faderift | O1 ♚ I'M IN NEED OF AN ANSWER

The courtyard was something of a refuge for Ariadne. Surrounded by so many strange and different things, there was one constant for her: Plants responded to her gentle touch. Even if they were plants she didn't recognize, she still had a marvelous talent for making them grow. And as of late, the strangeness of Thedas had been getting to her. It was no wonder, then, that there was constantly dirt beneath her newly Human fingernails.

She was kneeling beside a bed of flowers that reminded her of Valerian violets when she heard a warning called from above her. Instinct kicked in long before thoughts of subterfuge.

For a slight, skinny girl who couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds, Ariadne was quick. Agile too. With what looked like almost no effort at all, she threw herself into a barrel roll, spiraling under a nearby tree. She didn't even need to look up to know where the lowest branch was and she grabbed hold of it, swinging her entire body up into a squat on top of it.

Only then did she look up, brushing the fringe of her hair out of her eyes to see the debris crash down where she'd been kneeling.

...well. After Ariadne's incredible acrobatic display, really, the impact of falling rubbish is actually pretty darn anticlimactic. It's just a little hardened mud, maybe a few ounces of tile, tumbling off dusty and brittle into empty air. When it lands on the ground, the condensed dirt mostly vaporizes on impact, disintegrating into a fine dust that turns the shiny green leaves of Ariadne's plants matte and slightly brown.

Maybe a couple leaves get bruised, and that's it. Of course, by the time the literal dust has settled, Marcel doesn't even have a little bit of attention invested in the vegetation. No, his eyes are fixed, instead, on the girl in the tree, tucked into her mighty crouch, the branch steady under her surefooted weight. Humans do not move like that, at least not in his world. It's the vampires, the werewolves, the occasional spelled witch. It's the wrongness that comes of improvement on the original design.

"Sorry about that."

He pitches his voice across the distance between the elevated concrete and the tree below, and he has a voice that carries well in the brisk air. By sorry, one should note that Marcel doesn't sound like he's about to slit his wrists about it, but his voice is warm, and that passes for sincerity in most circles. Marcel cocks his head, shading his eyes. "I take it you're all right. Ma'am."

She recognized his voice before she looked up to spy the gentleman that matched Marcel's self-description. He had a pleasant, handsome face. One that definitely stood out in the strangely monochromatic world of Thedas. But really, it was his eyes which drew her attention. They seemed kind. A little sad, maybe. But it was wrong to read too much into someone's face.

Ariadne relied more on scent to understand people.

Curiously, she grabbed a branch over her head and pulled herself up, climbing up in the direction of the rooftop.

"Lord Marcel?" she asked, her voice light and innocent, like a child's, in spite of her decidedly woman-shaped body.

"Marcel. Don't think I can justify that... honorific," he says, even though he had once rather loudly and unironically announced himself king, and went to war over the power that he thought that held. That was at least a few years ago, at this point. Marcel hasn't yet figured out who all the Kings of Thedas are, but the world is sufficiently feudal that he suspects they and their squabbles exist somewhere beyond the concerns of interdimensional sky holes, demons, spirits, the Rifters caught in between.

A slight squint furrows his brow for a moment. Nothing serious, merely patching voice to face, remembering talking to her over a magic crystal once. The disparity between the way she sounds and the way she looks is mildly jarring, but considering he's fraternized with all sorts of people and creatures. "I spoke to you before, didn't I? Ariadne. You like gardens." He steps a little closer across the roof shingles.

Expertly, she perched herself on the higher branch, offering him a pretty, little smile. "That's right," she said mildly, pleased to be remembered. For someone who looked the way she did, with her wide gray eyes and long braid, she could easily be lost in the background.

It was how she'd been trained.

She tilted her head to one side, birdlike. "What are you doing up on a rooftop?"

Marcel looks around at the rooftop he's on, as if he'd forgotten where he was. Actually most definitely not the case; it's a Hell of a view, and a lady, fellow Rifter, with clever feet can honestly only improve upon it. "Oh, this." He shrugs, makes a joke out of it. Out of his own memory and decidedly peculiar behavior. At least, peculiar unless you happen to be some form of a cat.

"Exploring. You remember what it's like, right?"

And then he takes a running leap. His boots scratch off stone, and then he lands-- hard, impeccably, on the ledge twenty feet down. It's impossibly narrow, the strip that he hits with his heels, but his calculation is perfect. Not only physically. At this point, he sees little facility in people seeing him entirely as a mundane human being. Marcel snatches a hand on the grooved wall behind him for balance. They're nearer to each other now, a story or two for difference in altitude. He grins at her. "Being new."

She did little to disguise her surprise at his sudden display of physical finesse. A move like that was common enough among the Alastrians. But he still had the look of a Human to her eyes.

