serthica: war & peace

[groundrules]

Clockwork Serthica’s arrival event stretches til around 3 September. You’re welcome to hit up this log or make your own entries. Characters not assigned to a region can still access it, as long as they’re discreet.

Please share cool plot clues via network — and have fun!

WAR & PEACE

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SUMMARY: The Merchant assigns the group to determine if the dead lurk within Serthica’s adversarial halves. Eidris and Minaras hold a summit to normalise trade within Serthica’s elusive Neutral Zone — while a resistance movements attempts to capture Minaras lead figure Arabella. In Eidris, locals must calm a maddened dragon and her cohort and retrieve her hatching eggs. Minaras hosts its eerie civic indoctrination that seeks to extirpate physical and moral decay.


FAIR FORTUNE | SWITZERLAND | EIDRIS: THERE BE DRAGONS | MINARAS: EYES ON YOU

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FAIR FORTUNE

The party at sea is smuggled into Serthica with help from false passport papers secured by their Mouse House companions. The two groups meet at Serthica’s port customs, in time for the Merchant’s private transmission:

”Good afternoon. I salute and thank the efforts of our recent additions. You performed exceptionally.

You will hear Serthica is sundered by war, sickness and irreconcilable differences. In truth, she is likely divided by the interests of those who weaponise fear and manipulate opportunity.

In Eidris, they claim Minaraians are not human. In Minaras, they speak the same of Eidris. Disgust, dismay and paranoia have created a… system of profound physical avoidance. If this is mere fearmongering, it is distasteful, but inconsequential. However… if one of the citadel’s halves has succumbed to the dead, who now know to feign they yet live… this marks a dire escalation. You must study this.

Your transportation beacon sleeps in the holy grounds of Vassarizhia. It will light within months, when the Heart’s clock quiets for its annual winding. You may visit the grounds during the upcoming trade summit.

While in Serthica, your only objectives are to survive until the beacon’s eye opens, and to discover the dead present. I pray but question you will prevail.”

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SWITZERLAND

After a lengthy inspection of their passport papers, the party is steered towards the Sanctuary of Serthica’s Neutral Zone — a vast institute near Serthica’s great clock tower. Here, representatives of Eidris and Minaras assemble at midday for peaceful negotiations to improve distant trade relations.

■ The Merchant recommends mingling to broaden your investigation into Serthica’s dead. Even Minaras leading figurehead Arabella will attend.

■ For peace-keeping, entrants to the Sanctuary must surrender their weapons or allow them to be sealed, if they want to carry them in. Weapons are released on departure. Physical enhancements that characters cannot remove (ex: vampire fangs) are excepted.

■ Those who are unwilling to give up or seal their weapons can head on to Eidris and Minaras.

■ Summit attendants receive badges reflecting their Serthica identities, or can divert the greeting droid and liberate the insignia of a delayed delegation. Higher-ranking badges earns you more lenient treatment and higher security clearance.

■ Eidris attendants receive golden armbands or scarves, those of Minaras dark blue.

■ In bustling halls, officials negotiate grain exchanges, new train railways, the currency exchange rate and the saddening conditions of Mouse House exiles. Alas, if only someone (not them) could help.

■ Those drafted into the talks are toasted with a green, mint-like potion — an unadvertised truth serum intended to keep negotiations honest. The potion’s effects last two to four hours, compelling truth but not speech. But do talk: candour wins answers.

■ Artisans display their finest novelty items in the main reception hall. Aggressively enthusiastic traders seek testers and investors for their wares — potent opiates, goggles that show you the world in 10 years’ time, even detailed plans for luxury teahouses offering droid companionship. Extricate yourself with as much coin and dignity as possible.

SLEEP, CHILD, SLEEP

■ The great clock of the Neutral Zone strikes 18:00, triggering a light three-minute earthquake and the rise of nocturnal Minaras.

