MOD EVENT ↠ CREEPY CRAWLERS

[faderifting]

WHO: Everybody
WHAT: Weird shit comes to Kirkwall Riftwatch earns its keep
WHEN: August 20-22
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: OOC post! Random creature generator! CW: creepy crawly animals and the combating thereof.

I. KIRKWALL

The first Fade-touched creatures are small—they must be—because the first signs that something has gone wrong aren't swarms of oversized pests stomping through the streets, but a half-day of unexplained fires in Lowtown and Darktown, splotches of mysterious ice on the walls despite the heat, and the sudden simultaneous electrocution deaths of two dock workers standing knee-deep in water.

Rumors that mages must be to blame don't have an opportunity to get louder than whispers, fortunately, before the first pack of double-sized, fire spitting nugs is startled out of hiding and runs through the city, squeaking wildly and singeing walls.

By nightfall, it's become an invasion: rats, nugs, bats, deepstalkers, some oversized, some aggressive, all exhibiting unusual abilities. The City Guard—already overworked due to the traditional rash of crimes that often accompanies a heatwave combined with the caffeine-related unrest—does its best, but by morning the pests have reached Hightown and begun scorching curtains and leaving trails of poison slime through gardens and the Provisional Viscount sends a formal request for aid to the Gallows. It has a seal and everything.

II. DARKER THAN DARKTOWN

The old mines that Kirkwall was built around and on top of are only heavily populated near the surface. Beneath Darktown's shanties and encampments, the mining shafts narrow into passages too cramped to easily live in, twisting away from any natural sources of light and down into the black rock until not even dwarven and elven eyes can discern anything in the dark. At first, it seems cooler underground, as one would expect. But the air stagnates and the humidity rises and at times it seems that the deeper one gets, the hotter it is.

The tunnels aren't entirely deserted. Signs of activity litter the paths, along with skeletons—some animal, but also some human, dwarven, or elven—and detritus, discarded rags and broken pottery, and a whole collection of dolls made of bundled twigs. The smugglers and reclusive Darktown denizens who travel this deep are difficult to come across in person, and prone to attacking first if cornered by anyone too clean and official-looking, but now and then they can be seen disappearing around corners or heard whispering from side passages.

Navigating the mining shafts is fairly straightforward, most of the time. Widening passages and upward inclines are the way out; narrowing passages and downward inclines are the way in. If fire and glow stones fail, sending crystals cast a faint light that's enough to keep anyone from being completely blind in the depths. But there are still passages that turn back on themselves, downward tunnels boarded over with bridges that have begun to rot, tunnels half-flooded with Maker-knows-what, steep drops—and the occasional stampede of Fade-touched creatures, more and more frequent closer to the rift.

Close enough, the jet-black stone walls begin to reflect green light, and then the tunnels open up into a wide open space full of damp, briney cool air. And demons.

III. THE RIFT

It's just a rift: the usual split of churning green, so bright in the dark that it's nearly blinding, hanging over standing water in the center of a wide-open chamber, patrolled by the usual demons.

But once they're dispensed with, and the rift closed, the chamber is something more unusual. The standing water is salty—coming in from the sea, at least in part, never deeper than the knees (or waist, maybe, on a dwarf) but populated with a few small fish, and the stone around it is covered with deep mushroom, ghoul's beard, and a few sprigs of rare felandaris. Beneath the overgrowth, there are signs of architecture, dwarven columns and crumbling statues of dragons in the Tevinter style.

Beneath the water, the floor is carved with a design not unlike a glyph, and also not unlike the pattern of Kirkwall's streets. The Veil is so thin that a sneeze could have torn it open.

Comments

[staysail]

A lifetime (more or less) at sea has given Darras the skill of expert knot-tying--which means he accepts the mass of snares Athessa hands over, and gets right to work at them. The first one he does slow, making sure he's got the movements her hands had done fixed in his head. It's simple, so his second is quickly done--and his third, even quicker.

"Think of what comes after all this fiddly manual work," he says, helpfully. "That's how to stay motivated at it. Does this mean you're some sort of hunter?"

[sulahnan]

"When I have to be," she hedges, giving a half-shrug. She hasn't done much hunting in a long long while, but it's one of those things she learned early enough that it's hard to shake the muscle memory. "Kind of comes with the territory, I guess." Elf. Dalish. Not that the latter is as obvious as the former.

