IMLADRIS

[wildestmods]

IMLADRIS
The group is told to take a week of rest in the Last Homely House as the injured and sick among them heal. The Elves promise them that after the injured are healed, there will be a great Council, with representatives of several peoples in attendance. There Lord Elrond will meet and assist them with speaking with the Green.

Until then, they can wander the peaceful halls of Rivendell, which are filled with travelers from all over the Wilderlands who are making a rest stop while they travel through the lands of Middle-Earth.

There are many halls in Rivendell, but the most notable part of Rivendell is the Hall of Fire, a great feast hall where people can eat, drink, and be merry. Alongside chairs, cushions line the floors in much of the hall. This is the great social hall of Rivendell, where the Elves and their visitors share news of lands far beyond, tell stories, or perform music. The music here almost sounds divine, especially when the Elves sing and play instruments, but they're just as eager to hear songs from other lands, so if any of the squad decide to share, they'll be glad to listen.

Some of the hall's guests are a touch more lively than the others, like a party of dwarves staying at Rivendell. Their stories are a mite more adventurous and if you get in their good graces, they might be willing to share some of the beer they brought with them. Listening to their stories or their talk about their craftmanship is a way to get into their good graces. They have news of the lands beyond.

The Elves love learning, so there are libraries the group is allowed to browse, though they mostly only contain tales of Middle-Earth (for now), though the Elves seem to be collecting what books about other lands they can. These libraries often have viewing stations with telescopes pointing at the sky. Though concerned about what it portents, Elves have been almost delighted by the changing skies, enjoying the challenge of trying to understand how the sky has been knitting itself together with the addition of new worlds.

There are also beautiful balconies here, overlooking the gorge and the waters below, and terraced gardens filled with flowers, bushes, and flowering trees. Their rooms are open to the outdoors and have beds that seem grown into the shape of bed-frames instead of carved. The bathrooms actually have running water. The Elves have figured out how to direct the clean running waters of the gorge in primitive indoor plumbing. Water for hot baths has to be heated first in brass cauldrons over coal braziers before getting dumped into the bath, but are at least located right next to the tubs.

Different flowing slides and fountains can also be used as waterslides for the adventurous, though this will make the Elves tut in disapproval. (X cw: warning for mild nudity from a distance.)

It's time for the squad to rest, eat, and regroup. If a great Council is going to be called involving them, it might be a good idea to make sure they go into it as a united front, because the Green is clearly fine with trying to make decisions for them.

OOC DETAILS
❧ Cursed Weapons/Powers: So they know about how they'll be treated: those with cursed weapons and dark powers will be tolerated by the Elves after entry. While they'll get the same general treatment, the Elves around them may at times seem uncomfortable. Those with cursed weapons will only be distrusted a little, as the weapons themselves will seem more suspicious than their bearers. Those with dark powers or some kind of dark nature (such as being a vampire, Necromancer mage, werewolf, etc.) will be treated with the greatest distrust. But they'll be allowed to wander freely.

❧ Communication: The Elves will make it clear a Council will be called when the injured have time enough to heal and that the group can stay in Rivendell until they're all healed and refreshed. They'll be told they'll be equipped with weapons, clothes, and supplies when they eventually leave. The characters can move freely and characters can stay at the bedside of injured friends.

❧ Injuries: Characters with morgul-blade wounds will be find that any areas or limbs where the shard was will no longer hurt but will be numb at first, with feeling returning over several days. They'll be physically weak for several days at well, winded when walking a short distance. Within a week or two, depending on their constitution and the severity of where the wound was, they'll be able to walk on their own and start to rebuild stamina. Other non-Morgul-blade injuries will heal fully within a few days of treatment.

❧ Clothes: The group will not yet be fully equipped for their travels (that will happen upon leaving) but everyone will at least be given new clothes in Elven styles since theirs are dirty or torn. These are in many different colors but most commonly colors found in nature, like green and blue. Characters without appropriate footwear will also be given light and sturdy boots that will somehow be in their size without their size being asked. They'll also be given basic toiletries like scissors that can be used to cut hair and beards. There are no razors, however, because the Elves don't need to shave so they don't keep them on hand.

❧ Food: Food and drink are plentiful. The food leans towards fruits and veggies but there's enough game for any meat-eaters, cooked well in unknown spices. Wine is abundant, some vintages more inebriating than others. The restorative cordial miruvor is available to help weary travelers get their energy up and revive their strength. It doesn't get characters drunk but helps them revive their strength. It has a light, pleasant floral taste and smell. Beer can also be provided, though that of the traveling dwarves is superior to what Rivendell has to offer.

