[OPEN]

[nonvenomous]

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 ]

Comments

[revise]

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?"

[deceivingly]

"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."

[nonvenomous]

“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.”

[revise]

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.

[deceivingly]

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."