Entry tags:

MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

WHO: Anyone/Everyone
WHAT: Riftwatch investigates a strange occurrence in Western Orlais.
WHEN: Bloomingtide 9:51.
WHERE: Yvoire, on the edge of the Tirashan Forest.
NOTES: OOC post with reward claims. Body horror CW for the main post.

I. YVOIRE

It should have been a straightforward mission. Not a simple one—attempting to help mediate some sort of disagreement between the people of Yvoire and some local elves isn't simple—but straightforward. The sort of thing Riftwatch's diplomacy division has done plenty of times before. From the Hunterhorns base they ride southeast, through the late spring mud to a town on the edge of the Tirashan. Instead of a bit tense, edging toward violence, maybe a little strange in the way remote villages can be, they find the entire town encased in a nearly-translucent, impermeable magical dome. This calls for reinforcements.

II. THE BUBBLE

By the time Riftwatch has arrived en masse, it's been determined that anchors (it will take at least two, working together) can open and close a passage through the barrier the same way they might a rift, allowing teams to enter and explore the area. Inside, they find themselves in the Fade—the sky an unnatural green with no sign of sun or moon, jagged black rocks jutting up from the ground, the air teeming with spirits and demons—but also not. Among the boulders are houses, shops, torn apart by the Fade stone. A barn roof is pierced by a spire of dark stone, a bakery all but flattened. The residents haven't been spared. Some have been crushed by the arriving landscape, others encased within it. Arms reach out from more than one block of dark stone, the crown of a head just visible in an edge, a corpse frozen mid-stride as if charging out of the rock, but caught just too slow to outrun their fate.

The merging landscapes have rearranged some parts of town even more strangely. More than one building has been sliced in pieces, one remaining in place, the others and its contents relocated or vanished. Every book in a library has been severed from its contents, covers slumped in a bookshelf in a bisected library, pages now suspended in a cloud above a pigsty. A pocket of pond water fills an intersection, two drowned bodies floating trapped within it along with the contents of a wheelbarrow and a couple of now-well-fed fish. A copse of trees, uprooted, grow down from a patch of earth that hovers beside the town's small chantry.

As they investigate the fate of Yvoire, Riftwatch will encounter:

Demons, primarily of the less-powerful varieties but in unusual numbers. They don't manifest in the way demons often do and don't appear to be tied to any particular object or location. They're just here, similar to areas where a rift has been open for a time and demons are already roaming free.
Possessed corpses of the townspeople, some aggressive and violent, others just curiously wandering about the town going through the motions of life.
Spirits, of many different types and degrees of curiosity, communication, and helpfulness
Evidence of explosive magical violence, like a body burned by a flame that seems to originate where they stood, or a person crushed under a bookshelf toppled by the tell-tale blast of Stonefist.
A handful of survivors who have survived by hiding in cellars or other out-of-the-way spots who will report that whatever happened happened the morning before Riftwatch's initial arrival, when suddenly there was a strange sense of pressure and static in the air, as if a storm was arriving, and then everything suddenly flew apart or was crushed and a cloud of spirits and demons appeared everywhere.
At least one survivor will report that some of the elves who have been "stalking" (their word) the village lately were seen sneaking into town before first light, lurking around the chapel as usual.
Some survivors will report family members or neighbors who they had never suspected to be mages suddenly doing magic, often with deadly consequences for themselves and those around them.
And among them, a few people possessed by demons who will present themselves as survivors and do their best to get Riftwatch to help them exit the bubble and be free.
One elf who has been trapped half-inside a tree, his entire right side from ear to toes encased in the thick trunk of a flowering oak that wasn't in this spot yesterday. He is alive, for now.

Fully exploring the area takes time, not only because of the demons but because Riftwatch will find that staying in the bubble indefinitely is unpleasant. Humans and Qunari are affected first, then dwarves, then rifters who have amputated their anchors, and finally elves, but over time anyone may begin to experience headaches, nausea, blurring vision, and feelings of either strange pressure or the equally strange absence of pressure. The exception is anyone with an anchor — they and those in their immediate vicinity will feel fine, and once that becomes apparent, Riftwatch can begin organizing so exploration teams never need to stray very far from someone with an anchor. Even the presence of an anchor, though, won't stop some people from exhibiting the strangest effect of all: the spontaneous development of Fade-touched magic that, unlike the headaches, does not go away when they leave the area.

