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TEST DRIVE MEME!

WHEN SKYHOLD'S GONE THEY'LL BEAR ON

HINTERLANDS ARE FOREVER

How’s the weather, Inquisition? Terrible. Heavy rainfall pelts the plains and the mountains, four straight days of it! Dark clouds block out the sun. It may begin to feel like there’s no end to the storms in sight. When darkness falls, cold evening temperatures turn that rain frigid. Your boots, your socks, they’re soaked through. Everyone smells like wet wool.

And as if all that weren’t enough: the increased rainfall loosens patches of mud and shale, causing mudslides.

1. We’re not in Orzammar anymore…

A recent group of dwarven traders bearing fine crafts and goods were inbound for Skyhold, ready to flood the markets with their wares. Instead, they got flooded out.

Yes, word has reached the Inquisition that the traders have been unfortunately detained by the weather and they are now in need of a rescue. Dare you venture out into the lashing rain and sliding mud to rescue the traders?

If you do so dare, you’ll find some of the traders to be exceedingly grateful for your efforts, ready to bestow handsome rewards on you, O Brave Soul -- just as soon as you’ve escorted them safely back to Skyhold. Or you might find a cluster of more disagreeable traders, grumpy at the water in their boots and the loss of their goods. Some of those goods might still be rescuable, if you want to wade out into a mud field to retrieve a fallen chest, or tug an errant terrified donkey back onto what’s passing for dry road these days.

As you carry these treasures back to their masters, or back to Skyhold, you might consider helping yourself to a sampling of the wares on your way back. After all, your reward might not be adequate, and you are risking your life for these ungrateful sons of mothers. Just don’t get caught. These traders don’t look kindly on thieves, and frayed tempers snap easily.

Feel free to get stuck on your way to the rescue, too. Weather out the storm with a fellow do-gooder. These days, the rescuers might need rescuing just as much.

2. Are you mad? That’s twelve year old scotch!

In Skyhold and the surrounding tent towns, what with the confusion and the panic and the scramble for high ground, market stalls are left unattended and wares are ripe for the taking. For some, temptation proves to be too much. Where there’s disaster, there’s often looting! A few vendors defend their own wares, and those that can’t make desperate entreaties for assistance. Bandits! Thieves!

Are you a brave and hale friend to the Inquisition and to good honest trade, ready to defend the wares of the waterlogged merchants? Or maybe your sticky fingers spot a tempting treasure too great to ignore. If they didn’t want it stolen, they should have taken it with them! Watch out for that Qunari metalsmith with the mean right hook. He’s not to be trifled with, and his blow will leave you toothless in the mud.

3. I gotta go, Julia, we got bears.

The rainfall has disturbed more than the mud. Bears, resting in their caves, have found their caves to be too damp for their liking, and they’ve taken to the open air to vent their spleens. Some people say that the bears are as frightened as you are, but when you’re faced with a six hundred pound beast with huge pointy teeth, their innocence is a little harder to keep in perspective.

The tents surrounding greater Skyhold are especially worried by rogue bears. Make a stand against them, or else help evacuate a threatened campsite. Mudwrestling a bear is a great way to impress the ladies, or the gentlemen… but no one will blame you for beating a hasty retreat.

4. We got 12 skins of water, 56 ales, two vodkas, four whiskeys, six bottles of wine, tequila, hazelnut paste, cheese, bread, eggs, bananas, apples, bacon, steaks, pancakes, dry grain, milk, sweet tomato sauce, half a pudding, half-ounce Sour Wine, 3 1/2 grams Grand Inquisitor Kush, one ounce of 'shrooms, 15 ecstasy potions, a smutty woodcut, a bat…

TIME TO HUNKER DOWN. In the tavern, the barkeep is handing out free spiced wine to anyone who takes refuge behind her door. The din of conversation and lutesong makes a fine lullabye for the careworn traveler, and you might find yourself inadvertently dropping off to sleep. Or maybe someone’s fallen asleep on you.

Who can blame the slumberers, finally safe and warm and dry? In the tavern, the fires have been built up to ward off the chill and the damp, but relaxation is a little more difficult these days. You really have to elbow your way in there to get close to that warmth. Once you get close enough, you’ll find that the hearths are taken up with dozens and dozens of wet socks and wetter boots, steaming gently as they dry. Be disgusted if you want, or else peel off your own and go barefoot while you wait.

Hey! What’s going on over there? Someone’s taking one of your socks! Stop, thief!

