[OPEN] FRIGHTENING FESTIVITIES

[heirring]

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: Celebrating a totally 100% legit wedding.
WHEN: Summerday
WHERE: Edlingham Hall, the Vinmark Foothills
NOTES: cw: Spectral Violence and Ghostly Gore; if you don't want to deal with the spooky ghost adventure half of the evening, feel free to say your character went back to Kirkwall early rather than staying the night.

PARTY;

A few hours' journey from Kirkwall, the great old shape of the house known as Edlingham Hall rises up from out of the Vinmark foothills. In the decades (ages?) since it's abandonment, what must have once been a very imposing stone structure built in the mountain's shadow has given way to age and the elements. What remains is unequivocally a ruin, albeit a stunningly elaborate one. It's a place of columns and alcoves, gutted passages and weather worn stairs leading to the skeletal remains of old towers and chambers, with everything turned to varying shades of brown and green and as it's been grown over or into by the surrounding landscape. There's hardly a roof remaining to be found in the whole of the place.

Luckily, this particular party doesn't require one. In what might have once been the titular hall, a series of tables and benches (borrowed from the Gallows, thank you very much) have been set up around a stretch of cracked tiles which has been more or less cleared for dancing and everything has been lit amply by a collection of merrily burning braziers.

Party-goers will be treated to a host of entertainment, included but not limited to: at least one speech (thank you, Provost Stark), a half dozen toasts, a rather impressive spread of Orlesian-styled cuisine (no doubt prepared by someone devastated to be expected to do so under such rugged conditions), quite a bit of rather good wine, music, dancing, and a few more avant garde Rifter-influenced party games including a vaguely wyvern-shaped pinata and some heinous game called Snap-Dragon.

And if none of that sounds like a good time, then there are ruins to explore, discreet alcoves to investigate, and a campground pitched in the ruin's shadow where one might retire early from the party with only a stock level of scorn.

AT THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT;

An eerie mist begins to stream from the cracked tiles of the dance floor. Riftwatch does not count a fog mage among their midst. Was one perhaps hired? Is this a trick of some science? A peculiar feature of the weather in this region? Such murmurs begin to circulate as the mist continues to thicken, and rise, and sour to a sickly pale yellow. It clashes with the decorations. Its touch seems to wither the impossibly sumptuous meal, curdling cream fillings and souring fine meats.

And then the screaming starts.

In the stone frame of an upper window, see her: a woman, in a long pale gown, with a horrible wound around her neck. Her slippers peep over the sill. Blood begins to drip down her front as her mouth opens, and opens, and opens, until her jaw rests upon her bloody chest.

Guests seated at the table will feel some creature bumping against their legs--something big, and solid, and hot, and hairy. When they pull away in horror, they will find nothing at all beneath the table. But the growling will not stop, nor will the crunching of teeth on bone.

The twisted figure of a man rises from a pile of tumble-down stone. His limbs hang at loose and unnerving angles. One arm has been crushed and droops down too low, brushing at his warped knee. His face is a mask of pain, and his left eye bulges as if ready to burst. Pressure has thrust his circlet of gold low on his brow, cinching his balding head. He shuffles toward the party, reaching with his ruined hands for human flesh. Or perhaps a cup of wine.

A headless body comes running out from the rotting main keep. It is wearing armor but is otherwise without identity. From its stump of a neck sprays a great geyser of blood, spatting party-goers and the ground and the food and whatever else is in its way. Its graying hands are reaching, but without a head, its path is random and monstrous, trampling over anything and anyone without regard. Or it would, if it weren’t spectral.

The ghosts must be stopped. Find the source of the haunting or this marriage will be ruined.

Those not interested in tracking down the source of the haunting will soon discover that the fog which has wreathed Edlingham Hall has become quite impenetrable. Attempting to escape the grounds will result in being impossibly turned around and eventually spit any would-be escapee back into the ruin. Solving the mystery may be optional, but experiencing the haunting by the aforementioned ghosts (and any other thematically appropriately specters your heart might desire for the convenience of creeping out your characters) apparently isn't.

Comments

tony stark. ota.

[propulsion]

SPEECH;

Somewhere in the middle of the toasts, Tony Stark, dressed in a suit of deep crimson velvet, cleaned up nice and neat, aggressively strikes a fancy cheese knife against a crystal glass filled with something that is not the colour of wine, but is probably straight up liquor, and he starts to give a toast as well.

Or that's what you'd think it was, until it keeps going, and is in fact, a speech. It has been going for several minutes now.

"—which isn't to say that marriage is like being trapped in a house that's on fire," Tony is saying. "I'm just saying that between these two, the risk becomes exponentially higher, and that's when they're actually getting along."

His non-drink-wielding hand spreads. Am I right, folks? Anyway.