III. THE ARTIFACT

Yvoire's Chantry is small, the sort of village chapel typically staffed by a single Sister, or maybe a Mother if she's a local. It was a Sister, here—she'll be found dead in a closet along with a number of her parishioners, the apparent victims of a hunger demon. Despite the limited presence of people, the Chantry is a hive of spirit and demon activity, which Riftwatch will have to make its way through in order to investigate.

Once they do, in addition to the deceased inside, Riftwatch will discover another closet that instead of remains contains a patch of stone floor that looks older than the rest, and yet also as if its mortar has been recently loosened. Levering up the large stone tile will reveal a passage into an old basement crypt, shelves of vestments and liturgical supplies covered in cobwebs, niches containing grace goods and dedicatory plaques to prominent members of the chantry past. A path has been tracked through the heavy dust, leading to the far wall, which has been demolished to reveal a different stone wall, this one elven in design. This has been opened like a door, though neither seam nor lock nor hinge is visible, one portion of the wall simply rotated on a non-existent axis to create a passageway.

Inside is a chamber not so very different in design from the chantry crypt: the walls lined with shelves and niches, all of them bare. A strange absence of dust in the room makes it difficult to tell how many were previously full, but several contain stands or racks seemingly designed for display, many in unusual shapes. In the center of the room is a plinth of black marble, the stand in its center still gleaming. There's no ambiguity about the shape it's meant to hold, the spidering fingers plainly designed to contain a sphere.

Set into the wall opposite the door is a frame in the familiar shape of an eluvian mirror, its glass dark and impassable.

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The elven man in the tree — the man who now is the tree — does not have long. He should already be dead. It's magic that's sustaining him, and it's magic that's killing him, as any attempt at chopping into the tree will reveal he cannot be removed from the tree that has encased him because he is becoming part of it, and more so by the minute. They have until the process advances too far into his vital organs and brain to try to get information out of him.

The expression on his face when anyone approaches, a mix of pained grimace and furious sneer made more aggressive by the angles of his red vallaslin, suggests this will not be pleasant. Depending on one's approach, however, it may at least be unpleasant in a simple way.

[ OOC note: multiple threads are allowed, and multiple participants in a single thread are fine too if you want to team up. To facilitate the time-crunch vibe you can expect the NPC to die within 5-10 tags, with the upper limit of that requiring attempts at healing or Templar abilities to slow the progress of the spread. NPC tags will be network/action-spam levels of brief, so feel free to do the same. ]

"Healer? 's there a healer about?" calls Barrow from by the tree, where he's doing his best to assess the fellow's state on his own and coming up with only: bad.
"Can you feel your right arm or leg, mate?" he asks hurriedly, circling the trunk.

Tree Guy watches Barrow circling and calling for a healer, lifting his chin as much as he's able to try to see if anybody's come running. Regardless, the bend of his eyebrows (they at least still move just fine) make clear he's got no great hopes for his own prospects at this point.

"Yes, mate," he drawls, his accent an odd and very thick blend of Orlesian and Dalish, "they are feeling a bit stiff."

I. Possessed Corpses (fighting)

It's the violent ones first that Barrow seeks out, making it his prime directive to put them down. The hammer is strapped to his back for this, replaced by the more Templar-aligned sword and shield, albeit without the official insignia; all the better to carve his way through the small mobs, his blade flashing intermittently with holy energy. If he had to stay on the lyrium, might as well make it worth his while.
He sets his sights on the nonviolent corpses when he's convinced the others are cleared, and, unless otherwise talked down, will make quick work of them as well.

II. Possessed Corpses (burning)

Those who were present in the aftermath of the Gallows attack may remember how active Barrow was in the cleanup: strong enough to haul and pile an impressive number of corpses, he resigned himself to the task and is doing the same now. The visible Dalish are set aside-- they have their own rites, don't they?-- but humans are reliably cast onto the pyre, sacred words murmured over each in turn as he lays them to rest.

III. Wildcard

exploration

the possessed

captain

right now

the spirits

Fine

the survivors

wildcard

(

throw something else at me, add a twist, or hmu if you want a ~bespoke~ starter!