■ The Sanctuary loses all electric power. As servants rush for candles, you might notice some native summit delegates behave peculiarly: their eyes look glassy, faces trapped in an expression of comical, exaggerated dismay. Many are frozen in tense positions. Others move in sluggish, uncoordinated and jerky spasms. One might catch your wrist and attempt to speak in staggered, guttural croaks.

■ Lights return once the earthquake finishes. Locals resume regularly and do not seem to have noticed any erratic behaviour.

SLEEP, CHILD, SLEEP
CONTENT WARNING: TERROR ATTACK

■ Starting her speech, Arabella of Minaras calls a tribute for those lost to the great Culling sickness that struck Serthica mere years before. The vigil is interrupted by a fusillade of rifle shots fired from outside, through the Sanctuary’s wall-long windows.

■ The bullets exclusively target Minaras delegates and do not contain gunpowder, but a thickened, pale liquid. Once shot, those wounded experience a hysterical, incontrollable terror and the certainty that their greatest fear is hunting them. Many of the shot delegates develop an instant flight response and seek to claw their way out of the Sanctuary, with no care for whom they trample in their path. This terror lasts 30-60 minutes. Please content warn if you graphically describe your character’s greatest fear.

■ As rifle gunshots die down, a voice from outside introduces the Remembrance coalition, pledging safety if the summit surrenders Arabella.

■ The Sanctuary activates emergency measures: protective magical wards start to slowly reinforce, while attendants risk their lives to return characters’ weapons.

■ You could team up and help Arabella’s few remaining guards to escort her to safety in Minaras. Drop a line if you take this route.

■ Outside, you find the Sanctuary’s grounds have been drenched in a thick fog that barely allows you to see steps ahead. Your senses dull, and you are gradually prone to sleep — while masked men close in with rifles and vicious droid hunting hounds.

■ Help Sanctuary guards take out the assailants — and submit your character for a RNG draw to interrogate a lone captive.

■ Characters who later investigate the Sanctuary can find some of its windows have been very carefully pricked, fissured or even minutely holed, easing the way for attack.

Crawl back to your home base in Eidris or Minaras — you need the beauty sleep.

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EIDRIS | THERE BE DRAGONS

Eidris’s relaxed atmosphere might balm your rattled nerves after the Sanctuary’s disasters. Startled citizens gather to offer you help settling in, while dragons seek you out to curl up and nuzzle.

Eidris is governed by natural order and harmony, achieved through firm etiquette, consideration and reminders to slow down. You can hole up in a room in one of the many abandoned and repurposed villas, or group up to take a whole house. Local technology is a blend of mechanical gears and magic that substitutes fuels. Sorcerers are frequent, boastful and admired.

Dig deeper, and you’ll find the people of Eidris are unwilling to linger on negative experiences and gradually lose memory of them. If queried, many natives have normalised intermittent amnesia, with some using their link to their dragons to stay anchored in the present.

■ Acclimate to your roles in Eidris and enjoy the sweet welcome of neighbourly gifted meals and knitwear and a personal, signed letter of support from king Thivar.

■ Eidris prepares for the rare hatching of dragon eggs, lain by the beautiful fire-breathing Aiva — one of the fewer martial dragons used by Eidris’ military. Two weeks into your stay (around 25 August, forward date at will), word spreads that Aiva’s mate has been deeply injured by a Minaras scouting ship during the 6:00-7:00 overlap period when the two citadel halves are both overground.

■ A panicked, distrustful Aiva collects her silver-shelled eggs from the formal nest quarters, hiding them on the rooftops or in the balconies of tall, dangerous buildings. Several other martial dragons assist Aiva by guarding these hideaways until the young dragons can hatch.

■ Eidris calls back most transport dragons to avoid altercation with their fire-breathing, paranoid brethren. This might strand some riders on the nearest decrepit rooftop, while testy dragons fly by. They don’t initiate attack, but are more prone to warning tail sweeps or light charring, if you come close.

