therookery | Crystals or Action, choose your own adventure

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Crystals or Action, choose your own adventure | Open

FORM: Sending crystal plus (see notes).
SENDER: Cosima
RECIPIENT: Rifters (others opt-in)
NOTES: Catch-all for threads about amputation (so content warning for that being discussed, though I don't expect anything too bloody). Happy to match prose or brackets, as ever. See further notes under the cut.

Cosima wouldn't flatter herself she knows everyone in Riftwatch well, but she's been here a long time and she's been leading a division for a respectable bit of that now. She has names and faces for everyone, and at least a vibe on most of the people she doesn't know well. That makes this slightly easier, but only slightly.

The entire point of seeking people out one-on-one is that making an official announcement will give the discussion she wants to have too much official weight. But that does mean tracking everyone down individually (though at least Research members who aren't in the field will come to her for their normal check-ins, if nothing else). Still. She's put this off too long, and it's not going to get any simpler if she continues to procrastinate.

If she hasn't gotten to you yet, you may notice her walking through the Gallows with a bit of extra purpose. Nothing seems to be immediately on fire, at least.

[OOC: Choose your own adventure with this very un-formatted flow chart:

1.) RIFTERS who want a thread: Good news, Cosima is tracking down every one of you to talk about amputation and anchor shards! She'd lean in person, but OOCly if you'd rather a network thread, we can just handwave that your character is out on an assignment and do it by sending crystal instead.

2.) RIFTERS who don't want a thread right now: You can assume Cosima tracked you down (unless you took truly extraordinary measures to avoid her). We can either handwave or talk OOCly about it, as you like.

3.) NATIVES with anchor shards: If you want to chat too, Cosima's not hunting you down but wouldn't avoid a conversation if you clocked what she's up to and want one.

4.) NATIVES without anchor shards: Look, if you want to talk about anchor shards for some reason, hmu. (Otherwise her inbox is open.)

For all of the above, just jump in if you'd like. If you'd like me to write a more customized starter, reach out on plurk or discord and I'll take care of you.]

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Abby is one of the ones walked toward with purpose — on this afternoon, out in the courtyard, she's got a good paperback cracked open, held between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. The other hand is dedicated to running idly over the flank of her dozy mabari who is turning inward and over onto his back by careful degrees to ensure he'll end up with a belly rub until Cosima's smell alerts him.

Abby, feeling his leg go suddenly taught underneath her hand, looks up.

Of course she knows Cosima, has spoken to her many times, but wouldn't consider herself a point of call for the Provost and Cosima, striding toward her across the courtyard, has a faint sense of urgency about her. It makes Abby sit up out of her slouch against the bench seat, thumb marking her spot in the book.

"Hey."

Hilariously, Wags is mimicking her, alert and ears pricked. "You good?"

"Grading on the standard Riftwatch bell curve, doing great." Cosima spares a semi-involuntary smile for Wags before looking back to Abby. "I hate to interrupt your downtime, but I wanted a word if you have a minute?"

Abby's right that they're friendly, but hardly close, and their work tends to have very little overlap. There's a finite number of topics that they might have to discuss.

Abby nods.

Wags has to lose his spot on the bench to make room for Cosima to sit; with no offence taken he's off across the courtyard the moment Abby tells him down, stretching into the sun.

Abby dog-ears the corner of her page tinily, sets the whole book aside. "What's up?"

She sits, stretching her legs out in front of her and crossing them casually at the ankle. "Yeah. So. Since the Gallows is the smallest town possible, I assume you heard about Ness's arm." It's not quite a question, but she leaves a moment for the unlikely possibility Abby hasn't heard about it.

Abby frowns. "I changed the bandages on Ness's arm." When Ness was part of her typical infirmary rotation, a few times here and there.

But Cosima didn't come here to tell her about that, surely.

"Right." She exhales, idly running her thumb along the back of one of her rings. "So. Back when Wysteria first shared her research, she and I had a conversation about it. But I felt like ... being a division head, being the head of research, if I said anything about it it might have more weight than just my opinion. But now I think I might have corrected too far the other way."

Direct seems best, so she goes on. "I have no plans to amputate my arm unless something wildly changes. I have reasons that I can discuss if you want them, but that's secondary to the fact that my first concern, always, is bodily autonomy. I just want to make sure anyone who's thinking about getting rid of their anchor shard has all the information before they make that call."

"Fuck," Abby says, a little louder than she means to the moment Wysteria's name is mentioned — Cosima doesn't need to explain any further than that, it brings everything immediately into sharp and nauseating focus. She did it on purpose. What the hell.

Her and Wysteria's fight was very much a public thing; her voice is clipped, annoyed. "I'm not amputating my arm."

How many times does she have to say it, exactly?

Cosima sits up, both feet on the ground now. She hadn't — entirely — meant to blow up Ness's spot. On the other hand, she hadn't liked the bookcase plan in the first place and the close shave with infection after surgery made her inclined to think she should have put her foot down in the first place. So. No more "accidents."

"Cool," she replies to Abby's firm declaration about her own arm. "Like I said, me neither. But I also wanted to make it clear to anyone who needed it that I'm, a, available for questions and, b, ready to go to bat for their choice. Seems like you're good, though." She's not best pleased she accidentally annoyed Abby, but on the other hand it was probably not realistic to expect every conversation to be easy.

