws the word out as she thinks about what she could ask.
"Pickles?" Abruptly, a smirk jumps to Jester's face, and she leans a little closer, as if to tell something in confidence. "Because they are kind of a big dill."
no subject
Gods, devils. The righteous and pure and the scientific and corrupt. The cruel and the kind. Hearts on wrong sides and monstrosities made in laboratories.
The joke catches her off guard. She has been remaining a little incredulous, a little distant, and there is a long silence after the pun falls. A silence, and then Helena's mouth pulls into a grin, and she laughs - a scratchy, rough sounding thing from deep in her belly, and she slouches down against the crate more.
"You are funny, Jester-tiefling." Dipping her hand into the crate, she rummages around a little bit, and pulls out a packet of cookies, shaped like peanuts with peanut buttery filling sandwiched between the pairs. Unceremoniously, she thrusts towards her few friend.
"You want to try?"
no subject
The other part that stops her is the part where Helena brings out a packet of cookies. Jester gasps, happily, and takes it from her so she can study the words and the picture on it with great intensity.
"Ah, this is more peanut butter! On cookies? What the crap, man--"
But she's already pulling open the packaging anyways, eager to try it.
"You are really really generous to share your peanut butter with me. But I feel bad just taking it from you." Not that bad. A little bad. She really wants to try the peanut buttered cookies. "Do you want to trade? I have some doughnuts I can give to you."
no subject
To demonstrate, she taps the side of the crate she's perched on. See? Big crate. All hers. A packet is not too generous to be giving to funny person. "The rest I save to share with my sestra. Present for her."
Obviously Helena disappearing to help Inquisition and go meet the new rifters without saying anything will be good surprise, and peanut butter will be good surprise also.
Even so, though, her head tilts to the side. "Yes. I like."
no subject
She sticks the package of peanut butter cookies in her skirt pocket to free up her hands, as she pinches open the top of the doughnut packet and peers inside.
"Even if you have a lot, you can still be generous, you know. Like me! I am generous with my doughnuts. But I am also a tough customer. This is a very even trade so don't even think that you are screwing me." Her tough-guy tone evaporates basically immediately as she looks back up at Helena with a smile. "So-o, what's your favorite color? And what's a sestra?"
no subject
What is her favourite colour?
She's not sure she can think of the last time someone asked her that. She's not sure she's really thought about it for a long time, and she hesitates for a long moment. "Sestra is word for sister in my language. It is what I call my twin." And all those other sister clones that she doesn't quite know how to categorise, still. Sarah is her twin; they would have been sisters without science. The others are more complicated.
"I like... black," she offers, belatedly. Sarah likes black. She wears it much.
no subject
She pushes aside some of the other doughnuts in the packet, in a quest for a chocolate one.
"I cannot believe you have a twin sister. That is very cool. Do you guys talk at the same time? That is what I would do, if I had a twin sister. And I would play all kinds of tricks on people. I would make them think they were talking to my sister and then, they would be so surprised when they found out that they were talking to me! It would be really really embarrassing."
And also: really funny. Jester beams, as she holds out the chocolate doughnut for Helena to take.
no subject
Once I pretended to be Sarah so I could get close enough to the woman who birthed us to kill her.
She gives Jester a long, silent look.
"Sometimes we make prank," she agrees, slowly. "I am better at than Sarah."
Sarah was very clever, quick thinker. Alley cat making sure her survival. Helena was more imaginative, more dangerous, set the traps.
Reaching out slowly, anticipating Jester being likely to snatch the treat away until the moment she has successfully secured it in hand, Helena is as tense and poised as a cat preparing to leap. And then the dougnut is in hand, and she seems to go sort of limp.
Belatedly, when she's already taken a chomp out of the doughnut: "Thank you."
no subject
Already she's jealous of Helena, getting to eat a doughnut while she stands here not eating a doughnut. But her supply is limited, until she can find a bakery. And then what if that bakery doesn't have doughnuts? Oh, shit.
"Oh, shit," Jester says aloud. To the casual observer, this is said apparently apropos of nothing. Helena probably won't even notice. "Helena. Do you think they have doughnuts here?"
no subject
"I don't know." Slowly said, as she thinks about it. The not knowing is horrifying. She stares at the bit of doughnut that she didn't shove into her mouth, and holds it towards Jester.
"You might need this back."