Richard Dickerson arrives at the door like a package pushed silently through a slot -- an abrupt, angular and exposed presence, standing very still while he tries to assess what he might be doing here before he’s noticed. Nothing about him or his manner of dress is noteworthy; the high collar and long sleeves to his coat might be warm for the weather.
He is lean, but the hollows of his face aren’t as hungry as they were upon their departure from Disney’s Jungle Kingdom.
Apart from that, he is just a strange, balding, bearded man on the stoop. Watching.
Spread papers, stacked jars, some ingredient caught mid-prep; a cutting board or drying rack abandoned. It sprawls across his desk and the shelves behind, the site of some impossibly small, localized hurricane.
There are signs, if you know where to look: A steady rotation of objects, the way that nothing which matters sits out too long, or is left before prying eyes. There are signs — the neatness of his coat, a well-organized bag; bedroom stripped bare of ornament. Animals mark their territory.
"Mssr. Dickerson," Light enough. Tonight, the books and bottles have been set aside, returned to proper place. The long branch on the table before him is heavy, charred at the ends. Isaac cautiously unwinds the cord from its middle. "Thank you for coming on such oblique notice — will you please shut the door?"
There’s recognition in the pause it gives him, stripped bare of anything as well-developed as guilt or dread. With a glance from Isaac, to the branch and cord, and back to Isaac, Dick turns wordlessly to close the door behind him. Passive, but not especially polite.
That done, he walks far enough into the room for the distance he stops at to feel passably conversational, and waits.
His brows lift. A gesture to the staff — much looser than that which had unbound it. Sickly blue light gleams from two halves, sheared through. It must have been an ugly break. It's been uglier repairs.
"Have you seen raw lyrium before?" Isaac lifts one end the wood, squints experimentally before offering it out. "This has been worked, of course, but I shouldn't advise touching the core directly. Does a number upon the rifted."
Another step brings Dick close enough to take up the offered half -- careful, after that warning, with the added affirmation of eye contact to assure he won’t immediately pop the lyrium end into his mouth. He even goes through the motions of feeling the heft of it and examining the woodgrain before he rolls his wrist to peer more intently down the lyrium barrel -- a frankly stunning display of self-control, under the circumstances.
“As far as I know, it’s all but inaccessible to rifters,” he says, matter-of-fact, and only about 10% shady.
It bumps up to 20% when he glances up from the glow.
10% + 20% = 30%, which yields approximately ⅓ of a compulsion to go ahead and hook his thumb down into the lyrium hole.
With his thumb outstretched across the contour of the break, Richard watches Isaac watching him for a long moment, poised to read any trace of a further tell. Finding none, he looks back down into the glow hole, and holds the stave of it back out for its owner to retake.
“I’ve already volunteered for an assignment I need to be sane for.”
Or he absolutely would, pending further research and perhaps the arrangement of a neutral witness. Dick is nothing if not earnest in this weird, unspoken promise.
Because Riftwatch isn't — Oh, you know. Dick hands the branch back, and something shrugs out of Isaac's face, vanishes with the air's anticipation. Another time. Isaac rolls the staff between his hands.
"It still functions, more or less." More or less isn't good enough for the field. "But every so often, a spell will shake the binding loose."
In a Fade wind, some boughs bend. Others —
"I could see a Formari, but they'd like as not just tell me to chuck it."
Technically, Richard hasn’t confessed to anything yet. It would cost him nothing to deny any capacity for help and excuse himself. But Isaac is handsome, and there’s nothing more pitiful than a caster without a focus.
“I was careless, in the jungle.”
He is decisive in saying so, no affection for being put in this position behind his eyes, which have gone a little tight at the corners.
“Your people subjugate magic users.”
How embarrassing. But doubtless, he’s preaching to the choir -- at current both of them look like they could use a nap.
“I can mend the shaft, but not the lyrium core. Direct contact is required.”
Blithely as though Richard were a carpenter. His eyes shut comically, before reopening. As far as the Chantry's concerned, any Rifter is already a lost cause — but no point to voicing that. There are degrees to these things, and he hasn’t struck him as dumb.
