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

Myira (OC) | Rifter/New Arrival

[notacrow]

( Strange dreams and strange awakenings )

Myira never falls in her dreams. It just doesn't happen. She is as at home in the sky as anywhere else in the world and the idea of being afraid of something like falling when she can just stretch her wings out to catch a passing breeze is laughable to her. At least it is normally. This time feels different. She is tumbling, nothing but open air beneath her and at first there is no panic or worry, just the instinctive spreading of limbs and the expectation of lift. When it doesn't come, that's when the worry sets in--mostly about the flying part. She flails her limbs for a moment, trying to gain some sort of purchase, and then the ground rushes up at Myira faster than she expected.

The landing drives the wind out of her and she has to wheeze and cough and try to catch her breath for a moment as she scrabbles around on all fours, trying to get a feel for what's happening. Where am I and where are my wings duel in her mind for importance before she realizes that she still has her cloak of feathers draped around her shoulders, which relieves that tension. Pushing herself to her feet to try and get a look at the world around her doesn't have the same effect. The pain she can ignore for the moment, even with the bone-deep ache that seems to rip up one arm. It's the sickly green glow of the rift above her and the unfamiliar landscape that shocks her. She knows every tree and hill within miles of her home and none of this looks like it. Besides that, Myira knows for a fact that her home has only a singular moon.

That's all the time she has to gawk at the world around her though, because almost immediately there seems to be creatures descending on her--sickly green wraiths and buzzing little fairies and neither of those are fun. Myira isn't a fighter--never has been, even if she can get angry and besides she has no weapons. Her first instinct is to take her proper form but before she can start the magic she has to duck an oncoming fairy and make a run for it as a blast of magic also manages to get too close for comfort.

"Gerroff--! Hey, get this thing away from me--!" She yells at the sudden arrivals who seem to be on her side. Not that she trusts them yet, but hey. If they're fighting the stuff that wants her delicious teeth or to just plain zap her with magic, she's not going to ignore that. Ducking, dodging, and running, she tries to weave through the chaotic melee and find someone who she can take refuge behind until the fight is over.


( Who even likes hiking? )

Finally, when all the fighting and running and yelling is done, Myira joins the others in heading back to camp. Most of the trip back she spends in her raven body, not wanting to walk around in bare feet. Or at all. So on the way to camp, a random person might end up with a raven perched on their shoulder making unhappy noises. Those unhappy noises just so happen to include speech. Myira makes grumpy sounds as she preens under a wing.

"What's with this night travel, eh? Do I look like an owl? Do I?"


( Camping is just another word for suffering )

Back at camp, Myira seems to be back in her human form again. It's an odd experience. She sits at one of the fires. The girl is wrapped only in a long black cloak of feathers that seems to be her only garment. On top of that, she eats ravenously. As soon as she's given food, she begins to eat it with her bare hands, shoveling down as fast as possible as if it might be taken from her if she's not careful. If anyone wearing that weird eyeball symbol gets close enough, she picks them out for special attention.

"Hey! You! Where are we an' what's goin' on? I nearly got turned into a snack earlier-!" She's loud, indignant, but not much else except perhaps excited by everything that's happened to her in the short amount of time she's arrived. Anyone not wearing the Inquisition's symbol gets treated to the same questions, though perhaps with a bit less vitriol.

Kitty Jones (The Bartimaeus Series) | Rifter + new arrival

[rathercommon]

a. Arrival
Kitty thinks to herself, soon as her knees hit the ground, that this must be a new part of the dream she was in. And then she takes a moment to marvel and be impressed with herself, that her dreaming is so lucid that she can recognize when something isn't reality. And what a wretched one she was in, too: trapped in an office, secretary to all the demons and monsters the Empire had to offer, chased and harassed by wicked creatures, creatures that grated out in a wretched voice -

"Miss Jones..."

