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

[propulsion]

WHO: Tony Stark, Ellis, Gwenaëlle Baudin, Jude Adjei, Richard Gecko
WHAT: The Gang visit some wet forest to see why a rift-detecting vane is on the fritz.
WHEN: Mid-Solace
WHERE: Planasene Forest
NOTES: tba

Comments

[ophidia]

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.

[elegiaque]

“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.”

[propulsion]

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.

[ophidia]

"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.

[elegiaque]

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—”

[ophidia]

"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.