"Oh my god, I almost forgot that one time we filled the basement with noxious flammable gas 'cause of this bad reaction with the corrupted pyrophite? Do you remember?" is addressed fleetingly at the bride herself, before pivoting back to his rapt audience. "And immediately ventilating meant absolutely creating a fire hazard throughout that entire block of Hightown which is extremely not up to code, but at the same time, in not doing that, we'd be potentially creating a situation where the whole house? That we were in? Would explode catastrophically and kill us and everyone within a half mile radius," and he laughs, easy, "so good thing it was raining because we definitely had to ventilate anyway, and looking back, I'm like, that's so us."

A fond pause, and then a gesture;

"Circling back, I just want to put it out there that I saw this whole thing coming a mile away. There are not two people in Thedas who are more perfect for each other than Val de Foncé and my very good friend, esteemed colleague, and I want to say, like, little sister sort of dynamic, found family thing going on? Wysteria Poppell. We are all extremely fascinated by what's happening here, and wish you many years of marital bliss. Mazel tov."

He hefts his glass in their direction, and knocks it right back.

GOOD SPIRITS;

For 70% of the time, Tony is in good spirits, on account of the good spirits he is imbibing. He will dance, equal parts likely to invite a lady onto the floor as he is to accept an offer. He will swing at the piñata. He will play cornhole. He will sit and talk and be gregarious.

The other 30% kicks off when he wanders away from he festivities, into the ruins, holding his crystal glass of something or other. He considers the contents, the temptation to just down it, and then sniffs and with a casual flick of his wrist, splashes the contents out into some crumbled stone corner, and sets the glass down on the outstretched hand of a stone statue.

"Keep the change," he says, and moves out further into the ruins, not flinching at the sound of the glass slipping off its precarious perch and shattering on the tile.

BAD SPIRITS;

Tony is too drunk for this, but will absolutely try to haul off and punch the nearest ghost, sending himself into staggering chaos against the nearest table of fancy cakes and dessert wines.

bad spirits.

[poleaxed]

By this point, Jone is hungry for a fight, ready to go, ready to forget whatever frustration she's feeling in a brawl. Tony barreling past her and into a carefully balanced tower of tiny cakes takes the wind right from her sails, and a grin resurfaces on her face.

"Maker, but you don't mess about, do you?" She doesn't know who this man is, but decides she likes him purely because it's easier, in this moment, to do so than not. Standing between him and the approaching ghost, Jone squares up for a less desperate fight.

[propulsion]

Tony is slowly getting up from his half-sprawl over the cakes display, but does twist around enough to clock the person addressing him. "That's me," he mutters, pushing himself onto his feet and holding out his arms to check himself down the front. Various smatterings of buttercream and icing now decorate the red velvet.

Delicious. "No mess over here," he says, and then refocuses in time to see a second spectral entity, a woman with a narrow face and bloody gauges where the eyes should be. She drifts forwards, where she might hit the table, except she passes through it.

Scattered little cakes begin to moulder and clot at warp speed, but it's really just that eerie movement through the table where Tony's stupid brain had expected it to stop her short, and he startles backwards, back hitting Jone's back.

[poleaxed]

Jone has acted the bodyguard for drunkards before, though it's been a long fucking time, and the undead weren't involved. All told, her memory of the incident is smudged at best. Still, the basic idea is there: keep him safe, like.

"Can you fight?" Wait, better question, "ought I carry you out? Show up the groom, I could."

It would, of course, be a bridal carry.

[propulsion]

"You bet. I mean—"

He meant, he can fight, but does trip over the prospect of being whisked away from all of this in the arms of an Amazon. Tempting. "Lemme try something," and he opens up his hand and sends a wall of green energy bursting from the centre of his palm. It slams into the table, flips it completely with a clattering of cake and glass.

The ghost destabilises, reconstitutes, but goes careening away with an otherworldly hiss.

Tony goes, "Woo!" like he landed a goal. And then, "Bill me."

good spirits; 30%

[kantikoy]

Further into the ruins but before midnight he will find (1) set of green eyes with high eyeshine peering at him in the dark from where she sits on top of a ruined column before they blink and turn away. In the next moment, Adrasteia hops down from her perch.

"Did you have to leave the glass to shatter?" She asks, in the tone of someone who has given up on not using the rest of her funds set aside for this shindig to replace all the broken crystal.

[propulsion]

Tony, having stopped to watch her progress back down to his level, raises an eyebrow, pantomimes looking back without actually seeking out the sight of shattered glass in the dark before pivoting back.

"Yes," he says.

Like, just to see.

[kantikoy]

She snorts through her nose, amused despite herself.

"Alright." Supposing she set herself up for that one. Besides, it's not like she won't be using a lot of magic to clean this up tomorrow. "What do you think of the party?"

