westwhere | no man's sea

Avast ye — sprawling til 18 June is part I of the Storm at Sea travel arc, which doubles as a test drive. Participants don’t need an invite to reserve or apply over 10-17 June.

Try to label if you’re a test drive tourist or an old timer — and don’t hesitate to leave an OOC note to opt out of random NPC piraaaaaaaargh interaction. Test drivers can post both log and network prompts. Have fun!

NO MAN’S SEA

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AHOY! SCALLYWAGS

Departing Ke-Waihu, the existing party joins paranoid pirate king, turned stalwart saint Samuel Vane — the feared Quicksilver Sam — aboard the Pariah.

Test drivers awaken anguishing at sea, floating on rafts, or on minuscule patches of deserted land. They are collected by two pirates and the recalcitrant sorceress Karsa — who supplies translation and communication devices. She explains the newcomers were summoned into the land of Akhuras by warring undead factions. Karsa’s master, the elusive Merchant, ferries newcomers east to beacons hoped to return them home. He has secured them passage on the pirate vessel Queen Zanyra of ’Wet Rope’ Caladan Kreil, an associate of Quicksilver Sam.

The Pariah and Zanyra meet at sea, a day’s travel away from Ke-Waihu:

■ Characters overhear that Quicksilver Sam seeks to reach the haunted Crossing Seas and ‘settle an old score.’ Long-term ally Caladan Kreil supports his cause.

■ The two vessels make daily supply and crew exchanges by rowboat. The Pariah’s passengers must give the passcode: flaunted like gold to board the Queen Zanyra. Staff of the Queen Zanyra must speak the words before the blind man to access the Pariah. Forget your passcode and fall at the mercy of whoever patrols the decks!

■ Tasks await all passengers: diligently clean and polish decks, climb tall masts to sew torn sails, banish a preposterous number of seagulls, fish, read post or… dubious novels to sailors, count loot, guard the decks, clean cannons or serve as boat lure for shark fishing. Medics and cooks can practise their natural trades, while musicians and entertainers should amuse the crew.

■ By all means, grab thematic garments from crew coffers. Also available: daggers, swords and rare pistols.

■ Characters may notice both ship crews are spirited, but grow weary when Quicksilver Sam fitfully orders his five on-call priests to carry out protection rites, or to ‘exorcise’ evil from random staff — through ineffective bitter potions, shrill chants and requests to sit in unusual luck-incurring poses, or to commit some mundane, repetitive task. Let’s bore the devil away.

■ Treat senior crew with respect: some pirates are equally drunk on rum and fleetingly authority and reward perceived slights with a 24h-stay in the brig. These fine accommodations fit two and annul powers while there. No dinner.

■ Sleep where you can: hammocks and rotting mattresses can be found in great common halls beneath decks. The sick and women (naturally, ill omens at sea) can share the four private cabins of each ship. Sumeragi Subaru has his own cabin aboard the Pariah.

■ Each night, expect drinking beneath the halls and a pirate’s greatest hobby: gambling. Conmen might lure you into an ‘innocent game’ that sinks you deep into debt, winning your valuables, favours, or kidney!

■ Ladies are afforded a wide, begrudging berth and some authority over the crew.

■ Accommodations: fresh potions are readily available to ward off sea sickness, and magically resilient oranges are on hand to counter scurvy. As woe would have it, the long-serving Mr. Ishmael has passed, and his earthly remains have been retained aboard the Pariah for Kaneki Ken. Viktor receives a leashed emotional support albatross — a large, loud but docile bird that flies above him counter-current to balance him, whenever the ship’s sway threatens his footing.

OBJECTIVES

■ Discover why good Quicksilver Sam is intent on his haunted travels. The captain declines audiences, but try to get information from the two crews.

■ Please share the information gained via network…!

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THAT SON OF A BISCUIT EATER

Trouble starts to brew, within days at sea:

■ Be on the lookout while on watch duty: on a handful of occasions, new faces appear aboard. They fail to offer the passcode — and attempt to injure characters, throw them overboard, or to enter the captains’ lodgings. Sound the alarm or seize intruders!

■ After interrogating an infiltrator, Caladan Kreil sends word that the assailants hail from the Concord, a war vessel of the Dawns’ Reach Trade Company that is pursuing the pirate ships at distance under the command of Maximilian Hawk. A credit to his name, Wet Rope Caladan has the spy hanged.

