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

hermione granger (harry potter) (rifter)

[reparo]

[ooc; cw for mentions of torture in arrival! pm me if you need to discuss anything - and feel free to yeet a wildcard my way. (also let's hear it for a dumbass who posts to a tdm right before her bedtime)]

1. arrival

[ This is the irony of it all: Hogwarts nearly falls, and then Voldemort does, and in the rubble of her old school, Hermione and her friends find spaces where to rest, finally rest, after what feels like a whole year. Sitting against a shattered column, she falls asleep, and this is also the irony of it all: it's a nightmare that follows.

Bellatrix, cackling in her ear as she pins Hermione down and carves, and carves, and Hermione's throat is raw from screaming so she just whimpers and struggles and then -

A glade somewhere, somewhere unfamiliar. Her vision turns green, her world spins as she falls/stumbles/sinks, and one breath later, she's on the ground, hands and knees, fingers digging into grass and dirt. ]

Wh - where - who - [ Then comes the growl and unnatural sound of a demon slipping through the same rift as her, icy death in its eyeless face. She thinks: Dementor, and scrambles for her wand - she felt it, in the dream, while Bellatrix was carving a message into her arm - there it is, in her bloodied hand.

Think later, act now; after one year of this, she's used to it. ] Expecto P -

[ But, see, she's not used to her magic feeling wrong and different. Maybe, she thinks quickly, a result of just having woken from a nightmare to a Dementor nearby? The despair demon floats towards her quickly, target acquired, and in her panic Hermione does what she does best - she throws a fire spell at it. ]

2. kirkwall

[ Now listen here, you: she is not a spirit. She's fairly sure she is not a spirit. But then someone mentions that there are theories about Rifters, and she's supposed to be quarantined for a whole month here, so you can bet your galleons that she's going to be doing research.

That shelf, the one above her head in the library, is supposed to contain a compendium of herbs and other alchemical ingredients. She wants it.

Unfortunately, however, she is too short to reach it. Without her usual backlog of spells (so many spells, she knew so many), all she can manage is to attept, at the very least. Wingardium Leviosa is executed perfectly, sans wand, yet produces nothing but silence. ]

Stupid magic rules. [ Grumbles, grumbles, grumbles. And then, without checking over her shoulder if anyone else is watching, she glares up at the book, and kicks the bookshelf. ] Accio, damn you.

[ New magic: it's a learning process. ]

3. send a message

A month is a very long time to spend in quarantine, you know? I've spent less time in the infirmary when I was petrified - I imagine my memories all sound like the fancies of spirits to most of you, but they are real to me. I was real. I am real.

And now I'm here, I suppose.

Anyway - hello. I'm Hermione Granger, and I am, quite frankly, bored.

message.

[exequy]

[ Alongside her message, in small cramped handwriting: ]

Spirits are real.

[reparo]

That is true also.

[exequy]

[ dammit he wanted to fight.

oh well. ]

If rifters are spirits you are very unusual ones. Our magic does not interact with you the way it interacts with spirits. There was an incident a long time ago when we needed to try to bind rifters the way we can bind spirits, and it did have an effect, but not the same one.

Maybe you are spirits and something else. Maybe that is also what the rest of us are.

[reparo]

[sorry to disappoint, you faceless piece of text. (is this what Riddle's journal looked like? suspend your disbelief for a moment, Hermione.)

and besides - magic is mentioned. time to latch onto this. ]

I have been reading about that as much as I can under the circumstances, but first-hand knowledge is likely to be more useful than written one!

I must say, landing in the middle of a forest with demons coming over to attack was not in any way pleasant, especially when my magic doesn't interact the same way as yours either. Would love to know more on this topic, specifically - if mages are ostracised in Thedas, are Rifters who can do magic doubly so?

3;

[grindset]

[This reply seems to inscribe itself across the page with a steady finesse:]

It is a long time—necessary, they say. There was an illness.
How long ago did you arrive?

[reparo]

I lost track of time, but I have been in quarantine for three days now.

[THE BRAIN NEEDS STIMULATION.]

[grindset]

for three days now. <—— An eternity

1/2

[reparo]

Yes! With twenty-seven more to go, that is an eternity!

[reparo]

Wait, how many days in a month here?

3

[notathreat]

If you don't land outside the Gallows, riding a griffon technically doesn't break quarantine.

[reparo]

I'm sorry, there are GRIFFONS here?!

[notathreat]

Yeah, lots of them.

We use them as battle and scouting mounts. You would have to bond with one before it will let you ride it though.

1/2

[reparo]

Just like hippogriffs...

Apologies, I keep doing that. Comparing every experience here to what I remember from

[reparo]

Am I allowed to call it home, or is it going to get more fingers pointed my way?