Abby grunts. She knows, of course, that Cosima hasn't got anything to do with Wysteria or Ness choosing to hack their own arms off for whatever reason. She's brought up bodily autonomy like three times now, it's not like she's putting Abby on a list or anything. Calm down.

A moment of broody silence. She toes at something on the ground and eventually says, "Why'd she lie about it?"

Like, what's the point? None of them stopped Wysteria from doing it.

"She didn't want to start a trend." It was a little more complex, possibly, but that's the heart of it. "In addition to the personal risks of amputation, we don't know of any other way to close rifts. If everyone got rid of their anchor shards, we could watch the rifts all day, but we couldn't close them. She thought staging the accident would keep it from being a public vote in favor. I don't."

Cosima sighs, a small shake of the head. "I don't blame someone for being scared of death; it's pretty natural. And she was trying to be thoughtful. I'm not putting her on blast. But I don't think the fiction is serving us. Us rifters or us Riftwatch."

It's getting increasingly harder to not shoot the messenger. Abby says, "She thought we'd all want to amputate our arms?" with what is perhaps an unfair level of scathing disbelief. This scenario Ness was imagining doesn't exist — and where did she get the public vote thing from, anyway?? As if anybody here would have the right to vote against her wanting to do something with the shard she didn't even ask for.

... These are all questions that would be better posited to Ness, obviously. Abby rolls her eyes.

She says, "I'm not mad at you." To be clear. "This whole thing is fucked up. I don't get it."

"I know Wysteria meant to help, but I do think ... it's a well-researched theory, but it's a theory. If people know that and decide it's worth the risk, it's their arm. But that said, I do think she wildly overestimated the risk of people deciding to follow suit. Wysteria already did it, for one thing."

Yes, it had been a while and Wysteria wasn't present in Kirkwall. But even so, anyone interested in the topic wouldn't find it hard to come across the report. And Wysteria had been actively asking people (or at least Cosima) to consider it while she was still in the Gallows. On which note:

"If anyone tries to pressure you, I have no doubt you can handle it. But I'm happy to pull rank if you need me to. It's your arm."

"She amputated because she didn't want to go back to where she came from. Right?" It's not entirely a shot in the dark. After her fight with Wysteria Benedict came to her in the dining hall to say she should reconsider. He didn't want to lose her. But, "What about Gigi? She's from here." A native and a shardbearer both, not at all going to disappear whether you take the shard away or not — and, like Cosima said, it's just a theory that the shard is connected to leaving, anyway.

She sighs and rubs the back of her neck. She wants to talk to Clarisse.

"Thanks," is grumbly. "Sorry I snapped at you." It's annoying, that's all. That she changed her bandages and Ness lied to her face because she thought Abby might hop on some 'trend' — it's a misunderstanding of who she is and where she came here from.

There's a split second that Abby may or may not register as who? before Cosima catches up to who that must mean. (She's never been close enough to Gwenaëlle to hear, much less use, the nickname, but the organization isn't so large that it's not clear once she has a second to think it through.)

"No. I mean thanks for the apology, but I get it. And you have a point, about native shardbearers." A beat. "Everyone's got their own right to choose. But it's still a little bit ... I mean, it happened to me. Vanishing. And I don't mind talking about it, but it seems like this big thing no one wants to look at directly, sometimes."

"It did?"

She didn't know this before or she might have asked Cosima about it earlier. It's almost hard to know where to begin with this new information and then she says, "You didn't know you were going to vanish," which is not a question at all.

If Ellie had known she would have said something to, at the very least, Clarisse, but this is still something that Abby wants — needs — to know for certain.

"No, definitely not. I went to bed one night and, I gather, I was gone the next morning." Her voice is a little sofer, but she doesn't seem reluctant to answer. "I would have ... there are some things I would have said to people, if I knew I was going. But nothing felt unusual that day."

Abby relaxes a little. She exhales, "Yeah."

She thought so. Hoped so. It's not entirely reassuring — this means that, eventually, she will disappear without any warning and upend the lives of the people around her — but it in a way it removes the culpability from it. It won't be her fault when it happens. (This of course, now has to go both ways: it was not Ellie's fault that she left either, even though when she's thinking about it, she sometimes likes to blame Ellie just to make herself feel better.)

"You remembered everything when you came back, right? What was it like?"

"It was fucking weird," was frank. "Because it wasn't only that I remembered everything from here, though I did. I also had new memories from home. A bit less than a year's worth, but I also remembered not remembering Thedas, which was a little bit disorienting. It felt like less time had passed for me than had passed here, which would have been weird on its own. But it..."

Cosima exhales. "It's why I really do believe we're our own people, here in Thedas. Like, we're people who come to be in a unique way, for sure, but I think there's a Cosima who never left Earth, and I got a new batch of her memories when I came back with my own. We used to be functionally the same person, but we're not anymore." A beat, then she adds: "I can't prove that, it's a theory; it's possible I physically went back and forth, and just couldn't access my Thedas memories while I was there. But it seems less likely to me. Personally." She realizes that's not incredibly comforting, probably.

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