faderift | war table: how many riftwatchers does it take to change a lightbulb?

There's a point at which they have to forego the Pony Express, stabling their mounts at a semi-reliable hamlet to begin the much slower excursion into the marshy density of the Planasene Forest. There are probably parts of it that are beautiful, deep green wilderness, summertime butterflies, bursts of wildflowers. Those aren't these parts.

Terrain gives way to soft earth, thick moisture compressed to the surface under each careful boot. The trees are densely packed, making everything feel close, over-warm, over-oxygenated in a way more reminiscent of jungle than forest when it's the peak of summer like it is now. They do, however, provide shade, and rippling masses of roots both as bridges as well as tangling nets that make travel not completely miserable.

But it's a little miserable.

Insects swarming, biting, crawling. A plant-decay smell that comes and goes. Running into some half-dead thing in the bog that had no business being there. Water that is too shallow to have considered some kind of boat situation, too deep to escape thinking about the likelihood of leeches or creepy fish when making necessary crossings to dry(er) land.

It isn't directionless roaming. By the time the first day is closing up, the ground begins to stabilise. Real earth under their feet, trees spaced apart by some measure, running rivers with stones to traverse, locating territory on a map that makes camping viable by the time darkness is beginning to seep through the canopy. The beginning of a sunset renders a frankly lovely lake in tones of amber and silver, although you ought not to trust the half-rotted pier that was built who knows how long ago.

It'll be back into the gross wetness, come sun up, but for this evening, there is a campfire, there are rations or fresh game bird if anyone is feeling feisty, and Tony has also brought a small silver flask filled with something potent enough to be worth the bringing.

Jude absolutely fucking terrifies the horses. It's just his presence; being near him has them rolling their eyes back, stamping, dancing sideways, like they're sure he's about to leap at them and tear their throats out. He doesn't even try to come near them the first day -- instead he cheerfully says that he's never minded travel on foot.

And then he shifts into an Fuckoff Enormous black wolf, and takes the opportunity to scout ahead of the party. He returns when they're on foot, keeping to wolf form much of the time, though he sometimes returns to pace them companionably. Despite the heat of fur it's useful for keeping the insects away. He's faster than those with two legs, so he ranges afar, scenting for potential dangers and helping guide the party through safer pathways for their feet.

When they break camp, Jude personally delivers one of the game birds, trotting into camp with it in his fanged mouth. He drops it by the fire, and shifts back to human near-directly into a pair of trousers, followed quickly by a long-sleeved shirt in defense of bugs.

"Used to think the sunset over Yellowstone couldn't be beat," he says warmly, gesturing towards the stunning view.

"Glad you're having a nice time, Bolto."

It doesn't take Thedas alone for Tony to be inoculated against weird shit. Spend a week working on a time heist with a raccoon and you find yourself adapting to just about anything. Jude Adjei says he can turn into a wolf, and Tony believes him. He'd underestimated how frankly useful that would be, making a note to himself on taking the dog out during field work.

Anyway. Tony says this where he's sat by the fire, crouched in place and building it up, and his tone isn't derisive. Maybe he is glad he's having a nice time, and he flicks a glance to the lake. Sure. Nature. He picks up the game bird by the corner of a wing, and leans to simply place it down further away from him for someone to deal with.

He asks, "Lot of werewolf weekends in Wyoming?"

"Balto," Jude corrects him with a sideways smile, watching how he handles the bird. When he doesn't, Jude shakes his head lightly and takes it in his hands, plucking out the feathers like he's done it plenty of times.

"And not a werewolf, even if those legends are based on wolf shifters."

He lightly flicks a few feathers Tony's way.

"I live there full time. Makes me biased. You ever been, or you prefer the city?"

"White Fang?"

We have now exhausted Tony's reservoir of famous wolf references. Maybe. There could be more. (There are more.)

