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

[seaboard]

Please stop talking so quickly. Her brow knits, so pale on her skin it's barely there to be seen. Save that little decisive wrinkle in her brow that denotes she must be thinking and very particularly so.

What comes of it, is one swallow, trying to stop, something that won't be held back no matter how she tries. There are tears welling up, like tides flow. Confused, scared and lost and that comes to one very particular point that is neither here nor there.

"I want to go home."

[heirring]

There is maybe the briefest pause in which Wysteria fully takes stock of the situation at hand, sees again the girl's discomfort, and hesitates over it. There there, she wants to say. To pat the girl on the hand and give her cheek an encouraging pinch. No need to cry. It's all perfectly fine.

But is it? Is it really? Mostly, she things the answer really is honestly and properly yes. It's all perfectly fine. But maybe it isn't for someone else. Maybe Gilia's come from a place where she knew nothing but contentment, and now here she is sitting in a dark hole in a dark hole in the ground.

Still though: "Oh, yes. I expect you do." She is doing her very best to sound gentle., you know. "But I promise that in time you will find things you rather like about Thedas. Think of it as an adventure, won't you? Why, imagine how lucky the pair of us must be to have come to such a strange place more or less in one piece. The people I know back home would strangle each other for the opportunity to discover a whole new version of the world."

[seaboard]

"I'm not supposed to leave without - " it's blurted out, before she can stop it, like somehow this was all going to break eventually with all this pain and misery. "- without my family. I wasn't supposed to go without them, and the war, the - the - " it's all too many words at once, and she hiccups, tripping over them, so distressed.

"I must go home, I must. I must." And she sounds like she is going to cry all over again from just the distress of that.

[heirring]

"Drink your broth, my darling. It will make you feel much better." Because, really - what else is there to say? Everything else she can think of seems like a very cruel attempt at comfort indeed. "I'm sure once you've something warm in your belly, things will seem considerably less dire. Would you care for me to fetch you a blanket as well? You must be exhausted."

Poor little thing.

[seaboard]

She does as she told, perhaps, not really because she wants to eat. Her nose is filled with the smell of blood, her ears are still ringing with explosions, and she still hurts. Which all combine to an unsettled, constant nauseated sensation.

But there is a comfort to being told what to do. To not having to think on what to do, but taking the cues of someone else that comes like second nature. That finds familiarity in the complacent.

So she takes the spoon and begins to take a small mouthful. Swallowing, before she nods in reply. "If there is one to spare, I would not mind it."

[heirring]

"Of course. I'll see what can be found. Don't go anywhere." Not that there's much risk of that, she thinks. Tomorrow it may be a trial to peel the girl out into broad daylight.

Wysteria downs rest of her lukewarm broth (when did she have time to drink the first part with all that talking? It's a mystery), rises promptly and scurries away in a flurry of skirts. She's gone for some minutes, long enough for the quiet to seem quite thick and miserable and terrible in the cavernous old thaig with all its shattered stone. When she returns though, it's with a folded blanket with a little book balanced on top of it.

"Do you care for reading, Miss Gilia?"

[seaboard]

She will stumble about in it like a newborn deer, blinking and confused as the crushing sensation of being stuck here rolled over her.

No doubt, many nights for the rest of the week will leave her crying herself to sleep, but that is a misery to consider then, rather than now. Homesickness that was only half imagined, and half the pain of being cut off from which is most important to her.

But for now - for now, she takes help for what it is. "I do, very much." Which is to say a lot for a girl that made a habit of never saying anything directly. Tears hastily blotted away like she had been caught doing something she shouldn't here and now. Almost hear it, feel it, Godfinn pulling the lock of her hair, again?