faderift | [closed]

It's been a day or two. Enough to get some shut eye, eat something, agree to a meeting at some point today for a thorough handover of duties. Tony does not characterise either Yseult or Flint as people who take on vacations after a little thing like weeks-long captivity and a hard won slog through the battle-worn Free Marches.

He also doesn't characterise them as having a sense of humour, and yet.

When Flint returns from something that pulled him away from his offices, he will find, upon return: a humanoid figure, in the strictest sense of the word. Two legs, two arms, a knightly helmet where a head would go, a heavily armoured torso of patchwork iron, long metal limbs with enchantment-inscribed ore insets and coppery wire bonded with lyrium.

It stands behind his desk, because actually getting it to sit down would have probably seriously compromised the chair. One hand ('hand', a two-fingered appendage) is pinched closed over a sheath of pages, and the other holds a silver tray on which balances (precariously, if this whole arrangement seems dubious) a squat bottle of some kind of not-terribly-expensive liquor, and two goblets.

Light flares behind the slits in the helmet once Flint enters the room, but no other reaction is forthcoming.

Edited 2021-08-12 00:42 (UTC)

It's a tricky prospect these days to slip out into the Free Marches. Even the roads of Wildervale, which seems like it ought to somehow be immune to the presence of marauding bands of Venatori, aren't completely reliable. At least once since crossing the border into the sleepy, predominantly pastoral march they'd had to steer their horses off the road and wait for a long time amidst copses of trees—patiently out of sight until strangers traveling in the opposite direction had passed lest they turn out to be some enemy in disguise.

"For I have been kidnapped quite enough for one lifetime, you see," Wysteria had explained in a sotto voce whisper behind the fruiting hedgerow of blackberry bushes, idly nibbling on the ripe berries until the coast was clear and they might proceed on their way.

Otherwise, it is an uneventful excursion to the V.A.N.E.. The arcane clocktower like device is comically out of place in the old abandoned farmhouse where it has been erected, and it takes only a cursory review of its records and the positioning of its fadeiation vane before they are off again—on foot this time, for the energy registered by the recent opening of a rift is far too close to bother with remounting the horses. Instead Wysteria leads the way, cheerfully crashing through various brambles and underbrush until they find themselves at a low stone wall bordering a large grazing field over which hangs the sickly green crackle of a rift. Wysteria produces the little spyglass from her belt.

She consults the otherworldly slash for a moment, says, "How odd," and then passes the glass to Beth. "It seems to be fairly inert presently, yes? I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to close it without too much trouble. But it is strange that it would be such a minor disturbance. The Vane's records reflected quite the spike of arcane energy."

There is a field in the foothills above Kirkwall which doubles for a fine enough shooting range. It had also been a perfectly adequate picnicking ground almost two years prior, though Maker forbid any suggestion that the location was selected for reasons of sentimentality. Besides, any such nonsense has faded considerably in light of the manual labor required to set up a few targets for practice. They'd borrowed three sparring dummies from the training yards, and the donkey in charge of pulling the wagon along had decided to be quite stubborn about plodding around the field to drop them at intervals. It had only stopped heeing and hawwing in complaint when it had been at last been unharnessed from the wagon and picketed with a long enough line for grazing on the stubby late summer grass.

Now, sweating in the heat and the sun and the humidity down range from the practice dummies, Wysteria is has wrestled the oil cloth covering from the great long gun. It is by no means a sleek weapon. it is however clearly lovingly made, a lovely masculine kind of beauty in the pale polished oak of the stock and all its dark iron fittings.

"—I have already begun the mocking up of a second iteration which will solve a great deal of the difficulties I noted in my field report. My concern is of course with the weight balance. I believe the spindle—here; that is what I've decided to name the enchanting element—requires additional insulation, and you will see now when you handle the thing how reasonably well balanced it is. The support crutch—here you are, Mister Stark—" she says, passing the long gun's accompany balancing fork up to him. "—Somewhat diminishes the necessity to keep the weapon entirely light in the hand, but balance. Now I should think that quite important."

Up comes the great gun, balanced upright on its stock butt plate so Wysteria might begin to load its heavy cast round.

"Which reminds me." Ting, ting; she jams the round down the long barrel with a few robust jams of the loading rod. "Do you suppose you will you be competing in the tournament, Mister Stark?"

