faderift | closed | date but not date-date (UNLESS...)

Entry tags:

loki,
mobius

closed | date but not date-date (UNLESS...)

WHO: Loki, Mobius
WHAT: Dinner and a drink, with some odd canon update shenaniganry
WHEN: a wednesday in early drakonis
WHERE: Kirkwall, evening, a tavern called ~The Innocent Magpie~
NOTES: after this conversation

It's fine. It's all fine. Nothing Loki has said about himself, and nothing Sylvie has said about him, will deter Mobius from making good on Loki's offer of food and drink. Even if, in all technicality, it had been Mobius' idea first for the vague flirtation around the bonfire.

He hasn't spoken to Provost Stark about the events that had been described. It's tempting. He might have to, just to get another perspective on the whole thing. But he tries not to let it bother him. Whatever happens to their enemy, he knows that Loki is making a conscious choice to be better. And if he can't give someone a chance, then...what's the point?

It does amuse him that he keeps getting drinks with people with no real effort involved. Though perhaps Loki and Sylvie have...similar tastes? Astarion mostly just wanted to suss him out and not say no to a free drink. However he feels now is anyone's guess. He arrives at the ferry dock at the Gallows right around the appointed time. He can see the boat on its way, and he's eager to meet up with Loki.

Who doesn't show. And doesn't show. And doesn't show. He's willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but once the ferry arrives, he boards reluctantly and takes out his crystal.

"Ferry's leaving in a second. Where are you at?"

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Sometimes he thinks he can see a little of that variant truth come through. Loki and Sylvie are very different for supposedly possibly being the same person. But they both give off a very pointed intensity. When their interested and searching gaze focuses on you, and you feel a singular pressure for it.

Watching him in return is absolutely fascinating, though. The smile isn't a mask, but the brightness is. That just won't do. They did morose and pitiable at the bonfire. They need to not do that here.

"I already pestered you with about a thousand questions." And he could ask another thousand more and not be bored. "So I'm gonna try not doing that tonight and keep the intensity lower here. It doesn't seem like it's offputting to you, but I promise I can pass for almost normal otherwise." An amusing jab at himself. Start small. "If you've got questions you wanna start rapid-firing at me instead, it would only be fair. Or, we can find a middle ground to start with and build from there."

"In your position, I'd have countless questions," Loki states with a little shake of his head, "so I understand. Besides which, 'almost normal' is highly overrated, even here." Especially here, perhaps. Their drinks arrive (an ale, for Loki) and he takes a moment to sip and enjoy it before he figures out where else this conversation should go.

"I think a middle ground would be good, actually." He takes another sip. "We're both here, in service to Riftwatch, in the midst of a very long war. Why Riftwatch as opposed to the Inquisition?"

Ale is simple and easy, warm and relaxing. Astarion can turn his nose up at it all he wants, but a drink is a drink, and Mobius is a simple man. Sometimes.

"You might not want to encourage me to be weird and eccentric, but I guess that'd be on par with everyone else around here." 'Around here' being Riftwatch, of course, rather than Kirkwall.

It's a good and fair question to start with, though. Mobius leans back, shrugs easily. "Inquisition's under direct Chantry control at this point." He does not say 'because they would see me as a Templar and treat me as such', which is also, frankly, a huge reason. "With a rigid approach. Not that I don't trust them," he adds thoughtfully. "But the chances of me being stuffed into armor and marched to the front lines is pretty high. Needs an outside view. Different perspective. Fresh tactics."

"I encourage the chaoticness inherent in everyone. Besides this, Riftwatch is somewhat known for its eccentricities, certainly."

A small smile, as he takes another sip and listens to Mobius' reasoning. "Not everyone is a fan of the Chantry," he points out with a light shrug, "especially those of us who might be considered less than the rest by virtue of being of the Fade, or mages, or both." Is Loki concerned with what might happen after the war is over? Definitely. He doesn't want to be bundled up and sent away, sight unseen, to some strange place where he has to listen to other people about how he should conduct himself merely because he possesses magical ability and wasn't born in this world.

"Throwing bodies at the front lines isn't what's going to win this war, anyway."

"I'm a fan of the Chant in its various forms. And the Chantry is not an inherently bad idea. I just happen to occasionally disagree with the institution." Like, perhaps, the idea of anyone being Less Than. "It's complicated," he adds a little sheepishly. A cop-out maybe, even if it's true.

"But still, a fair point to be made. An Exalted March looks good on paper, but with something as big as this, it isn't going to be a case of who has a bigger army. Starkhaven won't be freed if it's surrounded by a mountain of rotting corpses."

