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

[mournwitch]

Athénaïs is going to say, probably, something very pithy on the nature of the escort she had in mind — maybe some kind of hit dog with big stick mime, escorting it all the way to a dirt nap that’s basically a mercy killing when Maker knows what’s happened to its masters — but the dog growls and she backs up, too. Instead,

“No. I don’t think we’re in a best case scenario here.”

That thing can definitely reason, and that’s bad fucking sign.

“I vote we table the academic discussion of the implications and kill it.”

[wythersake]

She steps back, and he starts of it, elbow knocking shoulder. Isaac's staff splays out — a desperate bid for balance — but it finds his side which is also her side and the whole comic twist-up is,

Abruptly less comic. Peeled lips keep peeling, back and back over a lengthening spiral of teeth; back past muzzle and bare, bloody skull. It doesn't need eyes to lunge. It already knows how to bite.

[mournwitch]

The height differential between them is such that the easiest way out of this — at least for Athénaïs, it’s probably not going to help Isaac’s balance any — is to drop and she does, falling into a crouch and launching her orb focus like the world’s scariest yoyo in the hopes of, at minimum, gaining them some personal space. In her head, she’s doing the math: they’re so close to the bubble that shapes can be made out on the other side, which means probably if this starts going really south they’re not going to be in it alone,

but it’s a bad start.

“Now’d be a great time to tell me you’re a seasoned battle mage,” she says from the general vicinity of his knees, throwing up a barrier around them that won’t do more than buy precious seconds for him to decide how right she is. The dog,

or what used to be a dog,

lunges in a way that could best be described as unnecessarily sinuous and she rolls to the side, coming up again knife-first.

[wythersake]

The seasoned battle mage yelps, slips, goes flat on his ass.

Dog leaps for ball. Dog smashes into barrier, and the noise it makes is less whine than primordial screech. Tongue slaps out a spray of thorny tentacles, ripping chunks from the magic before them. Isaac scuttles in the muck, sliding over his own boots to plant the staff upright, then stumbles — no, no, yes now upright — and the things he's used to killing, they all die easier than this.

Twist a demon's flesh, and you've only scratched off the to-do list.

So when he thrusts out a hand, smoking with light, it's only to turn toward her. If they've precious seconds, someone need use them.