crystal;

[foxsays]

FORM: Sending crystal
SENDER: Araceli Bonaventura
RECIPIENT: Everyone
WHAT: Offering advanced parkour lessons and trying to organise a shindig
WHEN: Now
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: Threadjacking encouraged. A few notices have been left around the Gallows to sign-up for lessons.

Inquisition, now that we're settled in Kirkwall I come to you with two very exciting propositions. As some of you know, I taught how to climb and run the walls and battlements of Skyhold, how to fall from such heights safely but alas this was not as it was at home when Skyhold was so contained. But here we are in Kirkwall! I can truly teach you how to leap from building to building if your desire and to dive into the waters from buildings and from the rigging of a ship. Of course, we start small so as not to injure your good self but if that prospect sounds intriguing, please come find me. I am Araceli Bonaventura, at your service. I'm either working at the Gallows or by the docks or you might happen to look up.

The second is a thing to celebrate and I could say that I do it as leader of the naval projects but truly? I do it as someone who loves cooking and seafood, to finally be back by the water after so long removed from it. Tell me, Inquisition, what are your favourite seafood dishes? Your favourite meals from Antiva or Rivain or places such as that? Because I thought it might be an idea to have a cookout by the waves towards the end of the month, say, the twenty-second? Everyone is welcome if they are a fan of good food and good times among friends.

[Also it's her birthday but since they don't really do birthdays that way back home, what better thing to do than have a fun time with people that have all certainly earned it?]

Comments

[foxsays]

Orlais charges a fortune for their seasonings and spices. [Orlais also can't cook itself out of a wet paper bag but she's not going to be rude.] They have those here too? I didn't know if other places would use all the parts of a fish like that. As for my skills? I was a bold child who wouldn't sit still and we don't have streets as such as there are in Thedas. Rooftops are an easier way to get about.

Especially in my line of work.

[Wren she is super open about her work. Or the thief part. It's the legit prestige guardwork she's told like four people about in all her time in Thedas.]

[limier]

[ Smoothly, ]

There are many more Orlesians than one generally hears from,

[ That she’s one of the ones who gets heard from, well. There’s being rich enough to eat regularly, and then there’s being rich enough to eat wastefully. Butcher or Chantry, neither smiles on that. ]

But I imagine the basics might be adapted for northern ingredients. Difficult to go wrong with some good stock.

[ Time to stan for bouillabaisse, you called??

Line of work, so definitely illegal shit, but apparently by a Rifter — potentially in service to the Inquisition — which all makes it a terribly grey area and probably not her problem either way. Very well. ]

How do the less agile make their way about such cities?

[foxsays]

The one trip I took to Halamshiral, I enjoyed more than Val Royeaux.

[Scandalous perhaps but does anyone truly enjoy being watched all the time and biting their tongue? Their friends not being allowed in all the same shops without them? Being mistaken for their servant and glared at for daring to touch the same garments?]

I'll make the kitchens my first stop to see what they can tell me, I know what I'd use but everything is closer to Antivan or Rivaini, perhaps you'd be willing to assist if I can't find what I'm looking for, señora...?

[Skills that haven't gone to waste here being as good an example as she could hope to be, choosing to be a bard to try to maximise that effect.]

Slowly, a young woman has little patience for that but we have some streets and many, many bridges. Though not all the bridges stay in the same place so you might need to wait until a person is done with one where it is and tosses it back over to tie again. Or you can take boats and barges on the waterways but again, easier to dance over the mooring posts and laugh at everyone shouting at you.

[limier]

I admit little taste for its recent architectural changes.

[ chiefly: being burned the fuck down. a dozen cooking jokes leap to mind, each in worse taste than the last, sick as vomit on the back of her tongue. all of them read long after the fact, passing witticisms in cheap commentary tracts; mass-printed for competitive shock, each one looking to outdo the last. to rattle a nation already reeling from simultaneous disasters.

but this whole subject is dangerous ground, however the aristocracy have of late embraced it for entertainment. if her opinions and araceli's apparently align in this regard, it's still nothing that she may speak of quite so publicly as a rifter might.

how much easier to front a cause without a world's worth of baggage attached. ]

It has been some years since I cooked more than camp fare,

[ and better to pass that off when possible, lead men raised by the chantry and they'll always be looking to a woman to coddle their needs. some skills are better taught through blunt exercise; she'll suffer through months of ashy rabbit stew to know the idiots won't starve left to their own devices. ]

But I should be happy to assist in whatever manner I might — and to hear tell of this home of yours, if you are amenable. I have never so heard of a floating city.

[foxsays]

All the better to give my coin then to those that have need of it.

