faderift | OPEN | i'll be working

Entry tags:

OPEN | i'll be working

WHO: Rey, Kylo, Nari, Aro, Myr, whoever wants to get drafted into chopping stumps in the rain for a pittance come on it's fun
WHAT: Chopping stumps in the rain for a pittance! Possibly inadvisable trebuchet action! Nari open while she's being a bummer!
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: Wounded Coast, Sundermount, and Kirkwall
NOTES: CW: discussion of character death in III

I. Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies (Myr: first half of Kingsway, Sundermount)

Nari's been waiting to test this ever since she'd slammed open the door to the room she'd shared with Myr. Finally it's not blistering and oppressive enough that it's not a horrifying idea to take the materials for the small scale trebuchet she'd drawn up plans for to Sundermount—where theoretically nobody would be bothered by the repeated launch of magically enhanced exploding rocks—to build it. Plus, there are a lot of rocks to magically enhance to explode.

Myr is duly informed of her readiness, and since they're both early risers, out they go into the wild brown yonder early one morning. Once there, Nari claps her hands together and asks with some enthusiasm: “What should we try first?”

II. I'm Only Happy When It's Complicated (Rey, Kylo, Aro, and The Hapless Voluntold: latter half of Kingsway, Wounded Coast)

[one thread~!]

With the long periods of heat lessening, Nari decides it's finally safe to take her crew out for the heavy work of clearing. The space near the Wounded Coast the Seneschal had allotted them for the final home of the course they had built certainly had space enough. It was also, blessedly, flat enough.

It also had stumps enough. Stumps enough of trees that had been old and established enough that once they arrive with the cart of provisions, thick ropes, shovels, picks, pitchforks, and axes, the elf looks out on the studded field with a dryly amused look. Luckily they don't need to clear all of the area, but there's more than enough for a solid couple of weeks of work.

She eyes the sky with much the same look as she'd given the field. It responds with a quiet disaffected rumbling promise of rain.

“Well,” she says to those assembled, “we'd better get done what we can while we can. If you've never done this before, we'll be digging around them until the roots are exposed, chopping through the main roots and whatever else we can get, getting ropes around them, and getting the horses to do the rest.” She hefts a shovel over her shoulder. “Questions?”

III. Time Has a Funny Kind of Violence (end of Kingsway, Kirkwall)

One morning Nahariel wakes up and it's here: the sharp cool smell of the autumn wind and the promise of the winter to come. With it comes the body's memory of the beginning of the decline from which Sina would never recover, and with that comes sudden intermittent hunched shoulders. Staring out into even blue sunny skies with a dull and tired bleakness mismatched to them. A wet shine in her eyes for small reasons, or seemingly no reason at all. The stop of work for a long moment before she shakes her head and starts again. A false ring to her buoyant good nature, as if it's being forced.

It isn't always, but it's sometimes. Especially when the wind blows.

She can be found more often in the Memorial Garden. Oftener still in the fringes of the statue's grove where her clansister's trees still stand both new and ancient to watch the leaves of those trees that are not evergreen begin to turn for the second time; the first that Sina won't see.

She will still greet company with a small smile.

IV. Wildcard

Hi!

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"Part of siegecraft is learning to defend against 'em, isn't it?" Myr replies, grinning wider if anything.

"I'm game. Might give me a better idea of what's gone wrong with it." Or he can just...also kick it. Two feet are better than one, etc. He takes his staff down off his back and makes his way over to her.

They head down the winding path with no great difficulty; it's well traveled and the earth has been tamped down to a decent surface because of it. The area where the boulder landed is a different story for which Nari offers both her hand and running commentary on the little hills, dips, loose rock, and larger stationary ones. And once a snake, but more for the snake's benefit than Myr's, it being a harmless venomless thing.

Finally they reach the site where the boulder they'd hurled had made its landing, half sunk into the earth with a force that had decently cratered the looser surrounding soil and broken a stone it had landed on. The glyph Myr had inscribed still glows with aggravating serenity on its side.

