TEST DRIVE MEME!

[faderifting]

TEST DRIVE MEME

Maybe you’ve been around for a while, or maybe you’re new to the Inquisition. Maybe you’re new to Thedas, having recently fallen from a tear in reality and been collected by uniformed rescuers. Whoever you are, you’ve been sent to Kirkwall, to an outpost where many of the Inquisition’s members and allies work on some of the biggest mysteries and problems the organization must solve if it’d like to keep the world from ending, where “ending” means “falling under the power of an ancient powerful corrupted being who wants everyone to bow to him as a god.”

And just to be clear, it would like that. It would like that a lot.

I. THE GALLOWS: The Gallows is an island fortress in Kirkwall’s harbor. It’s been home to, in order: Tevinter slaves, a Circle of Magi, a lot of creepy red lyrium, and now the Inquisition, which has occupied the fortress with the provisional Viscount’s blessing. There are walls that still need rebuilding and corners that still need dusting, but for the most part the Inquisition has gotten down to business. There’s space in the stone-floored courtyards to train or spar; or, if your skills don’t lie in the realm of hitting things, there’s a large library and several offices supporting the Inquisition’s areas of research and diplomatic efforts. If you don’t know what to do with yourself, then by all means, ask; someone will definitely be able to put you to work.

II. KIRKWALL: A quick row across the harbor will take you to Kirkwall proper. The city is built into the cliffs, from exclusive and wealthy Hightown at the top to impoverished Darktown in the abandoned mining tunnels below. In the middle is Lowtown, home to taverns, merchants, and plenty of trouble to keep anyone looking for it happy. You’re welcome to spend your free time and your money here—but try not to annoy the locals too much, please, in case their welcome runs out. It’d be a shame to have to pack again so soon after arriving.

III. TOURNEY: Barely had time to make yourself at home, did you, before you were sent away from Kirkwall again—but for fun! Sort of. You've been sent to Wycome, the party capital of the Free Marches, for the Grand Tourney. It's a week of celebration and chillin', shopping at vendors' stalls or drinking and making new friends while fighters from across Thedas try their hands at friendly (or "friendly") competitions of skill and/or muscle, leading up to the prestigious Grand Melee. Your mission, which you've presumably already accepted, is to put on a good, respectable show for the rest of Thedas—particularly if you're someone like a rifter, or a mage, or an elf, or anyone at all who isn't an Andrastian human—so the Tourney's affluent visitors take only good gossip home to their countrymen. Which is to say: if you get involved in a drinking competition, you better win.

IV. SENDING CRYSTAL: Joining the Inquisition gets you access to the very latest in barely-understood magical communication devices—namely, a crystal, small enough to wear around your neck, that will allow you to communicate verbally with anyone else who has one. Or everyone else who has one. Say hello.

V. WILDCARD: The whole of Thedas is yours to explore, from coast to uncharted wilderness. Choose your own adventure!

Comments

[tofindthesun]

Legolas crunches more fruit and continues looking at the people around them, passing them by, some perhaps halting at the sight of an Elf in fineries. He shopkeeper almost asked him where he'd gotten it from, when he gave her the button. Even though she literally watched him pluck it from his own tunic.

Just as well that he did not arrive with any weapons. Just as well that he hadn't not been dreaming of war and battle.

"My loyalty stands," he says in a hum. He does not say if he would have it, or need it, or want it. For doubtless it is that Thranduil would not turn him away. "I must remember to seek him, later. There is much that my elvenking should know."

He looks around again, this time for birds to feed. He'd call to them but these are strange creatures, and he does not know their songs.

"..I think I could learn to tolerate them. 'Tis a simple enough task." Daunting, perhaps, if it gets worse than this. There is always the chance that it gets worse. He'll think about that when it happens. If it happens. "But I wish not to become.. accustomed to it. I fear only danger that way lies, and I have had enough danger to last the lifetimes of several Men."

War is... hm. Quite tiring. Lots of walking and not enough trees along the way. Too many deaths. Legolas kicks his feet a little, finishing his fruit and eyeing the wine next to him, as yet still untouched. He turns back to his visitor, offering her another fruit if she has finished hers, of even if she hasn't. He got... a lot.

"But given the manner in which I came here, I take it there are more dangers than the eyes of the wary."

[kecharitomene]

Maybe it speaks for itself, how she looks back at him; the sadness that lingers in that sympathy. This isn't bad, she doesn't say, this is nothing. This is a good day. This is a day good enough to be grateful for, when all someone does is look, and hey: there's fruit.

“Well,” she says, philosophically, “they got hands, too.”

But that isn't the most pressing danger—she bumps him with her shoulder, takes the fruit. “But there's no 'enough of danger' in war.”

Elves, humans, qunari, dwarves, whatever they consider rifters to be—there's no place that Corypheus's fingers do not somehow touch. Galatea's sunny outlook doesn't come from a lack of understanding of what she faces, but the determination both to face it and to spit in it's eye. It means being careful, sometimes, so she can be savage later when it counts.

(She is better at savage than careful.)

[tofindthesun]

If he notices, he says nothing of it. He's well aware the world can always have darkness, and be darker, even where light shines still. Though he can hope that, one day, it will not be the case. But that will be a long time later, and not one he'd like to stick around to see, if he had the choice.

"They do," he says in agreement. Twirls the knife in his hand momentarily, with another disarming smile aimed into the crowd. "As do I."

Though it's not a knife he's comfortable using; too small and too thin, especially for his size. Though he is nowhere near as towering as Thranduil or Galadriel, he still cuts a figure tall enough make the knife look oddly under-sized. Still, it does not impede his use of it. It's only fruit-cutting, after all. What savagery he has is reserved for spiders only. And, like, orcs. Nasty things.

