open | brain heat meme

[cozen]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: Nightmares, slumber parties, etc.
WHEN: Throughout Justinian
WHERE: Kirkwall and surrounding areas
NOTES: Ignore the first prompt if you're bothered by bugs. Also, while this is primarily to help people RP about their nightmares, feel free to use it for any kind of RP you want. (I.e., you have permission to set up a truth or dare game at the slumber party.) Talk about dreams OOC over here

This month, our heroes' sleep is getting more and more troubled. Here are some excuses to write about it.

I. SLUMBER PARTY: Mid-month, an infestation of hardy, prolific Antivan fleas requires everyone to avoid spending prolonged periods of time in their bedrooms while local alchemist Lloyd Meyers eradicates the bugs with his proprietary smoke bombs (and an equally proprietary flea bath for the Gallows' many pets). While the rooms air out for two or three nights post-treatment, bed rolls are available on the floor of the unstaffed dining hall. Sleeping outside in the courtyards is also an option, but a sudden squall of a thunderstorm will drive people inside on the second night.

Footnote: Characters who live in the city are welcome to join this slumber party anyway. Maybe they miss the ferry ashore, maybe they're afraid of tracking fleas into their own homes, maybe they already did track fleas into their homes and Lloyd is treating them too, etc.

II. ROOM SHARE: Does the thought of sleeping in the dining hall with all of your coworkers make you break out in hives? Have you missed the ferry on any other evening of the month? Lowtown has inns, and Riftwatch has a docks-side warehouse with a few side rooms outfitted as bedrooms. But there are only so many rooms available, so you might wind up sharing a room (or a bed) with a friend or whoever is nearby and desperate.

III. CAT NAP: A lack of sleep—whether it be from the nightmares, the workload, routine insomnia, or staying up too late playing Truth or Dare during the Antivan Flea Incident—might make a cat nap on a desk, in a reading nook, or over breakfast particularly appealing. And bad dreams don't need more than a few minutes to get rolling.

IV. CAMP OUT: Investigating reports of enemy scouts in the mountains, traveling along the roads to a neighboring city-state on a diplomatic errand, looking into reports of weird magic on the Wounded Coast, or heading north to provide some assistance to the war effort? All might require pitching a tent and bunking down for the night with your colleague, whether you like them or loathe them.

V. NORMAL NIGHT: If you’re already sharing a room or bed with someone, you don't need this post. But you can still use it for your nightmare threads.

VI. BETTER IDEA: Do whatever you want. Live your dreams.

Comments

[elegiaque]

The way Gwenaëlle regards her is —

not difficult to read, especially. There is a remove still there, a barrier that previously hadn't existed. That she's not simply got up and left — it's not as if she isn't prepared to just get up and leave, if she really doesn't want to have this conversation. If she really valued it so little, she'd not waste any of her breath on it, but it would be hard to look at her and think she envisions a warm outcome.

“I might have been overzealous,” is not an apology. She isn't incapable of apologising; doesn't like to, never enjoys it, but when she thinks it's warranted it's something that she'll do. Therein, perhaps, lies the lingering problem. “What I don't think any differently of is the fact that you had a problem, chose not to solve it, and thought complaining about it to me was going to get you anywhere but told to go and fucking solve it if you don't like it, then.”

(Herian might have warned her, if Herian were still here, how incredibly goddamned difficult it can be to be Gwenaëlle's friend.)

“If you don't want to share a bed with the person who stabbed you, you're perfectly capable of saying: this person fucking stabbed me, and while we have decided to put our differences aside to work together, I don't want to share a bed with her. If you're determined to spare her the disciplinary action, you can even lie about it and cite some assault before the rift. It's a problem completely within your power to solve and a completely fucking insane thing to think is casual workplace bitching. It's also completely fucking unacceptable behaviour on her part, and if she ever does it again and you don't report it I'll wait until we're assigned to close a rift together, line her up with the rift and a demon and swear I missed when I blast her back through it.”

Snapping the lap-desk shut, “I've been through a rift and I know exactly what's on the other side of it. Believe me.”

[armd]

"You think?" Abby mutters, maybe uncharitably, and promptly shuts up for Gwenaëlle's inevitable speech. She's started noticing that whenever she gets worked up she likes to overwhelm you with blunt opinion; her version of bludgeoning somebody to death. Abby is not one to die quietly but she fucking asked to talk, so she doesn't immediately object, or say something along the lines of have you never complained to a friend ever in your goddamn life. Even though she really, really wants to.

And Gwen is making a few good points. Notably the one about how loosely Abby speaks of violence. And the one where she makes it obvious that she cares. Enough to pretend to push Ellie Williams backward through a rift for her, anyways.

She's been holding her breath. She lets it out, with a sigh.

"Okay," she concedes. "I– look. We solved the stupid bed thing. I told her to fuck off and she took all the blankets, it evened out." Both parties were happy in the end. Abby because she got the bed to herself, and Ellie because Abby got gnawed on by mosquitoes all night after she left. "I shouldn't have said the other shit." It wasn't relevant. It was, as Gwen rightly pointed out, an insane thing to say without warning. "Nobody knows that it happened," she mutters, and looks at her knuckles, "I thought-"

... What, that she'd casually mention it to Gwen, and get some kind of 'wow, fuck her' response? She feels almost childish for ever having said anything. She frowns, and picks at a bit of skin on her thumb and says, "What do you mean you've been through a rift? When?"

