open | beach party, blight themed

[nextone]

WHO: Anyone, and introducing Antoine and Evka.
WHAT: Darkspawn! Bonfire! Character intros!
WHEN: Late summer.
WHERE: The Wounded Coast.
NOTES: This is a new character intro, but it's also an open mingle if you would like to use it to do your own stuff without Antoine and Evka.

As it happens: Riftwatch is home to Kirkwall's only near-enough-to-permanent resident Grey Wardens. When travelers report an incursion of darkspawn on the roads into the city, then, the City Guard doesn't exactly punt — a few short-straw drawers are available to help — but it does send a messenger to the Gallows' front gate with a clear expectation that darkspawn fall firmly within the boundaries of Riftwatch's problem.

At least the weather is nice. One of the cooler days, wind chasing away the sea's humidity and passing clouds across the sun an intervals that provide bouts of shade but don't threaten rain. The darkspawn are less active in the daylight; a small band might try something opportunistic along the winding roads of the Wounded Coast, but the real task is to stop them where they're emerging underground. The source can be tracked to a winding cave, its mouth scattered with the possessions and gutted corpses of smugglers who tried to flee the first scouting party of shrieks.

That's also where Riftwatch will find two Grey Wardens. New ones. Pretty nice ones, too. Not the mean and/or shady kind of Warden they already have.

But that's the last good news for a while, as the sun sets and the darkspawn in the Deep Roads beneath the cave make a renewed push for the surface, hurlocks and genlocks scrabbling through the crevices in the dark like deepstalkers while the shrieks who emerged before them circle back to attack from behind. They're well-coordinated and have the potential to turn numerous, but the narrowness of their entry point keeps them bottlenecked to a manageable but endless stream. Stopping them for good may involve an explosion or two.

By the time it's done and the blighted bodies have been gathered to burn, it's late enough that there's little point in trying to travel back to the city in the dark rather than building another, less disgusting fire on the beach and waiting a few hours for sunrise.

Comments

no tagging order, we die like men (jk I got permission for chaos)

[wontknowwhen]

Antoine looks back at Athénaïs as she approaches, still holding Strand's hand (and thus not immediately taking the invitation to drop him back down the hole). "It is a good offer," he says, frank, "and I admit I've had a similar thought, though I would use explosives rather than magic. But I am afraid, given the geography, that they'd just come out somewhere even less convenient. At least this entrance is a good chokepoint, non?"

As satisfying as trapping a bunch of Darkspawn would be on the merits.

When he glances back at Strand, his gaze lingers a bit, like a man trying to remember the name of a song he's hearing a snatch of. But then he shakes his head. "It is lucky, though, that you did not seem to stir them up. For you especially, I think."

[anthracite]

His knuckles clench before she's got two syllables.

Ribs press, joints square, and at once he's stuck fast. If Antoine knows the string of Ander that follows, it's for a sign against evil.

(She knows it. He used to say it over horses, dice; when they were hard up for coin, and playing at magic was safer than the real thing.)

"Two dozen, three. If you drop this cave on them," Ground out even, deliberate. He is dangling out a pit of monsters, and she could crush him for an egg, and he is in control of this situation. He is. "You'll bury anyone who ran back in."

The shore is wormy as a rind. Not every tunnel leads to Darkspawn: If any of those smugglers were clever enough to hole up, to hide?

She might bury him, but not a lone survivor. Strand grunts, forces an exhale. Sand skitters loose. He hauls on Antoine —

It's not enough.

[nextone]

"Manageable," is a response to the estimate, of course, rather than these hypothetical buried civilians, delivered with a grim sort of breeziness as Evka comes up alongside and past Athénaïs, looking up at her with passing curiosity on the way. Not so far up as she usually has to look, among surfacers, so that's nice.

Of course everyone would rather not manage three dozen darkspawn face to face. But sometimes that's what it comes down to. And then you manage.

She's deemed an adjacent tunnel solid and hole-free enough that no one needs to worry about it right now. As for this hole —

"But this is a less drastic way to plug it up." Just behind Antoine, now, she puts her fist on her hip and spends a moment pretending that capping off holes with humans is a workable strategy and darkspawn wouldn't yank Strand down by the ankles like a ragdoll without worrying what parts of him it tore off.

[mournwitch]

Is there a split second moment where a stranger’s willingness to instantly join in on terrorising a man currently wholly at her mercy and warding off evil about it draws a twinge of remorse out of Athénaïs?

— nah. Can’t be. Indigestion.

“Is he stuck?” she asks, less to Strand — warding off evil, so probably not in a mood to be reasonable with her — than to Antoine, currently engaged in fishing him out. Probably. “Because I can help with that, too, if he’s not going to be a little bitch about it.”

She looms into view behind Antoine’s other shoulder.

“Are you stuck stuck?”

[anthracite]

"No," Says the little bitch, "You'll need another cork."

You get out of a hole the way you got in. The only ways to stick, to stick stick, are misfortune. Gravity. If you fit once, you can fit again, so long as you stay calm. Stay easy and fluid and relaxed —

So yeah, he's stuck.

Athénaïs looms. Close, closer. That'll do: Quick as a snake, he drops Antoine to seize a fistful of her hair and yank. Either they're both going down, or neither is.

[doneisdone]

"I heard there was an ogre," comes Teren's voice as she approaches from deeper in, only to pause and purse her lips as she assesses the sight before her.

"Should I come back." is anyone on this expedition not fucking

[wontknowwhen]

The ogre, for the moment, is less concerning than whether Strand and/or Athénaïs is going down into the caves. Momentarily startled by both the loss of Strand's grip and what the man grabs instead, he reaches out to catch Strand's bicep, hoping to keep the both of them from going down farther than ground level.

"Evka," he says, a little less light than usual for him, though it's more strained than stern. "A little help, please." Not because he doubts she'd get there eventually, but because he wants the newcomers to know they're not just going to abandon them to work out ... whatever this is. At least not before neither of them is stuck in a hole. Once they're both on the surface, they're (mostly) free to pick at each other.

[nextone]

That's — well. All right.

Evka shoots Teren a fleeting glance, but the question does seem rhetorical. Antoine's beckoning much less so. The possibility someone drags her husband into their hole if the antics get sufficiently childish does occur to her, so there is a touch of hustle in the way she swings her hammer around to rest it on the ground and shuffles around the edge of the problem, where she might grab Strand by the forearm and relieve some of the force on Athénaïs's scalp.

"Hey," comes out sounding halfway between a mild-mannered greeting and an admonishing prelude to settle down. No one is falling through the damn hole.