faderift | WAR TABLE: Start Spreadin' the News

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WAR TABLE: Start Spreadin' the News

WHO: Clarisse, Ellie, Desidério and Vanya Orlov
WHAT: Summary of content
WHEN:
WHERE: Anderfels
NOTES: OOC Post

Desolate and dry, the Anderfels in the winter is marginally cooler, but viciously windy. Dust whips up in stinging clouds at a moment's notice, day or night, and acts a stinging chaperone all the way to Hossberg. Camping is an uncomfortable affair, with dust and sand working through even the smallest gap in tent flaps. Travelers are few and far between, though sometimes Imperial caravans can be seen passing at a distance, easily avoided if spotted in time.

The harsh terrain provides no cover, no chance of a griffon passing overhead unnoticed during daylight. While the city is never unguarded, there are better odds of making a clean pass overhead in the wee hours of night. The soldiers patrolling every entryway to the city and strolling the ramparts are attentive, and well-armed. Their longbows are easy to spot, and their quivers are full.

Dropping pamphlets: easy

Everything leading up to actual moment of the drop and the moment directly afterwards: tricky.

Good luck.

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↠ daytime camping

It makes for miserable business, this whole affair of traveling by night and camping by day. At night and at cruising altitudes over the Ander landscape, the moderate temperatures of the day become so bitingly cold that his hands hurts for hours after they've dropped out of the sky; during the day, there is constant grit working between the cracks of their sandy colored tent canvas, and into the buckles of tack, and under layers of clothes, and (probably) between his ass cheeks. Nevermind the standard difficulties like how irritating it is try for sleep when it's so bright out, or the dull rations, or the fact that he has smoked through a great deal of his cigarillo case's contents out of sheer boredom.

With so little cover offered by the landscape, their little interim encampment constitutes of a series of canvas tents slung so low to the ground that they all but require crawling to get in and out of. The griffons meanwhile are making use of the only ditch to be found for miles, at best half obscured from sight by it and a stone-colored tarpaulin. They have been ruthlessly hobbled and staked by lead lines to keep them from hunting during the day, and frequently make to re-orient their bodies around their tie lines, ruffling feathers and bickering between themselves in an expression of their general displeasure with the situation.

The fact that the beasts are as fed up with the circumstances as he is makes for meager consolation.

—Is what he is thinking as he lies on his bedroll, having been awoken some minutes ago by a dream about washing his hands with sandpaper. He sighs. May as well get on with it.

Presently, the dark boots jutting out from under the edge of Desidério's propped canvas covering thrash around. The heels find purchase. Knees in dusty trousers work themselves out into the daylight. The man himself eventually follows. He blinks in the daylight as he sits up, bleary eyed and hair wild about the ears. He doesn't bother to stand; he can see whoever is stuck on watch just fine from this position.

"Have you spotted any darkspawn yet?" he asks, feeling around inside his coat for his cigarillo case. The Anderfels is meant to be crawling with them, aren't they?

↠ papers please

In the dark, from a considerable height, Desidério imagines that Hossberg looks more or less identical to any other place. It is little more than an assembly of dark shapes, mottled by the irregular fall of moonlight across parapet and tower, speckled by braziers and rare spots of lamplight. More distinct than the capitol itself is the Lattenflus River, a pale ribbon of thin moon and starlight slithering well south of the signal fires that mark out the city's watch towers, and gates, and guard posts.

It's cold from this height, and the wind in his ears is so extreme that he can hardly hear himself think much less verbally communicate to his nearest neighbor in formation. Which really only becomes a problem when Desidério spies the the shape of the lead griffon drop away through the streaky cloud cover afforded them, he presses with his knuckles along Potato's down-feathered neck to urge her down after her siblings, and she instead gives him a little shake and an irritated off-rhythm wing beat that sends him bouncing up out of the saddle, straining briefly against the catch of the harness straps before he's thunked hard back down into the tack.

