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."

Glimmer has likewise been in the Gallows for a couple of days, mostly getting settled, trying her best to adjust to this whole thing--she's been scarce outside of meal times as she focuses on doing her reading on the local world and occasionally popping into the training yard. Finally, though, she feels steady enough to begin exploring her new residence and it's on one of these explorations that she finds something. Or someone. When the question is asked, her heart stops for a moment--a feeling of shock, relief, impossibility. She turns her head slightly--maybe Ellie didn't recognize her because her shockingly pink and lilac hair is no longer. It's now a light, auburn brown, undertoned with darker reds. There's a faint, shocked sound of surprise and then in a sparkling rush of light Glimmer teleports right into the window next to Ellie.

Her instinct is to hug and not let go--but she knows Ellie's instinct is to stab and ask questions later. She settles for a jittery, relieved, confused, excited yell.

"ELLIE!"

There's a quality to his smile that's rueful, as much as it's genuine.

"I've never gone and checked," he admits, "but that's what I've heard."

He's never had reason to, really; but if he'd arrived in Thedas when he was her age, seeing griffons would've been a priority for him too.

After twenty-odd years spent alone, Aenor still finds time to ride out beyond Kirkwall by herself. Some of it is in hopes of getting to know her new dracolisk (Then'Harel, a recent replacement for poor Hellathen, sold some months ago on the way to Riftwatch) in the ways that truly matter; at some point, they'll go out together to complete work, and they'll need to be fully acquainted. Some of it, though, is the familiarity of solitude, comforting even now.

Why she's around is neither here nor there, however, when a rift cracks open nearly on top of her. Theni makes an awful keening noise, rearing back as something falls into him and nearly knocks Aenor out of her seat--but if it was so easy to unseat her, she would've died in a desert long ago. Her heels dig into her mount's sides, though once she's managed to rein him in again and get him a few paces away, she slides down from his back.

She's a tiny thing, dark-haired and arrayed in several layers of clothing--today in shades of crimson and mustard yellow, sand and dark brown--with swooping lines tattooed on her face. And as she nocks an arrow, aiming for the demon's hooded head, she shouts, "Your weapon, it is needed!"

Edited 2021-04-19 00:44 (UTC)

Noose appears first, snuffling around the bottom of the stairwell before giving a little huff boff of sound directed towards the pair of descending footsteps and lightly whistled tune following after.

"Aye, aye," breaks the tune, voice softening as Ellis' attention falls to the dog before clocking someone unfamiliar, a newcomer. There's a moment of assessment, over in a split second before he nods. "Don't mind him. He's hoping we're heading to the one of the courtyards."

Implying there's a disappointment of some nature in Noose's future.

But there's still a beat of slightly awkward silence before he offers, not unkindly, "Newly arrived?"

No place in Kirkwall is immune to the thick, muggy humidity that's blanketed the city, but it's a little better on the ramparts. The air is wet and heavy around them, promising a storm, and Derrica's hair is curling up where it's escaped the hold of her braid. She'd had her shawl pulled up over hair initially, but it's fallen back over her shoulders in short order, drapes along her shoulders and pools by her elbows where she's leaned them on the stone.

"The ferry will take you to land just...there," she's saying, pointing out over the water towards the Kirkwall docks for Ellie's benefit. "We have business sometimes, guarding the warehouses or helping to load or unload goods if the city asks it of us, but sometimes we're petitioned for odder things."

Odder than closing rips in the sky. Derrica clearly regards that as somewhere within the baseline of normalcy.

"One time we were asked to find the Viscount's cousin's lost nug."

Threaded | Flat

gallows.

gallows; wildcard-ish?

gallows

arrival.

consider: a wildcard