"You have faith in the inherent goodness of the institution." It's not a bad thing. A little naive perhaps, from where Loki stands, but not bad exactly. Not that he's going to say that aloud. "And are disappointed in the result?" A raised eyebrow.

"I've been given an idea of what it might look like once the direct conflict ends." If it ever does, he doesn't say. "War is a messy business."

Mobius makes a thoughtful face, humming around a mouthful of ale as he considers. "Let's put it this way: people run the institution, and people are always gonna be flawed, so the institution will always be flawed. Heart's in the right place sometimes, and sometimes it's just politics. You learn to try and read between the lines." Sometimes literally, if he were to ever show off his old copy of the Chant.

"No such thing as a clean war. That's why there's Riftwatch. Do some of the smaller but no less important shit. We fight, yeah, but we scout, we research, we listen to the word on the street, we dish out a little propaganda of our own, we help. Without having to waste so many lives."

"Is that easy? Reading between the lines of where there is flawed human idealism and thinking and where it's all boiled down to the popular or unpopular politics of the time?"

Loki's not trying to needle; he's trying to honestly understand. He's been a part of the royal house of Asgard for so long that he doesn't know how other people deal with or view these kinds of things, and he's curious as to Mobius' input on it.

He thinks there might be such a thing as a clean war, but it looks more like genocide than anything else. But he nods, and takes another drink of his ale.

"Easy, Maker, no. Sometimes it's more obvious, sometimes less, and sometimes you can't really separate the politics from the idealism; sometimes they're actually one in the same."

He sets his hands on the table, leaning just a little. "I could give you a bit of a history, but I promise you're gonna be bored about it by the time I'm through." Or maybe not. Maybe Loki would find it genuinely interesting. Not being from here, not knowing much about the Chant and the Chantry. "Or I could talk about the late Divine Justinia, Andraste guide her spirit, and how she exemplified the whole heart in the right place but definitely was about politics thing. Just in a far more progressive way."

"When you put it like that I realize that was something of an ignorant question." The last thing Loki wants is for Mobius to think he's stupid or something, but. "WHere I'm from politics are a much different sort of process. My home is home to just one people, with one governing class, and one set of decisions made on how to do that. I've been to other places where there is more variety, but I don't know a lot of the intricacies of how they all work. Politics-wise."

At the offer of a history lesson, either further back or more current, Loki has to take a moment to consider. Mobius could tell him just about anything and Loki would be at least a little interested, if not strictly fascinated, but expressing that seems a little too hopeless for his tastes.

"I've tried reading about what Thedosians would consider 'ancient' history, I suppose, but keeping the places straight has been a challenge; let's start with Divine Justinia then."

"Not really ignorant. I don't wanna treat you with kid gloves or anything, but you also don't know better. This is a different place. Works differently. The thing with the Chantry is that it's not technically a ruling political body, just a religious one. But the majority of people are Andrastian to some degree, and the power is palpable. They named the months; at the end of every hundred years, the Divine sees signs and portents and names the next Age after whatever seems befitting. Sure, there are kings and viscounts and dukes and whatever ruling each country, and Tevinter does everything differently over there. But the Divine has a lot of power in Thedas."

And that's just some very extremely basic background. They are gonna need more drinks. He raps his knuckles a few times on the tabletop, gathering his thoughts. "Let me know if you get bored. Or if it gets uncomfortable. It's not always the cheeriest topic." Just as a warning. In spite of anything Loki's done in the past, the doesn't want to touch on things so dark or dreary that it spoils the mood of two friends on a maybe-date-thing.

"So. Divine Justinia V, so named because Most Holy always ends up taking up some kind of new name from their real name when elected, and they tend to pass the same names around, was already a pretty controversial pick when she got elected. Frankly, I don't know how she got elected, because it's supposed to be unanimous from the Grand Consensus--that's all the grand clerics that gather together to vote. The Divine before gets to recommend someone, and usually that passes without incident, but it's only a formality to do so, cuz the Consensus does the actual voting and electing and might end up picking someone else. She had some stuff in her past that made some of them a little leery, I don't know the details but rumors abound that she had dealings with bards, and it was known that even from the start that she leaned more progressive. Like I said, shocked she actually got elected.

