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Entry tags:
open.
WHO: Alistair, Kostos, Other People
WHAT: Open posts for Alistair & Kostos, catch-all for other people doing other stuff.
WHEN: Justinian, vaguely backdated or forward dated to work around plots, whatever.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: If you want a specific starter let me know! Or if you want to drop something in here, do it. Jehan, Silas, and Tomek are available too, I just didn't do open prompts for them.
WHAT: Open posts for Alistair & Kostos, catch-all for other people doing other stuff.
WHEN: Justinian, vaguely backdated or forward dated to work around plots, whatever.
WHERE: Kirkwall.
NOTES: If you want a specific starter let me know! Or if you want to drop something in here, do it. Jehan, Silas, and Tomek are available too, I just didn't do open prompts for them.
ALISTAIR
I. THE GALLOWS
The Wardens have their own money and technically their own food. Or they could have their own food, if someone told them they had to have their own food. No one has yet. So here Alistair is, well after midnight, rifling through the stocks in the kitchens beneath the (former) Templar tower for whatever doesn't look like it's necessary for a planned meal in the coming days and doesn't require him to put significant effort into eating it.II. DARKTOWN
He's found an apple. And a hand-sized loaf of dark bread. And a cookie. And raw carrots, which are good enough for horses and therefore good enough for him, and which he waves at whoever comes in, saying, "I saw them first."
Alistair isn't frequently accused of being too clean, but in Darktown he stands out—because he's had a bath sometime this week, maybe, probably, and because he definitely has been accused of carrying himself with more noble-mimicking confidence than a scullery maid's orphan ought to. Got his head held down in mud puddles over it and everything. But he never learned. Never learns.
Exhibit Q: he is absolutely being mugged, right now, cornered by several armed and obviously hungry Darktown denizens on his way down to the clinic, but while he holds his arms up to let them pat him down their blighted selves, he's saying, "Yyyes, my money," in his usual quietly animated drawl. "My money that I brought with me. Here. To shop."
Identifying himself as a Warden might be easier. Or it might get him stabbed faster, since he's not carrying proof of that anymore than he's carrying coins, or a sword, or anything else that would be useful in this situation if they decide letting him walk away with his tongue and all ten fingers isn't in the cards.
Talking them to death is clearly his best option.
"My lady requires jewels, and I thought, where else for rubies but Darktown?"
KOSTOS
I. THE GALLOWS
The Ander invasion isn't Kostos' personal fault, probably, but for a while he takes it about that hard. When he isn't out drinking and fucking and gambling his way into unpayable debt like they're all going to die any day now, he's almost always in the central Gallows tower, scowling at paper.II. THE DOCKS
The type of paper varies. Maps, lists, letters, notes, books. Scraps of anything that might contain anything that would stop anyone in any of the countries he's meant to be keeping an eye on from acting up in the future. His desk becomes a disaster zone, and he indefinitely borrows a somewhat frightening number of books from the library to store in the Northern Powers office instead, in case they're necessary at some point. Most of them haven't been yet.
He'll narrow things down after a week or so, around the same time he stops considering it a personal moral failing that he didn't see it coming; organize, delegate, all of that. But before that time arrives, his stubble grows to rival his brother's, and he can periodically be found sitting slumped over asleep on a map or standing leaned over and nearly asleep with his forehead pressed against the books on a library shelf—
—which absolutely does not stop him from going out at night. And usually he knows where his line is, how to drink enough to feel his limbs loosen and for talking to stop being quite so difficult and for punching people to seem like a better idea than normal, but not so much he can't convince people who don't know him that he isn't drunk. Even on bad nights, if he's with someone whose opinion he cares about (or someone he intends to sleep with, which is not a complete overlap), he stays on the right side of the line.
But this is a bad several weeks, and he doesn't wind up with company every night, and after at least one of those nights he staggers back to the ferry's slip alone, shortly before its first departure for the morning, and has to sit down on the edge of the dock to keep from falling in. And then lie down, while he's at it, with his feet hanging over the water.
He sits up abruptly once, thinking he might vomit, but changes his mind.
It's very sexy.
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Bright smiles. His favorite.
(He doesn’t really mind them, in principle, but he feels like the equivalent of someone who hasn’t had morning coffee yet, trying to talk to someone who has, cross verging on murderous. How dare she have energy in his presence.)
But he looks back at the shelf, scanning titles. His sludgy processing bears at least a partial resemblance to intentional comedic timing.
