RIFTER ARRIVAL: Guardian 9:45

[faderifting]

WHO: New rifters, rescuers, and anyone else
WHAT: New arrivals are collected and transported to Kirkwall
WHEN: Mid-Guardian, 9:45
WHERE: The hills north of Starkhaven
NOTES: This log contains prompts for the ARRIVAL and RECOVERY of new rifters, as well as the subsequent QUARANTINE period. All prompts are open to anyone.

Comments

KIRKWALL

[faderifting]

III. KIRKWALL

Kirkwall sits perched on, below, and within the black cliffs surrounding a harbor. The Gallows sit in the center of that harbor, on a rocky island occupied almost entirely by a massive fortress. Despite everyone's best efforts at removing statues of slaves and depressing murals, planting more greenery in the stone courtyards and gardens, and removing unnecessary bars, it still has the lingering aura of a prison, or a place where something terrible has happened, or both.

Still, it's home for at least the next few weeks. New rifters are quarantined in the Gallows on arrival, to an extent. They're given rooms with everyone else and permitted to wander the grounds freely, but not to leave the island fortress to explore the city. It's for their own safety—there are social mores they can't understand yet, people who would like to kidnap or kill them who they must learn to be wary of, writing that may or may not be unfamiliar and a thousand places to get lost—as well as everyone else's, but as long as no one exhibits any signs of contagious disease or a propensity for murdering civilians, it will only be temporary.

In the meantime, they'll be gathered together or taken aside frequently for talks on a number of issues considered vital to their success, or at least their basic survival, from a quick overview of Thedosian geography, to an explanation of the war that the Inquisition fighting, to a breakdown of the local currency.

There is also a seemingly endless list of don'ts. Don't touch red lyrium. Don't touch lyrium at all. Don't approach darkspawn unprepared. Don't put anything covered with odd black film anywhere near your orifices. Don't deal with demons. Don't use magic in the streets unless absolutely necessary, or else the locals might panic. Don't mouth off to nobles. Don't wander too far for too long, if you insist on wandering at all, or the anchor in your hand will become unbearable. Don't forget that you're guests, frightening ones, and making a good impression now may make all the difference in the future, when the war is over and someone has to decide what to do with this collection of Fade-touched strangers.

And don't forget, when you are allowed to leave, that the last boat back to the Gallows is at midnight.

bartimaeus | ota

[reshapes]

So.

One thing leads to another and the next thing anyone knows, there's a dark haired boy in his indeterminately late teens being strong-armed through the Gallows courtyard. "You really should rethink all this," he is heard cheerfully protesting. "You don't seem to know any of this, but I'm something of a celebrity where I come from. When I say I raised the walls of Uruk and fought at the Battle of Qadesh, you're meant to 'ooh' and 'aah.' I can guarantee you'll regret this-- sorry, what did you say your name was? Oh right. You'll regret this, Humphrey. You'll rue the day you put Bartimaeus of-- hey!"

And then he is gone, having been shoved down the ominous passageway leading down into the depths of the Gallows dungeons.

Which look, these things happen. Do it usually require significantly more in the way of painful magical encouragement to get him moving in the right direction? Sure. But he's tired and this thing in his hand isn't making anything easy. Making good on threats is a goal best saved for the future once he's figured out how to avoid having his Essence eaten alive by this tear in his hand.

Which is probably why hours (or days) later, the young man who allegedly took on a half dozen shapes when he'd first arrived through the rift is both still in the cell he'd been shoved in and wearing more or less the same shape he'd been in while being crab walked through the Gallows. He can be found there in the Gallow's dungeon lying on his side with his cheek propped in his hand while he pretends to sleep. --Or maybe he's loitering near the thick cell door with his face pressed near the narrow slot. "Hello there, sailor. Help a friend out?" --Or maybe he actually is sleeping, which is maybe the most mortifying thing anyone's ever caught him doing.

[keenly]

Colin heard something about a captured apostate and his feet did the rest. Actually his feet did more than they should have--he was halfway to the dungeon before he remembered to turn back to the apothecary for herbs and a hornazo. He thunders down the stairs and takes long strides between the cells, looking in each. But Bartimaeus spots him first.

