let's set d o w n some (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
groundrules) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
westwhere2021-08-20 07:55 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2021-08-20 07:55 pm
feast and make merry
The following events should cover the span to 31 AUGUST. Feel free to make your own posts/logs, or use this one! Routes have been built based on previous plotting, but any last-minute questions can be asked here. Try to limit it to asking concrete outcomes for things you are definitely exploring in your tag-ins!
■ Don Macaluso has welcomed his suitors, including the party's very own Diego Hargreeves. And his wolves. He stretches Taravast's hospitality to a lavish masked fete, observed at the Palace of the Doxe. No expense spared, no opportunity to flaunt lost.
■ In attendance — sorcerers' schools, foreign dignitaries and suitors, prominent healers and academicians, artists and politicians, members of the Conclave and, somehow, the Merchant's hooligans. Good gossips, one and all. Show up or throw the gauntlet: those who do not come willing will be escorted in by guards.
■ Even Lady Vannozza and her supporters come to wish Macaluso well in his conjugal pursuit. She publicly gifts him a cryogenic rose, urging her cousin to award it to his intended. Macaluso calmly accepts the flower, then discards it on his table.
■ Out of respect for the nascent political contest, the supporters of Vannozza and Macaluso — yes, you — are seated at two different tables on each side of the fleetingly present Doxe Bonaccorso. The old man will appear in feeble health but firm dignity, excusing himself after a tremulous speech that ends, tenderly, "Citadels are for the living. They are for the gathering of means, of magic, for the making of families and legacies. They are not coin for commerce. I welcome you to my home."
■ For the grand finale, Macaluso's servants introduce a traditional fragile, sweet confection offered to his private guests. It can be refused. Those who consume the confection will find their strength and senses progressively deteriorate, threatening to kill them within five days.
■ A good showing by Fox, Mingyu, Wen Kexing, Zhou Zishu, Xie Lian and Alina earned the Lady Odile more of Macaluso's favour. In gratitude, her servants send word to these characters only that there is poison afoot, without mentioning which dish.
■ Within the hour, Macaluso calls the celebration to its end, pained to announce it has been stained by sabotage and poison. Macaluso's guests, including the characters in his employ are drawn into private quarters and examined by physicians, who name the cause of the sickness — winter lily mist — but offer no clear antidote.
■ Frustrated, two healers will list two superstitious cures: the elusive, shady 'fire water' of the necromantic district's underground
■ Characters assigned to Macaluso will spend the night huddled together, with healers. Fearing her people will be unfairly faulted for the poisoning, Vannozza will lock her attendants in her palace wing. The atmosphere is tense, with Vannozza's people accusing characters and each other. Overnight, some of Macaluso's drunk supporters will try to enter Vannozza's palace wing and cause a brawl. Defend the lady?
■ Come morning, the poisoning is blamed on the ringleader of one of the recent protests objecting to Macaluso's marriage to a foreigner. Characters may circulate freely.
■ The necromantic district is a... literally and metaphorically shady congregation of small, run-down houses and the city's 'finest': criminals, thieves, the mates of your horsecar friend Caspar, actual necromancers and sellers of flesh parts.
■ Those who ask for 'fire water' will face a few days of exploration until an old beggar finally takes pity on their cause and, in exchange for wine, offers them an introduction to a secretive
■ The Watch are an eerie group of grotesquely deformed necromancers, some of whom have clearly been stirred back from death a number of times themselves. They explain that the 'fire water' is a brew that can be obtained from two sources: the blood of either a man who has killed many innocents ruthlessly (such as the many murderers and slavers who travel the darker corners of the district) or of a...
■ ...harpy, not unlike those encountered in the Stairs of Sighs corridor: winged creatures dripping tar and harrowing sorcery, that crowd in flocks at the periphery of Taravast. The harpies of Taravast are ancient defenders of the city, who have forgotten their purpose and turned feral. Their claws run sharp, causing cuts that bleed without healing properly for hours.