He subtly leans away when nasty feathers are flicked his direction, but makes no complaint as he feeds more twigs and curls of bark into the flames. At least he's not handling carcasses, and can achieve this one little outdoorsy thing. "1981," he says. "Family vacation. Dad spent most of the time on the phone, mom was allergic to just about everything."

No forlorn childhood bitterness, here, just dry humour as if this implies his own relationship with nature. "Couple of cities. New York mostly, but settled upstate. Cabin, lake. Trees," he confirms. "I saw them."

He sits back on his haunches some, dusting dirt and misc tree crap off his palms. "It's nice."

"Both of those are dogs," Jude says patiently, but his smile's wide, a light in his eyes that says he's waiting for the next one, when he thinks of it. Whether it's in a few minutes, or a few years.

He notices that Tony doesn't talk about what he did. But he remembers the year they went.

"You settled down in a cabin in upstate New York?" Jude repeats, his voice settling into something quieter, curious. Those things don't add up, but there could be a lot of reasons why, and he's not outright asking why, just leaving him the room.

"I've been visiting up there. Big change from New York City."

"Toto. Benji. Otis?" Tony queries, hands spreading, and then transitioning into a sit in the dirt. "Of Milo and Otis fame."

Fucked up that they have all these famous wolves in common and he has yet to meet an Earth stranger who has ever heard of Stark Industries, as an aside.

"We needed it," he says, back on topic. There's a glance up and aside, conscious of people he knows around. Ellis the most and Gwenaëlle a little bit, specifically, but they appear to be out of immediate earshot, so he goes and says, "Me and the missus. We had our daughter, decided on a different kind of speed for a while."

A jolt of a shrug. "It wasn't what you'd call primitive, but it was quiet. Maybe you'd have liked town. Lot of wolf walking culture, you'd be surprised."

Yes, out of immediate earshot.

Though Ellis is near-finished preparing the brace of rabbits he'd caught and clearly means to roast for dinner, so eventually he'll be drifting towards the fire to proceed with that. In the moment, he lifts his head to sweep around the clearing, mark everyone's place, then return to his work.

"You just keep getting colder."

Jude notices Ellis, stacking his feathers as he keeps up his conversation with Tony, but when he unloads the spits for the meat from one of the bags, he makes sure to take enough out for Ellis' rabbits, too.

Jude doesn't comment aloud on the revelation of Tony's daughter, but by the way his eyes move to his face, it's given him pause. It's not pity by any means but it contextualizes a few things. Jude is far from the only one with family worlds away.

"Wolf-walking culture?" he asks, skeptically, looking like he wants to laugh, but yeah, he's very much enjoying himself. "What else about your world should I know?"

"Well," Tony says. "To my knowledge we don't have werewolves, or," his open hands gesturing to Jude, "shifters, but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if we did. We got about everything else. Some of it's from space."

He tracks Jude's glance on a delay, clocking Ellis. "Looks like we got Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail on the menu. Good catch," a little louder, then back to conversational volume. "We don't say it, but it's crucial to get someone who can wrangle something to eat on one of these things, unless you want extremely colonically brutal outcakes for a week. I guess that's not an issue for you.

"Do you have pizza? In your world, not here." He talks, just, so fast.

Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail is an assortment of words taken in stride. No follow up question, only a small, brief smile flashed up at Tony before Ellis returns to the business of attaching his catch to their designated spits.

It's a reference. Tony will clarify if he needs to.

And Ellis perhaps knows better than to distract from the topic of pizza.

Jude's expression pinches at werewolf, but Tony corrects himself, and he favors him with a smile. He likes the way he teases, gently biting. It's exactly the kind of teasing he's used to.

Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail get a snicker under his breath, and reaches for a knife from his pack, guts the bird- (sorry, gross) and wraps it with string.

"You bet we have pizza," he says with a grin that melts into a dreamy look. "Been a while since I've made one but I bet we can come up with the ingredients, back at the Gallows."

