faderift | I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Open)

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I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Open)

WHO: Cosima Niehaus, any Riftwatch personnel who have not been banished from the Gallows
WHAT: A chill birthday/dance party
WHEN: ~~March~~ Drakonis 9, evening
WHERE: Fourth floor of the former mage tower

If they weren't hosting company, there probably would have been a sign or two. Cosima is not, however, entirely clear what the Chantry thinks of dancing. As it is, Cosima makes a point to tell those she's friendly with, as well as the entirety of the Research Division; she also makes it clear they should feel free to spread the word, that any Riftwatch agents who want to stop in are more than welcome. That word is: A quiet party with dancing, Drakonis 9, a couple hours after dinner.

Arrival

As Cosima currently has the fourth floor to herself, she hasn't set up in her own room, but rather the one across the way. She's pushed the furniture toward the edges of the room to make a larger dance floor and requisitioned some plates and cups (that she has promised very seriously to return all of). She has placed her approximation of an iPod shuffle in a bowl to attempt to amplify its sound a bit, and it's jauntily playing whatever random song it has decided to play at the moment. There are no real decorations to speak of, but she's thrown some extra cushions on the beds to encourage their use as makeshift couches.

For refreshments, she encouraged people to bring anything they wanted, but she's provided a good quantity of wine and one unfancy but large lemon cake. These she's purchased with her own funds, rather than begged from the kitchen.

The party is late enough that anyone other than those on particular assignments (or guard duty) should be done with work. The music is unlikely to get especially loud under the circumstances, and Cosima isn't looking to throw a rager anyway. She mainly wants to rope some people into dancing with her, and she's not going to be put off by claims of being bad at it. Those who arrive early are especially vulnerable to being grabbed by the hand and given a good-natured tug.

Later

For those who stay late (or arrive late), things chill out in the early hours. In addition to the wine, there's some smoking, and Cosima is inclined to conversation, curled up on one of the beds pushed against the wall. The music is still playing, but someone needed the bowl for something else, so it's necessarily even softer; the candles have burned down, giving the room a warmer glow.

If someone seems hesitant to come join her, Cosima's quick to wave them over with a languid loop of her arm, unwilling to see anyone left out even as things get mellow.

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Not supposed to catches Cosima's ear, and she's curious, but also aware that some of the potential answers to why are unpleasant enough not to dive into here and now. Instead, she says, "Hey, that's cool. Five years in Thedas, I try not to take too much stuff for granted. But anyway, the books were one of the weirder-but-not-bad things to happen to me here. It's nice when surprises can be that and not, like, surprise invasions or new mysterious illnesses or whatever."

Clarisse grins, shrugs a shoulder. "I haven't experienced too much Thedas weirdness yet, but there have definitely been some not-bad things about living here."

Look, if someone gave her the chance right now to go back home, she's not saying it wouldn't be tempting, but... Now there are complications.

"Yeah? You up for sharing a for instance?" It's kindly and lightly asked, clearly meant to give Clarisse an out if she'd prefer to say something general or change the subject entirely. At the same time, Cosima does look genuinely interested.

"There's legal weed here," is Clarisse's immediate first reaction, because back at UofA that shit was abundant but definitely not anything you could just walk around with.

"And honestly, this war stuff beats having to go to class and study," she admits. "And... I'm dating somebody. It's pretty new." She shrugs, like she's just along for the ride and not utterly smitten or anything, but her smile is kinda giving her away. "Still fun."

"On your first point, I have good news about 2016 California," she says, with a small grin. "But hey, that's great. I'm glad you found someone, that always makes a place feel more comfortable. For me, anyway."

She has a small pang, with Herian so close to the surface of her thoughts, but it doesn't show on her face and it passes quickly.

"Fun's a great way to approach early days, I think. See where things go." An invitation to expand without making her dodge a direct question she doesn't want to answer.

"Really happy for the citizens of 2016 California." But even if Clarisse could get back home, she'd be like four years behind and in the wrong state.

"It is a lot of fun. But it's also kind of intense?" she admits, after a few seconds. "I think just because of everything going on." The whole... war of it all. "We've gone on a couple missions together, and that whole thing at Starkhaven? And I guess I'm trying to figure out how I should be around her when we're doing that kind of dangerous shit."

Man, it's complicated. Also probably a weird conversation to be having at your birthday party, sorry, Cosima. Clarisse at least has the decency to look embarrassed as she sips her wine.

"I know what you mean about the intense thing," is a little softer, but not without warmth. If it's a weird conversation, it doesn't seem to bother Cosima. "Everything's kind of heightened when you're risking your lives all the time, which doesn't even mention the weirdness of rifters knowing we could just vanish. Though I guess it's, like, only existentially weirder than dying, it's effectively that you're gone without warning either way. But it's ... we don't really do anything, as an organization, when rifters vanish, which makes it hard."

At least if you die, you get a funeral.

"Sorry, back to kind of a bummer. But I'm glad you found someone, and I think if it's intense because of what's going on, probably the best thing is just to be honest. It's probably intense for her too, you know?"

Clarisse blows air between her lips, looking alarmed. She'd been more concerned with trying to balance romance and beating the shit out of monsters, but... Yep, that's a new, distressing thought. Both dying and disappearing into the ether, or whatever happens when rifters vanish.

Gross.

"Right," she says, after a pause. "I can be honest." Probably.

"I mean," with a bit of sympathy, "I've definitely been told I get too intense too fast before, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. I'm sure you'll figure it out, it's just kind of a situation there's not a lot of precedent for, you know?"

