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)
westwhere2022-01-03 07:56 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2022-01-03 07:56 pm
Entry tags:
- 2ha: chu wanning,
- asoiaf: daenerys targaryen,
- avatar: zuko,
- dragon quest xi s: eleven,
- final fantasy vii: rufus shinra,
- harry potter: lily evans,
- interlude: ellethia,
- kingdom of the wicked: emilia,
- kingdom of the wicked: wrath,
- oh! my emperor: beitang moran,
- oh! my emperor: su xunxian,
- persona 5: akira,
- sarah connor chronicles: john connor,
- sword of frost: yun yifeng,
- the gifted: marcos diaz,
- tian guan ci fu: xie lian,
- tokyo ghoul: kaneki ken,
- umbrella academy: five,
- warcraft: anduin wrynn,
- warcraft: wrathion,
- watch_dogs: wrench,
- wheel of time: moiraine,
- witcher: yennefer
interlude: ellethia
En route to their next destination, the Merchant detours the party through his home citadel of Ellethia — the first, haunted casualty of the undead, now divided into Ellethia-Allayar and Ellethia-Hamsour.
Feel free to tag into this log or make your own posts!
ONE FOR THE ROAD
Macaluso Spina’s plans to escort the group out of Taravast are overturned by the Merchant’s transmission:
”It appears many of you remain indifferent to the stakes of our endeavour. So, you will see them. You go to Ellethia, jewel of innovation, the first cradle of the dead. My home.”
With the sorceress Karsa now gone, the party is entrusted to journey master and kindly-mannered biologist Enam.
Characters retain their bare essentials and what little can be carried on their backs. Magical storage is minimal. Everyone receives bags containing: three raw candles, a bundle of red clothes, a light blanket, two flasks of fresh water, a dagger, two bandage strips, two needles, strong thread, four textile patches, dried food, a pouch with two fistfuls of kiln-dried broken firewood and some flint. Supplies are replenished periodically.
Enam and his six assistants carry larger loads — with two aides transporting heavily bound humanoid forms. They’ve got you, Kaneki.
Ellethia requires delicate travel. The group first travels communally by ship, reaching the East Arakuthia Seas at sunset, meeting 25 small boats that can home between one and three passengers.
The group only travels at sea by night, when the depths are safest. The 3-17 January period covers two nights of seaborne travel, broken by journey on land across the two segments of Ellethia. Sea shipment will take characters from East Arakuthia to Ellethia-Allayar. A second voyage will later deliver them from Ellethia-Allayar to Ellethia-Hamsour. They spend roughly seven days at each land location.
TROUBLE AT SEA
The small boats have been thralled to slowly progress through mist and water to their destination. Enam quickly discloses the rules of seaborne engagement:
- ■ Keep the light. Enam offers each traveller a lit candle brazier to wave periodically around the boat and “ward away evil.”
■ If your candle blows out, rush to it light back with help from your boat-mate or other vessels.
■ If all of a boat’s candle lights have been died, travellers have three minutes to light fresh candle flames. The vessel begins to sink, seized by hands of rotting flesh and shadow. Undead mermaids attempt to drown those who fall in.
■ Sunken characters can be rescued by other vessels but remain “marked,” experiencing a bitter, unrelenting cold that no fire can tame. The saviours’ ship are intensely targeted by mermaids that seek to capsize it and collect their lost prize. You are rattled but safe as long as your lights hold.
■ Perhaps you dozed off, or briefly looked away — no matter your distraction, a newcomer (?) has now climbed into your boat, teeth chattering and terrified. These undead visitors are unaware of their condition and beg to be delivered to shore. They are not violent, unless ignored and often spark conversations. Over time, they become paranoid that they will not be rescued.
■ Those who share their names with these creatures feel compelled to take them to ground, where they trigger immediate medium-scale explosions. Other boat-mates or vessels can stop this.
■ Forcibly push your stowaway into water, trick them in, or pose a riddle they cannot solve.
AHOY, LAND
Ellethia has been cleaved into two — Allayar and Hamsour — by the Huntress, whose extended presence crumbled stone, decayed organic matter and eventually sunk districts and passageways. Crude bridges connect sectors of the citadel that have been partly submerged.
Although the tragedy of Ellethia occurred within the last decade, its ruins have been completely overrun by lush vegetation.
The following applies to both Ellethia-Allayar and Ellethia-Hamsour:
- ■ Characters must don their fashionable red gear once they reach land. Over 15 minutes of direct exposure to the crisp Ellethia air leads unprotected skin to erupt in a rash, then into gashes and tissue-deep decay. The wound fully regenerates within the hour.
■ Patch your party suit immediately, if it is torn.
■ Science-prone characters can notice no sign of radiation. Sorcerers feel no magic. Necromancers sense a complete absence of death.
■ There is no other human presence on land. Plants develop abundantly. Animals live an entire cycle of birth, growth, maturity and decay in the period between sunrise and sundown, reaching their prime around midday. Corpse remains patch back together into the creature’s new-born form at sunrise.
■ There are no human corpses anywhere.
