CLOSED: My How the Turns Tables

[katabasis]

WHO: Ellis, Richard v1.0, Glimmer, Abby, Edgard, Vanya, Richard v2.0, Fenris
WHAT: Riftwatch agents raid a Venatori survey encampment with the intent to capture a researcher or two in the hopes that they'll be able to glean information regarding Corypheus' plans for the Gates.
WHEN: Now-ish; whenever that makes sense.
WHERE: Northwest of Starkhaven, the Free Marches
NOTES: OOC information is available HERE at the sign-ups post. The objective/points pool spreadsheet with relevant instructions is located HERE and should be open to editing. Please include any necessary content warnings in your subject lines.

THE BRIEF
In addition to a mercilessly succinct in-person briefing, a copy of the following orders are also filed:

For Immediate Dispatch,

Selected members of Forces and Project Sashamiri are to proceed by griffon-back to the last known location of the Venatori survey group. Rough coordinates provided, may be readily corroborated by Fenris and Abby. You are to seek out their current position, and assess from a reasonable vantage the details and current state of their work.

Once your evaluation is complete, you are to make your way into the camp and there capture as many Venatori scholars (or similar) as you're able. Destruction of Venatori forces, equipment, and interests is preferable where possible.* Should it prove tactically advantageous, those with anchors are permitted to open rifts and are given license to leave them unsealed should closing them in relative security be implausible.

*In the margin, in Julius’s handwriting: In the case of any notes or diagrams, acquisition would be even better, but of course if there’s any doubt of success, destruction is a viable secondary option.

Captured Venatori agents are to be pressed for information relating to the Gates, including but not limited to: Corypheus' intentions, their number, their function, how they are activated, and suspected locations. Once their intelligence has been exhausted, you are given leave to tend to any captives in such a way as you believe befits their continued value to Riftwatch or her allies.

-J. Flint

If you do open any rifts and notice any odd phenomenon, please do try to remember to jot down any useful observations when you get a chance. Likewise, if you see any strange artifacts and are not able to retrieve them, notes (or sketches?) of them would be very much appreciated. Good luck.

- Julius

THE RAID
The targeted Venatori encampment is pitched in a scrubby, lightly wooded area above a ravine located Northwest of Starkhaven. The camp, which consists of the usual pitched tents and pack animal picket lines, seems to be the base of operations for an minor excavation effort occuring in the ravine itself. Careful observation, stealthy investigation, or the general chaos of the melee may reveal the following details:

• The camp sits alongside around a roughly built dam which is currently serving to divert the flow of a very minor tributary of the Minanter from the ravine into a muddy man-made spillway. This seems to have been done in order to lower the water level in the ravine and allow the researchers access to a small ruin there.
  
• Based on the state of the work in the ravine and the activity of the camp, it seems the researchers are primarily focused on recovering artifacts from the dig site. The spillway channel is being used to sift through materials brought up from the ravine. Trays of cleaned material are arranged on portable work tables under canopies, and a small collection of either field researchers or enslaved labor (hard to say which) are studiously picking through them.
  
• The camp's inhabitants consist primarily of Tevinter researchers (which may or may not be mages), some nondescript labor force (which may or may not be enslaved), and a subset of well-armed Tevinter soldiers (which also may or may not be mages and/or enslaved). There are enough people around that a straightforward assault into and out of the camp seems unlikely, but they're scattered enough between the various points of interest that diversions or stealth may be fruitful.
  
• During the day, the camp's inhabitants are scattered between their various work stations. At night, everyone beds down in their various tents or on bed rolls around low fires excepting the soldiers, who keep a watch rotation over the camp, and two bored sentries armed with signal horns posted at the ravine dig.
  
• The draft animals on the perimeter picket line consist mostly of stocky mules, fuzzy Free Marches horses, and two beefy druffalo. A fancy dracolisk is picketed separately within the camp itself.

Now comes the hard part.

Comments

[armd]

Abby, locking her jaw against the sudden, acrid impulse to vomit, tries to think of the whole thing like CPR, or packing a wound, even as the blood runs mercilessly out of her, a feeling compounded by not knowing what's going on right now, or what's about to happen either–

She jolts when Ellis' body restarts underneath of her hands, and draws that first, juddering breath.

