headed straight for the witches' castle

[groundrules]

Welcome to the bashful event covering 17 September – 9 October, working double duty as a test drive meme (TDM).

Existing players can strut their stuff here, or make separate logs & network posts. Our TDMing guests are stranded in this playground, but can include network options among play prompts.

If you’re test driving a character, you can apply them until 8 October without a game invite. Apps stay open beyond that, but you might need an invite or please get in touch @ groundrules to figure something out..

SCALE THE TOWER

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Cousins Macaluso and Vannozza Spina vie for the favour of the witches of Bessis, in their bid to succeed their grandfather Bonaccorso as liege of magical citadel Taravast. In exchange for their endorsement, the Bessis have asked both electoral candidates to present extraordinary sorcery at a fete commemorating the Bessis truce with fellow court witches of Attaryl.

On the day of the distasteful masque held in the upper levels of the Bessis tower, characters assigned to support Macaluso and Vannozza will split into two espionage missions — one upstairs alongside courtiers, charlatans and the Bessis, and another deep below, crossing abandoned aqueducts. Characters can participate in either effort, but should be discreet if they’re working against their patron.

It’s all fun and games if you’re enjoying Bessis hospitality upstairs — test drive characters might be rating their hotel stay a little less enthusiastically.

TDM TOURISTS | UPSTAIRS (TEAM MACALUSO) | DOWN BELOW (TEAM VANNOZZA) | COMMON TIMELINE | NOTES & MAP



TDM TOURISTS

Days ago, you woke up sequestered in an immense bird cage, chained near the ceiling of a tall, dark room that once served as a library or academic hall. Imprisoned with you are several strangers, equally warded from their supernatural powers and partly sedated — all the better to amuse the nearly two dozen (visibly) undead who roam the room, despite being loosely fettered to posts. They often swing for your cage, but fail to reach it.

■ Sorcerer sentries briefly release characters daily to feed or bathe in a repurposed nearby quarter with a large pool.

■ Characters receive basic devices that translate speech and writing, so they can understand their caretakers’ instructions. All along, the guards urge, Keep the animals distracted.

■ The undead reek of burning and wail their hurts. They are gifted in telepathy and often mentally share memories of carnage — two armies of sorcerers, one raining fire upon its enemies. At night, the undead seek to control the minds of caged characters, luring them to come down or harm others.

■ Necromancers sometimes visit to study the undead. The latest necromancer guest temporarily immobilises the creatures and throws three bundles of identical keys into the cage — he reveals he is employed by a Merchant, who wants the outsiders to travel east and return to their homes. They are currently in Taravast, captives of the witches of Bessis, who hold annual celebrations tonight. The keys will help with escaping the cage and accessing nearby tunnels.

■ The necromancer leaves behind rope, two daggers, and three potion vials that generate mist once smashed on the ground. Leave within an hour of your dinner, he says, before releasing the undead from his magic.

■ Get out. As soon as you can, running like hell from guards and the undead. If caught, the undead will rip you to bathe in your body’s waters and ease their burns.

■ The underground tower tunnels are patrolled by guards, who can be overpowered by groups. Characters will recover any supernatural powers within 40 minutes of leaving their prison. Escape tip? Steal the guards’ clothes.

■ The tunnels inevitably lead to the aqueducts, allowing you to meet Vannozza’s group.

» GET WET



UPSTAIRS

The halls of the Bessis sprawl over a pristine ivory tower, whose walls refract light in homage to the witches’ devotion to fire.

The tower receives guests today to celebrate the armistice between the sorcery schools of Bessis and Attaryl. The two groups futilely sought to slaughter each other many moons ago, with the Bessis notoriously gaining the upper hand — explaining the tense smiles of the Attaryl witches on premise.

The event is a standard Taravast masque: if there were coin to spare, someone poured it into the obscene dining displays and alcoholic fountains. Enjoy dimmed lights, the rare pickpocket or recreational narcotic — or test your luck at gambling tables, where winners can claim a forcibly extorted secret from losers over games of dice or cards.

Come masked and visibly unarmed — weapons are confiscated at the doors. Smuggle them in. Just outside the tower, take a walk through labyrinthine walled gardens surrounding a deep water moat and leading to abandoned aqueduct pipelines.

OF NOTE:

■ Magical sentries — armed with swords and fire spells — watch the banquet halls, stairs and outside grounds.

■ Bessis practitioners showcase fire, wind, water and air dances in the reception halls, along with performing token duels. Get involved, if you want.

■ Don Urbano, a respected Bessis sorcerer returned from abroad, announces his betrothal with Wen Qing, as orchestrated and financed by Beitang Moran.

■ Come sundown, Macaluso invites fete guests, Vannozza and the Bessis to join him on the balconies and behold the canal moats, where swims his recently captured white dragon. The creature is magnificent but tense, its ice power crackling.

ASSIGNMENTS:

■ Run recon of the halls. Keep track of guards, divert them from the aqueducts and alert your friends downstairs of their presence. Be obnoxious, loud and attention-grabbing when sentries get near the opened aqueduct entrance.