■ The harpies are best faced in pairs, but beware: if you speak too long, they will learn your voice and imitate it to lure in your companions. They will also attune to emotions and mimic the voices of people characters remember.
■ Retrieve two blood vials from either man or creature to the necromancers, along with two vials of your own blood, and the Watch will prepare two batches of antidote. One cup for you, the other for their own purposes.
■ Wen Qing has brokered access to the hunting grounds, for an easy entrance point. Those who wish to find an alternative route can try to have their characters infiltrate Vannozza's quar ters and steal her keys — but only theft such offensive can be carried out, so unite forces.
■ The Spina hunting grounds are a few hours' ride away, and carriage drivers seem unwilling to make the journey. Help the local economy: steal a horse.
■ The forests are a magnificent spread of everything dark and haunted, drenched in mist and sporting minimal visibility. There is a pronounced air of death and the stench of decay, with perfect, eerie stillness during the scant sunlight and a torture of creaking sounds, whispers and ghostly chills at night.
■ In addition to the typical violent forest fare — wolves, foxes, bears — the grounds also host the first sign of true undead: less well composed than some characters might remember the men of Anurr, lacking true awareness. Their garb and occasional garbled talk will reveal them as former sorcerers and witches of Attaryl and Bessis, killed during the confrontation between the two schools. Their spirits have been bound to protect the grounds — and they give vicious chase, calling on fire magic and wooing animals to help their hunt of invaders.
■ Run. Run fast.
■ Only two antidote owls emerge at night, drawn to drink from the forest's (shallow, broad) lake water. They are a mated pair, highly sensitive to sound, likely to escape on the first few attempts of capture and indifferent to magic. Farmhouse lesson: careful with the lake waters. The hands of bound spirits might seek to pull innocents in.
■ Owl feathers, ground and thinned with water, can create a highly potent cure that will take days to return a patient to full health — their hearts, eaten whole, can give one person instant recovery. Up to you, if you want to be that asshole.
ii.
After the healers have served their preliminary pronouncements, his bones as needles — their cautious, curious, weary examination knotting the flesh of him back around the glass shards of condemnation. When he is reshaped by pitying wet eyes and foregone conclusions, when he knows as they know, that the carcass might persevere a handful of days longer, but the mind may wish to conceive the merits of parting cruelties, of final words.
Paralysed on the sitting sofa, he retreats in old composure, in familiar obedience. Rest, they say. He rests for want of elsewhere to go. He has hurt before, born wounds that had yet the dignity to bleed him, to claim of him in graphic detail the gift of his body's waters, red. He has hurt, but this teases — an invisible, incomprehensible foe, like the winds of scattered plague.
He will die here. He died sixteen years ago, on the wrong rim of a cliff's abyss. What difference, now? ( He returned. )
Beside Lan Wangji, he hears the boy-man. The boy-elder. The monster. Shivers, and the tremor carries, wrecks the lines of his back, bows it in increments. His mouth opens dried, tongue scintillated by the prospect of sharing — rot. Poison, in thin filigree.
Let him share what he is, let him spill. One moment's weakness, gelid. He may sharpen himself to become a brave blade, after. "We do not."
You are wise, elder, you have lived your time. You know our cause lost.
no subject
It would be been a blatant lie that luck hadn't played some part in how both Five and his sister avoided the poison. If they'd put it in his drink, he would have been just as doomed as Lan Wangji. Still, it's strange to hear him so accepting, and more than a little hard to understand.
If it had been Vanya, he might not be so level headed about this. He wouldn't have asked how to fix it, he simply would have. He's lived a long life, but that life doesn't get to be over until his family are safe in the right timeline. All of his family. Nothing short of that will ever be enough, and he doesn't care how many times he has to bring them back to get there. He only considers the consequences when the risks matter to him. They're supposed to matter.
"You have time." For lack of something better to say. He's never really figured out what to do about Lan Wangji, never really understood how he felt about him, so he's an odd fit to be offering any words of comfort. He takes a step towards him and frowns. "Did they help at all?"
no subject
Arha. Hatisse. They were soulmates once. What death parts, romance and legends cannot rekindle. Learn this, if nothing else.