❧ Weather/Atmosphere: Rivendell is open to the outside air but the temperature is always perfectly temperate and pleasant. The sun shines frequently and is only lost behind shimmering mist. Sunsets and sunrises paint the sky in sections of the valley in every color imaginable. The valley is safe to travel in as long as they don't go back past the Ford of Bruinen or through the gap in the mountains past Rivendell on the valley's opposite end. The air is filled with the smell of green things and delicate perfume of flowers.

❧ Archivist Spells: Around the valley, Archivists can bank up to (4) iterations of a water spells that blasts a brief torrent at an enemy, with the force of a fire hose.

Comments

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan slips under, feeling still that last spark of fear as his conscious thought, the same one there always is, the dread about how stressed and unrested he's going to feel when he wakes up, and then he isn't there at all. Then he's someone else.

The world is fuzzy, hard to grasp, just a little incomplete. But the emotions are clear, the anticipation and thrumming optimism, the curiosity. The youth. It isn't an absence of heaviness, but an absence of psychological injury so damaging and deep that recovery becomes impossible.

[hasapoint]

It feels like being there, in the moment, with just a bit of older Tarma's more distant regard, but later it will be recalled more as a sequence of vivid fragments. The everlasting scent of the towering, whispering pines and the gloom as they shut out the sun. One of her fathers teaching her the long trilling hawk-like cry and the foolish feeling as she held out her arm, and then the exhilaration of a white prairie falcon, larger than any she'd ever seen, appearing to circle overhead and perch on her. The intelligence in its eyes, the delicate way its feet closed around her arm without harming her, the way it very deliberately took their clan-token from her father's hand before it flew away gain.

The shock of recognition and strangeness finally seeing the Cousins appear. They had the eyes and facial features of her own people, they kept their hair long and braided in the same way, and their skin was paler but recognizably similar. But they all had almost the same face and body, she struggled to tell ages, and that hair was white and their clothes were bizarre, multilayered and in patches of all the colors of the dark forest, very unlike the brilliant geometric patterns she and hers wore. And there were more of those birds all around them, hawks and falcons and owls and crows, mostly at least partly white, always huge and too bright-eyed and apparently trusted completely.

That they all ate together while she tried not to lose face by staring or refusing the thick, bittersweet chocolate drink they offered, or the unrecognizable fruits and grains and vegetables. She was approaching adulthood and wanted to take this with proper equanimity. That her father urged her to sing for them and it dried out her throat in sudden terror. Older Tarma, a woman whose throat was scarred in the same attack that killed her clan and can't so much as hum pleasantly, has to pause and explain that her voice had been something special once. She can't bring herself to describe it. It's as well that even Kethry doesn't understand, that she never heard the contrast or saw the pride her family and clan took in her singing.

She had sung eventually, after some coaxing, after the Cousins and her clan representatives started and took the pressure off. She had seen the dancing, seen the trading and the arguments, seen people slip away together and been utterly scandalized when her oldest sister went with three Cousins and came back flushed, with pine needles in her hair. The simultaneous relief and disappointment when the Tayledras covered their white hair and faded back into their forest. She remembers later, spying intently as her sister confided in a friend that the Cousins were as shameless and profligate as kestrels. That's how Tarma tries to remember her, alive and brimming with laughter.

That's where the memory ends, with that sense of looking back on what was and can never be again. Something of it lingers, that presence fading slowly. The memory comes from someone who lost everything and everyone and pared herself down into a single purpose, and tried to die fulfilling it. Kethry stopped her and the love and hope she brought kept her going, brought her to a good life even if it's strange. But she can never return to who she was, that gulf can't be bridged anymore, and she can't let herself wish.

[hallelujahjunction]

Naturally, Dan doesn't even feel the absence of self where he stops and the memory begins, but he does feel what it's like to return to himself, to realize time has passed - like the last time he got a concussion, almost, the absence of consciousness where there should have been a part of him keeping track of time passing. A skip in the record, missing film in the reel.

But he has a memory, now, of being someone else, of their curiosity and trepidation and relief as if it were his own. Dan feels as if he's holding someone else inside him like an ingot in his chest. He recalls how it felt to hold onto people's memories back on the Rig, or rather, the snapshots of how they felt. He always told Bunny it was like tending to a garden, nurturing growing, living things inside him that languished if he didn't think of them often.

His internal garden went barren when he left the Rig. He hopes that that doesn't happen to the memory sitting inside him now, the chain of memories that makes up a life. He stirs a little, exhaling deep as he tightens an arm around the blanket and the sword.

[hasapoint]

The memory has a weight to it. Parts start to evaporate as Need releases it, but slowly, and the heat of it lingers, almost alive in the way a burning coal is. It's an intimate thing to have, not just what someone had seen and heard but what she'd felt and thought, and how she'd felt much later recounting it to her partner and their children. Need dwells for a time in her affection for the woman whose life it came from, with a wry thought of how Tarma, dead now for over a decade, had disliked her. They both serve the same Goddess who does not stop calling on Her faithful after their deaths. Need's been asleep, though. She'd been stirring for decades and only came fully awake again here in the Wilderlands, where she can't reach the spirit paths at all.

