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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.
no subject
He absently rubs a hand over his throat, his eyes fully meeting Marcus' for the first time. "I thought you were." And as for himself, there's no reason he should be here, should have no memory of how he came to be bleeding out slowly to sitting upright in this office.
no subject
It doesn't change much, save for the way this adjustment produces in Marcus a vaguely sickened twinge, formless. Amounts to the same, anyway. Barrow, dead or dying, grievously wounded in the dirt, and not sat here, whole, respectable.
Marcus doesn't sit back in his chair. His posture is that of someone who is about ready to spring to his feet, a hand braced against the desk edge and now one wandered to the arm of his chair, but he doesn't, remaining poised. Barrow says I thought you were, and the next heart beat pushes ice through the arteries.
"Aye," is quieter, more texture than volume. He keeps coming back to that, the certainty of it in his body and in Julius' voice, and the absence of that other man is as off-kiltering as any other part of this. More so.
Prise his own hand off the chair arm to dig thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose, up near the eyes.
no subject
"All right?" he asks automatically, stupidly, because he not only isn't sure he wants to know the answer, but he wouldn't answer that himself.