If you can’t make it to the tavern, you might find yourself holed up somewhere a little more unlikely. The limited space within Skyhold means there aren’t a lot of free rooms. That door you shoulder open in desperation might have an owner already. Intrusions aren’t always unwelcome, but beware of what -- or who! -- you might find.

5. Lots of fish… and lots of weather.

WILDCARD. Whatever you do, just remember: there’s a lot of rain, you’re very wet, and if you’re feeling amorous, keep in mind that everyone smells like wet wool. We cannot stress this enough.

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She carries herself like his equal, in a way nobody for whom that wasn't true could ever quite match. Outsiders have tried and invariably failed--and she is undoubtedly an outsider; for all her regal bearing, she's not one of his kind, and that throws him further off-guard than any unfamiliar magic ever could. He has never before set foot in a place where anyone but a Shaper could lay claim to this kind of long-practiced dignity.

It should be terrifying. It is, and somehow reassuring in equal measure. He can speak to her less guardedly, foreign though she is (or because she is.)

"Fortune forbid that I ever get a reprieve from plagues," he mutters. "And they have--what? Summoned us to solve the problem, somehow? What can you do about them?" Kindred spirit or threat, he wants to get the measure of her.

"As much as you can." A tart answer, tempered by tiredness as much as the thought that she will do herself no favours making enemies before she's even seen her first sunrise here. "No one has summoned us," a moment later, purposefully relenting; weaponising her own momentary lapse by feigning a contrition she doesn't feel, a softness her husband would contend she's no longer capable of, even so lovely as she is. "We were no more desired than the creatures that accompanied us."

If she watches him to see where his eyes go and what his jaw does at the mention of the very violent arrival all rifters are subjected to -

there is no malice in it, but if she punctures his presumption deliberately, who could blame her?

"Our presence is here is the fault of the rifts."

"Impossible," he retorts, without missing a beat--without even allowing for a beat; the arrogance is literal reflex. He has nothing but enemies anymore. What's one more, even in a foreign land?

The imperceptible swallow, the twitch of his right hand, could tell her a different story. Mastery over spell and beast alike has been beaten into him from puberty, to the point where his colleagues would have demanded that he stare a dragon in the face, should it become necessary, and take it singlehandedly down--but the monsters from the rift had had not even a shred of vestigial obedience to him, not a fraction's hesitation to buy him time when his magic had failed him too. His reserves of essence had been dry as an ancient well, his body running on fumes, with nothing but the crudest fire at his disposal to send the terrible rift-things shrieking off into the rain. He still feels withered, and for that, too, there seems to be no reprieve. There is no life-power to draw upon here.

"Whether these people want us here or not is immaterial. They have us now, and if they can't control these...rift creations on their own, it falls to us to clean up the mess. They should consider themselves fortunate."

"They speak of the anchor-shards--" she lifts her hand, illustrating the remark with a gesture to her own, "--as able to close the rifts. In concert, never alone."

If he has to go and learn that lesson hard, well. She doesn't have any desire to see a stranger throw his life away, but she knows intimately the kind of pride that will learn no other way.

A year ago, that would have been a lovely sentiment. No battle can be won alone; everyone has a place. He wouldn't have thought twice about it. Of course it would be foolish to take on a thing that spews monsters all on one's own.

He knows better now. If he had a fraction of his strength back--hell, if only he'd actually slept within the last four days, literal exhaustion-blackout notwithstanding--he'd go out into the storm and prove her wrong. If he could Shape anything, anything at all, he'd be gone. But he has no weapons, no creations, nothing but near-useless novice magic, and no amount of Shaper bravado can compensate for that. He's no soldier, even now. He's a scientist. He was never meant for this.

"Then they have no excuse for turning their noses up at us," he says dully. "One would think we should be assembled."

"I think that they do not."

Turn their noses up, she means, though she suspects this man might at his most strident try anyone's patience to not do so - but perhaps it's as much a defense as her serenity. Perhaps this is the more true, the way he quiets; something sympathetic tightens unwillingly in her stomach and she lets her gaze fall away from him, as if to give privacy in the midst of all this crowd.

"We might leave in the morning, word says. Those like us go north."

He appreciates that more than she knows. Dignity has, of necessity, fallen somewhat by the wayside these past weeks, and now he's crowded like a farm animal into a room full of foul-smelling people who don't realize or care that he was ever supposed to have had it. A lack of scrutiny while he tries to look less defeated is a relief.

The thought that his talents--such as they are at the moment--might be welcome after all is another small ray of hope. He would object to being herded northward without any say in the matter, and maybe once it's light out and he has some food in him and has given it more thought, he will. But there's no reason to raise a fuss about the idea of going somewhere to help fight the demons, only the principle of being ordered to do it.