[Again the awkwardness of when parts of the alienage are a little closer to the places you spent most of your time in as a girl (as if she isn't still a girl) than where most people think she should be or want her to go. At least at home they addressed it better. At least she was working towards something better for people like her where she could see the results instead of this where there's a glimmer but who knows what that might be. A promise is only a promise and words only settle so much in the end.

When all is said and done, will it be different? Will it be changed? Will she have worked herself to the bone and have felt like she's made some grand difference? They'll all tell themselves that so they might sleep easier but aha, those are only words in the smallest of hours where they seem so much larger to lay a head heavily upon the pillow.]

Cooking is sadly my chief and only talent in the camps unless we count getting under the feet of people who know what they're doing. [But how better to say someone cares and appreciates her companions? You find a way to keep to the things that matter most to you and deprived of her own kitchen until now it was the easiest thing, even if it was sometimes under the guise of complaining about their own cooking, waving everyone else away. Happy and warm at least until it was done.]

Oh it doesn't float. Islands, archipelagos, built over the remains of when we once lived below the waves as we pleased. [You know, nice and casual, caring not a bit about Arlathan and sinking.] I'm always happy to talk about my home.

[limier]

Quite.

[ where one finds a high, there's always a low; the scant little she's seen of val royeaux's alienage, she wonders that it might ever be considered less worthy than halamshiral. if it still owns buildings, they don't stand for any lesser purpose, don't house any fewer souls. a teeming mass of life, lost in the shadow of a grand purpose.

the chantry casts it — her role, as so many others', to make puppets of the shape. a finer picture: something high for the low to look to, while the high stare at glimmering reflections of their own wealth. it does good. she believes that. it will never do enough. ]

None of them know what they are doing, unless they know to thank the chef. [ but surely, she misheard that, because below the waves what the fuck ] An — ah — an old place, is it?

please enjoy this girl giving you some lovecraft-lite wren

[foxsays]

[You get a sore neck staring up. Hurts more than looking down because Araceli can stand up there with all of them in the fine armour, the suits, the gowns, and if she does get aches and pains, the doctor is better and she has more coin to pay him or her with.

Doesn't have to go stealing it out of a rich person's house where they'll set the guards on her, doesn't have to stitch herself up if she doesn't quite do as good a job of it too caught up in the rush of it all. Rotgut for all a person claims otherwise isn't a patch on the real deal when it comes to killing the pain for someone to quietly stitch up your wounds to keep the infection out.]

A very long time ago, my people lived above and below the water but could only travel as far as a person could row and as the wind would fill a sail, and there was little life to be found because you need the tide to churn up a great deal of goodness from below. So when the waves were made as was the moon [nice and casual, how about we don't mention that there was day and complete desolate darkness Araceli] the making of them sundered the surface from what there was, so now we live on land. Life began there. Life ends there. We didn't need to write things down then so, I don't know just how old but older than islands.

a whole freakin month later sorry dude

[limier]

[ what ]

Ships beneath the sea?

[ surely this is, you know, a story — like those the elves hew to, like those that build and bloom within the chantry's own teachings. explanations for things that elude explanation: times gone forgotten, memories blurred by the passage of years.

surely she's not actually talking about breathing underwater ]

It sounds beautiful. But our present troubles aside, I would rather miss the sky.

[ she'd never seen so much of it, from such height, before the spire. you don't stare up within a tower, not unless you look to empty rock. but to look down upon the city, upon air,

this a world full of caves and dark places, the crushing depths of the earth. sometimes there's comfort in that, a peculiar rightness — an imperceptible presence at the edge of it all, drawing deep, ever deeper, straight to the bottom of a well.

sometimes there's comfort in that. but wells are where you go to drown. (how could you ever walk there without drowning?) ]

pffft never apologise you're good

[foxsays]

Not the ships, how would they sail. The buildings. Imagine - forgive me, this is clumsier over the sending crystals, if you ever wish a better explanation I am in the Gallows often to do the work that must be done behind a desk - how part of a dock is supported below the water.

That was us. Our homes. Our world. Our lives. We see them now through the glass floors or panels of buildings, and others built deeper down so we might walk down, down, down the stairs to observe the sea life not observed so easily other ways.

[The things you miss and it's the quiet and the darkness, the lamps you might light there unless the fish make their own lights and go floating by, a squid trailing long arms and tentacles in the deep. Thedas has ruins but time eats at them. They pillage them. At least they live on top of them and love them. Keep them close to their hearts as the new tides piled sand atop to start creating islands.

Instead of blue bloods of course, there are the most mertouched nobility; the ones who did have gills once upon a time. She looked for them on Leandra once.]

We have the sea and sky, the tidemaker is in the sky, in her seafoam cushion that is the moon, and all the stars the jellyfish swept from the depths that made lights of their own up there. On a still dark night far out at sea, you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

[And that's part of why she'll never be afraid to be given to the sea when she dies.]