2

[armd]

A hand reaches up over Hermione's head from the side of her, hovering before the row of spines and waiting to be directed to the correct tomb. Its owner: a broad-shouldered woman, her dark blonde hair drawn back from her face into a tight, practical french-braid that dangles into empty space off her shoulder. She seems put out, one eyebrow arched as she glances down.

The magic may not have retrieved the book, but it did summon a tall librarian's assistant.

"It's Abby, actually." Not Accio. "Don't kick the shelves. Which one do you want?"

2

[reparo]

"Sorry, that was rude of me," she murmurs, instantly deflating. It's not the bookshelf's fault that she is both short and has had her magic go all wonky since coming here. She keeps trying to experiment with the list of spells she knows, see how many just don't work in Thedas.

"Thank you, Abby - it's that one, the one about medicinal plants."

[armd]

Abby looks back up at the row of books, scanning, and plucks the one she wants, handing it to her. Easy.

"Anything else, while I'm up here?"

Bad joke, but. What she said about kicking the bookcase being rude seems to have mollified Abby completely.

[reparo]

She receives the book with a grateful sigh, finally research she can relate to. And then Abby asks if she wants anything else, and she realises that this might be the librarian's assistant.

"Ah - anything up there on the different branches of magic here? I'm trying to adjust mine to Thedas, because...well, it works but it also doesnt." A pause. "Also, I'm Hermione."

crystal book.

[elegiaque]

Before the quarantine existed, a rifter was brought back to the Gallows who bore a disease that specifically targeted rifters, mages, and users of lyrium in that order. Rifters, specifically, it pulled apart at the seams with a fever that sort of boiled them down to their simplest selves, and then began to degrade them so that we started to forget they existed if they weren't in front of us, sweating and crying.

We never knew his name, or how he'd come to be ill, or why that was the nature of his illness. He died. But now you have to be bored for a month, just in case.

[reparo]

That's a small price to pay for the safety of thousands. I shan't complain about that.

And for what it's worth, I don't think I am ill.

[elegiaque]

A month is a reasonable amount of time to find out if you're susceptible to something here, in reverse, too.

( not that there couldn't be a surprise, down the track, but still. )

Are you much of a reader?

1

[portalling]

It’s curious being on the other side of this: once upon a time, Doctor Strange had been the one dropped ass-over-teakettle out of a rift and seething about how none of his magic worked as it used to. All of the old habits and muscle-memory gone astray, familiar runes slid sideways as if he’d suddenly lost his grasp of a language he once knew as easily as breathing.

Now, he’s the one on the welcome wagon. Their new arrival looks unimposing, just a teenaged girl who looks liable to be impaled by an ice spike from the despair demon, and Strange is ready to leap in to defend her —

Until the world lights up in flame, and he watches (impressed!) as the fire washes over the demon, which lets out a scream like nails on chalkboard.

“More of that,” calls out the middle-aged man in the Riftwatch uniform and the dark cloak. His voice is blandly American, non-regional; he’s watching Hermione with sharp interest, attention honing in on the stick of wood in her hand. Is that a wand?

“Welcome to a bad situation, lots to cover, not enough time yet— if you’re a magic-user, it still works, just do it,” he fishes for the right word and comes up with, “sideways.”

[reparo]

Is she in the States? There's the flashpanic moment of that thought, then the demon comes swooping in again and she barely ducks out of the way on time - barely, because she feels some of her life force get sucked up into this not-a-Dementor, and it comes with a dizzy spell.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. When someone shouts at her to cast her magic sideways, she is quick to decide that he doesn't mean for her to hold her wand sideways.

An unusual way of casting spells in her world is non-verbal spells. She decides, might as well now. Incendio, she thinks but does not say, slicing her wand across the air in front of her - it sends a mote of pure fire at the demon, making it screech in anger.


"Ah! It worked? I - how did that - more tips, please!"

[portalling]

Oh god, he’s not accustomed to being a teacher, they’d never entrusted him with the novices at Kamar-Taj precisely because he was absolute garbage with them —

But Stephen Strange is quick on his feet, and Hermione Granger is uncommonly quick at picking up magic, and that’s precisely the kind of mind he can communicate with. “More effort,” he explains, hurrying across the glade to take up position beside her. “If your spell is like lifting a box, then consider the box is now heavier. Put in more effort than you’re used to. Haul harder.”

And to demonstrate, he whirls his hands with exaggerated flourish and summons a magical buzzsaw out of reality: it carves its way through the demon, shearing off one of its grey skeletal limbs. It hiss-screams, roils, recoils, before lunging at them again.