He arrives at the cell door with a grim look. The light isn't great here, so he can't really check the state of the prisoner, but he'll err on the side of caution. Mages tend to get locked up for things ordinary folk do every day. So far he hasn't heard of anyone being made Tranquil, but it could always happen.

Without comment, he slides the hornazo between the bars of the narrow slot. It is crusty and warm, the fresh lunch item of the day that Colin usually charges five silver for.

"Are you all right?" he asks softly.

[reshapes]

He'll give this place credit for one thing and one thing only - he isn't used to much of anyone falling for the bait he dangles from a very obvious hook, but so far the odds have been surprisingly good here. Falling into a physical plane and finding all the rules having changed usually isn't this good for him.

Hook, line, and sinker, he thinks as he receives the hornazo through the slot in the door. "Oh, how kind," he whimpers accordingly with the air of a limping puppy. "I'd be much better if I could get out and stretch my legs. Get a little sun. The air is so stale down here."

Out of view of the slot, Bartimaeus hocks the fresh lunch to one side. Won't be needing that, thank you. Instead, he shifts around just slightly in an effort for the light to catch his big, pathetic, teary eyes better.

[keenly]

A grim look. There's not actually much he can do without getting hung to dry by Beleth, even if this guy is completely innocent. Which isn't immediately clear.

"Believe me," Colin says. "Better for us both if you sit tight. They won't keep you in there forever. You're not hurt, are you?"

Re: bartimaeus | ota

[altusimperius]

There's a criminal in the dungeon, someone who came from a rift and is claiming he did nothing wrong. Which, perhaps, he didn't.
Benedict isn't brave enough yet to venture out to the rifts-- let alone to be open about his own shard-- but he does want to have a look-see at this new arrival with his attitude and his suspicious name. Dressed in his dignified chamberlain's duds, he braves entering the dungeon (Maker, the smell of it, the memory of the smell, fills him with nausea) and his fancy leather shoes click toward the cell.

"...well you're just a person," comes the vaguely disappointed greeting.

[reshapes]

This just a person is currently reclining near the rear of the cell with his back to the door, using a small chip of stone to carve lewd drawings into the base of the wall¹. This person has in fact been steadfastly ignoring anyone and everyone at his door in recent memory (what a nest of gossip mongers this place is!), but that kind of insult simply can't be left unchallenged.

Bartimaeus rolls over, his expression the definition of appalled.

"Excuse me?"

1. He's not the first one, either. There was a real artist is here at some point in the last 30 years.

[rathercommon]

Kitty certainly isn't going to let the new arrival just languish in the dungeons. Or, well, she is, she's not about to break them out, but she's not going to let them languish in the dungeons without asking a few questions. She had, you see, heard a few things about their arrival - the shapeshifting, the fact that they'd attacked people and sided with the demons, the way they'd landed in the dungeon right away - and decided that they were most certainly someone worth talking to. They might, after all, have something interesting to say...And, well, if they don't, they'll probably need someone looking out for them. And Kitty is, she fancies, just the person to do it.

So she makes her way down to the cell and finds that - well, that the person there looks like a rather ordinary boy. Which is a bit disappointing. Still, she settles down opposite and greets him, her voice pitched as gentle as she can make it -

"Hullo. I'm Kitty. Who are you?"

[reshapes]

The boy in question is preoccupied when she first arrives. Or at least, he's certainly making a show of it as he lies there flat on his back, hocking bits of hornazo bread at the ceiling to see if they'll stick if he throws them hard enough. It's all dreadfully important. He's far too busy to pay attention to visitors, the shape at the door only the most recent in-- well, if all the foot traffic is any indication then sticking someone straight into the dungeon still counts for entertainment these days.

