Back!

[cullen_fadewalk]

And I am BACK from my epic travels!

I'm going to start trawling through to figure out what I've missed, but if there's anything one of my characters needs to address asap (I see a Cullen page, for instance...) please link me to it.

This weekend, a plot avenue involving the eluvian will open. If you ever have big plot requests, fling them at me. I'm really very no-holds-barred so long as everyone is respectful and it doesn't blow up the game too much.


ETA: Oh hmm. To explain why they haven't gotten involved yet (because you know they would have), I am going to wave my hand grandly and say Cullen and Varric have been missing. Because of the weird way this world works, however, it is up to you whether your character realized they were missing or if you were just left with a strange impression that something wasn't right.

So, to make this work...eluvian plot starting right now.

Closed: Cullen's whereabouts explained

[cullen_fadewalk]

It happened the way it had before: one moment he was striding down the hall, heading to the War Room to reorganize the supplies (considering posting a guard so they could at least be positive the records remained accurate when people kept sneaking in to help themselves instead of going through proper channels and, no, he was not going to get uptight about this again) and the next moment he was standing in front of the eluvian.

It happened so fast only finely honed instincts kept him from crashing through. Cullen jerked back, one hand falling to the hilt of his sword...the knuckles nearly brushing the glassy surface of the dark mirror.

Nearly was enough. A dark tendril reached from the mirror and before he could pull back, he was being enveloped--yanked through, consumed in a watery ripple of light.

And then he was gone.

**

The prison he came to was strange. And dark. And cold.

There was no food. The only water came from the dew that wended its way down the stone walls. There was no door, no window, and no escape. He searched for a way out, at first panicked, and then methodical, and then just because there was nothing else to do but think and begin to waste away. Eventually, he stayed curled on his side to conserve his strength, letting himself gradually detach, unmoor.

Begin to give up.

It was at the moment he closed his eyes and let himself think, At least in the end there is some measure of peace that the darkness swallowed him and he was stumbling out of the mirror and crumpling to the floor.

Back in Skyhold once more.

Evelea

[cullen_fadewalk]

It probably said a lot about him that, after landing sprawled in the eluvian's chamber and determining where he was again, the first thing he did was check the journal he'd kept tucked in his belt. It hadn't worked in that cell...wherever in the world that had been...and part of him expected this to just be another trick. A punishment of some sort, continually inflicted for crimes he had long been ready to confess.

But he saw the writing appearing, saw the trouble, and the emotion that wended its way through him was complicated at best.

Cullen dashed off a message, hand trembling almost too hard to hold the quill, then focused on forcing his body to obey him. Weeks without food, with barely enough water to survive, with only enough space to pace six steps in any direction in the often absolute dark, had left him impossibly weak. He quaked and shook like an old man as he used the wall to pull himself to his feet, back to that damned mirror, teeth gritted.

His first step nearly sent him crumpling to the floor.

The second was only a little steadier.

But he kept going because he had to keep going, and by the time he reached the courtyard, he was able to keep his forward momentum by sheer bullheaded determination alone. (Even as the world swam around him with every blink of his eyes, a watercolor blur of sensation and shapes.)

He was needed. He needed to know everyone was all right.

Public Post

[cullen_fadewalk]

Don't go near the mirror. Someone bar the door and set up a guard. I will explain when I can.

RP: Fenris (broodyfadewalk)

[thecryoftheseagulls]

Anders was...having a conversation with himself, and wandering through Skyhold aimlessly in the meantime. Which was not as crazy as it sounded because he did share his body with a Fade spirit, after all.

He was certainly not brooding.


...maybe a little.

He could have sworn Varric had shown up to take over watching over Hawke for a spell, but time was weird in this place, and to hear Varric tell it, he had been gone - to another realm entirely? For perhaps more days than Anders thought had actually passed. Not that there were days and nights in this place to tell time by, but still. It meant that he had in fact left Hawke alone for who knows how long, and thankfully apparently nothing had happened - she seemed well on the mend, actually, but Anders still felt oddly guilty about the whole thing.

