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

[shri]

"Don't they already do that?"

She snorts, irritated gaze still sliding over the bleak grey, heavy walls. What difference was there between this and the slums that the elves were forced to live in? Not much that she could tell.

[ebeje]

"Mn." Slums aren't what she means, though. That Orlais has anything in common with Tevinter is a fact she would typically be content to let pass unnoticed. Today— "But when the truth is worse, it is more important it look better, no?"

With a theatrical lilt, "See how well these elves are cared for, how content they are in their place — how much kinder the certainty of this solution than the endless toil of the alienage. If their clothes are better mended, their shackles more fashionable, why should they be called shackles at all?"

[shri]

"Monsters and idiots believe those things, and I am not sure which one is worse." is the one dry snort of bitterness over it. Oh, she has heard it.

"I am sure they like to pretend that they've all but risen them as far as 'their kind' can expect to go, no less." The contempt dry in her throat, dragging along the back of her words.

[ebeje]

There's a grim, cautious pleasure in her eye, to hear this woman give voice to a bitterness Max rarely allows herself. There is work to be done, and monsters aplenty that must be indulged to do it; she is not so childish as to balk from that. But it is nice on occasion to call a thing what it is.

"All the more satisfying then, to prove them wrong." That, she sounds like she knows very well.

"But are you not a noble yourself, Rani Lakshmibai?" They have not spoken, but Max has heard -- a variety of things, about this rifter who frequents Flint's ship. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to sort fact from fiction.

[shri]

Well, there that was, and she's not wrong, not really, but it was a simplification of something far more complex. "I became a Queen, but I was not born a Princess. In fact, my father had more in common with those that live in what you call low town than anything you see amongst your nobility."

And perhaps, any other time, she would leave it there, her point made but - right now? "And then invaders that dress like Orlais and speak Fereldon burned my land to the ground, and I was stripped of my titles, made to watch as they ate my people alive. So do not put me in their category."

[ebeje]

Max is careful, always, about the precise degree of reaction she allows show on her face, but this— perhaps there is less use in hiding than showing that it strikes her. A mere deepening of interest at first, but then something flat and cold in her chest that hasn't forgotten the smell of ozone and burning flesh that took from her all she had sacrificed so much to build.

"And what did you do, to the men who did such things to your people?"

[shri]

Lakshmi's hand lifted, to the wrap of her pallu over her shoulder, the heavy drape of material that she catches between her fingers. Tightening it as she slowly draws it away. The short choli top leaves her stomach open, and the saree sits low across her hips. The fine gold chain wrapped around her middle as much adornment as is required to the scars.

And there are so many. Bites, claw marks, - eaten she says, and she means it literally - bullets as sunk in circles of mattered skin and swords that cut between them in lines. "I went to war." And she did it - all those scars said, not from the back, but on the front of those lines, herself.

[ebeje]

Max isn't a fighter; she does not put any more stock in the sort of scars you can see than those you cannot, wonders even if there is something simpler in being able to watch a thing heal, much as she rebels against the idea of letting anything leave a mark on her she can't undo. Nonetheless, these ones tell as much of a story, and Max eyes the lines of them like those of a book.

(--Seems to find the prose a touch overdone, but what can you do.)

"And did you win?" Her war.

(Max's is here; this.)