WELCOME TO THE FREE CITIES!

[abraxasmods]

WELCOME TO THE FREE CITIES!

Welcome to The Free Cities! The portal exits outside the capital city of Cadens. The first impression of the city is its sheer size. It sprawls out across the landscape like a great hulking beast at rest. The wall that encircles it barely contains it, the buildings of Cadens practically bulging against its restraint.

The air here seems thicker somehow, tinged with a scent that’s acrid and smoky. Smog hangs high over the city, belched out by smokestacks that tower over the industrial district. The desert stretches out behind it, dotted with towers and dust clouds that disappear into the horizon. Multiple gates lead inside and each is staffed by soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms that wave a steady stream of people through without appearing to pay much attention. People are coming and going almost all of the time, to and from the outposts and areas of activity around the city proper. It’s difficult to tell just what’s out there beyond the impression of tall metal structures and a great deal of labor. Wagons carrying travelers to Libertas and Aquila roll out from the Travel Post outside the city wall.

Anyone who can sense magic will notice a much lower concentration here. No one will be stopped or questioned at the gate, even if the soldiers seem to take note of the fugitives from Thorne.

The activity and sheer number of citizens can be overwhelming. It’s crowded and loud and feels constantly in motion with everyone talking and yelling over each other. It’s easy to get swept up in the ever-moving throng or find oneself ducking into the mouth of a narrow alley just to breathe.

Anyone who’s willing to make their way to the northern part of the city and Portham Hall will find Prime Minister Marlo Reiner available to receive them.

Comments

[gynvael]

[ His brows draw together. He thinks of Julie, who's told him her world is devoid of animals, too. Fallen in a great plague that struck. Maybe that's what's happened here—long ago enough that its people sealed itself in what she calls a tomb and rebuilt there. It's an image that's hard to conjure in his mind: the Continent is not forgiving, but a lack of those living is not one of its problems.

He doesn't hide the question in his gaze, but he leaves them unasked. It isn't important, in the end. And not a story to pry out of someone he's spoken to for hardly an hour.

Instead, he considers. If she's never seen a wolf, he doubts she's seen the mountains or the snow. ] Then look for the bones past the gates.

[ The dead are universal. ]

[frontlinetitties]

[This gets a laugh from her. It's a quick, staccato sound and yet one that's coloured by genuine mirth. The tender yellow light from the dimmed lamps dotted around the tavern illuminate her grin, making it seem to spark.]

Now bones--

[She says, and she gives him a fingergun gesture with both hands, one after the next in quick succession.]

--bones I can do.

[One does not spend the entirety of one's life interred within the House of the Ninth and learn nothing of bones. Not even someone who had despised every moment she'd been forced to spend in that place right down to the very centre of herself.]

[gynvael]

[ His eyebrows go up. There's amusement on his face, but now it's his turn to also take on a vaguely blank expression. He has never seen this gesture before, hasn't any fucking idea what it means, but the mention of bones apparently has brightened her up. He'll take it. ]

I've been in tombs. Never been in an entire place that was only that.

[ How do they sustain themselves? He supposes people find a way, somehow. It's not as if the Blue Mountains are an especially gentle environment. Kaer Morhen is scattered with the dead and old wounds and shattered walls. But it's home, still, to him, in a way no other place has been. ]

[frontlinetitties]

Lucky you.

[She says with a sigh, and mostly means it. For better or for worse, Drearburh is in her right down to the - haha - bones, but that doesn't mean she's looking at it now that it's behind her through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. She reaches again for her drink as the deep, chill caverns of the Ninth open up to her in her minds eye, the bruise-coloured darkness she'd lived her life within, the sensation of being dislocated from time and all meaning.

Nav is a Niner name, she's more Ninth than she ever thought she'd claim to be, and still she wouldn't wish that cold, decaying place on anyone. What was it that mayonnaise-looking bastard Silas had said? It was never really meant to be a place that sustained life at all.]

It fucking sucks. But the one thing we had in plentiful supply was bones.

[gynvael]

[ Lucky. Apparently. He's starting to learn the Continent is more plentiful in places where others aren't. How many, he wonders, would rather be here than return home to worlds of bone and death?

Perhaps not as many as it might appear. There are still those they've left behind. ]

How long has it been that way?

[ Is that simply how she grew up? Inside a tomb? It isn't the same for him, but Kaer Morhen is as much a cemetery as it is a home. It's how he grew up, too. She's the first he's met, outside of his own kind, who speaks so casually of being surrounded by the dead. There's something familiar about that. ]

[frontlinetitties]

Since always.