)

"Can you wiggle your toes?" It seems like the thing to ask, right, because if the elf can move his extremities maybe they can just cut him out.

Experimentally, Barrow pulls at a piece of bark by the man's face.

"There are better questions to ask."

She'd seen the man stuck in the tree before she'd heard the shout. It was luck (or misfortune) that she was the closest there over one of the actual healers, even if Rowena did have skill in healing spells. Actually, more skill than those who'd healed her injuries (or sustained her until she'd healed herself).

"How he's becoming a tree, perhaps."

She's looking over the man as she steps closer and this is far unlike any magic she's seen before.

"Non, I cannot move any of it." He frowns harder when Barrow's hand comes so near his face, clenched teeth briefly bared. Up close, there is sweat on his brow despite the cool day, a sickly pallor beneath the spray of dark freckles across his cheeks. "I do not think I have toes, anymore."

The glare persists at Rowena's approach. "Soon I will be dead because I am a fool who trusted the Dread Wolf himself and now they will not need to plant a tree on my grave."

On Rowena's approach, Barrow steps back; he's seen her about, doesn't know her well, but is inclined to trust someone willing to be assertive in the moment.

"...oh." Doesn't have toes. Maker. Barrow looks from the elf to Rowena and back.
"I can try to slow the magic," he offers helplessly.

When Vanya comes up to her shoulder, it's quiet but not meant to startle her. (To that end, he comes from the side with her good eye.) He watches for a few moments too, attentive. When he finally speaks, it's very low, so as not to draw attention.

"It can be difficult, sometimes, to tell at a distance. Whether demons are possessing the living or the recently deceased. If the demon is quick about it, in the latter case, it can go quite some time before the tells begin to show. But it takes finesse, steering a corpse." Living possessions can take advantage of the original inhabitant's ease with their body; wisps guided into corpses in Nevarra have the help of a necromancer (mostly). The jerky motions are far from conclusive, but they suggest something. On the other hand: "If it's a living possession, sometimes the person possessed is actively fighting it. That causes its own signs."

The elf's "No," is sharp, definite. He instinctively tries to shake his head, but succeeds only in prompting a grimace of pain.

"Better a quicker death than a slower one. You cannot stop it. You cannot stop any of this. Soon you may be half trees and rocks yourselves, mates."

“Is that a good idea?” Cassian asks, falling in beside and slightly behind the woman and the wisp.

He’s new here, but as captain of the guard, she’s probably been briefed about the unfamiliar face: Shadow Dragon, new recruit, vouched-for. Quietly competent, although he looks distinctly out of his depth here in this bizarre landscape; he’s a restless blade without a hand, a man waiting for orders, instinctively looking for somewhere he could be made of use.

He follows her for a few different reasons. For one, maybe this other captain will have orders. For another, while Gwenaëlle looks like she can handle herself, it’s still best for people to have backup and not walk off alone into this nightmare,

and, also, he can’t get out of this bubble without an anchor-bearer.

Rule number two: build your exit on your way in.

Cassian Andor is no templar, no mage, has no particular skills when it comes to the landscape warping beneath his feet and people being caught screaming in stone. He has his hands, and nothing else.

So as the bodies are being stacked high, he finds himself at loose ends, drifting and looking for something to do. He wipes off his sword, having helped to at least put down some of those possessed corpses. He stands too long by Barrow’s smaller pile of dead Dalish elves,

(and he remembers a streak of facepaint pressed into his chin, in imitation of what would have been vallaslin)

and he swallows, hard, before he turns and joins the larger man.

“Need any help?”

Isaac leans on the end of his own branch and makes no move to touch the oak — enough of this place points towards contagion. Without contact the brush of his spell is imprecise, a prompt toward growth that snarls in strings already beginning to weave. Animal, vegetable; and magic as like to encourage the latter. He pulls back.

"If anyone's alive, say what you'd have said."

Maybe the Dalish can make sense of it. There are better questions to ask: Who made off with the Chantry's orb? How did they know of it, and did they enter from tree or glass? But the man's going to die, and there's no telling how long he'll last. They may need to chase a lead.

"My tongue will be wood before I send shemlen bearing my final words." He's plainly not in a good way, but has strength enough for disgust. (Some, at least. The accent and the natural V of heavy dark brows are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.)