"And you intend to do so?"

A tilt of her head; "I do."

She isn't inclined to resist for the sake of resisting, and if nothing else it presents a clear way forward in an unfamiliar place where she is struggling to catch up. It's hard to imagine that the patience she's shown now will last if she doesn't have more to offer than wide eyes - she had better walk, she had better run. There is no time for digging her heels in and wishing.

And -

And there's exhilaration in it. In the freedom it represents. In the choice. In all of these people who have never heard her name.

"To me it seems the wisest course, to begin."

"We don't know who these people are, or what they stand for, or what they might want from us beyond closing the rifts."

He always has been the glass-half-empty sort, but his objections ring hollow in his own ears. To maintain his principles in the face of resistance from his own people is one thing, but...what does it matter here? Wherever he is, it's nowhere he's ever heard of. He ought simply to observe without committing to anything, remain independent, but if that isn't an option...

"What did you do, before this...rift fiasco?" he asks her. Only to Diwaniya would it seem more important to inquire after her job description before he actually asks, you know, her name.

His question comes before she can pose a few back to him - what would he do instead, to learn those things? - and it slows her, the care she feels must be taken with answering. She will have to answer this question more than once, she thinks; she should know swiftly how she intends to do it.

"I followed my husband on his military campaigns," she says, neutrally. "He and I studied magic together - I'm afraid I am still very much running to catch up to his tutelage in it. I was in some things his advisor."

An unavoidably sanitised version; the full story is nothing to lead with.

"I found the opportunity to study his tactics very - educational."

Well, that's a double-edged sword. (Staff?) She must have some magical prowess, obviously she must, because anyone truly respectable does (except for the ones who make up for lack of it with military strategy instead, and don't think about that, don't think about that, Norrell knew what he was getting into)--but to be self-taught at it is an unthinkable offense.

"You had no formal training in magic? No regulation, or oversight?"

Edited 2017-04-25 08:17 (UTC)

A quick shake of her head - though she regrets that a moment later, pulling a face as her hair tangles, combing her fingers through to find the knots she needs to work out with the comb. It's drying, at least, but far too slowly for her liking. At least there's a fire.

"My husband is remarkably skilled in the craft that he taught to me," she says, measuring her words as carefully as she tugs the comb through her hair. "I don't believe I could have asked for a more apt tutor."

However.

"Particularly as regulation of magic in my experience involves a pyre."

"Which is nothing compared to the dangers of letting it go unchecked," he protests. "Better one person die than hundreds. Skill isn't the issue; I'm sure he's serviceable enough at it. I have no doubt that you are, too. But does he have the temperament for it? The responsibility? Do you follow any safety protocol? It only takes a moment's carelessness for a spell gone wrong to wreak lasting havoc."

He's half-convinced that the rifts are the result of just such a slip-up on some scatterbrained sorcerer's part. Certainly those things that came out of it couldn't have been deliberately designed. He doesn't know anything about this husband of hers, but an unlicensed mage who would just spill all the secrets of it to his wife is clearly a reprobate not to be trusted in the slightest.

Her head tilts.

He speaks more as she's heard magic spoken of here, in some ways. The expectation of magic as something...controlled, something even discussed.

"To practise magic is to wreak havoc, in the eyes of the law. No difference is seen between my lord's sword aflame and a hearthspell to ease the sick; mine would be the same death as his." If his uncle were prepared to condemn him - she imagines, of her husband's temperament, that their royal relative may well rue the missed opportunity to deal with him swiftly and permanently.

A shrug.

"My husband does not wreak havoc carelessly."

Not carelessly.

Far more of that makes sense to Diwaniya than probably should. If she'd only said that there were a few limited exceptions to those rules, she could be talking about the laws of his own world.

"No, there isn't much difference," he muses. "You might think there would be, but I've seen healing craft go wrong. There's a terrible disease called Burrowing Mold--awful death, long and slow and excruciating. It didn't exist until some well-meaning Shaper was experimenting with a cure for dermatitis and let some magically-augmented spores escape his laboratory. Now it kills dozens of people a year, and that's one of the rarer ailments to come from irresponsible research."

Under most circumstances, it would be flatly forbidden even to acknowledge to an outsider that the Shapers were at fault for the diseases, but fat lot of good that law has ever done him. It clearly doesn't matter here.

"So no, I'm sure you don't think your husband's flaming sword is a problem, just as I'm sure you don't think whatever healing you can do is a problem, but if there's no way to hold either of you accountable for the damage you could do in theory, I'm not surprised that your people want no part of it. Everyone always thinks things are under control, until they aren't."