"Holy shit!"

Like, what else is there to say? His skin is knitting together against the goddamn callouses on her palms. Lucky that Abby's legs feel like water or she might have got up and run away in response to the pounding of her own heart. Or at least to get a little distance in the event of a worst case scenario- instinctively, of course. There is history, there.

There is no muck on her hands, but she can feel the deep cuts at her elbows shift when she moves her arms, relenting the pressure. She eases back, from a corpse come to life.

[heorte]

Once, when Ellis was a younger man, someone attempted to cut his throat.

He had not died then, but the moments following the drag of a serrated blade in a sloppy slant across his throat had yielded the same sensations as the fall of a sword had today.

It had been a blessing then and a blessing now, when he had lost consciousness. (There had a been a moment today, just barely registering amidst the seizing, guttural gasping through spurts of blood, where Ellis had thought: It's over.) Partly a physical response, but partly simply the mind attempting to escape. There is such a thing as too much pain to bear.

Wherever he goes, it is dark and quiet. In the split second he occupies that space, a flow of faces come and go. Wysteria. Tony. Ruadh. Cathán and Adrasteia. Jone. Richard. Bastien.

Joppa. His parents. Shanae.

They don't anchor him. The sense of drifting, sinking, follows after. Ellis would be hard pressed to explain it, only that there had been something finite, and he was passing into it.

Everything shatters around a jolt, concussive pressure and light and searing heat that blows everything apart and grounds him, once more, in his body.

Pinned under three hands, in the dirt. Ellis drags in a labored breath, chokes once more on clotted blood, and gags. One hand gropes for leverage as he convulses, coughing, to one side.

[nonvenomous]

And also Thot is there, more goblin than cat, twisting warm and wet under Ellis’ arm, behind his ear, close enough to catch the brunt of that first cough full in the face. The rasp of her tongue crosses his nose, his chin.

“Onto his side,” Dickerson is ready to direct, already levering to assist with a push at the hip.

“Ellie seems to be very taken with your eyes,” he adds, helpfully, for Abby’s benefit -- this buzzard of a Rifter mage in blood-streaked armor helping her to roll the man they just brought back from the dead over onto his side so he doesn’t choke on his own gore. “She has several drawings of you in her room.”

Most of the business end of Ellis is on Abby’s end of their current arrangement; the best Richard can do is dig a reassuring grip in firm above his knee.

[armd]

Abby obeys. Nothing she could say right now would be more important than the sounds of Ellis choking himself back to life anyway. She helps to get him on his side, into an approximation of the recovery position– is it leg bent, or arm bent? Both? There's a lick of white noise in her ears like a roiling ocean, she's breathing quickly; Ellis, grasping mindlessly, skids a palm off her arm.

She's still bleeding. They're still in the middle of an active battle ground.

Abruptly, Dickerson's comment reaches her over the tide.

"What?"

She stares at him with huge eyes.

[heorte]

So turned, Ellis's coughing deepens, hacking. Independent of Thot, who will have to forgive Ellis' convulsions.

Gobs of dark, congealed blood spatter in the dirt.

His fingers gouge deep grooves into packed earth. Consciousness in this moment is akin to being dragged through shattered glass. It had been quiet only seconds ago, quiet and dark and weightless and now—

It hurts.

At some point, between Thot's tongue catching his cheek, and Abby's gasped What? Ellis' coughing shifts, becomes rapid, frantic gasps. He is in his body and out of it, disconnected from the hands on him and the tremors and the disjointed thudding of his heart. Fresh sweat breaks at the nape of his neck, along his temples. The taste of blood is overwhelming. There is noise and clattering and every time he tries to get a sense of what's happened, everything slips away from him.

As such, Richard is more or less free to impart any other tidbits about Abby's eyes and Ellie's opinions on them without interruption.

[nonvenomous]

“I’m not a trained artist but I am well-qualified to recognize the specificity of her fascination.”

What. The intimacy of this shared moment leaves little room for misunderstanding. He speaks clearly and is easy to hear in spite of Ellis retching between them, the volume of his voice raised just so.

He watches Abby, also, to see how this is landing, not quite morbidly curious.

