strangetrip | [GP] puppies and kitties and buns, oh my!

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[GP] puppies and kitties and buns, oh my!

Not everyone had a Trinket, Vex thought during a lazy afternoon tickle fight-turned-cuddle session with her most excellent bear. In fact, most people wouldn't want a Trinket, but that was because they lacked appreciation for the finest things in life. They probably would've liked him better when he was still a cub.

Aaaaaw, Trink had been so fucking cute when he was a baby.

Baby animals were always cute. Even the dangerous ones.

Whether it was a harmless twist to her brother's penchant for pranks or a desire to shake things up a little in this resort prison that was way too quiet or hint of boredom and curiosity about the limited magic Vex had, she couldn't say, but one Conjure Animals later, and her room was full of small, fluffy, cuddly baby animals... and one much larger bear sniffing at them in confusion.

Looking very pleased with herself – and okay, a little surprised at just how many fuzzballs there were – Vex opened the door to her room. "There are lots of people here. Go make friends and have some fun."

The animals tumbled, stalk-pounced, and hopped out of her room and all over the inn looking for people to play with, and just before they were out of her sight, Vex added, "And if you see my brother... you can pee on him if you want."

[OOC: fey creatures in the form of baby animals invade the inn for an hour. have fun. feel free to link to pics or gifs of the cuteness in your tags if you'd like.]

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The little white fawn was being so stubborn Merrill was of a mind to call it Mahariel out of spite. She was kneeling on the ground with it as it wobbled around her, nudging and being all too chatty as sometimes small things were wont to do.

"We've already established that you're not hungry and you don't really know how to play so what is it? Hm? I don't know where your herd is, love, I'm sorry."

Dorian turned to look at the... yes, an elf. With a Dalish accent, even, unless he missed his guess. He only knew it because of the Inquisition, but it was distinctive and he was a fast learner. "Try putting it in a coffee cup and nearly drinking it," he offered with a friendly smile, lifting the cup containing the fluffy little puppy. "That's what endeared me to this little bugger."

Merrill hadn't met many people from the Imperium, but it was an accent she would know anywhere. Something slid down her spine, cold and fearful, remembering Fenris' stories and the tales of warning she'd heard on her own.

The elf turned and looked at the man and...

Surely someone evil wouldn't smile so nicely. She laughed a little. "I think he might be a little big for that. We'd have to find a dragon to manage something like that, and I'm just as happy not having those around." Yet. If there were any, they looked like people.

"Had a drink in hand rather than a dog, I would drink to that. Dragons are horrifying." And he knew, the Inquisitor had dragged him through twelve of them, not including Corypheus's corrupted monstrosity. Bull had been thrilled, of course, but Dorian had never quite managed to share the enthusiasm. However much else they'd shared. "Perhaps a laundry basket instead?"

She laughed a little and pet the fawn where it was nudging her. "Perhaps," she agreed. "If that's how you feel about dragons, let me tell you, if you ever meet a very charismatic surface dwarf trying to sell you a mine in the free marches, it's a bad deal."

"I feel that everything in the Free Marches is probably a bad deal. A friend of mine is from there. He's something of a writer, and his work has destroyed enough of my brain cells to make me wish to avoid the entire region." The various issues of Kirkwall and evident-via-letter religious fanaticism of the ruler of Starkhaven also contributed, of course. "But thankfully I don't think I could afford a mine in any case."

"They aren't that bad. A little..." She frowned a little and shook her head. "No worse than any other place I've been to. What sort of things does your friend write?" The deer stepped his way into her lap, trying to chew on one of her ears. "Sebastian, stop earning your name please."

"Utter trash!" Dorian gestured, causing the puppy to yip almost like punctuation. "Some dreadful romance even he hates, a crime serial set in Kirkwall that he claims is literature. The Tale of the Champion is the only thing I'd place in the category, but only because I feel there's too much embellishment to call it history."

Sebastian...? "Interesting name for a fawn."

"Varric!" Merrill said brightly, lighting up all at once. "Oh! You know Varric! How is he?"

The fawn bleated loudly in her ear. "Please stop, I don't need to hear it," she said, gently booping the thing on the nose. "I swear, halla are much better behaved than this."

Sometimes this universe was much smaller than it appeared. How often would a Tevinter Altus member of the Inquisition have a mutual friend with a Dalish elf not of the Inquisition? His grin expanded with some genuine warmth. "You know Varric too! Small world in more ways than one. He was well enough, last I saw. Hoping against hope, he said, that the world would stay saved for a few months at least." Staying with the Inquisition, though... no surprise, he'd been one of the first to join the Inquisitor.

Tired of the little deer, she got up. "Well, that's a relief. I worry about him sometimes." A lot of the time. She worried about them all basically constantly. Having Anders around didn't lessen her worry in the slightest.

