faderift | There's a story in my veins, with scars on every page

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There's a story in my veins, with scars on every page

WHO: Ellie & OPEN
WHAT: Rifting in less-than-gracefully, a rogue explosion or two, & initial trouble accomplished
WHEN: Arrival and during the first week after.
WHERE: The Hinterlands, The Gallows
NOTES: So much swearing holy shit.

[Arrival.]

The worst part about lucid dreaming is when shit gets a little too real. Especially when it's not the usual kind of horrible. So when Ellie goes from another nightmare about things hunting her in an endless horrible sewer to being sucked into the water, hurtling down through the rain-soaked Seattle depths, she tries to tell herself that she can breathe underwater. She opens her mouth and tries, and the foul water fills her throat-

And she launches out, along with a gush of Seattle sewer water, hits a hillside and goes tumbling.

... and it's steep enough that she keeps going.

Ellie coughs, chokes, tries to scream, and unleashes a garbled stream of hacking, choking profanity.

Maybe you're the unlucky person on the trail she happens to literally bowl into (and possibly take out).

Or maybe you're the one who finds her screaming back into the face of a despair demon, soaked in foul-smelling sewer water, having just hurled a piece of rock shaped suspiciously like a revolver into its face.

She absolutely just called the demon a motherfucker.

[Gallows; Quarantine Times]

A bath, a few square meals and a bit of explanation later, Ellie seems far less... feral. She's dressed in local clothing, a tunic, pants and boots, and has stopped acting like a cat, roaming the stairways in the towers and popping up unexpectedly in places people didn't see her enter.

She shows up near the top of one of the towers, tucked into a window, looking down at the courtyard below.

"... so I heard there were actual griffons roosting up here. Is it true?"

[ooc; HMU if you want a custom starter!]

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Mhavos is an elf, barely more than five feet tall, with a self-serious expression on his face and several books under his arm. He stops when he is asked a question, nodding respectfully.

"Yes," he says, his accent nominally Orlesian, "I've heard they bite."

Ellie's seen a few elves by now, and they still seem otherwordly to her, painfully beautiful with huge eyes. She's used to looking up at people, but even she has a few inches on him. She's seen him before; the library is one of her favorite places to poke around, though she hasn't managed to bring herself to say hello yet.

She prefers to haunt the racks, struggling with sounding out the new runic alphabet on the spines of books.

At his answer, she automatically reaches up to rub at her left hand -- her ring and pinky fingers there are little more than stumps, shorn off at some point.

"You've heard?" she asks, lifting a scarred eyebrow. "Or is it from experience?"

"I've heard," Mhavos says dryly. What he sees-- the missing fingers, and is that a hint of shyness or distaste?-- he studiously memorizes, while doing his best not to react at all. There's nothing to be gained in it.

"I prefer to avoid... animals." The last word said with the tilt of euphemism.

Ellie carefully watches where his attention goes, watches the lack of reaction. Scars and missing fingers are far more common here, so it doesn't tell her much, but the way he answers makes her curious.

She lifts both eyebrows, the edge of her mouth catching, twisting. Could be a smile, could be a grimace. Guarded, but not unfriendly. She doesn't seem afraid of him, just uniformly wary, like someone used to being cornered.

"In general, or do some of them make the cut?"

She is a human with a dwarven accent. Mhavos guesses she is a rifter.

"Despite what you may have heard of my alleged kin and their interest in nature," Mhavos says, just as dry as before, "I have lived only in cities, and feral cats and rats to not make good representatives of the animal kingdom."

Ellie's brow furrows -- she stepped in something, but she's not exactly sure what, not yet, but.

"I haven't. Heard anything, I mean. But you're telling me you live in a tower with griffons at the top and you're not even a little curious?"

She swings her legs forward, so they both hang inside, and leans forward to frown at him.

"Have you seen them at all?"

Edited 2021-04-18 18:34 (UTC)

"I'm not particularly curious what sort of meal I would make for them, no." Mhavos says, eyes lingering toward the window. "I am also not eager to find myself in the presence of dragon, drake, or dracolisk."

"That's fair," Ell concedes, following his gaze out towards the window, glancing past her shoulder, as if they might see something flying past. No such luck.

"But if the griffons actually ate people, they wouldn't have them in the tower." Ellie pauses a second, considering, and then gives Mhavos a searching glance. She is new to this world, these gallows. Demons and dragons exist.

"... I mean. I figure. Or if they do, they just feed them the assholes."

The bluntness of her humor surprises the shadow of a laugh out of him, more seen than heard. "I appreciate your assumption that I am in any way being rational about this. No, Griffon's aren't man-eaters, but as you may have noticed, I am very small."