[propulsion]

Tony half-smiles at her reaction, genuinely pleased that she laughs and doesn't, like, double down on the bit, and tucks his hands into his pockets, posture all at ease even if he is barely holding something together. Sobriety, probably.

"Magical," he says. "Stunning. Is it your first?"

[kantikoy]

"It is." She nods, taking in a breath and folding her hands in front of her. It's hard to tell if he's joking or not; Adrasteia decides she'll take his compliment at face value instead of fretting about it. "Oddly enough I hadn't considered wedding planning to me in my forte before this day."

good spirits.

[obdurata]

They didn't come together, it's not as if Joselyn is his date or anything, but they are both attending this wedding and Tony is one of the people to whom she's the closest in Riftwatch, closer to Wysteria than she is even though they are now definitely on first name terms (officially) — the point is, it's perfectly natural that she should have spent most of the party within roughly arm's reach or at least spitting distance of Tony Stark.

Just sort of generally been aware of where he was. Mostly sort of adjacent to one another, in a normal way.

It is therefore also normal that when he wanders off further into the ruins, after a short time during which she thinks she has perhaps heard a glass break distantly, she wraps her shawl around herself (around the prettiest dress she owns, peach-colored, the only one she owns that for sure started life as a dress and was never, at any point, a mage's robe) and goes looking for him.

“This is a ways to go to avoid dancing,” she calls, instead of his name, “I promise not to even ask.”

[propulsion]

"You kidding? I love dancing."

Tony raises his voice just enough for her to find him. He considers a joke about trying to figure out where to take a leak, but that's credible enough she'd probably leave him alone, and god knows you don't try to make a break for somewhere to be alone to actually be alone. Not at a wedding.

"The electric slide, the." He has a smooth pebble in his hand, and he pitches it through a glassless window. "Madison." When she emerges in line of sight, he says, very normally, "Hey, Macarena," not sung, but spoken like a greeting, while bending to collect another little piece of crumbled—marble, by the looks of things.

He throws it upwards, catches it, tosses it over a partially collapsed wall.

[obdurata]

With one hand holding her shawl in place and the other balancing her as she picks her way to him in the ruin, Joselyn stops when she reaches line of sight, eye-contact, the whole nine yards. She regards him, without his glass and with his pebbles, and there are a lot of things that she could use this moment to say.

What she decides on is this,

“I've been wondering. Do you like that half of what you say is completely incomprehensible, does it bother you that I don't know anything you're referencing but it's too much your own language to stop, or am I bringing up something you haven't been thinking about at all.”

The last one seems unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. She thinks she'd think about it, in his place. She's thought about being in his place, in reverse, what would she say that no one else would understand? She and Miriam used to have their own secret language. She remembers most of it. That's not what it'd be, though, it'd be — Markham and the Circles and Andraste and her piety and the vigorous debates that had been had with her about the nature of that piety in a religion that rewards the sword, above all else.

[propulsion]

It's a pointed enough thing to say to coax Tony into turning around to look at her instead of continuing the fussy ten-year-old act with the rocks and whatnot, hands loose at his sides until he inspects his fingers. Dusts them off on his sleeves of ruin dust, thinking that over.

Roams nearer. "That," he says, eventually, "was a list of popular dances, or dance moves. The comedy is that not only would you not know what I'm talking about, but no one here knows how to Madison. I'm not even sure I know, anymore. I think it's kind of like a..."

Gentle clap, toe-toe-toe step, clap, toe-toe-toe step. It's meant to be a line dance, but as mentioned, Joselyn doesn't know that.

"There was a song about it. I like your dress."

[obdurata]

“Good, it's new.”

Someone should like it, it seemed like a horrifically indulgent expenditure when she was standing in the market, turning this way and that and letting the seamstress persuade her into the few simple adjustments that would make it fit her just so. It probably would have been fine without them,

it's still nice.

“If no one knows how to Madison, then you can say anything is doing it and now it is,” is a bit philosophical, although she is not making any moves to let go her shawl and dance with him. She hasn't been to a wedding that she can remember, maybe something when she was too small for it to have lingered past colours and sounds, doesn't remember the last time she danced and is sure it wasn't anywhere someone else could see her.

[propulsion]

No one's looking now, would be Tony's rejoinder. He does quit the little dancey approach, though, hands sinking into the pockets of his jacket.

"That's probably not gonna stop," he says. "The incomprehensible part, fair warning. Honestly, I got that a lot back home already, believe it or not. It's just that this place is so hysterically different to the place that I came from that sometimes if I take it too seriously, I might actually lose it. Then you got—"

A gesture, towards the festivities.

"—Bo-Peep over there, who doesn't even wanna go home. This is her home."

