nonvenomous | Inbox

There is something in there he disagrees with -- clear in the lines that bite in between his brows -- but Wysteria speaks so quickly and with such momentum. Even in complete control of his faculties, he’d have a hard time getting a word in edgewise.

Here, today, he’s stumped to silence.

“Yes,” he says. He would. He almost says, I would.

Instead, he spends half the breath he was going to use for it dawdling with his mouth open while he reviews his own playback. He’d looked at her before, but this is the first time he manages hazy eye contact, fooled into it by his own disbelief. Perhaps he’s misunderstood.

“Under Kirkwall?”

"Under Kirkwall," she repeats, as if confirming the weather beyond the window.

His answer, however brief, must satisfy her to some degree, for she begins the awkward process of uncrossing her legs. A scrap of paper is fetched to her as well and smoothed where it might be ready for some note to be taken at the drop of a hat.

"There is a formidable series of caverns beneath the city, and in those caverns lie the foundations of the old Tevinter city or something like it. The Veil is weak there, in part I believe due to whatever enchantments were etched there by the old masters of this place. You will see it for yourself if we reach the chambers at low tide, but it is positively lousy with rune work. It is the most sensibly placed location to do the work. Should something go wrong, we will be well within reach of reinforcements."

This might be new information for Dick Dickerson. At the very least, it’s old information considered from a newer, much more attractive perspective. He follows the paper she fetches as if he expects it’s part of the equation. A Clue.

He already has the material components. They’re in his room. He could go and get them now. His posture shifts only to settle before he can stand, snared and anchored by fresh unease -- the kind of permeating wrongness that creeps into a dream even before it unfolds into a nightmare.

“You should be angrier with me.”

It’s not really an accusation. Just thought to speech, cumbersome to her planning effort.

Edited (what are words really) 2021-03-03 06:38 (UTC)

Unlucky for Dick Dickerson, the paper has no part in this whatsoever. If it did, it might keep her attention for slightly longer. Unfortunately, Wysteria looks up. And for the first time since he arrived--since before the dream; possibly for the first time ever at all--, she regards the man she finds before her rather than some interesting concept which lays both through and beyond him.

"Explain to me why."

It’s slow going.

Her words have to soak through a defensive prickle at his chops -- that he should be pressed on like a snake under her boot, his ears rushed red. But he’s too soggy for the pressure to keep; it lets off in grades as he unmires himself to think in earnest, and is gone entirely by the time he’s boxed it down into something simple and true.

“It wasn’t fair.”

He doesn’t add that he knows humans to be greatly concerned with fairness.

He has been very concerned with it himself, lately.

Her eyes narrow on him. For a moment, the line of her mouth slants toward a frown. It's a calculating examination, a thing made up of measuring and weighing until at last she realizes he is being quite serious. Genuine, even.

Wysteria scoffs. Or laughs. Her Ha! falls somewhere between the two.

"Forgive me," she says. Not for laughing, not for finding the suggestion ridiculous. She wouldn't apologize for something so small as that. "But if that's all, then I remain unconvinced. I truly do regret it if I'm the first one to say so to you, Mister Dickerson, but I'm afraid life has a certain way of being unfair. And I hardly think we should expect a bad dream to conduct itself better than reality."

His brows twitch down at her Ha! But it stays a ha, and doesn’t rise to real laughter, rendering him safe from truly catastrophic burn trauma. Instead he is left to frown resentfully at her feet, the fuzzy lines around his mouth carved in stark against the lesser sting of a scoff.

"It’s different when it’s a friend who decides, and not fate."

He kicks up a brow at her, unsure he deserves the designation.

"A friend or any mortal with power in -- " how should he put this, he sits back up out of his slouch towards her while he fumbles, "an equation."

Yes that was definitely the right choice.

The brow message of the brow is note. Recieved. Filed away like a record in a drawer in a great cabinet full to bursting with every manner of paper. Then, because he is hesitating, she waits a moment too before saying,

"Then as an affirmation of our friendship you will simply have to act more thoughtfully in the future when it may actually make some difference to me. And should such a time come where we are in similar straights and you conduct yourself in the same fashion as you did in that dream—Well."

