MOD PLOT: A Night Without Moon and Stars

[faderifting]

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.

Comments

[corpsestuff]

Emmrich doesn't bother to hide his curiosity about the gauntlet, trying to figure out from sight alone what material it was. It looked nothing like any of the common materials used for magical staves which left him at a loss.

"No offense taken," he assures her, gaze finally leaving the gauntlet. "Manfred, my companion, a Curiosity wisp himself, has been equally fascinated by steam from a teapot and a dagger. I promptly took the dagger away, of course. He's a gentle soul who means well but that doesn't mean the call of his nature won't tempt him into situations he otherwise would steer clear of."

The building up ahead looks like a surgeon's been at it. Straight lines mark missing portions that have been cleanly excised. Somehow, what remains of the roof is still holding. Emmrich doesn't think it will last for long, though. The wisp zips in and back out, weaving through the gaps, clearly wanting them to come in.

"Let's stick to the areas where the roof is missing. The vibrations from our movement alone may be enough to bring the remainder down." So saying, he very carefully entered a gap in the side of the former house.

[elegiaque]

The gauntlet is leather, wired with copper, the anchor-shard below exposed beneath a set of lenses that are clearly adjustable—

she’s wearing a matching glove on the other hand, but that one’s just so her hands don’t freeze when she’s airborne.

“Manfred’s the — so high, bones?” is very descriptive, as Gwenaëlle very obviously isn’t sure what the polite term for a wisp with its own constructed body might be, and doesn’t want to assume outright calling him the skeleton will be fine, following Emmrich’s lead with a cautious glance upward, mindful of where the light falls through the broken building, staying in it underneath the open air as much as she can.

She keeps him on her blind side, then, trusting Emmrich to be both their eyes as she trails the wisp, catching sight of a downed shelf and what look like the beginning of stairs, leading down.

[corpsestuff]

A focusing device for a shard. That the shards are related to the Fade seems obvious from the little he's seen and heard, but it seems intrusive to ask if he could simply study something embedded in another person. So he has not. All the same, his gaze keeps flickering back to her gauntlet.

"My assistant, yes," he says, somewhat missing Gwenaelle's dilemma. "He's drawn by anything shiny, moving, or both."

Emmrich spares a moment to take a closer look at the shelf. It's been destroyed, smashed by the impact of something large, but that's not what the wisp seems to care about. He holds up a hand and conjures an orb of green light to supplement what the wisp is putting out.

His curiosity proves too much to continue ignoring. "Do you feel anything, when you use your device to focus your magic?"

[elegiaque]

Her hand flexes when he asks the question, as if reminded — that it’s there. Her hand (given everything lately—) and the anchor-shard in it. She glances ahead, crouching down to see beneath the broken shelving, encouraged by the way the wisp shoots past her underneath and only emerges again a few moments later when they obviously haven’t immediately followed it down.

Not everyone moves with quite that much ease.

“The usual discomfort,” she says. “Not ‘I’m not comfortable with magic’, I mean it’s a sort of. Pressure and release,” she settles on, rocking back on her heels and tilting her head to study the shelves for leverage to move them. If she diffused her fade blast, she could probably just shunt the damn thing out of the way, Emmrich’s right: that might well bring the remains of the building down on top of them in the doing.

“But the effect itself is being altered outside of me — it’s more like using a looking glass to start a fire. If I’m the sun, in that analogy, the looking glass doesn’t do anything to me.”

[corpsestuff]

He follows her gaze and looks around. What they need is something to brace the shelves so that things don't collapse, and there's some wood that looks like it might be solid enough. Emmrich tilts his head in its direction as he listens to her.

"Are you comfortable with further questions? I study the Fade, and that you're tied to it in such a clear fashion is something I'd be fascinated to learn more about. But it does touch on the personal. I don't wish to offend."

As he talks he selects a few of the more sturdy looking planks broken from... actually, he doesn't know where. Normally he'd say it had to come from somewhere, but they're in the Fade. Logic doesn't always apply here.

The first piece he starts wedging in, slowly, carefully, trying to make sure he's only adding support and not unbalancing things in other places.

[elegiaque]

Tied to the Fade. It’s true in a very literal way, but she doesn’t know that she’s ever put it into exactly those words, specifically, before— not a bad thing, just a new thought. Among many,

“You’re unlikely to,” she says, glancing up with a quick, brief smile. “I don’t mind intelligent questions.”

She’s got more of a tolerance for stupid ones than most people would credit, too, if they at least seem sincere. But if she’ll settle for at least they’re thinking enough to ask a question at all, from time to time, it’s a low bar that Emmrich Volkarin is likely to clear with a pole vault.

“I’ve been keeping notes,” she adds, moving to steady what he’s doing between the two of them, “since I was struck with it. 9:42.”

Making hers one of, if not the, oldest anchor-shard available. Like she’d said to Stephen, years ago now: mine’s bigger. (She hadn’t always raised barriers with the degree of ease she’d demonstrated to him, minutes earlier.)

[corpsestuff]

"Years of notes," he says with obvious interest. "When we return I'd love to read them, if you don't mind." Even if they're simply personal observations they'll still have insight, and her reputation isn't one of someone oblivious. The notes could be invaluable.

After they wedge a second plank up to support the shelf Emmrich steps back and considers the area the wisp seems to want them to go.

"That should hold." His voice isn't certain. Logically the weight is distributed enough by the two planks and the bookcase itself that it will balance, what with three legs being stronger and more stable than two. At the same time, there have been multiple explosions in this town and something's sliced it up quite well. There are unusual factors at play. He'll wait for her opinion before stepping in.