--one [video]

[hejhej]

[Great, one of these things again. This was all feeling a little too familiar. A video shows up on the network, but Lisbeth's face is barely visible. It may seem more like an accidental video. The left side of her body is visible.]

I don't do well in confined spaces.

Comments

permavideo

[birdhousesoul]

... Oh.

Well, it ... does take some getting used to. A year in solitary confinement, and I still knew there was a world outside, even if I couldn't reach it. Weeks in the Deep Roads, and I knew there was a world above, even if there might be half a mile of earth between the ceiling and that world. Here ... there's only the Void.

But it's a big ship, this. Bigger than the village where I grew up. Is it really so confined? [A pause.] Or is it more the principle of the thing?

[hejhej]

The principle.

[But even in Siren's Port, she was chained to the island. If she even dared to move away, it would only cause her pain and ultimately death.]

[birdhousesoul]

[His jaw tightens.] That, I can understand. It's unjust.

[hejhej]

It seems like they all are, the places I've been.

[birdhousesoul]

You too?

Are you a mage?

[hejhej]

[She blinks, confused.]

No. We don't have.. mages where I come from.

[birdhousesoul]

Where I come from, mages are imprisoned for life, from childhood on. From the moment it's discovered you can do things ordinary people can't, you're taken away from your family and locked up.

If a different city needs a different sort of mage than the ones they've already got, then you might get moved around, but you'd still be imprisoned. Nothing would really change but the view from the window, if you can find one big enough to peer out.

So when you said, all the places you've been ... well. It's similar.

[hejhej]

[Oh that sounds familiar indeed.. but not in the same way he'd experienced it.]

The place I came from before here was unjust to people who weren't born there. They came from something called the Core.

The place from where the Core had taken me.. was just a normal place. And they locked me up.

[birdhousesoul]

Did they give any sort of excuse for locking you up? The Core? The place before it?

[hejhej]

At home, they gave me no reason.

[And that's how she'll leave that explanation.]

[birdhousesoul]

I'm not sure what's worse: a shit reason, or no reason at all.

We were taught all mages had to be locked up to protect society from us, and to protect us from ourselves. That's if we survived the cute little life-or-death ordeal they force upon every mage, a nice coming-of-age ceremony involving drugs and a trance state that we'd best shake before they thought we'd been under too long.

And this was just another measure of control, the teaching that we were weak and prone to corruption. Teaching us to hate ourselves. I believed that was perhaps the worst of it all, the pretense that everything they did was for our own good, and more than we deserved.

Only now I start to wonder. It was a shit reason, but it was a reason. It was something to think about, and something we could choose to reject.

[His description of mage oppression has been animated, almost rapid, certainly forceful. Now, though, Anders speaks more slowly, thinking aloud.]

On this ship ... we're not given a reason. We don't know why we're here. Unless there's something I haven't read, or run across, or no one's seen fit to tell me.

There's nothing to argue. No one to denounce, or take down. There's nowhere to run -- I escaped the Circle seven times, I kept trying until freedom bloody well stuck, I'd do it again if I got half the chance. But there's no place.

[hejhej]

[His story only led to more questions.]

What is the Circle?

[birdhousesoul]

A school, and a prison. A building full of mages, with templars set to guard every door.

[hejhej]

You said you escaped seven times. That mean you came back.

Or were dragged back.

[birdhousesoul]

Hunted down and dragged back in fetters, yes.

[This is not a flippant answer, and the grim set of his expression bears that out.]

[hejhej]

That sounds shittier than home.

[birdhousesoul]

No fetters at home?

[hejhej]

No. Body straps.

[And that fucking bed.]

[birdhousesoul]

I ... never saw those used. [Not in Ferelden, no. Not in the Tower where Anders lived. Much as Anders may despise them, Irving and Greagoir didn't run that kind of Circle. The stories coming out of the Kirkwall Gallows, though -- those were another matter.] I knew people who had. We tried to save some. The people I worked with after I escaped, I mean. The underground. We tried, anyway.

Some of the ones who suffered those sorts of abuses ... tended to choose a different escape route.

No one should have to live that way. Or die that way.