open

[atonally]

WHO: Redvers & You
WHAT: Traditional "new arrival hanging around the Gallows" log
WHEN: Nowish
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Wildcards welcome. If you want prior CR with a Starkhaven Templar and don't want to wing it, hit me up via plurk or discord or pm.

I. WAITING FOR THE FERRY

The pain in his hand subsides by the time he reaches the docks. So what exactly is the point of going any further, is what he's contemplating, sitting on his heavy trunk (left crooked and in the way, where the cart-driver and a charitable passing dock worker helped him unload his things) and watching the dark waves. If this is close enough, he could stay in a tavern. See about the city guard in the meantime, if the Chantry won’t pay for lodging while he’s trapped here.

The ferry is occasionally visible in the distance, when the moons peek through the clouds. Headed for the Gallows now, and then it will come back. There’s plenty of time to leave. So Redvers contemplates it, and he thinks he’s very serious about it, but he doesn’t move until someone else comes to a stop on the same dock.

The look he gives whoever it is is wary interest, not unfriendly. His glowing hand is hidden in a glove; his unmistakable Templar armor is hidden in the chest he’s using as a bench. He’s dressed to travel in the cold.

“Someone told me people go over to that island sometimes and never come back,” he says, which is true—someone did tell him so.


II. IN THE GALLOWS, AROUND

Redvers doesn’t go join the city guard. He goes to the Gallows, talks to whoever he needs to talk to to be allowed to stay, and finds himself sleeping on a bunk bed for the first time since he took his vows.

His uniform comes out in the morning, but only so he can rearrange the contents of his chest for a longterm stay. The pieces left haphazard on the empty bed across from his are indistinct in bundles of oiled cloth, but the neatly folded red and white robes that go with the plate are a dead giveaway. So’s the lyrium kit and his careful use of it, sitting on the bed with the box open on his knee.

Otherwise—it isn’t that he’s hiding it. He’s tired, he’s dressed for being off duty, and he isn’t announcing himself by name and title when he enters a room. That’s all.

He wanders around the parts of the fortress a new, involuntary arrival is allowed to wander around: the courtyards, the dining hall, the baths. Eventually he’s standing at the edges of one of the training yards—just to watch, bent forward with his forearms on a wooden barrier while others shoot arrows at targets or try to non-fatally pummel one another with practice weapons.

If someone joins him (or looks at him long enough), he waves his glowing green hand less in greeting than demonstration.

"It had to be my sword arm."

Not that the anchor prevents holding a weapon. He'd have cut it off by now otherwise, is what he means.


III. WILDCARD

Comments

II

[altusimperius]

A fair number of newcomers flow through this dormitory on their way in and out of Riftwatch, or at least to their private bedrooms, and Benedict doesn't often take too much notice of them. What he does notice, as he sits on his own bed brushing his hair for exactly one hundred strokes, is the lyrium kit and its casual use by his roomie across the aisle.

He pauses mid-stroke, unable to focus on it while also processing what he's seeing. Is that what he thinks it is?

[atonally]

It is what he thinks it is.

Redvers is working the grinder; it's his favorite part. But when he lifts his eyes to pick the flask out of the kit, he notices the stillness and silence across the aisle and looks the rest of the way up.

"Not polite to stare," he says, after a moment of holding still staring back, and then he carries on with it. "Unless you talk at the same time. That's the rule."

[altusimperius]

"Never heard that rule," Benedict mumbles, in his petulant, you're-not-my-dad sort of way, but even he recognizes that he's following it anyway.

"You're a Templar." It's a question as much as it is an observation, and there is no small amount of caution in the statement.

[atonally]

"You're a Tevinter," Redvers counters. This is worth paying attention to, so he stops preparing the lyrium, hands still around the flask and grinder. "That seems like a bigger deal. Maybe I should be staring."

[altusimperius]

A pang of dread surges into Benedict's chest, and he's caught off-guard for a moment, all pretense of politeness fully gone.

"How do you know that," he demands in a hushed tone, tightly gripping his hairbrush.

i

[niminypiminy]

"Maybe it's a paradise."

The elf leaning against a post jutting up from the quay has a dry voice. What he's said is obviously a joke, but there's no jolliness in his manner; he doesn't smile, or wink, or really even look over at Redvers.

[atonally]

Redvers does smile, with a puff of nearly-silent laughter, before he's glanced over to find he's smiling alone. It doesn't make him stop smiling, but it does cut it in half.

"Could be," he agrees, in his matching accent, as a rat as big as his forearm emerges from beneath a nearby pile of discarded rope and net and skitters toward the city behind them. "Clever disguise, if it is."

