faderift | [OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

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.'

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Under different circumstances, she might derive some pleasure out of startling him so thoroughly. As it is, she tactfully makes no mention of it and instead picks the book from the top of his collection and brings it across her knee so she might flip through it as they speak.

"I suspect you'd might if you try again tomorrow. Today"—she tips her head back and forth, a wobbling so-so gesture—"Today I should think most haven't gotten this far yet."

Hints of illuminated edges and the occasional macabre illustration flicker by under her hands. She glances surreptitiously in his direction.

"But you're well? Otherwise."

Richard nods offhand at a still-rattled disconnect, reassurance distracted by the ask at all. Nearly one year on, people in Thedas are still more polite than the ones he’s accustomed to.

“I’ve engaged shades and demons on assignment but have so far avoided anything that spews flame.” He marks his place with a loose scrap of paper, and closes his book, no shame in the truth: “I kept my distance.”

It would be nice for him to ask the same in return; he chases her glance with one of his own. No obvious sign of injury.

“How are you feeling?”

"Me? Fit as the Ambassador's fiddle. I can't say that I strayed very close either." Why, there had been the width of a whole work tabletop between her and it as the abomination had forced its way through the Gallows kitchens and they'd all trembled in their hiding places.

(The trouble with this business, the work she is most familiar with, is that frequency does little to diminish the mortal fear of a mage turned monster.)

"But," —is such a strange, delicate thing. She pauses at the middle of the book on some page without illustration, considers its contents, and then changes her trajectory. "Tell me, Richard. Is there no similar thing in the place that you came from?"

Does the ambassador have a fiddle?

???

He hesitates, but only for the colloquialism.

“No.” A definitive no. “Magic users are commonplace but not inordinately susceptible to corruption. They study in universities.” They’re held in high regard. Richard stops himself short of singing their praises, but there’s an unease to the muddle of his brows as he considers her and where to go from there, with this book of fresh nightmares in hand.

“Warlocks sometimes cut deals with fiendish entities from the lower planes, but even they have something to gain from stability. Unless you’re referring strictly to monstrosities, in which case there are fire elementals, salamanders, hellhounds and the like.”

He slides his book neatly onto the top of the stack beside her, rift shard sickly green in the butt of his thumb.

(He does - have a fiddle.)

"'Something to gain,'" is an absent echo, humming over the shape of it.

"And the people who aren't mages," Fitcher asks, tipping her attention from the open book on her knee back to him. She is so very good at sounding idle with her broad good humor and sly fox smile, but it's been a very long day (promises to be longer yet) and they're both running a little thin in her sharp face. "What is it they do?"

“The same sorts of things they do here.”

A reasonable answer to a reasonable question.

“Without the ever-present dread of their colleagues and loved ones collapsing into fiery aberrations.” Dick is, as ever, a little too keen on prying in through her eyes, raking around for a read in the low light before he reaches -- cautiously -- to draw the open book from her grasp.

“I don’t know if I’ve seen the ambassador’s fiddle.” It could still be burning, for all he knows.

She surrenders the book to him. It's not as if she particularly cares for the contents.

"Oh, I trust it's yet in one piece. I can't imagine why anyone would take one to lunch. Although," she adds, with a tip of the head and a quirked brow. "I'll grant that the man in question is known for somewhat irregular taste."

And then she drops the pretense, shifting into an aside that might as well be coming from behind her hand as if she is an actor in a some cheap play like the ones they put on under awnings on Lowtown: "I'm just tired. But thank you."

Richard nods to her assurance, polite acceptance without much bother made for buy in.

“Of course.”

Rather than file this book back into its place, he turns it, and thumbs a few pages backwards to get a load of one of the illustrations Fitcher had flipped past. It features not snakes, but coils upon coils of entrails, and he juts his jaw down at the artful mess of it. Blood and shit. The illustrator was very thorough.

A deep-drawn breath sees his heart rate fully restored to normal. He folds the book shut, and adds it to the pile.

“Athessa has provided me with a stash of elfroot if you’re having trouble winding down.”

"Mm. Would you be lending or sharing?"

How committed is he to this whole macabre exercise? If she agrees, will she be forced to carry a stack of dreadful books somewhere in exchange?