Jude glances at Ellis.

"Do y'all not know about pizza, here?"

"They do not. Or like—"

Vague gesture.

"One of the cooks back home knows about some grilled flatbread thing, but it's just not—you know what I mean. Anyway, I built an oven, figured out a decent dough formula,"

and here is a little bit of rambling about what a process that was, like sure he could probably rig up a functional electrical grid if he had the funding, but who carries around a pizza dough recipe in their heads when they bamf into Oz,

"But I think we've nailed it. It's good, right?" to Ellis.

And to Jude, "I bet old timey forests are pretty much the same as modern ones. Maybe this isn't the biggest leap for you." He seems so chill, around the stage at which Tony was pretty well into his second nervous breakdown, give or take a week or two.

Tony isn't so far off the mark. Fortunately, Jude's good at compartmentalizing, and work is therapy, right? Right? So healthy of him and not avoidant at all.

"Wouldn't go that far," he says, forgetting and licking a bit of blood off his finger.

"One of our pack-owned assets is a modular home engineering firm. We have a small complex commissioned, takes advantage of the heated pools in the park for power and warmth. Some of us are fine with sleeping in fur, but the elders and pups need a warm, dry place to bed down in. Then there's the greenhouse, kitchen, dining, apothecary."

Jude shrugs. "Place for the big-screen TV and the popcorn machine. Y'know, movie nights."

It looks like a clocktower, rising from the middle of a scrap of solid land. Its foundations are rudimentary stone and heavy wood to keep is solidly planted, and then twenty feet in the air, the mechanism itself, a cubic shape of metal inscribed in runes, precise clockwork gears, and an arrow shaped vane that they find turning to and fro.

At the base of the tower is an access panel, which is where Tony goes immediately, before sighing and using a rope and harness and a discreet couple of hooks up top to haul himself up—with Ellis as designated spotter and rope-holder.

"There were some defensive enchantments installed," he's explaining from up high, using a screwdriver to loosen one of the faces of the vane. "But I don't know, they're not working. And I don't see any damage. Hey, see that? Grab that," is to Gecko, pointing towards the thaumoscope lying next to an open kit of tools.

Besides this little hill of dry terrain, the area if dense with trees that droop and dangle, and pools of murky water with flying insects hovering above the surface. Gnarled roots make for good means of avoiding the worst of the wetness, especially when it's difficult to tell if a puddle will only reach as far as your ankle, or if suddenly you're ass deep in muck and trying not to faceplant the rest of the way. Probing sticks and some caution do a lot of heavylifting.

The other two Forces members have been directed to keep eyes out, whether wolf-shaped or not. To canine senses, the place just smells powerfully of tree-death, life, bugs, and water, and then—something else. Dead things out here isn't a surprise, slow decay and waterlogged rot sometimes snagging on the wind, but this is sharper. Bloodied, if not freshly so. But most importantly, human.

It's at that same time that Gwenaëlle is moving to cover more periphery, and she spies movement. A ripple the water, several feet ahead. And then stillness.

The only thing worse than seeing movement is not seeing it, immediately afterwards, and Gwenaëlle's immediate instinct is to shoulder her bow and look for a better vantage point. Like the cats with whom she shares a mercurial temperament and tendency to claw at whatever's near her, up a tree is not an infrequent solution to her problems even when not encouraged so by damp muck and unreliable ground,

given the way this place is going, relying on the trees not to be riddled with traitorous rot seems like nearly so much a gamble, but she takes it and darts up onto the thickest part of a meandering tree, loosing her weapon when she feels secure against the trunk and searching for any tell-tale ripples.

“Stark,” she says, her voice carrying purposefully to the rest of them as well, “there's something in the water.”

Probably there's loads of things in the water, but there's a scarred chunk out of her upper thigh that speaks to some experience with swamps turning nasty.

