faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ A THOUSAND WRONGS

MOD PLOT ↠ A THOUSAND WRONGS

WHO: Everyone!
WHAT: Assisting with the aftermath of occupation
WHEN: August through Kingsway
WHERE: Field of Ghislain
NOTES: OOC post. Please use appropriate content warnings in your comment subject lines as needed.

The Fields of Ghislain are, as the name suggests, broad open plains, more flat than not, more grass than trees. There are famous orchards around Arlesans at the southern end, but they fade into grassland and farm land, wide fields of wheat and corn separating quiet farming villages and the occasional bustling market town, the even more occasional country estate.

High summer here has always meant long hot days, dusty roads, and preparations for the harvest. Now it also means recovery from the sudden end to the area's year-and-a-half of occupation by the forces of Corypheus. On first glance, the area appears to have escaped relatively unscathed. There are a few burnt villages here and there, a few new rifts, and the scarred valley where the Battle of Ghislain took place, but there are also crops growing strong in the fields and markets open for business, people going about their lives.

On closer inspection, there's more work to be done. The immediate threats are obvious: an unusual number of rifts and the general thinning of the Veil they signal, small bands of enemies—including bands of darkspawn with red lyrium growths—still marauding through the region, isolated patches of red lyrium to be destroyed and Blight to be contained.

Most places have at least one building that's been destroyed by fire or force, some practically essential—a grain store, an infirmary, a watch tower—some invaluable in other ways—a chantry, a mayor's office, a monument to heroic ancestors. Some places showed more resistance than others, and there whole neighborhoods or even entire villages have been gutted by fire and the ruins shoved over like block towers. Some survivors fled and now return to pick through the debris, while others remained, living in shanties in the ashes waiting for a chance to rebuild. Despite the crops ripening in the fields there are signs of malnutrition in many places as well, stories of crops confiscated to feed the invading troops and only meager rations returned, worse off even than those affected by shortages elsewhere in Orlais.

And it's not just the material that the enemy has taken or destroyed. Every decent-sized village has its missing, people who were arrested and taken away in wagons or simply vanished one day out of the blue. Where there was resistance there were executions to discourage it, and while the inhabitants have already taken down and buried the displayed bodies, there are a few places where there is no one left to do so, or where magic placed remains out of reach but always in sight.

There are opportunities too: the enemy lived and worked here for 18 months. They did their best to cover their tracks when they left, but it was a hasty and unexpected withdrawal, and there is a wealth of information to collect and work through. There are houses they occupied that haven't been entirely cleaned out, papers only half-burned in an abandoned office, a storeroom in an outpost basement they forgot to empty. And there are the people who have been forced to live and work alongside them all this time to be spoken with, the names they've learned and the conversations they've overheard, the training exercises held on their village greens, all to be teased out and taken down.

One abandoned operation commands particular attention: the site that Riftwatch—then the Inquisition—observed on the eve of the Battle might be a shrine to the Old God Dumat. At the time this was a newly-discovered ruin and little could be discerned for certain, but during their occupation the Venatori have undertaken massive excavations. They've uncovered not just a shrine but a significant temple complex, much of it underground. Exploration of the lowest levels will be handled by a particular team, but there is more to see and do besides. The warren of ruins and the remains of the camp outside them must be searched for clues as to the Venatori's purpose here, and a preliminary study made of the site's contents. There are also the slaves who did the back-breaking labor of digging out the complex and now need assistance. Many are locals, who simply need a ride back to their homes. Others the Venatori brought with them from Tevinter, and they will need to be interviewed and local communities persuaded to take them in.

It is an unimaginable amount of work, but Riftwatch isn't doing it alone. The Inquisition still has a large number of noncombatants, many of whom have been sent to help with outreach and rebuilding in particular. The Exalted March, too, has plenty of volunteers that aren't exactly fit for the front lines. There is enough ground to cover for everyone, but there will be times when Riftwatch agents will be working with—or at least alongside—those from the Inquisition and the Exalted March, and orders are clear that they are to maintain good working relations and not start any trouble.