[niminypiminy]

"The Maker's Golden City," the elf says, voice still bone-dry. "Splashed with a layer of black paint."

His eyes flick over to watch the path of that rat as it skitters off. He seems undismayed by its appearance.

[atonally]

"That's sacrilege."

Redvers doesn't sound bothered. He's only pointing it out, before nodding his head back toward the paint-splashed paradise at issue.

"Are you one of them?"

I

[muckspout]

"Maybe they fell in."

Edgard offers. He's a little wary of strangers who will just talk to him, but this one in particular with his armor makes him a little hesitant. But still--

"People die everywhere." He can't help, but argue just a little.

[atonally]

"Some places more often than others," Redvers says.

If it weren't so dark he might eye Edgard with a little more skepticism, but it's dark. In the very dim light, he could be reasonably clean. Or, like. Only a week's worth of dirty. So there's minimal eyeing, and his tone is more speculative than argumentative.

"You one of them?"

[muckspout]

Edgard frowns. Is that a threat? Who is this man who makes conversation with a stranger just to threaten them?

"Not yet. Don't think."

He shifts a little from side to side.

"'d ask if you were one of them too, but pretty sure a ghost couldn't wear that much armor."

They probably could, Edgard thinks to himself, but doesn't speak this aloud and instead folds his arms over his chest.

[atonally]

That wasn't what Redvers meant, but alright. This could very well be a vagrant. Maybe not altogether there in his head. Might as well be cooperative.

"Oh, I think ghosts can wear anything," he says. "They usually looks ghostly, though. Ghost armor. An abomination—" A possessed corpse. "—is what you would need to be worried about, in a solid set of plate like this."

II

[inkindled]

"Better'n--"

Well. Matthias takes a deliberate pause there, and in the silence, the multitudinous possibilities of how it might have been worse begin to queue. Where on the body would be a worse place to have a shard lodged? So many. Many of them impolite to just shout out in mixed company. Matthias clicks his tongue against his teeth as he wipes his forearm over his sweaty brow.

"I'll spare you the speculation, as we're strangers and it's your, you know, body, and all. But trust me, mate, it could've been worse."

It's cold in the training yard, but Matthias has been at it long enough that he's peeled off cloak and coat and tunic and is down to his shirtsleeves. The discarded bits of clothes are in a heap next to him, and laid across them is his practice sword, which is standard-issue Riftwatch stuff, which means ugly and brutish. He's stopped to catch his breath, sat down on the grass with his back against the wall, which has put him at the perfect angle to observe this stranger.

He nods now at the fellow's hand, shard and all.

"Think you can still swing a sword, then?"

[atonally]

"Pretty sure," Redvers says. In most company, he'd leave it there. Not one for bragging, humble or otherwise, and especially not to people a third his age at most. But this company—strange, removed, living on an island days from the front with more books than blades—

Well.

"I stayed at the front," you know, where the action is (or was, until it recently redirected itself), "until I couldn't anymore." A twitchy movement of his fingers suggest the anchor's recent history of crackling and seeming murderous. "Now it's fine."

[inkindled]

No stranger to battlefronts, Matthias gives a nod of acknowledgement. A good place to be when you're up for fighting, that. And quite resolute and brave when you've got a shard lodged in your hand what like the Herald of Andraste had, but probably worse.

"Good for us. We did need more recruits." Well. He tips his head in a moment of exaggerated thoughtfulness and revises that statement: "Do. Always. One more's a good start. Joking," is tacked on at the end, lest this fellow think he's making too light of his misfortune. Then again, these days, what else is there to be but light? "I'd rather none of this, really."

[atonally]

Redvers hums. But it's warming hum. Who doesn't like a kid with a sword and some swagger? Maybe a kid, anyway.

He stands all the way up and then some, bending back until his spine cracks out the kinks it formed while he was leaning on the wall.

"How old are you?"

A shoulder crack, too, for good measure.

II - inside, lmk if you would like any adjustments

[sohighandwild]

At some point in his wanderings in the fortress, a young woman turns the corner and her expression immediately registers delight, as if he's a long-lost friend found again. Her dress and, when she speaks, her accent suggest an Antivan origin rather than an otherworldy one, despite the green glow in her right hand to match his. They've never spoken, but that seems irrelevant as she approaches him without hesitation and starts without a traditional greeting.

"Excuse me, are you busy just now?" He doesn't look busy, and the question is evidently at least somewhat rhetorical. She continues: "I need help with something, and you seem perfectly suited. It should be quick." She seems to fully expect an affirmative answer without further explanation or introduction, waiting expectantly.

