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?"

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From most others, the touch would have her skin prickling, but knowing the care that's behind it, the light grazing touches have Ellie settling down. She's fine, just bruised, and that's nothing.

She drinks in the look in Glimmer's eyes, the expressions she makes, the way she groans and messes with her hair and is so very real, and she can't help the smile that creeps in. The feeling of reality and relief. Ellie had quietly resigned herself to never seeing Glimmer again, and then everyone else, too.

Seeing a familiar face here means more than she can say.

"It looks really nice," she says, grinning.

"Ugh--shut up, all the color is gone--!" Glimmer's voice takes on an annoyed tone, but the sort that's more playful than really upset. Having someone she knows here, in front of her and real is doing wonders for settling her down. Grounding her. This feels a little more real, a little more survivable. She slumps a little, fingers pinching a lock of it.

"But if you think it's nice, I guess I can deal with it for now," she says with a wry grin.

"...And my magic is back! Or, you know, some of it? Told you I could teleport." Okay, never mind that it was her fault they fell out of the window in the first place, she's gonna look smug about it.

Ellie wriggles, fitting an elbow underneath herself to half sit up, returning the wry grin. Even if it's not the pink sparkles-

"Still suits you. Maybe you'll figure something out." Ellie reaches out, flicking a lock of it playfully back, her smile widening.

"I believed you, but holy shit, Glimmer- let's not do that again."

Glimmer looks upwards at Ellie's words and nods.

"Yeah I've done it before but--definitely don't want to do it here any more than I have to. And I am so sorry, I didn't expect to startle you out the window--I feel so bad about that, Ellie..." Glimmer winces, even though they're both safe and sound on solid ground for the moment.

"I was just excited to see a familiar face, that's all."

Ellie gives her a crooked little smile, then reaches out to punch her lightly in the arm, shaking her head.

"No harm done. Seeing you more than makes up for it, you know. But I could use someone to go with me to have a look at those griffons."

"They have griffons? I had no idea." Glimmer seems entirely enthused by the idea of griffons.

"Up in the tower?"

"That's what I heard."

Ellie goes bright, her smile wide; nobody else has been nearly as enthusiastic. In fact, plenty of people here seem to want nothing to do with the griffons at all, citing the possibility of being eaten.

Which, y'know. Ellie figures is probably an actual possibility. But she's willing to risk that.

"I guess some of the people here even use them as mounts. Like, they ride them. It sounds so fucking cool."

"That's so cool," Glimmer says with far too much enthusiasm. She pushes herself to her feet and offers a hand down to Ellie so she can help the other to her feet.

"Adora had a horse with wings back on Etheria, but I've never actually seen a griffon. We have to check it out!" Getting eaten is a small price to pay for seeing a cool animal up close, right?

Ellie reaches up to grasp Glimmer's hand, still bracing for the rush of emotion-sharing. It's both a relief and a loss when it doesn't come. She'd never thought she'd actually miss getting that touch of someone's heart brushing against hers.

She squeezes her hand, pulls back a little shakily once she's on her feet.

"Swiftwing? Or something? The talking one?" Ellie flashes a smile, then nods toward the tower entrance.

"Race you."

Glimmer stills for a moment when the rush of shared emotion and memory doesn't come. It's a shock, a strange sense of loss that she no longer has this connection with her friend.

"...The empathic bond isn't working," she murmurs distantly, then shakes her head.

"And yeah, Swiftwind, the talking one." Wait, a race!

"You're gonna lose--" And she takes off running.

Ellie's expression flickers -- but it's something to come back to. When they aren't caught up in the excitement seeing each other. When the race is done and they've seen some griffons. When something feels anything other than strange.

She missed Glimmer. She wants these few moments with her before they acknowledge the loss.

Instead she pulls a grin and makes for the tower. The whole way up will be several stories of spiraling staircases, making it much different from a normal race. More a test of endurance. Even Ellie's going to have trouble.

"You wish. See you at the top!"

Glimmer tackles the stairs two at a time at first--she's in decent enough shape but by the time she gets half-way up (okay probably earlier) her legs are protesting and she's gasping for breath. By the time she reaches the top, she's not running anymore and she's had to stop a few times to catch her breath.

"...I'm never racing up that many stairs again." She flops over onto the stone floor with a groan.

"Owwww..."

By the time they reach the top Ellie's wheezing, and puts a hand to the stone of the wall, even if she doesn't flop down on the floor next to her. It takes her a few breaths to be able to respond, and when she does it's with a breathless laugh.

"Fuuuuck, that was way more brutal than I thought."

She's so out of shape -- those months of soft living.

"If I could teleport like I'm supposed to be able to--I would have just--zapped up here. Poof. Instant win." Glimmer laughs from her space on the floor. Laughing when she's already winded just doubles her up even more and it takes a moment or two for her to finally get hold of her breath.

