arc iii: house of ravens | arrival

[groundrules]

Hi, everyone! Our Arc III arrival event covers 20 Feb-11 March and doubles as a test drive. Participants don’t need an invite to apply by 11 March. Reserves live here. Try to label if you’re a test drive tourist or an old timer — and have fun!

COTTAGEVORE

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TDM TOURISTS | OLD TIMERS | COMMON PROMPTS | NOTES

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TDM TOURISTS: THE SCENIC ROUTE

You flinch awake, hand weighed by a sharp stick, stone, or makeshift torch. Your clothes sit stiff, splattered with dried dirt and dusted leaves. Here and there, scratches and shallow wounds litter your limbs, the marks of days of dazed survival alone that you mistily remember. Your strength and supernatural powers are currently largely depleted, but should recover within two to three days.

As they journey, characters discover stretches of the eerily silent forests briefly transform into woodlands or recognisable spots of nature from their home worlds — perhaps they’re now seeing the meadows outside their home towns, their backyard orchard, or a fondly remembered lake pier. These images are short-lived illusions that other characters can also see.

Mind your steps: the mirages try to lure characters deep into the forest, where unfriendly animals and hidden pits wait.

A. THE MORE, THE MERRIER

Trailing through the labyrinthine woods, you stumble upon a group of heavily armed bandits who are already herding several captives. Depending on how agitated you are, expect shackles, leashes and tusk pendants that allow characters to speak and glean local tongues — including the thugs' barked instructions. The outlaws are on a three-day voyage to cursed village Ke-Waihu, where they intend to sell their prisoners to the Hok-Shinn criminal clan.

■ Ensure fellow captives survive the trek, avoiding leg-hold traps, snares and hunting nets.

■ Beatings continue, but morale never improves: help mouthy prisoners with their tasks or wounds.

■ Capture or forage food — and stop naïve captives from going deeper into the forest to follow glimpses of beautiful (wo)men or cries for help. There’s nobody there.

■ At night, prisoners are locked in stitched-shut tents — get friendly quickly.

B. JUST CRUISING

The bandits never saw you coming — but you’ve been watching them collect their prey. Perhaps you’ve even found others like you — also spared enslavement, but condemned to trail after the thugs towards Ke-Waihu. Characters can pick up discarded translation and communication tusk pendants, scraps of food and frail weapons.

■ Beware: superstitious thieves frequently patrol at night, while woodland predators are emboldened by the absence of fires.

■ Leave messages or instructions to the bandits’ captives (tree husk carvings, anyone?) and maybe try to rescue them.

■ ...or leave them for dead and trot on to Ke-Waihu. You savage.

» GO CAMPING, THEY SAID

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OLD TIMERS: CURSES FOR ONE, CURSES FOR ALL

After a bumpy ride aboard the Salamera II, the party arrive at idyllic village Ke-Waihu.

They are greeted by Hok-Shinn Weisi, the slippery mayor who officially helms Ke-Waihu, while his brother Sairen leads the clan’s heavy underground ventures. Weisi’s flippant and spoiled son Taksui is the Merchant’s local liaison. The botanist Enam and his apprentices set out to explore, taking the group's baggage along.

■ Weisi was told the party members are families of Taravast refugees, seeking finer fates in Ke-Waihu. Each family has been assigned a humble but serviceable dwelling — see what luck has in store for you.

■ Weisi officially welcomes the newcomers in Ke-Waihu’s main bustling marketplace. Every merchant, fishmonger and beggar stops to watch as foreigners are briefly stripped of their ostentatious jewels, clothes or weapons, soaked in iced water and told to embrace the village by accepting its old, its new, its ugliness and its truths.

■ To join the community, characters must absorb and redeem the wrongdoings of a deceased ancestor. They are served flasks of a thick, bitter brew that slides down mildly corrosive and cold.

■ The brew’s effects vary: some drinkers feel only a sudden, electric awareness of the story behind the curse they inherited. Others feel scalded from the inside, agonising for hours. The ancestral curse effects start to take hold that night.

■ Characters are sent off to their new homes in Ke-Waihu — but are contacted within hours by one of Enam’s anguished apprentices. His master and his peers were captured by bandits while inspecting the elusive forests for plant specimens. These wicked men took everything: your goods, your Ellethian high fashion, your extra weapons, even your Sleeping Zenobius. Go get’em — but beware the deadly illusions of Ke-Waihu’s forest.

