genessia | Action | Bay and Exterior

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Action | Bay and Exterior

[Disorientation was not unknown to Fenris. He’d experienced it several times in his past, but never quite in such a way. Uncertain what the pamphlet suggested aside from images of the device included in the box, he grumbled and shoved the pamphlet, the red papers included, along with the phone, into a pouch at his waist and strode through the water without hesitation. He’d faced demons and worse before, and while he was alone, he certainly wasn’t going to allow the weakness of fear show, and the spiked armor and large sword lashed to his back went a long way to help the image along.

When he approached the stand on which Weiss’ Transmission played, he glared at it but did not balk. Magic, then. Of course. He’d never heard of this Genessia, but at least the necklace was familiar. So, their kidnappers have pretty chains, then. It didn’t change what they were and he grimaced at the thought. This was all a grand deception, to be sure, even for a former slave as valuable as himself, so he had no reason to doubt the image witch’s integrity.

Still, as much as it pained him to do so, he needed more information than her repeating message supplied. Surely he wasn’t alone in this place, for this witch would not have seen fit to spend the energy to place this message here for only his benefit, and so he took up a spot leaning against the side of the map booth and would address anyone who happened past.]

You, there. I...require assistance, if you've the mind.

[He’ll not force anyone, but manners aren’t exactly his forte.]

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With her arms still folded, Alleyana gave another shrug. "We're stuck on a world even weirder than Thedas, and that's honestly saying something. At least fighting demons makes sense; not much else here does."

As for Merrill...

"I don't know, my being the Inquisitor probably had something to do with her tact on the subject. You're from an earlier time than I am, so I know that doesn't make much sense, but the Inquisition is basically what the Templars -- and Seekers -- started out as. We were reinstated when the Veil got ripped open and Thedas got flooded with demons."

"The...Veil was ripped open?" Or would be, but how, why? What did that mean? He shook his head, being unable to conceive of something that could do such a thing.

"How?" He looked around, trying to get a bearing on the situation. How the Veil may or may not be opened at some unknown point in the future didn't matter. "We can discuss that later." Which he surprised himself by saying. Apparently, talking with her later was on the table.

"I could sum it up pretty well, being the one who had to fix it... twice," Alleyana unfolded her arms and gestured vaguely up at the sky, even though it was a different sky and on a different world. "But... you're dealing with a lot right now, right."

On a whole new world, and all that. Whelp.

"Where's your phone? The device, I can show you how to use the network without needing to read or write."

He nodded, reaching into the pouch at his belt to retrieve the 'phone' and offered it to her. "Yes, this...thing. The future will wait for us, as it does."

He looked down at the device, then back to her eyes. "You called this a phone?"

"That's what everyone else calls it, so that's what I call it," Alleyana confirmed, gingerly taking the phone with her artificial hand -- visibly no different than the real one, of course, with all the armor involved. She stepped beside the other elf and held the phone so he could see the screen, turning it on.

"Basically, it works by touch. Gotta be careful about gauntlet fingertips if you don't want to scratch the hell out of it."

Holding it in her fake hand, her remaining hand was free to demonstrate how to access the network, the Inquisitor playing someone's video and someone else's voice post. She showed him where to tap to make either kind of post or reply, himself, and then moved to the actual phone functions.

After a moment of consideration, Alley added herself to his contacts in case he needed help later, adding a badly-taken picture to the entry to make it easier to tell who it was without reading.

"Fair enough." If a tree was a tree because everyone agreed on the word, the same should be true about a phone. She had his rapt attention as she explained the function of the device, and he could plainly see the usefulness of the item. It would allow for convenient communication across distances, and shorten response times should something arise.

After she finished, he nodded his thanks. "You are most kind. I thank you."

Alleyana offered the phone back, eyeing him again. Finally... "Now that I know we're both from Thedas; what's with the markings? I know that's not the usual vallaslin ink. Although some of it looks a bit like June," she tapped herself on the throat meaningfully, "and some a bit like Elgar'nan," and another tap, this one on her opposite bicep.

Elgar'nan's thorns no longer curled across her face in pale ink, but she hadn't lost her knowledge of those markings along with them.

He clenches his jaw, swallowing back the angry retort that sprang to the forefront of his mind. He didn't sense any hostility in her tone, only curiosity.

"I doubt they have any connection to the Dalish." He takes a breath before beginning. "My first memory is their application. The...pain it caused. They aren't ink. They're lyrium."

He met her eyes. "I have no memory of my life before them, but afterward, I was a Tevinter Magister's bodyguard, his 'little wolf'. He used me to intimidate his rivals. They grant me...abilities."

Lyrium?! Alleyana's eyes widened, and she couldn't help the reflexive half step back and aborted jerk of her arm toward her mace, as though preparing for a fight. It wasn't red lyrium; not corrupted, or he'd have been a maddened creature and this meeting would have gone very differently, just as it had for all the red templars she'd faced.

Her posture relaxed again. It wasn't red lyrium.

"I..." wait, a Magister had done this? "It wasn't Corypheus, was it?"

Edited 2017-09-24 09:44 (UTC)

Strange reaction, but the tested warrior only tensed, ready to strike. He relaxed on when she did.

"I know of no Corypheus." He shook his head. "No, his name is Danarius."

"In my time, the templar order had red lyrium forced on them. It grew out of their bodies and corrupted their minds," Alleyana's gaze dropped to Fenris' markings for a moment, the expression on her battered face just a little horrified. "I've never met someone with the regular stuff in them. Even the Sha-Brytol are only sealed in armor infused with it, it's not... in their skin. That we know of."

"Yes, they're singular and a novelty." It might have even been an amusing response if it hadn't been dripping with such venom. "Red lyrium...?" That was an idea beyond troubling, but he shook his head. "I can assure you I command my own mind."

