( on the other end of the crystal she hums, thoughtful— )
Maybe. Probably not, things would probably be different if they'd done it very successfully. The Chantry has more ties with the Inquisition— that's half the reason we exist in the form we do, now.
You’re the only person I really know from that far back— was it in order to go independent, then? Get out from under Chantry supervision, have more freedom to operate? I could see how that could still leave them interested. Checking in on the rogue stepchild, as it were.
Something like that. It wasn't unanimous, but it was...
( hmm. she's almost audibly considering how to put this. )
All the rifters, all the anchor-shard bearers, all the most ... controversial thinkers and work got sent to Kirkwall, out from the thumb of the Inquisition and the advisors— far away from them, from the Inquisition's methods and priorities. If we didn't go independent, half of our people probably wouldn't have been allowed to work at all. And, you know, there's no way the Kirkwall outpost, when that's what it was, would have cooperated with being folded into an Exalted March.
It was in order to continue existing, I think. It was probably inevitable as soon as they created the outpost.
( is stephen strange’s own thoughtful noise, absorbing that information. he likes these inadvertent history lessons with gwenaëlle; he’s always carefully mentally filing those tidbits away, as useful context for the organisation and situation and world he now finds himself in. he shuffles some of his papers, moving them into tidy piles, but his attention’s on that crystal on his desk instead. )
So, all the personae non gratae got shunted off into an out-of-the-way corner, basically. ( whichever magic renders his words into the common tongue, does it work for latin? is that a tevene saying here too? how the fuck does any of this work? he needs to stop thinking about it. )
And now, apparently, ( dryly, because he cannot help but tease, ) the undesirables’ undesirables have been shunted even further out of the way.
Kirkwall turned out to be less out of the way than hoped, I think.
( is dry, in answer. hightown— probably won't. hopefully, it will be a sight more temporary. )
I was still Lady Vauquelin when we first came here. So much has changed since Trevelyan ate shit, but we're still fighting the same fucking wars, so, I don't know.
( it doesn't come up often, any more. mostly — people know, or it's not relevant, or there's just no reason to ask. she doesn't answer immediately, but: )
You've seen the portrait on La Souveraineté? The elven woman in the foyer.
( elegant, beautiful; a little confronting, a woman wearing only a man's shirt and gwenaëlle's locket. long limbs. probably not tall, when she was stood up, with gwenaëlle's same colouring and an expression that's hard to read. )
My parents were the Comte and Comtesse de Vauquelin — “Vauquelin de Vauquelin”, it's very funny,
( she doesn't laugh, but she doesn't sound torn up, just: says it, a thing that she is saying, )
— and Guenievre Baudin, in the portrait, bore and birthed me. La comtesse couldn't carry a pregnancy to term, here's my lord's pregnant mistress who shares her colouring, so she goes from lady's maid to estate chatelaine in the space of one pregnancy. Well, one real pregnancy. “Her” baby “dies”,
( and so does the midwife who delivered her, and the entire small family she had been attending to a week later, in a tragic housefire that gwenaëlle has never heard about, )
and I am named Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, my lord's legitimate heir. It's still my name, ( for the sake of clarity and correctness, ) in an, I suppose, legal sense. But I annoyed a few of the wrong people a few years ago, and the whole affair was exposed, and I've used hers the Empress stripped me of my titles and inheritance.
( it’s a deeper dive on topics she’s hinted at before, and all so removed from the things he knows: this sounds like peak historical intrigue, a soap opera storyline for the nobility, all mistresses and hidden pregnancies and empresses. nobility still exists back on modern earth, sure, but this still seems a step beyond the celebrity trysts plastered all over the tabloids. royalty would still care about this sort of thing, maybe.
no wonder there’s that whole thing about wanting to tell her own details, rather than have it told for her. there’s a pause for a moment, strange trying to find the right words. in the end he tries to hit the same matter-of-fact note, just, here it is, a thing that he is saying: )
And now, ( genuinely impressed, ) you can just about break someone’s spine with an anchor gauntlet punch. Someday you’ll have to show me how you do that.
( this is the sort of insanity he’s gotten accustomed to; tends to take in stride. it’s interesting and he knows it’s interesting, but it’s not the same kind of salacious as imperial scandal. )
I, hm, ( this part is really rather unflattering, which is why he opts to just be straightforward about his mistakes, ) fucked up a spell, and it sundered the barriers between worlds. Created the equivalent of multiple rifts, pulling in people from other worlds who had a grudge against this spider-themed vigilante hero. One was a man made out of electricity, another made out of sand, another with metallic octopus tentacles he’d grafted to his body. And one was a doctor who’d decided he wanted to turn the entire city in his homeworld into lizard-people because it was… I don’t know, the peak physical specimen in his opinion, or something? The motivations were unclear.
He had a lot of scales and teeth. Big hulking lizardman. There was a lot of property damage when the group fought him, but it was technically just another day at the office, all things considered.
( said sheepishly, the way one might use for ‘oops i broke the milk bottle’ and not ‘oops i broke the multiverse’. )
It’s also why I wasn’t particularly surprised by rifts when I came here, because we’d already experienced something similar. And I’d strived to put those visitors back where they came from.
( strange has a continual tendency to drop extremely concerning information into casual conversation, but even he has the presence of mind to hesitate here before adding, )
Where I come from, if our equivalent of a rifter stays in a universe which isn’t their own — if you keep wearing those barriers between worlds thin, with too much travel — it can trigger a thing called an incursion. Two worlds colliding, and one of them usually winds up destroyed. An entire universe gone, everyone dead. So I am, needless to say, extremely relieved to hear that that isn’t the case here and that rifters have been here for years without the world ending.