Presumably both his curses—the one that happens automatically when his lizard brain thinks, for just a pissing moment, that he's going to be flung out of the saddle to his death, and the one that he eloquently expresses afterward when common sense catches up to him and he realizes they're moving in the wrong direction—fall on deaf ears. He certainly can't hear much of either himself.

The constant huffing and puffing of the griffons is getting on Ellie's nerves, making her jumpy and irritable. Then tend to more or less listen to her back at the Gallows, but it's helped along by the fact that they usually already want to do what's asked of them. They are bored, uncomfortable, hungry and sleepy, and they do not WANT to be cooped up.

Frankly, Ellie doesn't either.

She's steadily keeping watch while the other sleep, her back against a tree and her eyes on camp, when Desi starts thrashing around. She holds for a moment, wondering if something bit him, and is giving him raised eyebrows when he exits the tent.

"Not a one," she murmurs back, keeping her voice low. "Why? You hoping for some excitement?"

Vanya and Pamplemousse are, in part, well-suited because Vanya's steady calm is an effective counterweight to the griffon's playful nature. He's been flying with her for some time now, and he thinks their rapport is generally solid.

But occasionally, he's reminded of how willful she can be. He notices Desidério and Potato falling out of formation, and his first instinct is to fall back (up?) to try to help. But she is clearly interpreting the dive as the start of a race, and it's going to take him a moment to dissuade her. Even if it weren't a stealth mission, shouting is no good with this much wind in their ears, so he reaches for his sending crystal.

"Are you two alright? Did something happen?" It's hard to judge, from rapidly increasing distance, whether griffon or rider is in distress, but if Desidério can answer it's presumably a good sign.

The case is produced. A great deal of dust from crawling in and out of the very low tent is also summarily dislodged from his person.

"It might make all the rocks and dirt more appealing by comparison."

Not that the concept of dull work is entirely foreign to him. But there's something to be said about dull work being done in the middle of Maker-forsaken Nowhere, as opposed to dull work in the company of hundreds of people in a bustling city. Or even just a few people in a sketchy backwater trading post. At least the appearance of a few darkspawn would be terrifying. He could do with a mad dash to the griffon picket line. It might make him forget the feeling that he's been badly dozing on a pointy rock.

The pale flash of the blue crystal light at his wrist is like a pulse in the dark—too feeble to be seen at even short distances, but clear enough to Desidério even in the whisper of cloud cover through which Potato coasts upward.

After a brief pause (one presumes a struggle ensues, which neither griffon or rider is particularly satisfied with), his answer comes crackling back to Vanya:

"I'm being overruled."

Does this maybe have something to do with the past days of travel, during which the griffons have spent most of the day staked to the ground to avoid risking them being sighted by whatever Tevinter or Anders forces might have been traveling in the region? No, surely not. The overgrown bird's just being a stubborn little—

Clarisse isn't on watch, but she is awake and lying sprawled on her back as Desi struggles for and then finally achieves his freedom from the bedroll. She gives him a slightly judgmental look, not that she would've done a better job of it.

She's just really bad at this whole sleeping during the day thing, hates being cooped up and bored until night falls, and is about as miserable as the griffons are right now. She has her skinny boot knife in one hand, is using the blade to clean underneath her fingernails.

"You'll wake everyone up." (Only one person is sleeping right now, ackshually, she's just being a butthead.)

"Good," has a faux cheery slant. "We can all be equally miserable."

A cigarillo is produced, set between his teeth, and lit before Desidério clambers to his feet. He doesn't bother to knock the dust from his person—grey dirt clinging heavily to the back of his dark trousers and mottling his coat. In these months, it's just cool enough to warrant wearing the extra layer even during the day (and particularly when one is lying on the ground and having all the heat leeched free from the body), and besides he's only just started to feel his fingers again from the previous evening's flight.

Anyway, call the dust and grime camoflauge. If some Tevinter scout spots him dawdling over to the coals of the cook fire to put the coffee pot back into the embers from sixty leagues off, good for them.

(Small mercies of this daytime camping busienss: at least they can keep a fire going.)

"Mmm."

Ellie is not a stranger to any of these things either, but for her the nowhere has never been so very empty. She's not so sure of how to explain it, though.