■ One of the night’s most profligate gamblers, Caterina Zalle, leads a coalition that produces magical weapons. She is allegedly in talks with forces abroad that fight their undead oppressors. Even tipsy, she only speaks with those who best her at the gambling table — pair up and figure out how to cheat improve your chances, then drop a line here to win donna Caterina’s answer(s).

» SMILE AND CARRY ON



DOWN BELOW

A jaded spirit, Vannozza knows Macaluso’s historical patronage of the Bessis makes them unlikely to favour her. Better to take advantage of leaked information: the Bessis hide a secret that’s required them to mysteriously invite necromancers each day. Learn what the Bessis are shrouding, so Vannozza can extort them later.

The lady offers her protegees — and anyone dragged along for the ride — a map to abandoned aqueducts accessible through the sentry-patrolled gardens that surround the tower of the Bessis. Guards will be thinner at the start of the evening festivities, but keep in touch with your counterparts upstairs, who can distract them while you infiltrate.

■ The aqueducts can be entered through a shielded gateway that will require characters to dig extensively for access. Divert the guards creatively: use magic, tricks, everyone is a hapless beggar or a drunk...

■ The intricate waterways once served Bessis sorcerers who specialise in water arts. The pipelines range from roomy and rusted to highly claustrophobic and slick with a coating of dark tar that gradually starts to follow you.

■ You find out quickly why the pipes were abandoned: the tar starts to accrue behind you, taking your shape and diplomatically doing its best to choke or drown you. Luckily, the creatures disperse after scant minutes — characters who traversed the Stairs of Sighs will recognise this is the same molten tar found in the rocky corridors.

■ Brace yourselves — for a short stretch, the canal dips into the moat surrounding the tower, home to Macaluso’s dragon. The creature is currently peaceful, but its constant chill has largely frozen the waters. Swim across the moat through ice pellets to re-enter the canals.

■ The aqueducts ease characters into pool quarters, which show signs of recent use for bathing. In the nearby corridors, guards are posted before a room that erupts in frequent howls. Get in, somehow —

■ ...and find a large study hall with an immense suspended cage, a series of freshly freed newcomers and undead witches, who use telepathy, levitation and light mind control to their advantage.

■ Now, you take your newcomer fools, choose between returning through the aqueducts or daring the heavily guarded tower corridors — and you run.

» UP WE GO



EVERYONE TOGETHER NOW

Nothing spices a party like nearly two dozen undead witches that seek to salve their burn wounds with the blood of the living. Some undead invade the banquet halls, others the gardens, while a few head into the aqueducts. They use telepathy, levitation and mind control diligently — and wear the decayed insignia of witches of Attaryl.

The chaos and the undead that enter the moat agitate the water dragon, who goes on hours of rampage, breathing sheets and walls of ice around the tower and effectively locking everyone within for two-three days.

...with the wandering undead. The witches of Bessis assist with fire magic and torches, but it’s every man for himself. Beware: the dragon starts with magical attacks, but quickly progresses to throwing itself bodily to topple the tower.

TO-DO LIST:

■ Calm or immobilise the berserk dragon to ease the ice storms
■ Capture the fire-fearing undead
■ Protect and evacuate Taravast’s useless 1%
■ Stay alive?

NOTES & MAP

■ Old timers: GO HERE to vote on the fates of the dragon and later, the undead! And ask any questions you might have.

■ TDMers: TDM events count as game canon if you app in! TDM questions here.

Comments

[weifinder]

A smile, teeth bared, bright, and he laughs. Wear what pleases him, and he'd have to know more about that, he supposes, outside of wearing what's convenient, what's purposeful, what masks and misguides. Purples and blues and blacks, the bruise he'd bear, white layered close to his heart.

Here and now, a wraith that moves with squelching footsteps, ushering water with each step forward, cold but shy of freezing, independent of the moat and its carnage. More ice shattered and rock and décor strewn across its surface, swallowed by the dragon's waves, and less of the blood, which would define it should those trapped inside be forced outward prematurely.

He can see them, in that moment. The torn panic of their masks and magnificent clothing; the scents of burning hair and paper, of smoke lingering and eclipsed by the acid bite of winter. Bodies that could crowd balconies, pressed up to gnarled and jutting thresholds to a fall that would end in splashed, shattered red.

Blinks the afterimage away, to find no shadows spilled so far, but their progress inexorable toward the screams that precede such shadows, thick and heavy and heady enough, were he another man, were this another era. The question asked, and he steps close, shoulder to shoulder, gaze on a wounded man's face before it shifts slowly away, looking forward. Always forward, in the end.

"I tired," he says, that it has happened and could happen, but he smiles, teeth bared, and it is a matter of his past. "I learned to find room to breathe, reasons for joy. Even in the worst of it, Lan Zhan, we have to find the light."

His dark eyes pulled by elliptic orbit to study Lan Zhan's face once more, and he reaches for him, a small shift of hand to brush fingers against knuckles.