The silence that follows his words - Petrana doesn't wear it awkwardly, her small smile lingering as her head remains tilted at that slight angle, studying him. But it lingers, her gaze measuring and her mind working carefully through the many different things she might say to that. Many of them would simply not do, so soon -

"I can only apologise," she says, smoothly, "for the shortcomings of the world to which I was born."

There's a but.

Her finger rises.

"But, if I may, for anyone to teach, first: someone must learn. You do not mean, I am sure," gently, inviting him to smile, "to tell me your teachers were made from all-knowing clay, formed perfectly in one breath to guide the next. It is one way, today."

Her hands spread. In her mind's eye, Marius raises his sword.

"Perhaps when he is done, it will be another."

Her calm refusal to engage or escalate should be soothing--instead, it enrages. There's nothing objectively wrong in what she's saying, nothing he can argue with--

And perhaps, if the Shapers weren't so aggressively ahistorical when it came to anything but a catalog of the ways people have fucked the world over with magic, he wouldn't see a reason to argue with her at all. If he knew how his people had conquered the continent, if he had any idea what had come before them or what existed outside of them, he might see the wisdom in what she says. But the Shapers wouldn't be the Shapers if they let their loyal enforcers know these things, and he wouldn't be one if he thought to ask.

"My teachers," he grinds out, like a hit dog hollering, "were full Shapers, authorized by the Council to teach what our laws allow. And I, in turn, teach only what they grant me permission to teach, to those few tested and chosen to receive that knowledge. If the thugs with swords have their way with our lands, then yes, things will be different--but I would have died before I let them."

Would have. Because even if he hasn't admitted it to himself yet, he knows damn well there's no way to get back. And if he ever finds one, he'll be as dead as he just promised to be as soon as he sets foot in San Ru.

Edited 2017-04-29 02:36 (UTC)

Don't flinch.

Don't show you're afraid. Don't be weak. If he moves forward, there is no one at her back any more; her smile slowly fades, but she doesn't let herself look down, doesn't let her shoulders draw in or her posture stiffen. Her hands stay loose and visible in her lap, still over the comb, taking great care not to fidget, nor to lean away from his hissed anger.

"I envy you very much," she says, simply. "What you describe sounds wonderful. A much better way - it is very much what my lord wishes to bring to our people."

It much more closely resembles Marius's endgame than does, say, the dreams of freedom harbored by Anders. If her own desires align more with the latter than the former...she isn't going to argue with this man. He is shocked, still, by his change of circumstance - the points of contention between their worlds are not even relevant. He will see. There is no kindness in fighting him, or in forcing him to see what time will show him.

And she's uncomfortable, besides.

"I wish that I could have learned that way. That anyone could have. But there is no learning from corpses and burned books, and magic will not go simply go away because the world wishes it to." She warms, suddenly, reminded; it's genuine, but there is a strain under it, a conscious and continued effort to deescalate-- "They have books here, and teachers. For magic! I will follow them wherever they wish us to go, if I might have the opportunity to learn from such organisation, such history."

One doesn't become a Shaper without loving to study. They're tyrants, yes, vicious authoritarians crushing dissent beneath their boots--but nobody gets accepted into the ranks of the tyrants without a deep and abiding thirst for knowledge, and nobody enters Diwaniya's sect in particular without instinctively understanding the pure, soaring joy of research and discovery.

They aren't in Terrestia. There is no Shaper Council here to allow or forbid her to learn, nor to censure him for condoning it. And if he lets himself think, watching her face light up like all the best students' do, that she could have made a good Shaper with the right training--

"I suppose every civilization has to start somewhere," he concedes, finally. (It doesn't take him so very long to get it, once he stops being so willfully obtuse.) "And I don't know what the law of the land is here. Maybe their regulatory boards are satisfactory after all." Aha. Ahahaha. Oh, Diwaniya, if you only knew. As much as he'd like to argue that he would follow the local law if it was just, he'd change his tune in an instant if anyone ever tried to cart him off to a Circle.

But she knows more about it than he does, right now, and it's not beneath his pride to defer temporarily to that expertise. (He likes the way she kindles like a bonfire when she explains. Maybe it's all right to find a kindred spirit in an outsider.) "Is there a place to study, where we're meant to be going? Do you know for sure?"

She knows enough to know better than to tell him too much, right now; we're free...now, Anders had said. Free, and necessary. Useful. The Inquisition is accustomed to - mages, she makes herself think, not witches. She is a mage now, one of many. As appealing as she finds much of it -

Perhaps she won't be the one to tell Diwaniya what she understands of the system here, and how it does and does not work.