"Agh. Okay. I'm okay." She starts to push herself up to her feet. "Where are these griffons?"

"That'd be a cheap shot." Ellie blows a raspberry, but runs a hand back through her hair, gestures up at the heavy-looking wooden door.

"Guess through there. Dunno what to expect or anything, so let's go slow."

She reaches out to open the latch, glances back at Glimmer, and pulls the heavy door open. It smells like a mixture between horse and bird up here. Straw...

"Shit, this takes me back to the farm," Ellie mutters, and slips through the door, gesturing for Glimmer to follow her. They can already hear them above and they sound HUGE.

Glimmer wrinkles her nose and moves to follow into the open doorway, glancing around as she moves.

"Smells like the stables," she mutters quietly. "Mixed with... something else? Egh. I get why you'd keep griffons up here but cleaning this place must be a huge chore..."

"Chicken coop," Ellie says cheerfully, turning a grin on Glimmer, wondering if this is the first time she's smelled anything like it. She looks more the part of a princess now, even if Ellie's never really known her as anything other than her friend.

"Yeah, I'll just bet. Might as well throw everything out the windows. But that'd suck for the people down below."

"Maybe there's a chute. Like on a garderobe," Glimmer says thoughtfully. "And I've never been in a chicken coop so this is a new smell for me. Bleh..." She looks around the space and then gasps as she catches sight of white and brown plumage.

"Oh my gosh they're beautiful..." She takes a few steps closer, but stays a respectful distance from the edge of the... pens? Coops?

"Chicken coops are usually way smaller than this, like a pen out in the yard."

Ellie pauses, and her eyes go wide at the same time Glimmer's do- the setup accommodates way more griffons than she's prepared for, and the sight of it takes her breath away. No wonder they put these guys in the tower, holy shit.

"... damn," Ellie breathes, delighted, craning her neck back to look up and up into the attic of the tower. Looks like they even build nests, and. Wow.

"They're huge."

"I mean, they'd have to be. They're... I don't know, ten, twelve feet long..." Glimmer murmurs, pointing towards a particular specimen doing a rather large stretch. Then she turns her eyes away to look across others, the whole attic space rustling with feathers and fur.

"Their wings must be even wider than that. Can you imagine what that looks like in the open sky? Oh..." Glimmer's eyes shine with wonder.

"I've never seen anything like it."

Ellie follows Glimmer's pointing finger, and makes a noise under her breath, mumbling something that sounds like "oh, big stretch". They have identical looks of wonder on their faces, and Ellie can barely contain how much she wants to pet them.

Hell, she has eight more fingers, right?

"Dude, look at the saddles. Some people here actually ride them."

"They rideview up there. Like you were a bird or something." Glimmer is also restraining the urge to pet--mostly because she doesn't want to cause any trouble more than from any fear of losing fingers, though. She takes a step closer to peer at one of the nests.

"They're so expressive."

"Y'know birds are the last living relatives of dinosaurs?" Ellie murmurs, soft and excited as they get closer. While most of the griffons ignore them, one or two break from the nesting areas to approach, bright-eyed and feathers ruffling, possibly even hoping for treats.

Ellie feels a pang of regret that she didn't think to swipe anything for them, and reaches out to lay a hand on Glimmer's arm, letting the griffons come to them instead. She doesn't want to crowd them or anything, and her heart's beating hard.

If something does go terribly wrong, she knows that Glimmer won't hesitate to get them out.

"Looking at these guys I'd believe it." Her voice goes soft and incredibly sweet.

"Hey, buddy. You sure are pretty."

Edited 2021-05-03 05:25 (UTC)

Glimmer really doesn't want to ruin Ellie's moment, but she has to ask, quietly:

"What are dinosaurs?" One of those things from Earth, she guesses? They never got around to talking about it, she's pretty sure. She goes still as Ellie holds her back, though a hand does stretch out--fingers curled in--so that one of those fierce beaks can nudge against it in curiosity.

"Aren't you gorgeous?" She murmurs along with Ellie. Then, slowly, she runs a hand through the feathers on one of those massive heads. Giggles. She glances sidelong at Ellie, as if to say 'look! look, I'm petting one!' and then turns her attention back to the griffon.

"Oh, you are beautiful."

"Like dragons but without the wings or the fire-breath," Ellie explains with a grin. "They're all extinct but we've found bones and st-"

She's cut off by one of the griffons nosing into her shoulder, going for her pocket, dipping the tip of her beak in and poking around. Thankfully it's empty, nothing to find in there, though the griffon seems disgusted by the lack of anything on offer, and headbutts Ellie's side to demand grooming instead.

"Oh, right. Rude to talk about those when you're here," she mutters to the griffon, but can't contain the joy in her voice.

The way she smiles at Glimmer comes close only to the smile she got when they were looking at the projection of the planetarium. This is absolutely wonderful.

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