Athessa follows the ice, one snare ready while the others rest easily in the crook of her arm. She moves easily, not hesitant but not hurrying, casual, a spark of excitement buzzing in her chest. She loves this shit. Spooky magic, dangerous creatures, and a chance to impress someone. A Tailor-Made Athessa Adventure.

"Just make sure that any we wanna keep, we unlock the snare before putting them in the bag. Otherwise they'll suffocate."

[staysail]

"You say that, but I'd not have assumed it. Not until you got out the snares and started in on this. Anyway, it's more than I've got," he allows, generously. Undercuts it nearly immediately after: "Which is to say I've never hunted a day in my life. If it's fish you want, I can get you those. Shellfish, those little limpet buggers in the tide pools-- Y'know, there's something comforting, talking of the great open sea when we're more or less below ground, looking for fade-touched rats that breathe ice."

Not that Darras sounds particularly frightened. He's keeping up the conversational tone he's had all along, following at her casual pace. Or nearly. The ice is slick, right, and not exactly a favored terrain for him.

"I'll do that, with the snares. D'you think I'd have an easier time of walking if I took my boots off? 'Cos--"

And he points up ahead of them. The curve of their path is leading them to a shimmering cove. All ice.

[sulahnan]

"Um..." She looks down at her own feet, bare save for the stirrup of cloth that crosses her arches. The ice is cold. Very cold. She doesn't want to recommend walking on it barefoot any more than she wants to do it herself, even if there's better grip.

But what else can they do? "Probably, better traction n' all. Gonna be fucking cold, though. One time, Anders put ice down on the floors so I could slide around in socks. That was pretty fun, but I don't think we can slide around on this as...skillfully."

Skillfully, she says, when that idle sliding she did resulted in multiple falls onto the stone floor.

[staysail]

"Oh, aye? Only there's such a thing as ice skates, y'know. Blades that fit over shoes?"

This is a friendly ribbing. Darras looks down at his boots, then at her feet, then at the ice. He's kept his hair trimmed more closely since returning from the dead--helps to have someone to do it for you--which means that scratching at it, thoughtfully, doesn't have quite the same effect as it used to. He goes for a cheek scratch instead, considering his options.

"S'ppose that's not an option right now. If I do it, and get some weirdie disease of the foot," is how he starts off--thinking, also, of how good of traction his boots have got, they've seen him through a great deal, surely they can manage some ice--but he's saved from any of it by the loud and horrific screech that echoes down the way.

From behind them. Not down by the ice, but back the way they came. Darras' shoulders hunch. His hand goes for his knife, first. Might make more sense to go for the larger weapon, but then again, it's only a rat, maybe. Isn't it.

The scrabbling that follows that screech could be associated with a rodent of any size. But of course the one that comes around the corner--behind them, right--is the size of a dog.

So, there's that.

[sulahnan]

Athessa spins as soon as the screech pierces the air and eardrums alike, snare ready, and then she sees it.

Ho-ly shit. Her stunned expression stretches into a grin and she whoops.

"Now that's a GIANT RAT!" Not even waiting for a reaction from Darras, she kicks off the ice with only a minor loss of footing that luckily just propels her forward anyway. She sprints at the rat, starts to leap over it in the hopes of looping the snare around its neck on the way past, and mostly succeeds--

Except that the snare is made for maybe a hare-sized rat and not a dog-sized rat, so the snare locks around the rat's snout rather than it's neck, and the rat really isn't too happy about its new situation.

"Okay, small snag! Dog-sized snag! We're not gonna be able to fit any of these fuckers in a bag and the snares need adjusting!" Athessa shouts, hopping about to avoid the spreading ice coming not from the rat's mouth, which is locked shut, but from its nose.

[staysail]

"We're not still," Darras starts, but she's confirmed his worst guess, which is that she's still planning to trap, not just kill. Which he'd half-guessed to be the case when she'd closed the distance between herself and the snarling beast in a slip-run. "Don't be daft, we haven't got time to adjust anything--"

The rat snarls, pitchy and ferocious. Its eyes roll in its head, which is spade-shaped and studded at the snout with short bristled whiskers. Its jaws strain against the snare that Athessa has looped around it, creaking ominously--and it shuffles forward, trying to bowl her over with its weight. Ice crackles from its nose, spreading out like a carpet unfurling before it. The frost crackles across the grimy floor beneath her feet, spreading quickly.

[sulahnan]

The rat changes tactics from shuffling to running, its claws scrabbling at the ice for a comical second before it takes off towards the tunnel. The way Athessa sees it, she has two options: get dragged behind the rat, or go for a ride.

