the sunken

[groundrules]

Image source.

THE SUNKEN

The silent, dark, opaque seas briefly clear for a short stretch, as the Pariah and Queen Zanyra advance into the Crossing.Below sleeps a graveyard of sunken ships in various states of decay — including the beautifully preserved Vernalis.

Sailors say she was the crown jewel of an army fleet and the fear of every sea she traversed, sinking at least three pirate ships. One day, she disappeared. Caladan Kreil, who met and survived the Vernalis in battle, swears her leader Oscar Santorini was a spartan rule abider who would never have neglected the dutiful upkeeping of his captain’s logs.

A school of vicious mermaids has briefly blocked the paths of the Pariah and Queen Zanyra, orbiting around the sunken ships below. They will dispel naturally, sailors say, when the tides turn within three days. Until then, the ships only make slow advance — and Caladan Kreil sees an opportunity to settle one of the sea’s deepest mysteries.

✘ OBJECTIVE: search the Vernalis’ captain’s cabin for his logs.

■ Characters who accept Caladan’s mission are lowered down in lifeboats and supplied pale skin-tight suits that are membrane-thin, adhesive and transparent. They settle comfortably once the wearer hits water, feeling weightless and emanating light signals — red for danger or injury, white for alert or fear, yellow to broadcast the wearer must return to land, and a calm greenish-blue otherwise.

■ The suits protect wearers from temperature and pressure drops and enable them to fully breathe underwater for four hours at a time. Suits must dry for at least two hours between uses.

■ Suit lights are visible underwater. The green light does not attract other sea creatures, but the red and white lights repel nearby marine life, except for mermaids.

■ You can magically speak and be understood underwater, although in a short range, as sound carries with more difficulty here.

■ Mermaids patrol near the Queen Zanyra and Pariah and swarm the wrecks of the sunken ships below, including the Vernalis. Many lair up in the hulls or raided cabins of the downed vessels.

■ To safely enter the waters, spill a little blood on a bait or make a lure out of fish entrails, toss it, then dive when the mermaids give chase. Alternatively, wait until the midday sun is at zenith and the sirens have been lulled listless or asleep for an hour.

■ Careful: swift, sharp-toothed and long-clawed, mermaids have an exceptional sense of smell and will pursue anyone who scrapes or bleeds beneath water. Although not entirely blind, many have a diffused vision and respond quicker to sound than to sight.

■ The mermaids are largely starved and reactive. Some help guide strangers, if they are offered food or help from natural predators, such as sharks, unfriendly large octopuses and strange tendrils of dark water that appear more prominently, the deeper you sink down. Bring a knife.

■ The Vernalis sits about one-hour’s dive beneath water. It seems to have been caught in a net of dark coral-like matter, without reaching the ocean’s floor. Beware the tendrils of this strange ‘plant’: those trapped within will find their energy gradually depleted. Some of the strings of corals have snagged pieces of preserved parchment or cloth, littered with the names of sailors or the verses of sea chants.

■ Those who reach the Vernalis may notice the ship has only been deceptive preserved — many doors, hinges and pieces of furniture have rotted from within, threatening to collapse upon wanderers. All mirrors, pieces of glass and reflective or metallic surfaces have darkened and become opaque.

■ Those who enter the cabin or hull of the Vernalis will find the quarters eerily silent, but for a methodical, rhythmic pulse — like the drumming of an unnatural, but living heartbeat. Time passes much faster here — keep track that your costume doesn’t flash yellow, and help swim up with those who can no longer transport themselves.

■ The Vernalis affects visitors differently: some are entirely immune, others are overcome by a deep, animal and inexplicable and paralysing fear, or by the urgent wish to flee. Others still feel sluggish, lost and comfortable, for the first time in years, starting to fall in a deep, unstirring sleep (that breaks once they return to surface).

■ Searching the cabins will reveal there are no bodies or bones aboard the Vernalis. The door of the captain’s cabin locks after each entry, both in and out, and must be heavily forced open — once inside, rummage through Oscar Santorini’s wealth of books and correspondence to recover some of the loose pages of his torn captain’s log, then return with your discoveries on land. Drop a thread link with your characters’ good work to receive a summary of the contents of the page they’ve uncovered.

QUESTIONS

PLOTTING

Comments

[inferus]

Wrath says nothing about Emilia being his intended. She has not chosen him yet despite the tattoos binding them, and she will have the chance to choose otherwise still, to choose not-him. He accepted their marriage bond when he saved her life from the venom running through her veins, but he will fight for her to keep her own choice - free from outside influence, and thus far, it has not been him that she has chosen. Even that night when he had thought-

He follows Wangji down.

"Are you asking a question or making an assumption?" The description is more fitting of his intended, of Emilia though she has only begun to scratch the surface of what she is capable of doing with the fire at her fingertips, with the vines and flowers she can grow with ease - fire and life. That is Emilia.

He is ice and Death.

"Fire does not become me. It simply has no effect." Like placing a bonfire on a glacier.

