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

[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."