"Mending the wood may be enough. I think it at least worth the trial."
Sentiment. His head tips aside, considering. It’s a pleasant thing, to hold a secret; it looks, upon occasion, something like an upper hand. Better it not, just now. An offer of his own:
It’s both the ideal sentiment and thin reassurance -- Dick’s dry approval of how naturally it comes across isn’t quite enough to let off the tension pinned up stiff behind his ears. Then again, even his wardrobe is severe. This might just be the way that he is.
“If you’ll show it to me,” is certainly the answer of a man who is accustomed to having his hopes, dreams and lunch money stripped from him and dangled just out of his reach.
He is very still while he waits, interest keen with suspicion.
He comes up at last with an apple: Small and red, and unremarkable. Look, Says the flourish of his hand, Dinner and a show.
For a moment, nothing much happens. Another, and his fingers shift, dig into flesh. It's soft. Juice bursts mealy upon his palm, and the air tastes briefly of nectar; a cider tang. The apple-skin bruises — brown-purple-black — freckles into new rot. Something's gone off. Sour, cadaverous.
Isaac's fist closes about the shriveled mass. White fur sprouts from between the line of his knuckles, collapses in that last squelch of rancid pulp. If one of them will make a secret of mending, well,
The initial tang of cider rot that prickles the air pulls a swallow out of him, followed by a clearing of his throat; he otherwise watches with the same kind of wary attention demonstrating the slice of a freshly-sharpened knife through the same apple would warrant.
Context clues are telling enough that this is a no-no. Richard looks up to Isaac from his pulpy hand to acknowledge his handkerchief want with an of course nod and a is something wrong with your legs/why don’t you get your own handkerchief/Richard will remember this glance. It’s a glance given as he turns, with just enough pause for clots of mouldy pulp to start dripping if Isaac doesn’t get both of his hands involved to stop it.
Petty.
“Are apples especially sacred to the Chantry?”
Kerchief retrieved, he offers it out with a flick.
"I hope not. We only burned Andraste, imagine if they’d shoved her in a pie."
Isaac lifts his fist to inspect. Sticky fruit dribbles to soak his sleeve, spatters the wood below. The slant of his chin, waiting for Richard, isn't unamused — it stays him a further moment, before at last reaching for the kerchief.
There are some things that you excuse after you’ve done them. This little secret wouldn’t mean a pyre, nothing like the others he keeps; but even Ilias’ work draws the wrong sort of attention. When people write of witches, they write of withered things.
"But I don’t imagine they’d look kindly for the waste." He works the clot first from stubby nails, then down his arm, to the desk at last. The apple’s corpse lies half-crushed upon cloth. "For all faith, some things can’t be remade."
It would be impolite to ask how well it scales to human beings.
Left with idle hands while Isaac cleans himself up, Dick watches at the same quiet distance as before, his interest prickled coarse with the implications. As magics go, this one does not seem alarming to him, or even unfamiliar.
Just a little intimidating in a closed office with a stranger. That’s all.
“Is the vitality channeled elsewhere or simply destroyed?”
It's a good question. It's as clearly one he didn't expect to be asked. Isaac considers,
"Encouraged, is how I've always thought of it." Thought is its own shape, within magic. "But transfer is perhaps more accurate. There must be a tipping point. To which each of us, our life belongs elsewhere."
Something levels in the pitch of his brows, less performative. It would be easy to mistake for discomfort. A moment passes, is shrugged off. Light:
Richard nods his understanding, half to Isaac, and half to himself. Practice keeps him from glancing away as he does it, his skepticism banished to a sliver of a delay in processing. When Rah-shak halves a gnoll’s skull with her axe, is she encouraging its brain to leave its case?
It doesn’t matter, he just has to make it out of this room without being turned into a moist bed for fungi.
Hands at his sides, Richard offers no clue in posture or tone to help Isaac along with deciding one way or the other. He waits (with the empty patience of a blue-eyed grackle waiting for a french fry) until he adds:
“You can hold it in place if you like. A level surface would be best.”