It's warm and so sticky with humidity as the weather gathers itself to spill into a thunderstorm that an open door to allow some form of a cross breeze is all but some form of necessity given the very narrow set of the Gallows' windows. So undoubtedly it is with great restraint (or at least the demonstrative parody of it) that Cassius raps his knuckles—knock, knock—on the door frame of the Lady de Cedoux's office rather than waltzing directly into the work space.

What can he say? He's a gentleman.

"Oh esteemed Madame Cryptographer." Evidently his good manners don't fully encapsulate his head, for Cassius does lean it and his shoulders casually across the threshold regardless of whether the sum of his body follows after them or not. "I believe we discussed an exchange of prisoners."

It's so sick that it's annoying. The gun, that is.

It's also hilariously gawky with its little supporting tripod situation and its size, but also just plainly rad, especially after two years of medieval aesthetic every way you turn. Tony sets up the fork, staking it into the summer-soft earth, folding out the limbs, a knee in the dirt. He squints towards where they'd set up the dummies—he really need to improve Fred's speed so he can haul him out for this kind of task, but all those stairs are a nightmare—through the same sunglasses that had come through the rift with him, not so far from here.

"I mean, do you go to Vegas and skip the magic show?" is his rhetorical answer, and before she can remind him that she does not know what Vegas is, he says, "Joust, and the other thing that's like tee-ball joust. I can't get stuck in medieval times and not joust."

They come on the heels of a long string of refugees, though they bear only a passing similarity to those other travelers and even the worst kind of month can't have changed them so fundamentally that they would be unrecognizable to the ferryman. It is not the first time that James Flint has returned to Kirkwall in the night wearing a second skin of sweat and road dirt, dressed in clothes that aren't fully his own (the coat he's wearing is blatantly Ander, all red tinged leather and braided patterns and likely taken from someone who no longer has any use for it), with a strange sword and a certain drawn set to his expression which suggests the presence of a long list of to-do's being actively ordered even now as the ferry slowly works toward the dark looming shape of the Gallows.

It's hot and humid. There is the thick stilled feeling of a storm in the air, but no trace of a thundercloud has yet to manifest at the horizon. It takes a long time for the ferry to beat its way across the harbor without any breeze to speak of. It takes a long time for him to cross through the Gallows' nested courtyards, and to make his way up the long series of stairs in the central tower. It isn't until he arrives at the door to the division office that he realizes he no longer has the key to it. That it was left. Or rather, that it had been taken from him and never returned.

For a moment, he simply stands in the empty hall and blankly regards the door. It's late; there will be no one left in the office. He will have to scrape down two flights and pray that Pizzicagnolo is still at work in order to produce a replacement key (and a replacement crystal, while he's so engaged) and then clamber his way back again to this very spot—

But before that, he tries the latch.

Edited 2021-08-13 04:06 (UTC)

The door is not locked.

An oversight on John's part, perhaps. It's late and he had been tired even before climbing the stairs. Habit has nearly always seen a door latched neatly behind him, except—

Except it has been long weeks of a particular kind of exhaustion, set into the bone, and it is not assuaged by an empty office, nor the books left behind in it, nor the blank sheet of parchment he has considered for days without setting pen to it. (To write a thing, even a shadow of a thing, draws it ever closer to being true. John knows this.) The windows are open, in hopes of drawing in a breeze. John's coat is draped over the chair. There is a book in his hand as he turns towards the sound of an opening door and says—

"Whatever it is, it might wait until tomorrow," to the tune of Get out, some flat impatience lying beneath impersonal politeness that anticipates Provost Stark or Matthias or even Darras, but does not anticipate any familiar face beyond that.

Edited (wedges in extra words) 2021-08-13 05:32 (UTC)

Drawn short just over the threshold and with his hand still on the latch, Flint cuts a strange yet familiar figure. The patterned leather coat is heavy on him; the falchion sword at his thigh cuts an unnaturally boxed shape compared to the more at home line of a saber or cutlass. He is dirty and tired and the arrangement of his hairline or some trick has become very stark as the hair on his head has begun to bristle or due to some trick of the lamplight.

What he is not is dead is a Hasmal interrogation room (which everyone must know, as Bastien will have reported as much by now), or dead in a ditch from the injuries suffered there (which, given the delay of their return must have been considerably more questionable), or even—if how upright he is managing to be is any indication—so worse for the wear as to have found the ordeal unbearable.

"Forgive me." No that isn't true. He seems strangely grey, haggard in the way that only someone growing old can achieve. "But it's a little late to hunt after a different room for the night."

Is this not the way of it with them?

