faderift | [OPEN]

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[OPEN]

WHO: Dick Dickerson and you
WHAT: Prompts built around a Research-led investigation of territory in the Planasene Forest as delegated by Dick. Additional OOC info here.
WHEN: Justinian
WHERE: Kirkwall, the Vinmark foothills
NOTES: Kirkwall prompts OTA, Vinmark prompts open to martial or research types likely to participate in Rift analysis and closure. CW dead bodies, a little bit of corpse mutilation/desecration.

KIRKWALL STABLES or INN

The idea was to work with others.

A lone horse clatters into the stables on another rider’s tail late one stormy night, host to a grey-faced Rifter soaked foamy and raw through to the saddle. Richard Dickerson trips in his sodden cloak on the dismount -- wrestles it off heavy into a heap on the ground as he sets to working wet straps and buckles off the still-panting horse, both of their breaths steaming in the damp. He favors his left hand, and has not said good evening or sorry or thank you to the rider he rode in after, singularly focused.

He’s been gone for a week and a half.

Afterwards he retreats to an inn, the ferryman long asleep. He’s stinking and wet, hauling an armload of saddlebags with the bulge of his satchel, the weight of his dirt and hay-sticky cloak slung over his shoulder.

There’s some debate with the innkeeper -- no room he says, over the steady drip of Dick’s bags between them.

Richard narrows his eyes, seethes in on himself, looks -- for an instant -- as if he might lunge --

VINMARK FOOTHILLS BOG (rift aftermath, 1 thread please)

With the rift fresh closed and the morning sun warming off the last dregs of (a previously quite sinister) fog, Richard is wading in black mud up to his waist towards a humanoid corpse mired face down in the muck. The figure is long dead -- cold as the ground he was interred in, with traces of bone showing here and there through rotten cloth.

Spattered dark with bogwater and demon ichor himself, Dick twists a dagger from the back of his belt as he approaches.

He has a hunch.

A scrape of his blade across the corpse’s left palm reveals nothing, but at the right: a fast-fading glimmer of acid green peeks through the decay.

VINMARK FOOTHILLS CAMP

Later, at camp, a pair of disembodied arms have been dissected from their respective corpses at the elbow, and lay drying out on a log in the sun. There’s a creek nearby to rinse off the mud and blood and bog and ichor -- a tent to change clothes in, for the modest.

Notes must be updated, strange, fast-decaying plant life sketched and mushrooms sampled.

Firewood needs to be cut and stacked for the pyres, makeshift as they are. The stink of rot lingers on the wind until the sun sinks and the pyres for two unknown Rifters are set alight. Anyone who wishes to say a few words is welcome. Dickerson does not, although he does stand by to watch them burn, the end of his joint touched discreetly to a stick he’s roasted at the fire’s edge when he thinks no one (who would care) is watching.

WILDCARD

[ trust fall ]

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"Oh, no," Bastien says, sliding up alongside Richard like they arrived together intentionally—which they did, in a sense. The sense where Bastien intentionally followed him.

Before he was here, he was frowning out a second-floor window at the rain, deciding on the most viable alternative to spending a sleepless night with the snores of Maccio Vasari (his very new and very drunk Antivan friend, whose fault it is he's not in his own bed) and whether any alternative was worth the storm. And there passed Monsieur Dickerson below, wet and mysterious, illuminated for an instant by a flash of lightning, like a sign.

This is not what he'd hoped the sign was pointing to. But he is glad to be here now, moderately damp but not at all stinking, to smile at the innkeeper with Dickerson and his seething in peripheral vision.

"We can find somewhere else, I suppose," he says, attention shifting. "Let me carry something."

Oh, no and Richard’s forward momentum shifts out from beneath him like a missed step. His head turns snaky over his shoulders and there is Bastien, recognition slow to puzzle away at the venom wicked up incandescent behind his eyes. He was managing this very well on his own. Clearly.

His confusion is palpable, and salted with reproach.

It’s also less disruptive than whatever else might have been about to occur. He looks down, he knits his brow, he pushes the dumpy, sopping weight of his saddlebags into Bastien’s arms. Gawky, disordered --

“There’s hardly anyone here,”

-- reluctant to let this go.

Edited (rrrr) 2021-06-19 00:23 (UTC)

"Maybe they are asleep," Bastien says, letting the weight of the bags bend him forward for a moment before he hoists them cheerfully over his shoulder. "Maybe Monsieur l'aubergiste hates money. Or he has already laundered the bedding for the season."

