WHO: Nicola + You WHAT: Fresh meat. And eventually old gross meat too. WHEN: Bloomingtide, pre-mod plot. WHERE: Kirkwall & the Gallows for now. NOTES: Putting open and closed things for all my dudes in here as I write them, so if you want to plan something with any of them, tap my shoulder about it.
Two weeks after his arrival, Nicola loses an argument with a well-dressed merchant at the docks. Their debate is held in quiet and rapid Antivan, gestures louder than the words, and reluctantly concluded by a handshake that transitions into a friendlier clasp of his hand to her collar. She's leapt back onto her nimble little ship before he remembers the letter in his pocket, and they have to each lean over the grey, kelpy water for him to hand it across.
She tucks it into her shirt, and then she's busy with ropes and commands, and he's left him with the subject of their disagreement: ten sizable crates, arranged in five stacks of two.
He could lift one of them alone. Maybe. But the rest would not necessarily be here when he came back for them.
He's weighing the relative costs of (a) nine lost crates of shitty table wine, (b) having to broadcast a request for help, and (c) shelling out his own money for some loitering dockhand's time, when he spots (d) a single semi-familiar face or uniform that might be waylaid with a beckoning hand.
gallows.
Whoever has volunteered or been volunteered to teach a newcomer how the eluvians work — and what an eluvian even is — welcome to the room where Riftwatch's Gallows eluvian is kept. Nicola has been quiet. He hasn't expressed any reluctance to learn. However, when the mirror lights up, dully reflective surface giving way to a shimmering glimpse of what's waiting beyond it, he doesn't jump, exactly, but he does go from a curious lean forward to a more alarmed slant back from the mirror.
"I see," he says.
He has seen one of these before. His aunt has one, inert and decorative in her drawing room between a mounted halla head and a gleaming restored mosaic. Should he warn her? He'll consider it.
He does not step bravely forward or volunteer to go first. He says, "In Sirone everyone thinks Riftwatch is enormous. They think there is no other way you could be everywhere and do everything that you do."
“Good thing we’re limited by our imaginations and not theirs, then,” Gwenaëlle says, standing beside the mirror, clearly weighing whether or not she should outright remind him that the next step is literally stepping, or take pity on him and say she’s going first, or just haul him through and see how that goes. “If we stopped to consider how impossible most of what we achieve actually ought to be more often than we do,”
Nicola has had more charming first impressions than the cocky and implying his entire city lacks imagination. But he's also had less charming first impressions, and made them himself, so he only raises his eyebrows and tips his head as if giving this some thought.
What he's actually giving thought to is her contemplation of him. What her options here must be. The worrying fact that she has not already taken pity and gone first.
Maybe he should be embarrassed, about the hesitation, but he isn't. He has been very calm about meeting more mages in a single day than he'd ever encountered in his life. Extremely relaxed and reasonable about his roommate options being exclusively mages, too, plus one rifter. He didn't gawp at the griffons. He has, by his calculations, earned some hesitation over stepping through what is supposed to be glass into an alternate dimension.
It probably isn’t an immediate comfort to him that she stops to think about this question, or that she seems to be deciding what counts toward its answer—
“Not never,” she decides, “and the delay on returning wasn’t inexplicably magical and unique.” Borderline explicably magic and unique, except she doesn’t think a kidnapping is inherently, as a cause for disappearance, that special just because a demon did it. Impersonating everybody was the fucked up part, and hardly related to the eluvians,
Riftwatch has to answer a lot of questions most people never have to consider. It shifts one’s perspective, over time.
“Here,” she says, deciding that neither leaving him unattended to pussy out or sending him through ahead to somehow immediately find mischief are ideal outcomes for either of them and looping her elbow through his, “we’ll go together. It’ll be less impressive once it’s less mysterious.”
Maybe they’d have more support if more people realised they were seven people with the budget of three trying not to understand that they shouldn’t be able to fly in case they realise it’s true and plummet to their deaths.
