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.
i
The sound that the creepy ghost makes is unholy, if you want to use a word like that lightly. Scary is another choice. Muffled fingernails on a chalkboard, weirdly too-quiet for the gaping maw that opens like some horrible version of a mouth. The bolt sizzles in and disappears in the wraith's chest.
And Jester goes bounding after it, charging like a bull. A qunari, seven feet tall and light blueish-grey, her horns adorned with ribbons and baubles. Under her blue cloak, she's wearing a cute dress and a pinafore and petticoats, light pink and ruffled. Smudged in dirt, she flashes a big grin at the lady, as she darts past her.
"Hey, you are really pretty!"
A quick compliment, before she throws her hand dramatically up in the air, a true magical girl. Her spiritual weapon--in its usual form, a giant pink lollipop--arcs down to smack the wraith in the face.
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Her mouth opened, shut - thank you, she supposed she meant to say? - and watched her go bouncing off. Was this how people felt watching her? Perhaps. But even then she still fought by conventional means. Guns and swords.
Wasn't really time to go stuck staring, all the same. She has greater issues to attend with, namely that there were still these green wisps to contend with. Nothing as dramatic as the girl could do, but she could distract the next one for the woman to do her next... whatever that was. So she barks what was nothing less than a war cry. Loud and deep, she might look poorly suited for a battlefield, but she knows it better than being off it certainly. Enough to know how to pitch her voice to cut through the cacophony of sounds and get the ghost's attention on her.
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"Don't be such a baby, don't be such an asshole," she starts to reprimand--but she's much closer to the wraith now, and gets a better look at its weird face. And the way that its jelly-eyes are focused behind her, back on the pretty lady, who has just called the ghost's attention back to her.
"Heyyyy, wait," Jester starts--but the ghost whmpfs past her, with a blast of cold gross air, reaching one of its wavery hands toward the lady. "Aww, man! Lady!"
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Hears the cry that whines at her from her company and - "It's distracted! Hit it!"
That she is hardly a frontline fighter dressed like this doesn't seem to stop her from doing any of this.
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Jeez. The beautiful lady has a weapon, at least, so she's not totally unarmed. And she is distracting it, as the wraith hisses angrily, trying first to swat aside the blade, and then to close the distance between them with a surge forward--but Jester's lollipop has glided over smoothly and now swings down, braining the wraith in its ugly head. The hissing cuts off abruptly, turns to something that sounds almost like a sizzle as the wraith crumples beneath the blow. Its swoop forward is more stagger.
"Okay, now you hit it!" Jester yells. "Tag team!"
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