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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.

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.

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."

II. DARKTOWN

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.

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—

II. THE DOCKS

—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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"Excuse me."

Kitty could, of course, go to another part of the library. It's not like she's looking for exactly-that-book on exactly-this-shelf. Her selection of volumes has been near-random, trying to consume knowledge as varied as possible before she settles into delving deep into a topic. And also, Kitty probably should go to another part of the library, because it's definitely not a good idea to draw attention to herself because she didn't ask permission to use the library and probably if they notice she's been reading they'll come in and chase her off. But this is the third day in a row that Kitty's found this guy using library shelves as his personal spot for napping, and the first two times annoyed her but this time is really pissing her off.

And so she says again, a bit louder, "Excuse me. Do you need help back to your room?"

Kostos jerks upright with a sharp inhale, knocks a book off the shelf in the process, looks briefly startled and borderline frightened and possibly offended, and then immediately, like a cat that's fallen off furniture, slides into his default dignified glare.

Except he has to blink a couple of times. And wiggle his nose and mouth, very briefly, in the twitchy way of someone whose nose itches but refuses to scratch it. And the book he knocked down is leaning half-propped against his leg. The context isn't great, for dignified. But in other contexts, it would be a dignified glare.

"Do you need help," he says, and pauses, because he's only so quick on his verbal feet even when he wasn't half-asleep a few seconds ago, so he needs a second to come up with even the very pitiful, "shutting up?"

At his feet, gravity wins out, and the book slips down to rest fully on the floor with a quiet thunk.

"Oh, I'm perfectly capable of shutting up. When I feel like it. Which isn't often."

She bends down and picks the book up, brushing it off like it's a hat or a piece of fruit that's fallen to the ground, before turning it around to inspect the cover. A Brief History of Antiva and Its Domains. Sounds...interesting, actually, depending on what an "Antiva" is. She hands it back to him, and then says, "Why on earth are you spending all your time in the library when all you do is sleep here? Is there something wrong with your bed?"

It's been a while.

"I won't fight you for them," comes a vaguely irritated reply, but its bearer pauses in the stairwell, silhouetted by the dim light from above. Cade isn't normally in the Gallows after midnight, with only a few exceptions. He hadn't thought to find Alistair here.

"Hello," he says, as though only now remembering his usual awkwardness.

"If any of you kill me," Alistair says first—not the first thing he's said at all, given the long walk to the beach outside the city, but the first thing since arriving and sitting down the basket of snacks (and wine, you're welcome) he brought along—"I want Gwenaëlle in charge of the cover-up."

She knows him best, of the three women here. She'll know how to hit the right notes, how to make it sound both like his own damn fault and something he would plausibly do.

And this is not a legitimate concern at all. He's smiling, while he stretches one arm and then the other.

"No offense. I'm sure you're all fully capable of getting away with murder."

Better that Kostos be the one checking out half the library for the project's use, because his record with these things, unlike his new assistant's, is untarnished. Vandelin does his best to make use of the fruits of that labor, but there's only so much that old books can do for current events.

His expertise with Nevarran politics is mostly too secondhand to stand on its own. Under other circumstances, and in a more complacent time, he might have tried to keep to himself nonetheless, just to prove that he could--but the project's effectiveness can't afford to be compromised now, and neither can he afford to risk the last professional safety net that stands between him and the unwashed Inquisition rank and file.

He seeks out Kostos for a chat, having gone unsuccessfully to the office and eventually been directed to the library, and finds him pillowed on a map. It is rare that fortune affords Vandelin the oppotunity to loom over anyone, especially anyone human. He can't quite bring himself to pass it up.

"Enchanter?"

He could say he doesn’t have a bed. (A lie.) He could say that he wasn’t asleep. (Three-quarters of a lie.) He could explain that it’s a long walk, out of this tower and up several flights of stairs, when all he needed was to close his eyes for a moment. (One quarter of a lie; he needed to close his eyes for several.)

But all of those things would require Kostos to think she deserves an explanation, so instead he accepts the book without his glare changing whatsoever, and asks, “Who are you?”

A rifter, probably, with a hand like that, but some rifters are more deserving than others.

That's a bit of a dangerous question, in Kitty's experience. Who are you is a question that leads to - say - being banned from public spaces by someone important and powerful. And, granted, this guy doesn't exactly look important or powerful, given that he's got little gummy sleep-marks at the corners of his eyes and stubble that's way past roguish and well into sloppy and clothes that are so drab as to be depressing, but still. You can't really tell.