"I have fought only one war in my lifetime, and yet already I tire of it," Legolas says with a sigh almost as tired as he claims to be. "Everywhere it seems there will always be a creature with enough power to threaten the world... Yet I have seen such a war end by smallest and kindest of hands. This, I think, is not a war without hope."

Such a large war might have seemed daunting to him in the past, before he left Mirkwood, before the Council, before Frodo. Now it only seems like something achievable, if a bit... difficult. Just, y'know. A tiny bit.

He bumps her back with a smile, careful not to shove her off the ledge. "For that, a little more danger would be worth it. Even if these are not my lands or my people. And if that means we are able to leave after."

[kecharitomene]

Saving the world seems to Galatea a very large task, perhaps a larger task than her small hands are fit for—but saving a few people. Sparing and protecting the lives of mage children; speaking quietly and seriously to those rifters who cross her path. (Occasionally pointing at her eyes and then pointing at the Commander, while smiling.) If she makes it into smaller tasks, if she considers how many of them are taken onto other shoulders, too—she can do these little things. Be a light and not a shadow. Know that her hands aren't the only ones tasked with pushing Thedas out of the way of oncoming disaster.

“Nothing is without hope,” she asserts, and it's so easy for her to shrug away that momentary sorrow; too easy, maybe, the particular way her eyes glitter when she eats a fruit slice off a knife crafted for torture, her sidelong smile a mirror of his in its ingenuous sweetness, and a bit more troubling in the details. “Andraste shows us that.”

(The Chantry is a corrupt institution, she's come to believe, but she hasn't lost her faith. She hasn't even particularly changed what she considers to be the purpose of that faith—merely who she listens to before enacting it.)

Maybe Andraste would want her to let him hope for his home. What does she know, anyway, about what will happen to rifters? Those matters are above her pay-grade, and selfishly she hopes the opposite—that Iorveth and Bronach will stay always, and Thedas the better for it. The Provost seems determined to plant deep roots, too, but this young (she thinks—they all talk like they're old, the big elves, it's hard to guess from their faces) man has only now come, and is taking matters about as much in stride as she imagines anyone could.

So she doesn't say she's never heard anything to say it'd mean that, but instead, “We're asked to endure a lot, you know, but I think maybe because we can. Maybe the Maker doesn't ask as much of humans because they haven't got as much to give.”

That's one perspective.

[tofindthesun]

He'll be the first to say that it involves a lot of walking. One should get involved in saving the world if they do not like to walk. It helps if there are many shoulders, many hands, many feet to bear the burdens. Easier if it is one task at a time.

('Take the Ring to Mordor' is a pretty daunting task, though. Legolas doesn't remember the Inquisition mentioning anything about a Ring of... whatever their enemy is. Not much mentioning of anything, really.)

"Andraste is wise." He nods solemnly. He has no idea who or what Andraste is, except that name is dropped pretty often among the crowd. 'Maker', too, when he can recognize the term. It's easy to guess what they're referring to, though he might be a tad off where Andraste is concerned. "Without hope, all war is meaningless."

Legolas watches the people for a while longer after she speaks. They look... hale enough. Not worn down and trodden, as they had been in Edoras. Perhaps a little lost; but what they have lost, he cannot tell. A mother, a father. A leader. A hero. He thinks he can see clearly how they would mourn and grieve, and then stand up again. Man and Elf and-- yes, that is a Dwarf --Dwarves alike. And that... big one with the horns. That one too.

"The strongest person I have ever known was a Hobbit, near half my size," he says, musing, and fond, and worried. "He took upon him a burden greater than himself, for a purpose greater than he could have ever imagined, and I fear he will never be the same, for what it did to him... Yet I do not think he would have succeeded if not for those who went with him, his friends, and those sworn to protect him."

If he sounds mournful, he is. Frodo was so ill when he arrived in Rivendell, and so ill again when they brought him to Gondor. He was so small.

"If we stand together, I think there is nothing we cannot endure. And for those who would not stand with us--" He does not cast a glance at a Man, or Elf, or Dwarf, for there were all kinds who argued about the Fellowship. "--we must find others who will."

A pause. He brightens up with a little glimmer in his eyes, like an untold joke. "The second strongest being the Provost Thranduil, of course."

[kecharitomene]

Her sidelong glance is amused, if a little warily so; not always sure where the line is for other people on respecting belief and sending it up. He seems, at least, as if his intention is to set her at her ease, not mock her faith. It's fine.

"He's in the top ten," she allows, seeming to feel that sufficiently generous. "Maybe five, of rifters." If Galatea were to assess most strong rifters, it would go: Bronach, Iorveth, Probably Thranduil, the other tall elf one who is a lady, and then Newt, because there are only so many explanations for why Newt is still alive.

(A real mystery to her, having introduced herself to him by slapping a hand on his belly to stop him from marching towards polar bears.)

"The Inquisition can use all of our strength."

[tofindthesun]

Legolas will respect anything that doesn't try to kill or maim him or his friends; and even then it's a toss-up depending on what happens after. So, Andraste? He's heard nothing but good things about..... it. (He has heard pretty much nothing about. It. Her.)

"Great strength they must have, to best the Elvenking." He means it in more than physical strength; Thranduil was a warrior once, he knows, though he hasn't been one in many years. There are other ways to be strong, as Frodo has shown him. "And all of us at the behest of the sun-eyed ones, or enough so."

So said, because the eye itself makes him somewhat- concerned. There are many ill connotations of such a symbol in Middle-Earth. Legolas would much rather think of the sunburst than the eye, whatever meaning it holds.

"Are they truly all that stands between us and the coming Darkness?" Softly. Not out of fear or despair, but wonder. Solemn. Not even in Middle-Earth had it been entirely the Fellowship against the whole of the Enemy.