Beneath the mellow light of wan candle, he feels a child, feverish — overcome with the frantic exhilaration of ripping the world with his bare hands, leaving no beggarly shreds, if it is not his own to have. Healers dally, inundating the senses with astringent platters of fresh-lit incense, as if to humble the sense of smell that would wane first.
...may it be smell. He suffers from the inevitable weakness of each swordsman, dependent on sight and hearing, sister-resources only second to qi. May it be smell that dissipates —
No. Let it be nothing.
"I have a son." And the wisped translation, for ears foreign to sixteen years of grief and duty, coalesced in one human shape. A boy, now man. In all things, Wei Ying's and Wangji's better. "I shall hunt time."
Carve it, dissect it. Steal it from starved hands.
no subject
Too soon to tell. But he does know it'll get worse before it gets better, and Five finds he's strangely attuned to his suffering. There were enough close calls in the apocalypse before he had a better understanding of what was safe to eat for him to imagine what he's going through. Added with the frustration of being used as a prop in some campaign he pretended to support. If it were him, he'd be furious.
They should never have gotten involved in politics.
Just before he starts pacing again, Wangji surprisingly comes to his senses. The moment he mentions his son he seems to find his will to live, and Five can feel a tug at the edge of his mouth at his conclusion. Hunt time. What a concept.
"Good plan," Five mutters, still hovering inexplicably by. He could say it's because he's waiting to gather more information, but a faint internal pull informs him of what he's successfully ignored going on ten minutes now. He twists and yanks at his hair as he looks down at Wangji. "Shit. That's really bad, isn't it?"
To the side he thinks he hears the healers speaking to themselves again, and Five swallows the anguish he felt bubbling up again to try to listen. He breathes in and out a few times, and nods to himself. It sounds like they're still trying to come up with ideas.
"...There's probably some magic cure they're working on. Maybe they're waiting to get paid."
no subject
And he hears the bubbled, chirped counsel of healers each way, the rushed verbosity of their collusion. Wonders, under wash of dulled light, if it will be sight that flees him first, or the whet edge of his ears.
"Weak men chase thundered glory," he murmurs, faint to his own awareness. And the lord, Macaluso, he is not strong. Strength slept in his blood, when he called forth strangers for champions, broke ties with his own kin to seek custody of his grandfather's title.
The better man would have brokered knights among his court people. The better man does not haunt these halls, his shadow meek.
"His hands would have doled the cure." Loudly, publicly, to great splendour. Macaluso is but a ghost unwilling, unworthy to breathe Zewu-Jun's breath.
no subject
The man doesn't appear to be in any shape to do much more than spout his thought provoking adages like he's choosing words to be remembered by. Five tries to distance himself from his agony, but he doesn't move beyond shifting uncomfortably and adjusting his sleeves. He's right that they don't seem to know what the cure is for all their discussion.
"They should have cleared out the kitchen by now." For some reason, he keeps up the conversation, if only to hear himself think. Finding who left the poison would be his priority. Five could try tracking them down himself, and if it had been his family he might have if not gone to Vannozza directly. Family he needs to keep track of before they jump to the wrong conclusions. He will as soon as he gets some answers.
Five is hardly anyone's preferred company, and ordinarily he would have left by now, but he lingers while he attempts to hide that he could feel any part of his pain. "Does your son know?"
no subject
"Elder," and what is this, but humour, the bitterest ginseng twitching his mouth's corners down. Elder, ancient, confined in the glasswork of a diminutive body, house to frustrations. "You would trust not trust this to your sisters."
Why, then, ask if Lan Wangji — negotiating the displacements of mass and air and his flesh surrendering a stand — would trouble his one son's heart in kind? If these are his last days, let them be lived like the splendour of sunset. Let him breathe.
His nature betrays itself — walks first, the sea of people splintering itself to win his passage. Let it be so, arrogantly brokered.
