faderift | war table: one giant leap.

Helping??

With very little combat to be done, at least in this step of the process, Teren is doing a lot of milling around, placing instruments and collecting samples for the researchers, a process as foreign to her as courtly love or childrearing. But if the instructions are clear and the tone isn't too demanding, she'll do as she's asked.

Spacing

It's not unusual for Teren's expression to be pinched and sour, but there's an intensity to it now, and all it takes is for one to look at the other Wardens to note that it is likely from what only they can hear. Periodically, she'll stop moving altogether, staring off into the middle distance with a glazed-over look, mouth taut with worry.

[Helping?? part II: Nug Edition will be in a separate thread]

Abby has graced the party to help lift things and then punch other things in the face, whatever is most needed in the heat of the moment, but even she can't stop herself from asking questions. Hard not to when occasionally every Warden in the area goes distressingly silent and turns slowly toward the Rift as a unit.

"... What does it sound like?" She asks, after this happens for the third time.

It takes Teren a moment or so to realize she's been addressed, and then she turns toward the source of the voice, blinking confoundedly until the question's meaning worms its way into her mind.

"There are no dogs in the Deep Roads," she sing-says in a low, vaguely tuneless rasp, "dogs are too good for the Deep Roads. Darkspawn wish they had dogs for their search for the gods, but they don't, they're dogless in the Deep Roads."

[callbacks]

Edited 2022-04-11 23:34 (UTC)

She's obviously not meant to understand it, so she doesn't try to, and maybe the Rift really does sound like that: broken songs, old memories. She shifts her weight, and hikes her pack up a little higher automatically.

"Why can't I hear anything?"

"Because you're not Blighted, or a Warden," Teren explains bluntly, "and a lucky thing it is you can't, or we'd have a new problem on our hands."

"Glad I'm not," for clarification, her hands descending almost haughtily to her hips as she squints at the Rift. Still. "Anything I can do to help?"

"Excuse me. I require an escort, if you would."

The monitoring stakes for the thaumoscope have all been arranged, and the Wardens to which Wysteria might ordinarily glom onto for such a task are otherwise occupied. Yet here she is, in her skirts and field boots, and with her prosthetic strapped securely to her left arm, and she is in great need of assistance.

"We're to take an account of the ruin," she explains. "I would like to see how far the transformative effects extend from the Gate."

"All right."

Seeming neither enthused nor averse, Teren glances Wysteria up and down, takes note of the little beast's prosthetic, and feels something almost resembling pity.
Does it slow her down at all, she wonders, but doesn't ask.

"Lead the way."

"Very good. This way."

At the very least, her lopped off arm seems to have no effect whatsoever on the speed as which she travels overland, even in a crumbling ruin such as the one they find themselves in now. With a swirl of her skirts, Wysteria traipses away from the ominous shadowed rift and leads the way out into the surrounding fragmented structure.

She isn't measuring carefully. Not yet. Instead, she simply forges out, meaning to wander as far as the effects are visible. Once they reach the edge, they may make their way more carefully and methodically back.

"How were your travels, Warden? You've been away from the Gallows for some time."

Surprise; she can multitask.

"Fruitful," Teren replies distractedly, her shrewd gaze following Wysteria's path and the rot that surrounds them. She doesn't elaborate; it may just be that it's for Wardens and no one else to know, or it may just be that she's Teren.

"How do you intend to measure this?"

"In paces." See, she can do this brief, very direct sort of answering of questions tactic too. Wysteria in her hard soled field boots scrabbles over a few chunks of crumbled jet-dark stone.

"Were you attending to Warden business, or to war business? Or to some combination of the two?"

Neither of them broadcast what they were doing ahead of time, so it's likely too late for any of the other busy researchers present to have any say in what Dick and Teren have gotten up to.

Even if she's spotted approaching the Blighted rift with the nug, harnessed to the end of a stick as it is, Teren is quick to have done with the wretched business and thrusts it inside without a word or a glance to anyone. As she draws it back out, it quickly becomes clear that their subject did not survive the journey.

With a deceased nug, now Blighted and ghoulish in appearance, at the end of the stick, Teren frowns down at it and then diverts her gaze back to Dick. What now.

Exiled to the nearest section of the platform considered “safe,” with his arms folded stiff across his chest, Dick Dickerson looks on through the corruption seething through the stone between here and there and arches an eyebrow. It’s dead, yes, but not dissolved, or turned inside out, or otherwise mutilated.

In the beat it takes him to process this outcome, anyone in the right position might catch the way his pale eyes cut speculatively from the blighted nug to Teren herself. Hmm.

“Burn it.”

He doesn’t raise his voice, trusting she knows the routine for ghouls well-enough to recognize the shape of the words at a distance.

Though her expression doesn't change, Teren nods once and stoops to attend to the wretched creature, uncapping a little bottle of oil to pour over it. A bit of flint emerges from another pouch, which she clicks against a dagger until it sparks, igniting satisfactorily and prompting her to step back, arms crossed.

She looks over her shoulder, intent on keeping anyone from approaching while it burns.

war table: one giant leap.

Teren OTA

spacing

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helping

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Helping Part II: Nug Ghoul (warning for animal experimentation & death)

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