faderift | PLAYER PLOT | Forgetti Catchall, now in the right comm

At this point, Clarisse is operating out of sheer spite. Does she need to be walking all over the Gallows? No, of course not. Is a sick part of her enjoying the fact that she's forcing Astrid to trail behind her on the most pointless walk ever? Yes.

Right now, they're heading for the eyrie, but she's taking the longest, most impractical route to get there. The griffons don't remember her either—Clarisse has already been nipped, scratched, and screamed at enough to get the hint—but she's still drawn to them anyway. She earned their trust once, she can do it again.

"This is really stupid, you know," she can't help saying over her shoulder as the two of them weave around the training yard in a big circle. "None of us have done anything wrong."

“Yeh, I know.” The hunter sounds cheerful enough, amiable enough, despite the completely unnecessary detours she’s been led on, around and around and around. It helps that she likes the movement and doesn’t mind the physical activity, essentially going on a surreal walk together, banishing some of her restless energy and going up and down the stairs. Everyone’s in a weird mood this week: strained and uncertain what to do about the newcomers. They can’t trust them, but what do they do with them?

If they were infiltrators, wouldn’t it have been easier to just pretend to be new recruits? Several of them have shards. But the whole thing’s above Astrid’s paygrade, anyway —

“S’pose that’s why you’re not actually in the cells. Now that I’m saying you should be in the cells, just,” she backpedals, finishing lamely, “y’know. Ne-cess-ary pre-cau-tions.”

She delivers that phrase with the inflection of someone who heard it emphasised very strongly at a morning division briefing.

Necessary precautions. Yeah. Sure.

"Well, it's stupid," she says again, knowing she's just repeating herself but unable to stop. At this point she almost wishes they had put them in the cells, if only so she wouldn't feel so lost. Instead they're letting her walk around the Gallows like a lost dog, letting her go wherever, oops—as long as it's somewhere her babysitter can follow her.

And all the weird looks she's getting from people who are supposed to be her friends? Or if not her friends, at least her coworkers? Humiliating.

She turns and continues walking, shoulders set. "I'm not going to find any important documents hidden in the griffon shit, so why don't you go follow someone else for a while."

“Trained griffons are rare, mate. Like I know they’re out in the wild now, too, but they were literally extinct not too long ago. What if you’re here to sabotage the griffons, poison their feed? I’ve gotta keep an eye out.”

Not that Astrid fully believes that this girl would do that — there’s something sorry and sad beneath her seething irritation, most apparent around the animals — but still. Precautions.

So she keeps tagging along with a quick-step beside the brawnier stranger, but there’s a twist of her mouth, a sheepish, “Sorry.”

Almost makes it worse that Astrid seems genuinely apologetic that she's following Clarisse around. Everyone's been pretty cold to them since they got back, so the odd person here or there who seems semi-friendly is like rubbing salt in the wound.

When she feels like that, she just wants to plead her case again. Problem is, the more she argues, the crazier she sounds. It's a bad cycle she can't seem to get out of, and it never makes her feel better. She never walks away from these arguments feeling like she's won anything, but she can't stop.

"Poison their feed? I'm the griffon keeper."

“No shit, and I’m the Black Divine,” Astrid quips back. The griffon keeper is—

There’s just blank space when she tries to dredge up the name and she misses her step a little while walking, almost tripping on the cobblestones as she tries to remember. Part of her wants to say Ellie, but Ellie’s been gone a while. Her brow furrows. It might make sense for Siegfried to do it, but she knows that he doesn’t hold the position, either. They must not have a keeper at the moment.

She shakes it off like a momentary fugue, a temporary blip.

“They don’t recognise you,” she points out, even as they eventually start wending their way towards the tall tower. “You’d think that even if the people forgot, animals would still like… know scents and shit. They’re better at that sort of thing than people are. Once saw a dog recognise its owner after they’d been gone years.”

"I know."

Clarisse can't explain it either, other than maybe magic. At first she was thinking, hey, maybe they accidentally stumbled into some alternate dimension where the group of them never existed, but no. Their names are still written down on paperwork, her stuff is still sitting in her and Abby's room.

It's only the memory of them that's been erased.

"I can't explain why nobody knows us anymore. But I know you brought Potato to the beach party to work on her training. And that she climbs onto people's laps even though she's too big." Which, how would she know either of those things? Why would a spy bother with that?

—Huh. That was definitely a thing that happened. But when Astrid casts her mind back trying to remember it, she just sees: herself, alone on the beach with the griffon, working through the exercises and drills. She hadn’t had company, had she?

