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[faderifting]

New Year...

...Same Old Hinterlands

Maybe the Inquisition sent you, maybe you came seeking the Inquisition. Maybe you fell out of a rift into this world last week and are still just trying to find your feet. However it happened, the first days of the new year find you in the Hinterlands. Tucked between Ferelden's massive Lake Calenhad and the icy Frostback Mountains, the Hinterlands are a hilly region covered in patchy forests and small farms trying to eke out a living between the boulders. Though somewhat remote, the area is rich with game and minerals and home to Redcliffe, a bustling town on a busy trade route.

Lately the Hinterlands have also been full of mages and templars and rifts, all threatening to turn once-peaceful countryside into a dangerous warzone. The Inquisition has set up several camps and sent personnel to try to restore order to the region, unwilling to let it slip into chaos. There's a lot to be done, some of it straightforward killing bad things, some of it weird and nebulous morale-building.

STILL WITH ADDED SNOW.

1. SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT

You have turned the wrong corner in the snow, forded the wrong stream in the snow, crested the wrong hill in the snow, entered the wrong cave in the snow. Maybe you are far from camp, in the snow. Maybe you are in camp, which is also snowy. Whatever has happened, wherever you are: you are being chased through the snow by bears. Did you throw a snowball at the bears? Are they huge and snow-dusted? Babies burrowing through the snow drifts and coming for your ankles? Fade-touched in addition to snow-touched? Controlled by cold mages who are hiding in the snow? Popping up out of the snow like a game of whack-a-mole? What are they chasing you away from in all of this snow? What are they chasing you into, other than more snow? What warm things do you plan to make out of their hide if you kill them in the snow? What do you think they'll craft out of your hide if they kill you in the snow? P.S. It's still snowy.

2. WE TWO HAVE RUN ABOUT THE SLOPES

Farmers have been forced to abandon their homes after a series of vicious attacks by wolves. Packs of them are roaming the foothills and stalking paddocks and even roads seemingly without the usual wariness of humans. Inquisition agents and local volunteers guard travelers through the affected region, hunt the wolves through snowy woods, and track them back to their cavernous lair in the edge of a canyon. Only eliminating the demons that lurk there will free the wolves from their influence and allow the area to return to normal.

3. AND PICKED THE DAISIES FINE

Winter snows freeze and bury the ground, but the need for healing herbs is as great as ever. Stockpiles are thin after the chaos of the last year, and Corporal Vale is desperate enough to send people out to search caves and hollows and cliffsides and beneath overhangs for any plants still clinging to life. The weather is brutal, the search tedious, the footing often treacherous, but that last patch of Crystal Grace could be a key find. Getting it requires clambering up a slippery hillside and stretching up to a ledge and hoping whatever creature lives in that foxhole beside the plant isn't at home, but it's worth it, right?

4. WE TWO HAVE PADDLED IN THE STREAM

With many roads through the hills and ravines blocked by deep snow, some crazy, desperate few have begun traveling by river. The ice is thick and jagged along the shores but in the center the water rushes, just deep enough for a shallow draft boat lightly laden. Supplies are carried down from the passes toward Redcliffe this way, a white-knuckle process that you, for some reason, have become involved in. Maybe you were hired to help fend off the bandits that haunt the calm shallows and try to demand tolls for passage, maybe you're paying your way downstream by helping port both boat and cargo around the steep falls, the mist so thick and cold it coats whatever it touches in a thin sheen of ice. Maybe riding a glorified canoe through rocky rapids and narrow gorges just sounded like a good time. Don't rock the boat!

5. WE'LL TAKE A CUP OF KINDNESS YET

It is still snowing, and the tavern in Redcliffe is still the closest and warmest place to duck into to wait it out, and not only is it packed to the gills but it seems that the First Day celebrations have continued within long past the dawn of the second day. The Gull & Lantern is so packed with thawing visitors that it's hard to walk from one side to the other, the owner has given up on telling these Fereldans they can't bring their dogs inside, every few minutes the group in the corner breaks into a traditional First Day song that will be stuck in your head for weeks, and that lady in the corner is almost definitely someone you've tried to kill before, or vice versa. But there's a fire going, and the bartender seems to think that giving everyone half-price drinks might prevent a brawl instead of causing one, and there aren't any demons indoors, so it could be a lot worse.