So - "Why?" she asks. "Is it going to fill you with energy, knowing who I am? Is it going to stop you collapsing where you stand?"

Then she pushes her hair back behind her shoulders, and provides an answer that he can't possibly prove is a lie, given that she has the forged papers to prove that this is her name. "Lizzie Temple," she answers; it rolls off the tongue sincerely. She is a good liar. "What's your name?"

Nell shuts her mouth and just smirks back at Alistair instead of speaking. Better his words, not hers.

"So what's the plan?" she asks, weight braced against her staff in a casual lean. She glances at Gwen, then Adalia, before settling back on Alistair. "Do we go in turns, or can you handle us all at once?"

"There you are!" Nell steps out from around the corner, gesturing with the apple she carries in one hand, a single bite mark strangely white against all the Darktown grime. She does not, it should be noted, have her staff with her, but she is on her way to a tavern rather than back from it, so that's something.

"Thank you, sirs," she says, quick steps taking her to Alistair's side before they have a chance to think about what's going on, wrapping an arm about his shoulders as if to guide him away, "I'm so grateful to you for finding my poor half-wit brother. Is he going on about jewels and ladies again?" She clicks her tongue against her teeth, "He's always wandering off, this one. Can't trust him with a copper."

Edited 2018-06-20 01:53 (UTC)

"Can we do that at the same time and stay out of each other's way?" is a genuine question, self-aware about the fact her grasp of combat is significantly less than any of the rest; it's almost certainly good to learn how to manage all these moving parts, but she is coming to that as an absolute novice.

"Because I can't cover up my own death, talented as I am."

“Hello,” Alistair answers with relative cheer, and resumes his rummaging, talking as much to himself as Cade. “Damn right you won’t fight me for them. I would win.”

Maybe, probably.

“Unless you’re carrying a bow. Good job at the Tourney, by the way.”

"Of course," Nell replies with a shrug, "If we're careful. Battles aren't generally one on one, you have to learn how to keep your elbows in. But I take it you've never done that before," she's super perceptive, see, "So maybe best we start slow if you're just as likely to open a rift in your allies."

"Silver and gold only," Alistair says, and he is not a very good actor—atrocious, some have said—but he is very good at a very specific act, which involves slackening his facial features in a barely perceptible way and making his gaze a little less sharp, even while he's accompanying it with an overblown wink at one of his muggers. "And rubies. You should see my collection. Dozens."

Nell, he doesn't know very well. But he knows her better than these fellows (and singular lady), so he'll take her and her strategy.

But the Darktowners look less certain of her. In step with his attempt to follow her lead and be led away, the four of them are fanning out a bit further.

"What about you?" the bulkiest (and the brightest, it seems, which is hardly fair) asks. "Can we trust you with a copper?"

Unlike his half-asleep dozes against the shelves, Kostos' map-naps involve being well and truly asleep. So rather than holt upright at the word, he rouses more slowly and only part of the way, turning his head to glare blearily up at the source of the interruption.

"You do not," he says, muddled accent further muddled by drowsiness and having his face half-smashed against a table, "have to call me that."

During the war, he'd have been on his feet already. Maybe he's getting soft. Even so, awareness of where he is and how undignified it is seeps slowly in, and he peels himself off the map to sit up straight and rub his face, which has a clear line across the cheek from the crease of the paper he'd been resting on, then makes a valiant attempt at looming from below. Success is mixed. Mixed to nonexistent.

"What is it?"

Kostos is observant and reasonably clever, but there's nothing here to observe and no reason to think this rifter is more dishonest than any of the others, so Kitty Jones becomes Lizzie Temple until someone tells him otherwise—and maybe forever, because calling her Lizzie for the remainder of their acquaintance will suit him fine whether it's her name or not. He doesn't care.

"Kostos Averesch." He looks down at the book she'd returned to him, finally, and tries to remember whether or not he actually needed it for anything. "And it is going to help me decide whether or not I owe you an explanation."

He decides he didn't need the book for anything specific. He holds onto it anyway, in one hand, and gestures to the shelf with the other. Surely she woke him up because he was in her way and not because she's a nosy child with nothing better to do.

"Do you need help finding something?"

That would be a no, on owing her an explanation.