He smiles at the innkeeper as if this is a joke he is included in. Behind it, he considers steps beyond preventing Richard—who'd have thought?—from potentially making a scene. Considers Maccio Vasari, passed out and snoring in his suite.

"Come on. I know somewhere. And you cannot get much wetter."

Jone was tending to Loghain when a man falls from his saddle, and she scrambles to catch him. That it's Silas means her hold becomes gentler.

"Rest a bit, luv. I'll manage the horse."

The impact is unpleasant -- like catching a wet blanket full of bones, the likes of which struggle instinctively for a moment before recognition sets in and he sags against her. Not in relief so much as resignation, elbows out, limbs left loose in passive protest. She’ll have to set him on his feet.

“He needs healing.”

Jone does her best to get Silas to his feet, though it's an awkward process. Rain makes everything slick, and Jone is a creature relying principally on a sure hold to get her through life.

"Fuck the horse, mate, how're you?"

Soggy, exhausted, sore. After a beat spent brooding without an answer, Silas pushes his hair lank back off his brow and unhitches the clasp of his cloak one-handed, letting it fall dead behind him. It is ludicrously unfair that there should be a witness here that he knows.

“I’ll be fine,” he says, a steadying breath sucked in deep once he’s free of the weight. “I was testing something.”

Jone waits just a second too long before giving him space. If he says he's fine, he's fine. Probably.

She tends to the horse, looking it over for injuries. "What were you testing? How long a body can go without food? Maker, Si, but you look a mess."

“How long an anchor-bearer can go without his ilk,” is the answer, a little starchy for her assessment. Rude.

“A sound night’s sleep in the Gallows and I’ll be -- back to ‘normal.’” The break seems to be for him to reflect upon his use of the word at all. Considering.

He plants a hand flat to the horse’s flank before he stoops to collect his cloak, pushing him one step aside and sparing himself a kick to the head. The beast is rubbed raw under the saddle, here and there against the straps -- but Silas is already hissing his way through familiar spellwork, soothing blistered hide and sore bones.

“I take it I’ve missed the ferry.”

"We have," Jone says, sounding distinctly unimpressed. She doesn't imagine her scolding will matter much in the grand scheme of things. "I know a bloke lets me use his spare room in Lowtown. You can have yourself a rest before your next shite idea hits."

Okay, maybe she just couldn't stop herself.

“Given the gusto with which we’re flung into the far reaches of contested territory, it’s practical knowledge to have.” How long after capture before they chew off their own arms?

Not much longer than he was gone for, if the twinge that drains all the blood out of his face is any indication, cold sweat sprung up under the damp of the rain. Careful as he is with the cloak gathered over his arm, it’s clear in the shudder of his breath that picking it back up at all was a mistake. It is equally clear that he is not interested in debating the flaws in his methodology.

What were they talking about? Lodging.

“If you don’t mind the intrusion.”

She can't really argue with his intentions, just- "you could've gone with backup."

But it's clear her heart isn't truly in the scolding, for how she murmurs it, the sound nearly lost under rainfall. She offers him a shoulder to lean on as they make their way out of the stable.

"If I minded, I wouldn't've offered. Just say you're a cousin back in town and not some mage from another land, yeah? Generally goes over better with simple folk." She pats his back, attempting encouragement, comfort, something.

Rather than take the option of her offered shoulder, Silas makes use of any spare time to offload wet saddlebags and his satchel into her care. Seeing as she’s so keen to assist. A little grass snake slithers from the layers of his cloak to wind up his arm as he works, all but vanished beneath the turn of his collar by the time they’re out into the rain.

“So I shouldn’t announce to them upon entry that my ancestors bathed in pools of human blood filled with vipers,” he supposes, to clarify as they walk.

If he heard the first murmur, he pretends not to.

So she takes his bags. There are worse things. Yes, they're wet and slippery, but so's everything right now. They're going to spend the night camping out in a carpenter's basement; it's not as though they'll be living clean and glorious.

His admission gives her less pause than it should, and that's odd. Her first instinct is to think he's joking, but she just saw that bloody snake and what did he say about not being human? Some things are becoming a little clearer, bit by bit.

So she's out of her depth. When has that ever stopped her?

"D'you announce that sort of thing often? ...Leave an awful mess, that would."