6. WILDCARD

Hunt game in the snow, kill demons in the snow, dig under the snow for herbs, track bandits through the snow, deal with someone charging extortionist coat prices now that it's snowing, fall off a deceptively tall rock into the snow, get lost circling the same hill ten times trying to find a way up to the weird glowing skull on a stick you can see is up there in the snow, climb trees or abandoned towers covered in snow, rummage around in empty homes to get out of the snow, run from a dragon in the snow, cry over how cute that fennec fox you just shot in the snow was, set up camp and chat around the fire because it's snowy and cold, knock yourself out (figuratively, or even literally if that's more your speed)-- the Hinterlands are your Frostback Mountain oyster, topped with snow.

Comments

[fleurdesel]

"He's always been remarkably skilled." Otherwise he would have struck her down along with Unger. But- she stands, Unger is ash. She must make what Roul did for her worthwhile. "You have as much as you earned on your own- and nothing more."

[ferrushomimus]

He looks over his shoulder, before he speaks quietly, "Addy, I wasn't just kidnapped because Gaspard is a bastard. I was kidnapped because Gaspard was an impatient bastard. Because Obie - Obadiah - had been selling weapons to Gaspard for years. That he was the one that provided the weaponry that burned through the alienage in Hamshrial. SO yeah, unwittingly helped a massive prick war profiteer, who then turned around and sold me to Gaspard for a hefty sum."

He shook his head, "My hands are bloody from sheer stupidity."

[fleurdesel]

"Ignorance and Negligence are not stupidity, Tony." It is a terrible thing- it is something that he will likely carry for as long as he's alive- something to make up for. That is simply how he's always been. Failures are born like leaden weights until he makes it right. Something like this? Is not easily made right. "Obadiah deliberately kept you from most of the business dealings aside from showing your works, yes? How could you have known?"

[ferrushomimus]

"...Actually isn't Ignorance just another word for Stupidity?" Tony asked, arching an eyebrow, "And Negligence can certainly be blamed on lazy thinking. All of which, I am guilty of." He paused, his jaw tightening as he looked down at the snow, dark eyes hard as stones. "He said I shouldn't worry about such things - that I should keep my mind focused on the real work. Real work - building weapons that killed innocent people, those who had no part in the Civil War."

He shook his head, "I'm one of the smartest men in all of Thedas, Addy. I should have known.. I should have asked. Never, not one damned time ... " A sharp breath, "Well, that's over now. All of it. I'm not making weapons of mass destruction anymore."

[fleurdesel]

"That would be deliberate, knowing, or malicious ignorance. Stupidity is an inability to learn; that is not something that you suffer." Tony could learn, the hard part was getting him to quit. His near obsessive tendencies to chase an answer or build a solution reminded her well of her own habit of chasing an answer in the fade if need be. "You trusted him as your father trusted him. For all that you build- that you built weapons you tend to believe in the good in people. You hold them to a higher standard."

She knows that well enough. "Not even for the Inquisition?"

[ferrushomimus]

"I feel I should thank you for the compliment, but I have a feeling it's sort of a back-handed compliment towards my obsessive compulsive behavior." He joked, but something in his shoulders loosened a little. Adelaide always had the gift to get right through his bullshit. "... I guess so. Or at least I expect to be, I don't know, people. Not monsters. Not like something out of a Fade-rift nightmare."

There was a pause, then, before his lips flattened out, "We'll see about that. I need to see what they can do for me, first."

[fleurdesel]

"That depends on what it is you need doing." The Inquisition is capable of much- marvelously so; but they cannot move mountains nor seal the rifts just yet. Time and work and cooperation; the last of which is far more difficult than she'd anticipated- will manage it a great deal.

