FLIGHT TO THE FORD ※ RIVENDELL ※ LOG 1

[wildermods]

FLIGHT TO THE FORD
OOC POST
The foot paths are thin but seem to lead somewhere. Not far ahead, there is the sound of rushing water.

Someone is following them in the woods. They move with perfect quiet. If leaves are rustled, at most they sound like they're only shifting in the breeze. They keep circling around them, scouting to the front of them, scouting behind them.

They notice the great evil approaching from behind. Scaring away the horses of the Nazgul slowed them down, made it so they could safely rest in the city, so they could reach it without a fight, and so the magic encircling it went unchallenged by their evil. But they weren't going to stay behind forever. As they close in, the figure that has also been stalking them eventually reveals themselves.

A woman suddenly appears before them, leaping into the path ahead with a swiftness that is inhuman. She is shrouded in a silken cloak of light green. A sword is at her belt in an intricate silver sheathe. She calls out to them with a calm voice that rings clear like a bell.

"Hearken, weary travelers! Your coming was forespoke to my people and my kindred and I feared that you were in danger upon the road. I come offering refuge and succor."

She draws away her hood and reveals pointed ears and braids of black hair drawn up into silver net of gems. Her clear face is flawless and smooth, as if carved from the purest marble. The light of the stars burns in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night. Her bearing is that of a queen, fair and just and fierce and kind. Even among her kind, who are known for their beauty, she is counted among the most beautiful.

Her father is displeased with her willingness to travel forth into danger, but after the death of her mother, she too was trained to fight just like her brothers. In the strange new world that has been thrust upon them, Arwen Evenstar is no longer content with wiling away her days with needlework and song. There is too much that has changed in the world, too much that must be protected, and her long neglected skills with sword and bow have already been put to good use, sharpened by the many dangers of the Wilderlands.

"I can tell that some of you carry grievous injuries but you must hasten. The Servants of Sauron approach! The house of my father lies just beyond the swift waters before us. Once we pass over the ford your enemies can no longer pursue you."

Not far behind them there is suddenly an inhuman screech that makes the bright daylight seem as perilous as the darkest night.

Arwen unsheathes her sword and starts to run, leading them, moving swiftly but taking care to not outpace them entirely. There is no time for questions or explanations.

"Fly!" she calls out as she runs. "The enemy is upon us! Fly, ere all is lost!"

The waters of the ford are only knee deep when they cross it and the moment the last of them reaches the other side, the Nazgul appear on the opposite bank and then start crossing the waters, moving through them with mechanical ease.

Arwen raises her sword, glinting in the sun, and cries out:

Nîn o Chithaeglir
lasto beth daer;
Rimmo nîn Bruinen
dan in Ulaer!

In a great crush of frothing white, flood waters rush forth, and it seems as if the waves comes in the shape of prancing horses. The waters crash into the Nazgul right as they get close to the other side of the ford. They screech as they go under and get swept away.

She resheathes her sword.

"This way."


As they walk, the path descends into a gorge filled with warm sun and cool mists. The walls of the gorge are streaked with waterfalls pouring over the edges and the air is filled with the gentle sound of many rushing waters. Some of the streams thread through arches under the Last Homely House. The Elven settlement is spread over garden-covered terraces, with open buildings that mingle indoors and outdoors. The Art Nouveau style architecture is intricate, every bit of the buildings looking like a masterwork. A single stone bridge is their entrance to Rivendell.

Many Elves rush out as soon as they arrive in the first courtyard. Their clothes are made of fine fabrics, most of them colors found in nature, and some of them have silver ornaments in their hair. All of them are tall, slender, graceful and beautiful, almost exuding an aura of goodness, and the light of the stars and the moon is in their eyes. Their ageless faces are filled with genuine worry. Though the Elves are sometimes an aloof and distant people compared to mortals, they detest all evil, and seeing the haggard nature of the group seemingly has them deeply concerned for them.

The lord of the house leads them. The face of Elrond is ageless, neither old nor young, though in it is written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair is the same color as his daughter's, like the deepest shadows of twilight and upon his head is set a circlet of silver; his eyes are grey as a clear evening. He carries himself with the aged dignity of king crowned with many winters, yet there's a lightness in his step, like he carries the energy of a young warrior.

"Daughter," he says, reaching for her first, taking her hands in his own. "I started to fear the worst."

"Father, some of them are badly injured."

Elrond nods, his expression stern and beckons to the squad.

"Quickly, bring the injured this way, to the Halls of Healing! I can sense a malaise in some of you, the taint of the Dark Riders, and know this must mean some of your number must have felt the bite of a Morgul-blade. You haven't much time; the shards must be removed and the wounds treated before you pass into the shadow-realm."