Just a little closer, she supposed, and she'd be able to catch his scent, perhaps.

There were Darucs who could do something like that with equal grace.

For the time being, though, she let her lips curl into a little smile. "It sounds vaguely familiar," she replied, inching up as far as she dared to move along the branch. "Although it seems to me, you're not exploring any more. You're showing off."

The wind goes the other way, stealing from Ariadne her chance at his scent. But the mountains are high, and climate a little fickle; it'll be only a second or two before the air changes direction and brings her something for her query. In the meantime, Marcel's presentation of openness is pretty convincing, for a stranger who climbs walls and journeys between dimensions.

He smiles warmly. "I'm meeting new people," is his answer, not arguing, but asserting a point-- that he deftly turns to a compliment. "It's a different kind of adventure.

"And sometimes you gotta show off your best side, right?" He has the deftness of a billy goat and just as little fear, stepping sideways along a ledge that's only half the length of his feet. Doesn't even bother looking down, studying her instead. "I hope I didn't kill your plants."

He was a little like a pirate. Ariadne had met a pirate crew once, while spying on one of the shoreside kingdoms. Very charming and very dangerous at the same time. She'd learned a lot from them.

"I hope so too," she replied, standing up straighter, her balance steady in spite of the way the narrow branch creaked beneath her feet. "They're very pretty. I was hoping that they would cheer up the refugees a bit, you know? Nothing can do that quite like flowers."

Sadly, that part wasn't an act. She genuinely meant it.

"But I don't think you will. They're a lot sturdier than people realize."

Also true.

Lightly, she ran her fingers along the curves and crevices of her braid. "Be careful, though. I wouldn't want you to fall." And that was more of an act. Somehow, she doubted he would.

"Aw, shucks." Marcel would have made a good pirate.

As it was, he was certainly the sort of King who left villages burning, who engaged in raids and rarely provided more than a single shot over the bow before he opted to collect heads. He had not thought himself cruel. Charming, maybe; dangerous, probably. He smiles at her, and there are an awful lot of teeth showing in high contrast to his complexion. The next moment, he swings down again. Transfers his weight from foot to hand, his fingers somehow finding purchase on the thin edge of stone. He only hangs up enough of his weight to slow his descent, though.

And it is a descent, deliberate, a drop rather than the fall she pretended to be worried about. It places him near the foot of her tree, reversing their difference in height and then some. And it's then that the wind changes direction, and the flurry of his movement enhance the riffle of air besides. He smells—

human. But faint. Too much so to be human, as if the exertion, the gathering of dust from days of walking, the passage of food and water, was less for him than it would be to sustain an ordinary man. He smells mostly human but very faint. Unmistakably too, he smells of blood. "That's a nice thought," he tells her. "Flowers for refugees. I hear they're getting fed. After that, what could be better?"

The two of them could have fun trying to outdo one another in athletic maneuvers. Seeing the way he moved made Ariadne yearn--not for the first time--for the company of others of her kind. Which made his peculiar scent all that greater a contrast. It was like she was smelling him through a thick, cotton sheet. Her senses muted. It wasn't a feeling she enjoyed, but the aroma of the flowers and the grasses beneath were as strong as ever.

So it was him.

Interesting.

Ariadne dropped down to a lower branch, landing in a neat squat. "I could think of better things," she admitted, hooking her knees around the branch and dropping so that she hung upside down, the tip of her braid almost pooling on the ground beneath her. "But flowers are all I can provide at the moment."

Gripping the branch, she pulled her legs out from under her and lowered herself down to the ground, offering him a little curtsy with a quiet 'ta da.'

"Well look at that." Marcel's smile goes all the way up to his eyes. He puts his hands in his pockets and takes a step closer, cocking his head to look her over. His senses aren't quite as sharp as hers, but it's not a dramatic stretch to tell that she isn't human. For one thing, there are the ears. Even setting that aside, though. "Where I come from, people who can do that make a killing joining Cirque du Soleil." A beat.

"Or maybe killing people for governments or huge quantities of cash. Turns out there are wars in every world." Once he's close enough, he opens a hand toward her, offering a clasp in salutation. If she takes it, his hand is dry, not incredibly warm. Not so cold, however, as to seem out of place with the way he was running the rooftops.

"Nice to be able to put a face to the name." Up close, the smell of blood is stronger still. Everything else remains oddly muted. There is perhaps a dim but distinct quality of something else underneath the bright penny taste, but difficult to put a word to; if at some point she meets Elena, she'll find it links the two of them. "I take it they still haven't let you near the more sensitive herbs and all?"

The rusty tinge of blood was off-putting. But not entirely unexpected. At least, she didn't think so. Not in a refugee camp. But as he came closer and she examined him, she began to feel a little uncertain.

