Test Drive Meme!

[faderifting]

You'll Never Leave the Hinterlands Alive*

Welcome to Fade Rift's very first Test Drive Meme! Use one of the prompts below or make up your own, and tag around! Have fun, try out the setting, generate samples for your app, coerce your friends into joining you.

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, early fall finds 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.

1. In the Deep Dark Hills of Western Ferelden

You have turned the wrong corner, forded the wrong stream, crested the wrong hill, entered the wrong cave. Maybe you are far from camp. Maybe you are in camp. Whatever has happened, wherever you are: you are being chased by bears. Did you provoke the bears? Are they huge? Babies? Fade-touched? Mage-controlled? What are they chasing you away from? What are they chasing you into? What do you plan to make out of their hide if you kill them? What do you think they'll craft out of your hide if they kill you?

2. There I Read on a Hillside Gravestone

The rebel mages and renegade templars have ravaged the Hinterlands, skirmishes breaking out all over. It looks like you've just missed one-- great spikes of ice melt slowly in the cool autumn sunlight and patches of grass and trees have been scorched away. Three bodies are scattered about, two templars and one mage judging by their clothing. You could bury them. Or search their pockets. Or track their friends. Or all of the above, if you're feeling industrious.

3. Won't You Walk With Me Out the Mouth of this Holler

Whatever task you were actually sent out here to do, you are going to be late. One-Eyed Jimmy asked so nicely for your help finding his prize ram, Lord Woolsley. It's been in the family for years, so smart for a ram, it's a good luck charm, their business has boomed with it around, and it's lived for so long, he just can't abide thinking of it getting eaten by some mangy apostate. And then he went and offered you money, too. How could you say no? Maybe you're still wandering, asking everyone you pass if they've seen a ram that looks like it's wearing an orangey-red sweater. Maybe you've found it and are chasing it around a lake or trying to lead it back to the village for your reward. Maybe you've gotten fed up and gotten out your sword to bring Jimmy a new sweater instead and discovered that lucky Lord Woolsley is a demon in sheep's clothing. Surprise!

4. Fill Your Cup With Whatever Bitter Brew You're Drinking

Just because the region's had a rough time lately doesn't mean the tavern at Redcliffe is any less crowded than usual. Bella behind the bar dishes out tankards to refugees and soldiers, scared villagers and angry farmers, merchants traveling through from Orzammar and Orlais and families fleeing the rifts in the foothills. It's packed, basically. The Inquisition has only recently extended its influence into the region, and while some have already seen the benefit-- demons killed, fighting broken up-- others are skeptical.

5. Spend Your Life Just Thinkin' of How to Get Away

Choose Your Own Adventure: hunt game, kill demons, gather herbs, track bandits, haggle over the price of armor, fall off a deceptively tall rock, 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, climb trees or abandoned towers, rummage around in empty homes, run from a dragon, cry over how cute that fennec fox you just shot was, set up camp and chat around the fire, knock yourself out (figuratively, or even literally if that's more your speed)-- the Hinterlands are your Frostback Mountain oyster.

*Yeah, I had this stuck in my head. It's a good song!!

Comments

[colecomfort]

[If he feels her looking, it isn't enough to make him look back. His hands shift into his lap, fingers worrying with one another.]

They hear you, too. A beacon, beckoning. A dream to shape them, not to be shaped. They want to play.

...but not all of them would play nice.

[girlinthebox]

Simon says I shouldn't play with strangers.

[ Her eyes linger, even if Cole's do not. ]

You're already shaped. Sound. Safe. Why did you come?

[ He feels softer, less like being watched through some window with covetous intent. He plays with sharp things, but the intent is a gentle one. ]

[colecomfort]

[When he'd begun, all he'd known was that he was following the song. It wasn't until he'd arrived that he knew why he'd really come.]

You were lying down with dead people. [Communing with them, trying to see what they saw. Trying to understand why.] No one should have to do that alone.

[girlinthebox]

Had to be. Too many ripples and you can't see to the bottom, pond turns murky. The voices bounce off each other, balls of yarn knotted and tied...too loud. Too many.

[ She winces at the reminder, shaking her head briefly. She'd been meant to do more than listen, that's what they tried to do. Let her walk while waking, but it had all gone so very wrong. Now they wouldn't be quiet.

Not him, however. River's gaze turns skeptical, puzzled. ]

You make noise, but not theirs. Born of many you're softer than all of them. You...echo. Just one voice. How?

[colecomfort]

I'm Cole. [As if that explains it, at first - but the pause is a short one.] I used to be like them, but I made myself. It helps, having a way through.

[girlinthebox]

Can you go back?

[ She's quick to latch onto the particulars. He's unique, after all. She's never felt anything quite like him, at once soothing and intriguing. She'd rather know what she can, or try to.

Sometimes it slips, slides away from her, but she wouldn't forget. Like a puzzle solved a few pieces at a time, over days. ]

No. Not like this. The edges changed and you don't fit the same.

[colecomfort]

[He waits for her to work it out. He has a feeling, somehow, that she can. Or that she might. It isn't rare that someone sees him, if only for a moment — but it's rare that someone sees through him, past his skin to what he is.

Even Rhys couldn't do it. But she can.]

I don't want to go back. There's so much I can do here, like this. I can help.

[A considering pause. He knows she came here to listen.]

...am I a ripple?

[Or at least an unwelcome one.]

[girlinthebox]

You are.

[ It's not agreement with the statement. It's a statement of its own. He exists, tied into the tangle, but not abrasive. Not a bother. She isn't sure what he is beyond that, but she's in no hurry to see him go, this strange boy in his fantastic hat.

River's head tips, noting a change in the breeze. ]

You're...Cole.

[ Maybe that's all he needs to be. How lucky to have that much. Some days she's not sure what they turned her into. She knows she's not supposed to exist, that she has to hide, that Simon is in a lot of trouble for taking her out of Tevinter. Beyond that, she only knows that she wants to find, explore, dream.

Perhaps one day it will give her answers and make her whole. Perhaps one day she'll just sink into the Fade and never wake, like elves of old. But not today. ]

[colecomfort]

You understand. Most people can't.

[He dares to get closer now, climbing down off the tree trunk and going to join her among the corpses.

He offers her his hand.]

You shouldn't stay here. You aren't dead yet.

[girlinthebox]

[ Fingers, nails, skin, bone. Dressed in a frayed half-glove. Much like any other hand, and warm when she reaches out.

She doesn't take it immediately, just tentatively touching the pads of his fingers as though testing. Real, but echoes like the other side. Pulling from both sides. Where does the knot rest now? ]

Not dead. We're just lost in the woods, waiting for the wolf.

[ But at last she lets her hand rest there against his palm, dirty but delicately boned. ]