Just her, the beach, the bird. (And that telling blank spot, which should have been someone keeping her company, throwing things for her, then sparring with her after.)

In that too-long pause, Clarisse can practically see Astrid’s confused gears turning and not being able to land on a satisfactory answer, or anything that makes sense. Why would this total stranger know such a small, banal thing from a beach party months ago?

She exhales, a frustrated huff of air through her nose. “Sorry. Like… that’s true, all of that is right, but I still don’t know you. If this is magic, then fuck magic.”

Despite everything Clarisse huffs out a bitter laugh. "Seriously fuck magic."

She hauls open the doors to the central tower and begins to make her way up the stairs, ignoring the elevator entirely. It feels like Astrid's footfalls are closer to hers now, like instead of trailing Clarisse she's almost walking beside her, but she can't quite bring herself to look over and confirm that.

"I know you don't remember me, but I showed you how to ride a griffon," she says after a long hesitation. "And you gave me this carving of one for Satinalia. And we were kind of... friends, I think."

She keeps telling herself it's fine that all that is gone now. She can start over and rebuild it all. But those thoughts are hollow in moments like these, when she's confronted with the people she likes and all she gets back is blank stares.

Astrid is a griffon rider now — she knows this for a fact — but if she casts her mind back, she can’t really remember who taught her to begin with. How did she get there? It wasn’t Xio and wasn’t Jayce and wasn’t Desi, and so ???

That blank spot is like a splinter stuck in her thumb, but picking at it for too long bloodies the skin. She follows alongside Clarisse but her expression has turned even more furrowed, confused.

Did she carve a griffon figurine? She hadn’t had enough time to make too many of them so this should be simple enough to recall: a bear for Xio, a chess piece for Hermione, and with effort, she does think she did make a griffon; she remembers the wings had been a bitch.

“Do you still have it?” she asks. She’s a big believer in what she can see and touch: something solid.

Clarisse stops right there on the stairs and opens her bag. The little figurine is in there, small enough to be portable and so she's been hauling it around since Satinalia. She's glad that although she intended to put it somewhere near her bed, on her dresser maybe, she hasn't done that yet. Lucky.

She rests the griffon in the palm of her hand and lifts it up to Astrid's eyeline.

"Look familiar?" She doesn't expect Astrid to recognize the specific figurine Clarisse is holding, but maybe she'll recognize the style. After all, she carved it.

This is the annoying thing: she did, and it does.

Astrid leans in and picks up the griffon, rolling it between her hands. She can’t clearly remember making it, but it is in her style: a little lumpy and misshapen, not a work by a master craftswoman or someone who would sell these professionally, just a hobbyist; it has those stupid wings which caused such a headache, but the expression on the face has got some nice playful mischief which perfectly encapsulates

(Blunder Supreme)

this particular griffon’s mercurial personality. Although when she tries, she can’t remember her having a particular rider these days. And when Astrid tilts it upside down at a particular angle, she can see the innocuous little triangle etched on the bottom of its heel:
⧋

She holds it out for Clarisse in turn to see. “This is my signature,” she says, a little lost.

"But you can't remember making it." It's half-question, half-statement.

The signature is pretty solid evidence, but not foolproof. Someone else could have faked that. Clarisse herself could have done it. She's used to Riftwatch members seeing something they can't easily explain away and doing just that, even if the explanation doesn't make logical sense. Like Abby shrugging off the fact that without Clarisse around that means she and Ellie would have been willingly sharing a tent, or Benedict looking down at her name in the griffon keeper's office and assuming she must have faked it.

She isn't expecting Astrid to snap out of it just like that—it's promising that she seems uncomfortable, confused. That's more than she's gotten from anyone else so far. But Clarisse won't be holding her breath about it. She holds her hand out for the carving.

“But I can’t remember making it,” Astrid confirms.

There’s a moment where, irrationally, she closes her hand around the figurine and doesn’t want to give it up. Her brain might not remember the carving but it physically feels comfortable in her hand, well-worn and familiar, as if she has held and handled it many times over. Muscle memory.

But in the end, she opens her fingers and passes it back to Clarisse, letting it go.

Smart enough people might work themselves into convoluted knots to force reality to make sense with what they know, not being able to accept it, needing to justify it. But Astrid sees the disjoint, and just runs into that brick wall of confusion, not sure what to do with the knowledge. “I’m sorry,” she says again, offering feebly, “Hopefully, like… the folks over in Research might be able to find out what’s going on?”

PLAYER PLOT | Forgetti Catchall, now in the right comm

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