■ Dragon lord Cain d’Ubiq urges riders that can reconnect with their dragons to help retrieve the 1m, 50-kg eggs and deliver them back to the dragon grounds nest before they hatch by sundown — terrorising the baby dragons that wake alone and ripping into local architecture. Other riders are needed to spread a trail of deep incense smoke in the air that can soothe dragons from their outburst. Lend a hand!

■ Characters who enlisted for dragon riding on arrival could be middling riders by this point.

■ Aiva’s children hatch moments before the clock ticks 18:00 and Minaras also surges overground. Characters linked to a dragon feel the birth: first as an overwhelming exuberance, then as an all-consuming and irrational dread that briefly reduces them to inexplicable tears.

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MINARAS | EYES ON YOU

A sharp departure from Eidris’ laissez-faire is watchful Minaras, where citizens obsess with schedules, orderliness and time — as if every second is both borrowed and wasted.

Newcomers can choose between one-person 2.5x2.5m ‘sleep units’ in packed industrial homes, or pool funds to rent small refurbished alcoves that once served as hospital or science halls. Space is a luxury, silence a myth: helper droids constantly fuss after their masters, steam engines cough outside, and the gentle thrum on the streets betrays the current-shifting omnipresence of large Watch ships.

Civic sound systems periodically bleat reminders for citizens to STAY HALE, STAY WHOLE, alongside tips for basic droid care, the latest in scientific discoveries, paid ads and reminders not to park your robotic carriage near hydrants.

■ Quickly learn the ropes of your assumed identity, as Minaraians have a duty to report peculiar behaviours.

■ Watch ships prevent lawbreaking while Minaras is overground. Crime rates spike rapidly when Minaras falls underground.

■ More than violence, Minaraians appear to fear their pocket watch times being wrong, filth and sickness. The smallest cough earns a stern glance and a wide berth.

■ As part of Minaras’ periodic social indoctrination, you are robotically escorted alongside your peers and other unrelated Minaraians to a civic integration centre. Here, you take turns before a mechanical droid sphinx labelled ASCLEPIOS that asks, ”What rots you? and compels an honest answer (this can be emotional, mental or physical sickness, minor or severe).

■ A painless tattoo appears on the back of your hand, listing your Decay (ex: ‘malnourishment,’ ‘a choleric temper’). Others in the indoctrination centre must help you mend through acts of care (ex: cooking you a meal, helping you meditate). The tattoo fades after 72 hours, or once sufficient acts of care have ‘cured’ you.

■ After one week (around 20 August, but feel free to forward date), a transmission from Arabella informs watch, aerial, military and health units that Minaras is changing the daily schedule of its scout ships. The last scouts will now be deployed at 4:15am and return to base by 5:00am.

QUESTIONS

Comments

trade summit

[downswing]

Cloying stillness, mutinous. In artificial dark, his fingers tighten in their fist, hard like wet rope binding. Candles sob, cough and flicker, fresh-born: to his left, a boy bear a broad-bellied brazier like a midnight sun. Murmurs of the crowd die like wisps of incense. Earlier: how the earth's shivers stoke and quiet when the citadel halves swap place. How their daily eruptions soothe idle minds. How the long claws of the Sanctuary's bustling lines of 'electricity' must have been felled short.

He does not pretend false understanding. Barely stirs, mouth a dry gasp and hand iron cast on Bichen's stony hilt, where she sleeps a quiet babe in her noosing fetters. At the gates, between their apologies, We cannot give passage if the weapon is not secured. And so, the little silvered voice of her cries and chokes sheathed.

Before Lan Wangji, the spectacle is half accident and half hazard — the whole, a treacle of transitions. A man's mouth unhinges serpentine, as if to swallow the ceiling, teeth a pale, warm gleam. Strain erodes his madness thin, fat swells of tears tripping from eye corners. Farther out, between shifting waves of smudged silhouettes, another guest convulses in petty startles of movement. Like a fly, nursing the habit of spreading its tattered wings. Farther still, a woman's throat loosens like a string of beads, tension sculpting out taut ridges. She sings to a sky that looms empty, past gilded sills. No stars tonight. No patterns.