(Privately: he's thinking. How far down had they taken him? Reasonably, if he wants to leave this room he'll need to do it through the doorway. But if he sets of a detonation, he'll need to be certain it's big enough to do the work. And a part of him, a very small part, is faintly concerned about standing in such close proximity to a blast that size. It wouldn't usually be a problem, of course, but there's no telling how the magic tear in his limb will react. And then what? He'll almost certainly be too exhausted to make a rapid escape, which leaves him...--)

--Sorry, what? Did he hear that right? 'Kitty?'

The boy starts to sit up. A piece of hornazo falls from the ceiling and hits him in the eye. "Augh!"

[rowancrowned]

What order the Division Heads end up meandering (or striding, or walking) down to the dungeons to check in on their newest resident has no actual official planning—Thranduil hadn’t drawn the short straw, nor had he mentioned it to any of the ladies with whom he shared his rank. But not coming down to visit would have been uncharacteristic. Here he is, a rifter, usually doing his best to ensure that they all present a very nonthreatening face, if you please.

Bartimaeus is just the most recent. They haven’t had to use the dungeon for this in—a while. Helena, but that was hardly due to the same circumstances. He can’t recall. It's been threatened enough.

He drifts past the guards, finds a stool, pulls it up in front of the locked door, and very pleasantly says, as he’s settling himself down, “Bartimaeus, was it?”

[reshapes]

The boy in the cell is resting his eyes. It isn't the kind of rest he actually want (or needs), but he's tired of staring at four more or less identical walls¹ and the lack of having to look at anything - including the ugly faces of his guards - is more relaxing than most people would give credit. It allows his mind to wander in every direction, unrestricted by the immediacy of cold stone and a closed. He is thinking about the angry, aching pulse in his hand; he is thinking about how tight the towers of the Gallows stretched and how he'd rather like to punch a hole through them on his way out of here; he's thinking that he isn't quite sure what out of here means; he is thinking for absolutely the first time in his long, long life and his miserable service to the boy in question: 'Where the hell is Nathaniel?'

He is not, for once, listening for the sound of his own name. It takes him a moment to recognize the sound. One of the boy's dark eyes opens squinting forward the long lines of the figure behind the locked door.

"As a matter of fact, it was." Bartimaeus doesn't open his second eye. "Let's skip the chit-chat, shall we? What is it that you want from me? Because if it's a dancing monkey act for an hour's entertainment, I'll tell you right off that you've come to the wrong djinni."

1. Discounting the rude drawings scratched here and there.

[wont_be_me]

Someone is here to gloat. She leans her hip against the bars, gazing in at him with heavy lidded eyes, and just overflowing with stifled amusement.

"Straight into the brig. You're not too clever, are you."

[reshapes]

Someone else has just figured out how to make rings with the horrible, acrid some from a hand-rolled cigarette. He's doing that now: exhaling fat disks and watching them disintegrate in the stale dark air of the cell. Inhale. Exhale--

The boy coughs, curses, and knocks himself once or twice in the center of the chest. How anyone can stand to do this regularly, he couldn't say.

After a moment, he manages: "Oh, I don't know about that. Setting expectations low is a fantastic way to make sure people are shocked later when you really get down to business."

[meds4sale]

He'd heard about the arrest - one of the Rifters who'd arrived the same time he did, a shapeshifter of sorts. The Medicine Seller always took a special interest in such things and since this wasn't his first rodeo, it seemed the kindly thing to offer what he knew.

The only sign that heralds Bartimeus's latest visitor is the exhale of breath just to the side of the door, and the smell of tobacco smoke. The stranger doesn't speak for a while, and it possibly has something to do with the clank of armour receding into the distance.

"Some advice," came a quiet, even drone once the clanking had passed, "is to reveal as little of yourself as possible. Many know little and wish to understand even less."

[reshapes]

"Counter offer," says the boy from where he's meandering about the inside of the cell. Does it count as pacing if he's walking in circles? "No one cares about unsolicited advice."

He's crabby. All of this - the rotation of the guard and the heaviness of the cell door and the intolerable slew of busybodies poking their nose down here to look at him - is starting to grate on his last nerve. And it's not like he was in a great mood before either. He's tired, his Essence aches, and he's wound up by the frustration of being stuck down here in the dark like some common Imp bound to his master's basement. It's humiliating enough without random people off the proverbial street coming down to tell him his business, thank you very much.

