faderift | OPEN: turn off the lights and I'll glow

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OPEN: turn off the lights and I'll glow

WHO: New rifters & characters in Emprise du Lion
WHAT: More people falling on ice than usual, this time with demons, templars, and bonus nighttime
WHEN: Guardian 23
WHERE: Emprise du Lion
NOTES: This month, the arrival log is open to all.

You were asleep--deeply or fitfully, for the last time or just resting your eyes for a moment-- and then you were not. And wherever you were was not, anymore, replaced by nothing but the sensation of falling, tumbling into endless, bottomless nothing. If this were still a dream, you would wake before you hit the ground. You can't die in a dream, they say. In some worlds.

But there's no waking here, just a flare of green-white light and a jarring impact onto freezing stone or ice that is twice as cold and just as hard. When your breath returns and the light's after-image fades from your eyes you will find yourself beneath a dark sky, a full moon straining to be seen through intermittent clouds, and a second moon low on the horizon. Its light reflects off snow to add an eerie ambient glow to the darkness, made stranger by the sickly green tint added by the fluttery menacing shape of the rift hanging in mid-air. Be careful getting up: you are at the edge of a cliff, what was once a waterfall now frozen solid in a massive curling sheet of icicles. The drop to the bottom is several stories, surely a deadly fall even without the huge humps and spikes of ice and snow that litter the ground where splash and spray were petrified.

You are also not as you were: in the palm of your left hand there glows a narrow splinter of light the same sickly green as whatever brought you here. It aches, a bone-deep pain that gnaws even through all the distractions. Like the fact that you're being attacked by monsters--some tall, spindly stick-things with too many eyes, some hunched and hooded with no eyes at all. Some are entirely different but perhaps more monstrous for it: men and women in heavy, gleaming armor, all of them with chunks of red crystal protruding out in a way you soon realize indicates it is actually growing out of their skin. Their eyes are a dull red, hollow and empty, and they attack with a single-minded determination.

Luckily, you are not on your own. Around you others are waking up, equally confused, with the same green lights flaring from their hands. There is stuff scattered about, like the contents of someone's life exploded through the rift with them: a picnic table and benches upended, metal camp furniture flung about, clothes and utensils, bits of wood and canvas and mattress littering the ground. Even better, you are not far from a path leading toward an Inquisition camp, and noise travels far in this terrain, echoing up canyons and off cliffsides, carried by the chill night wind. Help is on its way; just last until it arrives.

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"No trouble at all, I assure you," he replied, in a tone that somehow managed to convey both humor and exasperation. It wasn't uncommon, after all, that one was unceremoniously thrown into a fight for his life, but that didn't make the situation pleasing, "...ah."

Not your standard blade-form, surely, but for now Korrin is lumped firmly in the realm of allies. There were stranger things in the world than ancient, unknown Jedi offshoots, surely.

Like despair demons. Like the sound despair demons make when they fly off a cliff, screeching all the way down-- and burst explosively on impact. Many, many stranger things.

"Good to know." Ugh, despair demons. Korrin hates that ice spike attack they do, but fortunately her barrier ought to absorb whatever comes their way. Obi-Wan's won't last as long, but she'll try to renew it as often as possible.

The terror demons are her true focus, though. "Watch out for those ones, they have this--" ...ability to phase in and out of the Fade, seemingly bursting forth from out of thin air, as what happens with Korrin. The Vashoth mage falls flat on her back, still clutching her hilt. "Vashedan!"

Scrambling to get up before they wear down too much of her barrier, Korrin at last manages to get to her feet and renew her assault.

"Look--" the realization that something is about to happen strikes him just as Korrin takes the hit, "Damn."

But he'll help her up. That one was on him-- since when is he so distracted as to miss his focus like that?

"You know these creatures!" That's not a question, but Obi-Wan allows for a pause as he grips the thing that had attacked his erstwhile ally. It's more force than is strictly necessary, and the thing writhes against the invisible grip of the Force, while Obi-Wan grits his teeth. Tough bastards, aren't they? Well, maybe he was just getting old, "What is--"

Wrong question. There are too many demons, and no seeming end to them, for that kind of conversation.

"--What should we do? To end it!"

That's an interesting use of magic, one Korrin hasn't seen before, and she would be all sorts of interested...at a point where they aren't fighting for their lives. Scowling, she slices into the terror demon nearest her, who retaliates with a blow from its claws. It doesn't harm her, but it does weaken her barrier, at least until she can attack it again.

"Terror demons are weak to spirit magic, if you know any! Otherwise, just keep doing...that." And to assist, she'll turn to her other magic long enough to unleash a Chain Lightning spell to strike both demons at once.

"...Right."

Magic. That explains... well, nothing, really. But clearly this being is no kind of Jedi. Almost all species threw the odd force-sensitive-- maybe some odd, isolated cult? Regardless, she was friendly, knowledgable, and fighting well enough to suit.

Damn but he wished he could use his lightsaber. It knocked uselessly against his thigh with every movement, as if to emphasize the dire predicament. As if the predicament needed emphasis, chaotic as it was.

And then Korrin does something... very alarming. Something that has Obi-Wan's head up, grim as a startled animal. Lightning. There's no time.