A dozen paces away, where she is shored up on slightly more solid ground (which in this case translates to being only knee deep in sludge), the ozone crackle of spent magic is fading as Miriam lets fall the last drags of her barrier. The effort involved with closing the rift has left her splattered with the fetid smelling mud. However, despite all these things—the terrain, the general unpleasantness of dealing with any screeching demon from beyond the Veil, and of course the less than ideal company—she seems—

Well, no one would dare accuse Miriam Smythe of being in high spirits. But the dual invigoration of conducting magic and not being slashed to pieces by denizens of the Fade goes a long way to encourage her to appreciate the unique novelty of her current circumstances.

(She enjoys work; in circumstances such as these, it's very straightforward.)

There are worse things in the world than a little adventure. Take, for example, watching your companion wrestling a corpse out of a bog and take a knife to whatever remains of that corpse's shriveled person.

"Oh, Dickerson. Don't—"

That's gross, dude.

The stench is unforgettable, permeating, likely to cling in their hair and to their clothes. But Richard has already switched his grip from one wrist to the other, scraping with his knife and muttering ”Mister’ Dickerson,” down into his collar while he works.

At the first glimpse of a green glimmer, he stops.

Just for a moment.

Then he raises the hand in question to show her, the spike of his dagger levered casually through a cable of tissue under the arm that resists the full range of its extension.

"Look at this."

At a distance: it’s a dead man’s hand, the fingers mostly bone. The sun is out, the ghost of an anchor’s glow is fast fading. Flies are beginning to take an interest in the smell.

It's an arm skewered on a knife. What exactly is she meant to be looking at here?

—is the sentiment plain under the shadow of her blunt bangs, even from a distance. But let no one say Miriam Smythe isn't a good sport. She's certainly close enough with her twin to suggest that she must have some tolerance for the slime and stench of the world. Eventually, after a significant pause, Miriam picks her way along the more solid sections of loamy earth and mud to shorten the distance.

Once she is near enough to observe that much diminished glow in the element-embalmed hand:

"What about it?"

"A ring?"

Doki didn't close the rift. Doki had wanted to keep her pulsing hand in her armpit, but as this would have made it very difficult to axe down demons, she did not do that. But she also did not close the rift. Still: no one can say she is not useful. She did much axing.

She was on higher ground, the better place to be scraping mud off of her boots against a knobby tree. Now she stops this so that she can look at Dickersnake. But really, so she can look at his new hand, eagle-eyed. "If there is a ring, I am wanting to see it." Have it: same difference. "Mages, Rifters, you are not knowing anything about rings the way that I am knowing about rings."

“He might have been a Rifter.”

Richard says so in much the same tone as he might say don’t be an asshole, the hand lowered by a matter of degrees, reproach furrowed in over his brow. This man had a family, as evidenced by his ring. Dick has to put his knife away to twist it off a skeletal finger.

“Not that I expect allowing us to slough directly out of Rifts to our deaths in a mire to be an important consideration for the majority of you.”

He tucks the ring plainly into his pocket, and calls back to Yevkdokiya:

“Help me pull them onto dry land and you can keep what you find.”

It's hard to say under those blunt bangs. Maybe her brow furrows.

"Last I checked, we don't usually decide when and where rifts open. You included."

And she hasn't gone poking dead bodies with sharp points. But let's not get mired in the semantics of good manners here.

On her patch of slightly higher ground, Miriam turns her staff over so as to wedge the hammer end under her armpit. She extends the blunt side toward Richard as a hand hold, feet widened a little so that when she leans her weight back against the hammer, it might act as enough of a counterbalance to help suck both him and the corpse free. Yevkdokiya can wade hip deep into the bog to join him if she likes, but Miriam is keeping her shirt some reasonable level of clean, thank you.

Doki's grumbling gets swallowed up by the squelch of the bog as she abandons her boot scraping and takes a first few steps in. She will be wading in if there are rings to be had. She is not so proud and so selfless as to be doing this work for Riftwatch and only Riftwatch.

She is also not in it for the conversation. But this particular bit has caught her ear, and she cocks her head, muck already sucking at her ankles.

"Could we be doing this? The shards, I am hearing that they are allowing us to do things. Maybe we could be opening our own rifts over," something nice, her eyes narrow as she tries to decide what these people would like, one a Rifter, one not, "hot baths."

Everyone likes hot baths.

"Starting nicely, this is good for finding new friends, new allies. Good recruitment for Riftwatch when Riftwatch is always without people."

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[OPEN]

inn!

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hi & sorry.

stables.

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bog, but open to no-turn-order threadjacking since I might be slow;

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