"Do you need something? Or are you just here for my prodigious entertainment value?"

[inkindled]

Matthias regards the pressed face with suspicion.

"I'm not a stupid sailor," he says, somewhat unnecessarily. Certainly he isn't dressed as a sailor. His clothes mange to straddle the line between outsized and undersized, too short in the sleeves and too big in the shoulders, in the way only a teenage boy can be. Drab green, dingy white. It had been hard to leave off the armor that he'd scrounged out of the Inquisition's scant armory, but he's here to mop a floor, and he'd look like such a tit doing it in armor, humble leather though it might be. "And we're not friends."

As punctuation, he lets the mop slop loudly back into the bucket, then hauls it out again and slaps it onto the stone floor. Grey water and greyer soap suds squeege out from beneath it, spilling in a wave across the stone toward the cell door.

With his head down as he works, and in a deliberately casual tone, Matthias asks, "Whatchoo do to get locked up, anyway? Only an idiot gets locked up."

[reshapes]

"Oh, but we could. Be friends, I mean," says the boy in the cell, breezing lazily between one point of conversation to the next as is most convenient to him. "I've mopped a floor or two in my day, actually. I could give you some pointers. Or we could complain together about how dull it is."

Which is usually a safe bet, unless the little grousey faced chap is just especially passionate about a well-scrubbed floor. Who can say? It's been known to happen. Still - if he's looking for common ground, and in this case Bartimaeus absolutely is, it's not a bad place to try starting.

Best not to avoid the question in that case either, though. Trustworthy people usually say more than they should. "Just a little misunderstanding. I'm sure it'll be sorted out in a day or two."

new phone who dis

[cyclic]

All things considered, this is about how he'd been expecting things to go when he'd last left his office. Which is to say: badly. He was in a desperate position, inches away from becoming a pariah or a criminal or worse — and now, here he is, restrained to a dirty room on a miserable island in a corrupt city that hates magic.

John swallows his pride remarkably well, all things considered. He knows how to shut up when it means survival, and so he does; plays along, follows the introductory course, negotiates his way into a private room by merit of accepting a particularly cramped one. He has to shove the cot onto its side to make enough room for two pentacles, and even then it's a bit tight.

It isn't ideal. He doesn't have any of the herbs he'd like to have, and the two candles he's scraped together are half spent. He takes his suit jacket off several times and puts it on several times, finally settling on keeping it on despite the fact that it's irreparably dusty and has suffered a few clean tears and a conspicuous burn on the right sleeve. It's a desperate grasp at normalcy, at authority, but it's the best he can do.

The summoning is the same as it always is, at least. Maybe. Is it slower? He counts off a few more seconds than he'd like as he waits in the empty room, eyes fixed on the empty pentacle, straining with impatience and focus.

[reshapes]

Let's get one thing straight: rift shard or no rift shard, he had no intention of sitting in a moldy old dungeon cell for long. It'd take more than some magical wound sucking at the edges of his ragged Essence to count him down and out! He was, in fact, only moments ago putting all his energy and concentration into making a rather fabulous escape.

Which may have something to do with the shape that eventually manifests itself the pentacle opposite Nathaniel's. It might also account for the hole blown in one of the Inquisition cells literally mere seconds before this. But really - who can say for certain. The point is that after a rather clenched, awkward moment, what materializes there amongst the elegantly scrawled lines of chalk is a giant bewildered chameleon. For a moment, it sits there perfectly inert in its mottled grungy-stone-and-filthy-straw color. Then one of it's massive corkscrewing eyes swivels to take in the magician there in the pentacle opposite.

The chameleon blinks.

Bartimaeus, the rift shard glowing hot in his clawed lizard says, "There you are. Took you long enough."

CARLA | IS A GEM

[wont_be_me]

It's not so much that there isn't plenty to poke around in and entertain herself with at the Gallows. It's more that she doesn't like being told what she can and can't do. She also rolls her eyes expansively as she's lectured to.