Kitty twists around to look over her shoulder. It's just a dream, and she's lucid in this dream (right?) so there's no reason to be afraid. And yet even so, she can't help the paroxysm of terror at the monsters lurching towards her. She can't help her fear at the way the one in the lead - a skeleton in a fine business suit, flesh hanging off him and eyes rolling - exhales a foul stench as he says, "Miss Jones, do put the tea on, we'll need you to work late tonight, I suppose a pretty girl like you has a boyfriend so let the poor disappointed chap know you'll be spending your evening with the handsomest men in all of England - "

It's a dream. She knows that. So she should be able to just will these horrible things to turn into vapor - right? Or make them just turn around and leave, or...But they keep coming. They keep coming, and they're joined by these horrible buzzing little creatures and glowing ghosts that she feels in her heart she would never dream up because they're like nothing she's ever seen, and her knees hurt and it doesn't make sense that her knees hurt still in a dream because aches are supposed to disappear as soon as you stop concentrating on them and she feels the real horrible certainty, right then, that she's going to die.

So maybe it's a dream, but Kitty Jones is not going to sit back and get slaughtered regardless of whether she's awake or not. Her hand falls on a fountain-pen with a wicked sharp point, and she snatches it up - finds another, snatches it up too, wielding them like daggers - kicks off her high-heeled shoes, and tenses to spring at the ghoul in the lead and slam the pens into his eyes...

When suddenly, it seems, people who are far more qualified to murder these things than she is show up.


b. Aftermath
Well, things are safe, it seems. Or at least the monsters are dead: that doesn't actually translate to safe, but it does translate to being able to pretend that you're all right and safe and good. So things are in a condition where she can fool her brain into thinking nothing bad will ever happen again so that she can suppress the terror and get on with the business of tending to what's in front of her.

And what's in front of her is...a mess. It appears that it's not just monsters that chased her out of the glowing green void; she's also been chased by an entire secretarial pool's worth of office supplies. Typewriters, sticky notes, fountain pens, stacks of paper, a dozen carafes of coffee and the cups to go with lie scattered across the ground behind her - some of them smashed and trampled in the fighting, but the vast majority intact. Kitty prods at one particularly shiny model of typewriter with a hose-clad foot, then looks over at someone near her and offers -

"I'll trade you this for a proper pair of shoes."

Since it seems she'll be walking a ways, and the high heels she arrived in will not do for that.


c. camp
The shock's faded enough that she can do more than react to her immediate surroundings. Now she's in a state where she can react to her extended surroundings. They've made their way to the camp, and they're huddled around the fire, and someone's put a shriveled piece of what must be meat or something into her hand, and Kitty knows that she should be asking questions but all she wants to do is bury herself under a blanket and hide from what's around her. Not the demons and whatnot - she knows demons and whatnot - but the brightness of the moon (moons) and the multitude of the stars. She wants to plug up her ears to block out the impossible, nauseating quiet. There's the noise of birds and night-bugs, she supposes, which is all right, but there's something incredibly wrong about the absence of engines and horse-hooves and electric buzzing, the lack of voices muffled through thin tenement walls, the songs of drunks and the tick of the radiator. Things smell wrong, things feel wrong, and the sky is so bloody big she feels like she's about to fall out into space.

"Ugh." Kitty hunches down, and buries her face in her hands, and takes a moment to count silently to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty. Okay, a hundred. As soon as she hits a hundred, she's going to sit up and deal with the world. Until then, she can spend a moment hiding her face, pretending that hiding will make it all go away.

c

[notacrow]

Myira isn't exactly the most sensitive person. She's kind of crass and sharp at the edges and lacks a certain sympathy for a lot of people. But seeing Kitty hunched over with her head in her hands makes something twinge inside of her chest. So she edges around the fire and finally sits next to the other woman, perching awkwardly a short ways away from her.

"...Hoi." She speaks with a broad accent, suggestive of the West Counties and rural life, though with a weird lilt to it that makes it impossible to place exactly.

"Are you gonna be alright?" Myira is asking after someone else (a human someone else, too) but then she's already seeming to recover herself. When (if) Kitty looks up at her new neighbor, it's a wild-haired girl with pitch black hair and dark skin wrapped in cloak made of black raven's feathers and not much else. She stares openly at Kitty with wide eyes, almost blatant in her study.

"I know this is all a bit o' magic that we ain't used to but no need to go blubbin' and boo-hooin'."

[rathercommon]

Kitty's response is immediate. Her shoulders drop, and her spine straightens, and her lips press together, and her heavy eyebrows lower, and she looks directly at Myira, saying hotly -

"I'm not going to blubber or boo-hoo."