» DUDE, WHERE’S MY COMATOSE SLEEPER?

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ALL TOGETHER NOW

The thugs, the old timers, the test drive prisoners and their creepy watchers collide in the mist-drowned forests of Ke-Waihu.

A. BANDIT BANE

■ Infiltrate the thug group in, kick some outlaws’ teeth on the way out.

■ Release and escort roughened-up newcomers to Ke-Waihu, picking up strays along the way.

■ One of the thugs snitches that the remaining stolen loot is hoarded in a nearby secluded cave, drowned under foliage. The entrance is watched by large, agitated boars with startlingly hard, but not impervious skin. With gold, gems, guns within reach, anyone for pork dinner?

■ After speaking with the new arrivals, party botanist and guide Enam confirms they have been summoned to serve as weapons in this world’s ongoing conflict between warring undead factions. The Merchant, Enam’s collaborator and the party’s patron, is leading otherworlders east, where forgotten beacons might return them home.

■ The villagers Ke-Waihu, Ke-Waiar and Ke-Waicai reportedly know the location of such a beacon. They will unveil it if the party breaks the curse of the House of Ravens.

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B. THE BLUSHING BRIDE

When the group returns, Ke-Waihu is celebrating the joyous procession of dozens of lavish 'weddings.' The (false) rites are carried out to commemorate the marriage of a huntsman and his fox bride...

■ The roads are awash with flower petals and rice, houses extend their hospitality freely, and the rich give away coin. Even Hok-Shinn clansmen don their finest garments and hand out gifts and favours, while lawmen grant pardons to captives held for minor offences.

■ Villagers pose as 'brides' and 'grooms' to play act public weddings. Characters are asked to participate as brides and grooms, or to join the wedding retinue of a NPC villager. Characters can unknowingly marry, but not become foxes.

■ The evening culminates in a grand market fete, with stalls offering sickly sweets and strong alcohols. Poets recite love songs, professional weepers wail to strangers that they lost their children to insidious in-laws, and petty clashes erupt among merrymakers.

■ Some of the NPC fox 'brides' seem to grow wide-eyed and alert, suspicious of the many hunting dogs that watchmen walk around the marketplace.

■ Come nightfall, 'wedded' pairs are escorted to suites in a large and extravagant inn. For each 'couple,' accommodations comprise one room for the retinue and a linked conjugal bedroom.

IF CHARACTERS MARRY A (FOX) 'SPOUSE':

■ They are handed three pieces of parchment before they are locked into the marital suite with their consort and their retinue.

■ Once alone in their 'marital quarter,' characters first enjoy polite conversation with their spouse, whose eyes start to glimmer golden, while their teeth and claws lengthen, their mouths distort to snouts and their hair reddens. The fox brides do not seem aware they are, in fact, foxes, but try to scratch, bite or maim their partners. Viciously quick, strong and prone to thralling their victims into spells of lethargy, these foxes could get the best of you — happily, the little parchment papers you received can share some survival tips.

■ Fool the fox spouse into thinking you are already married or pledged to someone in your retinue. Affronted, the fox bride will exile you out of the wedding room. Refresh the salt lines that surround the conjugal room, and gently steer the fox back if it flees overnight.

■ Your retinue and you should impersonate a hunting hound, down to howling, running on all-fours and sniffling. The fox will hurriedly isolate itself in the conjugal room, but will actively try to escape at night. Keep every inn door and window closed.

■ Become a widow(er). Call your retinue and make the best of your fists and a butter knife. You will need to kill the spouse a few times before they stay fully dead, each time reviving more and more fox-like in appearance.

AS A WEDDING RETINUE MEMBER:

■ Awkwardly hold watch outside the conjugal bedroom of the dashing NPC cannon fodder groom and his fox bride.

■ The NPC groom might request help as above — or might fall deathly silent. If that happens, villagers instruct, character must loudly ask if the wine pleases the couple. The flushed, visibly fox-like bride will then open the door to complain their new consort — clawed dead in the marital bed — won’t even share a wine cup with them. The fox does not seem to grasp they have killed their groom.

■ Defeat the fox at drinking — the fox bride can hold its cups, but slipping in some of the relaxing opiates on hand will help the cause. Sneak the NPC groom's corpse out with a buddy when the fox drops asleep.