He huffed and focused instead on this new Varric - Hawke reveal. Now, at the time, he'd expected Varric's overly stubborn grief over his Hawke to be just typical Varric - no matter what way you looked at it, Hawke and Varric had always been close. That much was unlikely to change even between different versions of history, right? In retrospect, however, Varric had seemed pretty...distraught.

Anders waited for the inevitable huff of disapproval from Justice's corner of his brain, but the spirit hummed in interest instead. SHE DESERVES HAPPINESS. IT IS ONLY JUST, Justice offered, and when Anders countered that Hawke had claimed to be happy already, Justice just sort of...snorted. NOT EVEN YOU BELIEVE THAT, ANDERS.

Anders conceded the point, and realized he wasn't entirely sure where in Skyhold they had wandered to. He still hadn't slept, and sudden exhaustion weighed down his limbs. Then there was a bluish glow from down some corridor ahead of him, and Anders found his feet moving towards it without really stopping to judge the wisdom of that action.

Closed: Varric's whereabouts explained

[varricmod]

He'd slipped out of Hawke's room and spoke with Anders in a quiet voice. It had been ridiculously (irrationally) difficult leaving her in even his capable hands, but Varric had scratched at the back of his neck, called himself six kinds of fool, and put one foot in front of the other.

He had work to do. He had to check the rations of food now that more and more people were showing up, and he needed to check in on Isabela, and check in with the Inquisitor, and...

...and apparently find himself walking right into an eluvian between one step and the next, because his life wasn't weird enough already.

The world he found himself in was just plain weird. It was full of people who seemed like the ones he knew--including a version of himself!--but different. He wasn't a dwarf there, for one, and Fenris was some strange species known as a...hipster? There were boxes called laptops and snapchat and MMORPGs and all kinds of things he was both fascinated and repulsed by.

Time passed. When he stepped out of the coffee shop (kind of like a bar, only completely useless) and onto the sidewalk...and found himself back in the familiar stone room that housed the eluvian...all Varric could do was sigh with relief.

"Well, thank the Maker," he muttered, immediately grabbing his journal. It had been weeks. Who knew what kind of stunts Hawke had pulled while he was gone.

Public Post

[varricmod]

So, as a point of curiosity, it turns out the eluvian now eats people.

Okay, more specifically: I was up near my room one minute, and the next I was in the eluvian room being pulled through. It didn't take me to that weird between place, though. It took me straight through to a world full of hipsters. Shit, I don't know.

But I'm back. What's happening?

OOC: Reminding you that this exists!

[zevranfadewalk]

Hello hello! I just wanted to remind everyone that the Hookup Central exists!

https://fadewalk.dreamwidth.org/2020.html

I check in on it regularly. I have a no one who wants shipped goes unshipped! policy, so just consider me your quiet Yente.

RP: Varric

[hawke_groundzero_fadewalk]

The world was getting less real.

Hawke knew that it wasn't supposed to be really real, but she had been waiting for Varric to come back for... days. She knew it was more than a few. Because she had eaten, bathed, slept, woke and he hadn't been there. He'd insisted he was going to be there when she woke up and he hadn't.

Anders had, and for that she was grateful, sure, but he was a busy-body with a nose that was too big and a stupid coat and she could only take so much of his smirking. He had the absolute worst smirk.

She hadn't left the room much after the first day or two. She was still kitten-weak, and she was struck with the sudden fear it wouldn't be where she left it, and once she was back inside she was sure (even if it was completely mad and even she knew that) that if she opened the door she'd see Nightmare's thousand thousand eyes staring back at her.

Dying alone, that was one of Hawke's big ones, the big fears, and aside from the journal and the occasional check-in from Anders bringing her food or water, she was terribly alone. Spending time curled into a nest in Varric's bed, wearing one of his spare shirts, was about the dumbest thing she could think of when she bothered to really examine her choices.

But there she was, napping in a pile of blankets, wearing the shirt that didn't fit at all, refusing to think. He'd said he'd be there, he'd be there. She pulled the pillow tighter over her head.