There is Ellis’ flailing to consider; Dickerson has kept his hold all the while, an anchor that branches out to catch at the undead man’s elbow somewhere in his clawing. Thot too keeps close in the mud and the blood and the phlegm, more eel than cat. Warmer than the earth beneath them.

“You lost a great deal of blood, Mr. Ellis.” This is true. “We’ve routed the Venatori.”

[armd]

Ellis, without meaning to, moves and sounds like a stalker. He's very lucky Abby doesn't punch him for a seconds-long wet gasp of breath, or the feeble twitching of his body out of the corner of her eye. She's on edge. Dickerson won't get much of a reaction out of her other than blank confusion and gears visibly turning, her brow knitting together as she migrates a hand to the small of Ellis' back, ready to thump should he need it. This has the added benefit of keeping him on his side.

He is heaving below her palm, a fish out of water.

Hissed, to Dickerson, "Is there anything else we should do?"

Obviously she wants to do something more to help Ellis if she can, and she wants him to stop saying weird shit about Ellie right now thank you

[heorte]

These things come to him as if from a great distance:

Thot spindly limbs, fur wet-warm with blood. His name in Richard Dickerson's mouth. Abby's hand pressing down over his back. The metal-bite taste of blood, unshakeable. White noise roaring in his ears around the rest.

The pain is muted. Not gone.

Slowly, the absence of armor and helmet filters through to find him. A kite string of a realization that only propels a hand towards his throat. Thot is crushed slightly in the process, as the first press of fingers there over skin made whole again gives way to a clumsy, scraping chase after a vanished sensation. As if it might be dug out of him. (The ghost of a blade at his neck or the healing itself?) His breath doesn't steady.

[nonvenomous]

Richard sticks in those turning gears like a pipe, the pry of his gaze strangely static against the twisting of a man in the mud between them. His hands, also, are still. Prickly. Blood drying stiff through the silver grain at his ear. In his beard.

He breaks before she does, looking down to maneuver himself frog-legged over Ellis’ corpus back to front -- the better to tangle clawing fingers up at the slick of his throat before he can rip the seam open. He’ll find both of his hands if he can catch them, (”Please,”) one after the other, (”don’t.”) too bony and too fierce to feel particularly healerly.

The cat is no help at all; she winks out of existence in a flush of black smoke. Poof.

“He’s too fragile to withstand being forced into unconsciousness.”

Or even lightly electrocuted, as the thought had occurred to him previously. Unfortunate that these are the two only options available to two normal people helping a third very normal person.

“I can keep him alive until he remembers or exhausts himself.”

[armd]

The cat makes yellow eye contact seconds before vanishing— Abby blinks once, slow. Somehow it is the least weird thing to have happened today.

“Can he be carried?” Does she need to explain that she could? Dickerson is efficiently holding Ellis’ arms still with hands that are thin, so it wouldn’t be hard, and she could get him out of here. She could take him to a quieter place where he could get his bearings. He must be so fucking confused as to what happened to him that it hurts her, a sympathetic heart-clench.

[heorte]

His hands jerk in Richard's grasp. Once, twice. Not hard enough to break Silas' hold, though the potential of it is there. Stymied only by—

"No," is clipped. Unfocused. Truncated, whatever follows after severed. (No, no, no—) It breaks off on instinct, awareness split between the sensation of Silas' hands around his wrists and the echoing quality of Abby's voice. Both come to him muffled, dropped stones down to whatever part of him still tracks where they are, what his role is. Drags at that part, where it has burrowed and curled away from the present moment.

Wrenching that piece of himself to the forefront is slow-going. Gathering himself is akin to winding a vise tighter, crushing and compacting the sprawling, bloody mess of himself back into place. Locking all things away from view.

[nonvenomous]

Will he be carried?

Richard pitches the question back to her in a furrow of his brows and a quick review of her physique in opposition of Ellis’ writhing.

“Perhaps.”

He slithers his tongue through another quick healing spell, warmth numbed palm to wrist through his grip. Barely there, like getting one last good twist in on the tourniquet before he’s life-flighted out by Abby Anderson. Just in case.

There isn’t much for him to say in the transition -- helping hoist the Warden into Abby’s care -- save:

“I’m sorry.”