player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

[cozen]

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.

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.

Comments

[hornswoggle]

The disconnect is so stark that John is momentarily unable to reconcile being stood here in an opulent Hightown estate and the bloody field that had filled his vision moments ago. The sense that he has been displaced can't be reasoned away, even when it is at such clear odds with his surroundings.

Some cosmic joke has put Julius in front of him, rather than Marcus. Or maybe it is a favor. The sense of unreality could only have been intensified by finding the pair of them in that room together when only minutes ago John had used his own blood to link them.

"What happened?" is such a broad question that even John isn't entirely certain what answer he wants.

What happened on that battlefield?

What worked, miraculously enough to put this expression onto Julius' face?

"I assume I wasn't drive to hallucination by Lord Demir."

Except how can he be here? He wasn't. They weren't.

[overharrowed]

He shakes his head: no, you haven't been or maybe no, I can't joke about it. Either way, he says, "It's too much to explain in Lady Eulalia's hallway, but it's ... you didn't hallucinate. You died. Everyone there but five of us, it was a." There's no good word to put there. He exhales, and that trembles a bit too.

"We should make some excuses and go, I can explain on the way back to the Gallows." Because he needs to be going that way soon, and he assumes John will likely also want to regroup. Whatever's meant to be happening here, they're unlikely to achieve it now. And is it even that important, in comparison? (Everything is important, a part of him things; but everything isn't equally important, another part counters.)

[hornswoggle]

Everyone but five of us.

John is good at figures. He understands, immediately, the number of people slaughtered that Julius implies with even this brief accounting of survivors.

And John among them. (He knew this. He had known it when he'd offered a torn, blood-drenched palm to Marcus.) Marcus among them, if Julius' reaction is any indicator. And which others? It is a morbid kind of guessing game to try and parse who might have been lost. Jude or Jayce? Clarisse or Abby? Cosima or Florent? Marcus or Theophenia? Val de Foncé or that new young rifter?

(Gwenaëlle?)

"I'll make our excuses," John says, because Julius is pale as a sheet and John is not. "I had another appointment to account for today, regardless."

This comes so, so distantly to John, without knowing fully to which appointment he refers. The duties at hand are all of a sort that are surely no longer relevant: ministering to the displaced at Granitefell, what he had been discussing with Abby, what he'd proposed for Clarisse.

Where is James Flint in this moment? John must know but in this moment, he can't lay a hand on exactly where he might find—

He grips Julius' shoulder briefly, a tight squeeze as he passes back into the parlor. The conversation carries, indistinct but surely predictable. Their apologies, John's excuses, promises of a luncheon in the weeks to come, please, there will be tickets for the production should they get it off the ground, of course...

And in a matter of minutes, John reappears in that cavernous, silent hallway.

[overharrowed]

Julius nods his thanks and they go. When they're outside, either because he was waiting to get out of earshot or because it took him that long to collect his thoughts, Julius speaks again.

"I'm not entirely sure where to begin, but it's ... we're here now because of fairly massive time magic." His voice is pitched such that it would be hard to casually overhear, but John can catch it clearly enough. "Provost Stark spearheaded the project. For those of us who lived, it feels like it's been weeks since Granitefell. I'm not entirely sure when it is now relative to when I expect it should be, I imagine we'll sort that back at the Gallows." There's so much to explain that he's still trying to sort through the components even as he starts. They've both been thrust into an unfamiliar present, even if their paths there diverged sharply.

He's not as shaken as he was after Granitefell itself, but however many weeks it's been for him, it's certainly not been enough for him to process everything that happened. Layering it unhappening on top has left him more than a little agitated, for all that he's hiding it better now that he's had some time after the initial shock.

[hornswoggle]

There is a few beats of quiet.

"I've an appointment," John says slowly. Does he? The sense of having been unmoored persists, makes it difficult to reconcile with the present moment. He has an appointment. Is that true now or not?

"How massive?" comes as if picking up a dropped thread, little expectation of discussing what obligations may await John regardless of this rupture in reality. A spell as great as Julius alludes to must have carried some severe risk in its undertaking. Had the Provost begged permission, or simply gone ahead with it?

as always with tags this old, we can handwave if you prefer

[overharrowed]

"Massive enough that they needed the buy-in of the organization as a whole, more or less," he says, muted. "We had to coordinate a fair number of raw materials, including a substantial quantity of dragon blood." John presumably knows enough for that suggest a scale in and of itself.

Julius rubs his wrist absently, his staff on his back and leaving his hands restlessly unoccupied.

"The thrust of it was a coordination between several of the surviving rifters. Stark, Mme. de Fonce, Strange and Viktor. Stark had Flint and Yseult's buy-in before he informed the rest of us, but it was." A shaky laugh. "I told him I didn't think it would work. Fuck. Sorry." He would love to give John a more solid and coherent account, but he's doing his best under the circumstances.