■ Or prove you are a fairer marital prospect by verbally wooing the fox or doing battle with your retinue companion, to prove your worth. Your wingman may wish to throw the fight, feed lines, or generally smoulder. The fox bride will offer the NPC corpse as a betrothal gift.

Come morning, the villagers open the now-delapidated inn. Those who survive fox weddings receive braided bracelets of red, golden and tangerine rope, earning good will in the village. The murderous fox brides have disappeared — in their place, yellowed and dust-drenched bones 'sleep' in the marital beds, covered by withered and torn wedding clothes.

Villagers share the whole story: a huntsman encountered a fox goddess in the forest, when she had taken the shape of a beautiful woman. Lovestruck, he brought her back to Ke-Waihu as his wife — but the horrified villager slaughtered her and her husband on their wedding night. The fox god cursed the village to relieve yearly 'fox weddings,' during which the bones of those murdered during the previous 'conjugal' festivities rise as brides to terrorise new spouses.

Skipping the fox wedding rites, villagers say, shrivels their crops and depletes their food stocks for several seasons.

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C. A-HUNTING WE WILL GO

It’s all fun and wedding games, until one of the victims of the recent nuptials is the son of influential wine merchant Saguk Chaomin. He vengefully sponsors a a hunt to finally lift the foxes’ curse.

■ Saguk Chaomin assigns weapons — from knives, spears and sharpened sticks to bows, arrows and rifles operating on gun powder — alongside lanterns and climbing rope to the brave adventurers. The contingent splinters into smaller groups to avoid detection.

■ The forests now aggressively conspire to lead characters to their deaths: whether it’s through fostering illusions that trip them into gullies, or decrepit bridges that crumble, sending travellers into whirling river waters. Animals (excluding wolves) attack travellers fiercely. Keep a hunting hound close.

■ Characters with unusual physical features or suspicious behaviours — from supernatural powers to a fear of dogs — are accused of being shape-shifting foxes.

■ Fox spirits assume a mortal but resilient shape the day after the wedding — strong, large, feral and willy. They’re quick to bite, and their presence dulls the senses of hunters.

■ To exorcise the foxes, kill their mortal bodies or obliterate or repair their small, decaying forest altars. These are stone rings the size of one’s hand, often hidden at the root of ancient trees. Cleanse the altars of filth, vermin and predatory creatures, and replenish the stones with fresh river pieces. Beware rare fox spirits that come to protect altars or hide their young.

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D. WELL, WELL, WELL

In the wake of the weddings, characters head to their abodes, while test drivers are garrisoned in communal temporary shelters. Over the next few days, everyone may notice:

■ Villagers have a marrow-deep fear of the Hok-Shinn clan, whose members behave as if they are immune from repercussions.

■ Villagers tell eerie tales of strange encounters in their locked stables, abandoned houses or wells — they have seen a creature with the head of a beautiful woman, whose hair braids to form her snake-like body. 'She' slithers away once discovered.

■ Word spreads across the marketplace that dark waters have returned. A farmer’s well has dried, leaving only a thickened, tar-like liquid at the bottom. Another villager shamefully admits his well also dried a month ago, clogged by dark filth — the fount was old, and he assumed it had naturally depleted.

■ Horrified villagers speak no more of this, but superstitiously volunteer flower and food tributes for the Ka-Sanwon volcano. Mayor Hok-Shinn Weisi intercedes to reserve the resources for the upcoming return of the patron lord of the volcano’s three villages — the undead Beastmaster.

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QUESTIONS

Comments

we're showing up with a ladder at the house that's not ours, okay

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian moved as a creature to be hunted, only aware of it, sliding between shadows and within the pauses of dreams and nightmares to tread light, unheard, among the village homes. Lan Zhan made his domicile available before he'd also taken one of the walls in Wei Wuxian's erstwhile home down, the insect-devoured interior unable to hold up to one act of passion. Never underestimate the strength of a open palm hitting a wall, or any other flat surface, he supposes, but he's conserving energy as he slips to the wall around the back garden, and squints through the shadows.

"Remind me," he says, a murmur that carries only enough for very nearby ears to hear, "Which hedge is hiding that bamboo ladder again?"

[blackscales]

Climbing over anything with a ladder is not exactly Wrathion's style, but as superstitious as this village is he's found it feels best not to be caught doing anything too... inhuman.