Kitty lets loose a dry snort, recognizing a dismissal when she hears one. It annoys her - it's annoying, being dismissed - and so she pushes her hair back from her face, and then smiles a bright (fake) smile at him and puts on her best polite-aspiring-to-middle-class accent and answers, "You can, actually. I'm looking to learn about the history of magic."

"I'd prefer to remain non-rifted, if that's an option," Adalia says, helpfully. "If we go one by one to start we can at least have an idea of how we each move. May make for fewer injuries in the long run, even if it takes longer."

“Ah.”

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.

There's always a bit of bracing himself before entering a conversation with Alistair, since there are always so many ways it could go, not all of them ideal. But when what results from the greeting is a compliment, Cade's guard is brought down slightly. "Thank you," he says, with careful hope. After a pause, "anything good?"

"Don't fall in. The stipend doesn't cover swimming."

In the washed out tones of the gray pre-dawn, Marcoulf might more closely resemble some Lowtown scrounger than an Inquisition soldier. Yet the accent is unmistakably Orlesian, the insignia there at his shoulder is unmistakable even in the near dark, and he is technically attending an assigned post. --Well, more or less. He's definitely sitting on one of the dock support posts more than he is actively patrolling much of anywhere, but his shift is nearly over. Anyone else might do exactly the same at the end of a late night.

If you're going to slip into the harbor for some drowning, have the courtesy to do it after he's finished here.

Kitty's brows draw down as she watches him pull the volume - in surprise, rather than in disapproval. She takes it from him, and opens it, and - yeah, it's an actual book on magic. It's not a mean joke, like a book on How to Talk Less or something like that. He's actually being helpful.

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.

"Do I look like a librarian?" Kostos asks flatly—and he should hope the answer is no, he looks very dangerous and borderline important, but he should also have realized how likely the answer was to be yes before he asked. He realizes after instead, and answers his own question. "I lead one of the projects."

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?"

She certainly was going to answer "yes" until he cut in with his own answer. Librarians, in her experience, look dark, forbidding, and super-judgey. He certainly fits all three criteria.

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."

"It isn't answering pointless questions, either." He was definitely the apprentices' favorite instructor. "I could stop."

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."

"A cookie," Alistair says, "which I also saw first. But there might be more in that cabinet."

He gestures with his head, where there are definitely more waiting in a tin.

His sneer is practically audible, which does put Kitty's back up a bit. Her previously-banished irritation returns. But - whatever. He gave her books, and even if he's doing so in a condescending manner he's answering her questions.

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?"

Cade follows the gesture and goes to the cabinet, where he's pleased by what he finds. The tin is pried open, two cookies removed, and he turns around to sit near Alistair, taking a bite out of one-- only to realize he has no actual idea what they're for, who made them, whether he should be eating one at all.
Even twenty-plus years after the abbey, Cade's 'oh god we're going to get in trouble' face hasn't changed. Still chewing, but more slowly, he looks at Alistair with veiled horror.

“I could hardly say,” Kostos says. “No one can.”

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.”

"Oh," Kitty says, like it's the most natural thing in the world, "that. Yeah." To be fair, what Kostos is saying is rather new to her - or she thinks so, at least. It's a bit hard to tell whether Kostos is saying what she thinks he's saying. He's a bit unclear in his metaphors. But he seems to be suggesting that she's completely fake, which contrasts a bit with Petrana's theory that they're the dreams of their original selves. But at the core, it's the same issue. Inauthenticity. Being a copy. Being a mirage.

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.

Edited 2018-07-04 03:27 (UTC)

Despite being so drunk the stars are shifting and he doesn't have any dignity to impugn, Kostos feels a vague stir of indignation, as if from somewhere very far away. He's from Cumberland. He knows how to swim. He can't communicate his life story and geography with a look, but he does try for an appropriate amount of scorn when he twists his head against the dock to glare at whichever Orlesian fop has the gall—

The glare turns into something more quizzical. Not too quickly, since his brain is sludge, but it gets there.

"The stipend," he says. "What does it cover?"

Alistair only raises his eyebrows—oblivious to what Cade might be making that face about, but it looks the same as not caring, maybe, until he says, "Get a bad one?"

"Are we supposed to be eating these?" Cade asks, looking ashamedly down at the cookie he already bit.
Logically, of course they are, or they'd be stored somewhere that roving thirty-somethings couldn't wander down and pilfer them. "Like... what if they're... for something."

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Alistair I

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