Fade Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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faderift2018-06-12 11:33 pm
faderifting) wrote in faderift2018-06-12 11:33 pm
RIFTER ARRIVAL: Justinian 9:44
WHO: New rifters & their rescuers.
WHAT: Welcome to Thedas.
WHEN: Justinian 12, 9:44
WHERE: East of the Hundred Pillars and Perivantium.
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: Justinian 12, 9:44
WHERE: East of the Hundred Pillars and Perivantium.
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 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, hanging suspended in the air, is a shifting, crystalline tear in reality. It's the same color as the mark on your hand.
Beyond it, the sky is a clear and black, with stars that won't show until the rift's blinding light has been extinguished but two moons visible now. One hangs above you, beyond the rift. Another is lower in the sky, cut by the jagged line of mountains on the distant horizon. There's nothing in between to obscure the view or to block the steady, warm wind from the east, which isn't howling or whistling over the flat expanse of land so much as gently humming. Not gentle: the ground beneath you, which is more rock than sand. Further to the east there are dunes; here, the land has been stripped by the wind. It is nonetheless indisputably desert, with low, shrubby foliage and the earth beneath the rocks cracked and sun-baked.
But this isn't really the time for sightseeing.
You aren't alone here. There are other people on the ground around you—humans, or at least humanoid—with matching green marks, and an assortment of junk that might be familiar or might be very much not. Beyond them, forming a crescent ring around one edge of the rift's light, are a dozen wraiths, each capable of shifting between elements and hurling blasts of damaging magic. There's also a swarm of large buglike creatures determined to eat your teeth and three ghouls in suits chasing one rifter in particular.
All of these things would probably like to kill you. But you're not alone. In the dark beyond the rift's light, a group of armed and armored people swiftly descend on the scene. Many are wearing a symbol that looks a bit like a hairy eyeball being pierced 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, it's only a short hike to an Inquisition camp in the greenery where the landscape begins its shift into plains, where everyone can patch up any wounds, have something to eat, and ask what in the void is going on here. But don't wander off. In the dark beyond the campfires there are other hazards: prowling wildlife, scavenging bands of darkspawn, unfamiliar lands and no map to guide you if you don't already know where you're going.
a. ...about that magic resistance
Pietro hasn't been out to fetch Rifters before. He's spoken to a few of them; enough to gather they probably aren't demons, or if they are, perhaps there's more to demons than he'd previously been aware. There'd been enough rifts in Orlais over the last few years that this isn't his first time watching wraiths pour out of the sky, either. Even the shambling corpse in the well-tailored jacket isn't the strangest thing. That honor goes to the hunk of metal that crashes to the ground in his path — not ore, mind you, but man-made, dream-made, a mess of impossibly thin metal tines and small round buttons once neatly aligned inside a now thoroughly dented box.
If asked, that mystifying contraption is the excuse he'll give for why, when the corpse closes in on the much-more-alive girl he'd been running toward, he's only barely within range. Blasted— There isn't time to get between them. Instead, he drops the butt of his staff to the ground and wills the creature to stop.
Ice springs from the earth in sheer planes, up through fine wool trousers and turned collar to knock a hunk of rotten neck skin (yeesh) loose into the breeze, before swallowing the skeleton up altogether within a solid, glassy wall.
–And not just the skeleton. One body successfully encased, the crystalline spears jut merrily onward toward the next nearest source of warmth.
"For the love of—" Pietro swings his staff round to send a flash of shimmering blue after, to intercept or, well, hopefully not also hit her. "Duck!"
this can only spell good things for their relationship
So she doesn't duck. Rather, when that magic comes, she's already moving, lurching to the side as unpredictably as possible so that she won't be a sitting target for a demon's next attack. Unfortunately, unpredictable movements are grand for avoiding attacks when someone's trying to hit you, but it also sabotages the efforts of someone who is actively trying to not hit you: she manages to lurch right into the path of that second magical attack.
It hits her dead-on. Right in the center of the chest. She shrieks, a primal noise of pain and fear, as she falls backwards, magic spreading across her, hair flying wildly, limbs flailing.
