faderift | MOD EVENT ↠ SATINALIA

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: It's Satinalia and no one dies.*
WHEN: Forward-dated to Firstfall 1
WHERE: The Gallows and Kirkwall
NOTES: *If you kill your character or an NPC please let us know so we can adjust the log description. Fire cw, use other cws for your tags as needed please! And participate in the gift meme if you want to be cool.

Named for Satina, the smaller of Thedas' two moons, Satinalia is a celebration of freedom, marked by wild celebration, pranks, the donning of costumes and masks—not the fine, delicate masks of Orlais, but animals and caricatures and playful horrors—and the exchange of gifts both sincere and satirical.

I. THE GALLOWS

In Riftwatch's fortress home, the dining hall—not the one recently wrecked by an abomination, the other one—and an adjoining garden courtyard have been decorated (by Benedict, thanks Benedict) in green, gold, and black, with enough torchlight to keep the room glowing once the sun goes down and a fire pit in the garden.

Dinner starts early, to leave ample time for festivities afterwards. Also to make sure everyone has time to eat, because there's a lot of food. Under Colin's direction, the banquet table hosts a spread representing many of the home countries of Riftwatch's members: coq au vin and tiny Orlesian cakes; Fereldan fish-and-egg pie with saffron and some potent cheeses on toasted bread; seafood with white wine sauce on noodles and fresh oranges from Antiva; spicy (very spicy) Rivaini curry and spiced rum cakes; a sampling of Nevarran soft cheeses, fruit, and dry-cured, thinly-sliced ham; and slightly spicy shrimp soup and chocolate-filled pastries from Tevinter. The centerpiece is an enormous and completely edible depiction of the Celebrant (aka the constellation Satinalis). It’s made of various breads—the man himself made of a lightly sweet bread rolled with cinnamon and chopped dates, his lyre golden with an egg wash, his clothes of rye, the stone he sits on of buckwheat. The constellation over him is drawn into the dough, the stars represented by clear rock sugar.

Every table is decorated with a ‘bouquet’ of delicate, edible marzipan roses, and in addition to the table wine and mead from Riftwatch's stores, there's a whole case of semi-decent Nevarran wine provided by Derrica and Athessa.

There's also a table set up to the side with plain, basic masks and a collection of paints and feathers to decorate them with, courtesy of Isaac, for anyone who doesn't have a costume or just enjoys arts and crafts. Some of the masks' interiors are subtly coated with invisible ink, slow-acting glue, fine glitter, or itching powder. Hahahahahaha.

Not long after most people have filtered in and found seats, the mostly-annual tradition of choosing the organization's own Satinalia Fool—usually arranged in advance, sorry, but there is a war on—is upheld, with little warning, by an apologetic Bastien. Volunteers (or those volunteered by their tablemates who don't do a good enough job demurring) are subjected to a few rounds of voting by applause. Some people applaud for their favorites, some for their least favorites, some for their crushes and some for comedy, and in the end Byerly Rutyer and Wysteria Poppell emerge as co-victors. That makes them co-rulers for the remainder of the evening. Or possibly the remainder of the week, by Antiva Rules.

Once the wining and dining are in their dying stages, the music starts. It's informal, at first, with Riftwatch's amenable musicians filtering over to their instruments as they finish their food (or bring it along with them), but once there's a critical mass, they coalesce into a tune that can be danced to. The next hour or so passes with a mixture of peasant reels and formal court dances—the latter mostly by request.

Eventually, after a break for a white druffalo gift exchange, the party disassembles into unstructured mingling. For anyone who wants to stick around, there's more alcohol, smoking in the garden, card and conversation games at the cleared tables, and a game of musical chairs with the rules altered so anyone left seatless has to take a drink and keep playing.

II. KIRKWALL

But across the harbor, the city is rowdy and reveling and will be all night, so making a break for the ferry instead won't be considered rude. The excitement in Lowtown spills out of the taverns and into the streets, with masked celebrants on their worst (but mostly harmless) behavior while street performers of all stripes provide entertainment for tips. The alienage has its own party—not because the gates are locked, but because the elves who aren't working generally don't consider throngs of drunk humans to be a good time—with a bonfire and shadowplays, and friendly outsiders might be allowed, especially if accompanied by an elf.

Hightown is quieter, but mainly because there's enough room in the mansions there for various parties—ranging from dignified, religion-tinged feasts that absolutely require an invitation to a word-of-mouth orgy at a particular mansion that only requires looking sexy and disease-free at the door—to be tucked away inside.

III. AFTER PARTY

Late in the evening, there's an outcry at the docks after an over-excited amateur fire-juggler lights fire to a partially-wooden warehouse full of wooden crates. By the time there's an organized effort to put out the blaze, it's roaring, threatening to leap to neighboring structures—including the warehouse and stables Riftwatch maintains on the docks—and visible from the Gallows. Any assistance from Riftwatch members in containing the fire will be noticed and appreciated by the locals, and just in case, it might also be wise for people to move the various horses, harts, nuggalopes, dogs, and any particularly stupid cats further away from the fire until it's under control. Which it will be, eventually, leaving a blackened ruin of the warehouse where it started but only singing one of the walls of Riftwatch's property.

