faderift | OPEN: this will be a better year

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: First Day
WHEN: Wintermarch 1 (forward-dated)
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: Scouts from both the Western Approach and Emprise du Lion are welcome (but not required) to have returned to Skyhold in time for this event.

There have been better First Day feasts, and less crowded ones, and cheerier ones. It isn't a good year for many to look back on, and this one isn't starting any better. Reports from both Eastern and Western Orlais are grim. Many in the Inquisition can't afford to take more than a few hours away from their work, if that.

But for those who can, the ambassador does her best. At lunchtime some tables, hot food, and finery are reserved for visiting nobility and wealthy pilgrims--cause for grumbling in some quarters, perhaps, but they're the people filling the Inquisition's coffers, and allowances must be made--but there's plenty of stew, bread, and ale for everyone, even with the soldiers and refugees who stay outside the fortress invited inside for the holiday. The recently repaired garden and its carefully tended plants aren't off limits, but anyone noisy and holding a drink will be stopped at the door; the battlements, with their potential for deadly falls, are blocked by Inquisition guards. But the courtyards brim with people, most of them happy despite the possibility that the world might end before another First Day arrives.

If the courtyards are too full of tipsy visitors for comfort, there's also the valley beyond the fortress, expansive, barren, and covered in snow. By the river the soldiers help the refugees make a bonfire larger than would ever be allowed inside Skyhold's walls, and some lend their shields to use as sleds down the embankments. A group of scouts start the most intense game of hide and seek Thedas has ever seen, with snowballs to the face for whoever is found first. In the camp, a refugee girl with her hand wrapped in a green scarf chases other children around the tents, shouting raaar, I'm from the rifts!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Welcome to his life, to be honest. But better play it off as a not so normal occurrence. "It totally counts, and you were cheating anyway. How did you learn to snowboard like that? Maybe we should make a ramp and see if you can do any tricks in the air." He might be leaning toward her a little. Just a little. She's warm and has warm hands and she's cool and he doesn't know a lot of cool women and she's warm.

"Snow what? I suppose that is a fine name for it." Snow-board. Well one made a board of ice and worked with that, more or less,, it could be done with a metal or wooden one like the shields had been for sleds. "Why would I want to build a ramp? That is terribly dangerous."

Foolishness meant for others- rather than her and he and the leaning he keeps doing. "I think you may have hit your head on something."

"We should get you to the beach and invent surfboards next." No reason she couldn't be good at that, too. "And making a ramp lets you get some air! Not enough that you get hurt if you know how to land. It's exciting. Learn to do some tricks and spins and stuff to impress people. It's a thing." Slowly inventing olympic winter sports was not what he was after, but hey!

"Blow was softened by snow. I'm fine. My head is just fine. Always is."

"We are a fair ways from the coast, Church." She steadies him as best she can, trying to wrap her mind around ramps and air tricks and how this can at all be like working on sand dunes. Perhaps with the right angle and curve of the ice but it would not glide near so neatly. "I do not need people impressed with me anymore than they already are. Such things are for fools that do not know their own merit."

"So, when it warms up some, we should have a vacation to the nearest, warmest beach. Get you in a bikini, get you surfing the waves. For fun, not for impressing people. That's just a bonus on the side."

"...a what?" Bikini? What?

"A what what? Which part is a what? A bikini? It's swimwear for women that's like in two pieces instead of one covering up piece. It's uh....it's... I dunno I guess it's like decorative underwear? Except with material specifically made to get wet and not get ruined."

"...smallclothes designed to be worn while swimming." That is- well it isn't terrible. "Most simply swim in the nude."

"Well I mean I wouldn't be opposed to that..."

"You certainly would not." She snorts a soft laugh.

OPEN: this will be a better year

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