If it's possible for an extremely large wolf to get low, he is. Jude is slowly flexing his paws on the earth, reaching out and out and out, listening with the senses he no longer has, just on the off-chance that something brushes up against his sentinel wavelengths.

Gwen sees the rippling first, and Jude flicks one ear back at her voice, easing closer to the base of her tree, marking where each of the others are. Head down, ears back, hackles raised.

A low, rumbling growl starts deep in his chest, a predator's warning.

There's enough going on with the vane and Tony's borderline mad-scientist explanations for Richard to focus on, especially seeing as he'd really like to not be focussing on the swamp around him. Turned out humidity and damp didn't suit him. Who could've figured.

He has the indicated that in his hand when the warning's voiced, and his attention has to turn hard to scan over the water. Nothing immediately obvious, but then, he's not the scout in the tree or the wolf. But there's a feeling at the back of his neck that he does not like. He glances at Ellis, upwards at Tony.

"Any room up there for company?"

Height seems like it could be a good option.

Charged with managing the rope, Ellis cannot immediately reach for his mace. Whatever is provoking Jude, Ellis can't see it, but he is immediately uncomfortable with his present position.

The choice between having to drop the rope and possibly Tony versus something lurching up out of the water at them and being caught without a weapon—

Two terrible choices, frankly.

"Where did you see it?" is pitched to Gwen, rope held taut in Ellis' hands.

"You wanna narrow it down?" Tony asks, vis-à-vis Gwen's statement, not turning to look from what he's doing immediately. Metal tool in hand, jabbing at the insides of the vane. "Like, romance? Dancing fever?" Ping, some metal thing inside releases, and he flips it over in his hands. "Dysentery?"

But then the wolf growls, and Richard says that, and Ellis also says that, and Tony twists enough to look over at where Gwenaëlle has scampered up a tree, suddenly serious. Even from here, and certainly from where Jude and Gwenaëlle are posted, another ripple, this time further away from solid ground, movement disturbing the murk.

"Okay," he says, tugging on the rope to signal to Ellis. "Ground floor, please."

Maybe staying up here is the better prospect, but not when the guy holding the rope probably needs to go do his secondary job.

And then, the water churns, something beneath the surface moving at rapid speed, before it breaks, rising out. One foot, five feet, ten, the alligator powers itself in a vertical leap out from the lake with a strong thrash of its tail, maw open wide towards where Gwenaëlle is sitting in the tree. Its yellow eyes, gleaming, and an odd, greenish light clinging to its scales.

Massive jaws clamp and sink teeth into wet, frail wood, and holds on as gravity drags the alligator back down. And the branch, easily pulled into wet splinters and shards along with it. And Gwenaëlle, whose catlike grace doesn't catch her in time before she hits the water, churning with reptile.

None of these questions get an answer, but to be fair: the answer is quite clear, as Gwenaëlle plummets through the air into the murky, awful water. Probably she saw it quite close to where she's just landed, altogether too fucking close to a thing that has just demonstrated physical power she certainly does not have herself—

for a moment, it's impossible to tell where in the churning waters is Gwenaëlle, hitting the water with such force as to drive her dangerously deep, but the self-preservation instinct that Coupe had worked so hard to instill in her, along with the muscle memory to act upon it, means she reacts fast before she's regained enough of her rattled senses to think about what she's doing. The water lights up with a sick green glow from beneath as she launches her anchor's shield around herself, clearly telegraphing her location.

And to the alligator.

Jude gnashes his teeth as the creature takes out the branch, and Gwen goes straight into the water with the thrashing beast.

It smells wrong. Not of rot, but of something uncannily like an alligator, but not. And currently, it's attacking one of the people he's circled, protected, gained the scent of.

Thousands of years of evolution make him ferociously defensive of pack.

Jude leaps into the water, heading fangs-first for the blighted alligator. He's huge and strong, and on land he'd be a more than formidable match against plenty of dangerous things in Thedas. In the water, though-

He's going to need help. Even the most powerful of shifters still needs to breathe.