Adjusting her cloak, she leans back, half-closes her eyes. She's still keeping watch with that readiness that has never really left her blood.

"Where Abby and I are from, there are things like darkspawn too," she says conversationally. "But they were everywhere all the time, and there were a lot more of them than there were living people. Someone told me it was like living in a Blight that didn't end."

Desidério's low hum of acknowledgement comes around the end of the cigarillo he's stuck between his teeth. It's only after he's pulled an ember from the Riftwatch's pocket lighter to its end, and taken a pull off it, that he says—

"So I imagine you're fine with the rocks and dirt as they are."

"Usually," she admits, grudgingly. "But this waiting-for-dark thing is a special kind of hell."

She eyes the cigarillo for a moment like she's having a thought, but then seems to dismiss the idea.

"Especially since we're sleeping out in the open like this."

They're as hidden as possible, but Ellie's nerves keep screaming that they're sitting ducks, and they should go to ground even if there's no ground to go to.

"I'd have the sand dunes back, haunted or otherwise."

(It is bullshit, by the way, to go from directly from trudging about the Silent Plains to trudging about the Anderfels.)

He takes another resentful pull on the cigarillo, attention shifting to squint in the direction of the very distant, very flat horizon. A flicking glance for the height of the sun—early yet—, and then his attention returns to her as Desidério exhales a long peal of held smoke. It doesn't linger long; there's just enough of a breeze panting across the stony landscape to sweep it briskly away from over his head.

"Smoke?"

"Nah, fuck the sand dunes."

It is bullshit pretty much fucking regardless. At his question she pauses again, considering. She doesn't usually smoke anything but weed- or elfroot, here in Thedas- but she's feeling out of it enough that it might actually help.

"Sure."

She holds out one hand.

Grunting in answer, he takes another brisk suck off the cigarillo, and the rolls over across his hip in the dusty earth just far enough to pass it off into her waiting hand. He remains there after—propped on his side and elbow, more or less reclined even before he hooks one ankle over the other.

He's an exceptionally good lounger, that Desidério Amanza—puts one in the mind of comfortable sofas and low tables where a man of his disposition and bearing might sets the heels of his dirty boots. Nevermind the present grit about his general person.

Ellie regards him as she puts the cigarillo to her lips. It's a stronger taste than she's used to, different, and her lungs tingle a bit. It's not entirely bad.

She regards it in her fingers. One more, before she passes it back.

"I know you're with Riftwatch 'cause you have no choice," she says, "but if you could go to any type of world or universe or time you could imagine. What would it be like?"

Because he's one of those rare people who could truly fit in anywhere. Or at least, he'd fake it so well people would never know the difference.

The cigarillo with its dark, leafy paper is set directly back into the corner of his mouth. It's allowed to dangle there, burning just the idle filaments of smoke for a moment as he considers the question.

(+Later, when he has smoked his very last Antivan cigarillo and every deficiency in trade imaginable stops him from laying his hands on replacements in Kirkwall for any sum but a prince's purse, he will think in this moment and regret it. Imagine! Just letting the tobacco slowly burn itself. What a foolhardy idiot he is!

But in the moment, he gives it no thought at all. Instead, he shrugs (or approximates one about the angle of the temple; it's hard to get the shoulders up around the ears while lounging on one's side). Says—

"Less dirt and sticks for miles, I can tell you that much. And less sleeping in tents." All this camping is too much for him.

Here, finally, he takes a proper draw off the cigarillo. When he has finished, he adds with a little more candor, "A friend once told me about the pleasure yacht of one of the Merchant Princes. I forget which one. It sails aimlessly up and down the Minanter, or did before Tevinter took it, and is as big as a quarter district with all manner of hanging gardens and games and so on built to skim“—he makes a gesture of his hand to indicate a boat moving across water—"just so, idle as you please. I like the idea of that. Traveling and taking the whole neighborhood with. They should make more of those, in this make believe world."

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WAR TABLE: Start Spreadin' the News

desidério | ota

daytime camping

papers please

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