[downswing]

Downwards, pressure opposes him, strips and lashes skin it cannot reach. The suit at once shields and strangulates him, lessens him from man to iota of dust, from a projectile, weight-bearing, to a particle adrift.

Around them, the coral crown thickens, doubles its filigree. On instinct, he reaches a hand out to anchor himself in the nest of threadbare, cloying dark. On caution, he holds back. It seems to him the coral's littered wisps of rot and vine have spiralled into an eternity, and the reach is only south and souther-bound.

"I had assumed," but he knows the segue, inevitable, and battles through it, "Limitations."

Humbling, to understand what Wrath politely keeps hidden: that limits and corners and edges carve out the space of Lan Wangji's reality, but need not his own. "You are fully immune?"

[inferus]

"Yes," Wrath says after a moment, careful to not be prideful about it (he is not his brother), careful to not reveal too much. Though he has taken a different tactic here in this world, the group is all after one aim, and they will make more progress if they work together. It is not like he is in Hell where revealing too much means putting himself at risk with one of his brothers or their other enemies.

Of course, he is immune to nearly everything when in his own world. Even what injures him, it heals. Some healing takes longer than others. Naturally, there is an exception - one exception (it is all about balance, and Wrath is part of bringing that balance more than anyone else). This world is different, but he can still endure where others would falter. "This world has its effects on my abilities and powers. I was not able to enter the lava of the volcano itself after all."

He could only get so close to it which may have had more to do with the nature of the magic inside of it than the lava itself, but he imagines he was able to get closer to it than most.

"You have no specific protection against the depths of water?"

[downswing]

"Will," he offers absently, hand nearly caught in a coral's tangle, then once more losing its anchor point. "Healing —"

To excess. They have seen him, stitch and patchwork of his wounds and his bruises, mending under wavering, timorous sun. And the sects warn, Keep close to yourself the secrets of your clan, like jade beads to your pocket. A man who betrays the techniques of his school betrays himself, his people. And yet, what good the righteous Cloud Recesses here? They are all brush strokes and thespians in hazy theatres of inconsequence.

"...does not extend to suffocation. Perhaps, I may burn less breath, if internal processes regulate." But he sounds clinical to his own ear, verbose. As if, for lack of truths to share, he dabbles in ambiguity, and perhaps this is the sin the precepts wish to choke — the art of words wandered, lost in the wind, speaking nothing, unto no one.

Resistance underwater at length and duress is untested — but for Lan Wangji, easing down and lower down, daring the sharks that coil and roil close to assault them.

"We are not your equals."

[inferus]

"Do not go further than you are able."

Wrath repeats if only to emphasize that any further is not necessary. He can transvenio to the top once he reaches what appears to lie below. Each member of the group needs to be protected and returned to where they belong in time. The group has, in a sense, become the House he left behind - a number of individuals who are under his watch and must be returned to the places they belong to.

He swims further down, examining Wangji for a moment though he appears to face what comes without flinching.

The statement brings a quiet, weighted pause. Wrath does not know what it means to be mortal - to be born, to be raised, to have family, to grow and live. He was made at the start of the world, and he has existed since - angel first then demon. Never has he been human, never has he known life in the way mortals do. When he was an angel, he was powerless in an entirely different way than humans are- humans who have always had their choices to make. Wrath fell so he could have that power, that beautiful power to choose.

"...no." It's soft acknowledgement. "I seek what lies below in hopes it will help us all, but you do not need to follow."

[downswing]

"You may be elder." A primordial thing, ancient when the earth that dispersed from beneath Lan Wangji's feet was young. He senses, more than knows this, with an intimate, arrogant animal instinct that dictates only a person so much more sophisticated in his seniority could surpass Wangji's ability so profusely.

But then, Wei Ying ruled the world, moth to the fire, a ghost cut from young flesh and manners new. Novelty can breed its own monsters.

"Therefore, clear your eyes." Of waters and tears and the pain-sculpted rheumy that elder men cultivate in their sight, when the years chip and dilute it. "Do not see me a child."

His hair darkens against a spreading pool of nether waters. He sees himself, his own extremities — the jade pallor that signals welfare, silencing slowly into white. It will be that, he knows, within half a shi, when his organism begins to struggle against the tightening fist of suffocation. Not yet.

He intends, as Wrath so cleverly dismisses him, to excuse himself before the inconvenient becomes lethal.

[inferus]

Wrath says nothing further in response to that beyond a simple nod of acceptance at the request. It is Wanji's choice to make, and Wrath feels strongly about choices.

Still it is far too difficult to describe in their trip down below. The truth is Wrath has no concept of a 'child' though he understands what Wangji means, but he does understand growing, learning, changing. When he was created, he is not as he is now. Still all mortals, regardless of their age (hundreds, thousands), feel fragile to him, and he has a damning feeling of responsibility over the entire group. He has no House here, but he does have a group, stumbling their way through an unknown world and attempting to find their way across universes to return to their own.