Wysteria doesn't shrug, but there is something of the sense of it in the tip of her head and how she rolls her attention to the page on her knee. The pen is there in her hand; she begins making notes.

"That is your a matter for your conscience, not mine. And in the interim, I am willing to risk it."

Resignation buoys out of him in a great intake of breath let out slow into a sigh, his posture still fixed upright, pinning him to the chair back now like an old stocking to a mantle. It’s about the farthest thing from an assurance he can muster without speaking.

He watches her note-taking, and realizes dimly that the slip of paper was blank.

“Holden told me you had a theory about where we come from.”

"Did he?"

It is difficult to draw a straight line across one's thigh, but she seems to be making decent work of the thing. She draws a great series of them, annotating here on there on the page as she goes.

"And tell me. Which part of it do you think is relevant to this discussion?"

He’d been very sure about this even before he knew about her theory.

Here he hesitates again, muddling over what he can see at a distance. Lines.

“The part where we aren’t really here.”

Her hand pauses, attention rising from the page. Her frown is all befuddlement, and for a moment she allows the line of her eyes to rove about the room as if she might find some obvious connective tissue there. Eventually, she settles on him. There is really nowhere else to look.

"And?" Is shamelessly prompting. "I'm not sure I see how the two things align."

The wise thing for him to do would have been to quit while he was ahead, and he could have returned to this subject never, or later, when sober and on surer ground. But he’s drunk, so he’s broached it, left once again to fish a coherent answer out of the bog between his ears.

“What happens to us is less important.”

Those are the words that fall out, so he is committed. But he can look at her when he says it, because he believes it’s true.

“Living here is a luxury.”

The point of her pen wavers, touching absently down onto the page before floating automatically up again. She has spent a lifetime attempting to avoid irrelevant spots on paper; this give and flex in his wrist is nearly automatic and entirely thoughtless.

"It seems Mister Holden has misrepresented my theory to you."

With a flick of the pen, she resumes drawing her schematic.

"I see where the confusion lies, of course. It is the part where I suggested to him that we are the product of a dream our true selves made which slipped through the fade. I can see how he heard that and interpreted it as us being—illusions, I suppose. While our true selves, our original selves, remain safely where they began. Their world goes on with them in it, and nothing we do here and anything which happens to us effects them whatsoever.

"But the moment we crossed the Veil, we became real and tangible and independent of those people. We are copies. Unstable ones, I grant you—connected in some way to the place from which we came or to our originals in some fashion, even—but not ghosts or spirits. In which case, I suppose I can see how there might be some reason behind the things which happen to us here being irrelevant. They are to our originals. But they matter very much to us as we are here. After all, there is little else that ever will. What's more, what we do is of every importance. Because eventually you and I will leave this place and someone else will have to manage after."

Wysteria punctuates a sentence. With a decisive flick of the wrist, the pen in her hand evaporates from between her fingers.

"Careful," she warns, leaning forward to pass him the note. On it is a basic drawing of the network of caves which they will find waiting below Kirkwall for them, and a series of runes which are etched in the largest buried rooms of the caverns. "The ink is still wet."

This would be a lot to process for a sober Dick, but he seems to follow well-enough not to disagree, for all that he also listens as intently as he might through a closed door, lest he miss some critical piece that connects everything together. Brow furrowed and eyes forced into focus, he holds upright with muppet intensity. Exaggerated with Effort.

He has Takes. Hot ones.

The pen disappears. Whatever important thing he’d gathered up behind his breastbone to say goes with it.

She passes him the note. He takes it, and lists forward to set his elbows on his knees to study the lines. He’s a long time looking at it, working to remember, loathe to let the subject drop while he still has it somewhat in his teeth.

“What we do is important,” he agrees, to the map. If he was going to say something wise, he can’t remember what it was. “The Venatori knew your value. They would have hunted you.”

"The Venatori knew what myself and Mister Stark dreamed they knew. In reality, they know nothing of the sort. Indeed, I am led to believe that very few people do."

Which is altogether another conversation. One she decides she doesn't particularly care to have, and so breezes beyond it without much hesitation.