“You can usually find it between the history of breath and the history of sex.” But he knows what she means, or thinks he does, and he pulls a relatively slim volume stamped Before the Light: Thedas Under the Imperium out from between other histories.
This one hasn’t already been squirreled away in the Northern Powers office because it’s basic and largely designed to impress upon young Circle apprentices the necessity of their containment. But whatever. He holds it out to her while stepping sideways to check the next shelf.
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She follows him to the next shelf, watching as he moves. And she asks, a little uncertain of what's going on, "So - are you the, erm, librarian here?" Because at least it'd make a bit of sense if he's helping her because it's literally his job to do so.
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And to that limited extent, it is his job to help her. But he would do it regardless, albeit with exactly this dark and put-upon expression, because too few rifters—anything less than all of them is too few—take the initiative to learn anything about what's going on here instead of going on about what games they miss from home, and they're at war.
He pulls Of Fires, Circles, and Templars: A History of Magic in the Chantry down as well. Sister Petrine isn't as bad as she could be, in terms of vilification. Possibly the best you can find without looking for banned titles.
"Why magic?"
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At least in theory. Because, at the end of the day, he's being remarkably helpful, in a way she wouldn't ever have expected in a hundred years. She takes this next book, and thumbs over the cover, and answers readily enough. "Magic is...important, back in my home," she answers. "Everything is controlled by magic, and by mages. So it's something I understand. So if I'm going to learn, best to start with something I'm a bit familiar with before launching into what's completely unfamiliar."
The problem is, of course, that it's really hard to continue to be peevish when someone's handing you books. It's absolutely dreadful, because it really shouldn't be anything special, getting handed books. Everyone should be handing books to everyone at all times. Knowledge should be free and freely available. But it's not, and so what he's doing is really special, and so she can't keep up the faintest veneer of grouchiness even though he's still scowling.
So, gentler, she asks, "Why are you helping me? I doubt your project is educating every uppity commoner who comes through."
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Two books is plenty, or at least all he intends to find for her, indicated by the way he folds his arms behind his back and considers her. Uppity commoner sounds about right, and is about how he's looking at her, even if he hasn't had a title himself since he was nine years old.
"If you want something familiar, you should start with Tevinter. Mages govern there. The war we are fighting is against something that would restore the Imperium's control over the rest of the continent, so when you are ready to be useful, your experience—" a little distastefully, because he has yet to be convinced that any of the rifters actually lived the lives they say they remember "—may not be completely worthless."
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So she controls her temper, and asks with reasonable politeness, "What, you don't believe me about my home? You said yourself, it's true here in Tevinter. Why wouldn't it be true there?"
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Which is the problem. Rifters can claim whatever they want about where they’re from, and who they are, and whatever else, and no one can verify any of it. And more importantly—
He inclines his head to one side, deciding whether or not it’s worth how many words it would take to explain himself to this nosy, rude—
whatever. He rubs the last of his nap out of his eyes with one hand. More importantly:
“Spirits shape a known to shape themselves to dreams, they are known to take on the forms and existences of what they see, and they are known to pass through the Veil and take physical shape. It is possible that there are other worlds with—with varying degrees of utter nonsense and familiarity—that touch ours, somehow, and send through nosy young women with moral objections to naps. Just like it is possible that a thief broke in, took a slice of cake, and smeared frosting on a child to frame her.” He pauses, then adds, awkwardly, in a half-hearted attempt to soften the accusation that her entire life was invented in the Fade, “I do not believe you are lying about what you remember.”
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At the end of the day, the question is definitely an interesting one. But also, at the end of the day, what difference does it make? She scratches her nose and replies, "First, don't say the word nosy like it's a bad thing. The opposite of nosy is incurious, and the world's never been made better by incurious people.
"Second - what does it matter, if the life I lived was real in the way you understand reality? My history, my life, real or dreamed - it's made me interested in magic, and it's made me want to poke about, and it's given me good eyes that can read even in dim candelight, and it's made me cleverer than nine-tenths of the people you'll meet in this world or any other one. I mean, here you are saying that my experience may not be worthless, when I'm here trying to make a difference, and the other rifters too, in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of people out there with lives you can verify and understand without having to stress your intellect, and those people are not doing a damn thing and have no interest in stopping any war. Worthless. Honestly."
She caps off her little speech with a shake of her head, looking quite haughty and quite offended.