faderift | [open]

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WHO: Vandren et al.
WHAT: A Tevene defector slithers into the fold.
WHEN: Presently.
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: A couple of loose starters, wildcard ok, brackets ok.

[ Q&A ]

Here sits Vandren Verminius, first and no doubt last of his name, summoned to an office, or a workroom, or some other private quarter fit for polite interrogation. He has been nothing if not accommodating of Riftwatch’s whims these past few days.

He’s unassuming in trousers and tunic, a rug of an old coat thrown over against the cold. It’s black and gold. Ornate, and threadbare.

No weapons, no armor.

Just an old man slouched in an old chair, gone distant in his struggle to reconcile that this place was once at the heart of the Imperium’s slave trade, screams ringing through the caverns below, flagstone sticky with blood enough to thin the veil. The stone halls are quiet now, between meals. Empty and still.

His seat creaks beneath him when he shifts, pricking his attention back to the present.

Sorry, he could say, or What was the question?

“No,” he guesses, instead. As blind answers go it feels like a safe bet, fifty-fifty, until he reflects more fully on his circumstance.

“Perhaps.”

[ nighttime yoga routine for better sleep ]

It’s late enough to be early when he finally makes his way out into the courtyard one dark night, his breath drifting after him. The statues he’s seen illustrated in historical tomes are long gone, sheer walls and pedestals stripped bare under the stars, to say nothing of all the damage and subsequent repairs.

The idea was to do some stretching; some meditation. Warm up and then jog a lap or two in the bitter cold.

He might yet try, depending on how long he has between finishing the cup of wine he’s just started and inevitable interruption.

Some of the people here are slow to trust, and it isn’t hard to imagine why.

[ WILDCARD ]

Dazzle and/or disorient me I'm still getting up to speed on what the world is like these days.

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"I tell them, you should kill this man," Hello, Verminius. It's been a while. "He freezes good wine."

Middling to bad, as it happens, but the Qunari aren't known for their vineyards. Perched atop a nearby battlement, all shining eyes and some absurd puff of furs, she might make a very mean little owl.

Verminius jolts where he’s stood pondering the southern stars, the steam of his breath pinched off into an expletive behind his teeth. A slap marks a sip of spilled wine meeting the flagstone.

He mutters as he turns, lumpy in his own (much shabbier) assemblage of borrowed layers.

His eyes glitter small in his head; he has to work to pick her out among the battlements, the squinting of a wrinkled shrew after a passed shadow.

“They might let you sleep inside if you ask nicely.”

"No?"

The young man sitting in front of him is one he has met already: in Benedict's tent, on the front, where they conducted what was more or less a job interview in the middle of the night.

"You... aren't here of your own free will?"

His quill taps against the side of the desk as he waits, his brow quirked skeptically.

Vandren furrows his brow, clears his throat, shifts again in his seat.

“No, no, of course I am.”

Of course he is -- nearly as reassuring to himself as he must be to Benedict.

Stripped of his hood and the darkness and the wobble of a barrier between them, he is less impressive here than he might have seemed that night. Whatever time it is, he has an air of only having woken up recently, and appears to be severely hungover.

“You misheard.”

"Very nice, to sleep outside cell."

She leans out over her knees, a precarious balance. Doesn't hide her scrutiny. By daylight she might mark missing threads, or a new purple stain; by night, even an elf only spies so much. So: A little shabby. A little harried. Most look that way out of armor. Without something to hold yourself upright, the years slump onto themselves.

She doesn't look so clever herself, far from the north in chattering teeth. Tense exchanges of coin and crate are behind them.

(She'd needed eyes off their contents. He'd needed a heavier purse. And the men in the middle, desperate enough to work with them both,

Dead now. That happens to the desperate.)

"They catch you?" The Imperium is built on bribes, but there are things the Venatori don't forgive. It wasn't only men in those boxes. "Your consciences?"

And their swollen rank of staves.

Edited 2025-01-25 01:41 (UTC)

“My what?”

Is she supposed to be here?? There’s genuine bewilderment to the furrow of his brow, to the short stretch of silence he fuddles in before he lifts his cup to drink. Is it really his problem? He only has so many consciences to spare.

“You’re not here to blow the place to smithereens, are you?”

Entreating an old friend. The thought of it makes him tired. All of that hard riding.

He pauses again, this time to mark the rattle of her teeth under a lull in the harbor breeze.

“I just got here.”

A pause follows, in which Benedict, clearly wanting to argue, restrains himself: instead, he drops his attention back to the document onto which he scribbles a note.

"Do you have an idea of what division you'd like to join?" he continues, pressing on, looking up to meet Vandren's eyes.