His focus returns to the coral, to the thrumming that calls to him as all magic does, but this one is familiar to him.

"There is something beneath, something of great magic the further we go like what was found in the volcano."

[downswing]

He remembers, again: Emilia, Wrath. Returned like ashes scoured from a brazier. The volcano released them tattered, worn. He watches Wrath now and sees a spectre of possibility, a force that might exceed Wangji's own but can still — dim.

Even the sun wanes, fat in a lone sky. Growth is an accelerated process of not thirty summers. Beyond, regression reigns. Limitations. Depletion. When they nearly brush coral, he thinks all, at once, Death.

"Will you survive descent?" Certainly, Wrath assumes so. And yet, there is the sharp knife of a woman who waits for him, and Lan Wangji owes her better than allowing her intended to pursue his madness. Pride pushes men past their natural instincts of preservation. Why should Wrath prove different?

"The volcano took toll of you, only weeks past." Another call on Wrath's powers? How formidable must they be, to seem interminable? "We need not solve all mysteries at any cost."

[inferus]

Death.

Wrath senses it too. He was made for it - the angel of Death, Samael, the poison of his Maker - that is what his name means, that is what his purpose was before he fell from Heaven and claimed his own purpose, choice, reason. He stares below but he lifts his gaze at the question, surprised that Wangji should ask or care at all.

"I cannot die." This is not entirely true, but the item that can kill him exists within the world he comes from. This world may try him, however. It already challenges his powers and limitations, and he is certain the mortal across from him is smart enough to think of those complications.

Still. Pride is not his sin - that is his brother's. Wrath attempts to never make foolish decisions. He would not be an expert strategist, a general of War otherwise.

"I will trasnvenio... - teleport to the ship the very moment I sense this world may have challenged that."

[downswing]

Transve... and teleportation. He has heard one of the — processes named before. Five's practice, or that of a motion array. To listen to Wrath, the first procedure must be akin to the second, and so Lan Wangji learns the name, stores it for later study. Men of different means, of different worlds, cannot be underestimated — not in their power, not in their hubris.

This creature believes in its immortality. Do sects not toil endlessly to produce the scant, chosen few who have earned the privilege of life, stripped of death's decay? Why should the concept now fester in Lan Wangji's mind like sickness? Because some virtues are better aspired to than conquered.

"All men die." But it slips him like snake's venom and steely susurrus, like the breath of a tinkering politician, "Monsters life forever."

Not the hour, he knows, for idle talk. On his flesh, above the reduced layers of silks that bind him, the membranous suit pulses the bright white of alert, as his slippage continues. Slowly, the beam starts to bleed into red.

He stays himself, enough of the old prudence left within him that he knows he should begin the swim up.

[inferus]

Wrath can see the change in the suit's color - the light begins to turn to red. However, he already agreed to respect Wangji's request to not be treated as a child so he does not point it out. He will make his own decision about when is best for him to return to the surface.

The statements seem simplistic in nature. There are worlds where it appears some men do not die at all despite the very wrongness of that reality. There are monsters Wrath has seen perish, killed himself when necessary.

"Is this your way of saying you believe me to be a monster?"

He does not sound surprised nor upset. The mortal world has long since made up stories about the devil and what he does. They all believe him to be a monster. He is accustomed to it though rarely from someone who does not know his title. Does Wangji not come from a place with gods?

[downswing]

A man made monster. A monster, wearing the flesh of man. What difference make chronology, causality, consequence? Emilia would marry him.

He thinks, foolishly, there are worse grooms to lift a bride's sheer red veil. He thinks she will smile, hyena-like, and tear out Wrath's jugular, if he without care.

"You decide your nature. I do not envy you that choice," he offers by way of simply concession, tongue slack and the bite of his words drained of venom. Lethargy reduces him to something not unlike palatable peacemaking. A statesman is born every time a man slips in an abyss.

On his temples, great giants drum their fingers and push in and in and in, the pulse of their large thumbs all but stabbing in holes of migraine. Physical frailty. That Wrath is so careful to recall Wangji's limitations does not mean Lan Wangji wishes to recall them.

Until, finally, "I shall wait a few steps on high." Enough so that the pull of the depth lessens. "Take half the hour. No more, before the others are called."

By him, with haste.

[inferus]

"At least I have a choice to make," Wrath says as that is the reason he fell to start with, isn't it? He was made in a manner that gave him none at all - Angel of Death, General of War. It was all set in a stone so strong that it was supposed to be impossible to break free from. For too long, he knew only obeying. He gave up everything to become what he is now if only so he could have the ability to make choices of his own.

And he would do it again and again despite what it means for his existence now - wretched and cursed, but his.

He waits, sensing the lethargy in Wangji, feeling the pressure mount given the depths of which they have traveled.

There's a singular nod from Wrath in acceptance with this statement.

But he wastes no further time, time is precious if he is only to have thirty minutes before a group of mortals attempts some type of rescue. He sinks lower and lower still, following the path of the dark magic gushing upward.