[She says it with a casual shrug, like it hadn't been the very bane of her existence since she'd been old enough to think coherent thoughts. In childhood Drearburh and been terrifying, awful. The stuff of fucking nightmares. It never really got much better, if she was entirely honest with herself.]

My mom just dropped in one day, right down the middle of the central shaft in a dragchute and a shitty old haz suit. It was out of power by the time she landed, which obviously meant she was fucked. It'd all been sucked away by a biocontainer she'd been carrying, inside of which was newborn me. No one knows where she came from, either. Which - you've gotta admit - is cool and mysterious as hell. Or you know, would have been if she hadn't gone and died, and left me stuck in that tomb with a bunch of decaying old nuns.

[Her tone is devoid of bitterness as she stares down into the amber liquid in front of her; these are old hurts, their colours faded and bleached away like bones left out in the sun too long. She still knows the size and shape of them, but they're not raw, not something she can't easily look upon.]

A bunch of the old nun-adepts managed to call back her ghost, but she just screamed Gideon! at them, three times. Then fled. So they guessed Gideon must be yours truly. I got taken on as like, the tiniest bondswoman ever. And that's where I stayed, though not for lack of trying to get the hell out.

[gynvael]

[ Geralt blinks once, twice. There are those, he's come to learn, who have few reservations sharing to strangers. Gideon appears to be one of them. He normally has little problem with this; he prefers to listen rather than talk, and so long as his company doesn't expect much out of him in return, it suits him fine. But this is...

More. It almost feels like a story he could've told himself. Except his mother had chosen to leave him. He can't decide if that makes it better or not. That he remembers Visenna, remembers believing he could be...something else, once. Probably doesn't make a difference. It is what it is. Maybe, once, he'd thought knowing her reasons would change things for him. He's realized it doesn't.

His expression is contemplative, before he appears to put aside whatever it is that's lingering on his mind. ]

Sometimes you get dropped on a path you didn't ask for. [ He sets his mug down on the table. It's hard to tell if he's still referring to Gideon or himself. Maybe both. He studies her. ] Would you rather stay here?

[frontlinetitties]

[He blinks at her a couple of times with that faraway look on his face, and she stares back blankly a moment, not quite sure how to read that expression on him. She simply hasn't known enough people in her life - really known, rather than observed from a distance, or skirted around deliberately whilst knowing her presence is unwanted - to have anything so sophisticated as the ability to read vague expressions. But there's something there, she thinks. Some feeling, or the lack of it, or--

--or it's nothing. The distant expression slips away as he makes a comment that seems kiiinda dismissive after she's just dropped her big bo-hoo story on him, or at least a fraction of it. But she realises - swift, and sure - that she hadn't been expecting sympathy. Wouldn't have known what to do with it had he offered it. Instead there's his question, one that feels loaded and heavy, but she's extending an answer before she's even thought it through.]

We can't go home again.

[There's something final in the way she says it, a stony kind of certainty. She hasn't asked Harrow what she wants, whether she wants to return to their own solar system to take up her place as God's hand and gesture, to do whatever it is that the King Undying required them to do. But there's no going back to the tomb.

In a lighter, altogether less graveyard tone, she says--]

Besides, why would I wanna go back to that when I could stay here for the booze and the babes?

[gynvael]

[ Sympathy is just not where his strength lies, in either giving or receiving. It always feels empty. He hums, taking her answer at face value. The truth is, his thoughts of going home have been distant, too. He wants it, but he doesn't know how it'll work, if it can work. Practically speaking, they're stuck in this world now. Most of his focus has been on keeping Ciri out of harm's way while they sort out how to handle what's happening.

He gives a snort, his attention coming back down towards her. ] That's one way to look at it.

[ Whatever she's said to him, it appears to not have entirely left his mind. He needs a walk more than a drink. Besides, he only meant to stay for one or two. He's got work to find, and so he rises from his seat without much ceremony, dropping a few final coins on the table to pay for his drink. Perhaps it's a bit abrupt, perhaps not. Geralt doesn't think twice about it one way or the other. ]

If you want to add blades to that list, you know where to find me.

[frontlinetitties]

[It is a touch abrupt, the way he stands all of a sudden, coins dropping down onto the table with a bright hard clink that somehow sounds as final as her earlier words had done. Did she say something to piss him off? Or is he just like this? Fuck if she knows, and he's already turning away from her before she can work it out.

The invitation remains though, extended once again before he vanishes into the sweaty crowd in this packed-in little dive.]

Yeah, I'll do that. Blades sets off my list pretty well. And hey-- thanks for the drink!

[She calls again, before he's gone, and someone else is already moving in to ask if his now-abandoned seat is taken.]