The situation descends from concerning to a major fucking mess at a speed Richard only sees around predators. Granted, the predators in question are usually culebra, but the point remains. He's also usually suitably armed, and it occurs that all the weapons he'd resentfully turned his nose up at in the armoury for not being guns might actually be perfect for dealing with a fucking alligator.

Hindsight. It's not going to help them now, and while he knows the less people in the water the better, he also knows one just leapt in while the other dropped with enough force to have maybe knocked herself out. Between wolf or woman, it's a pretty easy decision to make.

The thaumoscope is dropped unceremoniously, his cloak shrugged off somewhere on the way down to the water. Then he's diving in, headed directly for the green glow where Gwenaëlle dropped.

Having obliged Tony by returning him to ground, Ellis is free to pivot towards the churn of water.

There is a moment's pause where Ellis looks back to Tony. Maybe slightly apologetic. But it is a foregone conclusion. Satisfied only one person need tend to Gwenaëlle, Ellis and the knife he pulls from his boot plunge after Jude.

One might hope that Gwen's anchor provides enough light for him to see by. Ellis is just a Warden, and has no particular gift for seeing underwater in a swamp.

Ellis looks at Tony. Tony looks at Ellis, spreading his arms helplessly. Come on man.

And there he goes.

The water is thick, dark, kind of uncomfortably warm. Where Gwenaëlle has impacted the water and suspended, she might see (only barely) through the confusion the way a massive set of jaws opens and grates across the flash of green barrier, repelled backwards. The barrier fades, leaving behind the fairy-light glimmer of green in her palm.

Jude lands, attacks, fangs and claws on thick but not impenetrable hide. Around his muzzle drifts blood, and a flicker of green energy, lifting off the surface of scales, Fade-touched and made all the tougher for it. The alligator thrashes, suddenly, a big churn of muscled tail that thrashes mud up from the surface. Unless Jude disengages, he will be pushed under even deeper as the alligator rolls with more speed and grace that something so large and prehistoric has a right to.

The mud clouds, for a moment, Richard's vision, but there, the wink of green crackling from Gwenaëlle's open palm, and for a moment, spared the alligator's attention as wolf and a guy with a knife occupy its focus.

Ellis plunges, sees, for a moment, the pale belly of the alligator, as the tail comes around to slam into him.

Instinctively, in that split second, Ellis follows the only instinct he has and drives a knife into that belly. Or attempts to. How successful he is in this stabbing is guesswork in the murky water.

Either way, the knife isn't in his hand after the impact of that tail sends him skidding through the water.

The force with which Gwenaëlle hit the water was enough to have winded her, knocking her breath from her lungs as she sank, which is— under the circumstances, less than fucking ideal. The barrier does its job, just, and she is left disoriented and battered in a new direction as the force of the alligator's motion causes the rush of water around and against her, sending her spinning with the slow drag of heavy leather pulling against momentum.

She can't see a goddamn thing and she can't breathe and when Richard reaches her she's struggling free of her coat, trying to figure out which direction is up.

The blood that fills his mouth tastes of the Fade, cutting even through the acrid taste of the water.

Jude's wolf isn't a dominant, crazed and driven with the need to protect, and he's not a youngster to fight with only half of his mind. Wolf and man align here. Though he wants to lock his jaw and ride the beast, he instead pushes all four paws to the tough hide, digging in all of his claws, like he'd rend the belly of an ungulate, and gives a powerful, tearing push.

He comes up, snarls air in time to see Ellis go skipping across the surface- and with no time to waste, he dives again, knowing he'll have only a limited opening for another attack.

If it's at all interested in going after any of the others, Jude is about to remind the gator why he should be the center of it's attention.

Gwenaëlle is a churn of green light and limbs and fabric when Richard gets to her, none of it good. Panicking in water was dangerous enough, but even more so when you were trying to get away from a predator. He deliberately doesn't look over his shoulder to see how well that part of the situation is going.