There is another man nearby, hands in pockets and loitering in a way which looks like he’d rather fade into the background; not explicitly wearing Riftwatch colours or pins, not outright trumpeting the fact that he works for them, but Nicola will have seen him around the dining hall and the residential tower. The Gallows are small enough, and the faces become familiar.
And since Cassian is already waiting at the docks himself and there’s really not much to do until the ferry gets back —
After a moment’s hesitation, he obediently saunters over at that wave of a hand, sizing up the ten crates with the arch of an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of luggage,” he says.
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kirkwall (open)
Two weeks after his arrival, Nicola loses an argument with a well-dressed merchant at the docks. Their debate is held in quiet and rapid Antivan, gestures louder than the words, and reluctantly concluded by a handshake that transitions into a friendlier clasp of his hand to her collar. She's leapt back onto her nimble little ship before he remembers the letter in his pocket, and they have to each lean over the grey, kelpy water for him to hand it across.
She tucks it into her shirt, and then she's busy with ropes and commands, and he's left him with the subject of their disagreement: ten sizable crates, arranged in five stacks of two.
He could lift one of them alone. Maybe. But the rest would not necessarily be here when he came back for them.
He's weighing the relative costs of (a) nine lost crates of shitty table wine, (b) having to broadcast a request for help, and (c) shelling out his own money for some loitering dockhand's time, when he spots (d) a single semi-familiar face or uniform that might be waylaid with a beckoning hand.
gallows.
Whoever has volunteered or been volunteered to teach a newcomer how the eluvians work — and what an eluvian even is — welcome to the room where Riftwatch's Gallows eluvian is kept. Nicola has been quiet. He hasn't expressed any reluctance to learn. However, when the mirror lights up, dully reflective surface giving way to a shimmering glimpse of what's waiting beyond it, he doesn't jump, exactly, but he does go from a curious lean forward to a more alarmed slant back from the mirror.
"I see," he says.
He has seen one of these before. His aunt has one, inert and decorative in her drawing room between a mounted halla head and a gleaming restored mosaic. Should he warn her? He'll consider it.
He does not step bravely forward or volunteer to go first. He says, "In Sirone everyone thinks Riftwatch is enormous. They think there is no other way you could be everywhere and do everything that you do."
gallows.
more than none, less than they should,
“we’d get fuck all done, probably.”
no subject
What he's actually giving thought to is her contemplation of him. What her options here must be. The worrying fact that she has not already taken pity and gone first.
Maybe he should be embarrassed, about the hesitation, but he isn't. He has been very calm about meeting more mages in a single day than he'd ever encountered in his life. Extremely relaxed and reasonable about his roommate options being exclusively mages, too, plus one rifter. He didn't gawp at the griffons. He has, by his calculations, earned some hesitation over stepping through what is supposed to be glass into an alternate dimension.
"Has anyone ever gone in and never come back?"
no subject
“Not never,” she decides, “and the delay on returning wasn’t inexplicably magical and unique.” Borderline explicably magic and unique, except she doesn’t think a kidnapping is inherently, as a cause for disappearance, that special just because a demon did it. Impersonating everybody was the fucked up part, and hardly related to the eluvians,
Riftwatch has to answer a lot of questions most people never have to consider. It shifts one’s perspective, over time.
“Here,” she says, deciding that neither leaving him unattended to pussy out or sending him through ahead to somehow immediately find mischief are ideal outcomes for either of them and looping her elbow through his, “we’ll go together. It’ll be less impressive once it’s less mysterious.”
Maybe they’d have more support if more people realised they were seven people with the budget of three trying not to understand that they shouldn’t be able to fly in case they realise it’s true and plummet to their deaths.
docks.
And since Cassian is already waiting at the docks himself and there’s really not much to do until the ferry gets back —
After a moment’s hesitation, he obediently saunters over at that wave of a hand, sizing up the ten crates with the arch of an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of luggage,” he says.