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groundrules) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
westwhere2021-04-26 07:49 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2021-04-26 07:49 pm
sa-hareth | the imperious
But you’re short on time for belly shaving. In a brief window of weather opportunity, the long-stalled, majestic vessel Imperious has approached the port citadel of Sa-Hareth for discharge, bringing along the dregs of her reputation in slave trafficking. She docks at 00:49 of the morning, with the captain, a two-man delegation, the chief of vessel trade and several guards heading to customs to declare her merchandise, then liaise with high merchant Torsten.
Onboard the Imperius, they leave behind an ancient treasure Torsten’s eastern partners have commissioned for delivery to reinforce local undead warlord Unhalad — along with several captives, fit for sustenance.
And in the roiling sea, circling the vessel, restless ripples as ice storms stoke.
NEW CHARACTERS | HERE COMES THE FRESH (FISH) MEAT
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• New characters find themselves aboard the vessel Imperious, in the last five to seven-day stretch of its voyage at sea. They come awake before a mirror in an otherwise wastefully deserted hall in the ship’s hull, to the sound of dying whispers. • Captives are temporarily drained and missing abilities or memories. Players can use this to cap powers as much as needed so they don’t sink the ship! They will recover their bearings in two and four days, but may be brought back to feed the mirror periodically. • Characters targeted to fuel the mirror again will spend a restless night of nightmares and hellish whispers prior. Memories of interacting with the mirror are nebulous. Those who recently faced it are given white masks during their recovery, which put them at ease. Those due to visit the mirror are offered red masks. • At sea, characters are kept unarmed and captive. They reside communally and must wash the decks, sew sails, or cleanse and gut the fish catch. • Sorcery aboard the Imperious allows characters to understand each other freely. |
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• While on deck, characters will notice a swarm of fishy pursuers — mermaids or their creature companions, who will attempt to hypnotically woo onlookers to bring them the mirror. Careful: they all have sharp fangs and appetites. • Two days before scheduled docking, vicious snow storms engulf Sa-Hareth and ice the seas, delaying the Imperious’ discharge. The mermaids fall increasingly sick as they circle the vessel in the cold. • After a time, the sea creatures return undead, feral and exclusively focused on the mirror, with some bodily throwing themselves against the ship in an attempt to submerge it to reach their target. • Finally, the Imperious docks, with some crew and sentinels exiting for formalities. Within the hour, explosions can be heard outside, and parts of the Imperious catch fire, sending most guards to investigate and leaving captives less closely monitored. • Run, fight your way out, find your dashing saviours, beware the fire and a sudden raid of (yes) humanoid undead aboard the vessel, jump into Sa-Hareths’ freezing embrace — just don’t fall overboard. • Characters will need to steal or receive thralled translation quartz pieces to understand each other once they’re off the Imperious. Guards have some; rescuers will bring more. • Inventory items can be recovered from the captain’s cabin. • Head here with all your mod questions! |
EXISTING PARTY | YO HO HO AND A BOTTLE OF... FIRE
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| • Word of the Imperious’ voyage spreads, but the vessel is delayed from docking by worsening weather conditions. • Ahead of the vessel’s discharge, characters may observe strange rippling in the water: mermaids and other sea creatures, circling the Imperious. They are alert, agitated, ready to hiss and claw if onlookers come near them. They speak incoherently of a coveted mirror. • Private guards are trotting around the port at Torsten’s behest, wary of a second robbery. Heist participants scouting the port should cloak and shield themselves as much as possible. • As the storms strike, the mermaids perish and return as undead. They grow exponentially violent as they hunt the mirror, actively trying to pull those who walk the piers into the water and shred them to pieces, to coat themselves in their living warmth. • The storms let off enough for the Imperious to dock. Seagulls alert Su Xunxian of its discharge past midnight, with Karsa also sending word. Her people use the party’s 13,000 coins to set off minor explosions and fireworks in front the Imperious, starting small fires aboard the vessel. • Characters can infiltrate the Imperious to rescue the captives in the cargo hull — an exhausted, confused and masked lot, who will need Karsa’s quartz pieces. Guards and slaves mention captives’ possessions are in the captain’s cabin. • It’s about to get crowded on the Imperious. Sighted, now and then: Unhalad’s undead, Karsa and her cloaked people, Haltham and even some of Anurr’s deathless factions — recognisable because of their red sleeve arm tattoos. In the water, mermaids start brutally attacking the Imperious. • Those who search the ship will find an eerie, raided hall, with a large shattered mirror. • Return the captives to the House of Dew. The final fate of the Imperious is in your hands. Consider damage to the port! • Go here with any mod questions! |
OLD & NEW (AND MAYBE BLUE) CHARACTERS
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Congratulations, you’re off the floating death trap. Characters can trot through the freezing Sa-Hareth, but beware the effects of long-term exposure to the magical cold: listlessness, fatigue, the urge to walk out into the mountains, and to burrow oneself in warmth. Head back to the luxurious, if declining House of Dew brothel that has been offering sanctuary to arrivals so far. For now, mistress Tamaiu also welcomes newcomers into the decrepit servants’ quarters. Old and arriving characters will have to share dinner, hot beverages and blankets for a few days, while further accommodations are arranged. The sorceress Karsa will rally newcomers to briefly explain the status quo: captives are in the frozen western citadel of Sa-Hareth. They have been rescued from the undead forces of reining warlord Unhalad, who faces new pressure to defend his territory from his deposed, but resurging rival, Anurr. Unhalad and his brethren use otherworld arrivals as an exotic resource, to absorb their skills or vital strength. The land’s only hope is to evacuate these strangers through long-lost eastern portals — a voyage in the works under the stewardship of her master, the Merchant. The long-unused portals might return everyone home, but the trip requires discretion and finance, and the weather’s an enemy now. Karsa will withdraw shortly, probably in a foul temper. She has not found her mirror. This isn’t a party, but celebrate staying alive. |
OOC HOUSEKEEPING
- • The event is optional, but counts as game canon if you participate.