One heartbeat, the strangeness envelops him. The second, it suffocates.

Wangji reaches to inflict the warm stain of his hand's print on the nearest companion — and lights breathe again, bloom into the hall room like spells of summers rain. Around him, delegates wrench free of their stupour, arms swinging loose to summon drink, or the syllables of a friend's companionship. Earlier, Lan Wangji pulsed, a being adrift and alive. Now, he is — sedate, self-contained. The negative space that captures clamour.

He does not seek Wei Ying. Finds him, naturally, in the way comets discover the orbit of the superior planet's pull. Blinks of errant red, a hand all knuckles and gristle rounding a lazy cup. Wei Ying's eyes, dark and knowing, like a snagged, thin hunter's blade.

When Lan Wangji eases beside him, it's to tip and pour his watered wine in Wei Ying's cup, sound of his own voice too deep and rich in a room reduced to sketches. "You saw."

It cannot be Wangji alone.

[weifinder]

A shiver, electric down his spine, the trembling and shaking underfoot an exhalation unmatched by the dark that flickers in with the lights flickering out, so many points in a night sky swallowed by a vaster black. He straightens, fingers twitching, a smile twitching at his lips into a grim reminder of what humour can be found in the dark recesses of any moment, even his worsts.

His husband, separate from soulmate, twinned beings who are relearning the men they've become from the youths they once were, is a warmth and a gifter of wine and words and the certainty, as the liquid pours, that this is no mistake.

"He wasn't wrong to wonder," he says, wine cup shifting from one hand to the other, grasping fingers sliding down to find the edge of Lan Zhan's sleeve, to touch, to curl, to hold. Small movements, meaningful as they are, for the unsettled heart beating within him, no core spun golden in his breast, the senses he'd sacrificed to survive and conquer dulled to uselessness. He stills the melody that claws at the back of his throat, the demand that sits to be made but which cannot be voiced, not now, not so soon, not so uncertainly.

"These are not a people whole, whatever ails them." Death? Curses? Illness? The last makes the least sense, not the disjointed horror of the difference in flicking candlelight and flame, to the smooth certainty of the lights and, and, and...

"The energies that power their mechanical lights failed, and so did they. Lan Zhan," he says, voice soft and honeyrich with the cant of his head, a glance sidelong, a shift closer while he lifts the glass, prepares to drink, "Arrays always have a source."

The watered wine down his throat near steals his breath away.

[downswing]

"You think a curse sustains them." Soft, fresh spilled snow, words like winter. They could spend a lifetime like this, sketched by Lan Wangji's declarative summations of Wei Ying's wandered, distant thoughts. He's learned, over time, that Wei Ying requires this to ground him, as if the eerie brutality of Wangji's interpretation thrusts a mirror before his meditations. As if his nightmares can only then take form.

One hand to Bichen, reflexively ready, for all she sleeps quiet and forlorn and still, cold and uncaring. Sealed. She will not thank him, later. He will not thank himself, but for the price of entry that wanted paid, and he is here, is he not? Twenty-fifth rib, attached to Wei Ying's flank? Wei Ying, whose touch drifts to his sleeve, and Wangji chooses then the inevitability of discourtesy, two fingers waving to whisper an attendant close, so he might aggrieve him with the burden of Wangji's cup.

His arm twists, turns. A no man's strip of his wrist stretches out, pale. When he reaches to unhook Wei Ying's claws from his sleeve — a child, heavens split and strike him, he has married a child who must surely have taught Sizhui all of his habits of clinging — it's to slip Wei Ying's palm a coarse, ragged square of neatly folded parchment. Warding, written carefully before. No weapon, but enough to steer Wei Ying to safety, should disaster overspill.

...as if Wei Ying, master of monsters and birth mother to all talismans, cannot fabricate himself better in a heartbeat.

"They say the earth shudders each turn the citadels exchange places." Then, surely, "We may observe if the pattern repeats."

A delightful view for a romantic couple. He recommends the past-time.