"Well, here it is," she chuckles, "Did the boulder part right at least."

Nari's yet to steer him wrong on one of these expedition and this time's no exception; it frees Myr a little from the navigating to puzzle over what might be the matter with the glyph--

--and he still hasn't got the faintest idea when they arrive at the boulder's landing site. He gives Nari's hand a grateful pat once they're close enough he can sense the glyph and feel his own way over to it with his staff. "It'll be quite the day if I ever screw it up so badly it doesn't do the boulder part right," he retorts through a grin. "Then you can put me behind Venatori lines and I'll sabotage all their equipment to float off into the sky. --Now, let's see..."

He settles into a comfortable lean against his staff, smile fading to thoughtful frown as he feels out the spell through the Fade. It's all there exactly as he'd come up with it, so why-- "Why didn't you work?" he mutters to the glyph--before kicking the boulder in gentle frustration.

The glyph promptly ignites with a snap of not-sound and a flash of paralysis, freezing a look of almost comical alarm on Myr's face.

Not having had any warning but the flash, Nari's look of surprise is a bit more subdued, but the leaning half-step back she'd been in the middle of taking creates its own comedy.

Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all given the amount of dodge training she's been doing, her foot is placed in such a way that when her momentum and unbalanced position topples her over backwards it catches her a bit to soak a little of the impact. Even so, she hits the ground much like a statue of hers might, the slight hill she'd landed on rolling her face into the dirt.

The wind blows cheerfully across them.

After the few fraught seconds:

"So," slightly muffled by the ground, as the spell lets her relax, "does this mean I needed to shoot the boulder a little higher, or..."

"Uhm," Myr says intelligently, both because he's still thinking through that one and because sometimes paralysis comes off in patches and he can't make many noises other than uhm.

Though when he can, his first is, "You're all right down there?" --because he can imagine what's happened to her, and there's helpless apologetic laughter behind the words. "--But no, that one's on me entirely; I forgot to take the original trigger out. Wouldn't go off until someone touched it even after falling far enough."

if(boulder has hit the ground with force > 10x10^3 N AND someone touches boulder) {paralyze everything}; beginner's mistake.

"I've walked into doors harder," Nari replies with a laugh through her nose that is half whuff and half snort. She groans with comic exaggeration as she sits up and dusts herself off.

"Honestly, if we shot it into the midst of a charge, someone would touch it, so it's not the most inconvenient hurdle there could have been. That's a quick catch though—fixable, I assume?"

"Oh; hardly anything, then," because he's ambled face-first into a lintel a time or two when lost in thought, and knows whereof she speaks. "I'd worried I might have to explain to Cade and the rest of your clan what I'd done to you."

He offers out a hand toward the source of that groan, wincing in sympathy even if he knows it's largely for show. "It was obvious when I set it off--I felt it give way like it usually does, but I'd buried the trigger so deep in the rest of the spellwork I didn't notice it was still there before that. I'm not," his tone takes a turn for the sheepish, "the neatest when I'm working on something new."

And this isn't the first time it's bitten him either.

The source of that groan has become extremely quiet, although after a long silence that is enough to dip its toes into being uncomfortable she does take his hand and get up. There's the sound of more dusting, and then a question asked in such a solicitously casual manner that it's immediately obvious she's being squirrely.

"Why... would you have to explain anything to Cade?"

The silence stretches out and Myr wonders what, exactly, might've gone wrong in the web of his acquaintances that that little joke would be unwelcome. Or maybe she's abruptly reconsidering working with a mage with such sloppy spellwork--that's fair, he admits to himself, and it's kind of her to find a way to spare his feelings before saying so but it's also not the first ti--

Oh. Oh. There's only the slightest hitch in Myr's smile at the question. "Because you're his friend," he says, breezy and innocent. "And he doesn't have so many of them, and I'd feel awful to put one out of commission."