Still, despite her anger, the question of are you all right is sweet enough; so Kitty controls herself and swallows back the next, unkinder thing she was about to say - that the girl sounds like some country bumpkin, so of course she doesn't see anything wrong with this. In London, they got country folk coming in often enough - Kitty's pickpocketed her fair share of rural fools wandering around with their mouths agape and their grand-uncle's magic talisman tucked haphazardly into their bag. She and the other kids had always made the most ruthless fun of them, them with their wide-eyed astonishment and disoriented stumbling. But it turns out that being from the city doesn't actually make you wiser - it just makes you wiser about the city. Out here in the country, she's as disoriented as they ever were.

And anyway, this girl might sound like a bumpkin, but she certainly doesn't look one. Wrapped in those birds' feathers, she honestly looks half a demon herself. Like something out of a tale. As Kitty takes her in and the initial wave of anger fades, she leans away a bit, lips pressing together warily. And, warily, she blusters.

"And you don't know whether or not I'm used to it. Maybe I've got glowing green portals vomiting me up every second Sunday of the month."

[notacrow]

Myira's response to the hot response she's engendered is to grin fiercely, teeth shining in the firelight for a moment.

"Good. You do got some fire in there somewhere!" She seems overly pleased that her goading has gotten the result she wanted, but it's in her nature to be a bit smug and full of herself. When you consider you and your people the absolute experts on magic and spiritual dealings, it's quite easy to fool yourself into thinking that humans have nothing to offer you. Still, a little compassion doesn't hurt and Myira has always had a deeply buried soft spot. She adjusts her cloak a little, shifting the familiar, comfortable weight on her shoulders until she finds the right spot. Kitty's response to her attempts at reassurance earn a rough caw of laughter and another grin, a flash of brightness against copper skin.

"Mayhap you do at that! But you don't quite got the look o' someone who does, if you don't mind me sayin' so," Myira drawls in response. "Not sayin' I'm used to it either, mind. I figure if'n you came fallin' out of the hole in the damn sky we're all sittin' on the same branch."

[rathercommon]

Kitty purses her lips quite disapprovingly at the comment on her fire - it's her business just how much fire she's got, thanks very much, and also her business whether she wants to show it off to some stranger and definitely not some stranger's place to comment on it and definitely not some stranger's place to evaluate whether it's good or not - but she doesn't get overtly hostile. After all, the girl seems weird enough that Kitty's interest is engaged, alongside her wariness - even as she watches her carefully, she also doesn't necessarily want to drive her off.

"And what is the look of someone who falls out of holes, exactly?" Her voice is a little dry as she asks. "I'm not sure I'd be able to spot someone like that if I saw 'em."

[notacrow]

Don't be too hard on her, Kitty. Myira isn't used to humans.

"I dunno," she admits cheerfully. "But I was just assumin' they'd probably be glowing and green and what not. On th' other side of it, I came out of one of those and I ain't glowing or green neither so I'm probably not on the right track. This ain't the sort of magic I'm used to doin'."

Myira leans forward, resting in her chin in her hands and looking pensive. This whole situation is so bizarre and foreign to her. Still, better to act like you know what you're doing than to get pegged for some kind of easy mark or something.

"All I know is this don't look like any place near home. Not enough green for one thing. I don't like it."

[rathercommon]

Kitty, almost involuntarily, takes her eyes off the suspicious girl to look around them. No. It doesn't look anything like home. No buildings far as the eye can see, no cables bearing power from one place to the next, no roads, no villages, no people. Is there any place in all of the Empire that looks so bloody desolate? Even up in the Scottish moors, you can spot a manor house in the distance. Or, well, that's how she imagines it, anyway. Not like she's ever been to a moor, or honestly anywhere beyond London's suburbs.

Still, she brings her attention back to that earlier comment. "Do you do magic, then?" she asks, turning her face back to Myira. Her expression is more controlled, now, the suspicion shuttered behind a neutral expression.

[notacrow]

Myira gives a slow blink at Kitty's question, as if she has just asked if the sun rises in the East and set sin the West or if water is wet. The girl's head tilts to one side, then the other in an almost avian fashion.

"Ayuh. What sort of raven worth her feathers don't do magic?" What a silly question to ask her, Kitty. "Been learnin' since before I left the nest."

