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player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5
WHO: Everyone!
WHAT: Everything's fine and we're going to have feelings about it.
WHEN: August 15 9:49
WHERE: Primarily the Gallows! But potentially anywhere.
NOTES: We made it! You are all free of my tyrannical plot grasp! There is a final OOC post with some notes + space for plotting here.
WHAT: Everything's fine and we're going to have feelings about it.
WHEN: August 15 9:49
WHERE: Primarily the Gallows! But potentially anywhere.
NOTES: We made it! You are all free of my tyrannical plot grasp! There is a final OOC post with some notes + space for plotting here.
This is a timeline where, some mild chaos aside, things for the last month have carried on as normal. Riftwatch hasn't lost anyone at all. There were no funerals. The work continued. The late afternoon of August 15 may find people at their desks, in the midst of meetings or debriefs, in the library, in the sparring yard. Or maybe afield, seeing to errands or meetings or missions somewhere else in Thedas. Maybe, if they are particularly unlucky, they are deep in conversation with an ally or embroiled in combat with an enemy agent at the precise moment when the magical connection between two realities closes and the diverging timelines snap together into one existence.
At that moment, everyone forgets what it is they were just doing. Instead they remember what they might have been doing in the world where a third of Riftwatch's number was lost, despite their hands suddenly occupied with the normal business of handling pens or swords or books they don't recall picking up.
For the always-living, it may feel as though they have been magically transported somewhere new mid-thought. For the dead—the formerly dead, the might-have-been dead—it will feel as though they have just woken up. Perhaps they'll have a vague sense of a dream they now can't recall, in between their last conscious moment amid the blood and screams in Granitefell and awakening just now in a quieter world, or perhaps they'll have a sense of nothing at all.
For a few hours, the worse world will be the only one anyone can remember. Over time, memories of the other world—the only one that really exists now—will filter in, competitive with other memories in a way that might require everyone to double or triple check whether they wrote a letter or completed a mission in that timeline or this one. But the memories of death and dying will never fade into anything less real.
At that moment, everyone forgets what it is they were just doing. Instead they remember what they might have been doing in the world where a third of Riftwatch's number was lost, despite their hands suddenly occupied with the normal business of handling pens or swords or books they don't recall picking up.
For the always-living, it may feel as though they have been magically transported somewhere new mid-thought. For the dead—the formerly dead, the might-have-been dead—it will feel as though they have just woken up. Perhaps they'll have a vague sense of a dream they now can't recall, in between their last conscious moment amid the blood and screams in Granitefell and awakening just now in a quieter world, or perhaps they'll have a sense of nothing at all.
For a few hours, the worse world will be the only one anyone can remember. Over time, memories of the other world—the only one that really exists now—will filter in, competitive with other memories in a way that might require everyone to double or triple check whether they wrote a letter or completed a mission in that timeline or this one. But the memories of death and dying will never fade into anything less real.
ota
The words on the list in front of her seem to swim, and Clarisse bends over double, suddenly nauseous, breathless. The list and pen she's been holding slip from between her numb fingers and go clattering on the floor of the armory, where they'll sit forgotten for the rest of the day. Sweat breaks out on her forehead as she tries to breathe through the feelings of utter disorientation, because she can breathe, now. The air in here is slightly musty, smells of oil and metal and leather all mixed together, something normally comforting and familiar to her. She can breathe, but each time she inhales she expects nothing but acrid smoke and the taste of her own blood pooling in the back of her throat. Her forehead presses against the stone floor, and she squeezes her eyes shut.
She's dying. She was dying.
Time passes like that. Minutes. At some point, she manages to pull herself off the ground. Slowly, like someone recovering from a sudden incapacitating illness, Clarisse makes it to the door of the armory and tumbles out like she's forgotten how to move.
The afternoon is hot, muggy with summer stillness. She can hear birds, and farther off, the sound of waves crashing up against the docks, the ferry.
Those are the things that feel like a dream.
She crashes headlong into the first person she comes across, like she hasn't even seen them, only stopping when their physical presence blocks her. She reaches out and grabs for their shoulders, as if holding onto someone else can anchor her here, in this reality that still feels so unreal.
"What happened to us?"
no subject
Not here, stinking of an afternoon's effort in the yard with the grit of drying sweat on the back of his neck and a shoulder stiff from the demands of working a blade. Months ago, a sacrifice in the Arlathan forest had stripped him of his confidence with a sword. But in these last weeks, the grudging practice to see it restored had been sacrificed on the dual alters of being short handed, overworked. Of not feeling like it.
And now: a familiar tension in his wrist and elbow. Dusty boots and rolled sleeves, and a particular nauseated sensation that he's grown very poor at recognizing (hope being a fantasy frequently relegated to so narrow a margin as to become illegible). They'd sent three people through Stark's machine, he isn't allowing himself to consider in detail, and then Clarisse strikes him bodily.
She's taller than he is. If not for their dueling momentum, the grasping of her hands and his grip closing instinctively on her elbow, the desperation in the moment might knock him off-footed. Feels very like that anyway—a brief moment of startled lack of comprehension as he looks at her.
His grip on her elbow tightens. Something in Flint's eye clarifies, rapidly sharpening.
"Where did you come from?"
no subject
Where did you come from?
She looks over her shoulder toward the armory, but that answer doesn't feel right. It feels utterly wrong, in fact, to the point where thinking about saying it out loud makes her nauseous.
What feels correct is the scorched field and the smoke and the blood in her mouth.
"Granitefell," she says.
no subject
These would not be the first spirits to come passing through the Gallows having adopted familiar faces.
His other hand seizes at her before he thinks otherwise. His grip on her elbow tightens. It's fine. This is real. Surely there are better people a spirit might haunt with her shape, isn't delusionally clinging to the impossible. It's rational. This is meant to have happened.
"Look at me," has the tenor of an order. "It's done. It's been repaired."
(If he says it firmly, it's true.)
no subject
"What's done?"
Repaired. She has a feeling she knows, but it's a thing that seems like it shouldn't be possible. The gaping wounds in her chest shouldn't be gone. Her broken arm shouldn't be set right again.
She shouldn't be standing here.
no subject
The convoluted semantics of the thing anchor the forward racing trend of his thoughts. Wrenches the trajectory of his attention firmly and forcefully into place rather than permitting it to shear off in the direction of
(If it's true, if it is done and has been corrected, then she will not be the only body snatched back off a funeral pyre)
something else.
"The company was attacked in Granitefell. You died." He has two hands on her; his grip doesn't relent, equal parts steadying and another thing. Maybe he's required to fix her in place. (She shouldn't be standing here.) "Stark corrected it. Everything's been put back in one piece. You're fine."
totally understand if it's been too long!
Clarisse doesn't feel fine. She feels like... well, like she died. Like she can barely breathe. Going back into the armory and lying back down on the floor for a while doesn't seem like the worst idea. There's sweat on her forehead, and she feels hot and cold at the same time, somehow.
"I'm... going to puke." Maybe.
same hat
"No you're not." As if that's something he can dictate, and there is no off-kilter energy buzzing under his own skin. He makes himself release her a moment after, clapping her Clarisse stiffly on the shoulders to steel her (or himself; one is like the other). "We're crossing to the central tower. You've someone to find."
A lucky shot in the dark, or the kind of sideways prescience of a man who is neither blind or deaf to crystal chatter? Who knows. The point is he's turning with the clear expectation that Clarisse will not vomit on his boot heels and instead follow.