Instead he grabs for the first part of her he can reach, hoping for a wrist or a shoulder but getting only a handful of coat. It's enough at least to try and anchor her movement for a moment, make some attempt to find her face, get her oriented so he can get her to the surface.

And if that isn't quick enough, he'll just use it to drag her up, as the thought occurs dully that he doesn't know if culebra can drown.

So that happened.

The vane is repaired after an hour or two of careful tinkering. Tony had carted along several replacement parts, and when the last one is hammered into place, runic engravings light up with a flare of glowing green, and although their readings indicate that this section of the forest is rife with Veil weakness, there doesn't appear to be any active rifts open.

But the job isn't completely done, between determining the cause of the vane (a magical dispelment of some kind, some evidence of tampering) and the scent of old blood on the air that tingles at Jude's senses.

Not far from the vane, this scent leads to the remains of a campsite. The hum of flies grows in crescendo as they near, until it becomes a constant, fierce whine.

Here, on solid ground, are a few partially collapsed tents that hang limply from low branches, and an old firepit, now sodden from recent rainfall, marks the centre of the site. Next to it, facedown, is a leather-bound journal.

The bigger of the tents could have accompanied several people, housing a tipped over writing desk, an undisturbed light-weight chest, and a cot that has half-collapsed, two of the legs shattered with dark blood staining the bedding, and errant pieces of loose leaf parchment scattered around it.

A little further away, leading bloody tracks that drag in the mud, the buzzing flies swarm and congregate over a slumped over form smelling of death.

So, this slumped over form is disgusting.

But Ellis' expression remains neutral as he crouches beside the corpse. Not touching with his hands, but carefully using the hilt of his dagger to prod at what might be a face. There is a lot of mud to contend with.

He has been careful not to disturb the tracks.

Jude stayed furry as he caught the unmistakable scent of blood and death, something that's disturbing similar in any world. He shifts long enough to inform the others, and once the vane is cleared, he shifts back to lead them along the trail.

The swamp obliterates some scents, preserves others.

Unfortunately, this scent is as easy to follow as a spotlight at night.

As they come closer to the source, Jude shifts back into skin. He's covered himself with a cloak as they approach the scene of whatever pocket of hell happened here.

He watches Ellis approach the corpse, and goes instead to the cot, where it looks like the attack began. He breathes deeply, straining to catch more than the scent of blood and death, his eyes tinged with yellow.

Stooping down, he carefully picks up the pieces of loose leaf parchment, easing them up from the mud, blood and filth as gently as he can. Looks over the papers, looking for anything familiar.

"One of ours?" he asks, his voice appropriately solemn. Even if they're not...

The corpse is somewhat easily nudged, loose in its skin. The face is difficult to identify, to put it delicately, and has been here for some time in an environment rich with feeding life. What there is to tell of it is not recognisable, anyway.

But through the mud, looking it over, glints of armor and fabric have held up better in all the muck and humidity. Familiar colours, patterns, a high collar and a golden chain of decoration. By now, Ellis has seen enough dead Venatori to know what they might look like.

It missing a leg, the torn stump of it sunk into gory mud. One outstretched arm, as though in mid-crawl.

The pages in Jude's hands are made of decently sturdy stuff, if still delicate with how long its had to soak. Just visible, where the lines of ink and charcoal run thickest, are diagrams, showing machinery, clockwork-like, alongside little annotations marking up the pages, difficult to read in this condition. Eventually, one of the pages shows an outline that is more recognisably the exterior of the vane they'd just left behind.

"No," Ellis answers. Staid, even in the midst of this examination. "Venatori. You might see if there is any sign he had fellows who abandoned him to this fate."

It must have been a terrible death.

But more practically, if there were others, they might have carried their information away with them. Whatever their purpose was here.

