RIFTER ARRIVAL: Justinian 9:44

[faderifting]

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.

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.

Comments

[rathercommon]

"Yeah," says Kitty, emphatically, relieved that Jester gets it. Because that really is it. It's weird to feel like this - like standing atop a gabled roof, balancing carefully, a single wrong move enough to send you hurtling into nothingness. Kitty is good at climbing roofs, but there she at least could go back down, climb down under her own power...Here, she feels like she's trapped out in the open, with no net around her, buffeted by strong winds. And, for that matter, nothing to climb and nowhere to hide if things take a turn. In the city, you can always find a nook to hide in, a basement, a closet, something. Out here, the best you can do is run and run and run until finally you disappear over the horizon, which has got to be - Hell, she doesn't even know how far that is. If these people decide to kill her, there's nowhere to escape to.

"See, that's creepy," she says. "All of this space is just - It feels like you could die out here and no one would ever notice."

[the_cleric]

"Well, I would notice."

Simple and straightforward, and Jester smiles at Kitty again--this time with less teeth, though this is not necessarily the result of a conscious decision. It's just a sweeter smile, that's all, and one that she really really means.

"That's what made me feel better. I made friends. I found a group. And then it was like," she shrugs, one shouldered, "well, it was still big and weird, but it was super exciting too. I guess I was always a little excited. I had read all of these books and heard all of these stories, and then I was out killing gnolls and giant butt-ugly snakes and saving little girls and things. It was pretty cool. So maybe if you do that and find a group, you will also feel better."

Kitty totally, totally grew up in one room, just like Jester. She can feel the kinship.

[rathercommon]

A group? She gnaws on her lip, and she stares down at her feet. A group. What is it about that thought that makes her feel ill? Perhaps it's some nasty cruel thing in her that nauseates her. I had a group and all they'd done was mislead me and distract me and make me greedy and awful. But no; that thought doesn't feel quite right. They'd all been wrong. They'd all been greedy. But she doesn't hold her former comrades in contempt. Their loss still hurts, a terrible ache, made all the worse by the fact that they'd made so many mistakes that had led them to that deadly trap.

So then is it some sort of fear of loss? Some desire to hold herself apart and keep herself alone so that she doesn't feel the pain of loss again? That's not entirely right, either.

Then is it a sense that she works better alone? Or, perhaps, some mistrust of the people here? Or what?

"I don't know," she sighs, running her hand through her hair. "I'm not really...a group kind of person. I guess." A beat, and then she offers, "But thanks for saying that. That you'd notice."

[the_cleric]

"Awww," Jester says, and blows a raspberry. "I mean, you are welcome, of course. But it is true! I would notice. We all live together in the Gallows, okay, so it is easy to tell when someone goes missing. And maybe you have not found the right group yet, you know! Because it is too easy to say 'I am no a group kind of person, I guess.' "

Her imitation of Kitty is too influenced by her own accent, but she lets the physicality do the work for her: squints up one eye, pouts her bottom lip, tosses her hair and puts her nose a little in the air.

"Like that is bullshit, man. You haven't worked with all the groups on all the plains! You should remain totally open to opportunity. Because you never know."

[rathercommon]

That...good grief, Kitty hopes she doesn't sound like that. She especially hopes she doesn't look like that. Jester's face is demented.

"No, I don't." She admits that much with a little shrug of one shoulder. "I haven't. You're right. But it's simply that..." She hesitates, and then blows a strand of hair out of her face, and says, "I had people back home. And it was...It didn't end very well. That's all."

hope i don't know what is happening to me so many of those words in that tag were wrong

[the_cleric]

"Ohhhhh."

Jester takes another bite of her pastry. Since her mouth is much bigger than it used to be, the size of her bites is bigger, too. More than half the pastry is gone now. She chews, thoughtfully.

"So-o... do you want to say what happened, that made it not end well, or is it too hard?" Or maybe too secret. Should she tell Kitty how good she is at keeping secrets? Should she tell Kitty that telling stories around a fire is a great way to say hard or secret things? Maybe in a second. She keeps quiet for now, leaving the opportunity for reply totally open.

they were perfect words just unconventional

[rathercommon]

"No, it's not hard." Of course it's not hard. It happened, after all, so it's not like she has to search her memory for what happened. And yes, she does feel...It was a dreadful thing, watching it as it happened. Absolutely dreadful. But there are plenty of people in plenty of worlds who've seen far worse. Right? They weren't innocent people dragged away to be tortured to death in the Tower. They went in with eyes open, and they died quick.

She reaches up to push back her hair, gathering it into a loose ponytail and then letting it fall.

"We just...did things badly. We made mistakes." That's a safe place to start. "We wanted to stand up to evil, but just ended up perpetuating the same evil ourselves. We wanted to dismantle power but just turned greedy and grasping and ambitious. We wanted to do good, but we'd been too programmed for too long to see the world in certain ways, and we were betrayed, too." She takes a breath. "And so everyone died. Everyone except me."