[elegiaque]

The more passionate, the more words— it's not one of her most endearing traits, but it is one of the most predictably consistent. Gwenaëlle has never had an opinion she was prepared to say in five words if she might have fifty,

but having said them, she is satisfied. Whether it's resolved or not is neither here nor there, really, to the fact that when she's said what she wants to say she's finished with it, and in this instance that means when Abby asks about the rift thing it's an easy pivot to another subject she's still fucking mad about, years later.

“One of the single dumbest cunts I have ever had the misfortune in my life to cross paths with decided that instead of, for instance, making the absolute bare minimum of effort to find out that people physically going through rifts had happened twice before — perhaps looking at reports, inquiring with the people who study rifts, bothering to say 'who knows anything about rifts' on the crystals — she would, instead, take it upon herself to sabotage a mission to close a rift by launching herself head-first through it.”

The reason Gwenaëlle drew less attention to herself in Orlais, once upon a time, is because she talked almost never in public. She really has almost no subtlety in expressing herself whatsoever.

“We shouldn't have wasted the effort going after her, but since we did, I got to add myself to that illustrious list of people who've physically traversed the Fade. She thought it would take her home, because despite the fact we had several years of study she didn't think to ask anyone if that theory had been tested before, and personally I think we should have let her die there.”

[armd]

'Dumbest cunts' gets a low snicker out of Abby, her expression twitching briefly in amusement. She tries to imagine Gwen repeating what happened between the two of them in a similarly dramatic manner to somebody else but she can't, and that's when she realises she isn't truly fucked off with her. It's a relief, honestly.

... And it's also why she won't lead with saying she gets how that other rifter might have felt or that it doesn't feel like such a needlessly stupid thing to her at all. If she thinks about how desperate she was to find a way back when she first got here, it just clicks.

Abby sighs, and yawns. It makes her eyes tear up, she's really tired. They all are. "But you had to get her back," she concludes. Curiously, "Did it affect you at all? Going in there?"

[elegiaque]

The extremely flat look that question earns Abby is, in a way, an answer; of course it did. It was one of the worst experiences of Gwenaëlle's life, and she'd sooner punch Abby in the teeth and never speak to her again than address it — she'd been married, still, at the time. Thranduil had asked her, then, presuming that she would discuss it with him when she was ready,

he got to read the report, like everyone else, and other than citing it as an example of why many rifters are worthless sacks of shit, Gwenaëlle has never spoken of it. She's never discussed the experience, itself; today will not be the day she does.

“We didn't have to,” she corrects her, instead. “We chose to, which was a massive waste of time and resources and a mistake that I will never, under any circumstances, make twice. That kind of profound idiocy deserves what it gets.”

[armd]

If Abby could have been privy to any of that internal monologue, she would have told Gwenaëlle to stop being so fucking dramatic. Easily. Might have even added that she's far too quick to judge people, that she perceives a slight and lunges at it like a dog with jaws that lock and can't let go.

She didn't say it though, and their friendship remains delicately intact for another evening.

"It sounds like you didn't choose to," she remarks, which she thinks is a fair assumption considering. Sounds fucking awful, really. "But I'm glad you made it back."

A beat. Maybe this is part of the problem, that Gwen hasn't heard Abby say out loud: "I know that I can't go back. I'm not trying to find a way. I'm not gonna make anybody come into a Rift after me." Because if she was ever dumb enough to do something like that she would at least do it in secret, yeesh.

She adds, idly, "... I like it here. Riftwatch isn't so bad once you get to know you. No infected is just a bonus."

[elegiaque]

It's surprise that cuts through the very real irritation at the temerity of anyone asking directly about her experiencing an emotion—

“I wasn't worried about that,” she says, and maybe that is the most telling thing she could have said about the impact that going into the fade could have had on her: that she'd been so fixated, in discussing it the only way she ever does ("at Lakshmi's expense"), it hadn't occurred to her Abby might draw a line between the two situations, not when Gwenaëlle had thought of it in the context not of Abby so directly at all but an extremely reasonable consequence to inflict on someone if they hurt anyone she cares for.

(It might actually be overkill. She is, as Abby knows, fucking dramatic.)

“You're not an idiot. You understand the situation. I do know that.”

If she hadn't seen it as clearly, in the moment, it hadn't been because of Abby.

[armd]

That insistence gets a tired little huff out of her. Sounds like flat laughter. It seems like it would be a bad idea to lean over and allow her head to cushion on Gwenaëlle's shoulder, but for a moment Abby does consider it; she's so tired. Maybe it hurt to hear about the rifter who tried to get back home and messed everything up, just a little. Really it makes her feel homesick, which is stupid this late in the game.

"Okay," she says, like a sigh. She reaches up and knuckles her eyes. Blood has congealed in her mouth from where her teeth went in her lip and it's kind of gross but it's not the first time something like that has ever happened to her. She'll live.

"M' gonna go get a drink." Something to wash the taste out, "Want anything?"