Test Drive Meme!

[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

[forgottensavior]

"I... cannot explain it." No really, she can't. Practicalities aside that she doesn't know why she's been blessed with the Echo, she's been rather sworn to secrecy about it. Uncertain if it will be a problem here, having it is problem enough at home. Certain Garlean elements are wanting to eradicate anyone with such gifts as no better than the beast tribes. Uncontrollable gifts that manifest as they will. "I didn't mean to pry."

Her heart aches to hear that some were left behind to such a fate and it's that compassion that overrides her embarrassment over the situation. Still, her hands are shaking now. "I would go to aid those people. If they yet remain."

[gatheringstorm]

Korrin fidgets, plainly not comfortable with the prying, however unintentional. "They do, but they won't for long, and they're being guarded by Red Templars. We're looking at battle, no way around it. And you can try to explain, if I'm going to end up hearing blurbs from my past."

[forgottensavior]

Battle. The one thing that Celinie now fears more than anything. The one thing that will trigger her own memories to overwhelm her, if her guilt does not do so first. Yet she cannot in any good conscious leave those poor souls to perish if anything at all can be done to save them.

The insistence, rightly so to be fair, on explaining the Echo is both startling and frightening enough for her to pull up short from her ruminations on the fate of those prisoners in the snow. The expression that arrives is nothing quite short of an antelope doe staring straight into the the jingling lantern of a chocobo carriage.

There are others with this gift, she knows, yet none of them could well explain it beyond it being an unknown manifestation given to a select few. And she can no more control it, nor explain it, than she could her childhood draw to the outside of the mines which were her home. She doubts that Korrin would turn on her fully for having the Echo, but there is still no small level of fear and dismay that she's done something quite wrong.

Well. If she's to break her word about secrecy, at least she can keep all others safe by speaking naught of them. There is a level of a lie in making it a singular experience in the telling, and she is most uncomfortable with it, but better that than risk the rest. "I call it the Echo. There is... no controlling when it will manifest or how. I've never known it to come without purpose, only when there is a truth in someone's soul demanding to be made known."

Celinie pauses to give Korrin a most thoughtful, and compassion-laden, look. It is not lost on her that this is somehow quite significant to her companion.

"It troubles you to have left them behind, does it not?"

[gatheringstorm]

Korrin's not sure she would call it a 'gift', not since it could easily draw the wrong sort of attention. It's hard enough to convince others that rifters aren't demons with that going on. And she hardly seems fond of the notion of someone peering into her mind like that, intentional or not.

Crossing her arms, she frowns and nods, looking away. "Of course it does. Some of them aren't going to last in the time it takes us to reach them in greater numbers. But if we'd tried to free more, we'd have been overrun. There was no good solution, not that time."

[forgottensavior]

Ah there it is, that intense feeling that she's done something quite quite wrong, despite it being largely out of her control. Briefly she can hear Mama and Papa's frustrated and fearful disappointment calling her 'willful' and 'disobedient' again. She can read Korrin's closed off body language and recognizes she's gone and crossed a line that can never be fully repaired. But she must try. Not for herself but more for this woman whose life she's peeked into.

"I understand all too well about no good solutions." Attempting to disable the mechanical monstrosity that ripped the moon from the heavens? Not a good idea. Trotting off to an unwinnable war to try to stop Dalamud's final descent? Certainly not a good solution at all. "Perhaps I may yet help? I could put a segment of their captors to sleep."

A properly timed spell to spread out her Repose to a group might buy them more time. Pacifist she might be now, but remaining fully passive just isn't in her nature. Celinie feels more and more she must do something now that she knows.

[gatheringstorm]

That gets Korrin's attention and she quirks an eyebrow, interested. "Really, now? That would be useful. I hope it works on all kinds; they aren't exactly human, not anymore. Some of them are now downright bestial."

Please don't let there be a behemoth. She didn't see one on the outskirts of the quarry, but that doesn't mean it isn't further in. If so, they're all fucked; memories of the one in Haven are particularly ingrained, and the devastation it caused. It was only eclipsed by Corypheus and that pet dragon of his, though she tries not to think about that as she'd rather not have Celinie comment on that whole mess.

[forgottensavior]

At the mention of the Red Templars she'd seen in the Echo, Celinie bites her bottom lip. She quite wondered about them but was fearful to broach the subject. Now that it's come up, her curiosity is pressing hard on her. "Anything alive, it should work, that I've seen. May I..." Hrm, should she or should she not ask. "What happened to those people? The ones guarding those prisoners. There was something misshapen about them."

[gatheringstorm]

The question itself doesn't bother her, though dwelling on the Red Templars isn't her favorite subject. "They ingested red lyrium. The normal kind is addicting and has some severe side-effects, but that stuff is far, far worse. It consumes you, twisting you into a blighted creature until there's nothing left. And they're all under Corypheus' sway."