[atonally]

Redvers could not possibly look less busy. There also could not possibly be anyone behind him, leaned against a wall as he is to observe the quiet comings and goings in the library, but he turns his head halfway toward checking anyway.

So. Alright.

"Are you about to ask me to carry something heavy?" he asks, in the Starkhaven-accented tone of a man to whom that happens all the time. Even now. No respect for the grey in his beard and the bad back that could easily, theoretically, go with it.

[sohighandwild]

"Not initially, though I though I could think of something heavy for you to move, if you're in the mood for it." She does seem, briefly, to consider his arms and shoulders. "I don't need someone strong, I need someone tall."

At this point, it can be noted that she is nearly a full foot shorter than Redvers, give or take some footwear.

[atonally]

Redvers needs another moment to consider it. To consider the whole of the situation, really: being trapped here by his own hand, in his hesitation to join anything relegated to a bunk bed in a room shared with a pack of hormonal young men, a walking mud pie, and one older fellow who seems normal enough but is named Mobius and thus cannot possibly be. Fed but not paid.

Fed isn't nothing, though. A bed's a bed. He's not doing much of anything else. And she is very short, and plenty charming.

His sigh is the sort that sounds like stop sulking, self, more than it sounds put-upon.

"In that case," he says. Alright.

ii. personal space.

[luaithre]

Here's a strange thing: when Marcus reads the name Redvers Keen, he does so while sitting in an office that is his own and behind a desk that has been assigned to him on account of maintaining some position of authority, dressed in clothing that aren't robes and haven't been for many years, his mind half-distracted with the sort of occupations that would never have been given to a Circle mage of any stature, several years ago. And all of this in the Gallows, no less.

And yet, this context abstracts and absents itself for a few moments spared recollecting that name, and the associated memories that string out after it, slippery and plenty.

He turns aside the page, after several cold and still minutes have gone by. He addresses the next piece of paperwork that lays beneath it, and focuses with unmitigated attention.

It's the next day that Marcus roams a direct path for the location that he understands Keen has opted to make his home. It's a business-like stride and pace, and likely sounds distinct with purpose by the time bootfalls are audible from where Redvers is seated at his bed. Slows, once he reaches the doorway, but doesn't pause. They are nice boots. He bought them recently and they've yet taken a beating from too much use. Grey layers of fine fabrics, grey threads through dark hair, and new scars.

No staff, for once, for no real purpose save he did not have it on him when he decided to go.

[atonally]

Redvers, midway through returning the pieces of his lyrium kit to their velvet-lined places, looks up with habitual mild interest when someone enters. But time and distance and an unstrategically placed bunk bed stand in the way of recognition until the trajectory becomes clear and he looks up a second time, from those good boots on up.

The surprise, recognition, confusion, concern, and amused appreciation of the irony that pass over his face, one after the other, are saved from being comical by restraint and subtlety that's all personality, not effort. He doesn't try to hide a bit of it. His face is just sort of lazy about changing too much too fast.

The lyrium fresh in his system—it's just a disciplined touch, the minimum required to keep his hands from getting cold and his head from getting foggy. But the little rush of boldness is still enough to land him on, "Marcus," rather than Rowntree.

[luaithre]

The recognition is recognised, and gains only a subtle reaction—a small, dismissive exhale, before Marcus flicks his focus away to look at Redvers' living set up. First to the lyrium kit, something he's seen before, apparently, no curiousity there, and the gleam of an anchor shard nested into palm, and then to the chest at the end of the bed, and any other sign of personal belonging, settlement.

Moves around it all, as if it were an inspection, but less like a superior checking in on a new recruit and more like if you left the door open and something sharp-toothed and blunt clawed had wandered in from the cold. Although, that's really up to Redvers, as far as impressions go.

[atonally]

A curious bear seems right. Or a bored/cautious/suspicious Templar, in a room more or less exactly like this one. Redvers shook his fair share of apprentices' bedding in case anything fell out.

But there's little to see here. A bed made to military standard. The book lying on the pillow is religious and dull—he makes it through about a page and a half every night before his lids get heavy. The chest is not quite closed, cracked open by a thick fold of sturdy cloth that was disturbed when he pulled out the lyrium, and his armor and sword are tucked inside. It's only the shield that's made it out, laid flat beneath the bed. The clothes he's wearing are plain and warm and perhaps the first time Rowntree has seen him out of uniform. The beard is not new, but it is better.

Redvers watches his progress, scratches an itch beneath his mustache with his knuckles, and stands up. It's nice to be tall, when things are uncomfortable. He doesn't fix the wrinkles he leaves behind in the bedclothes.