[weifinder]

Curses have lingering, lasting effects; here, even more so than elsewhere in his experiences, where the Burial Mounds seem to fester and bubble up in places where nothing should indicate they would. The Merchant's destroyed, home citadel, those people and their mirror research, the magics they crafted or were undone by, the bodied dead who now roamed...

"I think it possible."

Of the citadel itself, on its platforms, he doesn't see why it would not be possible. Magics are bound to objects here as surely as anything else. Aren't their pendants small proof of such?

Life continues without the pretense of an interruption around them, no note that any difference was even seen. He breathes in, the paper pressed into his hand felt and acknowledged and left folded, then slipped into the front of his robes as easily as breathing.

"Observations," he says, "Which would have been more enjoyable from low rooftops. Alas, Lan Zhan, we're at a lack of low heights here."

A half smile with his sideglance, and a nod forward as he mentally shakes off the fetters of that weird silence continuing into that horrific display, and lingering on well behind it.

"Twice a day, in opportunities. For which do we aim?"

[downswing]

"You shall yet have wine, when we start in Eidris." Coaxed, in the way of tender bribes, for what is Wei Ying without the quick, honed scent of loquat, without the test of his tongue on sharp wine and flattery? The Emperor earned his crown in Caiyi's markets, but smiled for Wei Ying alone.

He thinks, more fool than man, to tip his cup into Wei Ying's again and drop-drip-drip-pour the last terrible dregs of his wine, like the sobs of a child: first in a torrential downpour, then simmering to nothing. Ahead, crowds crow once more and croon, to unwind the mysteries of their silent trade. Perhaps there is nothing for their hands to offer. Perhaps, like their bodies, their proposals are husked, paper filigree that will melt under the first storm.

Wangji's gaze does not shift from them, when he begs Wei Ying close with the nudge of his hand, when he brings Wei Ying's knuckles to his mouth. Listen, and pretend they are this, no more than fond lovers transgressing with the indecency of their public affections, not hawk-eyed watchers of their companions:

"If they are not as men." But he stills, stalls, dead of his tongue a sullen, stale lacquer. He cannot injure Wei Ying's pride, cannot presume with implication. Wei Ying stands, alone. Wei Ying does not — require a champion.

"The Patriarch may lack his army." The dead do not heed, do not listen. Necromancy is as gossamer here, unravelling between fingertips. "But he has a sword."

Bichen, borrowed by Lan Wangji's hand. It need not impose its protection, but it stands ready.

[weifinder]

He snorts, the sort of amusement that could be cutting if intended, delivered soft. Subtle sway to the winds that blow cool around him, Lan Zhan's heat transfixing when his mind twists away, considering as it does from dappled shadows what the play of light and dark means, where celestial bodies and earthen realities push and pull and form each other.

This: the dead exist disguised, not stirred to his whispers, to his cadences, his coaxing, cajoling, gentled commands.

This: the citadel that moves in disjointed, earth-shattering halves, as if the dragons of soil stir and wrench and shudder, seeking rebirth but unable to awaken. That their sky brethren soar and descend each evening to be encased, egg-like, held captive beneath veneers of safety, returned to the egg and reborn daily only to die, again, daily, there must be some injustice there to rectify.

This: the cut strings of puppets in a play of shadows and light, and dappled again he stands, Lan Zhan warmth and cool whites and the promise of Bichen's restrained length, cold song and protection of sheath and blade as hand in hand as they are, moment to moment.

This: to lean in, turn face, eyes darkened by the shadows collected in them, a grotto in a forgotten wood parched for the spring rains, seeking out his husband's face.

"Two," he says, though it stands as promise and not graspable, not without reaching for his husband's length, fingers dancing across a familiar sheath, "Soon enough. Have faith, Lan Zhan."

Faith, fragile and stronger than it has any right to be, woven in with hope, with belief.

"A year and months we've walked the land of mortals and mortal dead. This place will not be where we fall."

