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Entry tags:
- ! player plot,
- bastien,
- benedict quintus artemaeus,
- byerly rutyer,
- caius porthmeus,
- derrica,
- edgard,
- ellis,
- fifi mariette,
- isaac,
- john silver,
- julius,
- kostos averesch,
- marcus rowntree,
- matthias,
- obeisance barrow,
- petrana de cedoux,
- teren von skraedder,
- { alais amphion },
- { athessa },
- { betrys miniver },
- { colin },
- { fitcher },
- { ilias fabria },
- { jenny lou davies },
- { laura kint },
- { leander },
- { lukas },
- { marcoulf de ricart },
- { poesia },
- { salvio pizzicagnolo },
- { sister sara sawbones },
- { sylvestre dumas },
- { vance digiorno }
[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'.
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.
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“Should I drop these off and meet you somewhere?”
Or is he just following with his miniature research library?
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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."
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“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.
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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."
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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?”
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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."
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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.
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"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?"
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“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.”
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"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?"
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“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.”
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"I hate to be the one to tell you this, Richard. But I suspect you may have some trouble with the delivery."
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“Provided I remember any of it.”
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Provided he and the things he has to go back to are, might be inconsiderate to say.
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“I don’t think it matters.”
Matter-of-fact. Sober is probably the wrong word.
“If I’m a demon I’ve decided I’d rather die swiftly than be painstakingly checked for extra nipples or thrown in a fire or however it is that you flush them out here.” He breathes in deep. “Then I’ll either go home or I won’t have to worry about it anymore. Until then, I have nothing to lose by helping your cause.”
He tilts, and crooks out another half a grin, just shy of finger guns, eyyy. Keepin’ it positive.
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She takes a last long pull from the dying end of the joint, cherry humming bright red between them until she turns, coughing out the itch of smoke, to smother the joint on the stone floor. Conversational still:
"I doubt that demon business will hold water unless the mages continue to make a fuss after this cause is resolved. Its resolution being the height of optimism, I'll admit." She sweeps away some ash or the pretense of it from her skirt. "In which case, should you still be present and in possession of some interest beyond saving the world, I might gently suggest dividing your fortunes from theirs to the best of your ability. The Chantry finds it convenient in this moment to align you with them, but I suspect it may think better of it when it comes time to settle differences more permanently."
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He watches her smother the stub of the joint out, and relaxes in earnest, moulded against the wall in a lazy, rawboned recline, with one arm hooked up over the railing’s edge. It doesn’t look comfortable, but it must be.
“I’ve only had dealings with Matthias,” he says, “and I doubt he’d be eager to maintain a working relationship outside of the current necessity.”
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"I'm speaking in slightly broader terms than Matthias, Richard. Or anyone else here for that matter." He looks, she thinks, rather like a scarecrow that's slipped from its post. "Rifters and mages. If the reports of this office are to be believed, the Chantry has slotted the both of you into the same square. I'm sure that seems very convenient right now—all these messy questions in one place, easily ignored so long as we're all moving in the same direction. But if the mages intend to go back to their rebellion once Tevinter is set to rights..."
Her mouth pulls, an able substitute for a shrug.
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He should really buckle down on learning Orlesian.
“Would you help me to saw through my wrist if I asked you to?”
Impossible to tell if he is serious, sobriety imposed hardline again until he loses held breath to a huffed laugh, and sighs to himself, nudging at stacked books with the side of his foot. They're too solid to tip over.
He would ask Ellis.
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No it's not, but it is very well tailored.
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He looks. It is very well-tailored.
"Do you use someone in Kirkwall?"
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She won't even ask for a favor in exchange, though she'd extorted one out of Messere Vorkosigan for the same.
"When you go home and tender your resignation, do you suppose you'll be obligated to save that world too?"
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Seriously.
He pulls a slender journal from beneath the flap of his bag, and scratches in a quick note to self with a chalk pencil. If she happens to peep the name to him while he’s already writing, well -- all the better.
“In the most literal sense of the word,” is his answer, meanwhile, on the subject of obligation.
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See? Look at how agreeable she is when the request is a reasonable one.
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His next look, less put on, holds on Fitcher seated in the gallery as a complete portrait for a beat. He was going to say something. He draws in an odd breath instead, caught shivery in the middle, and turns to flop the book shut and tuck it away.
“I owe you a favor,” he decides on his own, once he’s tipped his head back to the wall.
He should probably go.
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