Which leaves him here, glancing between the bushes and then moving to pull out a bamboo ladder.

It's borderline humiliating, but at least if anyone does see them he'll be answering more mundane questions.

"I really think they could just let us in the front door," he grumbles. Anduin doesn't seem too troubled by the rules, but to Wrathion it feels as if he's being treated like a child.

Which... perhaps by other people standards he might be, but to Wrathion he's absolutely not. He's High King of the Alliance!

[weifinder]

"Oh, they could, and then either they'd need to let everyone sleep over, or kick us back out so we'd jump the fence anyway."

He sounds so cheery, waiting for Wrathion to place the ladder. The one neither of them really need, but sometimes, you just want a pretext for being clearly more normal than any of you actually are.

[blackscales]

"I don't see what's so wrong with allowing visitors."

He's quiet! He doesn't make a mess or get drunk or cause a ruckus! Really, what's the problem? All he does is sit quietly and play boardgames or talk, keeping Anduin company. Is that really so offensive to their sensibilities?

Setting the ladder, Wrathion boosts himself up it and comes to rest on the top of the wall -- waiting just out of the way for his companion to climb up so he can pull up the ladder behind them. No point leaving it outside after all.

me, 5ever late

[weifinder]

Small villages are strange, his friend of circumstance, small villages are strange. Wei Wuxian pauses before he leaps down, instead shrugging and waiting to see if Wrathion settles the ladder... down into the gardens below.

"It's the visitors who stay over late. Either it's for intimacies or for conspiracies, and this village and its, ah, guiding hands are more suspicious of the one than the other, I imagine."

[blackscales]

He lets out a huff of frustration, setting the ladder down and boosting himself off the top of the wall. Wrathion lands lightly, glances around once before moving the ladder more into the bushes.

"Gossip might add some colour to this place. The atmosphere is unpleasant."

It's about the most cold, frightened place he's been in some time. The people are not exactly unfriendly, but he suspects that is purely because of their dear friend The Merchant's contact being among the Hok-Shinn.

[weifinder]

And being connected to power in some sense or another means being connected to known quantities, to expectations. Soon enough they'd be inducted to the last of them, the whispers about sins of ancestors that none of them could come from, that he's not sure even the present occupants of the town came from, and what did it serve?

Not for him to say in this moment. To make claims over another's culture, their beliefs, would be to only know his own as familiar, and theirs as strange. The ones here aren't any more odd than those in Sa-Hareth, than those in Taravast, than those found in the cracks between.

"Oh, they're gossiping, just not with us quite yet. Have you asked about the complaints delivered here? I think it's Anduin who ends up listening to most of them, Lan Zhan should have the practice from his chosen obligations, but his patience wears thin over this last year."

If anything, walking on quiet feet toward the back entrance of the house, Wei Wuxian himself sounds... amused.

[blackscales]

"Anduin has always been a good listener."

So it does make a lot of sense, that he'd be spending most of his time listening to complaints.

"An excess of patience, too."

Combined, that would make the perfect person for such a thankless task. Wrathion dusts off his hands, following Wei Wuxian -- a curious expression on his face. Lan Zhan? He assumes he knows who the man is talking about, but the style of address is... different. Does that have some meaning?

"You knew each other before you came here?"

Curiosity in part, but the information may be useful too. People who had a connection in their home are more likely to prioritise each other over everyone else. This talk of chosen obligations mixed with a different name implies something of that.

[weifinder]

"Ah, yes! He's my husband." As one casually announces things which are, between the two of them, contentious. He'd hardly known he was married eighteen years ago, or again in Taravast, until for a third time, also in Taravast, they'd bound themselves in...

Whatever their relationship was. Husbands, yes. Not ones who slept easily side by side, but also did not sleep as well, without some sense of breathing in, and some sense of protection against the nightmares that enjoyed stalking him, night after night.

"My general understanding is you and Anduin are familiar to each other from your own home?"

Opening the door, and indicating for Wrathion to precede him inside. He hasn't, in fact, explained anything about why Lan Zhan should be familiar with fielding complaints, but also, it wasn't Wei Wuxian's job to be chief cultivator. That'd been his husband's chosen path.

[blackscales]

That explains some things, but not everything. It explains why he is so interesting in visiting Wangji, but not why he's forced to sneak in at night. Could they really not find a way to just adjust their cover stories so they could be together formally?