These unremarkable reentries: on a sloping sand dune over a trio of newly-dead Imperium soldiers, turning towards each other covered in blood on a roadside, in a jungle over a shattered mirror, and now here, a few steps over the threshold of an office in a tower. Should this not have been expected?

John's knuckles have gone white over the spine of the book, still held unthinkingly as his attention narrows entirely to the man in front of him.

How rare it is, that he finds himself with nothing to say. There is a long moment of scrutiny instead, in which John marks the coat, the sword, the dirt and what lies beneath it. You catches in the back of his throat. It breaks instead on a laugh, punched out relief coloring the sound.

"We've managed it before," is not what John wants to say, but comes anyway, holding place as John looks at Flint, and feels the weight of so many weeks of uncertainty (and dread, a particular kind of dread) lift from his shoulders. When he speaks again, his voice dips over the words as he says, "But please, come in."

Stupid. But close at hand, near enough to what he means to serve until he finds the right words for such things.

The shock of that noise—his laugh—in the oppressively still evening is like cool air ruffling across the back of a too warm neck. It makes the line of Flint's mouth slope first up and then sharply down, following the path of some instant relief and impulsive ache like a bird might a wind current.

He closes the door behind him. The simple activity of it unsticks his joints; reminds him of their liberty and clears that tangled shape high behind his ribs. So he begins to shed the coat too, peeling out of the russet leather even as he crosses further into the room.

"Don't tell me you've taken to reading for pleasure in my absence."

Silver's pale knuckles; the spine of the book. Flint frees himself from a dead man's coat, laying it over whatever article of furniture is convenient while on the move, and slowly some slanted smile creeps in to replace it.

"I admit, I've been having some difficulty occupying myself without your company," is suffused with fond humor, a thing that comes so easily to him now in the wake of dispelled dread.

Attention drawn briefly back to the book in his hand, John's grip flexes momentarily tighter, then loosens. The prospect of opening the tome in question, of working his way through some borrowed text to pass the hours, is so far removed from the present moment. He glances down, gilt-marked cover turned up into the light to meet his examination then tipped back into shadow when his gaze returns back to Flint.

The pull of his smile is such a fine thing, all the more so for weeks where John had thought—

"I've heard it's rather dangerous. But I suppose if something terrible were to happen, Riftwatch is now staffed well enough to oversee a substitute without much incident. Have you prepared a list of recommendations for the position?"

She smiles at him with all due beneficence—ha ha ha, she's very funny—as the shot clicks into place and retrieves the loading rod with a rasp of metal on metal.

With a great heave, Wysteria hauls the long gun up under her arm. It is not so heavy, but the dimensions are awkward when held parallel to the ground and so it is a relief to shift the stock into its appropriate place in the waiting balancing fork.

"I believe I will add a small block here to keep the arm from slipping too far forward in the fork," she remarks in the tone of making a note aloud, and then takes a half step back with her hands still supporting the stock. It's a clear offering. Would you like to take the first go?

(She's shot the thing a dozen times now; first is relative.)

"So have I," Beth had answered, and then spent the next hour failing to explain herself. (On the upside, she'd picked a little bagful of blackberries while they stood around, waiting for the other travelers to pass. She's started carrying little flour-sack-like bags, empty, in case of finding interesting things on the road. Most of the time, it's nothing this delicious - and some tired part of her is soothed by the knowledge of extra food.) It makes for slow traveling, hiding from everything on the road, but it's not so bad. They don't run into anything that actually knows to try and kill them.

The V.A.N.E. turns out to be kind of cool - all the technology is, here. She can imagine it existing at home, if any of them happened to know enough about making mechanical stuff work. (And if there was magic to bother measuring, of course.) So far, aside from hiding from possible Venatori, the whole thing feels like something out of a storybook, especially the stone-fenced fields; even with a war on, it feels safer than home by a long shot.

She takes the spyglass from Wysteria and squints through it, but the rift doesn't look that much more detailed. It's just slightly closer, slightly greener. "No demons. Should we just...go look?"

It feels like there should be some kind of protocol. It also feels like Wysteria probably would've spent the last five minutes telling her about it if there was.

The last time they were in this particular clearing, the rift they'd been experimenting with had dropped out a despair demon, which had disrupted the entire day's proceedings.

But today, there's no rift, none of Wysteria and Tony's instruments, but instead: two horses, and a pair of lances, and a practice target that Ellis had lugged from the training yard, to the cart, and then set up in the center of the clearing for the express purpose of—

"Have either of you seen a joust before?" Ellis is asking, slightly winded from the positioning of the training dummy. Straightening, he dusts a scattering of dirt from the front of his tunic, turning back to Wysteria and Tony.