(She has work to do and has little use for winding down. But cards must be played as they come to one's hand.)

This specific question gives him pause, as though he hadn’t considered that the offer could be conditional.

“Sharing.” ‘Lending’ would have strange implications, wouldn't it? He gives her a look, adjacent to his uncertainty over her intimate knowledge of goat doping, as he draws his stack of very normal non-fiction horror away from her to straighten it. It’s conservative, as stacks go -- a mismatched jumble of three or four volumes plated on a pair of larger tomes. He can probably carry it himself, and it appears he intends to.

But first, he reaches past his lapel to draw out a tobacco box.

“You can take it with you if you prefer.” He flips the case open and offers it out, helpfully. There are joints already rolled inside.

“Was today’s the first abomination you’ve seen?”

She raises her hand to refuse the produced case - no, that's quite all right. She can be companionable.

"No, it wasn't." Sometimes it is more interesting to tell the truth. "Come, let us find some better place to pass the time then. I'm an old woman and these days can only stand to sit on a table's edge for so long."

With a flick of rearranged skirts, Fitcher uncrosses her legs and slips from the aforementioned unappealing perch.

If she’s sure, Dick arches a brow, snaps the case shut in his hand, and tucks it away for transport. He collects his books, also -- the upper half balanced at center before he pulls the lot off the table, and braces it to his middle. Her admission regarding previous contact provokes little more than a pause, and a more thoughtful glance in aside.

“Should I drop these off and meet you somewhere?”

Or is he just following with his miniature research library?

"I'm confident we can find somewhere between two points," she assures him, carefully fetching the book highest on his stack and tucking it under her arm. She's helping.

Which is how the pair of them find themselves on some cramped little open air gallery overlooking some equally cramped little interior courtyard. There is no where to sit, so they're sitting on the ground with Richard's portable library placed wherever there is space. Say what you will about Tevinter architecture; the brutish stone railing is flat enough that it's perfectly comfortable to settle her back against.

She has her legs stretched out before her, one ankle hooked across the other, and her pull on the joint is deep - held for a moment as she passes it to him, and released with, "Athessa's a dear."

Richard is at her left, near hand tipped back to turn the joint in his fingers once it’s back on offer. He’s also seated, criss-cross applesauce, with his back to the railing and his ankles tucked up tidy under the long crook of his knees.

“She’s been very accommodating.”

His voice is rough with trace evidence of a coughing fit, but he takes this toke with more aplomb, drawing breath in deep, and matching her hold. They’ve been here for a few minutes now, he rationalizes, once he’s kicked oily smoke out slow through his teeth.

“Was your last encounter with an ‘abomination’ here at the Gallows?” Mister Casual Interest, and his library.

He passes the joint back.

"No. If this has happened before during the Inquisition's occupation, then it was before my time. Though now that you say it, it seems a prudent question to ask.

Maybe she'll consult with the Seneschal. There is likely some third party that can be made to take the blame for all of this should it seem likely for something to be uncovered. Anyone with a history of being adjacent to such things is as good a place as any to start searching out her scapegoat.

Accepting the joint, she takes another pull.

"It was in a little village not far from Hasmal. I went there for clerking work. To read letters, and write up legal documents and so on and so forth for anyone incapable of doing it. She—Well, it I suppose had been—had been run out into the hills long before I got there, but the ruin in the village leaves an impression. Rather more funerary record keeping and the executing of wills than I was anticipating."

The joint is passed back to him.

"And at night, you could hear it."

Tension is just starting to ebb its way out of him, poise concentrated in his core letting slack out into the lean grip of muscle through the back of his neck, unbuckling across his shoulders. It’s a gradual process, but definitively begun, after the relief in this latest puff, hold and release. He hits it again.

With the eventual pass comes the sense that he’d’ve found somewhere to smoke if she’d joined him or not.

“This isn't something most natives are eager to discuss, but the distinction between ‘she’ and ‘it’ is an interesting one.”

He is listening, curiosity acute in a glance.

“Is there no hope of exorcising the corruption once it’s taken hold?”

"As far as I'm aware, no. But you're asking this of a woman who makes her living reading peoples birthday cards to them."

