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

[inagutterson]

"A fare, y'know, a toll? He's not a free ride, are you Gaspard?" Yngvi has to lurch awkwardly and alarmingly in the side, digging in with one thigh to keep himself anchored to pat the horse's neck when it snorts, and he doesn't really know too much but he'll be taking that for a 'yes, of course, look at me I'm the size of a gurn son'. "Gotta say, all the birds I know that look like you don't talk much, if they do it's croaking and just any words someone taught them, you're not a demon? Just to check. Since you're on my saddle, on my horse, in the dark. It'd be manners to tell me what's riding along right in front of m'bits. And I'm guessing you probably fell out of a sky vagina."

Which he'll explain, if asked, because yes there's a reason he calls them that but he clicks his tongue and here's the good thing about a dwarf: they see better in the dark even if he'd never admit that because he was born on the surface, and then tips his head down at her.

"That's 'cause he's a tourney horse, someone didn't want him anymore because they didn't win on him and I got him for a bargain before I left. Plenty of sad farm horses elsewhere but where we're going, eventually, you'll see good horses. Solid horses. Besides the things other people ride because oh look at me, too fancy to sit astride a horse."

[notacrow]

"I dunno what a toll is, neither." Myira says with complete earnestness. The idea of paying for a thing seems foreign to her. Maybe exchanging one thing for another thing but this is silly.

"I ain't a demon. And yes, I fell out of the sky but I dunno what you're talkin' about with that sky vagina talk. The rift or whatever it is? It was the worst." Myira gripes about her situation in no uncertain terms.

"That seems like a poor reason to get rid of him. He seems like a nice type of horse. At least he ain't flighty and skittish or nothin' like that." She turns her head to preen under a wing for a moment, then tilts her head to look back at the dwarf.

"I usually fly but you try doin' that in the dark."

[inagutterson]

"Where d'you come from that you don't know these things? Even birds got a sense of payment, I've seen 'em, scrapping over who gets what. Especially ravens, got a better sense of taking their due." Maybe he should write to Aura, ask her if the ravens in her dreams ever do any talking or not, what he does instead is rummage through a pocket for some of his rations: cubed cheese, dried meat getting tougher and saltier by the day it'd seem, and of course the essential hardtack getting down to crumsb. "Hungry?"

(Yngvi knows what it's like to be hungry. And there's...well it's hard not to look and to speak with a raven, to want to offer out something in an open palm.)

Considering how to answer that, he does smile, kindly but it's hard not to be a little amused all things considered on his end at least. "You got a Lady of the Skies, right, that's what my battle master and his people all believe, so the sky and all that it's a lady. And the rifts are in the sky. So. Sky vaginas," he replies, calm, collected, assured in the logic of this from a recent addition to a slightly haphazard introduction to a faith. "I'm a dwarf, we burrow, crunch the earth down with our gnashers. I see bloody brilliant in the dark but got nothing to get me flying do I?"

[notacrow]

"Arguin' about who gets what bit of meat ain't payment or whatever you're talkin' about. I take what I like and if someone else wants some of it we work it out." Makes sense to her! She preens, then perks up at the sudden arrival of food. She bends forward a little and pecks at the various options, then decides to work on the crumby hardtack. The meat is too salty for her taste. She gulps down some crumbs, then peers up at Yngvi.

"Well, the Skies ain't really a lady nor a male nor anythin'. They're just the Skies an' they made everything. But I suppose they could have a sky vagina if'n they wanted to, thinking on it." She peers more intently at her new companion.

"You don't look like no burrowin' animal I ever seen. Not mole nor ferret nor nothin' like that--more like a human. And flyin' is the best there is so of course it doesn't. Owls can see in the dark of course but they're a big lot of fatheaded idiots with no sense."

[inagutterson]

"It is in Darktown." These days he can just about hold his mouth in a straight line while he says that, picking at old scabs like he does with it since some things might always be what they are but best to just say it. Tell this crow girl person rifter nibbling away in his hand before they get where they're going.

"The skies are a Lady though. Lady of the Skies commanding the wind and all the dead go to her when the ravens eat the bodies laid out. Avvar ways are good ways with that. Better'n Chantry ways, now that's a scam and they'd put you in the pot if they could catch you." He says that light enough for a joke. The catching. Deniability if Wren or Herian hear somehow and come to glower down from their impressive heights.

Clicking the horse on, Yngvi grins, shrugging expansively. "You met many dwarves? Don't think us and birds usually got reasons to be meeting. D'you know owls though? The way you talk, they sound like old noble dwarves or the Shaperate lot, pricks the lot of them."

[notacrow]

"Ain't heard of a Lady of the Skies before. Grandmothers always just called 'em the Skies. They always been there and always will be, ya know? Before there was anythin', not even birds nor clouds nor earth nor trees nor water. Before male an' female. And they'll be there long after we're all dead an' gone." This is definitely an interesting exchange of cultural ideas. A bit of a clash, but interesting.

"Oh, aye. Dead that get left out are a treat, no mistake. The eyes are the best part." She pecks up some more crumbs between words. "An' no one's gonna put me in no pot. I ain't some ninny-brained chicken!" Huff! The very idea is preposterous and so she laughs. The mention of owls again brings her around and she flaps her wings briefly.