In between all of this there will be long rides by horse or cart from this village to that one over dirt tracks with cicadas buzzing in the sun, sweltering afternoons broken up by sudden, drenching thunderstorms, warm evenings playing pétanque on the green with the locals over a pint of cider. There will be as many wary as grateful, but hopefully by the end of the summer Riftwatch can tip that balance a little bit.

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The dry grass is grown around the crown of the hill in a ragged tonsure, razoring up from the thin and rocky soil. Crouching here to observe the house below, Matthias has thought that maybe this is part of the trap. Plant terrible weaponized grass and let your enemies get cut to pieces.

There is no smoke coming from the chimney of the house. It's too hot for a fire indoors. There's a storm at the horizon, still far-off, and the burgeoning pressure of it is thicking the air, so every movement feels like pushing through wet wool. And there is no wind at all.

They killed the dog first, before anyone got here. The flies are thick on the wounds, glittering like eyes on its underbelly. The blood has already dried. There was no reason to kill the dog except to make a point, and maybe that was reason enough. There's a stake it the ground where they used to tie the dog, and a man is tied there now, hugging the stake backwards, his arms wrenched cruelly behind him. He has been praying, on and off, his voice high and thin. All Orlesian, but anyone would recognize the patter.

"We don't give them the treasure," Matthias says. He's pressed low to the crown of the hill, his chin in the dirt and his eyes hard. His staff is on the ground beside him, ready for what comes next. The man in the armor, strutting back and forth at the gate, like he's walking on a stage. He's got to be boiling in the steel. It would be nice, to boil him a little more. Turn the heat up and cook him. "Even if we had enough of it, we don't give it to them. Right?"

He looks around at the other two. Both Rifters. It can't matter. Their way is clear.

"Of course we don't give them the treasure. We give them anything, they figure out this works and do it again." More people get hurt. Once, Daisy would have said — Skye would have said to give them whatever they wanted to get those people safe. Daisy knows better. The big picture is more important.

The big picture is a sweltering day, almost too hot to stand the steel gauntlets on her forearms, but she's going to need them for what comes next. So she pulls the hair out of her face, off her neck, instead. As she ties it off, she says, "That guy's not alone. He's bait. He's gotta be."

Maybe she's expecting twenty-first century spy tactics out of a renaissance festival. Maybe not. But they can't be distracted by the shiny, obvious issue. As tempting as it is to swoop in and save the sputtering Orlesian ... He would be the only one saved. Assuming they made it out at all.

Richard has been quiet, scruffy chin parked just above dirt and poking grass in the crook of his elbow, listening to the hopeless warble of prayer in dead air more than he watches the source. Instead he’s watching Matthias, with only the occasional glance to spare down for the one bull on parade.

“We won’t give it to them,” he agrees, quietly, “but a negotiator would need to know where and what it was if they intended to make an earnest attempt at returning it.

“I could go down and approach from the front. As a distraction. They might bring others out, or allow me to see inside.”

Disconsolately, Matthias nods, and tucks his mouth against his hands, burrowing his chin into the dirt. Now he is looking at the captive from the tops of his eyes, the grass a fringe in the foreground.

"Pretend to take the bait." He puts his chin back, brooding done with for the moment. "And we wait here and see what happens, or better--one of us stays, the other goes round the back?"

He wants to volunteer himself for the moving part, not the watching. The watching already is making him itchy, and not just because of the dead grass poking at him. He lifts himself onto his elbows and holds a fist toward Daisy, waiting.

"Stone-shears-paper for it."

For a moment, she just stares at the extended fist. Then she reaches up and swipes it away.

"Okay, first of all, it's rock-paper-scissors, and second of all, when I run back-end, it's like ... There's an actual back-end. Not a wait-in-the-car back-end." She scoffs. "I'm not just hanging back here."

Another glance down at the house. At the men outside of it. She does some math. There are no good angles.

