Test Drive!

[faderifting]

TEST DRIVE MEME

While in some alternate, tidier timeline, the War against the Elder One ended years ago, you're not in that timeline. It's 9:49, and the war continues. An enemy force partially occupies Orlais and has decimated several Marcher Cities, while the Chantry, aided by the Inquisition, has marshaled Orlais and the faithful of Southern Thedas into a new Exalted March against the army of demon-bound Wardens, Red Templars, Venatori loyalists, and darkspawn Corypheus has amassed. Rifts are still scattered across the continent, periodically spitting out strangers from strange worlds with green-glowing anchors embedded in their hands. There's no Herald of Andraste to save Thedas. Someone else is going to have to do it.

You're part of (or allied with, recently hired by, imprisoned by, etc.) an organization, dubbed Riftwatch, that split off from the Inquisition several years ago. Riftwatch consists of these otherworldly new arrivals, rebels and Wardens, and other people who want to prevent the apocalypse without necessarily marching under the Chantry's banner to do it. Their headquarters is an island fortress called the Gallows—formerly a Circle of Magi, more formerly a prison for slaves, but its new occupants have done a good job removing the more grotesque reminders of that past and making the place livable. Their goal is to do what the Chantry can't or won't do, to go more directly after Corypheus and the dark magic he employs, and to keep the Veil from coming apart entirely.

Maybe you're here because you want to help. Maybe you need the money (though there isn't much of it). Maybe you acquired an anchor and sticking around is the only way to prevent your hand from killing you. Maybe you've been sent by the Chantry or some other entity to keep an eye on everyone—they're rumored to be a lot of weirdos and troublemakers. Or maybe you're a new rifter and just going where the nice people with swords tell you that you need to go.

NOTE: This is a static test drive! We post them once per year or so and continue to use them for a long time, so you're never late. Current players are encouraged to track new top-level comments.

I. THE FREE MARCHES: Hasmal, Tantervale, and most recently Starkhaven have all fallen to the Tevinter incursion, leaving Kirkwall the largest city-state in the Free Marches to remain unoccupied. For Riftwatch, that means the war is closer to home than ever, and traveling anywhere north of the mountains runs the risk of running into enemy scouting parties. Perhaps you've been sent out to find these scouts before they find the unwary, or perhaps you're just trying to pass through unnoticed to Antiva or Rivain when you run into trouble. Or maybe you're more in the thick of it: joining the Free Marches armies in harassing the occupying army as best they can from outside the city, or slipping your way into one of them to gather intelligence or meet with an ally.

II. THE WAKING SEA: When Riftwatch isn't traveling by griffon or magic mirror, it frequently travels by sea, courtesy of a small assortment of allied pirate ships. So welcome aboard. The sea is choppy and frequently violent—violent storms, violent enemy ships, or both at once—and the crew may not have much patience for incompetence, so either make yourself useful above or try not to get sick below.

III. KIRKWALL: Even when enormous evil darkspawn are trying to take over the known world and you and your colleagues might be the only ones who can truly stop him, you can't work all the time. And when you aren't working, Kirkwall is there for you with its dingy Lowtown taverns, its flashy Hightown establishments, its market stalls and street musicians and cellars hosting gamblers. (Or maybe you can work all the time, and you're in the city to do some official shopping, try to spy on a suspicious character, or show a potential financial backer a good time.)

IV. SEND A MESSAGE: Each member of Riftwatch is assigned a blue crystal, small enough to wear around the neck, that can transmit voice messages, as well as an enchanted book tied to that crystal that can be used to exchange written messages. They're secure enough to discuss the war, if you'd like to get down to business, but loosely controlled enough to ask a question or play a game with only a few rolled eyes from people who hate fun.

V. WILDCARD: From the Gallows' library to the pirate islands off the coast, from Hightown's high-priced market stalls to the bloody frontlines of the war, Thedas is yours to explore.

Comments

v.

[cozen]

[ By the time Bastien has her in his line of sight, she has been back a day. Perhaps two, depending on how much of the first she spent being difficult to find. On that note, perhaps three.

Enough time for him to know she's here and to sit alone for a little while with the stew of feelings—mixed but warm, you know, only a few chewy or slimy pieces in the bowl—that arrived with her. Enough time for her to have had any number of other conversations with other people and to know nearly anything new he might be able to tell her.

Their little Lowtown house, hardly lived in a week. Before that, Byerly's resignation. Before that, Byerly's temporary death, which is of course fine now. All patched up.

But what no one else could have told her even if they cared to is that in the undone time before it was fine, Bastien wrote her a letter, terse and desolate: He's gone. I don't know what to do. Don't come here. I'll come to you. If things had taken a little longer to be set right then the letter might have reached her (before it too was undone) and a few weeks later Bastien would have washed up onto her doorstep, too.

Now it has doubly never happened. It is only a vague plan born from a months-old feeling in a world that doesn't exist anymore. It animates him all the same, though, when he catches a glimpse of her hair and she stops being the vague idea of Alexandrie Back In Kirkwall. He's swift down the stairs cut into the side of the Gallows' wall. He says, ]

Alexandrie,

[ seeing as he's coming from behind her—hurrying briefly away from her, due to the direction of the stairs—and he would prefer not to be stabbed today, just before he plants a hand and hops over the pony wall protecting the stairs so he can skip the last ten of them and go the right direction instead. The warning (and the thud of his feet, then the slap slap of running after her, of course) leaves plenty of time for her to turn around before he's there and hugging her not a single ounce of deferential propriety. ]

Re: v.