This entire operation has been strange, but what is Dick’s life if not a series of variously strange operations. Apart from his silence while he waits for Isaac to figure himself out, there’s no trace of outward discomfort about him.
“No risk, no reward?” he guesses, when all is finally clear for him to step in and place his hands on either side of the break.
“I’ve been meaning to study Orlesian.”
Matter-of-fact, with a glance aside, and the crook of half a smile. Keeping with the theme of normalcy, he then proceeds to murmur over the staff in a language most often associated with demons and snakes, sibilant, breathy. If it was any less casual, an eavesdropper could be forgiven for thinking this is part of the slow build to an unwilling sacrifice.
"Oh, you don't want to do that," Edging an elbow about his. "Orlesians are dreadful."
Richard speaks, if one may call it speech — there are things that hiss in dreams, that wind through paths of Fade. Few of them own tongues, but every night, you can listen.
You can grow used to anything.
He listens, and it isn't casual; not really. The tension in his hands draws them up new, knuckles lifted with a degree of care not present about the apple. And something in the staff slithers, reaches for itself.
Edited (awk sentence edits) Date: 2020-09-25 05:41 am (UTC)
There’s no glimmer or glow to mark the incantation taking hold between them -- Richard’s spellwork is as severe as the rest of him, and in this case, all but indistinguishable from prayer. Raw, healthy material builds its way out of the break at a crawl, virgin wood following the grain to bridge the gap from both sides.
No more than a minute has passed when Richard winds down into a silence that the growth continues beyond, the eerie trickle of cells through a rapid cycle of growth and death just audible beneath the rustle of his breath.
The new wood is a shade or two lighter than the staff around it, not yet having endured the rigors of weather or travel or combat under a mage’s hand, but otherwise seamless. Natural.
He lifts his hands with a hope you weren't expecting something more spectacular glance, and withdraws an easy step, leaving Isaac room to admire or test it as he sees fit.
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Date: 2020-07-14 09:28 pm (UTC)...Should I meet you somewhere?
no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-16 08:33 pm (UTC)He is lean, but the hollows of his face aren’t as hungry as they were upon their departure from Disney’s Jungle Kingdom.
Apart from that, he is just a strange, balding, bearded man on the stoop. Watching.
jesus how was this two weeks sorry dude
Date: 2020-07-31 08:05 am (UTC)Spread papers, stacked jars, some ingredient caught mid-prep; a cutting board or drying rack abandoned. It sprawls across his desk and the shelves behind, the site of some impossibly small, localized hurricane.
There are signs, if you know where to look: A steady rotation of objects, the way that nothing which matters sits out too long, or is left before prying eyes. There are signs — the neatness of his coat, a well-organized bag; bedroom stripped bare of ornament. Animals mark their territory.
"Mssr. Dickerson," Light enough. Tonight, the books and bottles have been set aside, returned to proper place. The long branch on the table before him is heavy, charred at the ends. Isaac cautiously unwinds the cord from its middle. "Thank you for coming on such oblique notice — will you please shut the door?"
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 03:58 am (UTC)There’s recognition in the pause it gives him, stripped bare of anything as well-developed as guilt or dread. With a glance from Isaac, to the branch and cord, and back to Isaac, Dick turns wordlessly to close the door behind him. Passive, but not especially polite.
That done, he walks far enough into the room for the distance he stops at to feel passably conversational, and waits.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 05:24 am (UTC)"Have you seen raw lyrium before?" Isaac lifts one end the wood, squints experimentally before offering it out. "This has been worked, of course, but I shouldn't advise touching the core directly. Does a number upon the rifted."
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 07:22 am (UTC)“As far as I know, it’s all but inaccessible to rifters,” he says, matter-of-fact, and only about 10% shady.
It bumps up to 20% when he glances up from the glow.
“What would it do?”
no subject
Date: 2020-08-07 08:48 am (UTC)Or so he's heard. Records of the Inquisition's little blue plague are notably sparse.