"Can you take that guy on your own?" The look she gives Richard doesn't expect much of him. But then, other people probably gave that same look to Coulson. Middle-aged white guys all have that hapless, mealy look to them. "We should both get in the back. One to be ready to fight whoever's in there, the other to secure whatever other hostages they've got. Assuming Dick can keep the distraction going."

The look Dick turns onto Daisy in aside is as cool as it is inscrutable, more open study than strategic consideration of what she’s suggesting. Find you a man who looks at you the way he’d look at a wound to see if it’s infected. He is oddly still. Oddly comfortable laid out flat in the dirt and poking grass, also.

“He’s fully armored,” he says. “If he decides to kill me, he will almost certainly be successful.”

But if he does that, he won’t get any treasure.

“Why don’t you come with me? Matthias has a staff. You and I look like civilians.”

Offended in the way that only an embarrassed teenager can be, Matthias scoffs.

"Because that matters." Word order. And what's a car? It's like she's saying cart and then not finishing the word. Stupid. But he's not going to let himself get bogged down, he's here to do this work, so moving on--

"You two round the front, me round the back. You hear out what Ser Pissface down there has got to say and I'll have a look on my own in the meantime. If they have got hostages, not one of us is going to be able to free 'em and also do the fighting on our own, right, so we'll have to regroup. Or maybe we do a signal and just go for it if we need to. Depending on what the hostages look like, 'cause it could be bad."

Daisy opens her mouth to agree, but gives Matthias another look. He's just so young. Big eyes and lanky, staff or no staff. Sending him off on his own feels wrong, in some ways. Even if that historical crap about kids growing up faster in ye olden days held true, this isn't ye olden days, and he acts like a kid. Carries himself like one.

He shouldn't be going off on his own to do spy-work.

"Don't do anything stupid," she tells Matthias flatly. "No hero moves. If it looks bad, back out. Or ... scream. Something." An unexpected quake might buy them at least a few moments of panic, if nothing else. Was this how May felt? This has to be how May felt all the time.

She shrugs her shoulders to dispel the awkward feeling that she is becoming the Mom Friend, and claps a hand on Dick's shoulder instead of engaging that anymore. "Come on. You want a bodyguard, you got one."

“If you do decide to go in, shout how many of them you see, and whether or not they have mages,” Richard advises, presumably so that he knows whether or not he should run away.

No, he is here to collaborate in earnest with Parchment and Shears.

“We’ll do the same. I’ll send my snake to find you once we’re clear.”

Daisy’s hand is on his shoulder, and Dick adds a mild, “Please don’t touch me,” as he turns to lead the way downhill at a stoop, crouching keeping his silhouette below the profile of their lookout point. Better to circle all the way around to approach from the road, as actual civilians might.

With consensus and orders, Matthias flips over and slides down from the crown of the hill some. It doesn't do anything to make him appear older. It does get him down the hill faster.

"Shouting," he agrees, over his shoulder, "yeah--"

This feels better. Action, something to do. When he's on his feet again, Matthias takes it at a jog, the dried-up hills sloping gently along his left. After a bit, he stops and scales to the top once more, crouching low when he gets to the top. From this new angle, he can see the back of the house. The stone wall is more ramshackle here, leaning in places--especially against the large cypress tree that provides patchy shade to the garden.

Matthias stays where he is, watching, holding his breath. When he hears no screams from the front, and he sees no other shiny armored sentries--he moves, dashing down the hill and crossing the blank space to huddle against the wall. Waits, again, listening.

Daisy pulls her hand back, but not before rolling her eyes a little at Richard. She hadn't done it to make him feel comfortable, admittedly. She hadn't called him 'Dick' with that in mind either, but he seemed surprisingly okay with it. Ruffling others' feathers is the only way to help her settle into feeling comfortable with ... this.

She grimaces as they straighten to approach the patrolling armored guard. Keeping her eyes from drifting sympathetically towards the captive tests her resolve. This is the part of undercover work that always throws her. How do you pretend to be fine when the things happening around you are totally not fine?