"She gets elected and it becomes pretty clear to everyone else how progressive she is. Pretty sure she was doing some stuff behind everyone's backs, again, that's stuff that's only rumor, but what we do know is that she ended up being very pro-mage for the Divine. Mage rights, well, maybe we won't go that far, but she has definitely done things to help the mage cause even if just indirectly. When everything went south with the mage war, Lord Seeker Lambert said that she was one of the big reasons what happened at the White Spire went down, because she had called him up so that he wouldn't be available to help out quelling that rebellion. She was the one who invoked the Conclave to get the mages and Templars together to vie for peace. Maker bless her, that's where she ended up dying and everything with Corypheus started. Big on mages, big on some very generally progressive ideas and ideals, very unpopular opinions as a whole, but she believed wholeheartedly and tried to use her powers and influence thusly.

"Before that, we're talking a couple years before the Conclave, she also made a big splash with the actual Chant of Light itself. You're mostly gonna find the original Reader's Edition printed in the common trade tongue from back in the Storm Age. She decided to have the New Cumberland version printed. Backstory on the Chant, that's also been subject to politically-influenced revisions. There's a whole canticle about Shartan, leader of the rebel elf slaves, and how he and his people helped Andraste and vice versa, stricken from canon because, what do you know, elves got really unpopular after the Exalted March on the Dales. There are a bunch of these dissonant verses, things that used to be in some version of the Chant or another, officially, at some point, but got taken out for reasons. So Justinia decides she's going to release the New Cumberland Chant of Light, almost ten years ago, and that one's one of those ones that's meant to be as accessible as possible to as broad a range of people as possible, it has the dissonant verses published. That doesn't make them canon; they're still not officially part of the Chant, don't get sung. She could've tried to reverse that, but it absolutely would not have worked out for her. But it's all still there printed for anyone to read."

He takes a long, long pull of his drink after that. "I'm not a great storyteller. Sorry."

"You're not as terrible a storyteller as you appear to think."

There's food that arrives toward the end of Mobius' explanation of all things Divine Beatrix, and Loki, presuming that they'll probably share whatever is in front of them, takes a small plate with offerings from both of their orders and takes a bite, thinking. It's interesting stuff, this issue of the New Cumberland Chant, of making things accessible even if you can't change the entire thing to fit the needs of everyone.

"A shame she's dead. Do you think she would have been successful had she survived the Conclave?"

He hasn't known Loki to lie to him yet, though there's the question of whether he'd be able to tell. So while there's part of him that doubts Loki means what he says, the rest of him pushes that aside so he can focus on some food.

And give Loki's question some thought.

It's one of the lower times of his life, that he doesn't care to think on too hard. Can he be objective about it?

"I think if Corypheus hadn't blown the place sky high, she still would've contended with no less than three assassination plots. And it was more than just every mage and Templar who could make the trek: you had Seekers and bards as well, third parties for security, Dalish spies though you won't get them to admit it, surface dwarves in attendance and I can't even fully guess why unless they were Carta looking to rob people blind, there were even qunari there. Not--not capital Q-Qunari, little q, there's a whole thing apparently."

But had she survived? He can scarcely imagine. So much got kickstarted that day that it's hard to see the potential of the dividing paths.

"And success after that is largely dependent on what the outcome of the Conclave would have been. If she managed to broker some kind of peace between the mages and the Templars...I don't know. That would've been celebrated, given her more clout, could've let her ride on that higher with more sway for change. If it failed, I'm sure she still had her connections to try and enact change and rile things up on the downlow, but it would've been a blow to her front-facing power. Hard to say."

"It's unfortunate that his was the one that was successful." There probably would have been a war, yes, but not one that tore holes in reality. This, of course, would mean that Rifters like himself and Sylvie and Astarion and Abby wouldn't be here... and he has mixed feelings about those scenarios. Not everyone came from a better place, after all.

So he thinks about it, and he chews, and he frowns a little bit. Part of him wants to change the topic, but the rest of him is still fascinated by how this all works. He has a better sense of the moving parts, at least, or the ones that were taken off the board by Corypehus.

"Did you use to work for the Chantry?" It's Loki's understanding that most of those whos staff the administrative ends of the religion are male, but that the power resides in women who serve.

Broader than Astarion deciding he's a Seeker. And not a bad stab, given Mobius' knowledge of the Chant and Chantry. Will he get more specific? That depends.

He hasn't lied to Loki yet, either. So he shrugs a shoulder. "Used to, yeah." And that could mean so many different things in so many times of his not insignificant amount of life. Doesn't have to mean much of anything. Doesn't have to be incriminating. "More of a free agent now, in a sense."