There’s an irritable prickle of tension when it seems like there might be further debate on the matter, dismissed in a scoff when Benedict’s quill returns to his paper. Thought so.

No chance of him reading those notes from here. He gives up the attempt nearly in its earliest stages, preoccupied with scuffing at an itch under his chin instead, blunt nails rough through the stubble.

“Forces.”

Easy. This is an easy defection quiz, a child could do it.

His eyes are exceptionally blue today, owing in large part to how bloodshot they are.

“Might it be faster for me to write the answers in myself?”

"Forces," Benedict repeats as he writes it, followed by a pinched little smile up at the man across from him. "I can read my own handwriting. It's for our records."

And if you stay defected from Tevinter, you too could become the perfect bureaucrat!

"Verminius," he repeats, from earlier no doubt, "you said you're from Minrathous." Tilting his head a moment, scanning through the mental rolodex, "...Laetan?"

One might anticipate another rise at his hackles if he’d been misclassified. Obviously there is no risk of that here.

“Mm, well,” is what he says instead, itching abandoned for him to pluck at a thread in his coat instead. Unbothered, dehydrated, unfocused, mouldering, “not anymore.”

Band on the run, and all.

A little snort, and Benedict, once again, almost argues-- but he stops himself and looks down once more. You're what you are forever, he would say to anyone except obviously himself,

"Have you got any questions for me?" Like about the organization. The flatness of his smile communicates this: please do not ask about Me.

“Perhaps you have an anchor-shard? I rather thought that was a yes-or-no question. Like, you’d probably have noticed already, unless it’s in some unmentionable hard-to-reach location—”

There’s an archness to Strange’s sense of humour; a little sharp, but it doesn’t seem like it’s directed at the Tevene mage in particular. It’s habitual and unthinking, a sarcasm he falls back on from old instinct. This conversation doesn’t feel much like an interrogation either; the man had simply corralled the new arrival in their shared Research workroom and sat him down for one of the rote, scheduled introductory meetings.

The Head Healer is reading out questions from a form and they haven’t gotten very far yet — name, age, certainly not a rifter — when they stalled here. But he relents; slides the piece of paper across the table for Vandren to examine and read for himself.

Verminius rolls the thread’s end between his fingertips; tests it with a light tug before breaking it free with a snap. Its sudden absence leaves a distinct run behind at the shoulder. He brushes it, all the while aware of the little snort and the flatness of that smile.

“I don’t know that I ever got your full name.”

Verminius marks the error with the barest roll of his eyes. Less put out by Strange catching him than he is the inconvenience of abruptly needing to land on his feet when he’d prefer to continue imagining he’d arrived here in an era more exciting and hopeful than this one is for him personally.

“There are parts of me I haven’t seen in years,” he answers easily, mere moments after lying about his age. “You know how it is.”

When you’re old.

He reaches to flip up the piece of paper on offer. It takes him longer to skim the first few lines than it would if he didn’t have to squint at it from arm’s length.

“May I borrow a pen?”

Edited 2025-01-30 06:40 (UTC)

Here it comes, the inevitable, but-- Benedict supposes with a sigh-- it's probably only fair.

"Artemaeus," he says, trying his best not to cringe, "Benedict Artemaeus."

“I see.” No amount of brushing is going to undue the run in this coat, but it would be difficult to pick out amidst all the embellishment even if it wasn’t already tatty at the seams.

He leaves it.

“Quite the tumble.”

Dry, and too miserable to muster a leer, he is difficult to read in his bleary reassessment of this runaway noble/secretary. A muffled thump marks the flop of his wrist back to the arm of his chair.

“Did they beat you?”

Lips pursed in restrained annoyance, Benedict's gaze flits to meet Vandren's: looking for mockery, pretty sure he sees it, but unable to swear on it.

"In a manner of speaking," he says coolly, "but not..."

He trails off a moment, unexpectedly, his eyes going distant. What does he have to gain from lying or being catty about this?

"...we fell out after I came South," he clarifies, finally.

Is Vandren mocking or is he just like this, slouched and indifferent to the rigors of this interview. What would (or could) he even say at this point to be pushed back across the bay on the ferry with a pack of armor in his lap?

“Hmm,” he hmms.

“Why was it that you came south?”

He nudges the prompt along with an eyebrow, the creases around his eyes sharp in contrast with the dull energy about him. Remind him, as if the information was shared elsewhere and he simply can’t recall.

"Pfah," He's seen the city: "Mage beats me to this."

Time and time over. She's not the only one delayed, nearly a year since his people knocked these towers in. A haphazard little scramble down the wall — old knees and no athlete — draws her abruptly close.

