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[acreage]

WHO: Holden, you!
WHAT: A catch-all for the month(?)
WHEN: After Satinalia and onwards
WHERE: Kirkwall, Gallows
NOTES: There'll be post-murderhaus stuff in here, so there may be references to some of the horror movie occurrences!

Starters will be in the comments! I'm sorry, I'll write a real log one day.

Comments

ota insomnia bc i just can't stop

[acreage]

There will be a night, not long after he's technically allowed off bedrest, where he quietly leaves the room and heads outside. He's not headed for anywhere in particular, just walks until he finds a place he can sit in the open air with a good view of the sky.

The nightmare that night actually hadn't been about The Silver Lamp at all; it'd been one he knows better. A thousand solar systems burning to ash, an entire civilization crying out in its death throes, a semi-sentient technology that didn't understand where its creators had gone and barely noticed the human race it'd almost destroyed in its quest for answers.

What he does is sit, hands folded in his lap, and watches the stars, and idly wonders if any one of them might be the road home. It's possible to catch him off-guard, or maybe you don't; and he'll offer a crooked, wry smile, and ask,

"Couldn't sleep?"

[sulahnan]

Athessa doesn't answer his question with words, because just look at her. She's standing next to Holden, wearing a blanket like a wizened old king wears a robe. A joint hangs from her lips, gently smoldering away. And since their return from Ostwick, the dark circles under her eyes have deepened their hue to a very lovely purple.

She fwumphs down beside him and sighs out a fresh cloud of smoke. Offers him the joint.

"Was about to ask you the same thing."

[acreage]

There's a rueful tinge to his expression when he sees her because, yeah, stupid question. He moves a little to make some room for her, waves off her silent offer with one hand and drops it back to his lap with the other. Not unlike the last time they spoke; but the truth is, he gave up trying sleep aids, chemical means to relax, a long time ago.

Instead of answering, he looks up, says, "You have a clear view of the stars here. Not too much light to obscure the sky. Where I come from, the cities are so crowded and lit up, it's hard to see anything even at night."

It'd been one of the first shocks, after leaving Montana, to look up at the sky and find the Milky Way hidden from view.

[sulahnan]

"Really?" A dumb thing to ask, but it practically asks itself without Athessa's bidding. She looks up at the sky, her spooky elven eyes reflecting the stars and any available light that filters in. Like a cat strolling across the lawn at night, looking towards the sound of a sliding glass door opening.

"I don't think I could handle not seeing the stars at night."

[acreage]

So much about how elves are built reminds him of Belters, just smaller and better adapted to gravity. But the eyes take him back to being eight and watching a bobcat stalk across their property in the darkness, his hands on the cool glass of the window.

He shrugs.

"They don't know anything different. And most of them never get the chance to. The only ways to see the stars are to go somewhere more remote or get off-planet, and neither's an easy thing to do."

[sulahnan]

"Off-planet?" She echoes, but this isn't one of those Rifterisms that mean absolutely nothing to her. Athessa looks at him with wide eyes and dawning realization.

"You mean you go up there? Back where you come from, you can reach other planets?"

[acreage]

"You asked if I was a sailor," he says, looking sideways at her. "I've never sailed on an ocean. Our ship, the Rocinante, sails through space."

[sulahnan]

That's information worth scooching an inch or two closer to him. Scooch, scooch.

"How? Does the ship have sails? Have you touched a star? What do they look like up close?"

[acreage]

That entire reaction is enough to make him laugh, not unkindly.

"The ship has an engine." Christ, would she know what an engine is? Rockets isn't any better, and nuclear fusion is far and away worse. "Firepower," he tries, and sees how that lands. "And if I tried to touch a star, I'd be burned to a crisp, and the ship would go with me."

Trying to go further sunwards than Venus would pretty much be suicidal, even in the Roci. He opens his mouth to say something else, pauses, and then looks at her. It's so easy to forget the knowledge gap between here and his system, somehow.

"Did you know the sun is a star? The closest star in the universe."

[sulahnan]

Whether or not she knew the sun was a star doesn't get addressed, as she's too busy thinking about engines, firepower, stars that burn, and so on.

"The Qunari use some kind of firepower to sail their dreadnoughts," she muses, then snaps back to attention to ask: "If your ship runs on fire, and stars burn, can you use stars to make the engines go? How many people crew a star ship? How many other planets are there where you come from?"

Perhaps this is too many questions. It's definitely too many at once, which is a realization that has her looking a little embarrassed, reigning in her enthusiastic lean. "Sorry."

[acreage]

"Don't apologize. It's not that often, lately, that I'm answering questions."

His tone's all easy, self-deprecating, sincere. Since early after arrival, he'd consistently worn Riftwatch-offered gloves, but he hasn't replaced the pair he lost somewhere between the Pickney house and the murder inn. His shard glints in the darkness, and he worries at it idly with his other hand.

"You have the right idea, actually. Engines run on the same kind of physics as what powers stars." Pretty close, anyway. "How many people depends on the size of the vessel, and eight major planets in our solar system."

Mentioning dwarf planets would probably be confusing on a planet with actual dwarves, and he deliberately leaves out the worlds reachable through the Ring gates. 1,300 habitable systems, and they've barely scratched the surface. With as much as they still don't know, it's hard to say if they really should.