"Hasn't one of you ever thought about writing this repertoire down? I could read it twice as quickly and it would smell half as rank."

A gem this one. She'd been a gem the entire march here--riling and insulting as many soldiers as she could--and she continues to be a gem now. Maybe it's tempting to put her downstairs with the other one... But she's very--irritatingly--certain never to push anyone quite that far. She's kept her hands to herself, and done nothing more untoward than be persistently nasty.

She lifts her hand, the shard glaring in her flesh. "Why don't I just hide this and no one will ever know I'm not meant to be here. That's all that marks me as any different from you."

That and her general superiority and cleanliness, which she is sure to remind you of.

[kyrr]

Tofa has been watching from a distance, her eyes careful as the new arrivals come. She's quite new herself - she's barely been here a month and has spent much of her time with her sister - but the Rifters are something different. They're novel, unique, and she has not met many of them; not enough to get a true grasp of who they are. Instead, she seeks to learn about them now, to see what their worlds are and how they compare to here, to home.

One of them catches her attention and Tofa frowns, head tilting, watching. It takes her a few moments to step closer, and she feels huge and bulking with her six and a half foot height hovering over the other people around her. Eventually, she tries to catch her attention, beginning to motion.

She points at her own hand, where an Anchor might be, and winces. Sign for Does it hurt?

[wont_be_me]

The casual antagonism on Carla's face turns to something more thoughtful, contemplating the very large woman. Cold and clockwork, she quickly calculates whether or not she is being threatened for her behavior or not. Is that the promise of wincing, or--

She flexes her hand with the anchor in it, then holds it out palm up for inspection. The woman's face had lacked the sternness or anger of a threat, so why not try this instead. While visually distinct, touching it only feels like flesh.

"They tell me I'm stuck with it," she offers wryly.

The Medicine Seller | OTA

[meds4sale]

What was it about the deeply religious that they so enjoyed the sound of their own voice, the Medicine Seller wondered as a Chantry mother droned on about the dos and don'ts (mostly "don'ts") of Thedas with intermittent insinuations about anyone with pointy ears and facial tattoos being baby-eating heathens. He'd have been somewhat fascinated with the whole thing if he wasn't already well acquainted with Thedosian customs (relatively) and didn't have somewhere to be (dinner, then a quiet spot by a fire with a good book and his pipe).

The point was, even his deep well of patience was feeling a bit... depleted.

There was a pause in her long diatribe in which the Medicine Seller managed to interject.

"...I was hoping for more re-"

Aaaaand she cut him off again. With an exhale, he excused himself. It was clear he didn't need to be there for anything she was saying and he was sure someone else would be kind enough to catch him up on things. He had the whole quarantine period to be brought up to speed after all.

[amnotaweasel]

Really, that old lady was just rude. In all the hustle and bustle of Kyoto or her search for Aoshi-sama, and then the busy days of becoming the Aoi-ya's hostess, Misao'd rarely had time for the ramblings of Buddhist priests about what people ought to do. She had even less patience for some old lady who kept interrupting herself to rant about pointy eared people with face paint, and glare narrowly at a guy who'd arrived with her.

So, when pointy-eared-fellow excused himself and left, Misao... followed. She didn't bother excusing herself -- she just waited until the old lady's rheumy eyes went unfocused as she told herself another story about how evil "elves" were and used the moment of distraction to stand, slip to the back of the room, and slip silently out the door.

As soon as the door had closed behind her, she darted forward to catch up.

"She must be very important. Or I guess filial piety's even bigger here than back home. I don't know why anybody lets her go on and on, otherwise."

[meds4sale]

"She is a Chantry mother," he explained slowly, pausing a moment to let Misao catch up.

"They share a... similar prestige as Christian vicars in the west."

Such as tolerating dated opinions from someone who was still, mentally, living in a time when giving voice to such things so blatantly was much more socially acceptable.

"Though she forgot I sold her medicine for her rheumatism," the Medicine Seller remarked, his cold, flat tone slightly amused. Senility was a big part of being eighty-five, he supposed.