But not enough to reject the pleasantries.

She took his hand, but rather than shake it, she just gave him another curtsy, this time one less for show and more out of respect. Her fingers were hardened, calloused built up over years of climbing and falling from trees. And yet, her delicate and birdlike bones were as light and fragile as they looked.

"You have a very nice face," she told him, straightening up again. Certain expressions got jumbled in her head, but she meant well. "And no, I haven't worked with anything sensitive at this point. Too many of the natives simply don't trust those of us who fell through the sky."

He has a nice what. Marcel looks mildly surprised by her choice of comment, his eyes flitting across her (nice) face for a moment. Presently, though, the corner of his mouth quirks north. He acknowledges her compliment with a nod of his head. "Thank you," he says. "I appreciate that. You have a good one, yourself." He doesn't tend to get his expressions jumbled inside of his head or outside of it, but he means well too. Better for Rifters to be friendly than the alternative, especially when the rest of the world perceives them-- as she mentions.

"I'm hoping that's going to change soon. I mean, they way that they look at us." He motions at the flowerbeds that he'd just dropped a dust shower on, not too far away from where they've landed now. "Not that this isn't worthy, but it sounds like they could use your skills elsewhere.

"I'm beginning to get the impression that we can make an account of ourselves, as long as we're stuck here. I think it could help us get home, too." He speaks easily of grand plans, doesn't he? Well. 'Grand.' He speaks of grand plans in the way of someone accustomed to planning far grander. This seems relatively straightforward to him. "We're going to need more access to magic and resources." A beat. Perhaps realizing that he's making some assumptions here, he looks at the woman quizzically. "That is, if you want to go home."

Ariadne was used to hearing people speak of grand plans. Both for better and for worse. The Red Dragon made speeches all the time. Speeches that turned her stomach and soured her otherwise pretty face. But then, so did Princess Amanda and Lysia. Grand plans for freedom. For unity. For...hope.

She much preferred those sorts of plans.

"Yes," she said with a slight nod. "I think I would like to go home. Not that I don't like it here but..." She just didn't belong. "And I think you're right," she added. "We really ought to work together. Even if we can't get home, it would be nice to have some kind of voice. Some kind of representation."

"Now, that's the word," Marcel says, nodding, his face pleasant and inimitably serious. The reader should note that the back of his mind is already churning out the logistics of getting himself squared into a major representative role in all this, the better if he does not have to be the first to nominate himself. In the front of his mind, though, Marcel is well-aware that he's new, yet. And doesn't know the half of what's going on. Clearly, Ariadne, Church, and the others have more knowledge capital than he does at the moment.

Something to work on. Matters to catch up with. People to learn from. Fortunately, Marcel's enormous confidence has never been based on fanciful assumptions that he needs do nothing to get what he wants. "How would you feel about meeting other Rifters at the tavern?" he asks. "Private event, just for those of us who fell out of the sky." He opens his hand, raises his palm. The one with the seam of light glowing out of it. "As soon as next month?"

"Oh, I'm all for it," Ariadne said, nodding slightly. "But we shouldn't make a secret of it. They already suspect us of being horrible monsters. The last thing we want to do is let the natives catch us meeting in secret. It'll look bad. Suspicious."

She was a spy, after all. She knew exactly what did and didn't look suspicious. And if they wanted to have secrets, after the fact, the best thing to do was look harmless from the onset.

"It would also help us to try to track where we each were when we were brought here. See if there's some kind of pattern to it."

There was more to the girl than appearances.

This response makes Marcel pause. He looks at her for a longish moment, not rude, and his eyes still on her eyes (up here). The next moment, his face breaks into laughter, a lot of teeth without too much noise. He thinks these are good qualities for a woman such as herself to have; good skills for an ally to wield. Thanks to his race and supernatural fame, Marcel is terribly accustomed to being looked at with suspicion, but it certainly doesn't hurt to play it safe.

"Makes sense to me," he says. "Good call. And good topic. I hope there's few enough of us that we can track without writing anything down. In the interest of privacy." He shifts his weight onto one foot, his face thoughtful. He nods his short-shorn head. "It'd be our luck if there was some kind of mystical mathematics behind the way we were taken." Solve for zero, go home. Marcel doesn't think it's that simple, but it's nice to think.

He cocks his head, brows hooking upward hopefully. "More likely, if there's rhyme or reason, there's spirits or mythological figures from the Tevinter Imperium behind it. Right?" Please tell him he's warm. He's a little tired of not knowing his ass from his elbow.

She was used to being laughed at. Mostly when she failed to grasp some sort of humanoid euphemism or figure of speech. But as Ariadne watched him laugh, she replayed their conversation and couldn't imagine any of it being especially funny.