"I met a couple. They like to make like they're wise but really they got brains full of nothin' and they're easy to trick. Even if they see at night."

[inagutterson]

"Same with the Avvar, they're the oldest human people around." Which isn't wrong but Yngvi isn't the one to be going into the history of the human tribes of Thedas, leave that one to boring scholar types who don't go outdoors or who do and then almost get eaten because they're idiots who might know seven languages but couldn't find their arse with a map, a torch, and both hands. "Oldest people, oldest ways. They keep all that. Lot of spirits and stuff. Mountains. But even mountains go. Wind whittles them, ice and water carve them. Spirits don't have male or female I don't think, like, they might look one way or the other but they're spirits. They're a thing. S'pose if we all go it'll be there. Unless the rifts swallow it all. They could." A horrible sort of thought, the idea of it all being bathed sickly green as the world Yngvi never sees being a dwarf incapable of dreams, but he's seen rifts, seen demons, seen spirits, and he does like the world. Enjoys people in it. Riding a big horse about now gets him a better view of it.

It takes a bit of juggling to wrap the reins around his wrist comfortably to get at his waterskin, a gentle murmur to Gaspard of all being well your majesty, walk on. "Let me know if you're thirsty," he says since it's hardtack. Dryness is the order of the day. He has to take a swig himself though to get his words out. "Dead get left out by the Avvar, it's...important. I know they ate dead people, seen lots of it but it seemed good and orderly, nothing was fighting for the prime cuts. Not like outside the butchers on a Tuesday. But you know, when it's scarce, some boys and girls are fast, catch anything up lickety-split."

Or traps. Which are hanging off his horse. Suited more to much larger beasts or really humans, demons, whatever the Inquisition is fighting but they're jingling along from the sides of the saddle as they make their way in the direction of the camp where he can see the dim glow of at least a few torches. "Do they talk like you? I never met talking birds that weren't crows but...they didn't chat. Just repeated stuff."

A lot of it was fuck. Or shit. They were rough Kirkwall birds waiting to peck on dead Carta toughs, it limits the vocabulary.

sorry for the wait, had to brain this one a little harder than normal

[notacrow]

"Oh, aye. Humans got their own spirits an' talk to them in their own ways. Personally I think we do it better. Anyway, we can talk to the Skies and the Winds better and that's the important part." 'We' in this case must refer to other birds. Or at least other ravens.

"Spirits ain't male nor female nor anythin' in between. They're spirits." She nods in agreement. This fellow has a solid head on his shoulders, if nothing else. "Oh, some water'd be prime. I ain't drank since I fell through the hole in the Skies." Her head tilts first to one side, then the other. "Wait, like humans eatin' other humans? That's something I ain't seen before. Huh." Her wings flare out briefly and she settles again, swaying with the motion of the horse.

"...Where I come from it's mostly ravens that speak human language. We can talk between ourselves and some of the other birds, too. Most of the others don't care or just ain't clever enough to learn human speak."

no worries, there's no rush

[inagutterson]

"Wait-- wait, wait," which the horse takes to mean stopping until Yngvi nudges him and says 'no not you' because he has a very casual dialogue with his horse, none of these commands when Gaspard could crush him. "You have separate spirits? There's just spirits here. And demons. Demons more likely to trick and attack and want to get all up inside you however they can but spirits are for everyone. Well, mages most? But humans and elves and Qunari. Don't know if they want us dwarves we don't dream or have magic so I reckon we're good, and I've seen some possessed trees, shit like that so..."

So yeah, dwarves are the greatest and safest (except from themselves and other shit) but this is a whole other thing. Maybe he'll go yell to Thranduil about cool things he should talk to this new bird about.

Sorting the waterskin out so Myira can drink is a bit of a production but in terms of what Yngvi's gotten into lately, some water sloshing over his leg isn't so bad as he offers that out, nodding along. "I think some just maybe look more mannish or womanish? You'd be better asking mages. They know that. Thranduil's not from here but when we get to Kirkwall you could ask him, he's the biggest elf I've seen, heads up research, called Provost and knows so many things, well smart. Just real decent y'know? And some humans have eaten others probably, sometimes shit happens, or you're a creepy fucker, but the Avvar leave their dead for crows so their spirit goes up to the Lady of the Skies and they don't really have much for permanence. Bodies? Don't need those no more, crows you have that, get the spirit where it's gotta go. S'good. I've seen it." His voice softens towards the end, smile sad but fond, an acceptance of an old hurt that won't go away.

"D'you all learn it then?" Better to switch it up to interesting bird language discussion he is totally out of his depth for outside of owning a goose that's ready to fight with anyone and anything back in Kirkwall. "All the ravens? Like, from babies? Or...chicks? Or d'you just know, like, I know we learn stuff but it's not like I remember everything about learning how to speak from the start, just getting better at it and maybe some other things don't remember, it's just there in them." (You're a bird, he's not saying, you're a bird talking to me maybe it's some magic thing and I'm trying not to be a rude git.)