Still. The guard comes to a stop in front of them, all impassive steel, and Daisy nods her head to the captive.

"Nice, uh, art project you got going on there. You wanna talk about it?"

In much the same way Richard tolerates Dickification, he is utterly impassive to the state of the man staked up in the yard in plain sight of their approach, past a natural look aside to measure the state of him, and the canine corpse rotting close by. He doesn’t have to pretend to be fine. He is fine.

“We’re here to negotiate the return of these prisoners,” he chimes in, more politely from where he’s stopped a full step behind and beside Daisy’s approach. Clearly, she is the muscle. Flies buzz in sluggish circles around them, heavy with dogmeat.

“We understand you’ve demanded the return of a treasure.” All he’s missing is a doorbell to ring and a clipboard to reference, his gloved hands idle at his sides. “Is there a leader among you?”

The guard spits at his feet, but turns to lumber back to the house proper.

Richard waits for him to rove out of earshot to mutter, “That seemed uncalled for.”

Around the back, the voices Matthias hears are far off, too distant to make anything out. Is it Daisy he hears talking, or someone else? He holds his breath and listens all the same. Waits.

When he's marked enough silence, he twists around so he can peer just over the top of the tumbling wall, his eyes narrowed. He gets a look at an overgrown garden--not terribly so, the weeds are just beginning to thicken between once orderly rows of vegetables and flowers. If he remembered anything practical about farming, maybe he'd be able to count backwards and work out how long these hostages had been kept from their work.

Instead of farming, he's been honing other skills. And when a sweep of the garden reveals no Vints waiting for him, Matthias pushes himself to his feet and scales the wall. His boot catches on a loose stone, kicks it free, but the noise is hardly more than a quiet scuff. He dashes to an upturned wheelbarrow and crouches there--waits--and then dashes the rest of the way to the house. The stone was well-laid and well-calked. There are no gaps to peer between. He goes for the shutters of the window instead, listening before looking.

A murmur of voices inside. The squeak of a door opening, footsteps, and then another door, out to the front. Someone is coming for Richard and Daisy. Matthias moves during the tromping of feet, letting that noise bury any noise he might make. He presses his eye against that narrow sliver of space where the shutters meet. He misses the soft scuff of footsteps behind him.

"Can we deal with your wounded pride later?" Folding her arms in front of herself, she jerks her head towards the house. "The kid is in there."

Surely, if Dick Dickerson and Daisy Johnson can come to equal footing on anything, it's 'protect the children,' right? For all she seems to roll her eyes at Dick's general position, her proclamation of concern for Matthias suggests that she assumes he'd be equally worried.

Behind them, the captive goes silent. Noticing that they're here to bargain for him, putting it together slowly, he starts to try to scoot towards them. Pleading. Daisy can't bring herself to look at him because if she does, bleeding heart that she is, she knows she'll do it. That wouldn't help Matthias, alone inside with all the bad guys, at all.

Brow furrowed, Richard looks down to muddle at Daisy in (a very public) clinical assessment of her attitude in aside. His eyes are an awfully friendly blue, to be capable of such judgmental scrutiny. He ignores the scooting and pleading behind them entirely, not looking up again until the front door slams back open on its hinges in the next beat.

The figure that emerges is a taller, broader bloke in even heavier armor, carrying a pike. His helmet is spiked, pitted through with sight holes at apparent random, and fastened down snug over his face. He leaves the door hanging open behind him, and strides across the blood-matted lawn towards them with swift purpose.

Dick doesn’t break to sprint away, but he’s close enough that Daisy might detect him tensing against the impulse to do so.

“He’s coming to kill us.” He says so quietly, and with certainty, still and upright. Braced for ‘negotiation.’

They have about four seconds to decide.