They're all just working it out as they go, especially the rifters.

"And hey, I'm all for focusing on the not-bad parts about living in Thedas. I think it helps. I've seen rifters who like, treat this like a big LARP and never really think of themselves as part of the world here. It's a rough approach."

Clarisse can't help wincing at that, because she's kiiind of guilty of it herself—not the LARP stuff necessarily, but the rest of it. It's hard not to feel like she's on some kind of foreign exchange, a lot of the time. Like this is all just temporary and she doesn't need to invest herself in it.

"So... you think of yourself as part of the world here," she says. "But it wasn't always like that, right? You've just been here longer."

Maybe in a year or three years or five years she'll feel like she's supposed to be here, like she isn't watching everything happen around her and struggling to fake her way through the day.

"I do, yeah," though there's the slightest pause; she's aware there's some parts of this answer that are just unavoidably bummers. "I mean, even when I first arrived, I didn't have a lot of patience with rifters whose attitude was who cares about the war, it's not my world, that kind of sucks objectively." At least in Cosima's opinion.

"But yeah, I know more about Thedas than I did once. And look, it's never like ... I'm always aware that I'm like an immigrant, right? Or maybe a refugee, more accurately, but either way, I think it's important to me to think of this as my life, you know? Not just some holding pattern." And there's that thing they didn't talk about earlier in the conversation, about whether there's even a place to go back to for them. But again: harshing the cake experience.

If nothing else, this conversation has given her a lot to think about. Even if the comments about rifters acting too good to give a shit about someone else's war stings a little bit, makes her ears go hot at the tips.

"I'd like to think that sooner or later, anyone would get to that point."

Clarisse isn't saying she's there yet, not fully, but she knows from experience that it will have to happen. After all, this isn't her first time having her life radically rearranged. She figured it out once. She's sure she'll do it again.

"Yeah." A little more sympathetic, she adds, "I mean, I know it's a lot to handle. Most of us didn't know there were other worlds at all before we turned up in one, it's ... it is an adjustment. But I don't know. I think even if I knew that the all of us were going to vanish the minute Corypheus was defeated, the people here deserve a better life than they'd get from him winning, you know?"

A huff of a laugh as she shakes her head and then takes a drink of wine. "Shit, sorry. I didn't mean to give a lecture, it's just ... you know. I feel strongly about people being worth helping, however long or short I have to help them, I guess."

"Yeah," Clarisse murmurs, "I guess."

She can't say she disagrees with Cosima's philosophy in principle. Her own views are a little (maybe a lot, some days) less selfless, but she's still here. Helping out, doing what needs to be done. Maybe her motivations for doing it don't really matter in the end.

"What did you do before you came here?" she asks. Cosima doesn't look that old, but old enough to have probably had some kind of job, or something, before she ended up in Thedas. "Did you help people where you're from?"

"Uh, yeah, but sort of not the way I was expecting to," she observes with a rueful smile. "I'm a biologist, I just got my PhD a little before I came here the second time. But ... long story short, I ended up with a rare disease and I managed to collaborate on finding a cure for it. So I was in the middle of traveling to give it to others who had the disease or were at high risk to develop it." She knows she's leaving a lot out, and it's not that she won't elaborate if Clarisse is interested, but what did you do for a living is not usually a trigger for an entire saga about unethical human experimentation.

She does add, however: "I planned to go into pure research. Evolutionary developmental biology, we um. Try to figure out how organisms evolved by studying and comparing the way they develop as embryos. The curing a genetic disease thing was a bit of a left turn."

"Wow," is all Clarisse can say. "Shit."

Just kidding, she can say more (always). "That's like some human interest story you'd see on Good Morning America. 'Woman discovers cure for her own rare disease.'" She's not knocking it, though. She could never even begin to do all that.

"I was a freshman at the University of Arizona before I came here. Didn't pick a major yet." It was absolutely not going to end up being anything related to evolutionary developmental biology, though.

"Freshman year of undergrad is totally for not knowing what you want to do," Cosima says with a smile. "My freshman year was like ... probably 20% making out with girls at parties, so look, you don't have to figure it out all at once."

Of course, she's not going to college in Thedas at all, and she won't remember Cosima or her advice back home, so the entire question is fairly moot here. Still, it feels important to be encouraging.

"Do you have any leanings, for what you might have done back home?"

"No," Clarisse admits, "not really."

Her lips quirk a little bit, not quite a frown. "My dad gave me a really hard time about going at all. He doesn't believe in that stuff. He wanted me to go straight into the military."

Which is kind of what she ended up doing, when she ended up here. So maybe it all worked out in the end.

"That had to be hard. My parents are both professors, so I was hardly breaking the mold, but it took my dad a little time with the gay thing. He came around, and I'm not saying it's the same but." Even so.

She misses him, suddenly; wonders what he would have made of her trying to make research progress in a lab where a simple microscope without its own light source is among her most advanced pieces of equipment.

"Do you have any siblings? I feel like I got, like, extra expectations raised as an only."

"Sounds worse." It's one thing for your dad to give you shit about what you choose to do with your life. Your dad giving you shit about who you are, fundamentally, as a person? That's on a different level. She knows that from experience, too.

Cosima's question has her making a face. It's the kind of defensive expression a person makes when they know exactly what kind of reaction they'll get before they even open their mouth, because they know exactly how weird their next statement is going to sound.

"It's kind of complicated, but... yeah, about fifteen of them."

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I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Open)

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