"Rather, there is much work to be done, and mages - we will be called mages, here, whatever we call ourselves - are needful, in that work, and if we can be useful, also, we will need to learn more of this place, and what...they do much research. And they have libraries." The more he relaxes, the more she does, in turn; by the time she's got to libraries, she doesn't even have to think about keeping her shoulders still, turning winsome enthusiasm on him-- "The only books of magic I have ever seen, I have written. I could never have imagined a whole library."

He makes a face at the thought of having to be a mage now--he's never wanted to be a mage; the profession is nothing but a consolation prize for those who couldn't pass the entrance exam to a Shaping academy--but lets it go without comment. It's the only option he'll have if he wants to do any research at all, and what would he do with himself if he couldn't do that? He can't fathom it. He wouldn't know himself.

--what kind of research can he do if he can't Shape anymore? What good is he with no reserves of essence, nothing to work with, no way to replenish it? If these people have a source of it, he can make himself useful, but if they don't--

No. That doesn't bear thinking about. Don't think about it. (That's what being a mage is; crippled as if by the loss of a sense, forced to make do with near-nothing, forever bumping up against an impassable ceiling. That's what he is here.) And yet--everything is relative. She seems so giddy about it, so thrilled to be freed from the confines of her world's draconian law that she doesn't notice or care about the ceiling.

"What have you written on?" he asks her. His curiosity is genuine, for all his moping despair. He always wants to read others' work.

"I have - well, I kept," amending a moment later, her gaze sliding to her drying clothes, how little she's brought into this world with her, "meticulous notes. I filled many journals with all that we studied and discussed."

And...experimented with, but Petrana is self-editing more carefully now that they're in safe territory. She'd rather like to stay there, where no one is yelling at her.

"Most of all I was taught to defend myself - combat spells, protections. But hearthspells, as well, for the home, so I wrote on the importance of balance, and not over-reliance. And I kept notes of his more ambitious works - I wrote much more than I have done, truly. My time was the freer for it, once we ... I had more time."

Secured a nursemaid, she'd been about to say. But Veda is gone, and reminders of her taste bitter.

Edited 2017-04-29 09:40 (UTC)

Diwaniya's sense of what is acceptable in magical study is fairly all-or-nothing. Of course those who are allowed to learn magic at all need to be able to experiment--how else is progress made? He's just left behind an entire underground complex full of hideous mad-scientist experiments. One of them is a breed of dog that literally explodes. Now that he's grudgingly acknowledged her as a legitimate practitioner of magic, he'd be curious about what she's experimented with, but as a colleague would be, not an enforcer of punishment.

That brief pause, and the little hiccup in her recovery, aren't lost on him, but even Diwaniya isn't so socially inept as to comment on it. His gaze lingers on her for a little longer than it might have, but there's no call for interrogating a stranger.

"That wouldn't have been a popular position to take where I come from," he says, a little wryly. "You'd have been called a radical. The more fool we, I suppose, taking all our powers for granted. If you can still use all your magic here, though..." The envy in his voice is almost palpable.

"Well," she says, with an echoing wryness, "I have been called a great many things already."

Radical sounds almost complimentary, or if nothing else, rather accurate to her views. As carefully and discreetly as she may hold them for her own safety. Ambition has always driven her, but a cool head and a sensible outlook go a long way to ensuring there's still a her tomorrow to be driven. (She forgets, sometimes, but Marius - well, Marius.)

"I believe in taking very little for granted," more thoughtfully. "It is breathtaking, how swiftly all you know can change about you." This, yes, but - this isn't where she learned that.

After a moment; "I've not tried much, but what I have tried has succeeded."

It's not so much a compliment to Diwaniya, who's always tried to play by the rules, but he can't deny that whatever her philosophy entails, it seems to have left her better-prepared for the impossible than he is. It should be common sense not to rely so entirely on one skill set, as if nothing could ever render it inaccessible, but his people have always been legendary in their arrogance that way. Dhonal could never have been conquered so swiftly if the Shapers had actually believed it could.

"Truer words were never spoken," he admits, and sighs. "You're luckier than I am, after all. But at least we'll both be apprentices if we have to learn the regional magic." That's more an 'at least I won't be outdone by anyone right off the bat' than a 'hey, we can be study buddies,' but he'll leave it at that, except--

"--what is your name?" He probably ought to have realized he was forgetting something.

Edited 2017-04-30 06:20 (UTC)

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