[rathercommon]

That's...quite a lot of bird metaphors, isn't it? What, third or fourth? And with the feathers and the whole thing...Kitty's brows draw down in puzzlement as she looks at the girl.

"You're, erm - " She clears her throat and tries to figure out a way to phrase this that's more delicate than completely loony for birds. "Fond of - birds, then, are you?" She purses her lips, debates whether she's satisfied with that question, and decides: good enough.

[notacrow]

"...Does bein' a bird make you fond of 'em?" Myira scratches under her chin, brow furrowing as she tries to decide on that particular distinction.

"I mean, I'm more fond of ravens than I am of humansbut I expect that's the same the other way 'round with most humans. Owls are idiots and I could do without 'em, though." That's definitely one way of answering that question.

[rathercommon]

"Being..." All right, the girl is looney. Or Kitty's still dreaming, which is most certainly a possibility she's considered, though this seems all terribly detailed and logical for a dream.

"So, erm - you're a bird, then," Kitty asks, rather in the tone of voice that one would ask someone, So you're King of England, then. "You don't exactly look like one."

[notacrow]

"Well, no. On account of I'm wearin' human skin right now." If Myira is aware of the complete rejection of the possibility from Kitty, she's not showing it.

"But I am a raven! I just know how to change my feathers for skin an' back. It's magic, you see. Nothing complicated about it." She gets to her feet. "Here, I'll show you--"

Suiting her actions to her words, she mumbles a few words and tugs her cloak up over her head in a smooth motion. There's a sort of twisting in the space where she is, a flurry of feathers--

And there's a raven perched on the spot where Myira had been sitting, no sign of her or her cloak anywhere.

"See?" That is definitely Myira's voice, though it has a harsh cawing croak to it now.

rani lakshmi bai | rifter & new arrival

[shri]

i. (arrival)
Where was a shotgun when she needed it? Is the first, clear thought, when the haze of the strange circumstances begins to dawn her - from dream to hard ground.

It is not strange that she dreams of being younger, though the youth is hardly the point for someone who does not age outwardly. It is home she dreams of gladly. A place that she never leaves, not in her mind, she is of Jhansi, and it is of her - and for once, it is not it in smoke, in ash. It is the happiness she'd once had. Standing with her husband, presenting to him - his son, and to their people, an heir at long last. A boy that was all her own and a duty fulfilled.

The raucous joy spilt out into the streets from the courtiers in the durbar hall, as the cry goes up, shouting so loud that the room near shook with it. A moment, when everything is clear with the shouts and outcry of happiness. For a moment, there is them: there are his arms overlapping her as they both cradled their child. A love that is as soft as her little boy's breathing. The little boy in her arms, grips to his father's finger. She should have seen when the flames guttered in the oil lamps. Behind the incense, she should have smelt the taste of seared flesh. She should have seen the Knight, dressed like a crow in all black, standing in the crowd of attendants, that had no smile on his ancient face when around him people danced. But how could someone so happy see the suffering that might come? That there might be a hard fall waiting for them.

Jhansi had been a place of all her pride, once, with nothing else to taint it. A smiling angel that bestowed protection with an easy embrace.

But it is swallowed up, engulfed in flames, as surely as the dream succumbs to reality. But if not for the ripped green sky, she might not have thought herself so far from home when she falls out of her dream back into a reality that, unlike the dream, is utterly incomprehensibly strange.

She dares not break her fall with her arms, no - the wrapped clean white cotton and silver lace of a child's blankets is still in her hands. Held in close to her chest, it has not caught to her yet, that there is no boy in her arms. In the dream, but out of it. After all, she still wears the clothes of that day. Why should the boy go too? A secondary realisation that is strange, she has not worn these garments for years? The chanderi silks at least weren't heavy - but as many layers of them as there were they offered no protection. They stood out orange and red, glittering with the gold from every embroidered inch of them. In them, she fell clattering like a temple bell, chiming loudly with the sound of her gold jewellery clattering with her. From toe rings to the long ornamentation that fell down the rope of her hair under her veils. The white flowers that were pinned to the top of the braid falling loose and scattering white petals about her. Rings to bangles to the earrings and chains that hung off her, not a bit of her unadorned, not even her skin, stained in intricate patterns of mehndi designs, swirls and dots and arcing lines, even red circles painted on the centre of her palms.