"Come. Sickness calls to sickness." Stale air, the perpetuity of desperate wet eyes, and distantly, a fevered groan. To persist here is to succumb to the despair Five would spit upon, creature of cruelties. "You intend to search the kitchens."
For trace, perhaps, if not of the poison, then of the affiliations of the man named criminal. Wangji thinks, however wavered his balance, he grasps the spider silk that weaves these inquiries, whole.
no subject
Five doesn't keep things from his siblings to spare their feelings; it's too easy for them to get distracted, and they get into shit, and if he's not careful he can end up with a bigger problem than he has. With Lan Wangji he imagines it's more of a matter of pride and not wanting his son to see him in this state. As if word isn't already spreading that half of them were poisoned.
Which is what he needs to focus on. Someone tried to kill him and his sister. He may not be in perfect health, but one look at the way Wangji fights to get upright and he knows the bullet he dodged.
"What, are you going to be a visual aid?" He scoffs and shakes his head, the asshole can barely walk. — The kitchen isn't a bad place to start though. If there is anyone left, they'll know something, and he's persuasive when he wants to be. He can blink over and be back by the time they come up with alternate plans.
He nearly turns to do just that, but he looks the other up and down one more time first. "Do you know what it was, or did you eat everything?"
no subject
He cut of his confection, a mere, tentative morsel. Poison might have slept beastly on the blade.
No matter. The lesson, humbly learned, as if he were a disciple: trust nothing, no man. Not his table, his allies. Not his shadow.
He walks with the certainty of a man facing his noose, knowing the seas of people part for him — pity, glistened in dark eyes, mellowed by candlelight. Enough of the child rests still in his soul to find appeasement, when he teases a brazier down from its walled perch, in passing.
The kitchens, a worm's gut of stranded noise and claustrophobia, the rush of servants. Walk the line. He balances, one foot, and the next, until the simple exercise of function, past shock, takes the mantle of him. Rumour lives in this world, spreads like living flame. Already, some semblance of word has gone shared, for the knowing, pitiful glances thrown Lan Wangji's way like pearls in beggars' hands. At least, they step aside for him, and he neglects their mercy. Five. Focus only on the boy.
"You may have first turn with the findings." A bribe, know it so, sickly and saccharine. "My son need learn nothing."
no subject
His attention trails back to Lan Wangji, who seems to be moving around easier than he thought he would when he first found him. Not that it makes him look any less like he's about to keel over. If he thinks he can fool his son if he runs into him, he's got another thing coming. It can't be improving.
"You'd better hope they come up with something then." He huffs another sigh and looks around the room until he can make a note of where Vanya is. No one seems to be hassling her, but he doesn't want to be gone long and risk something happening.
That was the plan, but as soon as he pulls on his powers to go, they decide at that moment to push back. He tries again, only to have the blue light in his hands fizzle out and he swears under his breath. Of course he's already running on empty. He should have eaten before he came, he should have slept. He should have done something about the curse that makes him too aware of the sickness around him.
"Later." He bites out, frowning at anyone who might have turned their head at the sight of his failed attempt to teleport. Give it a few minutes and he can probably do it, but he's not going to struggle with it as long as someone is watching him. "It's too crowded anyway. This isn't a good time."
no subject
He remembers: a long, dark alley. Five, scattered across the alleyways, glimpsed here one heartbeat, distant the next. Lan Wangji, struggling to keep pace, lacking navigational direction. He remembers, nothing explained.
Enough reveals itself now, flesh unskinned. His eyes slant, half the frown of concentration, half the strain of sight that starts to taper and dissipate at its edges. Convulsive, it will gasp and breathe and excuse itself in deeper moments of loss, later. Not yet, so. "Your strength does not self-generate."
There is an external, exhaustible reservoir that feeds Five's... ability. His condition. It does not string back to a core, unravelling in exercise, a muscle of magic drawing from the caster's resources to complete its task. It is... a stranger, distant treasury.
no subject
"I'm only human," he answers, smiling up at him. There are many difference between his abilities and magic, and as far as he can tell the energy his takes is one of them. Ordinarily it took a lot longer for him to run out, which is. Inconvenient. "It's a long way to the kitchens and I haven't eaten."