Which is all true, but not all of the truth.

Oh. Dear. His smile twitched. Does Myr know? Myr knows. Myr knows and he is blind. Why is this surprising? It's not like she's been careful, recently. Sylaise, they'd moved in together.

She starts to take the offered out with immediate relief, but reconsiders halfway through the first syllable which means she just sort of makes a croak noise, then whuffs a laugh through her nose, the beads in her hair clicking as she runs her hand back through it. Shy as she is, she's not ashamed of it. Of Cade. Of course, feeling that way is one thing, actually opening her mouth goes a little more like

"I'm... well we're... not... friends." Then, quickly, "No, we are friends, but not just friends." Pause. "I think." Pause. "No, I mean, I know, but... it's complicated?"

You kept an ear out, in the Circle; you knew what your friends were doing (and who) so you didn't give them away in all innocence by mentioning where they'd been together. Myr knows, but also knows well enough not to tell, just as Nari had done him the same service before he and Simon elected to move in together themselves.

His smile grows a little wider--a little warmer and more knowing--as she fumbles through her confession; he knows his own hadn't been much better, when he'd come to her all those months ago to explain why he might need their room to himself some nights. And it's heartening to hear put to voice something he'd long hoped for, his dear friends finding mutual comfort in each other.

"Complicated like splitting your nights between both towers in the Gallows before you decided to move into one room?" he suggests through that smile. "Or complicated in you've not done anything like this before in your life and you don't know where it's bound or what might happen except you want to meet it together?"

Because, well. He's only a few months further along that path.

Complicated like a Dalish elf and a human Templar, both of them fumbling and new. But that's closer to one than the other, so: "The latter. It was sort of... sudden." And also not. It had been... Creators. Had it been a year since she'd asked him to help her with the statue? Theirs hadn't been a smooth progression. It felt out of order sometimes, all fits and starts and unplanned unexpected intimacies before their time. Too close, too far, feelings attached to places she didn't understand and words forced out through throats like tightly clenched fists.

"I just... I came home from the temple of Falon'Din remembering that the future isn't promised to any of us, and I didn't want to go out—didn't want either of us to go out—into the field again without saying... something. Doing... something."

Myr's smile doesn't fade but is transmuted to something less antic by her words, by the emotion behind them-- The too-recognizable emotion behind them.

I almost lost you, he told Simon, the soonest instant he could once they were away from that Vint prison. Even if he'd made the sentiment explicit long before in how he'd embraced his templar, before the Knight-Commander and Benedict and every onlooking guard, without any care for what they might think or say because--

Death, or its near brush, had a marvelous way of simplifying the most complex and snarled things. Whatever else the world might think of them, Myr could no longer bear it thinking they meant only friendship to each other.

That kind of complicated. "Maker," he breathes, half-punctuation and half-prayer. "I hear that. Better to see what you can make of the two of you together than--wait until the opportunity's stolen forever." Casimir.

Not again. Not ever.

There's a whuffed out breath that speaks of agreement every bit as much as words might. "I don't know what'll come of it. Might be that nobody's happy but us," and are they? Happy? She's not sure about that. Are you happy when a dislocated shoulder pops into place? It's less happy and more... right. Which is fine. Nari has never been the giddy type, and she and Cade have spent enough time sitting in right-feeling silence together when they seek each other out that she sees no reason to think it's different for him.

She realizes she's been silent for a while and clears her throat.

"You know how that goes, though."

"I do." Soft and rueful. "Though no one's been too loud about it yet."

And Maker grant the elements of the Inquisition who might get loud continue to look the other way--for his sake, and Simon's, and Cade and Nari's sakes as well.

But that's a thread best not pursued aloud, and so Myr lets it go with a little roll of his shoulders. "But speaking of--" Or not, as the case may be, but whatever, it's his verbal transition to make. "D'you want to go back up there and see if I can do better on the next rock?"

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OPEN | i'll be working

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