"Not ours," Jude agrees, looking over the papers. "They were studying our equipment. Probably attacked by something that came out of the Rift."

Ellis is the closest to him, so he carefully hands over the wet parchment to punctuate his findings.

"They were attacked in bed. Doesn't look like they posted a watch, so they might've been alone. I'll make sure."

Jude turns away and shifts, padding back into the tent. If there was more than one person, there will be scent trails in here. He puts his nose to the ground, tracking towards the writing desk, paying attention to the bloodstains. He searches for the scent of any humanoids occupying the tent, and the scent of whatever attacked.

He leaves the chest; Ellis has the opposable thumbs at present.

"Hey Fido, what you got."

Tony follows along after, and this line is less bright and cheery than how it reads. Distracted, quiet, scanning around, sunglasses dipped low on his nose as he steps enters the tent. Bloodied and abandoned, no sign of anyone else. The stains themselves, to Jude's nose and senses, speak of an attack of someone caught in bed, dragged away, of struggle.

The writing desk, collapsible and transportable, knocked over, is surrounded by writing tools, spilled ink and scattered quills, and a curl of a scroll, only half-filled with writing.

Jude sniffs over the rumpled, bloodstained sheets to make sure there's no trace of anything but the dead Venatori, cocking one ear back at Tony's query. He pauses in his sniffing to huff, apparently in response, then pads over to nose at the curl of a scroll.

This one seems mostly intact, away from the rain and the blood.

He doesn't take it in his mouth -- wolf saliva won't help with the legibility, but he paws at the air above it to point it out, then tilts his head to read over what's visible.

Leaving the corpse, Ellis rises and trails along in Tony's wake. One hand drifts to the hilt of his mace, though there is no visible threat.

When he crouches, just outside the tent, it's not the scroll he reaches for but the scattered detritus of the writing desk. A brief trailing of his fingertips over the broken and discarded items, as if taking stock.

"They were interrupted."

Or attacked. Same difference.

Creak. Tony, opening the light-weight chest, evaluating the contents in the time it takes for Jude to set his eyes on the writing on the scroll.

It is addressed to someone, first, the name 'Volaris' at the top of the letter, addressed plain but apparently respectfully. The rest beneath it is a formal report, noting that whoever held the pen hoped that the recipient had received the diagrams of the rift-detecting device's inner-workings, and if he hadn't, it could be anticipated soon.

It goes into a more enthusiastic if general description of how promising these discoveries could prove to be, specifically the way in which this technology might "revolutionise Ascalon's subject-collection process", and before it can continue—

Nothing. A smear of ink, as if the pen had dragged across the page, before it had fallen.

It's about that time that the scents of inside the tent register in Jude's mind. Reptilian swamp-stink beneath the blood. An alligator had come through here, whether as a part of an attack or cleaning up the leftovers, but no other strange scents register.

As Ellis sifts through the detritus, he'll turn over a few pages that show some sketches of local flora and fauna, including charming depictions of a hatching of baby alligators.

Jude shifts, inside the tent and behind Tony's back. It's kind of horrific to see close up, but there's debate on whether it's worse to hear, and he's within earshot of them both. The wet breaking and re-forming of bones.

Sorry, folks.

Jude shrugs back into the cloak he wears purely for the sensibility of his companions.

"The whole mess smells like Fade-gator," he reports. It puzzles him that the creature didn't bother to eat, then again, the alligator they'd run into earlier had been more interested in violence than survival.

"No other people, no other beasts."

But even those words are distracted as he picks up the scroll, taking a few seconds to absorb the contents.

"... he sent diagrams of the VANE to someone called Volaris. Hopes it'll help with 'subject-collection in Ascalon'."

None of those things sound particularly promising. "Volaris? Ascalon? Any of those ringing a bell for anybody?"

The smell of old blood and of nearby decomposing flesh was unmistakeable, and while that was definitely the locus of what happened here, the dead also don't go anywhere. Paper and similar, that was more at risk from the elements, and it's the leather-bound journal that Richard spots as needing more immediate rescue.

