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faderift2024-01-15 09:35 pm
faderifting) wrote in faderift2024-01-15 09:35 pm
MOD EVENT: Crossover
WHO: Everyone (give or take)
WHAT: Reorganizing the Crossroads
WHEN: Wintermarch 9:50
WHERE: The Crossroads
NOTES: A small event to help everyone shake off the winter break.
WHAT: Reorganizing the Crossroads
WHEN: Wintermarch 9:50
WHERE: The Crossroads
NOTES: A small event to help everyone shake off the winter break.
Shortly into the new year, Riftwatch's routine visits to the Crossroads–to get from here to there, or just to check up on the eluvians and watch for any signs of Venatori or elven presence–turn less routine. Patches of the Crossroads give way quite suddenly to patches of what seems to be (for lack of a better word) the real world, evidenced by sudden changes of landscape and temperature, the sudden presence of small mammals and birds. In the first of these locations to be discovered, snow blows up a crumbling Crossroads stairway from the snowy clearing below; in the clearing, gravity's hold is gentler than it should be, snow swirling up alongside the staircase that climbs up into a grey sky and never coming back down. Wisps or spirits may follow you freely here. One enterprising spirit has possessed a squirrel and is considering the merits of wandering off into the world. Walk far enough across the ground, away from the stairs, and things become normal (as much as Thedas ever is)–but the staircase is still waiting if you turn back the other way, the Crossroads there to walk into without any particular effort or magic at all.
This is of course a sign of a grave problem that warrants further investigation. But the instability in the Crossroads also presents a more immediate and practical threat to Riftwatch's work: the eluvians Riftwatch uses to traverse Thedas and reach some otherwise far-flung or inaccessible locations are scattered throughout the Crossroads, and reaching them is already becoming more difficult, not to mention the danger of someone else—foe or unwitting stranger—blundering into Riftwatch's work. So for a week in Wintermarch, everyone able and available will be assigned to relocating the eluvians: reaching them in the Crossroads, uprooting them from their ancient locations, and carrying them to rearrange on a single stone platform that so far seems sturdy and unaffected, where they can be more easily monitored and protected all in one place.
There are only six eluvians that Riftwatch regularly uses, but the instability is making them more difficult to reach, and they're heavy and unwieldy enough that multiple people will need to assist with transporting each one. Meanwhile, everyone will be asked to observe and make notes on the changes they encounter, as well as to collect other eluvians–the ones that lead to ruins in wild forests with no signs of where those forests might be, or deserted remote fortresses, or pitch-black caves, or the unyielding wooden walls that mean the mirror's counterpart is packed up somewhere behind and beneath loads of junk–to preserve them in case their Thedosian counterparts can be located and moved somewhere more practicable in the future. (These that are not yet usable will be arranged in a second location, separate but not so inconveniently far from the first.)
While trying to complete this work, Riftwatch will encounter the same spirits and hazards that have always made using the Crossroads a bit of a headache: paths that collapse ahead of them if they tell a lie while chatting with their traveling companions, spirits of suspicion that try to trap and drive wedges between them, guides who take on the embarrassing and/or adorable forms of the people they're guiding as children, wisps fascinated with travelers' impulses and emotions who endeavor to replicate them. The good news is that the new configuration of the eluvians will make walking through these spirits' domains unnecessary in the future and could mean many people will never have to deal with them again after this.
The bad news is that in the meantime, those retrieving the eluvians will have to deal with both the usual nonsense and the new patches where the borders give way and dimensions blend together. In these patches, the landscape and laws of the world mixes with the features and rules (or lack thereof) of the Crossroads. Sometimes this means the world, like the Crossroads, is more colorful for elves and more oppressive to everyone else–something akin to having to walk and work with a terrible headache, except there's no pain, only light and sound sensitivity and a general sense of difficulty and slowness. Other times it means something that looks more like the Crossroads feels more like the mundane world to humans and rifters, actually. Sometimes the Crossroad's loose ideas about gravity will be applied to a real river; sometimes the world's more strict laws will impose on a river in the Crossroads.
When these places are discovered, agents will be tasked not with avoiding them, but exploring them to estimate their sizes, note any features that might narrow down their locations on the map, and search for any signs of populations–in vain, fortunately. While a number of these locations are within ruins or abandoned villages, something is currently causing them to appear in areas that people seem to be avoiding. Journeying beyond the perimeter of the effect will reveal a strong contender for an explanation: these areas are places where the Veil is already damaged and thin, with spirits and demons passing through to discourage resettlement after whatever disaster or massacre weakened the barrier.
But the largest patch of bleed-through that Riftwatch will discover is also the least remote. Here a door in the Crossroads opens onto a wet, cold underground chamber, clearly man-made, roughly fifty yards across and roughly circular. The perimeter of the chamber shows signs of use for some academic purpose–crumbling shelves, the moldering and unreadable remnants of books left exposed to the damp for centuries, rusted and shattered equipment.
But the center of this chamber turns to jagged dark rock threaded with raw lyrium veins, and the ceiling shifts in the dark–sometimes a ceiling carved into stone, sometimes a churning sky in sickly dark green. Squint and you might see the Black City's floating island in the distance, for a moment. As the moments add up over the course of hours, a keen eye might notice that the carved ceiling of the chamber is shifting in a way stone shouldn’t shift, losing its careful patterns to a more chaotic swirl.
