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

[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.