And it means that landing is messy, these clothes were for a Queen's ceremony, not soldier's combat. She was not Shiva, appearing beautiful as he destroyed, no, she was rather more limited in such things - and she uncurls on the ground from where she had protectively rolled to protect her bundle of blankets to catch the sight of seas of sand and her heart beats confused - home, still? that could not be possible - shifting, uncurling against the ground, to get the knife she had landed on from her side as she rolled, first onto her knees, and realise that she's barefooted, as - what were those green things? No Half-breed took such a form. Not even Hastings at his worst commanded that kind of power. They had more in common with the demons that Lord Ram himself had fought, and the little ones -

Look almost like the little creatures in English children's books, until it bites her. She swats at it immediately. But when it doesn't work, the solid gold bangles will do, smashing it across the head with it as she tries to figure out where to even go to escape their teeth. Stepping away and caught, it's not like she has a hope of being subtle in all of this, not when each step chimed with the sound of her anklets and bangles. But she certainly does not miss. Does not move slowly - she might wear as much gold as a bloody treasury, but she had her fame as a fighter, not from her diamonds. That there is no hesitation to each strike, no slowness as she turns fast on her heel, her footwork not pausing to let herself fall. ( Even if there are concessions made, letting her second dupatta fall off her arms and down her body, leaving her whole midsection exposed but her arms free to move, it wasn't elegant, but it would do. )

The rest is desperation, clutching the bundle of blankets to her with on hand, the other to her short khanjar blade and the rest the instincts of the years and years of battle that lets her duck to whatever cover could be afforded, to get her back covered and her blade up, shielding with a for arm laced with scars from just this. Cutting at anything that got to close. At least until she hears the crack of the air being ripped apart by magic and she see's the fireball coming directly her way - and she shoves to push herself out of the way, looking for anything to cover herself. Wanting desperately for the shields of the shoulders that she see's coming like a lover wished for a kiss.

Maybe one of them had a shotgun, or so wishful thinking hoped as she swung around again to do her best to slash at the twisted human shadow, like it might do something to smoke. To her mind, she knows she can last better than most, even one handed, but she knows she can't last - help, please.

ii. ( aftermath )
It's only after it's over, that she finally lets the creeping revelation stemmed by the chaos come to her. Bleeding from a dozen bites, the burns that singed her, as much of a mess as any other. There are tears in her skirts, smeared with grime and blood, everything askew, but she doesn't go to fix herself up - rather she walks to the edge of the assembly to deal with - what matters most. Firs to draw the long piece of orange material over her head, her face. A need to veil herself not from modesty, but privacy to look down.

The bundle of blankets in her hands. She can do this, she can. She has done it twice now. Once more out of memory should be no great wound, merely, a practised action. She holds one end, tightly, fiercely, before she lets the rest fall free, unravelling from her held point, out and out and out, to...

Nothing. There was nothing there. Just empty weight. A piece of material that reaches her feet and pools there. Caught in that warm breeze that - it isn't right, but it is so much closer than England could ever be that it hurts to feel. She takes a breath, then another. A disinclination to even know how to grieve and be still, after all, she hadn't when it had first happened. Why now? The habits were already ingrained. So she pinches the material between fingers to find a straight edge. Smooth it out and begin to fold it in halves until it is nothing but a narrow piece that she tucks into her skirt's waistband ( to part with it, would have been sacrilege ). Then goes about righting the rest of it. Re-draping and reorganising herself a sight more assembled since practically was beyond hope presently. The jewellery put back where it should be and her fingers smoothing her hair.

Needs the excuse to just take quiet, deep breathes as privately as she can.

iii. ( camp )
She doesn't have a hope of sleeping, exposed amongst strangers like this. When she can hear animals clawing in the near darkness, fighting and crying out. When there are soldiers she does not know, walking the perimeters. Nothing here has told her that Lycans do not exist, after all. For it seems everything else did. Not least of all the strange ache that was in her palm.

That - and it seemed everyone could tell someone of rank when they wore a treasury's worth of jewellery on their body. Though for the time being, the veil stays down over her face. Just thick enough to obscure her face even if it didn't hide her completely. They had been respectful, of course. But she didn't fancy taking it off and thus making it easier for a thief to steal away when a wealth she might need to do some of her own trading. Nor fend them off when she had been sleeping. So exhausted or not, she sits by the fireside, stiffly in posture. Regal as the jewels implied, the knife at her hip hopefully a deterrent as she took the time instead of resting to begin to clean the wounds left over. Healing them openly with a sip of the blackwater would attract too much attention when she was not sure of her company. So more mundane uses would do.