TASKS
- ■ Forage or hunt. Replenish resources. Water from Ellethia’s canals is potable.
■ Help Enam find samples of the Widow’s Yearning. The plants grow in small fields whose scent woos travellers into a restful sleep they struggle to wake back from on their own. Widow’s Yearning can be ground into a potent hallucinogen.
■ Explore the pastoral surroundings.
ELLETHIA-ALLAYAR
The party first reaches Ellethia-Allayar, which hosts the ruins of the citadel’s seats of banking, commerce and governance. Ellethia-Allayar has been deeply flooded, with many streets partly overcome by water.
- ■ Amid torn-down halls of rhetoric and administration, characters can find bright flags on public office buildings, and glitter debris and street cups on the ground.
■ Several decaying pamphlets remain in the main piazza, whose halls have been submerged 1 meter underwater. If recovered, the pamphlets bemoan: Toss a Bone to Your Taxman: He’s Already Got the Meat, Gristle and Fat, Dowries: Sense or Sentiment? Join Tonight’s March for Free Wedlock, Who Watches through Your Mirrors?, Selling: Minor Palace with Main Street View and Cat, 90 Days Since Conscription: Where Are Your Sons?, Taravast Was Our Fathers’ Question, We Are the Answer.
■ Fresher pamphlets littered on public streets announce extended burial grounds in the botanical garden.
■ Roads and buildings show signs of clawing and trampling, along with spattering of long-dried blood.
■ The carriages, streetlights and infrastructure of Ellethia suggest a technology level near the 1800s.
THE SILENCE GAME
Ellethia-Allayar’s impromptu “canals” have made it a prime target for mermaids, who only infiltrate at midday — the peak of the accelerated animal life cycle.
■ Between noon and 13:00 each day, swathes of vicious mermaids storm the Allayar canals, working in packs to draw unsuspecting animals or humans into water. Some mermaids are dead, some living. While they always circle Ellethia during the day, they only proactively hunt in this period.
■ The thick fogs of Ellethia throw a boon: if they are very silent and very still, characters can hide even on low ground. Beware: the mermaids’ hearing has evolved to compensate their weaker sight, helping them locate close-by characters who speak or heave.
■ Mermaids imitate the animal calls and human voices they have heard to lure out prey.
■ Most central and public buildings are on low land.
Enam directs characters to their boats again to head to Ellethia-Hamsour within the week.
ELLETHIA-HAMSOUR
Unlike Allayar, Ellethia-Hamsour is a completely demolished territory, bordering a wasteland. Water infiltrations have been minimal.
The fog runs thicker than in Allayar, compounding the dangers of the collapsing, decayed roads and bridges.
The strong, vibrant greenery only breaks in coastal regions. Beneath the plant beds, you can find signs of the academic, science or technological districts. In some manicured gardens, flowers have overtaken hundreds of newer stone plates bearing local names and the marker, Truth Bows Only to the Sun.
Any remaining stone edifices display intense clawing and blood residue.
Characters are tasked to head to a distant lighthouse, lone in the horizon.
- ■ Characters become increasingly obsessed with reaching the lighthouse, often neglecting food, safety and sleep.
■ The single-minded focus leaves some vulnerable to being lured into steep pits or down cliff edges, into the sea.
■ Some characters become possessive of the lighthouse and plot to prevent their fellow travellers from reaching it. The lighthouse is not safe, if others get near it. It does not want them. Only you.
QUESTIONS
no subject
( Spoken just so: calmly, enticingly, shrewdly. He knows the frustration that absolute certainty invites in those who still weigh and decide their footing. How the example of definitive contentment does nothing more than spurn and irritate them. Children and disciples forever despise a firm hand.
No footsteps, muted underfoot. The red that shrouds his limbs absorbs sound, sloshes weeds and grass under a firm boot. He does not enclose her, nor removes his helmet — this the time and this the place, for example. The flickered arc of his arms waves calm more than acceptance. Anger breathes and lives and sprawls the same in men as in animals, like the spread of a watered stain. )
Enough. ( Settle, as if she were a storm-maddened horse, rebellious thunder rushing to prickle her ears. ) What troubles you? Think. Your health is secure. Needs met. You are at advantage.
( Perhaps no chipped ceramic tiles sit above them, no silks welcome their bodies, no salted waters and oils whisper their skins fresh — but they are not weakened. What is there to complain of? )
Ease.
no subject
[ The question is asked honestly, although with an acerbic note. Since her arrival, she can't seem to shrug the chronic tension out of her shoulders. Everything isn't as it should be and her mind is a swirl of disorder and clutter because of it; her equilibrium precarious.
What troubles you?
It's a question with two answers, really. Everything and nothing. Or perhaps it comes down to being far too much that she can do nothing about. Yennefer has always been in a battle of some kind, be it against herself or with people who constantly fail her. They always want something and this place was proving to have its own reasons, too.
Think.