Well, all the more reason to better get to know his world, she supposed.

"I said track," she pointed out, as soon as he'd stopped seeing the humor in the situation. "Not write down. No, we shouldn't write any of it down. I don't want us being...what's the word? Registered?" An involuntary shudder ran through her shoulders at the thought.

"Hey, I didn't think you meant that," Marcel says, lifting a hand-- an understated gesture of surrender. "Just thinking out loud. I got no idea how many Rifters there are in Skyhold right now." He crooks his eyebrows upward, and belatedly recognizes that she probably thought that laughter was at her. In reality, that couldn't be further from the truth. Wits and a sense about people are good assets to have.

Marcel tucks his hands into his pockets. "I think those are excellent ideas. Important material to get hammered out, if there's any kind of possibility." A beat. His eyes flatten slightly, but however sour the recollection is, he knows that it's only that: a recollection. And finding common ground is important here, this alien world to which they've been stolen. "I don't like the idea of being Registered either. They used to do that with my people. It meant we weren't see as people." He twitches a smile at her. Small, brief, dry. Humorless. "If I remember right, you know something about that.

"We're on the same page, ma'am. And I appreciate you looking out."

How curious this man was. A scent that made no sense. A pleasing face. And ways about him that she couldn't even begin to understand. Humanoids were always such puzzles, but generally much more easily solved than this one.

"I know something about that," she said carefully, still trying to measure each of his words. "Where I come from, there's a war that makes everything going on here look like a petty squabble." Not that any war was a good thing, but even in her hopeless optimism, she had to admit that some were better than others.

Or maybe it was more that some were worse than others.

It didn't matter.

"But," she continued, "looking out is something I do. And if we're all...Rifters..." She liked the term and would use it from this point forward, "...I see that as making us a kind of family. Which means we need to look out for each other and for the whole. Otherwise, we'll just get swept up in this violence. Without ever really having a true stake."

Marcel's head tilts fractionally one way as he listens to her, some of the shinier, more facetious good humor easing out of his face. Mostly, he's paying attention. For someone who seems to fumble around with social niceties a little bit, he finds that particular sentiment remarkably well-spoken.

"I couldn't have said it better myself," he says, nodding his head. The curl of his hands changes slightly where his arms are folded. "Maybe if we'd ended up a few thousand miles out from the borders of conflict, yeah all right. Ignore a war, focus on the rest. But it seems like the mechanics of how we got here are pretty inextricable from the war. Details varying on who you ask." Marcel weaves his head left and right for a moment. "I mean violence has a way of getting to people even without magic connections. I think you're right.

"Even for people who don't care about going home." Do they exist? Marcel hasn't met any thus far. He hadn't asked Church straight-up, but it had been clear from the way the man spoke about adjusting to Thedas that he'd sooner be embroiled in the bizarre futuristic terms of his own world, for one reason or another. He angles a curious look at her, smile starting again. "Is there anyone else you'd think to bring to the meeting?"

She demurred. Ariadne had strong opinions and plenty of beliefs, many of them contrary, but she wasn't one to speak up quite as much as she just had. It was only that it was so important to her.

Let charismatic figures like Marcel take the lead. Ariadne knew how to play her part from behind the scenes.

"I'm just worried about us," she said shyly. "Worried about us become tools and soldiers for others. We need to stick together."

"That's a worthy concern," Marcel answers, nodding his head. He notices the subtle way that she retreats into herself just then, and marks it down in his mind as something else to know about her. It does't bother him, partly because he's loud enough for dozens of people, yes, but also as he's met women of a similar demeanor before.

All one has to do is remember, in the future, to ask. He's never minded taking the time to mine for insight where it's available, even from unlikely or unassuming sources.

"I'm pretty sure there are gonna be some of us who'd rather go it alone." The Klaus Mikaelsons of the world. There will always be a Klaus Mikaelson. "But I want there to be somewhere for people to go if they don't." He crooks a smile at her, then turns slightly, back toward the flowerbed. "Do you have to get back to work?"

Ariadne didn't have to do anything. And when it was all said and done, that was her very real problem in Thedas. She didn't belong. In every sense of the word. And without obligations to anyone, she felt lost and adrift.

Maybe she wasn't alone though. Maybe joining up with others was the answer.

And even if it wasn't...at least she'd tried.

She gave Marcel another smile. "You're just as interesting as you promised to be, Marcel Gerard," she told him.

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slaveking - 2016-01-26 01:11 (UTC) - Expand

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demonicbeauty - 2016-01-26 01:16 (UTC) - Expand

O1 ♚ I'M IN NEED OF AN ANSWER

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gdi i suck at picking up cues, i will do scent things next tag

No worries!

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