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

[elegiaque]

A win for normal conversations. Gwenaëlle lets the rest of it pass without any colour commentary — Stephen will probably get to hear that version when she recounts this, later, along with the withering self-awareness of how fucking miraculous it is that she hasn’t herself been backhanded more frequently in her life — and tips her head, mouth quirking. To business, then, and she considers their options as she leans back on her hands.

It’s an honest attempt to workshop a strategy where this just works with the two of them, but realistically—

“We’ll need more hands,” she says, finally, “regardless. They’re what you’d be protecting me from, and I can’t realistically keep them off you in any meaningful way.” Her strengths lie in dipping in and out of combat, working as much from a distance as she can, and being brutally efficient when she gets in close. It’s not crowd control and it’s not going to provide enough cover that Calpernia wouldn’t be exposed.

But she doesn’t stop there, considering what she does have, Calpernia’s staff, who she knows is near enough to join them—

“What’s the landscape around the rift like? Tree cover, flat, an incredibly convenient cliff—”

Belatedly, as her mind rushes ahead to how they could make best use, it occurs to her that Livia introduced herself and she hasn’t, focused on that rift this entire conversation. “I’m being rude,” she says, which is what she says when she means and not on purpose, “Gwenaëlle Baudin. Captain of the Gallows Watch.”

It costs her nothing to offer the courtesy, though it would’ve, once. She offers a hand.

[foramen]

Something besides scorn colors Calpernia's face-- interest, and she doesn't try to hide it. It even lightens her voice, a naturally sweet thing turned sweeter. "In that Riftwatch organization?"

She'll manage tactics later. After years of war, tactics are something she can manage in her sleep. Alliances, negotiations, significantly less so. She'd rather focus on the more difficult part of this exchange before this Gwenaëlle woman annoys her past the point of reason.

[elegiaque]

At no previous point in this conversation has Gwenaëlle been particularly off-put. Frustrated, baffled, groping in the dark to figure out what version of her Calpernia is disagreeing with in her head, yes; prepared, on the face of what she appears to be, to try and be patient with someone who probably has good reason to react harshly to someone who looks and sounds like Gwenaëlle does.

But that little uptick of sweetness earns wariness that nothing else had. Throughout this entire exchange, her only interest has been in tactics; that doesn’t change now, she’s just suddenly foreseen an immediate future where she actually has to engage with the difficult part and briefly considers just trying her luck with the rift on her own to avoid it.

“We’re the only people closing rifts,” she says, just this side of pointed.

[foramen]

That's the only throughline she needed. Calpernia would prefer to avoid trying to walk to Kirkwall without any aid, and submit herself to Riftwatch's judgement like a peasant. She nods, curt, and turns toward the treeline of a forest over a sloped hill. "How fortunate," Calpernia says. "The rift is that way. There's a ridge I can conduct myself on, if you can keep yourself out of imminent danger while I climb it."

One may reach the conclusion that condescension has been baked into her over the course of years. One may also just shrug and decide she's just a bitch. Both are, invariably, true.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle could not be more transparently relieved that that’s the extent of that conversation—

and, by its tone a genuine question: “Is that the sum total of information you’re planning to share about it?”

For a cunt notoriously disinterested in what other people think of her, this is honestly just the normal conversation she was hoping to have in the first place.

[foramen]

Calpernia decides she's not going to exert any more energy toward trying to gauge this woman's motives or judge her. Maybe she's used to being judged and weighed, maybe not; it doesn't matter. Withdrawing is a kind of release. Calpernia realizes she needs to better remember what it was like not to be a general, a leader. She's just anybody, now. She hates it, but she is.

So she answers, voice flat, "what else do you want to know?"

[elegiaque]

It is entirely possible, Gwenaëlle thinks, that this woman has heard about one word in three of everything she’s said and filled the rest in with hon hon hon frilly baguette. Sufficiently possible that she doesn’t bother reminding her she’d already asked (probably serving only to ruffle her already puffed up feathers), but simply repeats, prompting,

“The landscape around the rift. So we’ve got a ridge— tree cover? Uneven ground, wide flat space, anything nearby?” To either keep in mind or to make use of. The nearest settlement’s further out, and probably if there were anyone nearby then Livia wouldn’t have been alone when she’d come upon a fire, so at least they likely don’t have to worry about hysterical civilians.

(Or they’re dead. She should have died, nearly a decade ago in a broken carriage, a thousand times more helpless than she is today.)

“We might have to make do with keeping the demons too occupied to focus on singular targets,” is thinking aloud, the likelihood of this fight ending up a bunch of people who aren’t exactly plate-wearing siege engines, something for Livia to factor in as well with where she places herself. “Scatter, distract. It’ll be faster if I don’t have to wait for the field to clear.”

Riskier, too, but if back up means a sprint rather than a marathon, that sounds better for what it looks like the state of Livia’s stamina might be.