Well. In any case, she has the impression that Dan could very easily form a dependency on these memories. Need can imagine why, she's paired with a lot of people from terrible situations in the past. There are many things that shared memories can help with. And a lot of things they can't. It's not good or healthy to try to live only in other people.

Keeping some attention on Dan's sleeping mind, she lets herself feel as if this is her, living body and grimaces internally. Need is very close to the surface, to the material world, right now, between the contact and the lingering memory and Dan's consciousness being out of the way. It would be utterly trivial to take that tiny remaining step and get control, and the thought of just pulling in another deep sigh - not doing anything bad, not even getting up, just indulging in the simple pleasure of controlling 'her own' breath - is tantalizing. But if she starts acting on that kind of impulse and taking control like that for no reason beyond that it satisfies her as a hungry ghost, that's a road that ends poorly.

Instead Need starts a gradual catalogue of injuries and general damages and aberrations. There's a lot she can't do as she is here, but she can still investigate. And it still feels good to be pressed against that life.

[hallelujahjunction]

For his part, Dan's mind was finally disconnected from the aches and pains of living, the circulation throttled by decades of nicotine use, the respiratory and gastric inflammation from tobacco and alcohol, the thin, pockmarked butterfly-net nasal tissues from cocaine and methamphetamine, the lumbar strain from sleeping for years with his spine curled like a question mark in a cramped car, the endless muscle tension. Coming back to it is like returning to cold water, in a way. He suddenly feels it again, not as pain but as awareness. He's aware of how far from ideal his body has become over the years.

"How long was I out?" he murmurs, not opening his eyes yet, when he's back in control, conscious enough to think of himself as existing in his body. Dan rarely conceptualizes his own existence. He spent too much of his youth expecting to be struck dead. Untethering from his body feels like untying a balloon from his wrist, like he's chancing it to float away from him forever.

[hasapoint]

There's nothing she can do. Well, there are a lot of things she can do. She can take stock and work magic that forces a series of changes and corrections, the way she can convince Raistlin's asthmatic body with its total lack of muscle tone to be something that breathes deeply and can run. Magic that wears off soon after she's out of contact, here with her power curtailed. There's some real healing that she could manage but the fact that these aren't new traumas but small, additive troubles racked up over many years... given how curtailed she is, it would take a very long time to make a significant difference, and that wouldn't do anything about what drove him to do this to himself to begin with.

Besides, even though it's a vague sense she does have the feeling that she shouldn't be making alterations, even helpful ones, without the body's owner approving first. She has no such qualms about blocking pain while she's present, though, and letting Dan surface at whatever rate he surfaces at.

When he does and with that question, she gives him a waspish :And a good morning to you, too!: She doesn't mean that level of annoyance and that's readily apparent. :How do you reckon time? Never mind, I have it. About seven hours. Get up and go relieve yourself.: She was blocking that sensation, too, or it would have roused him earlier.

[hallelujahjunction]

Seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. Seven hours without nightmares, tossing and turning, sleep paralysis, waking up in a cold sweat, all without having to straight up drink himself to sleep. Dan sits up, hand to the flat of Need's blade, and rubs his eyes with his other palm. He takes in how different the light is.

He realizes he's been speaking to her out loud again, and switches back to just his thoughts. Thanks. I'll be right back.

When he's taken care of biological necessities, he sits back down on the bed with her, feeling as if he's relearning his body, in a way, a reaquaintance. Like saying a familiar word out loud and realizing what it rhymes with for the first time, a sort of attention pulled to something that's already been known. Thank you for that. I didn't know what to expect, but I feel rested for the first time in a long time.

He cracks his neck. Do you ever need rest?

[hasapoint]

Need's seen people sleep for a lot longer, but Dan didn't actually have to spend half a day or more lost to the world. Also those biological necessities had been getting in the way, some people simply can't sleep twelve hours at a stretch without that being accounted for.

:It's not a big deal for me,: she says gruffly, because it's that or being very smug with a 'you're welcome'. :I've had a lot of bearers with a lot of bad dreams and so on, and they make things harder than they have to be. Sometimes fatigue creates a margin of error you just can't afford.:

Ooh, that's a satisfying feeling. Joint cracking, just one more of the things she doesn't remember she misses until she vicariously experiences it again. :Not in the same way, as a function of the body. I've got to spend a certain amount of magic at all times to be conscious. If I use up my reserve and cut into it, pfft. I call it being asleep, it happens the same whether I'm drained or left with no one who can hear me talk for too long. It doesn't in any sense mean I'm inactive, but I'm pared down to some base impulses.: