[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

[esquive]

For a moment, with his hands still on his edge of the table, he bristles—hissing ginger cat to big surly black dog. And that from somewhere in the courtyard beyond the hole in the wall that is a terrible snarling sound of fire that swallows the sharp point preparing to snap free of him.

Marcoulf reasserts his grip and motions to turn the table back onto its side so they might shove it flat across the span of the blown out wall. Clearly (petty) this time:

"Un, deux, trois."

[muckspout]

Edgard’s body loses its fury, but it reigns his eyes which remain locked on Marcoulf. He waits a beat and then turns to return to his side of the table.

Edgard doesn’t see it, but feels unbearable heat and instinct takes over. He leaps away from the flame and into Marcoulf shoving them both out of harm’s way. They hit something hard.

Edgard struggles to catch his breath.

[esquive]

His attention is on the gap in the wall- shoving the table into it, thoughts already straying backwards toward the other miscellaneous furniture scattered about the kitchen that they might stack on top of the—

And then it stops mattering as he's bashed sideways, clips something hard on the way down, and manages only by the grace of Andraste not to crack anything against the flagstones of the ash-strewn floor. For a split second, he is aware of being flat on his back with weight over him and little else. The smell of scorched wood. He puts a knee into the other man (wherever is convenient), but at least has the good grace not to snarl at him as he extricates himself.

There's a hot burn mark blasted the width of the table. Smoke peels up off of it in great twisting eddies.

(He still has both his eyebrows and all of his beard; he knows because he checks).

[muckspout]

Edgard regains his breath just in time to get kneed in his left leg by Marcoulf. He grunts as he observes the man standing and touching his face checking his facial hair.

"Yes, yes, pretty boy is still pretty." Edgard grumbles impatiently as he raises himself to sitting with his arm. "You're welcome, by the way."

Nothing appears to be injured on Edgard except for his pride. His fury smoulders behind his eyes in synchrony with the table.

"I guess the hole still needs covering?"

[esquive]

Maybe in some other circumstance, he might be more quick with a shrug and a mumbled bit of revisionist gratitude. Maybe the sharp treatment is just adrenaline and chalk-faced pale fear, and the knowledge that there is very little he is actually capable of doing in this moment.

Or maybe Marcoulf de Ricart is just a dick. Regardless, his answer for this companion is to simply move to tip the table up across the gap in the kitchen's rear wall, and then to fetch whatever loose articles of furniture - chairs and stools, whatever crates of things that aren't too heavy to lift, or barrels too full to roll - to pile on after it.

What difference does a barricade make to an abomination? Very little. But it is something, and maybe between this and whatever is happening out in the courtyard (bright flashes of magic bursting now, the crackle of heat and the burst of barrier spells), the terrible thing can at least be kept outdoors for long enough to be put down by more able hands than theirs.

[muckspout]

Edgard stays sitting as Marcoulf is busy completing the job without him. Usually it would bother him, to have not helped, to be discarded as useless, but he doesn't give two shits what this man thinks of him.

Perhaps he should've let him get scorched, he ponders as if he had a choice in the matter, as if it wasn't a reaction of instincts. This absolute ass, this utter slug, would deserve such a nasty death.

Edgard isn't thinking clearly (he's never thinking clearly), so he does a stupid thing and puts his foot out as Marcoulf is walking past and trips him. It's no abomination, but it'll do for now.

[esquive]

The work is expected - unquestioned, comes to him automatically; the extended foot to trip him is not, and so he does: fumbling forward with a three legged stool, catching it awkwardly on the edge of the piled makeshift barricade-in-progress, and it's only after that he thinks to look back. To catch sight of the line of the other man's leg and boot and--

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" is snapped so sharp, bewildered to the point of snapping. "Get off your ass! Help or leave!"

The stool is jammed into jammed into place; he scurries to fetch something else to add to the pile.

[muckspout]

Edgard jumps to his feet and starts adding whatever’s at arm's length to the now growing pile with a bit more ferocity than necessary.

“What’s wrong with me? What the fuck’s wrong with you? You ask me for help, nearly take me out with the table, and when I have the decency to make sure you don’t burn alive, you step on me. I don’t know if you hit your head, but we happen to be on the same side here.”

It makes sense, too much sense, that this man is simply an asshole in general, instead of one of circumstance. Edgard turns from Marcoulf and piles a table face down on the rubble.

[esquive]

"Then act like it," is his short snap back as he tosses another stool up into the mess of the makeshift barricade. And that, it seems, is the extent of Marcoulf's argument for the present - he is busy, and if the man insists on make a nuisance of himself, then he may enjoy the benefit of being ignored.

I sure didn't close my tag up there huh lol

[muckspout]

Although unaware, both men are in complete agreement. (The awareness of this would likely cause twin revulsion as well). Being ignored by Marcoulf is beneficial to them both.

Edgard piles another stool onto the pile, spits on the floor, and moves on his way.