Not even with half the citadel dropping away to darkness, opposing half lifting skyward, to a darkness less consuming, but no less hallow. Outside, the summit swallows back a sigh, condensation creeping closer, a fog of rivers and cold mornings winding its way forward in slow, steady heartbeats.

[downswing]

"It will not." He agrees too easily, too readily, just as children coax their dreams into daylight. A whisper, and the liminal spaces between appetite, fantasy and reality converge, and it is a flux, to want, hot slide of a body reshaping itself around its certainty.

They will not fall here, Wei Ying says, and in his hand, Bichen pulses with the quiet, sealed ache of every monster that knows a maiden's taming. Will the sword yield to Wei Ying, this strange slip of nothing, more laughter and swelling pride than man? When his strength stirs, and the smoke of his spirits meets the mirror of Bichen's blade, will she allow him union? Half of Lan Wangji's soul in his sheath, the other in a body lessened through the many sword-cut attritions of starvation in the Burial Mounds, of harrowing neglect thereafter. Of course they must marry. Of course, one day, Bichen will let him draw her and not flay his hand.

Around them, the stench of rose and lily white thickens, cloying. Beneath it, reek of rust and metal, hard between his teeth, and wreaths of old, pervasive mould. An ancient house this, and its vast guests feel — ...weathered, too. Nearby, Wei Ying, dead man returned, is the liveliest creature.

Do not flee, Wangji means to say, and draws his head ribbon down, quickly, quickly, as if to dally now is to risk Wei Ying's withdrawal. Blink of an eye, and he could be gone. He could have been, as these men are, no more than phantasmagory. When he knots it around the sharp-edged cliff of Wei Ying's nearest wrist bone, it comes too loose at first, ungainly — product of its artless haste. Then, too tight, to compensate. Lan Wangji cannot bind it well on this night. It hangs, limply, begging Wei Ying's forgiveness, a sullen afterthought.

"Wear it in parting." A token to anchor him.

[weifinder]

A shivering start, turned surprise more than startlement, as the ribbon snakes around his wrist, first loose and sliding, then tight and choking, trailing down from his arm to reach for the ground now steadied underfoot. A false stability, and he quirks his brow at his husband's flailings, this failing of an oft repeated tendency with its own meanings made clear in a way that drunken words a lifetime ago had seemed more a pervasive jest when taken too literally.

Lan Zhan, who had then taken so many things too literally, too without nuance. A different man now, tempered by near two decades of chasing chaos, and whatever else followed. Chance encounter for the both of them on Dafan Mountain, leading back around to what? Dancing to a shadow man's tune, and here, a man who makes apparent his motions in simple terms of make them fall, and we sink together, and that is not a terrible plan.

He reaches up, slides his ribbon out of its knot, and catches at Lan Zhan's hand, pushes back his sleeve with strokes of fingers calloused now more from playing flute than from swordplay, for all he'd been flirting with the art again.

"You keep doing that, I start to feel uneven," he says, lips curling upward, tease in voice while his eyes run serious. He winds his own ribbon up Lan Zhan's arm, to the point he can, as a brace, as something visible now, but hidden with a flick of a wrist, a fall of cascading, overgenerous fabric. At Lan Zhan's whim, but not less marked or married as this whole dance is, side by side, no matter what the citadel does to separate them by unreliable chance and merchant-granted, group-supported opportunity.

"Wear it in anticipation."

Parting is due, will follow as the summit reaches culmination, plateaus to whatever lack of ending it may find, but parting is not a sorrow given depth and permanence. They must look, investigate where they can, make use of the tools given and tools of themselves to move forward into understanding this unsteadiness, these disjointed puppets with cut strings and simmered, thickened insobriety.

He smiles, lashes lowered, and a flicker of warmth cuts the calculation and the cold shimmering there, the night's sky bearing testimony to whatever follows.

The crowd stirs, fog slides along glass, slips through miniscule punctures, cracks, openings. Little by little, fear stalks closer, and the machinations of a citadel's stress reaching one of many boiling points readies the whole for the event of boiling over.