It sure isn't warmth in her voice. Maybe a little like familiarity, when she asks:

"You share that wine?"

The probable answer hasn't stopped her from reaching.

Benedict gives a little sigh through his nose. He's told enough people now that it shouldn't still be stuck so fully in his craw, but somehow it never gets easier.

"I was apprenticed to a magister who took us south for his research." What was the research? He doesn't fucking remember, who cares, he was high for most of it, "when we were captured by Riftwatch, I discovered he had fallen in with the Venatori."

He meets Vandren's eyes wearily; go on, get it over with.

As a mage, and so as an expert in blowing things up, he can clearly survey that there is still plenty of masonry here that survived last year’s effort --

The scuffle of her spidering down towards him pulls his attention back around.

“Maker,” he tucks the cup back in closer to himself as one would lift a plate away from an untrained dog, reproach, mild alarm, not with you, why are you like this, and so on. “Absolutely not.”

But she’s already reaching and is he really going to plant a hand on her face to shove her off with his longer arms.

No.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” says Vandren. His eyebrows are really carrying his part of the conversation on their backs, furrowed with sympathy along all the appropriate pathways. “You must have been shattered.”

"I was," Benedict says flatly, "actually," if only because Venatori Were The Reason They Were Captured, but he knows better than to inject any sincerity into this conversation.

"If nothing else, you have the advantage of having chosen to be here from the get-go." He's trying, he's trying so hard, to steer the conversation back somewhere professionally detached: "have you encountered the Venatori much?"

A sympathetic tut, SAD, and he follows Benedict’s turn of the wheel without languishing any further on this larval Altus’s misfortune. He’s right. This is a professional conversation between two professionals.

“Oh yes,” matter-of-fact. “They’ve burrowed through the Imperium like shipworms.”

He’s veered a thousand miles away, just for a moment, with his mouth left open as if he intends to elaborate.

“Gorging themselves. Do you smoke?”

Edited 2025-02-11 10:46 (UTC)

This, at least, is a topic on which they can agree, and Benedict's gaze becomes a little more focused as he nods to Vandren's assessment.

"Turns out there was opportunity everywhere," he begins, but is caught off-guard by the question, and, after a hesitation, nods.

Fingers tangle about the cup – and his own, if he doesn't let go, nails angled sharp toward skin.

"Could be poison,"

Here. She'll check.

Edited 2025-02-12 04:39 (UTC)

“Would you spare an elderly refugee a spot of tobacco?”

He mugs an exaggerated frown to further his plea, tucked down into his own shoulders.

”Tch --” he relents with a show of an eye tooth, cup relinquished so that he can step back to put that afore-considered arm’s length between them. No sooner is it done than he’s sulking, resentful, deprived of his two in the morning treat by this clawing opossum of a woman.

The cup is warm, the wine spiced, and the courtyard is so cold and she probably doesn’t even go here, or hasn’t for long. Plausible deniability.

Everything about the line of his shoulders squared under his side eye tells he’s running the numbers on whether he could kill her without his staff quickly enough not to get killed himself in this the moment of her victory.

But if his heart was really in it, he wouldn’t be bothering with the odds.

A little breath sighed out, as whatever Benedict hoped to hear following that question is quickly dashed. He levels Vandren with a weary stare— seriously— and then, most generously, opens a pouch on his belt to withdraw two pre-rolled cigarettes.
He hands it over, lips pursed. “A welcome gift,” he explains, to himself as much as to Vandren.

Edited 2025-02-15 18:17 (UTC)

“Certainly.” The sorcerer fishes around in his satchel; he finds a finely-wrought brass pen with its own ink reservoir, hesitates over it for a moment, and then pockets it again to hand over a standard-issue quill and inkwell instead. Slides them across the table for Verminius to start filling it out, turning the conversation more like bureaucratic interview and less like questioning.

“So. Anchor shard? And any pre-existing medical conditions which might require particular monitoring or accommodations?”

Strange remains polite, but impersonal and distant; these are just the questions he has to ask. (They’ll get to the far more interesting ones later—)

Edited 2025-02-16 00:09 (UTC)

Verminius waits for Strange to excavate a writing instrument befitting his station without rankling; too tired and soggy on the inside for a spark of irritation to find kindling. If he’s still around six months from now and remembers this moment, he might attempt to steal this special brass pen then.

For now, he receives what he’s asked for, draws ink up from the well, and strains his eyes to find his place on the form again.

“Mmm,” His voice gravels muddy in the back of his throat, non-committal as he writes, n o. A brief pause to consider the lay of the ink, and he continues on writing to answer ahead: no, no, none, burn them. And so on.

