crystal

[wroughtamiss]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Deacon and Myrobalan
RECIPIENT: Everyone
WHAT: Confess your weird magic Inquisition
WHEN: Throughout the month
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES:
HERE is the survey sheet if you want to just fill it out that way. HERE are the assignment details. Also if you've got a rifter and/or a non-loyalist mage who'd like to be part of this please PM Deacon's journal and we'll sort it since they'd include one of each to try to get better coverage.
There's the option to self-report via npc if your character wouldn't but you'd like to. If you'd like to report on other characters please check with that player first but I know we got spies and shady folks and that's fun but let's make it fun for everyone!

Greetings Inquisition. In light of the negotiations some of your number participated in there are of course promises to be upheld on the Inquisition's end. Namely concerning magic or abilities those among you called rifters possess not native to Thedas as well as magic outside the Circle.

If you'd complete this survey, you'd have our gratitude. If you will have it, you'll have the Chantry's gratitude too: I needn't have to tell you the importance of not sitting idle, all of you.

We'll be available if you'd rather do this in person but copies of the survey are available in the Chantry Relations office.

As with the medical surveys and the information we’re keeping on the shardbearers, this will be maintained--and transferred to the Chantry--under a cipher. If you’ve further concerns about what might be done with what we’ve gathered, [and Myr’s tone says he very well knows there will be,] I’d ask you bring them to me as the new head of Chantry Relations.

[Not for him this whole formal announcement stuff; or, more likely, he’s had too much on his mind to make one. Nevertheless, a splinter of his usual humor:] I’ll be with the surveys in the office.

Comments

[rathercommon]

[ Kitty's voice is bright and innocent. Because she is a LIAR who is LYING but it seems wise to try to appear helpful here. ]

I can't speak to any abilities I've got myself or anything like that, but there's magic back home where I come from. Would talking about that be useful to you, Brother Deacon, Myrobalan?

[faithlikeaseed]

The Chantry's requirements only pertain to magic here on Thedas-- I s'pose one might argue knowing what could fall out of a rift might come useful, someday.

Personally, though, I'd be very interested.

[rathercommon]

Yeah, I'd be glad to talk it over. I mean, not that I know that much - I'm just a commoner, myself, and magicians kept their secrets from us, 'cause they didn't want us to know. But I know that magic, for our magicians, came from contracting with demons.

[ Let's see how bad she can make magic back home sound. ]

[faithlikeaseed]

[That's enough for some instinctive revulsion; one point to making it sound awful--

Though Myr reins it in before it makes it to his voice.]

And your demons are alike to our own? Liable to use their agreements to take the body of the mage they've treated with?

[rathercommon]

Not - exactly, no. They can't possess people. They've got bodies of their own, rather. They're quite a lot cleverer, too, if what I hear about demons here is true. But they've got powerful magic, enough to tempt magicians into reaching out to them.

[faithlikeaseed]

We've some very cunning ones--but they're not common, thank the Maker.

[Can't possess people, bodies of their own, and they sound like they're not motivated by a hunger for the world as something else. Very different from their homegrown variety-- But probably not any better, if they're helping fuel the dominion she elsewhere describes.]

What do they ask in return? Are your mages--magicians, pardon--magicians at all without a demon helping them?

[rathercommon]

I don't know. That's something that's kept a secret, so - I don't think so. I think they rely totally on demons for their power.

[ A hesitation. ]

As for what they ask in return...Nothing, really. From what I understand. They haven't got any power to stop it. They're slaves, essentially.

[faithlikeaseed]

[He and Merrill had spoken, back in the abbey, of how demons and spirits alike were two sides of the same coin and both saw the world far differently than mortals did. Of how mortals--bred of the world and bound to it--often couldn't think beyond their own frame and so came to grief for it.

And now, here, again--

He doesn't want to feel sympathetic to anything that goes by the name demon but these hardly seem like if they haven't the volition to avoid being bound to service.]

I see, [quiet, thoughtful] --So if one of your magicians appeared on this side of the rift she'd be liable to come to grief in short order, if she could talk to our native demons at all. [He does not sound like he'd be too broken up by that.]

[rathercommon]

Or he.

[ DON'T BLAME WOMEN FOR THIS. ]

But - I suppose so, yeah. Unless whoever it was could bind the demons here, too.

[faithlikeaseed]

Or he, and that's probably the more likely thing, isn't it?

[All men are tainted by Maferath's sin, etc.]

And it's possible they might, aye. Though coming to Thedas changes things--our demons aren't nearly so helpless, though spirits can be bound if it's done properly. [Rifters can be bound, if it's done properly, though they don't know what "properly" might be.]

I don't know what might be worse--if he could and have demons at his command, or if he couldn't and we've an abomination in our laps.

[rathercommon]

[ Well. She has to speak honestly to that. No matter what her emotions say. ]

I expect the latter. Abominations are - enormously destructive, right?

[faithlikeaseed]

Yes.

[and then there's a pause, and then, abruptly private--]

Worse than what came of Alvar and Jang, [for a not-at-all-painfully-recent example of how bad it could get.]

[rathercommon]

Yeah.

[ A slow breath. ]

Magicians are - Well. They're people. So they have people's desires. Fame, money, power. Not - to kill people without reason.

[wroughtamiss]

You're a rifter with an anchor, that alone is a thing the Chantry wish to have an accounting of. I'd hear tell of it as you listened of what history I told you.

[Extend an olive branch. Ready to hit people with if needed. The Deacon special.]

[rathercommon]

All right.