"Solid like this, it might kill me — which doesn't bode terribly well for anyone with a stronger connection to the Fade."
Conversationally. He watches Dick, expression level, and only about 10% I dare you.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-11 03:30 am (UTC)With his thumb outstretched across the contour of the break, Richard watches Isaac watching him for a long moment, poised to read any trace of a further tell. Finding none, he looks back down into the glow hole, and holds the stave of it back out for its owner to retake.
“I’ve already volunteered for an assignment I need to be sane for.”
Or he absolutely would, pending further research and perhaps the arrangement of a neutral witness. Dick is nothing if not earnest in this weird, unspoken promise.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-12 06:55 am (UTC)Because Riftwatch isn't — Oh, you know. Dick hands the branch back, and something shrugs out of Isaac's face, vanishes with the air's anticipation. Another time. Isaac rolls the staff between his hands.
"It still functions, more or less." More or less isn't good enough for the field. "But every so often, a spell will shake the binding loose."
In a Fade wind, some boughs bend. Others —
"I could see a Formari, but they'd like as not just tell me to chuck it."
no subject
Date: 2020-08-16 07:45 am (UTC)“I was careless, in the jungle.”
He is decisive in saying so, no affection for being put in this position behind his eyes, which have gone a little tight at the corners.
“Your people subjugate magic users.”
How embarrassing. But doubtless, he’s preaching to the choir -- at current both of them look like they could use a nap.
“I can mend the shaft, but not the lyrium core. Direct contact is required.”
no subject
Date: 2020-08-20 05:58 pm (UTC)Blithely as though Richard were a carpenter. His eyes shut comically, before reopening. As far as the Chantry's concerned, any Rifter is already a lost cause — but no point to voicing that. There are degrees to these things, and he hasn’t struck him as dumb.
"Mending the wood may be enough. I think it at least worth the trial."
Sentiment. His head tips aside, considering. It’s a pleasant thing, to hold a secret; it looks, upon occasion, something like an upper hand. Better it not, just now. An offer of his own:
"Would you like to see something careless?"
An exchange.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-24 08:03 am (UTC)What magic.
It’s both the ideal sentiment and thin reassurance -- Dick’s dry approval of how naturally it comes across isn’t quite enough to let off the tension pinned up stiff behind his ears. Then again, even his wardrobe is severe. This might just be the way that he is.
“If you’ll show it to me,” is certainly the answer of a man who is accustomed to having his hopes, dreams and lunch money stripped from him and dangled just out of his reach.
He is very still while he waits, interest keen with suspicion.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-24 09:27 am (UTC)He comes up at last with an apple: Small and red, and unremarkable. Look, Says the flourish of his hand, Dinner and a show.
For a moment, nothing much happens. Another, and his fingers shift, dig into flesh. It's soft. Juice bursts mealy upon his palm, and the air tastes briefly of nectar; a cider tang. The apple-skin bruises — brown-purple-black — freckles into new rot. Something's gone off. Sour, cadaverous.
Isaac's fist closes about the shriveled mass. White fur sprouts from between the line of his knuckles, collapses in that last squelch of rancid pulp. If one of them will make a secret of mending, well,
"There's a handkerchief on the bench."
Please and thank you.
dick https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/250/493/d16.jpg dickerson
Date: 2020-08-24 05:25 pm (UTC)Context clues are telling enough that this is a no-no. Richard looks up to Isaac from his pulpy hand to acknowledge his handkerchief want with an of course nod and a is something wrong with your legs/why don’t you get your own handkerchief/Richard will remember this glance. It’s a glance given as he turns, with just enough pause for clots of mouldy pulp to start dripping if Isaac doesn’t get both of his hands involved to stop it.
Petty.
“Are apples especially sacred to the Chantry?”
Kerchief retrieved, he offers it out with a flick.
they call him triple d
Date: 2020-08-26 07:18 am (UTC)Isaac lifts his fist to inspect. Sticky fruit dribbles to soak his sleeve, spatters the wood below. The slant of his chin, waiting for Richard, isn't unamused — it stays him a further moment, before at last reaching for the kerchief.