[obdurata]

Context is sufficient to infer who he means by Bo-Peep, though it still takes her a moment. It's hard to say precisely how she's reacting to his elaboration, first; less because Joselyn Smythe is such a fucking enigma than because she isn't sure, either, pushing past a kneejerk reaction that she has this uncomfortable sensation means something else entirely.

“A fine bit of pantomime, all this, if she did.” Want to leave, that is; who gets married not to enjoy the benefits of that marriage? Whatever they may specifically be. Specifically, they are certainly tied to the world in which one marries, that much she's comfortable being firm on.

[propulsion]

"Well."

Let's not be so hasty as to call it not a pantomime, but it is a very calculated means of mooring herself in this world. Tony is, currently, attempting to get a bead on Joselyn, and failing, even with all the practice he has in divining what Ellis might be thinking or feeling on any given day.

He hasn't called Wysteria silly names in a long ass time, and he doesn't really intent to start again. It's still affectionate, even if there's a tension to all this that breaks that particular rule where she can't hear. "I haven't figured out the rules yet," he says. Different rules. He's not talking about Wysteria. "Who gets to stay and go, I mean."

[obdurata]

“I don't think what anyone wants has much to do with that,” she says, folding her hands into the fabric of her shawl. “It only really seems to make a difference to what sort of life you have while you are here.”

Tying it, neatly, back onto Wysteria and her wedding. There was a shift to the set of her jaw, a few moments ago, and it doesn't relax.

[propulsion]

There's a lapse in the rhythm of the conversation, Tony quiet, some part of his brain wholly elsewhere in the way his focus lands on ruined wall. It's not complicated. He's drunk and the wedding is making him sad.

But he's never done super well at sadness. Or drunkenness, for that matter.

"Maybe," he says, like he didn't miss a beat. "But you care about the people you see every day. And that turns into caring about all the people you don't. Save the world stuff."

[obdurata]

Joselyn reflects on that. Reflects on why she's trying to make sense of this lumbering conversation, unclear on what exactly Tony is working out and whether or not anything she thinks she might say on it is at all useful. Probably not. But you do, after all, care about the people you see every day.

She thinks, briefly, of Kendrick.

“Not for everyone,” she says, eventually. “Not everyone does that.”

good spirits.

[rezni]

Where he encounters Nikolai, presumably walking his way back from the depths of the ruins.

If there was an expression of contemplation, something more serious and less suited to the joyous occasion, it's gone in an instant. And then, upon recognizing the figure approaching, breaks into a pleased smile.

"Ah, Provost Stark. I have been hoping our paths would cross."

Surely a promising start to conversation.

"My name is Nikolai Lantsov. I am newly arrived and, assuming that very nervous man in the Seneschal's office put through my paperwork, a new-made member of your division."

Huzzah.

[propulsion]

Huzzah.

Tony's hands are empty of a drink, which is what he was about to go remedy, but he is stopped in his tracks. Fortunately, a server is swanning by with a full tray of drinks, and Tony lifts a cup of fragrant wine up off it as they go.

"Rings a bell," he says, his other hand automatically questing out for the handshake he is anticipating must be coming to him, never mind that this is less this world's custom, and further never mind that Nikolai comes from wherever the hell. "Welcome to Riftwatch. It's not always this dire, sometimes we have fun around here too."

opening leigh bardugo's twitter to ask if her if they shake hands in ravka

[rezni]

"Something I'm very reassured by," Nikolai answers, recovering from the split second of quizzical assessment of extended hand before putting his own into it.

He has a firm handshake.

"I'm sure this isn't the ideal venue to discuss work," Nikolai says, in the tone of someone about to flirt with the idea of discussing work. "But once the happy festivities have passed, I am eager to speak with you as to some projects I think you might find beneficial."

The hovering server, tray bumping insistently at Nikolai's elbow, is waved off. No, he doesn't care for a cup of wine.

wildcard its my party i do what i want

[heirring]

One of the cake trays has been repurposed into a shield. Effective against ghostly apparitions? No. But it is quite effective against the various stones flung from ruin wall tops and glassware hurled the length of would-be dining rooms. At least Ellis isn't in attendance, Wysteria thinks distantly. Given his track record for having things lobbed at him by sullen spirits, the whole ruin might be coming down about their ears right now if he were.

"And surely we've enough problems without walls collapsing onto us."

Because yes, obviously she has been saying some of this aloud to Tony while they take shelter behind a half wall from the whirlwind of plates currently exploding against the other side of the stones. Wysteria is holding the tray over both their heads. Occassionally fragments of dishware rattle down onto it, bouncing free and spiraling off farther into the darkness beyond them.

"And while we are on the subject of complications, is there anything I ought to know about you and Miss Smythe?"