"While it's certainly possible that over the course of our work, that evaluation may shift, I see no reason to cross that bridge prematurely. Why, we have hardly begun to build it, Mister Dickerson. Now, the thinning of the Veil where we might open this rift is close but I would hesitate to travel down there without at least a little preparation. And once we arrive--what is the process? Roughly how long does the summoning take? I believe it will be necessary to keep the rift open during it, which may necessitate the company of armed companions or arcane protections for you and I. Or both, I suppose. Though my preference is for the smallest party possible. People who are solid, who will not be troubled overmuch by strange magic performed by Rifters."

He hasn’t finished the thought, and it seems increasingly likely to stay unfinished, resolve pushed and pulled in the tidal sweep of Wysteria’s determination like a dead eel, pale and soft and losing pieces of itself on the sand. Richard is quiet for a while longer while he watches it slip away, rotten through his fingers.

If it’s only important to him, it isn’t important.

“An hour.” His voice pinches raw in his throat, and he clears it to frown back down to the paper with scholarly intent. Serious, in spite of the odd slurred word wobbling his arcane authority. “It’s a ritual. I already have the materials.”

Finer details like armed companions pass him by as a logical progression, in the moment. Whatever she thinks is best.

“I won’t be able to assist while I’m concentrating.”

"An hour." She blanches, some of the color draining from her face.

"That is a very long time to be in the presence of an active rift, Mister Dickerson. But no matter. I will gather some materials of my own, and see to it that we are adequately protected while you perform your ritual. Tell me," Suggests no change in tack whatsoever. However-- "Would you prefer it if I were upset with you?"

She has been practicing her archery at Ellis' behest. Maybe that explains the ruthless shot.

He is muddled in thought when the bolt finds him, thumping him back into the cold light of harsher consideration. In a way, the lack of balance is easier to manage in this state — too loose for whiplash to catch.

“I’d prefer you made an informed decision.”

But that isn’t entirely true. There are plenty of aspects he’d prefer to gloss over in perpetuity. They come drifting along into bleary focus as soon as the words have left him.

“We could take a graded approach.”

To science. Or to honesty.

"Very well. And under these circumstances, what do you imagine that framework to look like?"

These are merciless questions in his condition, even she knows. It would be difficult not to be aware of it, given the bleary eyed look in Dickerson's face and the distinct stench roiling off his person. But it's rare for a person to be in a position where they might feel some obligation to her, and she can hardly be blamed for using the leverage of this to pry a few concessions out of him.

It is only right.

“It has occurred to me that you might not be interested in understanding the motivation behind your attempted murder.”

He closes his eyes as he says so, very late acknowledgement of failed empathy.

“We can move on if you prefer.”

Is Move on in the Kalvadan vernacular?

"Is it not merely as simple as the fact that according to the dream, Mister Stark and I had supplied the Venatori with means quite capable of supressing a great deal of the resistance effort against them? I have difficulty believing that it was a personal matter. Though I suppose if you harbor some secret dislike for me or what we might accomplish together, now is the time to say so Mister Dickerson. I will even promise to hold it against you, if you prefer."

“It wasn’t personal.”

But an unconscious tick up at one eyebrow doesn’t discount the possibility, for all that this must be the first time he’s considered it.

“If they had rescued you successfully, the Venatori would have pursued you relentlessly back to what remained of the resistance and sundered it.”

For the first time since they began speaking, something narrows a little in Wysteria's expression in response to that. It is a little like asking someone where they've hidden something and seeing their eye dart uneasily in the correct direction. She is quiet for a full half beat as her pulse jumps unexpectedly high in her throat, then—

She tucks that away. Smooths it over. She manages to be quite matter of fact when she says,

"See then. Perfectly reasonable. Indeed, you were not incorrect for the Venatori did attempt to follow us after Mister Stark and I had made our escape. So I can hardly fault your logic, much as I prefer our alternative."

He tries to watch her, but his eyes are small in his head as the minutes have worn on, watery and weary and a little bit dumb. The paper between his fingers droops under the weight of fresh ink.

“I was reared to be disposable.”

Perspective tossed down out of the aether is what it is, matter-of-fact and miserable.

“I understand that humans have a more nuanced relationship with perseverance.”

...is a much nastier way of saying ‘I can hardly fault your logic,’ but he finally seems satisfied that they are on the same page.

Inbox - Fade Rift

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