■ Prepare to get drafted for double watch duty, as both Caladan Kreil and Quicksilver Sam bolster defences. Tensions escalate, with pirate crew questioning the loyalties of newer recruits.

■ A few days later, at dawns, the silent, swift and massive Concord approaches close enough to fire its cannons at both ships and send vicious militia to climb aboard. Defend your ship!

■ The Concord withdraws by midday, after lightly damaging its opponents. Help with repairs and enjoy some rum — you’ve survived your first sea scuffle!

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MOLLYWICK

Just short of entering the Crossing, where the seas are dark and highly opaque, the Queen Zanyra and Pariah encounter a stretch of vibrant, lushly forested land.

■ Both vessels send crew over for a few hours, with captains urging quick incursions. Pair up to collect berries, scant mushrooms and sweet water. Curiously, no animals are found.

■ Veteran sailors say this is the Neverflight isle of myth, where sea kings have buried their treasures. Pirates share legendary coordinates of long lost loot, archived as riddles or poems. Grab a shovel and a-digging you go!

■ …ah, but don’t linger too long. What pranksters your sailor friends are. Within hours of the island’s appearance, the earth beneath your feet crumbles and quakes, and the land starts to sink. Evacuate or call for help to get out of here — as the great white whale Mollywick submerges in the waters with the Neverflight island it carries on its back. Hopefully, you don’t go under with them.

■ If you’ve threaded out a treasure dig, drop a line to receive some especially deplorable loot. You deserve it.

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THE CROSSING

The Pariah and Queen Zanyra — frequently chained together to avoid separation — creep into the Crossing : a stretch of eerily silent waters, dark and volatile.

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■ Slowly, a thick, nearly impregnable fog dawns during the day, covering the sun and leaving the skies a desolate slate. Dreadful storms spark at night.

■ Strange, talking carps jump on board, offering to tell you your future. Caution: they only make bad luck readings (request yours) that turn true. They appear wherever their target flees and are exceptionally annoying, until either the moon rises, or you apply the superstitious cure of throwing salt on them.

■ Nightmares haunt you — your own, or glimpsed memories of ships crashing, sinking, falling to storm. Note: only your character suffers these memories/nightmares, but everyone else can experience their exhausted grumpiness, come morning.

■ Be wary, when pairing to cross over to the other pirate ship: you may find another rowboat beside yours, its sailor begging for an oar or ladle. If you give him one, he shovels water into your boat with inhuman speed — desert your vessel and swim quickly to a pirate ship, before undead hands pull you into the sea.

■ While alone on deck, characters might hear sweet, coaxing voices that urge them to walk the plank into the water. Break your brethren from this spell, or watch them fall into the arms of man-eating mermaids.

■ Now and then, the ships are shaken by long, whips of something lashing from the depths.

■ Pirates become increasingly skittish and on edge. Priests perform countless protection rites and exorcisms on both ships.

■ At night, a handful of undead men climb aboard. They lack awareness and are in a clear state of discomposure, looking to catch the living and drown them. With toothless, rotting mouths, some rasp, This is kinder.

■ As you officially enter the Crossing, beams of light erupt in the horizon, showing the distant silhouettes of several ghost ships.

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NOTES

TEST DRIVE QUESTIONS

OLD-TIMER QUESTIONS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( She holds her tongue. Looks away and into the darkened waters, briefly.

Exhales. Sometimes she half-expects flame and smoke to follow her breath, but it does not. And still. This ancient, rumbling power awoke inside of her in Taravast. Grows more ravenous the more it feeds. She holds it at bay, and worries for the day she is not able to. It serves well like a blast of cold water.

Discipline, then. And silence. Perhaps too much silence, until she thinks to speak again. )

I tire as well, Lan Wangji.

( Not often, but she does. )

Have I offended?

( No. He breathes. He is. He has, through the fetters and binds that wrap leathery to shape his body, waged insult, if not war. There is a scratch to his movements, the steel of his sharp edges ever stabbing, when he means to embrace. He knows this, of himself — that the qualities that create warm kindness in others coagulate glacially around his core.

Dusk swallowed the ship, like the angry, mean mouth of an elder, absorbing spoonfuls of congee — bitterly, with grudging stubbornness, knowing they live and thrive against reason, at the expense of their caretakers' patience — but refusing to let go.