She does something with her eyebrows and the tip of her head which roughly replicates the sentiment of of a shrug as she takes a puff from the joint. The smoke is held warm in her lungs, then expelled with a hiss of breath; it's been a long time since she last did this, and she had forgotten how dense it makes all her feel.

"But,"—the joint is remanded back to his custody—"Everything I have heard suggests no. That indeed the possessed mage is as much victim to the thing as anyone else might be."

“Bleak.”

He says so after a break taken to reflect, in lieu of bummer.

Even loose in his coils and present in the conversation, he’s isolated into himself in the gallery next to her, darkly-dressed and facing forward. The longer they smoke, the longer his silences, with this latest stretch punctuated by a sharp, wheezing cough after he holds onto smoke for a shade too long, and sends it drifting over the courtyard all in a skunky huff.

Pass, he passes, or tries to without dropping the thing, to free up his hands for a flask on his person.

“...Are you really retained to read birthday cards?” hoarse, while he recovers.

Edited 2020-08-19 16:21 (UTC)

Beside him in his isolation, she chuckles—a low, gravely sound—while accepting the trade.

"Just once. An older gentleman in Wildervale who'd had a daughter go off to Starkhaven with a nice lad who could broker wool sales. His granddaughter had sent him one of those press printed cards along with whatever else had been shipped back. There were other things he needed read and written up, of course. Accounts that needed looking over, and so on. But It was very sweet, so it sticks in the memory." Fitcher makes a gesture with the joint between her fingers, the loose looping movement of a writing hand. "She did her B's backwards."

With the habits of a woman who smokes a pipe and the good grace not to be intolerable about it, Fitcher takes a hit from the joint and exhales the smoke before tipping her head toward some undefined study of him there.

"What did you do before you came to Thedas?"

Whatever’s in the flask smells like it’d strip paint off a wall, but it’s enough to stifle the coughing fit; he tucks it away again with a sniff and a scrub of his sleeve after one watering eye, struggling to clear his sinuses.

“You have a knack for capturing vignettes of the human condition,” he tells her, once his sniffling has (mostly) subsided. It is impossible to tell how earnest of a compliment this is or what it could mean otherwise. He doesn’t seem to register that it’s strange enough to warrant any additional context, via eye contact or inflection or…

“I was an accountant. And an adventurer. The latter more by imperative than by design.” He mugs preemptive incredulity back over at her, sidelong and wry at his own expense. “Our world is also facing imminent destruction.”

"Ah," is such a knowing sound, even huffed out through smoke and with a chuckle and a rasping cough curling at either end of it. She passes the joint back.

"I knew there was a reason we got along so easily. A fellow dashing clerk at the end of the world." Her sidelong look is all put on ham before she breaks—a short laugh pressed against her knuckles.

All right. Be serious.

"What's meant to be doing yours in?"

Richard shows his teeth out in a knifish line when she laughs, self-derision escaping in a scoffed breath that he immediately pulls back in to sigh with.

“I have reason to believe it might be my employer.”

Weird to think about, right? He keeps with her sidelong look without matching it -- less ham for more dire speculation -- and leans to drag his heels out from under himself, resetting his legs out at a less organized jumble with joint in hand. He hasn’t hit it again yet, winding down his intake along with winding down everything else.

Smoke spools idle off the dull burn of the cherry once he’s resettled. Thinking.

“At the risk of sounding too courageous, I’m considering putting in my resignation.”

Her eyebrows rise toward her hairline as they are no doubt meant to. After a moment's contemplation, Fitcher leans a handful of degrees toward him to delicately pose that—

"I hate to be the one to tell you this, Richard. But I suspect you may have some trouble with the delivery."

“The longer I’m here, the more time I have to work up the nerve.” If that’s how any of this even works. He finally pinches the joint up for one last (deep) pull, and holds it back out for Fitcher to take, leaned as she is.

“Provided I remember any of it.”

The last of the joint warrants a considering look, but if Fitcher was weighing the prospect of refusing a last pull then it is put summarily put aside. Setting it there in the corner of her mouth— "Provided any of this is real, you mean."

Provided he and the things he has to go back to are, might be inconsiderate to say.

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