"My people will find me one day. But I will give you a warning, shem: many more of you will be trees before he is finished."

With her head tilted, studying the definitely possessed but inconclusively living women ahead of them,

“It all ends the same way, though,” seems like the most important part of it. Finesse or no. It doesn’t much look like finesse to her, but then: the tells, he says. Even still: “They seem so oblivious. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

Possessed, obviously — but to what end, exactly? It all ends the same way. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the point of going through these motions is; maybe there isn’t a point to it at all. Maybe demons don’t think about these things, except it seems leagues from the way Vanya himself had been impersonated, and that creature had been reasoning, hadn’t it. Had purpose.

These things barely seem to register anything else around them. None of the chaos that’s been wrought here, nor any of the people come to deal with it.

As anchor-bearers go, Gwenaëlle is a good choice; the gauntlet encasing hers is clearly to purpose, even if he hasn’t seen specifically what, yet, and he’s already identified her. Captain Baudin is unlikely to be mislaid, unattended — but she does have a bad habit of pursuing curiosity with so much less impulse control than she generally brings to bear on her duties and responsibilities.

To wit, “Probably not, no,” is not the most heartening answer she could’ve given him, albeit a prompt and honest one.

“Ignoring it doesn’t seem like a better one, though, so—”

There's nothing he can do to physically help here, not if Isaac's healing isn't enough.

"They will find you." The least he can do is offer assurance of that as the man dies. "Is there something we should do, or stop doing, to spare others from this?"

The tone had felt more threat than warning but Emmrich chooses to take him at his word.

1. WARNING

To him it seemed obvious where they were the minute they stepped in, and from what he knew and had seen of the Riftwatch he'd think they could all make an educated guess and land on the correct answer, but above all he was a teacher. Making an assumption about what others know only set a group up for failure.

"We're in the Fade. Be mindful of your emotions, and question the reality and logic of what you see and hear." His voice was calm, though he had yet to put his staff back into its straps on his back. He'd pulled it out before coming in and for now at least it was staying in his hand, just in case. The presence of lesser transformed spirits was a comfort, though. They weren't fleeing a stronger, more predatory being. "We are likely not in immediate danger, but do stay alert."

2. POSSESSION ('ARMLESS)

An older woman, missing her left arm and much of the skin and hair on the left side of her face, stared at the library in dismay. "The books, all the books," she seemed to say, sounding mournful. She wasn't bleeding, and she'd taken no notice of her injuries.

Emmrich joined her, gaze on the damage. Obviously the woman was long gone but one must still be considerate and careful when dealing with a spirit that had been caught up in the emotion of the dead and dying.

"It must have mattered a great deal to you." Others were tending to the living. He could help see to the dead and a tangled-up Compassion spirit, even if it might look rather odd to an onlooker.

3. POSSESSION (NOT SO HARMLESS)

"You have to help us." The speaker was a young man. His abdomen was wrapped in bloodied bandages, and the jacket over it as well as his pants were filthy. There was an air of condescension to his words and the way he looked at anyone around him. "That's what you're here for, right? You can get us out of here?"

Of course a Pride spirit would be the first to attempt to cross over, Emmrich thought but did not say. It was strong. It was powerful, old enough to seem convincing, and it was right next to actual, non-possessed survivors which means it couldn't be simply confronted. He'd have to play along and hope for assistance.

"In good time. We must first figure out what's happened, so we know it's safe to remove anyone or anything." That was almost definitely not Riftwatch procedure. Emmrich glanced around to see if anyone nearby had also picked up on Pride's presence, or if he was about to be contradicted.

4. WILDCARD

[Hit him up! His focus will be mostly on helping/dealing with/fighting the spirits and aiding any survivors who are in mourning, but I'm down for whatever.]

He hears her voice and sees her expression but neither register right away. Instead his focus is on the little wisp ahead of her and how it clearly is on a mission.

"Oh, a helper!" Only then does it register that he's the only one delighted by this. She, quite distinctly, is not. Emmrich tries to moderate his joy as he stands up from where he was kneeling, watching the fade-fish.

"Ah. I mean they seem to wish to assist. That's not uncommon, for wisps. May I join the two of you, Captain?"