[sulahnan]

Athessa smiles, still self-conscious but reassured that she isn't being too annoying.

"People tend to get kinda annoyed with my questions around here," she explains. "Though I think that's because magic isn't really a popular subject to be questioned about."

The mage-Templar war is far too recent for anyone to feel like it's truly over; merely put on hold while there's a bigger threat. Once Corypheus is gone, who's to say that the Chantry won't just go right back to terrorizing mages?

"So... people live on other planets? On the moons?"

Thedas has two moons, don'tcha know.

[acreage]

"I'll have to keep that in mind, myself."

He's still working on educating himself about events just like the mage-Templar war, but he's heard about Circles from Amos not too recently, and. He isn't a fan.

"They all came from Earth, originally. Once humanity developed the technology for space travel, we colonized our moon and one of our nearest planets. When that tech got better," thanks Solomon Epstein, "we moved out even further. People live on Earth, Mars, and throughout the Belt — in space stations, asteroids, and on other planets' moons."

not sorry for how i am glacially spamming your post

[heorte]

"Guard duty," is the explanation Ellis offers. "I just traded off."

And he hadn't really expected to come across anyone outside since the weather turned. Apart from seeing a few from a distance, the higher arcs of the Gallows tended to be a good place to be alone with one's thoughts.

Not that he minds Holden.

"Does Sister Sara know you're out of bed?"

don't u dare be sorry

[acreage]

He smiles and says, as if conspiratorially, "Not if you don't tell her."

The cant of his head indicates Ellis should take a seat, if he's so inclined. Though if he wanted to get some shut-eye (or privacy) instead, Holden could hardly blame him.

[heorte]

There's clear amusement on his face as Ellis takes the offered seat, settling and slouching slightly. He'd put his hands in his pockets, and for a few minutes there's companionable silence.

Then—

"How's the..."

A tilt of the head, one hand emerging from pocket to tap at his own stomach.

[acreage]

A companionable silence, with the sounds of a planet: the whistle of the winds through ramparts, the ebb and flow of the waters around the island, the distant chirp of some night bird. They're well-positioned to hear it all, and that might have something to do with how he chose this spot.

He glances over to catch the silent end of the question, nods understanding.

"Looking less like a pincushion. Feeling less like one too, which I appreciate."

[heorte]

"I can imagine."

Though Ellis had somehow escaped largely unscathed. He has some conflicting feelings about that, but it's hard to feel anything too deeply about the randomness of the entire event. It hadn't been a battle. It had been knives in the dark.

"It's not always like that," Ellis says instead. "In case you were thinking the rest of us are stuck in situations like that every other week."

[acreage]

He can't help the slight laugh that he breathes out.

Then explains, "You're the second person to tell me that." Not that he can blame Ellis or Richard; he'd probably say the same thing, from the other side. "Though it is good to know that every innkeeper in Thedas doesn't keep a torture basement."

[heorte]

Second person. Ellis almost wants to ask who was the first, but it doesn't matter enough for him to pry. It's the truth. Whether or not it's a comfort, Ellis cannot say.

"You don't seem as shaken by it as I'd have expected."

Ellis doesn't sound very surprised. Holden and Amos had appeared with a certain amount of confusion, but they seemed accustomed to some level of chaos.

Of course, there's a difference between chaos and serious injury. But still.

[acreage]

"Oh," he breathes out, "I'd say I'm probably as shaken as anyone else."

His tone is self-deprecating, eyebrows raising briefly. This isn't a question of playing it cool, some sense of machismo.

"But," added, looking sideways at Ellis, "there's a time and place for it."

Which is something he thinks Ellis would understand. Granted: after the experience is, arguably, the time and place; but it won't help him get better any faster, or adapt to this place any better.

[heorte]

A small smile. Is Ellis shaken? Maybe he should be, but he finds he isn't.

"Yes, there is," he agrees, rather than broach the topic of his own reactions, or his opinions of how their companions had weathered the shock of that place.

"You've been through something similar, or worse?"

It's phrased as a question, but it isn't, not really. It's an assessment that Ellis doesn't believe is misplaced.

[acreage]

"I've seen my fair share."

He supposes it's easy enough to guess. Training and experience are the two pillars to managing a situation like that without panic, then or later.

"You seem pretty calm about it, yourself."

[heorte]

"I'm a Grey Warden. An old man in a house of corpses isn't such new territory."

In some ways, it had been relatively tame in comparison.

"We did a service by stumbling into that trap. Who knows how long he'd been operating there?"

Something bleak to think about. Maybe he should have been more strident about keeping that man alive or leaving the place intact. Were there people seeking lost family that would never have the opportunity to solicit answers? Was that man even capable of providing answers? Ellis sighs, sets the line of thought aside.

The man is dead and the structure burned. It's done.

[acreage]

"I've wondered about that."

He addresses the second point first, leaning backwards as he does.

"We found a few bodies, but that doesn't mean that's all he's done." A few, he thinks, and wonders briefly at the callousness of his own wording. As if killing that many people wouldn't have been bad enough. "Plenty of people must've stopped at that inn, just like we did. I doubt he treated them any better than he did us."

For his part, he's glad they burned that fucking place to the ground. No one else will go through that; and knowing that does, on some level, make the experience feel worth it.

He's quiet a long moment, before circling back around to the first.

"So for a Grey Warden, that's just a normal Tuesday?"