Still horrified, but Alley reined in her reaction and inclined her head for a moment. "I'm sorry, Fenris."

Done to him by a Magister who he'd then played guard to -- there was little doubt he'd been a slave, then. Alleyana didn't need him to state it plainly to get the gist. Still, he should be told--

"The vallaslin of the Dalish started off as slave markings put on us by the Evanuris in ancient times. I doubt it's a coincidence your markings look like a mix of two of them."

No doubt an attempt at making an original pattern out of the old. It made her wonder just what sort of records this Danarius had had access to. Was there proof of the vallaslin's ancient meaning, tucked away somewhere in Tevinter where the southern Chantry hadn't been able to find and destroy it? If so, what else from ancient times was hidden away up there? The ancient Tevinters had taken so much...

Something useful against Solas' plans, perhaps?

"I don't really care what his point had been." His tone could have been craving, but it wasn't. He had no issue with this strange elven woman who'd, for all appearances, experienced her share of strife.

He shook his head, his expression softening. "You owe me no apology, unless you tipped Danarius off to these markings." It was a joke, but far from expertly delivered.

Edited 2017-09-26 21:14 (UTC)

"Hardly, but it makes me wonder where he did learn about them, and their original meaning. And more importantly; what else of ours may be hidden away up there in Tevinter. The vallaslin being slave markings is information lost to the millennia."

Alleyana eyed him for a moment, then made a joke-but-not-really-a-joke of her own, her tone as dry as could be. "I get the feeling you won't mind if I extract what I want to know from him forcibly. Even Magisters have nerve centers under their kneecaps."

W h e l p. Look, she highly doubted someone experimenting on slaves was someone she'd regret considering collateral in the fight against Solas. Dorian was sadly the exception up there in Tevinter, not the rule.

A slight smirk curled Fenris' lips at her response. She was welcome to extract whatever information she wanted, certainly, so long as he was allowed to watch.

"They have nerve centers in many places, and some of us can find them." He raised a hand, it becoming shimmery, as though it were there but not, all at once. "These markings aren't without their merit, and I'd like nothing more than to turn them upon him."

Alley tilted her head slightly to one side, staring at Fenris' ghostly hand with plenty of curiosity. The Inquisitor had seen more weird shit from Thedas than most, but that didn't mean she'd seen everything!

"That's because of the lyrium? It looks..." she blinked, taking in the insinuation that he'd find nerve centers in interesting places as a result of this trick. "...Ah. It's not solid, when you don't want it to be?"

With a motion, the glowing receded and his arm was solid again.

"That's correct." He continued with a nod. "These markings of mine run from head to toe." The implication being none of him is corporeal if he chooses it.

"So, you can walk through walls," Alleyana considered this information, then remarked dryly, "you know, one of my people used to be able to teleport around... or I think he could, anyway," hard to tell when Cole had made everyone forget most of what he did, at the time. "Made him a pretty good assassin."

"In a manner of speaking, yes. I can...shift, become less likely to be seen. It's...difficult to explain." And he didn't really feel like demonstrating at the moment.

He frowned at her explanation. "What sort of magic is that?" It isn't as though he's familiar with magic, but he knows what it isn't capable of, at least he's fairly certain he does.

"I'm not sure if he actually teleported, or if everyone just forgot where he was," Alley mused, "honestly, one's as likely as the next. Cole is a spirit, one possessing no one's body but his own. When he became more human, to be safe against blood magic binding, he lost some of those stranger abilities; became less of a part of the Fade and more... permanent. Less malleable in general, I suppose."

He blinked, confused clearly. He'd never heard of such a thing, but if Alleyana's expression was anything like his own, neither had she. "A spirit with its own body? I...don't understand. And no mage did this?"

Honestly, at a certain point Alleyana had reached full saturation on the strange people and things she'd encountered on Thedas. Cole didn't seem all that odd anymore, not after all the rest.

"No mage did it, he came across on his own. A spirit of Compassion, he was trying to comfort someone as they died and ended up manifesting entirely. Even he doesn't know how it happened, and apparently he spent the first year or two not even remembering he was a spirit. He thought he was the ghost of the boy who'd died."

The Ghost of the Spire.

"We know lyrium still has strong attachments to both sides of the Veil; if it's letting you imitate the reality on the other side, temporarily going incorporeal suddenly doesn't sound that weird, does it? The Fade's quite the bizarre place. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if you could walk up walls and across ceilings, for that matter."

Fenris had seen his share of strange occurrences, many of which he couldn't explain. It wasn't, of course, for always for lack of attempt, though. He simply never tried. He had little interest in the crossing of the veil, magical or mundane, and even less in the profane rituals the Magisters most likely used to accomplish it. It made sense in a vague sort of way that the spirit had come across and thought itself a ghost, but he wasn't familiar enough with the nature of spirits to assume much more than that.

"True. It's only something I've never heard of." He takes a breath. "I'm not exceptionally experienced with the Fade, nor have I tried to be."

"I wasn't either, but shit happens," Alleyana would have left it at that, but, considering Fenris' markings she continued with an attempt at some minor commiseration, "I ended up with a chunk of the power that made the Veil embedded in my left palm for a few years. It let me repair the rifts and seal the breach twice. Between that, and somehow ending up physically walking around in the Fade a few times, I had to learn."

It hadn't been done to her by some nasty Tevinter slaver, no, but magic had still been shoved under her skin and into her veins by some fuck-ass mage's experimentation with ancient Elvhen power.

And they were both warriors, to boot. Not exactly built for magic, elven heritage aside.

Edited 2017-10-18 21:03 (UTC)

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