He supposes you could ask the same of him and Anduin, yet that's --

Different. They aren't actually married, it's... complicated.

"Yes," Wrathion allows, pacing into the house. "I've known Anduin several years. His hair was shorter when we met, as was his list of concerns."

Something that seems to grow endlessly, at a far too accelerated rate.

[weifinder]

"The two tend to grow with time," he says, agreeing with studying his companion, closing the door quietly behind them. "When we can help with the one without adding to that, it's a good day."

It's not always possible, but that's reality, such as it is. He doesn't guess their circumstances are so different across worlds than his own as to prevent all possible interpersonal conflict.

"How much shorter were both your concerns and your hair when you first met him?"

[blackscales]

"Considerably so. He still had the confidence of youth."

Without the burdens of loss, without the frustrations of broken trust and weight of expectations. He flickers a wan smile.

"I still had the arrogance of someone yet unburned."

He may still have his own confidence, but it is much quieter now than it was in his youth. Much more hesitant, more aware of consequence.

[weifinder]

"You either learn through whatever the world throws at you, or you die. Sounds like you've both been learning."

He smiles, and there's a resigned, self-aware aspect to it, like he remembers what the confidence of youth and the arrogance of the unburned had been like for him; like it happened so far long ago that it couldn't be summarised as "a year and six months before, when I woke up from sixteen years of being in an unknown dark space, after I tried to be nowhere at all."

We all have different massively traumatic turning points.

"Who is he to you?" Curious only, not a pointed or particularly poignant question. Rude? Yes, but he did just 'sneak' into the house with Wrathion. They're both incorrigible.

[blackscales]

Who is Anduin to him?

Labels seem unable to capture it.

He is the person Wrathion would let his whole village burn for, the person who gave him a chance when few others would, the person whose opinion he values most, the person who features in many of his nightmares. The source of many of his regrets, many of his hopes.

He doesn't know quite what to call this, and doesn't know if he's confident enough to give it a name.

"The person who knows me best," he allows, "and still seems to have time for me."

Against all the odds.

[weifinder]

The way Wrathion says that, the parallel that runs through Wei Wuxian's life, gives him pause. So much so that he in fact stills, observing Wrathion for a moment, before he nods.

"He's your soulmate." A translation of a concept that was deeper: the person who knows you better than you know yourself, who is there, who is incalculably important, having nothing to do with trappings of love or lust or bonds of social connections. Two souls, entwinned. That he happens to have found himself married to his own soulmate is inconsequential to the understanding of what two such souls are. "Do you know him best in turn?"

Does Wrathion know him best, and have time for him? Wei Wuxian finds that latter self evident given what they're doing, and Anduin is a man of patience, but not a man who is infallible. Most men are far from that, whatever their... species, he supposes, unsure of what word encompasses the variety of peoples he's met who are and are not human, but still mirrors of each other, in so many fascinating ways.

[blackscales]

Soulmate?

Wrathion blinks at that, tilts his head in thought. He's heard people use such a phrase, but has no concept of if it... holds any weight, any meaning beyond an ideal.

The question makes him pause, however. Does he know him best? Has he ever been wrong, in his judgements?

Yes, he thinks so, to his own detriment. Mostly assuming a harsher judgement of himself, however. Not because he doesn't understand who Anduin Wrynn is. Does anyone know him any better, however?

Who would be in contest? Genn Greymane? Not at all, Genn doesn't care to understand who Anduin is in his heart. He has an ideal of Anduin held in his mind, and holds him to that. Jaina? Perhaps, she's known him since he was young. They share much in common. Yet Jaina has not stayed a constant in his life. Her impression of him may be coloured by still remembering him as a small child. Velen, then? Velen understands Anduin on a spiritual level, he is sure, but a personal one? That he cannot be sure of.

"I could not be sure if I know him best, he has more people in his life than I do, but I think I know what is most important for him -- and my time is always his."

[weifinder]

"Mm, soulmates then. Finding someone like that is a blessing. I'm glad the both of you have each other in this place."

Then he smiles, waggling his fingers, slipping down a side hall that leads to the stairs up to Lan Zhan's chosen retreat.

"See you tomorrow night, ah? Enjoy yourselves!"

With a wink, he takes himself away. (Perhaps surprisingly, not to think licentiously about either of them. After all, he sleeps by his husband's side nightly as they mostly manage it, to nothing more salacious than shared space.)