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

[inferus]

Wrath remains quiet as she speaks, allowing the space for her anger and her pain, noting the scar across her neck which would have killed any mortal in his world. He listens without judgement. It is upon Death that his judgement is wrought.

This is not the time for judgement.

There is no possible way he could understand her experiences. He does not know what it is like to be mortal, to have siblings and fathers the ways mortals do. He does not know what it is like to truly nearly die for all the times his brothers have disemboweled him or shoved their daggers into him. Wrath does not know what it is like to have the finality of death before him in the way mortals do.

He does not know the sixties as she has lived them - fearing for her life and the lives of those she cares about taken based on the way they look and nothing else. Beaten, lynched, power removed.

There is much he cannot understand about what she has told him. He does understand anger, however. He understands brutality and wars waged. Necessary wars, indefensible wars. Wrath understands the true fury born from powerlessness.

"There is little more valuable than power, and no greater power than freedom. Only those who do not want to share it would say otherwise."

There was a time when he would have said there was nothing more valuable than power, but Emilia- She is more valuable than it all.

"Anger is often seen as being destructive, but it can also be righteous and just. And you have every right to wield it as a weapon after what you experienced, to use it to reclaim your power." There's a pause. "How did your voice return to you?"

[rumorate]

It's comforting to hear him say it, someone relatively objective who isn't her family. When you only have people with the last name Hargreeves as a sounding board, it's hard to really tell if your feelings are valid or if they're just heightened because it's her siblings. Part of her relaxes at that, but her hand comes up to rub against her throat.

"It took time, but the attack didn't completely destroy my voice box." She pauses. "The time from her attacking me to us traveling to the sixties was ... a day, maybe? A day and a half? But in my first year in the sixties my voice slowly started to come back. And I joined the movement to try and help improve things for people like me, and that's where I met Ray."

And Ray is one of the bright spots that almost makes all of it worth it. Still traumatizing, still anger inducing, but he's right. She wouldn't trade her year of marriage with him for the world.

"And I married him. Even with things being crazy and dangerous, he made me feel safe."

[inferus]

Wrath is silent.

He knows what it is like - not to not feel safe, but to have met someone that changes you and changes something fundamental about you and your life and then to want to marry them even if marrying means an eternity. Especially then. He stares ahead. The chill around him has not quite eased.

"...and you lost him."

Wrath can feel her love for the man she speaks about, but also her grief - and her anger too. It is always there, simmering away, threatening to lash out with venom and fangs like a viper at anyone who dare take from her again. He appreciates the strength and sharpness of it, and he knows his presence alone evokes and encourages: anger.

[rumorate]

"And then I left him."

Does she get to be angry at that? Angry at him for making the choice she would have made if she didn't have Claire on the other side, waiting for her? She loves Ray so much, but it can't be more than her daughter. It will never be more than her daughter.

"Because I could either have him or my daughter, Claire. I couldn't have both. But before I could get to her, I landed here."

That? That she might be more than a little angry about.

[inferus]

"It has been more than a year."

Allison was here when Emilia and Wrath arrived. She was the first person from this particular group they met. Of course, Emilia and Wrath did return to their own world briefly when the Taravast beacon was activated, and so they have had the chance to return to their goals and to Hell.

Wrath has no child. Again, family he does not understand, and he cannot know the bond of a mother and a child. However, he sees all the reasons and pieces for wrath to build and build.

His gaze is drawn again to her hand, and he nods toward it as his voice indicates how useless he finds this entire integration center:

"What have they done at the center to... help you with your anger that rots?"

[rumorate]

"Yeah, it has."

And she hates it. Hates that she gave up the thing that made her happy in order to wind up here and further away from what she wanted. Hates that it seems like she has no control over her own life.

But Wrath changes the subject ever so slightly, and she lets him, stemming the tide of back into herself.

"Nothing that actually feels effective. It's all self-care and comforting each other, and none of that feels particularly ... helpful."

[inferus]

Wrath's gaze surveys the lot of them in front of him. His dark-gold gaze taking them all in as they flit back and forth attempting to 'heal' those who are broken with their tattoos reading exactly what is 'wrong' with them.

"Their methods are too simplistic to deal with many of the issues they've forced to be written upon our hands."

If they merely were sick, if they merely were hungry, it would help.

This would not.

[rumorate]

"They are."

Unfortunately, Minaras doesn't seem to have the resources to provide therapy. Or maybe this is what they think therapy should be - Allison can't say for sure. But a structure like this isn't going to help everyone.

"I wonder what they think they're actually solving."

[inferus]

"They do not truly think they are solving anything. It's the act alone that brings them comfort - a sense of self satisfaction from having tried."

Wrath's expression is one of displeasure as he straightens his body, his shoulders, tightens them while he watches.

"I dislike this center." Ahem.

[rumorate]

"So do I."

She glances back over her shoulder, examining the exits. She knows that they're being watched, but she personally doesn't care.

"Maybe we should leave."