She'd forgotten how miserable that could be, as Lakshmi began to dab away the blood with a clean cloth and water mixed with something they insisted would help. A nasty bite from the foul little-winged things. It sat just at the curve of her side that she had to curl herself to begin to dab at it. Holding the skin stiff to begin to wipe at it. Hissing to herself when it caused a sharp sting of pain from it. Felt it now, when she hadn't in the exhilaration of fighting. Would it match the hideous mess above her heart when it healed? Time would tell, whenever they had privacy, she did her best to keep the miserable noises to herself, too old to tolerate them, and go about cleaning up.

b!

[shri]

A raven.

A raven was speaking to her.

Somehow, it made as much sense as anything else did, at this point, and she could be no wary of it when she was already weary of everything that comes too close to her. Sat on her shoulder like it deserved it, pretty as the night sky. "Take pity on those that walk, and cannot fly."

But even so, the adjustment comes easy, she shifts her veil, letting it settle over, not under, the little beast. Giving some shelter if the night truly did send the - him, her? - into a slumber.

Re: b!

[notacrow]

"Well, if'n I fly I won't be able to see an' I'll lose the lot of you in the dark..." Her voice comes back again, a rough, grating thing that still carries the touch of femininity and the drawling rural sound of the West Counties.

"And I do pity those that can't, don't you mind that non--" The bird cuts herself off. There comes a muffled sound of disapproval for a moment as cloth surrounds Myira. A shifting of weight and the raven manages to free herself a little better and find a comfortable spot underneath the drape of cloth. It feels better like that. A little separation from the sky makes her anxious but it is cloth, easily scattered if she needs it. Her wings splay a bit and then settle. Myira doesn't want to whack her companion in the side of the head, after all.

"...That's nice," she admits after a long moment. "I never seen cloth this bright a'fore. All the humans in the village had duller stuff in greens and browns and sometimes blue. Never anythin' like this."

[shri]

It is mercifully, at least, light cloth. Chanderi silk was not the heaviness of baranasi silks, after all, it was needed in the hot deserts of Bundeli. Even if this one was weighed down with the heaviness of the golden embroidery.

"Then you have not been to Hindustan. Colour is easy to come by. Even amongst the poorest." She keeps walking, eyes forward, unlike her companion, she has her own benefits. The blackwater had many gifts, and sharp eyesight was least amongst them. It means there aren't likely to be any sudden falls.

Though she keeps her ear to the tone, she knows the tone, if not in this form. Ah, an English crow? There was a thought.

"Shall I build you a nest out of it?" It's mild, away from herself in any real manner. Making sure to keep an even tone to even steps.

[notacrow]

"Never heard of Hindustan. Then again I don't usually fly further than a week or two afield from home. Is it a nice place? Do the ravens there have bright colors, too?" That's the most important part. If the humans have all this sort of stuff it makes sense (at least in her head) that the ravens would be bright and colorful as well.

"A nest? I wouldn't mind havin' a few scraps for the lining. This is soft an' light. Perfect for sleeping in to tell the truth." Myira laughs a little, though it's more of a 'caw' to human ears. "Though I dunno if a human could build a proper nest the way it's supposed to be. Nice of you to offer, though. I couldn't take something like this without giving something in return, though. It's too fine a gift."

[shri]

"India perhaps might be more familiar." She hums a little, with the words. Foreigners names, even if not what anyone else called it. "I am afraid not, no, they are quite the same. But there - we have many other colourful birds. Peacocks are prized for them. So by contrast, something all feathered black? Stands out all by themselves." A consolation at least.

Though to the latter she takes a second to think, seems to be mulling it over with idle speculation. "Perhaps we find something similar to it whenever we reach where they take us. I think this may be too decorated to be completely comfortable to sleep in." Her hand lifts, one finger pointed as she taps a point out of the air. "Then that can be our exchange. I will find the fabric for you, and you can show me how to build a proper nest."

i!