[ferrushomimus]

"...Well. Okay." He leaned down and parted his shirt, where the shard was now sticking out of his sternum. "Can they help me with this, yet? And if not, do they know if I can use it as some kind of power source... ?"

[fleurdesel]

"...what did you do?!" This has to be something he's done to himself, out of curiosity, out of some twisted accident- out of spite. Tony usually does his worst tricks out of spite. Her hands overflowed with blue light as she rested them on his shoulders, seeking out the aches of having a shard in ones' chest and smoothing them over without asking. sHe'd never needed to ask in the past. "Tony this thing can kill you-"

[ferrushomimus]

"Me? I didn't do this. A giant rift in the sky did this by creating little rifts. One of those rifts popped up while I was escaping - if I hadn't been wearing my augmented armor I would have been dead." He eyed the shard, feeling the pain release around it while Addy worked. "Oh good to know - the shard thing stuck in me is gonna kill me."

He gave her a wry look. "Hence, Inquisition. So they pull it out and it doesn't kill me."

[fleurdesel]

"...they can't be removed." Not without killing him. Leaving it in- that would kill him eventually as well.

Shit.

"There is no- you need to avoid rifts. Rifts and VeilFire. The shards react to them in some way- most others with them have the shard in their hand and while I will not go so far as to say it does not hurt them; it certainly will cause you a great deal more harm for all that it is lodged in your chest."

[ferrushomimus]

"... well shit." He rubbed his face for a moment, before giving her a wry look. "Okay. I will just have to avoid things that appear out of nowhere. No problem."

Deep breath, and giving her a firm look. "...You have to know, I've left pretty much everything to you. Hire someone reliable to run it for you -- if you want to switch it to magical staffs I guess I can't blame you but you'll want to hire some good enchanters. Seems like you might be okay with the ones you got, but look into the Dwarven Merchant Guild, regardless."

[fleurdesel]

"What- Tony I am a mage; we cannot hold land or titles or run businesses." Even with the war and what they might build in the Inquisition that would be too much far too quickly and she was simply going to ignore the fact he decided of everyone he'd ever known that she was to whom he would leave his enterprise. "Stop being an idiot. I am not going to let you die like this. We will learn more and find an answer and fix this. That is what I do, remember?"

What was left to her to fix was never something so risky as this- a burnt palm, a sloppy letter, an ill conceived notion for one of his projects- not his life. Never his life.

[ferrushomimus]

"And remind me to put in the name of my solicitor so he can sue all the people would say you can't own anything. Because you're gonna own a lot so this will be unbelievably inconvenient." He stated wryly, before giving her a long look, "I am not being an idiot - I want to leave my money to someone who actually cares about me, and I don't even know if Rhodey is still alive. However, I feel better that you're not going to let me die."

Which ... he knew she would try. So he had to put this in, "But if I do die, seriously, no blaming yourself. And I want a gold statue of myself as big as that idiotic monolith in the desert. Except I want it in my front yard."

[fleurdesel]

"You are not going to die." She won't allow it. The very idea- frustrated beyond words she reached up to haul him in. Squeezed him tight as she fought against every knot of tension in her mind and down her spine. Tony wasn't allowed to die. He was supposed to be infuriating and clever and wonderful until he grew into an old man with many fat children and grandchildren she would visit and spoil. That was the deal. Why was he attempting to change the terms of the deal?

[ferrushomimus]

"Woah, we're hugging again. I thought we weren't doing the hugging." Didn't stop him from hugging her back tightly. He could feel how upset she was over the whole thing by the way she was trying to crush all his ribs. "But that's my Addy. Telling me what not to do. Even die."

[fleurdesel]

"Sustained contact I don't initiate- shut up. You are not dying." It isn't allowed. They had a deal and even if Stark deals can change, LeBlanc deals do not. He just got back from being dead or missing after she'd given up on hearing from him ever again; she'll be damned if she lets him die because she didn't try hard enough.

[ferrushomimus]

"All right, all right, I'm not dying. Which one of us is the genius around here?" He still would not let go, and kissed her hair besides. So there, Addy. Have some mush for your telling him he can't die until she says so.