milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Varric had meant to enter the Hanged Man this evening, but if the odd magic bar decided to appear instead, who is he to argue? Although the note that appeared when he went to see about getting a pint was pretty well unexpected, he reads it and solemnly nods. "Far be it from me to cause trouble when there's magic involved," he says. "But I'm going to need a stepstool."

He gets one.

Specials Tonight:

Antivan Brandy
Ale
Wine

After some thought he adds:

Drink a pint of Orzammar dwarven brew without making a face, and your next drink is half off

He's a surfacer. He can get away with that.

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YT does. She makes the most hilarious face. "Eeew!"

"Granted, if you drink it often enough, you get to like it," says Varric. "Then again, I'm not sure what it'd take to get me to get anywhere near often enough. I like what I get at home just fine, thanks."

"No desire to go back to the Old Country? Or the Old Mountain, or wherever it is? I don't blame you. Who wants to live in a place where they make beer out of fungus and worms and things?"

"Oh, I was born in Kirkwall. My parents and my older brother, they were Orzammar born," says Varric. "Me? Give me sky and wind any day of the week."

"You say that like it's weird for a dwarf to want to get out once in a while," YT says.

"Most of Orzammar's never seen the sun," says Varric. "Old tradition. Once you go surface, you don't go back. It's a caste thing. Most of them are afraid of falling off into the sky, or something."

"Wow. They sound kind of like fundies." Pause. "Crazy religious fundamentalists, I mean. You leave the fold and you're shunned forever."

"It's not quite completely shunned. There's a good few of them who accept trade with the surface," says Varric. "Keeps the kingdom alive. Accommodations, as they say, are made."

"Okay. But does that mean there's some folks who can go to the surface and come back, or is everyone in Orzammar perfectly happy to have dwarves on the surface doing business for them but God forbid they ever get in past the entrance hall?"

"More the latter than the former," says Varric. "Surfacers are allowed to come back in and sell their wares, but they're considered casteless in the eyes of everyone else down there. Might as well be the lowest sort of criminal. It doesn't help that they're supposed to lose their connection to the Stone- there's dwarves in the Shaperate who think sun-touched dwarves might as well be humans."

YT rolls her eyes. "Flattering," she says. "I guess they need some kind of disincentive to keep people from going to the surface and convincing everyone else that hey, it's a lot nicer up there. Uh...what's a Shaperate, anyway?"

"Historians, scholars, you name it-" Varric waves a hand. "They're the dwarves who keep the Memories. Everything that's historically ever gone into defining who and what the dwarves are. Their word carries more weight than just about anyone's down below, most of the time."

"So they're basically the resident old guys harping on about how important tradition is?" YT guesses.

"Got it in one," says Varric with a smile. "You won't find a finer bunch of petrified old fossils anywhere."

"You mentioned something about castes too," YT says. "Are the Shaperate, like, their own caste?"

"Nah, but they might as well be," says Varric. "Orzammar's basically divided into noble caste, warrior caste, smith caste, artisan caste, miner caste, merchant caste, servants, and the casteless. There's shades, levels, gradations, you name it- but those are the big ones. Most of your Shapers come from the high castes, although once in a while a lucky smith or artisan'll wind up with a child or two headed that way."

"So...the guys in charge get to write and interpret the history that justifies keeping them in charge?"

"Funny how that works, isn't it?" says Varric. "I'll never know what my brother sees in that place."

"Oh. So he likes all that tradition stuff. Well, I guess it's good to be proud of your cultural heritage. Which kind of makes me wonder, what caste was your family from?"

"Nobles, originally," says Varric. "From what I understand, pretty well ranked, too. Not royalty or anything, but good enough to hold our own in the Assembly. Then there was a fuss over a Proving, and it turned into a fuss over a lot of Provings, and next thing you know the entirety of House Tethras was expelled from Orzammar. I can't say whether the accusations were true or not, of course. I was born after my family took up residence on the surface."

"I don't know what a Proving is, but it must have been serious business if it got a noble family run out of town," YT says. "Either that or they pissed off someone in a serious way."

"Another ancient dwarven tradition," Varric says. "This one's at least entertaining to watch. There's courts for questions of law, and duels for questions of honor, but when you absolutely, positively have to settle a dispute in front of as many people as possible and have the Paragons and ancestors on your side, you go into a Proving against your opponent, and the two of you beat the stuffing out of each other in the arena. In front of everybody who's anybody in Orzammar."

"Ouch," YT says. "I don't mean about the beating the stuffing out of each other, although yeah, that's ouch. I mean that it's the highest court in the land. Well, under-land." It's a bit more serious than fixing a boxing match.

"They're not all honor Provings," says Varric. "Sometimes, you just want to see two dwarves smack each other around until they can't get up any more. They do that too."

"But even messing with a prize fight is...well, not kosher," YT says. "Not that I'm into that kind of thing, but I can understand why it upsets people."