• Applications opens at 00:01 GMT @ 3 May. If you think you’d like to throw one in, dropping a comment on the reserve / notice list helps give a heads up on how many apps to prepare for! Thank you in advance!
• Participating in the Test Drive Meme is not mandatory to apply, but all new characters accepted in this session will have been brought in as captives aboard the Imperious.
how did I end up second, wtf | brothel, where some might say this woman belongs!!!
Words, warmth, explanation. There, in a bowl, honeyed congee. Another's cup, sediments of clotted tea, oversteeped. Acrid burn, singeing Lan Wangji's tongue by proxy. Scent stakes, scent does not stab. Ice, the howling wind distant outside, kills.
This was to be expected, but his lips don't part. Force of cold-stiff fingers smoothens the base clay of his own cup, tighten cruelly. He sees her early, seeks her late. Thinks, more the fool, if he is first, if he is ready — if the heavens tally and are satisfied to absorb all laughter at their mockery, whatever its provenance — then Wei Ying's gasped debt of awe lessens. What difference, then? Foremost diplomat among the sects, the chief cultivator knows his duties. Let him be first before her, then.
Shuffled, the narrow movements of their knees syncopate, then deafen. No privacy, after the witch Karsa removes herself, no patience for prey. Knelt before the corpse roused as mistress Wen Qing, Lan Wangji is only the white of his silks and the silent thrum of late-night, bated anticipation. He raises his borrowed cup between them in a doubled grasp, follows the careful pale spill of it, from her right flank to the left. Wine, diluted. Dull smears on splintered floor, may the wood drink what this dead cannot take as her right of libation. Beneath, may old soil and rotted root and the chills of the land accept their due.
After, he sits back, back straight, cup discarded — the pull of one sleeve caught in his other, settling hand. Nerves: distantly, he knows the sickness — remembers it, from when it last struck, in early youth. He does not weather it well. Rasps — ]
Do we choose to greet, or to Inquire?
[ A spirit's aggression dictates the beginnings, the protocols. And this, a body roused — to puppetry and the craftsman's doubtless satisfaction. A young woman, befitting the image of what must have been her execution day. Could Lanling not spare the dignity of whites? The expense of a silk shroud for her, the high daughter of a defunct clan.
But then, mercy upon Carp Tower: what man could have foreseen revival? The Patriarch, perhaps, but this exceeds even his work. ( He will sour for it. Settle, Wei Ying, with the tea. )
Madam, you were returned, at least, a perfect revenant, to blaspheme in glory. ]
only if she's the one running it
Not Lan Wangji.
Her eyes close as he tilts the cup, the bitter tea falling around her. Around them, people mill, and above them the careless whispers of a lively house. Hardly the place to be, the second heir of a respectable clan and the disgraced daughter of a now-dead clan.
He assumes her dead, and Wen Qing remembers walking to her death. This then must be her punishment. They had existed on borrowed time, inevitability written into the months she had in the Burial Mounds, and she repays that now, fresh from a frozen sea and granted shelter in the basement of a place she shouldn't even know exists.
A question and she opens her eyes, studies him. She's a doctor and there are few illnesses she's encountered and not been able to diagnose. But the Lan's are difficult to read, this young master especially so among them, revealing little. The hand gives away something, the raspy voice, the question itself.
No answer but an answer: ]
Hanguang-jun.
[ The title she remembers, although it feels weird to say it now, to greet him as such in this place. A small piece of home lost to her now.
She recalls the white robes she saw on the ship, the people she met, the rest of the passengers. He was not among them, so he must have been part of those rescuing the ship. Surprising, and yet not. Her attention again drawn to the hand holding his sleeve, she offers— ]
More tea, in exchange.