"Sure. I've seen Excalibur."

Tony is on horseback, retuned from doing a few laps. The benefit of growing up obscenely wealthy: you innately know how to ride horses, play tennis, and race cars, so it's nice that one and a half of those things can translate.

"It's not to the death, right?" he queries, glancing to Wysteria to loop her in. "Or is that part optional."

Edited 2021-08-14 02:55 (UTC)

Wysteria is standing beside Ellis' horse, one hand occupied with the reins and the other scratching between the animal's ears. In her skirts and field boots and somewhat absurdly deep brimmed hat, Wysteria clearly means to play a largely supervisory role (read: the provider of blistering commentary) during the day's excursions.

"I believe that part is optional, though no I have never seen the thing done myself. I believe we are usually expected to make do with maiming. Isn't that right?"

This question is not for Ellis; it's for his horse.

"Though I'm sure Mister Stark will do his best to avoid striking you."

"You should probably just shut down the Division," Tony says, after a fleeting half-smile for her joke. Of course he has to come in with his own. "It'd be too sad to continue."

He stands in place as she sets up, not inclined to help when, you know, she's got this. It's August, which is the kind of fact he tries not to think about too closely. If he was on earth, he'd have shifted operations back to Malibu for the summer, and the weather would be perfect. Kirkwall has a way of ruining a good thing, too wet all the time, the sewers somehow even riper than usual, the way the ocean smells like dying marine life.

Being out here is nicer, at least. Pleasantly pastoral. He looks around all the rolling hills and the absence of power lines, planes in the sky, signage.

"You go ahead," he says, with a gallant hand gesture, focus drawn back to the offer. "I like to watch, and then do a better job. How's the recoil on this thing?"

"He'll have to strike me, or he won't gain any points," comes breezily, Ellis looking largely unconcerned with the prospect of being hit with a lance or potentially knocked off his horse. In the course of his approach, he stoops to lift his breast plate from the ground beside his pack.

But, just to be clear—

"Death and maiming will lose you favor with the crowd. It's not chivalrous," Ellis says, drawing up alongside Wysteria as he imparts this information. "And people like to think they're watching chivalrous competitors."

More or less.

Notably, no inquiry as to exactly what Excalibur might be. A particular tourney, perhaps?

She shifts back into place smoothly enough that perhaps it is, at least in part, the answer she'd been expecting.

"It is not not a factor, but I have fired worse for a smaller round." The long gun is set to her shoulder; the dial on its side os tuned; the runelock is ratcheted unceremoniously back. Click. "So long as you don't resist the force, there should be no issue."

Undoubtedly Tony has witnessed Wysteria's chaotic attempts with a bow. This is a different thing; there is something suspiciously like competence is how she squints along the length of the gun, lines up its sights and—

"Will Miss Smythe come to watch, do you suppose?" She lifts her face away and turns it back to him. "The tournament, I mean."

The armor is definitely the worst part about all this. It is hot and he has no means of any kind of internal cooling system (yet) to relieve it. He's only in a couple of pieces—the breastplate, namely, a pair of gauntlets, and the helmet will waiting for the last possible second, but still.

"You should probably teach me a killing blow, just in case," he says. "But I'll settle for me not, uh, getting shish kabobed in front of god and everyone. That's a kind of skewered meat," he adds, louder, at Wysteria.

He moves around, hands in pockets, watching her set up and line up. Internal notes append to observation as he focuses mainly on mechanism and her handling than carrying out a conversation, so when she says that, his expression is blank, a little like some corner of his brain has misfired and shut down.

Smooth recovery on a delay with, "Everyone's gonna come. It's a big whole deal, with these people." Of which Miss Smythe is clearly one. Of these people. Just a face in the crowd, obviously.

He adjusts his glasses. "Why, do you think she won't? Come to the tournament."

Beside her, Wysteria drums her fingers on the top of the low stone wall.

"It's possible that when we near it, the rift will activate and demons will manifest. But I see no reason why we shouldn't take a closer look. Between the two of us, we ought to be able to knit it closed before anything truly terrible passes through."

How reassuring! Wysteria is already clambering up over the wall in her calf length skirts and field boots.

[closed]

WYSTERIA.

CASSIUS.

FLINT.

a meeting.

beth

tony

petrana.

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a knight's tale ost blaring in the background.

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