Yeah, there’s a reason I haven’t until now. I’m not exactly keen on having rifters rounded up with torches and pitchforks by an angry mob. It already seems close enough, some days.
If that had been on the table seven years ago, you might have been killed on sight, ( does not seem an unreasonable assessment. ) I was honestly surprised no one was in the first place. I'd have argued for it, if someone had told me that was a risk.
( and from a significantly more potentially influential position, too. )
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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Maybe. Probably not, things would probably be different if they'd done it very successfully. The Chantry has more ties with the Inquisition— that's half the reason we exist in the form we do, now.
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( hmm. she's almost audibly considering how to put this. )
All the rifters, all the anchor-shard bearers, all the most ... controversial thinkers and work got sent to Kirkwall, out from the thumb of the Inquisition and the advisors— far away from them, from the Inquisition's methods and priorities. If we didn't go independent, half of our people probably wouldn't have been allowed to work at all. And, you know, there's no way the Kirkwall outpost, when that's what it was, would have cooperated with being folded into an Exalted March.
It was in order to continue existing, I think. It was probably inevitable as soon as they created the outpost.
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( is stephen strange’s own thoughtful noise, absorbing that information. he likes these inadvertent history lessons with gwenaëlle; he’s always carefully mentally filing those tidbits away, as useful context for the organisation and situation and world he now finds himself in. he shuffles some of his papers, moving them into tidy piles, but his attention’s on that crystal on his desk instead. )
So, all the personae non gratae got shunted off into an out-of-the-way corner, basically. ( whichever magic renders his words into the common tongue, does it work for latin? is that a tevene saying here too? how the fuck does any of this work? he needs to stop thinking about it. )
And now, apparently, ( dryly, because he cannot help but tease, ) the undesirables’ undesirables have been shunted even further out of the way.
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( is dry, in answer. hightown— probably won't. hopefully, it will be a sight more temporary. )
I was still Lady Vauquelin when we first came here. So much has changed since Trevelyan ate shit, but we're still fighting the same fucking wars, so, I don't know.
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What’s the difference between Vauquelin and Baudin?
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You've seen the portrait on La Souveraineté? The elven woman in the foyer.
( elegant, beautiful; a little confronting, a woman wearing only a man's shirt and gwenaëlle's locket. long limbs. probably not tall, when she was stood up, with gwenaëlle's same colouring and an expression that's hard to read. )
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( she doesn't laugh, but she doesn't sound torn up, just: says it, a thing that she is saying, )
— and Guenievre Baudin, in the portrait, bore and birthed me. La comtesse couldn't carry a pregnancy to term, here's my lord's pregnant mistress who shares her colouring, so she goes from lady's maid to estate chatelaine in the space of one pregnancy. Well, one real pregnancy. “Her” baby “dies”,
( and so does the midwife who delivered her, and the entire small family she had been attending to a week later, in a tragic housefire that gwenaëlle has never heard about, )
and I am named Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, my lord's legitimate heir. It's still my name, ( for the sake of clarity and correctness, ) in an, I suppose, legal sense. But I annoyed a few of the wrong people a few years ago, and the whole affair was exposed, and I've used hers the Empress stripped me of my titles and inheritance.
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no wonder there’s that whole thing about wanting to tell her own details, rather than have it told for her. there’s a pause for a moment, strange trying to find the right words. in the end he tries to hit the same matter-of-fact note, just, here it is, a thing that he is saying: )
You’ve had such a very colourful life.
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( it's very dry. )
I still have ties to that world, but not as many as people tend to assume.
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( a thing that she clearly does and did not take for granted across the board, )
so hers was the only division that I was willing to consider being in, at the time.
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I can definitely break their spine.
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( this is the sort of insanity he’s gotten accustomed to; tends to take in stride. it’s interesting and he knows it’s interesting, but it’s not the same kind of salacious as imperial scandal. )
I, hm, ( this part is really rather unflattering, which is why he opts to just be straightforward about his mistakes, ) fucked up a spell, and it sundered the barriers between worlds. Created the equivalent of multiple rifts, pulling in people from other worlds who had a grudge against this spider-themed vigilante hero. One was a man made out of electricity, another made out of sand, another with metallic octopus tentacles he’d grafted to his body. And one was a doctor who’d decided he wanted to turn the entire city in his homeworld into lizard-people because it was… I don’t know, the peak physical specimen in his opinion, or something? The motivations were unclear.
He had a lot of scales and teeth. Big hulking lizardman. There was a lot of property damage when the group fought him, but it was technically just another day at the office, all things considered.
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You sundered the barriers between worlds?
( yeah, she heard him, and it's not like that could possibly mean some other, secret thing, surely, but
bro what the fuck. )
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( said sheepishly, the way one might use for ‘oops i broke the milk bottle’ and not ‘oops i broke the multiverse’. )
It’s also why I wasn’t particularly surprised by rifts when I came here, because we’d already experienced something similar. And I’d strived to put those visitors back where they came from.
( strange has a continual tendency to drop extremely concerning information into casual conversation, but even he has the presence of mind to hesitate here before adding, )
Where I come from, if our equivalent of a rifter stays in a universe which isn’t their own — if you keep wearing those barriers between worlds thin, with too much travel — it can trigger a thing called an incursion. Two worlds colliding, and one of them usually winds up destroyed. An entire universe gone, everyone dead. So I am, needless to say, extremely relieved to hear that that isn’t the case here and that rifters have been here for years without the world ending.
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that having been said (or not): )
I don't think you should say that, ( more carefully, ) to anyone else.
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( and from a significantly more potentially influential position, too. )
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