(Open) They'll steal your patents for the sun

[youwonscience]

WHO: Cosima and YOU
WHAT: Open post/catchall
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: Gallows and environs
NOTES: Prose or brackets are fine. If you want to talk about another scenario/your wildcard ideas before diving in, DM me or hit me up on plurk/discord. All comers welcome!

I. Infirmary

It's almost easy to forget that she's not in good health, sometimes, which Cosima supposes does credit to spirit healing. But she also never misses her twice-monthly appointments, too conscious of the potential consequences. Since she's here anyway, she brings a few goodies from the kitchen for people well enough to have them but not well enough to fetch them on their own. She's conscious of people who seem to want to be left alone and people who could use a friendly word. And of course, by now she knows the regulars, staff and otherwise.

II. Cosima's lab, the Gallows

Damn, Cosima, back at it again with the microscope. Ever since the phylactery negotiations -- and arguably, since Tevinter, though Cosima wasn't even there herself -- she's thrown herself into her work, harder than ever. They still have so much to learn, and it feels like the conflict is multiplying faster than they can keep up sometimes. She's doing her best, and frustrated she can't do more, though she keeps the latter sentiment to herself.

III. Docks

There's nearly always activity at the docks, so it takes some doing to find a spot that isn't in anyone's way. But Cosima has managed it, and is using her find to watch the water. She's alert enough to her surroundings, since it never pays to let your guard down out and about in Kirkwall, especially as a rifter. But the water makes her feel better. Not like home. It demonstrably isn't home. But as if it's a place that at least makes sense to her.

IV. Wildcard

[Choose your own adventure.]

Comments

[youwonscience]

Cosima can't help thinking (briefly, guiltily) of Delphine. They were sort of... what had they been? It was complicated, though future-Delphine had suggested it certainly got more intense. But for Cosima's, that's a might-have-been. Less real, now, than Herian in many ways.

"One war," she says, instead. "That's... wow. I mean, I'd never been directly touched by a war at all, at home, but they were always happening. I was just lucky enough not to be in those places. Granted, nothing on the scale of Corypheus, not in my lifetime, but..." She shrugs. "Of all the things that are strange to me about this world, sad to say the conflict isn't it. What the conflict's about, yeah, that's new, but now the actual fact of it."

"I agree with you, though. The best thing for people is finding a way to get involved that works for them. Even my sisters have joined a division, and neither of them are really, uh, joiners by temperament. I think just sitting around seeing what's wrong isn't good for anybody, native or Rifter. The difference is, for now, the rifters can't just leave."

Maybe one day. Maybe never. Still to be determined.

[foxsays]

"Ours swept over every nation but one, we still feel the ripples now in little ways so it's hard to say if those stop." Maybe when people keep leaving those who started it and lost, maybe that's when the jaws unclench but the treaties are carefully, painstakingly written; she should know, she had to study them. "It only makes me sad sometimes that this is going to end and they'll have a new reason. Border disputes. Trade deals we negotiated. Alliances of convenience that aren't that. It's deeper than the Abyssal Rift here."

Her plan for after is sailing. Off the edge of the map. Take a ship and go with her arm cut off as much as she must if it aches with the miles.

"If enough left they could. Maybe." Cosima might understand that idea more, and Araceli certainly looks to her for some sort of confirmation of if a mass walkout might be sustainable.

[youwonscience]

"Maybe," she says, unsure. "The mages got a seat at a table with a boycott, but they also occupy a different position than we do. They're splintered, but not as splintered. And if you mean just setting out on their own, indefinitely... I don't know if any of us have figured out how big a group you'd need before that was even logistically possible at length." Quieter: "I saw what happened to Sina. I bet you did too. I don't want to just wander off away from the most information anyone has about the anchors, and I wouldn't have even if I hadn't chosen to join the Inquisition for real."

[foxsays]

"They've enough time and a more solid foundation to argue their place better than us: they all have a stake and a place here, this is their home, it always has been, the longer people are here who knows where their loyalties will lead them from whatever fraternity they were part of before. We could be a deciding factor in pushing more of them together when they finally have to make that decision. It wasn't popular and that's just the people we heard it from."

Whatever was said-- and then there's Sina and she can't swallow, can't breathe, there's Sina and being there when she died after the final weeks. What came after. Being cracked open.

"Sina had been ill a long time." It's a struggle to get that much out as if to justify it, to dance around the reality of what happened but Araceli knows she doesn't have all the details. "Her anchor had already almost killed her once before and that was in the early stages, whatever happened-- Groups of us can leave on missions for a while. I was in Rivain. Alone. For several days and it hurt but nothing untoward happened. If push came to shove, there are people who'd think to test the limits, everyone knows the kind who'd cut off their nose to spite their face."

[youwonscience]

Cosima's demeanor is sympathetic, quietly compassionate, but not apologetic. She didn't bring up Sina lightly or carelessly. "I know. I know that, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. My point is I don't want people getting hurt because they don't know how serious this can be. Or because they think it's somehow not real. I just... I don't know how to talk to people who seem determined to think that those of us who have allied with the Inquisition didn't give it serious thought before we did."