(For what it's worth, she's not being actively dramatic. It does hurt in the moment. A lot. And it is bloody alarming, being on the receiving end of a magical bolt, even if you're pretty sure it's not going to take you out. Maybe a little bit of it is exaggerated, because a big dramatic death-scene is useful if you're planning to play dead after, but it bloody hurts, still, for the few seconds until the magic dissipates into nothing and fades from her system.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9fBQYE-S5o
"Don't they teach listening skills in the Fade, or whatever impossible place it is you all come from, honestly," the string of complaints begins rattling out of the mage as he flat-out runs for her, and if Pietro's tone is sharp and unsteady as a tray of knives, well, it's only that he's just hit an unarmed teenage girl with enough magical energy to risk freezing a limb, and he's fairly certain he didn't hit her anywhere they can simply cut off.
"Please don't be dead," he breathes as he drops to his knees and skids across jagged rock to land beside her. "Or near death, even, because the last healing spell I tried didn't go exactly well, and Maker knows if Isaac even bothered to show up."
He reaches one hand out to check if she's breathing, the other rifling in his belt for a potion or a tonic or something.
no subject
So when he reaches towards her, she's ready. She's not completely unaffected by the magic - her chest is a little achey, and she thinks she might get a chest-cold or something later from it - but there's no physical damage visible. Hopefully, the oddness of that is enough to give him some warning, because when she springs into action, she's vicious. Her hand closes around the pen she's armed herself with, and she swings it upwards, driving the wicked-sharp tip towards his throat with a cry that's mostly fierce and only a little bit scared.
no subject
Very much more not dead than Pietro had been expecting, in fact, and the instant rush of relief he feels at her first movement is— rather unfortunate for his reaction time. He yelps, reeling back, and barely manages to raise the midsection of his staff between them in time to avoid being skewered in the neck.
"Hey—" Rude. It is not the most elegant block, but it is a solid one, with a bit of a shove to it. "I am not here to fight you. Not even with— what is that, the world's bluntest knife?" What kind of weapon is that?? True to his word, however, the faintly glowing end of the staff gets no brighter. At least for now.
no subject
"Rubbish, you're not here to fight," she snarls, though she doesn't sound quite as ferocious as is her usual wont. "You cast a spell right at me."
no subject
"I was aiming for that," he explains, with a nod toward the frozen block of a skeleton, and the icy stalagmite that has reached out from it, entirely unscathed. Both have begun to sweat in the warm air.
(Beyond them, sickly green light begins to swirl, and something else begins to stir from the earth.)
no subject
"Well - " She hesitates, biting her lip. Then she shakes her head, and pushes herself to her feet, dropping the pen into her pocket. "If that is true - and I'm not saying it is, but if it is - thanks." She looks past him, and towards the swirl of magic - and suddenly she has the distinct feeling that she's very much not out of danger yet.
"I think something's coming. Over there."
no subject
Anyway. He should probably pay attention to whatever is liable to try to kill them next. Pietro scrabbles to his feet, turning to look at the green glow coalescing into a vaguely human shape.
"Another wraith. It won't be the last, either, if you don't close up that hole you opened up in the sky coming in." Because clearly, this whole situation is her fault. He backs toward her all the same, raising his staff again. "Can you use a proper knife, or do your skills lie solely in stabbing your would-be rescuers with blunt instruments?"
no subject
She still doesn't trust this magician, not fully. But at the end of the day, she's going to be rather more able to absorb something glowing and green and unsettling than he is. Her resilience will keep her safe. He might have shields, but a shield's not much in comparison to what she's got. So she squares her shoulders, and steps between him and the ghostly, ghastly form.
"And stay behind me, won't you."
no subject
They've hardly got time to tussle for it, though. Instead, Pietro pulls the dagger from his belt and offers her the hilt. It isn't the fanciest, but it's no hunting knife, either, long and thin and sturdy in a way that's meant to get between plate mail or ribs more than slash at partially corporeal demons. Not what he'd usually fight a wraith with, but it's better than nothing.
"How about you keep it occupied, and I'll get around behind it," he offers, as the shape moves to close in, trailing wisps of green in its wake.