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]

"The perhaps you should reexamine what you find beautiful because I assure you, you look only from your comfortable height."

Her eyes roll. As if to say, really, Lexie? "I am sorry, what do you call how the elves live? The poor? Freedom? Save that for parties, if you please, no one else would bother believing it."

[coquettish_trees]

"You have a loftier title than I, Bai Saheba," Alexandrie returns, her eyebrow lifting. "Why is it you persist in speaking as if you know so very well the lot of the lower classes? Even if you went to visit them, to eat as they do at their tables, to ask after their woes so that you may address them better as their Maharani, you still had always the potential to return home to the exquisite banquets you made, no? You have seen hardship, you walk as a soldier, but you have the eyes of a queen; her bearing, her riches around your neck, her habit of speaking to all as if she expects to never see recompense for it."

And then she purses her lips and looks irritated.

"Do forgive my lack of courtesy. This is a supremely trying day."

[shri]

And Lakshmi, she begins to laugh and laugh and laugh. It clearly isn't a happy thing or anything but mocking. Irritated, but she is all the time, lately, isn't she? But knowingly or not, apology or not, and whether or not it is unintentional, Alexandrie had crossed a line. Tapped on a sore point.

"I regret to inform you, Lady Alexandrie, on one particular false aspect of your understanding. I am Brahmin. Do you know what that means? No, of course, you don't. Everyone in these blasted lands is too busy screaming at Rifters that we deserve nothing more than to be thankful for being here, to ever listen to anything we might have to say. So I shall tell you: my father begged our supper. We lived at the behest of our betters. I was no Princess, no lord's daughter. I spent my days hungry, lucky when other's took pity on my family." She rounds on her, enough that people get out of the way, as she walks those long, heavy, soldiers steps.

"And oh, yes, I became Maharani. Jhansi ki Rani. Bride of the Newalkers. Do you know what it got me? Humiliation. I lost my husband's throne to war I never wanted that was forced on me, and my name was made a crime to speak because I would suffer no longer watching my people being eaten alive in their beds at night, so I could not even be myself, could not even have the name I was given in love. All I had left was the respect that my once beggared father gave me for myself, yes, this way I talk, this way I walk, these jewels that were the last gifts my dead husband gave me. But so do all that comes from my lands have left, that is the difference between these lands and mine. So do you know where I lived? Slums, no different to the alienages. With the knowledge that I could never return to my home, even if I did only as a beggar on the banks of the sacred rivers. Even lower than the position I came from because even if I went hungry as a child, I had family, but now they were all dead, and I had even less than where I began. So, would you like to try again, Lady Alexandrie, now that you have a better idea about what I am?"

[coquettish_trees]

Despite the invitation to, she doesn't. Rather, she looks a bit as if Lakshmi had hit the back of her head with a board. Eventually the stun passes, and Alexandrie blinks her widened eyes back to normalcy.

"You painted me a different picture, when we spoke of your home," she says, her tone subdued. "Its fabrics, its women, its brilliant color. Your time with your husband." A small quiet reminder: she had asked questions. She had treated Lakshmi with the deference due the position she had held in her own world, despite her holding less than no status in Thedas, as she had come to treat all Rifters. "I would no more have asked you your origin than I would inquire it of Her Radiance. But I suppose assumptions of finery and lineage are still assumptions, even if they are made with the intent of respect.

"I have learned how little I knew of the world outside the fine birdcage of court, but it still galls me to hear of it from anyone save myself. Apparently I made display of that little knowledge in vengeance for it, for which I think there can be no true apology save one." Alexandrie inclines her head toward the steps, an invitation to sit upon them. "I shall listen, if you have more you would say of it."

[shri]

"Of course I told you those things. A grand thing to say to ever say anything else - my land burns, my people live in bondage, I do not speak, I do not sleep, I do not breathe with the ache of knowing their screams are written into my bones."

How little she knows how to stand down. She doesn't know how to be anything else than this figure. Her back cut into this shape. But she swallows, trying to take the edge of her words.

"And perhaps I wanted to remember something other than that, for once. That I was once a woman who had no need of blades or pride. Who had only her happiness and made no apology for it."

[coquettish_trees]

"If you truly wished to wear that woman, and truly wished it believed, then why be angry with me now for having fulfilled those wishes?" Although they are of a height, Alexandrie has settled herself in such a way that she gives every indication of being smaller. "You cannot speak only of clean skin and then rage to have the import of the scars you have hidden go unremarked upon, Bai Saheba.

"Or I suppose you can," she smiles, and it is a barb aimed at her own chest, "I often do. Lie, and grind my teeth in secret when I am believed. Play at being an ornament, and choke on gall when I am treated as one."

[shri]

And that - that infuriates her. Bears her up all the way through. "Lie? I have never lied."

She steps into her. Directly sharp, and shoves her hands between them. Her bare arms, her scarred arms. Adorned not just in bangles, but in scars, in a body that is a battlefield that. "Clear skin? What clear skin have I hidden? Because I have none. It is not like I hide my body. I wear what I am proudly."

Then she takes Lexie's hand, with her own, the hand that had lost fingers to the battlefields here, and drives it, not away but into her. Into her shoulder as she snatches away her pallu over her shoulder, to the heavy scar that blooms on her shoulder. It is a hideous thing, that on her brown skin. "Do you feel that? It is a bullet. You do not have those. It is a hard metal that men fire to kill one another. It is inside of my flesh. I know you have seen it, Lady Alexandrie, all have. I have never, never, hidden what I am. It is always others that choose to see what they wish in me without thinking that more than one thing that can be true. Call me anything you wish, but I am no liar."

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie had meant it metaphorically, but it's far too late for that distinction when her hand has been grabbed, pressed to the woman's abused flesh. "What do you call it, then," she asks with the sort of cool detachment that comes from seeing your hand in a toothed grip and knowing struggling away is worse; it will have it off or it won't. "When you allow others to see what they will in you for some gain to yourself, or to their detriment?

"Is it a fine and righteous feeling, Bai Saheba, to be so angry with one who assumed you a warrior-queen who was loved well and who cared for her people but knew them only as a noble might? Who has thus far attempted to grant you the same respects as she might a native royal-in-exile even whilst the whole of the world argued over whether or not you were a demon?"