[ For the tea he spilled before her, for the hand that does not shake but by force of will. A cup held out, arms extended, poised on the edge of a bow. ]
no subject
Too long, since he last bowed his eyes from the sun. He lifts them in spilled increments.
Was she — is Qing of the Wen beautiful? Poets and artists might suppose it. The eye, objective, sees: meat, granular alignments of the unexpected and classical convention, geometries matches. Light taps of his freed fingers on his thigh, he counts the petty imperfections that place her at the periphery of Sizhui's likeness. Ache, where his heart beats too full, to count similarities. ]
Over sixteen years since your passing.
[ He saw no body, no scattered ash, no shroud or restitution. No evidence, but spatters of sound fleeing troubled mouths in Lanling, where gossip propagates, coin for survival. Hyperbole distorts history, painted Wei Ying in every coat of soot and lime to hide the mould of the sects' communal indignity. Could the truth of Wen Qing's execution have overstretched itself?
He drinks, and he drinks, and he does not wish wine, cannot bear it. Wonders, absently, if the truth of her robes is silk strewn over hollow husk. ]
It would suit us both to remember.
[ But he has mistaken the game once before, sees the walls constrict themselves like the fragile, trembling esophagus of a gluttonous snake, and they, a meal between two people. Mouthfuls of ache and game.
Should need rise, can he trouble her with recounting this particular anniversary? Duty commands the answer: yes, with token regrets and academic difficulties. Earlier, the sorceress broke the orbit of her realm with a few incisive strikes of revelation. Lan Wangji can betray the cultivation world with as little preamble. Must learn, even as itch grazes the round inside of his elbows, eats the back of his knees. Run. ]
Do you?
no subject
The foremost cultivator, second in the rankings only to his brother, Wen Qing knows. The memories of Wei Wuxian waxing poetic over him are fresh still, remembered clearly, no longer muddled as they had been on the ship.
She died. She does not remember it, but she remembers marching away from her home, putting aside the blessed months she had with her brother and her friend, her extended family. She remembers dressing in her old robes, Qishan Wen's finest, fixing her hair, fixing Wen Ning's robes for him, ever a sister. ]
Remember what?
[ No direct question, not from him, but she will not answer what is not directly asked. Too many years in Wen Ruohan's care taught her well: watch your words carefully and tread lightly around power. And the man across from her, for all the tremble in his hand, carries power. Always has, in the way of the noble sons of the cultivation clans.
Has he known indignity? The indoctrination camp, she remembers, walking wounded, without sword or spiritual weapon. An indignity forced by Wen Chao, glorifying in power, corrected eventually. Was that the worst? The indignities here, stuck in a house where neither one of them should be, are mild. What then lingers outside of this?
Is there an outside?
But no, best not to wonder, for wondering leads to hope. So far, no sign of her brother, no sign of Wei Wuxian. A balm, at least, that she has seen A-Yuan, and now Lan Wangji. Lightbearer indeed.
A small token, she offers: ] What do you wish me to recount?
no subject
They've learned — she then, him since. Evolved. And they knit and rise up now, disk and facet joint and vertebrae, like the quiet undulations of a serpent learning to strike unseen from water. Lean in and partake of their tea.
What is his wish of her? None unto no one. She was bones before she was his, and the chief cultivator owns in name but commands no true possessions. Beneath the pox spell of sinewy candle light, she's wan, beauty flickered and contorting. If not for her gauntness, she might have won suitors. If not for her name, she might have held them. You were honoured, before you were a curse. In the petalled curl of wisp-smoke, it strikes him as instinct, to tilt in when servants remember them with serving treys of the night's meal, and pick out a scrawny, yawning bowl of millet — Wei Ying's least favourite of the gruels, but comforting, familiar, hard.
Warm, when he distracts them both with nods and flourish, propping the plate on the tired wood slate before Wen Qing. He did not raise a Wen to misremember the dark, owlish look of hunger that sharpens them. Eat. Eat, then. Isn't this civil? Barring keep and company and circumstance and location, and the blood rusting thick and dusting on the innards of Wangji's sleeves, and the dreaded, gainless futility of the occasion — barring the minutiae, even Uncle would agree. Lend her civility and a cracked, faded spoon. Soy and scallion flakes, to please the mistress. A feast.
His tongue weighs harder than her misdeeds, roots rotting underwater. If he looks up at her before he is done with the spread, he will hurl every thread of his spite into needle and stitch her mouth silence-spelled shut. He looks only down. ]
If mistress Wen's hand stuttered, relieving the better man of his core.
[ If his should, if he were to demand — sixteen years' worth of restitution. She stood accomplice to a buried crime, dead with its victim. And they say the world is drained, drained of wretched stories to tell him, drained of it like pus from a once festered, but healing wound. ]
Recount that.
no subject
When was the last time she felt warm?