However, for better or worse, someone took pity on the ferryman and sent him home at midnight rather than making him wait around all night, so everyone who'd intended to go back to the Gallows can either draw straws for who has to play ferryman to get people back to the island and then get the boat back to the docks, or else just pile into the stables and warehouse for an impromptu slumber party.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"He obviously didn't suffer much for stabbing Byerly," she mutters under her breath.

"I'll inform Yseult, and...fuck, I dunno. Maybe I'll just flat-out ask her why Leander hasn't been brought to heel."

It just doesn't make sense. Maybe it's just that they're desperate enough for competent recruits that they don't think they can afford to cut him loose. Or perhaps they're concerned that cutting him loose will drive him towards the Venatori, and then he'll be encouraged to harm more of their number. Athessa bangs her fist on the gunwale, but not hard enough to hurt.

"Fucking hell. Let's go to the warehouses by the docks. I know a place where we can smash shit and nobody'll care."

"Byerly probably didn't think it was worth really punishing," Colin says through clenched teeth. "Because it was Byerly. I'd thought maybe I didn't know everything about it, but no. Leander is really just a murderous shit."

The last word gets emphasized by him smacking the surface of the water below. It's not very satisfying.

"Warehouse. Warehouse sounds good."

Edited 2020-11-15 00:50 (UTC)

If stabbing Byerly isn't worth punishing, she thinks, then breaking my arm probably isn't either.

--

In the end, they don't actually get to smash anything at the warehouse, because one of its neighbors goes up in flames. Luckily, that's an active enough thing to do that it burns at least some of their mutual angry energy.

Colin's task is seeing to burn wounds and smoke inhalation. When it's all over, he's exhausted, but he's also calm again. His work always seems to set him right.

Afterward, he goes to find her, looking a bit glazy-eyed.

Athessa's task was more animal control than anything else. Moving horses, dogs, cats, her hart. By the end of it, she's covered in soot and dirt and sweat and there's hay in her hair, but the animals are safe and the fire is out. All's well that ends well.

When Colin tracks her down she's sitting on a crate outside the stables, wiping her face with a wet rag. The soot comes off, but the indigo she used to dye her face and hands for her costume doesn't.

"Well, that was exciting, eh?"

"Let's go home," he sighs. "I'll draw you a bath. You don't have to sleep there, but I'd like it if you did."

"What, you don't wanna sleep in a pile of hay next to a bunch of animals? Or in the stables?"

She hops (more like flops) off the crate and tosses the rag to lay where she just was. Of course she's going to stay at Colin's, are you kidding?

She'd been talking about a rooftop, before, so.

He doesn't say much on the way to the apartment. Once there, he fills the bathtub with cold water and heats it magically. He didn't get the worst of the soot and smoke, so he's just going to scrub down with a cloth and a bucket, which he sits down to do.

"Thank you," he says quietly after a while. "For waiting till we were on the ferry."

Athessa glances up from examining her dark blue fingertips to look towards Colin, her expression gently wry.

"It seemed like the best way to keep us both out of the dungeon. Now would be the worst time to get locked up, with the cold weather setting in."

"Why did he tell you?"

She sighs. "I dunno. To get me to leave him alone, maybe. I tried to give him a pomegranate for Satinalia and he refused to take it."

Colin resists flinging the cloth into the bucket just to have something to throw. He doesn't have the energy to mop up any splashes.

"Can't believe how petty he is. But he has to know you'd talk about it."

"Oh, I'm sure. He thinks he knows an awful lot about me, chief among them that I can't help but stick my nose in other people's business."

Athessa flicks some droplets of water off her fingertips, watching the ripples they cause when they hit the surface of the bathwater.

"And he thinks I fall in love with unattainable people on purpose, because it's safer."

"That's stupid," Colin says immediately, because he is a friend. "It's just a way of blaming you for those things to make you feel bad about yourself."

At the same time, that last accusation of Leander's is one he sort of relates to.

She doesn't want to acknowledge how spot-on, or nearly spot-on Leander was about many things. She scoffs and nods, expression wry.

"It also tells me that he thinks of people in terms of attainable and unattainable, which isn't how I think of people at all."

"Where romance goes, at least." He flips his hair over and dunks it in the bucket. When the drips from that quiet, he asks, "Why do you suppose he thinks that? Not-not based on you, based on him. What does it say about him, if he thinks that of someone?"

It's the kind of question that she'd expect to hear from Bastien, a prompt for her to exercise her training to decipher what she's observed. Even though Colin is just asking after her opinion, that professional switch is flipped, and Athessa sinks back into the tub while she mulls it over.

"It could be that he thinks I think of people like that, and that because I'm an elf, anyone other than an elf is aiming too high. Or maybe he thinks of people as...achievements, or objects to possess. I dunno."

"That sort of attitude towards elves isn't...I mean, by the time Circle mages are Leander's age, they've usually had that attitude beaten out. Mostly."

A moment of silence until he can finish soaping up his hair.

"Sometimes it's only the tendency to speak it out loud that's been beaten out," she says.

As loathe as she is to have wet hair, she doesn't much fancy hair that smells like a burning warehouse, either. Athessa takes a breath and dunks her head under the water and rinses as much as she can from her tresses before surfacing again to actually clean it.

"I don't think I know enough to guess what it says about him. But inflicting harm on someone to get back at someone else who's none the wiser doesn't speak to rational thinking, as far as I'm concerned."

MOD EVENT ↠ SATINALIA

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject