Fade Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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faderift2019-08-20 11:18 pm
faderifting) wrote in faderift2019-08-20 11:18 pm
MOD EVENT ↠ CREEPY CRAWLERS
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.
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.
he feels a disturbance in the force
It's not the sort of feeling one can articulate with words, but damn if this bony chatterbox isn't going to try.
a million crustaceans crying out with a loud voice and then, silence
Val looks about, trying to work out where the Skull is indicating. Down that-a-way. The corridor that he has just unearthed? Some other secret door, yet to be discovered?
"And I think you must have needed better pants, in your living years. Now, Wilmore's concepts, I am not opposed to. But his execution. Those flat, dull strokes of the brush. It smacks of a certain thick pedestrian style. Buchard argues that this was Wilmore's point, that to expose the art collector to this broadness, Wilmore was making a commentary within a commentary. But Buchard is a notorious kiss-ass and cannot be trusted. This way, was it? Ahead? Where you sensed this... tearing?"
Val steps forward into the hidden corridor, listening closely. No sound. Nothing at all. The floor is dry and sandy here, and the walls quite close together. He could turn his elbows out and touch both walls at once, should he want to.
no subject
Meaning up your butt, Val.
no subject
But as an effort was made, he sounds quite pleased all the same. Better to be debated inadequately than not debated at all, or debated by extreme stupidity. The Skull does not strike him as extremely stupid. Therefore, he is pleased.
He continues along the narrow passage. From somewhere up ahead, he can feel a chill underground wind carrying along the smell of Darktown. A bad smell, sewage and wet clay and rot. But it is familiar, and might explain some of the dread.
"Tell me," he says to the Skull, "do you smell?"
And then smell becomes the least important scent, because a quiet buzzing has started from somewhere ahead of them. It is the sound of three large wasps, each nearly as big as sparrow, zooming along the corridor. Fade-touched, of course.
Well, shit. Val swings his bag around to hold in front of his face as a shield. This swings the Skull about too, swishing it violently in the jar. One of the wasps collides with the glass, its thick stinger making a dull THUNK against the side as it stabs, mad and blind.
no subject
As hilarious as the Skull's response is, it fizzles out in comparison to the bird-sized fade-touched wasps. More accurately, it gets drowned out by the droning buzz they emit. How dare they ruin a perfectly good--
no subject
The wasp backs off, but only to regroup and attack again. This time it goes for Val. Or it would have, if he didn't swing his bag around bodily and whap it against the wall like a shuttlecock in a game of wall-tennis. The movement will jar the Skull in its--well, jar--but that's not on purpose.
no subject
After Val's bodily reproduction of up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Skull's orientation inside the jar is inverted, reversed, and gently rotating, but the conversation doesn't abate.