"I'm Merrill," she said, offering a hand to the man.

"He's fine," Dorian assured her seriously. "The Inquisition looks after its own, believe me." He accepted her hand, and rather than shaking it indulged some of his old etiquette training regarding ladies and lightly kissed the back. "Dorian Pavus, very pleased to make your acquaintance."

She blushed a little at the gesture, turning pink right up to the tips of her ears. "I'm... I'm glad to hear that. I haven't heard from him in so long. Anders had to tell me that Hawke ran off to the Frostbacks in the first place or that there was an Inquisition at all. Even he didn't seem to know very much about what was going on." She sat on a chair at his table to pet the little fluffball's head while the deer decided to start trying to gnaw on Dorian instead.

"On purpose, as I understand it. Corypheus had a nasty habit of stealing Wardens' minds, you know. Makes it very difficult to have them following along due to knife-in-the-back issues." Not that it was entirely their fault, of course. And given that Dorian was certain his educated guess about which 'Anders' this was... making that one more destructive to the innocent seemed like the worst idea on record. "I gathered it worried Hawke, anyway. Though of course I had very little to do with her directly, so I might be mistaken. It happens so rarely I can never tell."

For whatever reason, that particular quirk of Corypheus hadn't occurred to her and Merrill paled a little. "Mahariel," she said, staring out into the distance. "Oh, Mahariel, please be okay."

"Just... generally?" Dorian's knowledge of the Dalish didn't extend to most of their gods. A few, certainly, from following the Inquisitor through several Dalish ruins, but not all.

It was safer to stay general, anyway - there were only a few people who'd been topics of conversation. Anders was here, he'd already assured her Varric was as safe as he was likely to get... and that left Hawke. Who was almost certainly too dead to be helped by prayer. Dead or worse: locked in endless combat with an unkillable original Nightmare. But that was hardly something to be flippant about when the only ones present from his own world had been the woman's dear friend and oh yes her lover as well. "For what it's worth, our would-be god met a very final end thanks to the Inquisitor. No one will be threatened by any power of his again."

"Just generally?" She tilted her head, giving herself a moment before she caught up and made a soft sound of understanding. "Mahariel is a friend. The... The Hero of Ferelden. He was a member of my clan." She shrugged a little, happily giving the puppy attention while the deer settled into screaming at nothing. Very much Sebastian as far as she was concerned.

"Will you tell me about them? The Inquisitor? I don't- I'm afraid I know very little about all of it. The sky had only just opened up and then...then I was here." That was putting things vaguely enough. She didn't need to relive that terror in front of a stranger.

"The Inquisitor is... really quite remarkable. A Dalish elf, like yourself, but I'm almost certain a different clan. Her Keeper had sent her to the Conclave to watch, so she was there when it exploded and the hole in the sky opened up. Rather than dying, she fell physically into the Fade. She came out again, too, with a thing on her hand that let her close rifts." There was rather more to it than that, more detail, more specifics, but Dorian sensed that Merrill's inquiry wasn't magical-technical.

"The Inquisition sort of formed around her after that. I, for example, met her in Redcliffe. She was trying to coax the rebel mages there to join her, but my old mentor had swooped in before she could. Using time magic, which I helped him design but had never worked until the world was unraveling anyway. The Inquisitor and I were thrown into a hellish nightmare future, gained a few hints about enemy plans, and long story short I managed to reverse the spell and send us back to very nearly the moment we'd gone." That version of events was leaving a lot out, but the less Dorian had to think about the future that almost had been, the better. It hadn't hurt, much, at the time to watch the Inquisitor's companions dying to buy them time, but it was the stuff of nightmares now.

Merril nodded a little to herself, following here and there. "And Hawke?" she finally asked, "Was she doing alright? It's... It's been a while since I've seen her and Anders isn't... Well, he's Anders. It's always hard to tell what kind of mood he's going to be in at any given moment and if he's going to feel much like sharing. I haven't wanted to make this whole place worse for him by prying about how she was when he last saw her too much."

Consciously missing Hawke wasn't at all going to help much with the trouble of Anders' moods or Justice for that matter.

"Ah. Yes. I hadn't-" Dorian stopped mid-response to think. On the one hand, it was quite possibly kinder to tell the more lie-like but technically truthful story that he hadn't seen Hawke in quite a while and didn't know. Technically correct, occasionally the best kind of correct.

But he knew from experience that that kind of obfuscation and not-exactly-lies tended to pile up and become untenable, and the eventual reveal was worse. People didn't appreciate the defense 'I was trying to safeguard your feelings' either. He sighed. "I doubt she's still alive. In dealing with possessed Wardens, we ended up physically in the Fade. Hawke stayed behind so the rest of us could get out. The Nightmare didn't strike me as particularly inclined to mercy."

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[GP] puppies and kitties and buns, oh my!

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