Loki realizes his question was somewhat vague but since Mobius hasn't whittled things down yet, and Loki doesn't want to seem too nosy off the bat, he won't poke at those specifics. For now.

Things'll be different once he realizes he can cross-reference the things he knows about Mobius between himself, Sylvie, and Astarion. "Free enough to choose Riftwatch over the Inquisition." See, he was paying attention. "Why did you decide to leave the institution of the Chantry?"

"Mostly the same reasons I've pointed out. I like the Chant. I like the idea of the Chantry. But it's run by people, people are flawed, people have agendas, and sometimes--Justinia--the agendas are more progressive and trying to subvert abusive systems. And sometimes it's the abusive system itself."

But that's not the whole of it. He says it all casually enough, but it feels disingenuous to leave it there. Turns his mug on the table slowly. "And I needed a break. I had something of a...guess you could call it a crisis of faith. I don't want to get into it," to cut off any potential questions about that, which given the sensitivity of the subject he figures is understandable, "but I wasn't in a place to keep serving the way I was. So I bowed out."

"Sometimes it's better to leave if you can't rebuild it in the moment," Loki says thoughtfully, "And sometimes it's best to do something completely different."

Somewhere, there's a Mobius who made a different choice. A worse one. Perhaps he compromised on his belief in the greater good; perhaps the weight of it ground him down to a point beyond recognition. Loki considers the good fortune that this is not that reality.

"I have... some recent experience with the concept."

"Yeah?" He doesn't press. Doesn't ask 'does it have something to do with that manic takeover you tried', doesn't say 'falling into another world will do that to a person'. He doesn't want to invite questions back for something like that.

(Would Loki care? He possibly knows what Templars are as a concept, but without the context and nuance, what would it matter to him? Hm.)

He spreads his hands. "I'm all ears if you ever wanna talk anything out."

Loki would care exactly long enough for him to probably freak out about it, worry about the relative safety of anyone knowing about Sylvie's brand of enchantment, and then calm down. Because it's Mobius. Mobius works for horrible institutions but is, at his core, a good person.

Still, perhaps for the best, then, that this is not the time.

He blinks, however, at the offer. Remembers how this really got underway, at the bonfire. Mobius is a good listener, as much as Loki is reluctant to share at times.

"I may take you up on that one day." It's both promise and warning, and he takes another sip.

It's a small but genuine smile he gives at that response. Maybe it'll be like the surprise gift of drinkables. Out of the blue with the promise of a buzz. "I look forward to it."

He does, really. Yes, he wants to help people, and he's found that (in spite of Astarion's guffawing disbelief) sometimes laying things out to someone willing to listen helps. Puts things in perspective. Sometimes he doesn't even need to say much, just getting it out is enough to help untangle things stuffed inside. But also he's curious about Loki specifically.

"I'm no historian, but if you've got any other pressing questions about politics or religion or society through the Ages, I might know a thing or two to enlighten you."

"Actually I thought I could steer the conversation towards things that have little to no bearing on the state of the world, if you don't mind." Loki gives a smile, more an uptick in the corner of his mouth than much else, and takes another bite of the food in front of him. "What do you enjoy most about Kirkwall?"

That's fair, although he doesn't feel like that particular question will necessarily lead in that direction. "I don't, mostly."

It's big, it's disorientingly designed, it's loud, it's dirty, it's got some very unfortunate history and the remaining physical and mental scars to prove it, Ostwick was nicer--

"I don't hate it, but frankly I think I like the Riftwatch the most. The garden's nice, though. A good use of space." Would be nicer if there was still a Chantry on the spot, but. "Maybe it being a big cultural center for it being a port city? And all the migrating that's happened in the past few decades. Lot of viewpoints, even if it means there's never any agreement on anything."

"Oddly enough, despite not living in the Gallows any longer, I don't disagree with you." He gives a little flourish and a shrug. "The architecture is brutalist, to say the least, and the stairs and lift from Hightown to anywhere else is, frankly, highly unpleasant."

Another sip. He thinks he knows the garden that Mobius is talking about. "Do Thedosians tend towards cultural centers?" He'd gotten the impression that one didn't share their culture as much as they made certain that everyone else knew how much better it was.

"Not really. Unless you mean a shining pillar of one singular culture being the most itself as possible. But ports are always gonna have a lot of mixing around just from their very nature. It really brings to light how at the end of the day, we're all just people trying to get by. We're really not all that different, and a lot of the differences we do find tend to just be in whatever stories we choose to believe in about our people. Pageantry."

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