And then, for a good while, there's no time for anything but the ebb and flow of the fight.

Busy with the demons, Korrin doesn't notice Obi-Wan's reaction to her element of choice. Still, it's easy to see her affinity for it, as aside from her spirit blade it's her most common form of attack. Whether it's frying multiple targets at once or trapping enemies in a cage of lightning, she seems to know what she's doing and uses it with no hesitation. When the demons inevitable fall before the two, Korrin takes a moment to catch her breath and reaches for a potion at her hip.

"Are you alright? I have healing available if you need it."

"I'm fine," He had never blessed his Soresu training more fervently. Stamina, he had this much in droves, but all even the deepest reservoir eventually finds its bottom, "This can't keep going forever, though. We'll both tire, eventually."

And though this fight was dangerous, the enemies seemed disinclined to use Blasters, if they had any. Exhaustion was by far the worst opponent here, the weary clumsiness that made you vulnerable, that choked your responses with mistakes.

"You've done this before! How do we end it?"

"You can end it! That mark on your hand, lift it up to the rift! Do it before the demons fall, and it paralyzes them. After, and it'll seal the rift entirely." For all her power, that particular one is out of Korrin's reach. She hates to ask it of someone so new to the situation, new enough that the pain in their hand hasn't had time to subside, but it's necessary.

Obi-Wan looks at her for a moment as if she's gone quite insane, then looks down at his hand. It's green, a terrifying anomaly; he's been ignoring it to the best of his ability for the duration of the fight, but the pain was undeniable.

Well, ignorance yet knowledge, as they say.

He waited, gauged the moment, then flung his hand upwards. The shock of it was like watching a mag-repuslor lock in, a fierce and terrible upward pressure, centered terrifyingly around the palm of his hand. For a moment, Obi-Wan entertained the mental image of being pulled inside out through the palm of his hand, inverted in one terrible messy thrush-- and then he quashed it.

Focus, Jedi! What good are you if you cannot focus!

He focused, bore down on the pressure and power with all his training and the considerable strength of his will. And the Rift... Gave.

Korrin responds to that look with a firm 'shut up, I know what I'm talking about' look of her own. Explanations can happen after, and seeing is believing anyway. Once his hand connects with the rift, she stands back upon hearing usual sound of the rift imploding. As its green light evaporates, she lets out a sigh of relief.

"Thank you. I can still fight, but wave after wave of demons gets old. And the area's been under enough threat by those as it is."

"Demons," His tone belies some measure of doubt-- It all sounds so fanciful, like something superstition would cook up, "Is that what they are? I've never heard of anything like it."

Which is not, strictly, true. But many things, poorly understood, have lived or died with that label, and certainly Obi-Wan's never believed it.

"Where are we?"

"We're in Thedas; that's the continent, anyway. More specifically, the Empire of Orlais and then Emprise du Lion is the region. Said region is massively fucked-up at the moment, so rifts and demons are the least of our problems. It's all the Inquisition can do to keep the area from going further downhill."

Korrin glances around, but after the demons, nothing in the area seems to want to return any time soon. "And yes, I know they're demons. They stepped in from the Fade because a powerful asshole decided to punch a hole in the Veil. That rift? Was one of many spawned by a much, much larger tear. We called it the Breach."

Now we were getting somewhere. Obi-Wan turned when Korrin did, drawn by her attention to the scars on the langscape around them. The birds were silent in the trees, no sign of life, animal, native population, or otherwise. There were burn-tracts and lichtenberg fractures, whole long furrows chunked out of the discolored ice. No matter what else came of it, the physical marks of this fight would linger until the spring thaw finally washed them away.

Obi-Wan suspected, deep in the part of him that somehow always knew it was right, that he himself would linger much longer than that.

"I'm going to need a little more explanation, I'm afraid. What is this Veil?"

Focusing back on him, Korrin crosses her arms and does her best to explain, though given her lack of surprise or awkwardness, this is a question that gets asked a lot. "The Veil is the metaphysical barrier between the physical world and the Fade; the realm of spirits and demons, the place where people go when they dream...and when they die. Until recently, spirits couldn't easily cross over; they had to possess someone. And mortals just can't, for the most part. The exceptions to that are a whole other can of worms.

Anyway, the creation of the Breach changed all that; spirits could cross over without possessing anyone first, and people started arriving here from those rifts, as you did. Said people all have shards of their own, and none of them heard of Thedas before arriving here. To be fair, we had no idea about other worlds until all this happened."

"There are more of us?"

His first thought was the obvious one-- that somewhere out here, a whole community of Republic citizens had fallen through. Or, worse, a small army of Clone Troopers.

That's a disaster waiting to happen.

"How many, how-- how long ago did this begin?"

"A few months ago. It started with another rift, one by the our ruined base in Haven. As for how many, I'm not sure. Twenty or so? I really doubt it's higher than that. So far, I haven't heard of a rift spewing out more than maybe half a dozen or so people at a time. Maybe they can't, or there's some other reason at work."

Whatever the truth is, Korrin's a bit distracted with the present. Emprise du Lion is a dangerous place, after all. "Let's get out of the cold. There's an Inquisition camp just outside Sahrnia, the main village. Or rather, what's left of it."

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OPEN: turn off the lights and I'll glow

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