And it is good to be thought meek.

Even if it's not a full-on laugh, it's a start, and Ellie gives him a quick, sharp little smile back, her eyes softening.

"Maybe if you do run across one it'll decide it's not worth it to mess with you."

"Please." Slowly, he slowly spreads his free arm, careful to keep the books balanced in his other, to gesture to the whole of himself. "I am meal-sized."

It's a very dry joke, but that's his style, to cautiously and carefully feel out the hollowed shape of friendship.

Ellie snorts aloud before she can stop herself, her eyes gleaming with the laughter she's holding back. It feels good. Feels like the first shot of normalcy she's had in a while.

"Depends on how big the griffon is," she quips back, sliding off the ledge of the window, and holding out her hand in an offer.

"Want some help with carrying those?"

He nods his head in a small, thankful dip, before handing some of the books over. They are mostly philosophical treatises with similarly convoluted titles. "Thank you. Am I correct-- I have seen you about the library before?"

Ellie takes them easily, balancing them against her chest, curiously looking down at the titles. They're far too complicated for her to puzzle out yet, even if she's memorized most of the runes, and she pulls a face at his question, taking a step and making to follow him.

Griffons can always come later, it's not like she's going anywhere until her quarantine is over.

"Yeah, probably," she concedes, without a trace of embarrassment about being caught lurking. "Not that I can read anything yet. Totally different alphabet out here."

She says it with the frustration of someone who would read quite a bit, were she able.

Mhavos nods, taking this in. "But you were, at one point, literate? I ask because we have literacy books at our disposal."

And because literacy is rare, though from earlier conversations with a different Rifter, he is hesitant to bring that up all at once. She'd seemed surprised, and Mhavos dislikes characterizing Thedas as backward.

"Literate in English, yeah." Ellie heaves a sigh -- but then nods, this time eagerly. Books, and especially a library's worth of them, mean she'll be able to figure out almost anything she needs to. She's been spoiled utterly by New Amsterdam, but the library here is a huge leg up from her own world.

"You think I could borrow a few of those?" she asks, perhaps giving away that's also seen him in the library, poring over the pages and keeping an unobtrusive eye on things.

"Of course," Mhavos says, wondering what 'English' is. "We have a limited supply, but I'll make sure you're given one. You needn't return it; they were donated by a noblewoman who... never had cause for their use. The intended audience is, of course, children."

Surely she can put the implications of those facts together herself.

Ellie can, and she does put them together, by the look of somber understanding that crosses her face. She nods once, acknowledging things, used to tragedies.

"Well- I'll take good care of it. Thanks."

And then-

"I'm Ellie."

He respects that, an automatic understanding uninterested in gossip. "She wanted them to be used, and so that is my only request."

He makes a few more light-footed steps down the tower's winding corridors. "Mhavos Dalat. A pleasure, Ellie."

"You too."

Ellie nods back, glances down again at the books in her arms, the titles she can't make out, and tilts her head again to one side.

"So where're you taking these? They for you, or some... commander or something?"

"I've work in the libraries," he says softly. And then, with something approaching real emotion (awkwardness), he murmurs, "I was reading these on... a break."

Tilting her head back at Mhavos, she lifts both eyebrows, surprised that he'd be embarrassed about it.

It kinda endears her to him.

"Hell, once I get back up to speed I'll probably be reading everything I can get my hands on, too. You've got a whole library here." There's no mistaking the wonder in her voice; it's clearly a privilege, from her perspective.

"What're these about?"

He can appreciate that. While not knowing the Ellie's past, there are plenty of places in the world without libraries, and plenty of people whose minds wish to extend further. In that regard, Mhavos is very lucky for his past.

To answer her question, Mhavos mumbles the word in Orlesian before remembering how to pronounce the Trade equivalent aloud. "Epistemology." His accent is still rather thick on this one and only word. "The philosophy of knowledge. What we know, and how we know it. Rather boring stuff, I'm sure."

Just... not to him.

Good thing he translates; between the thick Orlesian accent on that one word, and the way she doesn't recognize it immediately, Ellie honestly doesn't know whether it's a word with no translation, native to this land, or something that Joel would've called a "four-dollar word".

"Sounds like it," she admits, a little bluntly. "But I guess it depends on the writer. Like poems can really suck, but some stick with you?"

This scarred-up, freckled girl with missing fingers doesn't look like she might appreciate poetry, but everyone's got their secrets.

Mhavos rarely bothers himself much with appearances. People are often completely oblique to his experience, which is somewhat limited.

"Poetry is a recurring fascination," he admits. "I suppose you've not had much time to read Thedas' offerings, but our selection is growing."

Mostly thanks to him.

gallows.

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