He gestures for some of the Elves to attend to the squad. Some offer a stable arm of support to the injured or any weak with hunger or illness, if they need to take it. Others offer cloaks to those who were sent into the Wilderlands under-dressed. Others bring gilded water jugs and golden ladles to those that appear thirsty, and offer to lead them to places where they can eat or where they can find creature comforts like baths and beds.

"My people will attend to your needs. The masters of those who pursued you are the enemies of all free people, and those innocents they would harm can find refuge in these halls. We will eventually hold Council, and all questions shall be asked and answered by all parties, but rest and healing must come first."

---

NOTES
✦ Arrival Log: This is a log for people to play around arriving to Rivendell, so some characters can react to the Elves and players of injured characters can play out any drama of them reaching the last leg of the journey.

✦ Post in actionspam format. Plots and mod-run events in the game are meant to be in actionspam format to keep a brisk pace.

✦ Free-for-all Post. This event will be in "free-for-all" format, meaning that threadhopping is encouraged and that threading should be treated in the same conversational way as network posts.

✦ Cursed Weapons/Powers: Players don't have to play it out unless they want to, but the Elves can sense cursed weapons and "cursed" beings, such as Necromancer mage types, vampires, werewolves, etc. If players want to play out their character having to talk the Elves into letting them in, they can and the mods will npc the Elves. Please hit the "NPC ENCOUNTER" post if you want to play this out and describe what your character is in the action brackets.

Comments

cw: slight coughing tmi

[bravelyrunaway]

[When he starts to feel a creeping fullness in his lungs, when he starts to grow more and more exhausted, when he starts to develop a crackling cough he knows what it is. It makes sense. His tools spontaneously stopped working, even despite being completely intact and looking physically unbroken. There's something messing with technology here, and if it's messing with more simplistic technology like his tools then surely it's messing with the various medical nanites Rommie usually keeps his system pumped with. Ever since he'd become part of the crew of the Andromeda, barring the radiation thing and the Magog larvae thing, his health has been the best it's been in, oh, his entire life. Gone were the weird rashes and little skin infections, gone were the low-key coughs from infections that lasted weeks. Only the odd catastrophic event has affected it.]

[This is a whole system crash and he gets sick almost immediately. It's no surprise everything would hit him this badly when the group is probably crawling with a whole cross-contaminated stew of microbes from multiple worlds. It's like being in a multi-dimensional spaceport and he doesn't have so much as a zinc supplement.]

[So he gets sick and he quietly hides it because he doesn't want to be a burden. It grates on his pride and makes him worried he'll wind up even more on the outs with the group. Instead he quietly asks one of the healers to help him out with his chest cold.]

[Not Trance. She's (rightfully) Disappointed in him and he still feels equal parts annoyed back and guilty. So he goes to one of the others.]

[It's not enough, though. The cough abates for a little while and then comes right back with a vengeance and he realizes not only did it not get stopped, it probably is even worse, the equivalent of not getting a full round of antibiotics. Just his luck, winding up with some kind of resistant other-dimensional superbug.]

[He debates bringing it to someone else's attention but then things get pretty heavy, they're probably getting chased, they start picking up the pace. They meet the Elf babe and he's so breathless he can't even hit on her. Holding the coughs in to hide being sick and to not make too much noise, while trying to run, has taken its toll. His lungs burn and feel too full, like there's not enough room for air, his breathing is shallow. Now he can't hide the lack of oxygen he's getting; as they rush along, his skin suddenly grows ten times paler, dripping with sweat.]

[By the time they reach Rivendell, he's wobbling without realizing he is, and too disoriented to realize how disoriented he is. He barely tracks what the Elves are saying, and just starts trying to take the stairs along with everyone else through sheer force of momentum. There aren't many of them but by the time he reaches the first little balcony, blackness starts creeping in on the edges of his vision. He takes a wobbly few steps forward, making it so he at least won't fall down the steps. Then his legs buckle and he collapses, pitching backward without a word.]

[One of the Elves is close, and with supernatural reflexes she reaches out to catch him and lower him to the ground, calling out to Elrond, "My lord! I fear this one is injured or ill."]

[Harper tries to hit on her almost reflexively.]

Heeey, beautiful, wanna be the photon to my photosystem so -

[He doesn't get to finish before he breaks off into uncontrollable coughing and can't hold it in anymore. The Elf turns him on his side in something resembling a recovery position so it's easier for him to cough and breathe. What comes out is somehow very green and very rusty colored at the same time which is probably bad.]

[easy_as_cake]

[She is disappointed, and hurt, and a lot of things. To her credit, she'd resolved to make up with him as soon as they reached a new camp, but until then she'd done her best to avoid both him and Dixon, something like one of those Time Outs Beka liked to threaten.