There are some things that you excuse after you’ve done them. This little secret wouldn’t mean a pyre, nothing like the others he keeps; but even Ilias’ work draws the wrong sort of attention. When people write of witches, they write of withered things.
"But I don’t imagine they’d look kindly for the waste." He works the clot first from stubby nails, then down his arm, to the desk at last. The apple’s corpse lies half-crushed upon cloth. "For all faith, some things can’t be remade."
In an image, or the palm of a hand.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 09:22 pm (UTC)Left with idle hands while Isaac cleans himself up, Dick watches at the same quiet distance as before, his interest prickled coarse with the implications. As magics go, this one does not seem alarming to him, or even unfamiliar.
Just a little intimidating in a closed office with a stranger. That’s all.
“Is the vitality channeled elsewhere or simply destroyed?”
me googling arguments about spontaneous generation in the 1700s like i did this to myself
Date: 2020-08-27 10:19 pm (UTC)"Encouraged, is how I've always thought of it." Thought is its own shape, within magic. "But transfer is perhaps more accurate. There must be a tipping point. To which each of us, our life belongs elsewhere."
Something levels in the pitch of his brows, less performative. It would be easy to mistake for discomfort. A moment passes, is shrugged off. Light:
"If it's wet enough, you get mushrooms."
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 11:14 pm (UTC)Richard nods his understanding, half to Isaac, and half to himself. Practice keeps him from glancing away as he does it, his skepticism banished to a sliver of a delay in processing. When Rah-shak halves a gnoll’s skull with her axe, is she encouraging its brain to leave its case?
It doesn’t matter, he just has to make it out of this room without being turned into a moist bed for fungi.
“I’ve heard hill giants can have that problem.”
Jock itch on a massive scale. Anyway --
“Your staff,” he reminds.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 11:26 pm (UTC)Should he like. Leave. With the Tranquil, he usually leaves.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-28 05:04 pm (UTC)Easy.
Hands at his sides, Richard offers no clue in posture or tone to help Isaac along with deciding one way or the other. He waits (with the empty patience of a blue-eyed grackle waiting for a french fry) until he adds:
“You can hold it in place if you like. A level surface would be best.”
no subject
Date: 2020-08-30 08:13 am (UTC)Of course he does, shifting to make room less for Richard than to shuffle off uncertainty. It clears a space about the desk, all the same.
"Very well," He stretches to press the pieces together. "Qui ne risque rien n'a rien."
no subject
Date: 2020-09-02 06:30 am (UTC)“No risk, no reward?” he guesses, when all is finally clear for him to step in and place his hands on either side of the break.
“I’ve been meaning to study Orlesian.”
Matter-of-fact, with a glance aside, and the crook of half a smile. Keeping with the theme of normalcy, he then proceeds to murmur over the staff in a language most often associated with demons and snakes, sibilant, breathy. If it was any less casual, an eavesdropper could be forgiven for thinking this is part of the slow build to an unwilling sacrifice.
definitely not almost a month later
Date: 2020-09-25 05:41 am (UTC)Richard speaks, if one may call it speech — there are things that hiss in dreams, that wind through paths of Fade. Few of them own tongues, but every night, you can listen.
You can grow used to anything.
He listens, and it isn't casual; not really. The tension in his hands draws them up new, knuckles lifted with a degree of care not present about the apple. And something in the staff slithers, reaches for itself.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 07:43 am (UTC)No more than a minute has passed when Richard winds down into a silence that the growth continues beyond, the eerie trickle of cells through a rapid cycle of growth and death just audible beneath the rustle of his breath.
The new wood is a shade or two lighter than the staff around it, not yet having endured the rigors of weather or travel or combat under a mage’s hand, but otherwise seamless. Natural.
He lifts his hands with a hope you weren't expecting something more spectacular glance, and withdraws an easy step, leaving Isaac room to admire or test it as he sees fit.