The helpful wisps of the Necropolis have never, regrettably, had the opportunity to be Gwenaëlle’s primary takeaway from visits to Nevarra; every time they go, there’s been some manner of extreme crisis, usually but not exclusively resulting in having to fight their way through the dead that occupy the halls of Volkarin’s life’s work.

(Or, memorably, gathering a cluster of them with the hoop of her skirt and bowling them down a Nevarra City hill—)

Between that and the collisions she’s had with elvhen spirits, her enthusiasm is markedly less than his own even if her interest has been sufficiently caught. Still: necromancers are substantially less irritating when they aren’t fucking her grandfather, so if she doesn’t immediately warm, she at least seems willing to defer to his expertise in the matter.

“It’s not my usual experience of spirits,” she says, dry, producing a monocle from an inner pocket of her coat for her remaining eye (its twin, replaced by a blank gold substitute, surrendered to some other damn spirit). “But it’s been trying to get my attention for the past twenty minutes. I’m not sure for what, exactly.”

"Depends on the type of demon, but more often than not," of her first question, which had probably been rhetorical in the first place. But it's not entirely without relevance to the second part of his response. "Some demons are just ... want to touch the living world. They aren't sophisticated enough to plan, they just see an opening and push through. Most mages can avoid those, unless they're somehow compromised another way, so we were trained to look out for the more subtle ones mostly. But this."

To her point, the two young women badly carrying a bucket of water are not subtle in any way. They seem more as if they were clumsy toys badly wound.

"This looks to me like opportunism. Still dangerous but not strategic." Then again, it could be a double blind. But given where they are, he suspects not.

Gwenaëlle has been paying attention to the elf in the tree.

Or the elf that is the tree. Was the tree already there, before the elf became part of it? That seems probable — simpler — but under the circumstances of literally everything around them and much of what she’s witnessed in the past decade, not something to take as read. However it began, it’s become clear how it’s going to end; he knows they can’t help him. He’s got little and less reason to help them, from the sound of things.

Okay. They probably don’t have time for her to think too hard about whether or not the next thing she does is a good idea, so she doesn’t; catches Ennaris by the elbow and starts walking her towards the tree, briskly:

“Tavane. I’ll ask him questions. You listen for the answers.”

Presumably she doesn’t need to be told how, or why Gwenaëlle isn’t being explicit about it in potential earshot of half the company.

It's not the time to feel sorry for herself over Gwenaëlle's treatment of her in the wake of her amputation; there's a pang of hurt at the use of her surname, and then Ness pushes it down and to the back of her mind. She's been considering using her telepathy from the very start, wondering if it was something she should do without permission or input from anyone else, but—this is better. Sanctioned is better than not.

They stop in front of the—elf, he's still an elf, despite what's happening to him, and it occurs to her that she might be able to help him. Not plumb his mind for information, making his last moments an interrogation he has no choice but to participate in, but soothe his mind, offer him a few moments of peace before he's lost. She has the power to do that, where no one else here does. They might not get any information from him that way, but it'd be a good deed, nonetheless.

From Gwenaëlle's perspective, there's no indication of Ness's internal conflict. She stands in front of the elf for a moment, eyes blue and pitying, and then they flash violet, and she slips into his mind, settles deep on the sea floor of it. He'll be able to tell she's there as she sifts through his thoughts, examines each and every thing Gwenaëlle's questioning dredges up, but it's not as though he's going to be able to tell anyone.

Ness looks over to Gwenaëlle and nods—she's ready for the questioning to begin.

Paying enough mind to be sure that Ennaris is on board, and thereafter focusing entirely on the elf, Gwenaëlle is entirely zeroed in on their work—

and less concerned with the arboreal Dalish’s final moments. This will probably feature in a nightmare, weeks from now, but in the moment she doesn’t allow herself to think about anything except that Ennaris’s abilities might glean them something of use before he’s nothing more than a strange shape worked in wood.

“Was this deliberate?”

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MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

TREE GUY

no subject

no subject

Barrow OTA

gwenaëlle baudin | open

exploration

the possessed

the spirits

the survivors

wildcard

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

the possessed

no subject

the spirits;

burning;

pile in if anyone wants a group thread

no subject

no subject

no subject

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Emmrich | OTA

the spirits

no subject

no subject

for ness

no subject

no subject