She has tired, Emilia says. What right have they to fatigue? He has born this conversation with so many, and at each turn waits the death of a thousand cuts of strategic, self-preserving indifference.

He watches her — too tense. Too lone. Too strong. Strain is the destroyer of form. Misplaced pressure, turning surfaces round beneath weight, brittle. He hesitates. )

My presence angers you. I may extricate it.

No.

( He has not offended. But it is striking to her how this keeps happening. How they start their given tasks a cohesive unit, succeed in their intentions, and end at such different points in the horizon. East and West. He is not a warm man. She is not a soft woman. Not any longer. All that light. All those dreams.

They died in the bloodied chamber alongside Vittoria.

Perhaps this was the only possible end, and she feels that much sillier for the attempt. Attempt to what, exactly? Connect. Express that her own soul wearies at the death and destruction that plagues them, for all that she remains committed to the fight. To her justice.

Emilia could make another attempt now. Explain she is always angry, whether she leaves it on simmer or she lets it out. But then she would only confirm his suspicions, the ones that scare her in the dark of the night, the kind of dark that does not kill. Celestia has assured her she is not La Prima. Wrath has suggested her family meddled in affairs they should not have, and she is left to pick up the pieces. And still she fears it. Fears she is the villain of this story, and she simply doesn't know it.

So she nods. That he may be granted the leave that he wishes, that she can tend to this wound in the silence. )

( No, and so he lingers close, stray cat and vagabond, a wisp of white for night chasms to howl at. He has startled her — bites down on his tongue, and what parts of him do not wilt will weather — if not from her preconceived notions of her person, than from the myriad reflections of herself she'd thought she'd peeled from mirrors, sooner than fairytales.

When he lingers, it's a fruitless concession, born of inertia. Hasty, the silhouette of his fingers barely casts shadow, under a flat, half-absent moon's light. He does not see the pregnant roundness of her, basking in the heavens. Does not see himself in waters so cored of vitality, they barely stir.

Emilia preceded him by the railing. The man she blessed with the longevity of his sad, cursed life does not turn to wave. )

Do not look long in waters dark. ( She may not love what gazes back — a face distorted, possessed, greyed. What can a cursed sea give her? A bleak, nameless thing crawls its way up his throat into meagre sound. ) They say river ghosts wait to drown their successors.

( He speaks beyond himself, to excess. Without cause or reason. )

( Oh. They are both sticking around, huh?

Emilia does avert her gaze, an instinct driven by how disquieted she remains from her experience with the mermaid. How close she was to walking the plank. Draws her eyes up toward the moon instead, briefly. Was it even true that she was a true daughter of the moon? Or was that another lie Nonna fed her? )

My friend Claudia —

( The only one she'd ever had, really, prior to Allison befriending her. )

She was entrusted with the task of preparing the bodies of the deceased, back in the island we grew up in. Our version of death rites. She never encountered a ghost, I don't think, though she loved to tell tales when we were younger.

( Share stories of how the mummies came to be. It would make Emilia squirm, and Vittoria — it's hard to think of it now, but Vittoria would always lean forward with a hungry gleam in her eye. Demanding to know more. )

( Claudia, the death-rite cleanser. Perhaps this is what they lack among them, a pair of hands honest and worn and true, and their binding to coax bones to settlement, skins to stretch and easing, limbs to posture — to gift back the dead their dignity of cosmetic presentation. Of what has this realm not stripped its cadavers? Rest, peace, the integrity of their natures, whipped to the marrow by instincts of consumption — in Sa-Hareth, howling hunger and the winding cold, thereafter the bleakness of sorcery misplaced.

It feels, to him, a world unmerciful. As if survival at all cost, unto eternity, suffocated and supplanted the petty pleasures of courtesy, of kindness. As if the bright light of the world unfurled and within it sleep dust motes.

Her friend, Emilia says, and Lan Wangji spears her with a gaze that wants itself emptied of assumption, but lands dark, cold and distracted. No starlight here to glitter sumptuous on the sea's span like broderie. Nothing to interrupt the vivid, gut-gripping understanding that, in looking, he stares. )

The dead are as children. ( And him, having raised a son. ) More sentiment than reason. More hurt, inexplicable. Do not fear them.

( Pity them. They have that yet to give. )

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