“No,” he answers aloud, finally, as he ponders the last question.

“Where are you from?”

Edited 2025-02-17 06:35 (UTC)

There’s a ghost of humour in the doctor’s face and voice, as he says with a faint degree of impishness, “New York,” which is probably one of the more irritating ways he could’ve answered that question.

After almost two and a half years, Strange does look very much like any other mage. He’s dressed like a local, his clothes comfortable and tailored better than if he were still rooting around in Riftwatch standard-issue castoffs; there’s an eye for style even in his working clothes, someone who has assimilated and wants to make sure he still looks sharp here. So it’s just: that accent, the occasionally inscrutable slang, the glint of green in his own palm.

“I expect the dwarven accent gave it away, but I’m a rifter. America, same general continent as a few other rifters here, albeit different universes and circumstances.”

She drinks. Watches him watch her, petulant and childish and stooped, and only more frightening of it. That's how it is with dangerous people, dangerous things.

(Saare-bas, And still recalls stumbling over the word, misshapen: Sorry, bas. Sorry,)

She isn't sorry. She's running numbers of her own. The world where she overtakes and kills him, bashes a fragment of these battlements into one lucky blow, then two-dozen more diligent – that world doesn't exist. They both know it.

Victory's sweet. Indulgence rankles, sours the taste of clove and honey. So she turns, and spits it into the yard, and briefly considers faking her own asphyxiation. Just to see, would he turn white or red?

"Poison," She affirms. Shoves the cup back, near-empty, "Come, we find you mittens."

Edited 2025-02-25 07:02 (UTC)

Vandren’s frown dissipates nigh upon the instant cigarettes are offered over, the pangs of addiction carving at his ribs soothed seemingly on sight.

“Ah,” he clucks affectionately, grandfatherly, as he sets one of the two immediately to his lip to tuck the other swiftly away:

“You’re too kind.”

Some rustling, a flurry of sparks at a snap of his fingers, and he drags deep to stoke the cherry.

“Were there any further intake questions?”

“Why?”

Whining despair leaves Vandren without his consent, all of that wound tension discharged in incredulity over the waste: spat wine dulling swiftly into the flagstone. Creature comforts run thin, here.

Poison is her answer, of course.

He accepts the cup, having no choice, and too baffled to push it back on her besides.

“Are you part of this organization?” he asks outright, pre-managing his own disbelief, all wrinkled brow and no desire to follow her. Mittens are for children and grandmamas. “You’re so awful.”

At that answer, Vandren measures him up and down again from under the hood of his brow, looking for a moment even older than he is. Goes hand in hand with a particularly jaded flavor of suspicion re: the other.

“The Fade.”

Ugh.

He needs a moment for confirmation to steep. Not a long one. Time enough to wet his quill again. To find his focal length without a lense, and then down the list of questions to the remaining blank.

“You do look like a human,” sounds as though it’s intended to be congratulatory, something in the lift of his tone as he resumes writing: burn me. “A bit long in the face.”

Slumping back into his chair, Benedict finds abruptly that he has had just about enough of this person.

"Don't mention it," he says dully, and leans to one side, propping his jaw on two outstretched fingers.

"Would you be willing to provide a list of your Venatori contacts?"

Funny that it took this long for it to happen. It’s not the first time someone in Thedas has questioned his humanity, but it’s the first time it’s happened inside the Gallows — typically everyone here is so accustomed to rifters by now — and it shakes a surprised, bitter laugh loose from him.

“Yes, it’s a real irony, going grey when I’m only two and a half years old. I’m the most precocious toddler you’ll ever meet.”

Strange’s voice is arch, made even more biting from that small flicker of irritation. Most days, he’s able to push the existential anxiety down and not be reminded of it quite so bluntly. He hates being reminded of it.

“Am I the first rifter you’ve ever met?”

He’s soaking in the smoke like a parched pot plant, still drooped but reinvigorated, ready to give life another week or two after having half a cup of stale coffee splashed onto the soil.

“Oh, yes.”

No hesitation, past the moment it takes him to replay the question for himself.

“No problem at all."

Smoke spools idle through his fingers. He should really like to find something to eat first, and maybe a nap, but this boy looks so sad already.

"Right now?"

Patiently (so patiently): "unless you've got somewhere to be."

Somehow... he doubts it.

"We have agreement," You're so awful, I agree, it passes right over her head in stilted Trade – "They make new thing, I look. Maybe I tell them how to make it better."

And certainly she tells the city's remaining converts, the ones who forward her letters. She glances over her shoulder. He'll come or he won't.

"Now you and I, we have agreement, too." If he means to freeze his little paws for Riftwatch. "They give you rules?"

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