Exploring to establish the outer perimeter of this disruption will require venturing down branching hallways and tunnels, some of them populated by shades and freshly possessed skeletons. Another fifty yards or so out, in pursuit of any identifying features to place this on a map, the jet black stone and design of crumbling old mining equipment might start to give the observant a sinking feeling. Another hundred, and one of the labyrinthe and increasingly claustrophobic tunnels will end in a cave-in that is fairly recent, judging by the state of the three skeletons of people who appear to have died trying to dig back out. Their clothes and possessions have mostly rotted away in the moist air, but two of their skeletal hands are still wearing signet rings stamped with the Coterie's symbol.
no subject
that would probably be easier to manage. Much more straightforward than whatever this is — she imagines that it should be less jarring from the blurry, impressionistic nature of the spirit's imitation, but somehow that makes it moreso in the face of how incredibly identifiable it is, even still. Maybe she'd have had a little more trouble placing it exactly if he hadn't so instantly understood it,
but he had. And it raises more questions than it answers, solidly half of them not even approaching relevant to this moment. She would have called it a terrible impersonation; she still might. That he hadn't, well.
“I'm not completely convinced that's not what's happening,” she says, dry, mostly thinking of how badly he looks like he wants the crossroads to swallow him whole.
no subject
Instead, he’s trapped here, with this conversation which somehow keeps happening, and this is the most embarrassing thing which has ever happened to him maybe. While they’re standing here, their surroundings have seemed to resolve into an old-timey street sign with wrought-iron decoration, Thedosian runes spelling out: IMPULSE AVENUE
Rather than choose to deal with the implications of all that, Stephen promptly sends a fireball at the spirit. Which dissolves like tatters of fog, the fire chewing up its shape, and he feels the brief stab of jubilance at having banished it,
but then it just reforms a moment later on Gwenaëlle’s other side instead. “Rude,” it huffs, then, “So how about it, Baudin? We really should grab a drink sometime.”
Eyebrow-waggle.
(Please, kill him now.)
no subject
This one seems ... trickier. But at the same time, what the spirit wants seems abundantly fucking obvious, and it's just—
they're working. It's work. Spirits frequently make work complicated and strange: she is missing an eye. So it doesn't have to be anything, or be strange, or maybe her internal monologue could use the word 'strange' about a hundred percent less, and the point is she mutters, “Oh, for crying out loud,” and shoulders her bow so she can grasp Stephen by the arm.
“We aren't going to get anything done otherwise,” she says, and that is all the warning he gets before she hauls him by his elbow to meet her in the middle, rising up on her toes, a collision that's so sudden at first her teeth knock into his through the cushioning of her lower lip before she reorients and it's sort of — brisk? It's a businesslike sort of kiss, except that she wasn't raised to half-ass anything that could be whole assed and there is a methodical thoroughness in her grip shifted to his neck, and probably she will have memorised the contours of his mouth after this,
a normal thing to know about your colleagues. Respectfully.
no subject
Awkward, is his first thought, because Gwenaëlle’s smashed her face into his with very little warning and if it had been any harder, someone’s lip might be bleeding. His teeth ache, but rather than let him go, her hands drift to his neck. And perhaps it’s surprise which first opened his mouth against hers (to form an “oh!” or “what!” or “Gwenaëlle I’m really not sure if that’s necessary”), but the thing is, he hates to leave a job poorly-done. And he’ll be damned if he fucks up this one singular opportunity. So after a moment of frozen indecision and mild terror where he’s gone completely still, a coin spinning in the air as to whether he’ll pull away or reciprocate—
Stephen kisses her back.
(Impulse Avenue, noun; impulsive, adjective. The working theory is solid. Spirits demand weird shit.)
Once he thaws back into movement, he reaches for Gwenaëlle’s face, catching the bracket of her cheek and tracing the line of her jaw. After that initial collision, it’s easier to jump into the metaphorical deep end and find some kind of functional rhythm, the push-and-pull to trying to devour someone else: stinging lips, warm mouth, tongue against hers, breathing each other in.
no subject
the end of
that.
The question of whose impulse it really was is better left unasked, she thinks, dizzyingly reluctant to step back in part because she doesn't know what the fuck she's going to follow that up with right until she opens her mouth and finds out what comes out of it,
“I think it's gone,” isn't quite a question. Probably they should talk about what prompted it in the first place,
or: “I think,” clearing her throat, “we haven't lost the day, but we might want to reorient. Where we were going.”
She tries to stop thinking about his hands. It mostly works.
no subject
except she’s cleanly swept his higher-thinking logical faculties aside. Not that he’s put too much concrete thought into kissing Gwenaëlle Baudin (had in fact steered himself away from those potentially-looming thoughts, like avoiding touching a hot stove), but it had been easier than he expected, somehow. Both of them with atrophied muscle memory, skills gone rusty from disuse, and yet they still knew how to fall back into it, remember where your hands went, how your mouth was supposed to move.
She’s finally pulled away and caught her breath, and Stephen, too, has to shake himself loose and remember what they were doing. He had completely fucking forgotten about that stupid spirit. Looking over her shoulder, scanning the rocky landscape around them, he can’t see any sign of it, and says “Oh, good,” and briefly hates how dazed he sounds. Being kissed by Gwenaëlle is apparently a little like being punched in the face but, like, in a good way.
He visibly reassembles his composure a moment later; like wrapping himself up in a cloak, doing up the buttons, trying to don that mantle of self-possessed unflappable calm again. He blinks. The gamble paid off. The spirit is gone.
“If this was the avenue rather than the road, then I think,” he’s desperately trying to recall that map with its vague borders, “we should be heading upwards rather than down. That should get us closer to the eluvians. Mostly. I think.”
Is this how he used to talk? He has a creeping worry that he isn’t talking normal. Talk normal, Stephen.