[ She nods, and takes a breath, saying - ]

My world's a lot like Tevinter - power given to mages, and the most power given to the strongest mage. Magic's completely unlimited there, though, and my country's taken over practically the whole world through their magic. A big part of that is because - well - they're able to take advantage of the labor of the people under them.

[wroughtamiss]

An entire world.

[A long exhale. Had there not been the Maker, had there not been Andraste--

Is this what befalls the world now should this Inquisition, abomination that it is with the apostates, the rebels, the deserters, the demons populating the ranks, fail?]

When you say unlimited, in what way am I to take unlimited? Some of it does indeed sound like Tevinter but I think I might have spoken of blood and of lyrium, and spellcasting requires one or both if it's to do something-- something terrible such as the things done in Kirkwall's history. Or indeed what the Magisters once did. Is slavery practiced in your world?

[rathercommon]

Sort of.

[ Well, more than just "sort of," but - Kitty expects that getting into a discussion of the slavery of demons and how they're actually really just as entitled to freedom as any other intelligent beings and how they ought to be liberated from human control wouldn't go over great with Brother Deacon. ]

It's not a direct sort of slavery the way it is in Tevinter. It's more...When you get into debt, you're sent to prisons where you work for no wages. And commoners - non-mages - they're blocked from jobs that pay well, so they're always struggling to keep their head above water. The only jobs that pay all right are in the army, so lots of our young people go into the army, which lets the magicians conquer more and more of the world. People can get arrested and sentenced to hard labor for a lot of things - [ Oh, here's something that'll resonate with Deacon. ] Like preaching religion.

[wroughtamiss]

[Demon-slavery sounds great demons are terrible and should all be gotten rid of because they're just a thing you read about or hear about until one of them possesses some terrified mage child and then innocent people are dying.

A Brother has two roles. To protect them when it comes, to pick up the shattered pieces after. Neither one is easier than the other.]

Tevinter has ways that the common man or woman might sell themselves into slavery to work off what they owe, I'm not an expert, I've never had to go but I do know that they have their tiers of society. And that those without magic are very much the lowest rung, only above the slaves until they become them. I can't imagine their prisons. [Can't imagine that souls ever come out of them, or if they do that they'd be the same soul that entered.] Religion is-- is outlawed?

[He can't speak to the army. He can't. Cyrus without his vows, cracking without a drop of lyrium in him, Templars who should stay with the Chantry as they swore their Oaths but who are ground down by it, the stalwart men and women turned from something hard to something that spills between the fingers.

Easier, the horror of faith hidden away. That he'd have to lock his away. A whole life that might not have been. (Left to the elements or worse. There is always worse than the cold.)]

[rathercommon]

Not exactly. But - [ A shrug. ] People who make trouble get arrested. And religious folks tend to make trouble.

[ And then, the central point - ]

It's what happens when countries like Tevinter go unchecked.

[wroughtamiss]

Each and every Chanter if you have those would have been rounded up then. How broad a definition have they for 'trouble'?

[There are lots of ways to cause trouble. Deacon of course is the classic straightforward way.

Magda and Abigail another.

Yet more Brothers of the scholars path could cause far more havoc than Deacon on a bad day.]

Tevinter is-- Tevinter is a thing complicated and festering that even now is seeing its zealots and ugliest parts take over it again after what happened in Minrathous. I believe there will be an appetite for change within and without after this.

[Probably not an Exalted March, they haven't the bodies.]

[rathercommon]

[ A little quietly: ]

Really broad. I watched a lot of my neighbors disappear for nothing worse than speaking the wrong language at the wrong time.

[ A breath, and she tries to pull her thoughts out of London and back into Thedas. ]

But - what sort of change do you think there'll be?

[wroughtamiss]

Have you had a chance to read at all on the Orlesian occupation of Ferelden?

[Not quite the same but it hadn't been a great time for those involved. It's close in some respects where they'd been determined to seize a nation, to take it, and it's a far more recent account.]

Slavery will be brought into the light: we have voices here who will not stand for it and where the Inquisition goes, change follows. I imagine that there will be those who will bring it to the attention of the Mothers, the Grand Clerics, perhaps even our next Divine. The people of Tevinter who have found themselves ground beneath the oppressive mage rule, people who might at last find themselves in a position to rise up too. To seek change. If Tevinter is in tumult then this is the time for them to rid themselves of the Magisters at long last, to do away with a system that has only ground them down.

[rathercommon]

A little bit. Only that I know that it happened, and that it lasted for about fifty years or so, and only ended a few decades ago. And that there's still a lot of hatred between Fereldens and Orlesians because of it. The Orlesians - they're sort of people who try to build empires, aren't they?

[ But - ]

But I definitely agree. The people of Tevinter - the slaves, and the people without magic - they mustn't be ground down just because the mages are more powerful than they are. That's not right. They ought to have a say in how they're ruled.

[wroughtamiss]

Orlais isn't happy if it isn't at war, it's probably half of why it was at war with itself. They have their curious politics that they call a game despite all that it might destroy or ruin but no, only a game, The Game to them as if there aren't still people dying for want of food when they want their borders back from Nevarra.

[Fuck Celene. Fuck Gaspard. Fuck their roots twined about the Chantry. That it's The Chantry vs the Chantry because of Orlais.]

You might find the mages of the Inquisition will put themselves and their fellow mages above all others. After all, no one will ever have had it so terribly as a mage. It's a powerful image for them. The mage in shackles. As if people have nothing to fear from a mage in the first place.

[Deacon is absolutely not above stirring that pot.]

[limier]

[ seen @ 5:22 PM ]