[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

[unshut]

WHO: Everyone and anyone
WHAT: An abomination redecorates the Gallows.
WHEN: Early August
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Part One of FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE. Will include some violence, some general chaos, and some light murderin'.

There is a man in a worn traveling cloak. He is dark haired, with sharp features dominated by a dark horizontal scar near his hairline, and later someone will describe him as having been soft spoken when he asked for directions.

But something in the Gallows' dining hall, with its unreliable population for the midday meal, must catch under his skin; he's found his voice again by the time he steps up onto one of the benches.

"Is this all of you?"

Someone nearby tells him to get his boots off the furniture, so the man climbs higher onto the table and is louder the second time: "Is this really all you are? A few people in a tower on an island?"

Heads are coming up. As his voice rises, he produces an envelope from his pocket.

"Do you think this is funny? Playing at being something, and telling people you can make a difference to them? You were supposed to be helping, but you're all just sitting here! Don't touch me"—to someone encouraging him to get off the fucking table—"You were meant to be helping us. You promised you would, and I told her I believed you!"

Hands are reaching for him. No, really, get off the table. You can explain what's wrong once you're down; you're with friends— The man jerks his arm free, snarling, "Don't touch me! You're nothing!" A stronger hand finds him then and begins pulling him struggling down. With a wrenched cry of, "Livia!" the man slips from the table.

A column of fire pours upward out of him like molten heat from a crack in the earth. It bursts so high that it scorches a circle on the dining hall ceiling, and burns so suddenly hot that it sends those nearest to him recoiling backward as their clothes catch. The fire licks again in random directions, in chaotic fits and starts of light and heat, and the thing that rises up again in the mage's place isn't really a man at all.

The rage abomination will ravage its way through the dining hall and prodigious Gallows kitchens, then out into the courtyard beyond leaving considerable destruction in its wake until finally brought down by Leander. In the charred aftermath, the following can be recovered from among the mage's belongings: a leather corded bracelet with a green bead woven in it (too small for anything but the smallest wrist), a functioning phylactery, and a letter from "Riftwatch" which implies a history of correspondence and familiarly refers to the recipient by name, 'Felix.' An investigation of Riftwatch's files will reveal the log of having received a message from a similar Felix, No Lastname six months earlier. The message itself is nowhere to be found among the Gallows records.

The recovered letter assures Felix that all will be well, and includes instructions to wait in the woods above the crossroads of a small Wildervale village.

'Help will be on its way. Good luck, and safe travels.'

Comments

battle;

[libratus]

Ilias doesn't eat lunch with his staff. He does not typically feel threatened by meat pies, on the whole, nor think it appropriate to do so much magic in mixed company as might require one, and of course there's the fact that his staff has a human skull lashed to its top, which some people apparently find spoils their appetites.

In the future, he's resolved not to listen to those people.

At present, however, it's left him scrambling out of the way of an arc of flame with naught but his palms (misting white with flash-boiling frost) to defend him. Black robes hiss singed in his wake as he bumps back against a table near Marcus. There's a smell like steamed bologna, whose source Ilias elects not to consider further right now.

"If I freeze him, can you--" You know. A limp overhand gesture. Hit him with a rock.

He doesn't wait for an answer before lifting a hand again, pulling ice from the stone floor.

[luaithre]

"Aye."

It's a familiar enough maneuver, and he seems to know when best to strike as Ilias starts gathering his magics, the earth around the cracking and trembling as Marcus focuses, half-bowed in place with his staff held stiff to his side, bladed end pointed forward.

Ilias will then feel the weapon skate inches above his head as Marcus sharply arcs it around and connects the blunt end into the floor, and dust explodes into the air as the vague shapes of rocks, both summoned from the Fade and gleaming green as well as made up of the material that composes the earth beneath the dining hall.

These shapes follow the silvery-blue path of ice almost exactly, careening to crash into the twisted, fiery shape of the Abomination.