And then he asks. Hanguang-jun, imperious and perfect and older than she remembers, with knowledge of a secret that only three knew, and two of those secret bearers walked to their graves. Or at least she assumes she and Wen Ning died, even if the last thing she remembers is arriving at Carp Tower.
A secret then, now known by one other person, at least. Recount that, he demands, as though it is his right, his story to know. The surgery and the three days it took; the screams of agony that haunt her every time she looks at Wei Wuxian. In the aftermath, when she and Wen Ning parted from Wei Wuxian, when Jiang Cheng left the mountain, new knowledge burning in her mind, a core removed from one man and put into the dantian of another.
Part of her had been proud of it, that she had accomplished such a surgery from just reading a book. What surgeon could claim that?
Lan Wangji demands, expectation in the language of his body, even if he doesn't look at her. Noble and proud and foolhardy. He should have taken Wei Wuxian from the Burial Mounds when he'd had the chance, but no.
She looks away, too; it is too much to look at him and answer. ]
My hands never stutter.
[ Even in the worst of it, when a-Ning had to hold Wei Wuxian down and they had all been pale and strained, her hands had been steady. No mistake. It had a fifty percent chance of success and she had done it. ]
The core survived the surgery. Ask no more than that, Hanguang-jun. It is not your story to hear.
no subject
[ An aberration of violence, cleanly delivered. Bichen could weep her light just as well between blinks of amputation. Beauty does not stagger cruelty. Beauty, his mother's life lesson like the crackling of mould on silk tapestries, is pain.
What would it achieve? A simple solution, vengeance tallied in rat snake ink for the ledger, honour restored. His fingers churn beats of dissonance on hard floor, and he does not reach for his sword, only digs into wood as if he might unearth viscera and gossamer, where splinters answer first. Digs and stabs and lets kindling needle burn the underside of his thumb, graze beneath his nail — until the moment abstracts itself to pinpoints of the absurd, a quiet, blasphemous ache that Hanguang-Jun, war-anointed, broken within the last chi of his back's scar web, should not observe.
Breathe, and old quarrel lives with him, and the house joins him in synchrony. The man who finds peace within himself centres the world. He is one, he is whole, he is axis. He is untouchable, and yet this woman breaks gravity. ]
And that story would be mine.
[ And Qing of the Wen could not take it from him, then. Is that the way of it? Shall they trade? He drinks. Drinks again. Abstains, finally, when the flavour snags between burn mars. A tight, wet knot of disgust, contracting. ]
I ask humbly.
no subject
[ Wen Qing has spent her life the pawn of a man feared by the cultivation world. Threats roll off her shoulders, especially now, when she'd been given extra time— not just at the Burial Mounds, but here in this place. And although a threat to her hand isn't something she takes lightly— her hands, after all, are those of a surgeon— Lan Wangji has nothing on the sheer fear her uncle inspired.
It would solve nothing, and if Lan Wangji is too caught up in whatever is going on in his head to see that, Wen Qing isn't going to be the one to point that out.
She stares at Lan Wangji. Inappropriate, far too direct; he's older than she remembers, the trappings different. How different, she wonders? He knows the secret that should have died with her and Wen Ning; Wei Wuxian wouldn't have mentioned it. Who told him, how did they know? Did Wei Wuxian tell him? Questions that demand answers and yet, despite the audacity of Lan Wangji's request, she can't bring herself to ask in return. It reeks too much of hope. ]
Wei Wuxian found a procedure. It had a fifty percent chance of success. He asked, I refused, and he kept asking. [ She'd had to circumvent that stubbornness, in the end, the only way she knew how. ] It was a long surgery but a success. The golden core from one into another.
[ She can't even be proud of it. ]
no subject
What is left for her, besides? Watch the years grow on her, like the rings of wood entrails, pronounced and deepened. Watch her house and bear them, symbiotically, like the lichen of deserted temples. Watch the slowness that flurries the air when she breathes, the quiet, crepuscular anticipation of the world suspending itself to hear the exotic gift of a last Wen's pronouncement.
And know she gives herself to be seen.
He remembers the boy he was, the first time he beheld her. The abrasions that still marred Bichen like pox marks, when years of oil and polish had yet to settle the blade unto smoothness. The tentative cadence of his step, the lack of belonging. He has exorcised a hundred men besides that boy since, but there are occasions when he is summoned: just so, just now, with the willow tree's drop of his back, the tender, calculated curve, the push that final few specks of chi down, until his forehead nearly touches his folded hand and his bow before her completes without reservation.
If respect must be performed, let it be done beautifully. Uncle would agree. Hold the line. ]
Gratitude for your story. [ If not her deeds. Not her intentions. ] You took a core. I stole a child. [ From his name, his heritage, his memories. ] Debts rest settled between us.