The interior of the house is dim, and Matthias' eyes (or eye, really, there's only room for him to press one eye to that hairbreadth gap between the shutters) don't adjust easily after the blasting sun. He can make out shapes, and nothing more. With a quiet huff of irritation, Matthias pushes back from the wall and steps back, scanning along to see if there are any other points of entry, or other ways to get in.

And he backs up right into someone. A pair of mailed hands clamps down on Matthias' arms. His stomach drops. Shit.

"What's this, sneaking around?" says the Vint to whom those hands belong. "You want to get in so badly, I can let you in."

Shit, Matthias thinks, again, stupid. But at least his staff is in his hand. That will help--if he can get clear enough to not burn himself up in the process.

A subtle burning, of course. He still needs to get in to that house.

"Get the hostage." Daisy reaches out. Dick told her not to touch him. That doesn't matter now. Her palms plants his shoulder as she shoves him behind her. This isn't up for negotiation and strategizing; this is training emerging as instinct. "Get out of here. Now."

She doesn't think for a minute that Dick would stand up against the guy coming for them, but Daisy also doesn't have any armor of her own except for the strange-looking vambraces on her arms.

Raising them up, she projects some kind of shockwave that takes their armored opponent right off his feet. The armor resonates like a tuning fork, a bass thrum that continues rattling even after he's on the ground. Lingering vibration. The pike in his hand goes another few feet away from him, slipped from his grip.

She puts her body more firmly between Dick and the man tied to the post.

Dickerson staggers startled from the shove, a glimpse of resentment knotted up behind his jaw in the instant before he slithers through it to comply. Their orders did specifically encourage the safe return of civilians.

It takes him no time at all to produce a dagger once he’s knelt at the stake; he wedges it beneath bindings and splits the braid with a pair of practiced strokes, loosing the hostage to fall over to his side.

A child screams inside the house.

Electricity crackles purple across the yellowed yard in a wide, warning ring, arcing between fence posts, bursting flies. Dick drops his knife and strikes off away from the hostage, Daisy and the felled tinman alike at a scrambling sprint for cover.

"MAGE!"

With the storm still miles away, a bolt of lightning splits out through the home’s open door and erupts through the back of the mercenary on the ground. It splits upon impact, scorching blinding white out through the man’s breastplate to send tangled bolts after everything living and breathing in the vicinity.

Even Dick catches a whipcrack sizzle through his shoulder that snags him stiff off his feet. He drags himself the rest of the way up behind the privy housing he'd been running for on his belly.

Around the back of the house and in the wake of erupting chaos, the Vint holding Matthias swears, grabs rough at his arm--and Matthias twists the other direction and breaks free. He swings his staff around and slams the butt of it into the thin soil.

A gout of flame leaps savage across short distance between him and the Vint. When it reaches the man's boots it blooms. The steel doesn't take the flame, but it doesn't need to. Magic is what feeds it, keeps it lively enough to wash up the greaves, across the breastplate, the gorget, heating the metal and cooking the flesh as it goes.

The Vint falls back with a scream--Daisy had said to scream if he ran into trouble, right? Someone is screaming, at least--and Matthias spins around and goes tearing off around the house, backup for whatever chaos is raging up there.

The shout drops Daisy like a stone. Although she projects a sort of vibrational wave in front of her like a forcefield to deflect the threat, lightning has no mass to disintegrate. It works its way through, and catches her in the side. The potential energy involved is enough to hurl her backwards, just as she'd hurled the armored defender.

She grabs onto her ribs and pushes herself up as she hears the scream, though. There are more important than her own pain, her own seared flesh where kevlar fibers have become a part of her ribcage.

"Matthias," she exhales it, not quite as loud as she'd meant to as she staggers towards the farmhouse. "MATTHIAS!" A fire has started on the front porch, where the lightning caught rotted wood. It spreads steadily. Daisy pushes on towards it all the same, as if she has not even considered looping around to a back door.

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MOD PLOT ↠ A THOUSAND WRONGS

HOSTAGE NEGOTIATION - closed to Daisy, Richard; tw brief mention of animal violence

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