There. That wasn't hard. She's okay. Her voice didn't shake. It was steady, and her hands were steady, and she was rational and calm. She...might have also been a little bit too...Well, Jester is sort of - straightforward, isn't she, sort of...uncomplicated, mentally, and so she's not sure if that explanation will be understood...Well, anyway.

you're very kind

[the_cleric]

Jester does a closed-mouth gasp, so her latest bite of pastry doesn't fall out, and her eyes get really wide. She takes another bite and chews, slowly, as she listens.

"Wow," she says, when Kitty finishes explaining. It's a quiet wow, almost reverent. "That is like a story."

Perpetuating the same evil that they were trying to stop--well, that's history, right? People do that all the time. But usually it happens a long while later. Things are usually really really good, until they are really really not, and then people look around and thing, oh shit, when did things get so really really not good? Because it happens slowly, right. Usually. Maybe Kitty is much older than she looks and that's why she has had time to live through all of that.

"Thank you for telling me," she says, still serious, "even if it wasn't hard to tell or really even a big secret or whatever. Did the evil that you were standing up to come and kill everyone? Who betrayed you? Was it someone you thought was your friend and then they totally weren't?"

There's a little bit of her usual gusto, but it's muted, too. This is Serious Business, man.

[rathercommon]

"I mean - that's what a betrayal's got to be, right?" Kitty asks. "If they weren't a friend, then it's not a betrayal. It's just a shitty person being shitty."

She takes another steadying breath. Jester, at least, seems the right degree of interested - not enough to seem suspicious, enough that Kitty doesn't feel horribly self-conscious going on with the story. So she does continue, with a little less hesitation and a few more details.

"Where I'm from - magicians are in charge of my country. And they're all just wretched and cruel and greedy and grasping. So sometimes they'll make these artefacts, these massively powerful magic items, but of course they won't ever want anyone else to have 'em, even after they're dead.

"So the first Prime Minister, he had these things he'd made or stole or things he made other people make. And when he died, he had all of them buried with him. And of course other magicians wanted them, because they're so powerful and magicians want power. But Gladstone's tomb had a curse laid on it - a lot of spells guarding it, and a vicious demon trapped in his bones who had to kill anyone who entered. So the magicians wanted the stuff, but didn't want to risk their miserable cowardly lives, so they planted someone in our group who lied to us and tricked us and convinced us to go after the things in his tomb. So we did. And we survived all the spells, but when the demon came out, he slaughtered...

"Well, I shouldn't say everyone." Kitty shrugs bitterly. "There's me, and there was also Nick, who turned and run and let everyone else die. Coward."

She shakes her head, then, and tries to swallow her anger. It was the right move, really. Nick wouldn't have done any good, staying behind and fighting. The best move was just to get out. But it still makes her furious.

"So, in a way - yeah. It was the evil we were trying to stand up to that killed us. We got greedy and grasping and stupid ourselves. And we died for it."

[the_cleric]

"Sure," Jester says, agreeably. What does she know about having friends long enough to be betrayed by them? Maybe one does have to follow the other. She decides to defer to Kitty on that point, and just listen to her story.

Her interest is expressed throughout, by wide eyes and quiet gasps, neither of which are enough to really interrupt what Kitty is telling her. It is crazy. Demons and curses and people making other people go and take the brunt of the cursing just so they can go in and get the cool items.

It's around the part where the demon comes out and kills everybody that wasn't a skinky doodle magician that she has to interject: "That is bullshit, man!" Because it is. "Like, treasure and items and stuff are really really great, sure, but you can't make other people get them for you. Or if you do, you have to be nice and give them some of it, too. Not all of it. Just some of it. And don't let them get killed by frickin' demons, man!"

[rathercommon]

The outrage is nice. It doesn't make her feel better, not exactly, but it makes her feel a little bit vindicated. Everyone back home, Mandrake and Bartimaeus and everyone, they'd treated the betrayal like it was natural and inevitable. Like she should have expected it. Even the Hyrneks hadn't been surprised. Jester's dismay is reassuring, in its way. Reminds her she's not crazy.

"Well, they hardly saw us as people." Kitty presses her lips together. "Commoners aren't people to them. We're just...meat to put through a grinder. To get chewed up in their factories and their wars and their farms. Just because we don't know how to do magic, and just because we're poor." She lets out a breath and tries to calm herself. "They're wicked, the magicians. That's the long and short of it."

[the_cleric]

"Man..."

Jester lets her gaze go to the fire for a few seconds, as she thinks through this. What a shitty world. What shitty sorcerers. What shitty wars.

"I guess there are shitty people where I am from too," she says, thoughtfully. "But man! That sounds like it really really sucks! And just because no one has taught you any magic, and because you don't have any money or gemstones or a mom to give you an allowance! Like, that is stu-pid!"

Irritated by the prospect, she lets out a huffy breath, and sticks her chin in her hands, and her elbows on her big tall knees.

"So I guess it's cool that you're here, huh? And not stuck with all that shitty shit."