[rathercommon]

Kitty has only ever fought beside other members of the Resistance. The Resistance, they never took blows for each other. No need to, after all - they all had that same immunity, that same resilience, and it's not like they were often being menaced with knives and cudgels and all that. And, well...Well, it just wasn't that sort of group, was it? At the end of the day, though she hadn't realized it at the time, self-sacrifice simply wasn't their way of operating. They weren't noble and compassionate and heroic - just greedy and misguided. So why would something like taking a blow for someone else be trained into them?

No, Kitty doesn't have any instinct to shield others. She especially doesn't have an instinct to shield someone with fancy clothes and a king's ransom worth of gold on her, not when wealth came from exploiting others and making your profits off others' backs. But the thing about being a human, a free woman, is that she doesn't have to rely on instincts, nor on commands; she can observe, and decide. And so as a fireball arcs towards the fine lady, she decides. She doesn't know if she'll come through all right, if the magic's too strong for her resilience or if it'll burn the flesh from her bones - but there's no question that it'll burn up the fine lady, right into a crisp, and the arithmetic of maybe-one-life versus definitely-one-life is one even Jakob would have been able to solve if Miss Hempstead had put it to him during class.

As she steps into the path of the fireball, she really hopes she doesn't die, because she does not want her last thoughts to be about maths.

She doesn't die. The fireball catches her on the back, and scorches through her jacket and part of her shirt and hits her skin and stops scorching. Kitty stumbles forward with the concussive force of it, but doesn't fall; and then she regains her balance, and whirls, and hurls one of the pens she's armed herself with in the direction of the attack - where it does nothing, just passes harmlessly through the demon that seems to be made, impossibly, of mist and nothing more.

She curses, and curses again when the demon turns its attention towards her. As it gathers itself for another magical attack, Kitty calls out to the fine lady, "Get to cover!"

[notacrow]

"Nope," Myira admits. "Never heard of it before. But I don't talk to a lot of humans." Not now anyway. That wasn't something she wanted to think about too much though, so she just brushed past it onto more pleasant things.

"Well, ravens are just about the smartest birds," she opines with more than a little smugness. "And I like my black feathers." She preens a little, the pride in her voice unmissable.

"Sure! That sounds like a fair exchange t'me. I'm hoping they take us somewhere with more green than this--it's too barren for me to really like it. Where's the trees? Ugh..." Myira seems to exchange one thought for another almost as fast as they come into her head.

[rathercommon]

Her reaction isn't fear, exactly. Fear involves some sort of uncertainty - but Kitty knows exactly what she's seeing, the sort of magic that's involved here. No: this is simple, self-assured hostility. Kitty tenses, and her hand grasps towards a weapon that isn't there, the knife she's not wearing at her side - and her jaw clenches, and she says -

"So you're a demon, then."

[notacrow]

"A what? No! I'm a raven!" Myira hops to one side and spreads her wings, as if showing off to the other girl.

"I was hatched a raven and Skies willing I'll die a raven but I ain't like, a demon. What's a demon, anyway?" This terminology is all new to her and the reaction that Kitty is having is more baffling to Myira than anything else. Surely once they clear up this misunderstanding, things will be okay, right?

[rathercommon]

"It's - a - " This is not something she ever expected to have to explain, and so she certainly doesn't have an explanation ready. That's like asking what's a building. It's a thing, a thing that doesn't give you shelter but is instead wicked and violent and cruel and an ally of evil -

But that's not true. Bartimaeus had told her that much, that none of that's true. He'd told her that they're bound unwillingly to the desires of humans, who are themselves the wicked ones. So even the standard rhetoric doesn't work, now. She runs a hand through her hair, and complains -

"How can you know magic and not know demons?"

[notacrow]

The raven's head tilts to one side, those same pale eyes examining Kitty for a moment. The bird makes an annoyed sound, then there's another twinge of space, a rustle of breeze and a few spare feathers float to the ground. The girl is back, still wrapped in her cloak of feathers. She leans over, chin in hand again. It's easier to talk to humans like this.

"Magic doesn't have anything to do with demons," she explains, though she sounds confused herself. This whole idea of a thing called a demon just doesn't sound real.

"Th' Winds and Skies whispered magic to the first Ravens and then mothers passed it to their daughters and so it's been ever since the Skies made the winds and clouds and all the flying creatures."