"The carnage cannot be all that we allow to define us. And it tries. You know that better than I, I think." Sixteen years of chasing chaos, and the heart of it had always been light and blinding and as hollow as the centre of a lightning struck tree.

He fumbles for his flute, his instrument of horror in one era, his named and thoughtful companion, steadier than his own heart. Salvaged by Jiang Cheng once, and from a time of his worst darkness and desperation, named by the woman who had raised him in the only way that had taught him half of what it can be to love. Wei Wuxian plays, and steps forward, nods for Lan Zhan to take the balcony first. He will follow, but here, also, to clear some of the way for the panicked and the frightened, who will not recall him or thank him for it, when his song rises stronger than the melding of bone from sundered edge to sundered edge. The body that responds dead but living, and the witch that streaks past lingering with scents of burning despite no new burns in injury. She carries with her, always will, that haunting, that hatred.

But she carries with her that power, too, and it is hers that moves the wreckage that turns the screaming passage into louder shrieks before she's sent off again, giving survivors and avenue forward and across, away from whatever haunts the far side. Back to the dragon and its writing tantrums, merited and owed, and there is no life or unlife as sacred as hope in a moment where Wei Wuxian forgets what it means to breathe pain, and simply bolts sideways, away from the flame that reaches toward them, and looks for that balcony, each cliffside conquered in a spire's worth of shuddering near-relief.

[downswing]

Light. Optimism. Stitched by ignorance and prayer, coated by fresh integuments of hazard. Wei Ying advises — and flees, all flash and flicker and lightning bolt that swells and smites, bound up and up and scraping, scratching the dust skin off stones. Storm air shrouds him and crackles, electric and dispersing only when Wei Ying's creature tramples the ground before him, spearing the corridors.

And Lan Wangji, only drifting behind or before them, calculated in his step. Flitting, from side to side of the smoked corridor, in part to avoid — limbs shivered by the sinister crescendo of Wei Ying's song — playing the pale-garbed, strident target. In part, also, to steer clear of Wei Ying's vantage, to leave the room for him and his blind and undiscerning witch.

You have this under control, Wangji needn't say, and abandons Wei Ying to study the fine, weighted device that brokers their daily communications and the developments of their party. Eleven, rallying the people. Back to the wall, Lan Wangji hastens through his exchanges, concluding what reedy screams already sculpt as a plain priority — they must evacuate the people, remove them from beneath the range of the dragon's shadow, should the creature fall.

Wei Ying, wooing his ghosts, must hear the direction. More fool he and mouth yet dry, Lan Wangji intends to shout the instruction, choking on soot shrapnel, deafened by the wild, fractured yells of the civilian crowd. There are ways to draw Wei Ying's attention, from a distance — most of them rely on the subtlety of missives, the failing option of sound.

The time is nigh, then, for a heavier hand. What sentry corpse Wangji divests of his bow and arrows, he cannot say, only that the gear shines bright with the polish of castle make and castle wear. He weighs both with the brief unfamiliarity of every man who has long delegated an art as a lesser, secondary skill, and must now depend on it. Then, he unspools Wei Ying's heating talisman from his sleeve, binding it to the arrow's tip, while a second, plain parchment piece, his letter, is scribbled and braided into the feather fletching. Fed an excess of qi by the force of Wangji's intervention, the warming talisman catches flame — to the slanted scowl of undead, surrounding him. Sheer fortune: the witches of Bessis, casting stronger fire, helpfully distract them.

When Lan Wangji shoots, struggling to peer at distance, the flaming arrow lands like splintered sunlight in one of the narrow nooks that carve stone ground at Wei Ying's feet. Lan Wangji thinks, all considered, not his poorest mark. (Thinks too, if he were Jin Zixuan, he would suffer an embarrassment of the Patriarch's comeuppance, within heartbeats.)

On one side of the scribbled parchment by the fletching, Wei Ying.

On the other, They intend to cast the dragon asleep. Leave me to rally those civilians that left the tower. Mind those within. We meet at sundown.

[weifinder]

Sharp thud of metal in wood, or stone, or whatever forms this carapace of a tower takes, his eye caught by motion and flame and what else, further away: the man who sent the arrow flying, Lan Zhan, a tattered, beautiful living flame that flickers to white.

The message caught up in a motion down to his knee, and the collection of parchment woven in fletching; his name, such as it is, and the plan of action.

He lifts the paper to his lips, and lets it rest there, the closest thing to a blown kiss before he nods and slips into the interior shadows. He will be pulled out again, as the dragon becomes a settled beast, as magic collides and he's brought down to small size and even exhausted, he will find it in him to navigate the streets he's learned and guide two other men to the docks from the path of least obvious tracking, but that is for hours still.

Hours before the cold seas, hours before the sun sets, and he will live and stand and breathe and ensure he and Lan Zhan share that much of themselves, for whatever else they do not right now. Trust and faith, stitched together by circumstance that pulls the better out of them.

The chaos, and disaster, they both know how to most easily survive in the midst of, when silent.