EVENT: TRUTH BOMB

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: TRUTH BOMB
WHEN: Bloomingtide 15-17
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC information. Use appropriate content warnings in your subject lines, please.

It’s an ordinary day—so not a very pleasant one. The weather is dreary and muggy, and the day’s lunch is a soup that’s a little too watery and bland. The griffons are being their usual level of noisy and swoopy. The work is its usual level of urgent and difficult.

But in the storage rooms, something wiggles. Then it hums. Then it pops.

Outside of the storage room, there’s no actual sound, no shift in the wind, and no visible sign of a change. But the pop might be felt—like the moment something finally clicks, or two ideas suddenly fit together, except the opposite. In the heads of everyone in the fortress, something is suddenly not connected quite right.

The first sign of what’s gone wrong is that someone immediately stands up and tells the cook how bad the soup is.

A lot of people’s days are about to get exponentially worse.

Comments

Julius | open, middling

[overharrowed]

I. Early

Julius doesn't first realize the effect as it pertains to himself at all. He's used to the low itch of carrying around unvoiced opinions and unexamined memories, and sometimes that sensation is more itchy than others. But after overhearing a few interesting sending crystal messages and having a guard he didn't even know on more than nodding terms blurt out, unprompted, that mages still gave him the creeps as hard as he tried to relax around them... it didn't take long for Julius to think a bit more closely about his own discomfort.

It's likely a bad sign, but how bad he isn't quite sure.

He's heading for his office, to be safe, and considering whether to put his sending crystal somewhere out of reach. There's likely work to be done, though precisely what... well. He'll figure it out when he gets there and is no longer in the hallway. Where anyone at all can just talk to him.

II. Later

Staying quiet and out of the way only works for so long. It's taking effort, and that effort is beginning to wear on him. He decides to look for a division head, or even another project leader. Perhaps if they keep the subject matter to strictly what is happening and how to make it stop, no one will say anything regrettable.

He'd rather see strangers, at the moment. If he says something to someone with no context for him, that can be dealt with. People he knows are a more complicated prospect, and he'd just ... rather not. (He's likely not going to be so lucky; the Gallows isn't that heavily populated.)

i

[wythersake]

He hasn't been looking for Julius.

Hasn't been looking for anyone, but if he's not the last person Isaac would like to run into right about now — well, twelth place isn't bad.

"Oh, fuck." He says, in the hallway, where anyone at all can just talk to anyone. Can even run into them headlong, if they're paying very close attention to not saying every single little thought that crosses their mind instead of what foot goes in front of the other, "It's you and your bangs."

They're awful. Not that Isaac has any room to talk, except that talking about some things seems to make it easier to avoid the others, and It's you and your brain isn't —

His mouth screws up, briefly frustrated; bites something back.

[overharrowed]

"I don't know what your obsession with my hair is about," is a thing he almost certainly wouldn't say, normally, but it's better than a variety of the alternatives that jump to the tip of his tongue.

He takes a moment to rein those in. Unfortunately, the conscious desire to walk away seems to be competing with the desire to say and blurt out something even more ill-advised. The force of the two men not saying more to each other might cause a torch to spontaneously ignite in a moment.

[wythersake]

An attempt to move aside, continue moving down the hall becomes a frustrated gesture, the blurted response:

"There's so much of it. You can't be any younger than me, and here you are —" Probably a senior enchanter if nothing had changed, and Isaac's never been ambitious so much as he's navigated it, and found himself frustrated to recall the difficulty, "— Wearing fringe curtains."

But that frees him to take a step back, brace a hand against the wall. A flat, calculating look to Julius. There may only be one way out of this. He sucks in a breath, stutters around some more meaningful confession:

"And honestly, the robes."

There's a door, if they can make it far enough.

[overharrowed]

"I'm a mage, I don't see why wearing robes is especially offensive. I imagine the large staff would give it away regardless." It's not sarcastic so much as dry. Fighting is a dangerous way forward, though if they can keep sniping over mundane things, they may succeed in inching around everything.

He takes a step toward the door, but can't resist adding: "It's not as if you'd like me better with a different hairstyle or other clothes."

[wythersake]

"Of course not --" Is out of his mouth before he can bite on his tongue. "-- I don't know what you want."

His hand curls on itself, a curse of a gesture (self-directed), but it's freed a foot or two further between them.

"It matters. The robes. Like you've never had to bother,"

Hiding. Blending. The only mages at the Gallows to walk about in them lately: Wardens, Vints, Shivana. Even Anders, after a fashion, represents the old guard; hangs his neck on the safety it affords.

[overharrowed]

"Of course I had to bother," Julius says, more baffled than affronted. "If I'd thought the Inquisition needed a rather quiet scribe more than it needed an experienced mage, perhaps I'd have maintained the pretense after arriving. I'm useful because of what I am, I don't see what hiding it would get me in this particular circumstance."

Which is. Much more than he'd intended to say.

"No one who's prepared to dislike me would like me better without the robes," he adds, after an awkward pause. "I don't see why I should pretend otherwise now that I'm not hiding."