[coquettish_trees]

[ The number of days, whichever it is, is an entirely unsuspicious one. One crafted not by what would I do, but what would I be expected to do; a one-woman show for an as yet unknown audience. And how would Bastien be cast? A friend, a dear one, even, but also the love and lover of her love and lover... and if whoever watches has been watching for long enough to know what would keep her in Val Fontaine, they will have watched long enough to see her covet Byerly Rutyer as jealously as the ocean does the ships it wrecks and takes to hold forever in its depths. And so Alexandrie waits.

And so does Bastien.

And then finally there he is, and there they are, and she's swept up in his arms and smelling the cigarette smoke in his hair, and returning the embrace fiercely, and if her shriek of surprised laughter rings too loud and bright to be entirely sincere, the smile that follows and the warmth and relief in her eyes are real. ]

Oh là, Bastien!

[ She raises her hands between their bodies where they are hidden by his arms, lays them on his chest to gently push them apart and free herself—

And signs being watched there against him while she smiles, playfully scolds. ]

We may celebrate my visit without wrinkling my dress!

[cozen]

[ Bastien accepts the distance easily, smiles easily, and does not look any less at ease at at all when her message is received through the winter layers on his chest—save the twitch of his eyebrow, just a hint quizzical furrow. Even here?

Curiosity, not resistance. Even here, there was Fitcher. Up goes his guard against everyone, everything. Alexandrie included, for completion’s sake. ]

Of course.

[ Perhaps Byerly mentioned—he said that he wrote to her after their visit to Arlathan Forest, when a bastard of a spirit leeched the color from his vision down to sunset hues. Perhaps he also mentioned Bastien’s hearing was cleaved down the middle. Or perhaps not. Either way, there is a touch of care and deliberateness—of a sort that’s uncommon for him, the way he masks his poise behind leans and slouches and hair that is never perfectly neat, and of a sort that normal people would never notice—that hasn’t yet been fully smoothed out of the way he positions himself specifically to her left.

Once there, he offers his arm. A cheeky, affectionate pantomime of chivalrous manners between class-divided friends, and an opportunity for her to keep any future taps of her fingers hidden safe against his arm. ]

Wherever you are headed, I’ll walk with you. You have to tell me everything. How is your father?

[ Surely he’s alive. Word of a Comte’s death would have reached them long before Alexandrie herself, however she hurried. ]

[coquettish_trees]

[ Whether or not Byerly had written of it, whoever had read those words had decided Alexandrie would not do the same. She knows some letters had been lost— or “lost”— now, had gone back and started looking through the record of her correspondence after the night she’d discovered what was truly ailing her father, but not which or how many.

Bastien’s arm is taken with exaggerated delicacy and demure delight—her half of the pantomime—and her fingers answer the question posed by his eyebrow on the way: Unknown. Being careful. At the question he’d posed aloud her countenance turns grave and a little sorrowful, a little resigned. ]

Living, and I thank Andraste for it, but unchanged. He took the winter very poorly, rallied enough in late spring to give us hope, but a few weeks before the early harvests… [ A wan smile, a shrug of her shoulder, ] again to bed. And still, we do not know what ails him.

[ If the movement of her fingers’ earlier answer had not been all that definitive, this one—

Blood magic. ]

[cozen]

[ This is the easiest acting there is. Concern on his face and in his chest—the former only much milder than the latter. He's never met Alexandrie's father and can only feel a distant, secondhand sort of fear for him—but if a blood mage has had access to her father, this past year, then they've had access to Alexandrie, too. ]

I'm sorry. My father was like that for years, [ is probably not a comforting thing for a man who's traditionally self-identified as "orphaned young" to say, so in that sense only, it's good that what ailed his father and what ails her are absolutely not the same thing. ] We never knew what it was.

Maybe you could speak with Monsieur Strange about the symptoms. He's our new head healer. I think you had gone before he arrived, but he's from the same world as your—your Loki.

[coquettish_trees]

[ The next breath she takes in is longer, deeper; the words had landed somewhere soft in her. It is a simple thing to disguise in places and professions where one cannot show that gentle landing. Perhaps Alexandrie is losing her edge. Perhaps it is a mark of trust. ]

My Loki was from this world. [ It is gently said; neither reminder nor admonition, only a small truth. She had loved another one, the same and different, from another world but—

She thinks it often, when she looks upon that portrait she'd painted of her husband with his face turned to profile, lifted to the night breeze sweetened by the blossoms from the land he had loved. Not always in words, but always with a kind of softness that aches. I had my turn.

She had had her turn with the man who had come from the rifts too, the Loki who had come to the drought of her like rain from a clear sky from far beyond the place where Thedas dreams and dies.

It was not enough, but it never would have been. And so it is the same enough as a lifetime could have given. ]

I am sorry. About your father. Did it feel to you as if time had split as well? How the world walks on and some parts of you go with it, and some walk only in place?

[cozen]

[ Bastien looks sideways at her with a hint of a rueful smile, at this first part. He hadn't forgotten. He only lacked a word for the second one and what he was to her—but it's well enough to know what not to call him next time, and to hear and mark this new use of the past tense for her husband.

Then he shakes his head. ]

No.

[ He would have liked to say yes, to lessen the loneliness of it for her. But, ]

I was young. And it was the only way I ever really knew him to be.

[ One of many lessons in the inconstancy of security and the unreliability of protectors that he learned so early they never felt learned at all. Only things that were and always had been. The quiet, cautious unlearning of it all has been slow.

The wind blowing over the Gallows shifts, caught for a moment between the walls in a way that makes it howl. Softspoken as he is, Bastien doesn't bother trying to speak over it, waiting several seconds for the noise to pass. ]

Have you tried a spirit healer? I suppose they are more difficult to hire than they used to be.