A Whole Lot of Silence and Trousers - Harriet Amell and the Order of the Penis-Looking Hats (Part 1)

DRAGON AGE ORIGINS [DAO] STORY - CIRCLE OF MAGI
CONTENT - Imprisonment, Slavery, Genocide, Non-consensual Drugging, Body Horror.

Sorry I switched from Sooney to Harriet for all of this.  I chose her for this sequence since she has a lot greater emotional stake in the whole thing.  Sooney's objective was to collect as many mages from the circle as she could grab from the abominations, and she gives exactly zero fucks about everything else.

Actually, there is one thing I did learn about Sooney in all of this.  Magic annoys her.  It's far more trouble than it's worth, it's attached to the people in her party most likely to get up in her fries, and yeah.  Fuck magic.  Or maybe that's me saying fuck the circle.

Harriet's view is, predictably, a little more complicated.

When Harriet arrives, the templars are hanging out in the atrium, having barred the door, because that's all they've got at this point.  Knight-Commander Pronstache* is exactly as happy to see her arrive as he was to see her leave, and seems to have exactly the same amount of ability to do dick about it.  Or he thinks he does, a fact for which Harriet is not ungrateful, because there's no Duncan around to tell him to step off Grey Warden business, and no one to give him shit if he just straight-up murders Harriet.  I mean, when demons and abominations are overrunning your Circle, shit gets crazy.

Fortunately, Harriet has a plan.**  Well, it's plan enough to satisfy the Knight-Commander's mind.  She's going to go in there and kick the ass of everything that crosses her path, and save the mages thereby.  Knight-Commander mentions the big old rage demon in the room: even if she wins, the Chantry and the Templar Order is going to consider every mage in the place damaged goods, just saying.  But, at the same time, I figure he thinks that if Harriet goes in and kills a few things before he gets the paperwork filed to perform the Rite of Annullment,*** it will be a) less work for him to do and b) Harriet will be where the law says he not only can, but must murder every mage, and that's cool with him.  He's so sure this is going to work he even gives Harriet a chance to get out of being annulled with everyone else in the Circle tower: if she can bring back Sketchball Dumbledore to personally tell him everything is okay and all the demons are dead, then he won't just kill all the mages.

Quick aside: despite the fact that mages have to live with demons sniffing around 24/7/365, a mage who is in this sort of situation, where demons are possessing folk left and right, manifesting, making abominations is considered possessed unless they can prove otherwise.  There's not really a way to prove you're not possessed, which means, best-case-scenario, Knight-Commander should keep them all super locked down forever, if not tranquilize or murder the lot of them to be sure.  It's what Knight-Commander Meredith would do.****  From this, I've decided that Sketchball Dumbledore and the Knight Commander are lovers, the kind of passive-aggressive, codependent, frenemies-with-benemies shit that you only see in Dangerous Liasons.*****  Knight-Commander is fine with killing all the other mages in the Circle, but he just can't lose Irving.  Not yet.  Not when he could take credit for saving him.

That's my headcanon and I'm sticking to it.

Anyway, the tower is full of abominations.  Also demons.  The abominations in the tower get designations, depending on the demon that has possessed them and turned them into the lumpy, fungal hunchbacks they have become - rage, sloth, not appearing in this game, titty and pride.  How you can tell them apart is beyond me.  They all look like lumpy, fungal hunchbacks.  They also explode in flame 2 seconds after you land a killing blow on them, a fact that has my party looking like Elmer Fudd within moments of contact.

And shortly, our soot-stained party would discover a magic barrier and a party-member-to-be using it to hold off the demons from a gaggle of moppet mages.  A white haired, yet surprisingly fit educator and mage; ladies and gentlemen, I give you Wynne.  Wynne was at Ostagar, where Harriet (and Sooney) briefly chatted with her about the darkspawn and where they came from.  She returned with the others (including Uldred, our single-act Voldemort) after the battle and was there when Uldred Voldemorted out on everyone.  She's less than pleased to know about the turn of events downstairs (though she's not surprised), and she's not sure if Sketchball Dumbledore is still alive, but, she figures that the only way to save anyone is to go back up and find him.  She'll totally go with Harriet, if Harriet agrees to save the mages.

Morrigan flips out at this.  It's been pretty clear that she's been holding shit back since she arrived, mostly due to all the templars looking right at her, but now, on the other side of the big door which has marked the templar no-fly zone, she'd going to be fucking heard.  Her argument is fuck these guys.  They traded their essential liberty for security and not even their own fucking security, someone elses.  Slaves, she says, who chose slavery because they were afraid of freedom.

This is the closest Harriet has ever come to killing Morrigan.  See Sooney brough Morrigan, too, because Morrigan was the party's only mage, so there ain't no party like a Morrigan party because a Morrigan party is mandatory.  She rolled her eyes at Morrigan's rant.  Harriet was put in the circle super young by a family, that turns out, knows a lot about mages, since a whole bunch of them are born in their line.  She was then shipped out of her homeland to fantasy Alabama, put in a tower and taught her whole life that her freedom would cost the lives of everyone, everyone, including hers since the demons would be on her like... well, demons on mages.

None of that is even headcanon, that's a close reading of the text (mostly in DA2, but whatevs).  I remember Sooney had something heroic to say with only a minor dig at Morrigan.  I think Harriet's response was "Shale, Sten, I am going to close my eyes and count to five.  When I open them, I'm going to kill the first yellow-eyed apostate bitch named Morrigan I see.  Just so you know."

Generally, you end up with Wynne in your party and Morrigan not in your party.  Unless you want to kill Wynne now.  You can also kill Wynne later, if you don't do a good enough job convincing Cullen not to hate all mages (he's upstairs, getting messed with by demons, and don't worry, Cullen, there's a ginger mage named Pyewackit out there who loves you).  Really, you have to work very hard to keep Wynne alive.  It's also pretty easy to lose Morrigan, if you don't let her deflower Alistair (or get with her yourself if you're a straight guy who likes getting with the always chaotic evil), and thus, pretty easy to end the game with no mages.

I get the impression that the writers didn't much care for Wynne.  Digs against her age are very hard not to make, even if you do everything right and get her out of the circle alive (it's hard to do, first run).  Her "deal" is less interesting than everyone's except Zevran's.******  She's not Ferelden's McGonagal - she lacks the class or the badassery - she's a lot like the older, well-to-do, NPR listening white lady you can find by the gross in my general IRL stomping grounds.  A little school marmish, but then, she is, in fact, a school marm.  With fireballs.  Who can heal like a motherfucker.  Which is super useful, since Harriet and Morrigan were statted out for the murder.

This is going on longer than I thought.  Next time, we'll get from meeting Wynne to the only part of the game worse and Orzammar.

* He doesn't look anything like Mendez, but I'm going with it.

** It's always the same plan.

*** Yes, it requires paperwork to kill all the mages in your Circle.

**** She'd nuke the place from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.  Then again, she did have a psychotic break and turn herself into a statue made of red lyrium, so maybe she's not our gold standard for decision making.  Silver, though.  Strong silver.

***** I cannot be arsed to go find the French for that, but I can be arsed to make a footnote talking about how I can't be arsed.

****** But Zevran gets a pass because he's a sexy elf boy and Tumblr loves them som sexy elf boy.