He picks it up with light fingers, flipping it quickly to examine how badly its time face down on wet earth may have damaged it.

Edited (space) 2022-08-13 23:32 (UTC)

At his elbow, Gwenaëlle, “Here,” shaking out what looks suspiciously like an embroidered handkerchief, “if we separate the pages and press them— we could dry it out properly by a fire, but in the meantime,” just to see how much ink hasn't run, if it's salvageable at all.

Face down in a swamp isn't great odds, but there've been worse they've made something of.

The book is about what you might expect, sodden pages full of bleeding ink where outright muck hasn't simply stained the pages to obscurity.

In the haste of whoever had been gripping it, the book must have tumbled in such a way that the back half of pages are the least damage, if still wet through, with first half mostly ruined. There are a fair few blank pages towards the end, as well, indicating that this thing appears to be a written diary rather than a printed book.

The offered handkerchief is taken, glanced at briefly before it's pressed between the immediate open pages.

"Think we'll need a few more hankies."

But he does as she's suggested until it's apparent the cloth won't take any more moisture, handing it back to her as he examines one of the more intact pages he's come across.

"Looks like a journal." Not the kind of thing people weren't careful with, usually, and he glances up from the pages to the firepit, the ground where he'd picked it up from. "Someone was in a hurry."

Question was if that someone was the body the others were checking out, or if there'd been more than one in this camp.

“If we dry as much as we can with fabric,” wringing out the handkerchief in a gesture that seems more habitual than with any real intent not to almost certainly burn it, “we can hang it by its spine not too near a fire, it'll dry.”

A little doubtful— there might still not be much to salvage— but at least it's a minimal potential waste of time, and likely valuable if there's anything in there they can read once it's dried again.

(Gwenaëlle is a poet and occasional problem drinker; she has absolutely had to dry out books before, albeit not from swamps and not recently.)

Casting a look around them, at his last remark, she notes: “We've never been the only people interested in rifters.”

The page he studies is mottled in mud, but a scrap of writing reads,

ve erected in fields of Veil instability. It is now apparent that these towers do not directly influence that stability, so it holds that it is a system of monitoring the potentiality of Veil-tears/rifts for the pur

before the ink begins to run and disperse into nothing.

A few pages over, another fragment of writing reads,

rtainly be replicated for my other projects. A note: how far a field does its detection extend? Presumably further mapping will illumin

And so on.

"Rifts always equal rifters?" Raised eyebrows, lifting the journal to show the last legible line to Gwenaëlle, finger pointing at it in highlight. "Cause someone's been trying to copy our homework."

There'd been the vague sense that he and Seth were lucky to fall out of the sky in Riftwatch's neck of the woods, rather than further north, but landing in the hands of someone who might've been more interested in going alien autopsy on them was starting to occur as a far more pressing possibility.

She leans to read it, a frowning pulling down the corners of her mouth as she says, “No, they don't. I think that's part of what these are for,” with a vague gesture encompassing Tony's work, the detection vane, “the Inquisition originally had to rely on Solas to predict rifts opening and go and check them for you lot, before he fucked off to cause problems and Stark built the vanes.”

Certainly be replicated. Well, that's not good.

“Venatori have always wanted to get their grubby hands on anchor-shards. If they start beating us to rifts—”

"Building their own, mapping the ones we've got." He glances up, over towards the vane. The tampering that had damaged it might have been clumsy examination for this researcher's purposes, or it could have been intentional sabotage. That'd be the next step after figuring out how to track rifts themselves - slowing down the competition.

"If they don't have any shards yet, they will soon." And the people attached to them.

war table: how many riftwatchers does it take to change a lightbulb?

travel mingle.

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slides in on socks

the vane site.

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sneaks in quick

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csi: free marches.

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mea culpa, i lost track of this notif

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