Which is all well and good until she almost literally stumbles upon Harper on the ground, being helped by an unfamiliar person. She'll yell at herself later, but she knows she couldn't have foreseen this. She can't foresee anything.]

Harper!

[Then she notices the coughing and realizes he's not hurt, he's sick, and maybe she couldn't have foreseen it, but if she hadn't been ignoring him the last few days, maybe... But no time for maybe. Later.

She drops to her knees at his side, barely sparing a glance for the woman.]

Harper? Are you- No, okay, you're not okay. Oh, please let this help.

[She places a glowing hand on his shoulder, holding her breath. If this magic couldn't save her friend now, what good would it ever be?]

[bravelyrunaway]

[It does help a little. He coughs out a lot more gunk all of a sudden, breathes a little easier, gets a little more coherent. But it's not enough to heal him all the way. There's a sharper pain in his left lung when he breathes than the right, like he's got some kind pleural effusion or abscess, and the infection's already in his blood.]

[Maybe if he survives this, his beleaguered immune system can go back to toughing it out on its own but it's been heavily reliant on the nanite boosts. It was a major shock to his system to have them all taken out of commission at once.]

[The Elves hustle around, Elrond signaling for some of the others to get stretchers, but this situation is devolving a little. Harper's not the only one that's sick or injured and some of the others are worse. The female Elf even lets him lay his head in her lap and for a moment he looks like he's going to drop another line or at least finish the one he started, but he's too tired, which is...not good. If he's going to say anything at all when he's in this state, hovering on the edge of unconsciousness, it's going to be to Trance anyway.]

[And it's a little too nice for him to crack wise or act egotistical or drop a pick up line or get cranky. It's nice here with his best friend hovering over him and his head in the soft lap of a beautiful babe, and the sun and the leaves and the sound of water and the sweet calls of birds.]

[He can smell earth that isn't spoiled with chemicals or fallout. It's just...earth. He likes that he can feel dirt when he presses his fingers against the stone. Maybe it's not mud under his feet, but it feels right.]

It's beautiful here.

[This might be a pretty place to heal up and get better, but if not...then it's a very beautiful place to die. He's not particularly set on thinking the latter is going to happen, he's not that defeatist, but every time he's gotten this sick, he's come awfully close. Before the Andromeda, the Maru crew'd needed to drag his mudfoot butt into a hospital and scrape together enough scratch to pay some terrible doctors to bring him back from the brink more than once, and it'd been a close call each time.]

[And it's so nice that it feels almost too nice to live in. He doesn't feel lucky enough to survive in a place like this, only just lucky enough to die in one.]

[As much as spaceships feel like home, as much as he'd never give up being an engineer for all the green earth in the world, he's still an earther at heart and a part of him has always longed to exist for just a little bit in the Earth-that-was instead of the Earth-that-is. It at least would've been a nice place to visit sometimes.]

We seriously live in the wrong genre. We should consider making a switch.

[Not that their world is anything but the present but he's partly named after a sci fi author, for crying out loud. He knows that their present was once someone else's speculative future. And even if they'd be fighting back the night all the same, this seems like a much nicer place to do it in.]

[The jokes fade. He's a little scared. He's almost always scared.]

I know I disappointed you. I'm sorry. [It's rare he apologizes but he's pretty sick.] But in my defense that guy's face is extremely punchable and I feel like I've shown a lot of restraint in not punching it. (Yet.) [And he stops trying to defend himself.] And I'm not cut out for this noble hero stuff, Trance. I can barely manage any thrilling heroics when I have a slipstream drive in front of me, a nanowelder in my hands, and Dylan calling the shots, and I'm batting 0 for 3 in this place.

[It's so much easier to be a good guy when he has a niche and someone else can figure out the nitty gritty morality bits for him, and maybe he has been lashing out a little at a convenient target over having that taken away.]

[easy_as_cake]

[Her lips press flatter the more he talks, and it's only proof how worried she is that she doesn't try to interrupt him at all. She only gives the lady an awkward smile, not quite sure how to thank someone for not being creeped out by her sick best friend being weird in her lap.

...Of course, considering how many ways Harper can be weird, this is a pretty mild one.

She takes her hand back when it's obvious the light isn't doing anything else and the effort is leaving her short of breath, taking his hand in both of hers instead.]

It is really pretty, but you're not making any sense, Harper? [Isn't a genre like something with Beka's music? How do you live in one? And she isn't touching anything about Dixon with a mile-long pole right now.] You're a good guy, even if you forget it sometimes. That's why I'm here. To remind you.