She pulls up whatever slack in the snare she has until she's slipping and sliding and nearly losing her footing at the same pace as the rat, and with an ungraceful leap she's on the rat's back, skittering past Darras.

"Nevermind!" She yells as the rat carries her off down the grimy tunnel. "The snares are fine!"

[staysail]

"That's your definition of the word fine?" Darras yells after her. Then he swears, loudly--grabs the snares he'd dropped--and takes off after her and her rat steed.

The fade-touched rat sets a better pace than he does. Turns out his boots aren't miserable on the ice. Well-soled, with traction good enough to keep him standing on the wet planking of a ship's deck or the long boards of a quay, he manages to follow, at least. But it's slow going, and at one point he slips and goes down hard on his knee--

And ahead of him, he can hear the frantic and furious screeching of the rat. It's a sound that echoes wildly in the tunnel bit they've found themselves in. Impossible to pinpoint except for the vaguest sense of ahead somewhere. Darras keeps after, rounding each corner like he might find the pair locked in their struggle--knife ready to stay or cut or whatever's needed--snares ready to be dropped so he might have a free hand--

Eventually, he rounds a corner and does find--well, a scene.

[sulahnan]

It is, luckily, a scene which Athessa is merely observing, and not a part of.

She stands next to her dog-sized rat, still snared and tugging at the rope, on a bit of miraculously ice-free rock at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel, made almost entirely of ice itself, opens up into what must be some long-forgotten or simply long-neglected section of smuggler's tunnels. A few walls have crumbled, the debris scattered and glittering with frost, and the other side of one such wall seems to lead elsewhere--probably into Darktown, if Athessa had to guess.

But despite the ice, and the wall, and the snared rat trying desperately to get away from her rather than attack her, the scene in question is further into the open space, where the other busted wall is, where apparently there's an inlet--or would it be an outlet?--to open water via the sewers.

There, several rats are clustering together, with more rats skittering forth to join their brethren, tails knotting with one another until what would otherwise be considered a swarm has become:

"It's a fade-touched rat king..."

[staysail]

It's by the grace of someone--the Maker, let's say--that Darras' slide on the ice doesn't carry him headlong into the active part of the scene. The active part of this scene is the seething mass of joined together fade-touched rat king, which is, in a word, horrifying. Darras slaps his hand against one wall before he goes any farther, coming up short.

The squeal of Athessa's muzzled rat is urgent and piercing, but it's got nothing on the mass ahead of them. That is noise: a dozen or so rat voices, raised in frantic emotion. Undefinable unless you speak rat.

"Oh, fuck this." Darras hops onto the same ice-free rock that Athessa has planted herself on, to save himself from scrambling to stay on his feet. "Where's a bloody grenade when you need it? Save us from diving in to take on that face-to-face."

The rat king is aware of their presence. Its seething--group seething, uncanny to behold, a ripple across rat-flesh--has an attentiveness to it, though it's neither attacked or broken free yet.

[sulahnan]

Unfortunately, her little bag of tricks doesn't have grenades in it.

"I don't suppose now's the time you're going to confide in me that you're secretly a mage and can just blast them with fire or something?" She's not going to hold her breath on that one.

Looking around, there doesn't even seem to be anything conveniently and immediately useful. No ballistas laying about, no spiky chandelier hanging directly over the seething mass, nothing. Just a bunch of huge rats, ice, debris, and two hapless fools.

What are they gonna do, just chop at them one by one?

"Maybe we can...I dunno, collapse another wall and aim it so it lands on them?"

[staysail]

"If I was secretly a mage, I wouldn't have waited this long t' reveal it." The time for that would have been when he came around the corner and found a tangled mass of writhing fade-touched rats, thanks.

Darras cranes his neck as he tries to weigh their options.

"That wall there looks a bit crumbly but I can't say I'm convinced that the two of us could bring it down without having some way of exploding it. Not that we're not each useful in our own ways, but I know my worth. Could have a try at kicking it down."

The hole that the rats are moving toward is rough, bricks that have worn and crumbled away, leaving exposed a place for escape. He's got to step around to get a better look at it--careful not to leave the bit of firm ground Athessa had found for them; careful not to get too close to the dog-sized rat she's still got hold of. Well.

"I mean," he says, "if it leaves... it's not a problem for us anymore. Is it."

[sulahnan]

"Except we were told to keep it from escaping Kirkwall," If she sounds disappointed to not have an exploitable loophole, it's because she is.

"Hey, isn't there some legend or another about luring rats with music?"