She shrugs, closing her eyes and finally surrendering because she was far too tired to think anymore. Thinking upset her and deflecting kept her from stumbling on all the reasons that she needs to stay angry. ]
Ease. I don't know what that means. Where I'm from, slowing down allows something to catch up.
no subject
Beneath the red veil of his helmet, Lan Wangji's mouth twitches with sour notes of sympathy. Grass blades tickle and ache the back of his calves through their shrouding, until he must shift in place or move himself, move them both. He kneels, absently, to fling out his hands and pat down the offensive greenery, until he stills — all at once, hairs on his nape raised electric, fingers trailing back, catching a trace. Warmth beckons him, the creeping, round sound of a body huddling close.
He does not entrap the bony, swarthy rabbit, all wet nose and taut skins, so much as he gently nudges it forward, a friend at the woman's feet. Behold. )
Your first predator has arrived. ( But he raises a hand to stay the inevitable recourse. ) Do not harm it.
( He has seen the mercies that men crossing woodlands reserve for the quiet, fragile, trembled creatures of the field. Each rabbit, each deer, each pheasant becomes game, and Wangji has tired of empty bloodshed. )
no subject
When the stranger near her speaks, her eyes open again and settle on the animal. For as untrusting as she is with people, animals are the one living thing that she does her best to preserve. But she doesn't smile. Nor does she reach out to touch it. Instead, Yennefer folds her arms on top of her knees and watches its little nose as it sniffs around. ]
That's not a predator. Not even so much a nuisance as my stepfather used to call them. They just exist.
[ Yennefer's eyes narrow a little on the man again. ]
Did you get the impression I would harm it?
no subject
He does not name himself proficient in arts of conversation — only drags himself down, wraith-like despite his reds and the callous absence of his orthodox whites, loosened at his feet. The rabbits swarm the woman first — slighter, if not softer, a traditional attraction.
Above, the high call of dauntless birds rattles him with reedy sound. He leans into it, like weed calling to the sun, ignorant of the creatures until a third rabbit finds him, climbs his knees, then his thighs, and sprawls in the compact, tightened way of animals awake on burrowed time — its heartbeat a massacre of pulses, now here, now flickered, now gone.
He recalls the way of it: how to catch the rabbit beneath the warm swell of its belly, full, how to trace long fingers until it shivers and curls, and learns the ache of sweet comfort, beneath the spells of dread. )
Will you? ( How simple, to assume kindness. He has learned the complexity of his 'betters' in this. ) You gave no name.
( Neither did he. Under the siege of rabbit militia, they can lack in manners. )
no subject
His question receives a momentary silence. Her gaze fixes evenly upon each of the rabbits and as one approaches closer, Yennefer remembers the various animals she claimed as pets on her stepfather's farm, that included a menagerie of soft and fluffy.
A hand moves out slowly, hoping not to spook the rabbit closest to her. ]
I have no quarrel with animals. Not unless they wish to eat me, which has happened before.
[ Another pause. ]
It's Yennefer. And yours?
no subject
( Part formality, part instinct. To introduce oneself is to cast a long bruise on another's trembled existence. It is to intercede, to invade, to impose. If greetings must take place, let them occur just so, with whispered, structured dignity.
Together, beside the rabbits, on warm-breathed grass that barely tips and shrivels back into itself, hardly pulses alive. He thinks, if this were another life (fair) and another day (kind) and another audience (living), they might suit the study of a painting. Two brush strokes of red, harsh and grainy. The creatures, smooth at their feet.
He barely recognises his own hand, passing the rabbit, and studies his stroke slim and sweet, excessively tender. There is weight in the gloves he cannot prevent, only address through idle cautions. )
You joined in the past days. ( And he does not say, Your hands clean of the massacre of Taravast. They know each other by names — often cursed — in this... caravan already. 'Yennefer' is a recent addition. ) Be welcome.
no subject
Another question pops up, though she holds off on asking it to snort at his welcome. It seems an odd and misplaced thing to do, all things considered. An invitation wasn't exactly accepted. ]
Thanks. I don't exactly feel all that welcome, to be honest. Then again, I was gifted this fashionable attire, so perhaps my gracious hosts aren't as malevolent as they seem.
[ The sarcasm continues.
She goes back to his name. ]
So, is that your whole name? Or do you prefer just Wangji?
no subject
Conceal. Smile, perhaps, in brother's way, his name. The dark candour of Zewu-Jun's lips, when he weaves and paints and perfects the lines of his gentle diplomacy, when he sets the lure of his courtesies and tugs. Lan Wangji trembles to think of his comparative failure. )
Lan Wangji. ( Slow, trickled, like melting ice. A thorn and snagged edge to it. Then, academically: ) To exclude the clan name is intimacy.
( Unearned. Folly. And she, a woman of seeming marrying age, taking idle stabs at the tatters of her reputation. Half an accident of ignorance, half play. He wishes he knew the game, for all he shares his bed with a master of it — that Lan Wangji too could pretend the kind, warm approach of those who do not struggle for words, for friendly acquaintances. )
Duress has forged us companions. Whatever your needs, name them. They are ours.
( A simple thing, the confluence of interests. Strategic. )
no subject
And so starts the reset of the time before she can take it off again. ]
I can't think of anything but thank you, Lan Wangji. You're very kind and it is comforting. I'll let you know if I think of something.