That's why he's not currently doomed. If Wangji could focus on that, it might help him.
"Fortunately, my sister hasn't either. I have all the time I need to find out who tried to kill us." She at least skipped dessert. Five glances back to the healers, still muttering and looking more grim by the minute. "Who knows how many were plotting this. He did say not to trust any of them."
no subject
The lesson, learned thrice over: he does not reach first. Awaits obediently, as with creatures that learn the sharpness of their teeth and the hard nature of their bite, for Five to yield himself first, in degrees. Men pour trust like water, first syphoned, then openly awarded as the calamity of deluge. Between them only well-walked marble and a thin, trembled rivulet.
"I have..." There is a slackness to this, to his thoughts, his desiccated lips. Poison streams, erodes, houses. Makes a canyon of his body, slows it in gentle steps. He reaches within himself to purify, first the thin frown of his brow, then his voice of tremors. "There is energy within me. That can transfer."
Qi, though whether it is sufficient in its current traffic between fending Wangji's own weakness and the natural depletion of fatigue, he cannot say. As for compatibility, only the attempt may seal it.
no subject
He meets his gaze, trying to determine how much he's willing to believe in this previously unknown ability. For one, he's surprised he has any energy to spare. Maybe he recognizes that he is the one most capable of solving their crisis, or at least someone he doesn't need to protect. It's that, or all this time he was waiting for a moment of weakness to strike back at him. That last possibility seems unlikely, which is hardly a solid foundation for trust, but it's more than he might have allowed him a few weeks ago. That he even offers a choice is different enough for Five to take notice.
The debate continues until he finally reaches out his hand. An unspoken warning remains in his posture, the knife in his sleeve within easy grasp. If this is the moment Lan Wangji decides to betray him, he'll end his suffering sooner rather than later. If not, he'll follow through with his intentions and begin his search.
no subject
Intervals and crevices in the stream of dormant energy present themselves. He chases, mind alight with wonder, until he trusts the union of force and flesh enough to intercede with the scattered, drowned fluidity of his magic. It scratches of him. Tears. Asks more than his golden core, the generator of his body, may freely give at this time of startled function. No matter. To the starved man, even half a morsel should do for feeding, and the chief cultivator's resources yet stand a feast. He thieves from himself, directs, rehomes —
And finds, in futility remembered, as with Wei Ying before. An overwhelming, startled silence. The absence of an anchor, energy only swirling within the child's body, seeking points of lower pressure to fill, an easy, uniform distribution. Enough to boost his resources, but — and Lan Wangji's touch dissipates, the transfer scant but sufficient so as to not overwhelm a novice recipient —
"Use swiftly." And was Wangji's voice so coarse before, his pallor so deepened? No matter, either. "There is nothing within you for it to latch."
The current highs of the donation will be succeeded by corresponding lows.
no subject
Back then it had all seemed to be part of a ritual, acting on superstitions that he knows now didn't help him avoid any consequences. This time he can tell as soon as he starts that something is happening. A sensation like a pulse of static or a rush of a current passes between them. His nerves spark to life and he's swiftly and alarmingly awake. What couldn't have been more than a minute seems to last in a suspended space of time, and he watches him intently as he tries to get a sense of how he's doing this.
When he finishes it's the best he's felt since magic was last used on him, forcing him to sleep for longer than he had in weeks, if he'd then gone on to down several pots of coffee. If he hadn't watched him do it, he would swear he'd given him some similar type of drug. There's still an underlaying anguish beneath it, but it no longer feels like suppressing it is taking all of his willpower. His natural limits are suddenly wiped clean.
Five nearly misses what Wangji says next and gives him a confused look, but doesn't ask for clarity. The man appears drained, more than he already did, and it's strange to think he willingly handed over what little reserves he had. If this is temporary, he can't waste time thinking about what he did and why, or what he owes him for the favor.
This time when he pulls on his powers, they respond easily. He takes a deep breath and nods, then disappears in the next instant in a flash of light.