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

[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?"