plot roll | gulliver's travels

[groundrules]

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GULLIVER’S TRAVELS | EIDRIS

The dragons of Eidris remain agitated after Aiva hatches her eggs and her mate Ariste is allegedly wounded by a Minaras reconnaissance ship, the Relint. Outraged, Eidris aristocracy demands satisfaction, but war-wary king Thivar III soothes tempers until Minaras’ involvement is proven. Scouts report the Relint has crashed in the Sibilant Sands wasteland near Serthica, where dragons used to roam and mate. Dragon warlord Cain d’Ubiq organises a three-day flight expedition to recover the Relint, accepting companions.

✘ OBJECTIVE: locate and investigate the Relint.

■ Thirty dragons and riders, led by Cain d’Ubiq, leave once Eidris rises overground at 6:00am. Cain and two of his companions fly martial, fire-breathing dragons.

■ Every dragon rider is given three days of smoked meats for their dragons, food and water supplies for themselves, two blankets, binoculars and climbing hooks and gear. Riders are advised to wear warm full-body clothing and to cover their mouths.

■ Departing Eidris, you learn that you fly in the middle of the sandstorm season, amid deep reddish mists that rapidly exhaust you and vicious whirlwinds prone to unsaddle you. Don’t get lost and catch anyone who falls!

■ Through mental links, riders can sense their dragons are unnerved by the weather and the thought of confronting the Relint. Many transmit image glimpses of the Eidris-Minaras conflict, when dragons frequently battled warships.

■ Dragons are wilful and predatory creatures: try not to slip off when they suddenly pair up to play tag, hunt large birds or chase the flocks of nocturnal peaceful cloud whales.

■ The Sibilant Sands are a long, red, arid and withered stretch of land east of Serthica, littered by fog-drenched peaks and abyssal, sudden canyons. You may experience spells of inexplicable thirst, dizziness and listlessness.

■ Each night, the dragon party alights at watch points — very high plateaus, that host a few man-made caves. Cain d’Ubiq recommends sheltering your dragons. Squeeze in with them, or negotiate warmth with your fellow travellers: the Sibilant Sands are fiercely cold at night, and large fires can alert hungering man-sized hawks.

■ The stormy weather and recent events have left your dragons exceptionally skittish, prone to fits of anguish. Your physical presence — stroking, feeding, or grooming — reassures the dragons, as can your explicit efforts to send them happy, positive feelings. Think. Happy thoughts.

■ At long last, you reach the Relint: a small plane vessel that has crashed and remained stranded at a vast height between two steep cliffs that house several hawk nests.

■ Dragons are too large to fit in the space occupied by the Relint without being seen and attacked by the hawks — but you can leave your mounts behind and ascend with your climbing gear. Beware brutal hawks and storms.

■ Those who finally enter the Relint find no human remains — only two man-sized, straw-filled burlap mannequins, with a puddle of cold dark water at their feet. The mannequin ‘pilot’ wears a crudely painted fox face. The ‘navigator’ has a bear one.

■ Drop a line if your character plans to touch the dark water: you can get information, but please be aware there will be some unpleasant consequences.

■ The ship is very battered, showing Serthica markings: only RELINT remains visible from a distance, from the originally engraved AERIAL HEALING UNIT.

■ Dried blood is smeared on the back of the ship, where a fresh indentation has taken out the Relint’s engine. Any dragon that smells a sample can convey through images this is the blood of Ariste.

■ Grab whatever you need and fly home: the Relint creaks, rattles, and is at all times just about ready to fall.

QUESTIONS

NPC ACCESS: CAIN D'UBIQ

Comments

[valeas]

One step at a time. His answer moves her, for the truth held within, and also that it should so heavily focus on others as opposed to himself. She holds in high regard the way he cares for others, the way he cares for justice.

"I am learning this patience," she confesses to him. The admission is not too difficult to make when they are high above this world so strange death fell in love — it truly does feel like they're the only people in it.

Well, and also the dragons.

Emilia places the warming stones back in his unfurled hand as he studies its emptiness, considering her choice of words before she shakes her head to rectify. "I'm re-learning it. I'll have you know I was an extremely patient and cautious child."

Too cautious, perhaps. The reminder has some ruefulness returning to the curve of her lips.

"I took my time. There was not a rule I would not obey if my grandmother gave it. I can scarcely recall what it is to be that dutiful young woman, but she would have been satisfied this way, once: a simple life crafting happy memories, surrounded by books and recipes."

[weifinder]

His fingers curl into loose claws around the thralled stones, humming a note of affirmation, or of acknowledgement to her words. To patience, which had been his inverse, or perhaps had been the devoured roots of his childhood. Filial piety has never been tempered so much as acknowledge as complex, deeply woven into his culture, and only irreverent when he allows its delivery to imply so.

"Then something changed." He doesn't ask what, simply rolls the thralled stones around in the palm of his hand. "The moments where simply satisfied lives evaded us."

The moment life became more complex, and the cascade of decisions that followed as the paths stretched on before them.

"Relearning patience can be one of the most difficult things, but I wish you luck. It's worth it, for ourselves, and for those we care for."

Having patience with both is a delicate balance he's still searching for, but these days, at least he always feels like a man in his own skin, not a creature ill-fit to the trappings of its confines.

[valeas]

Us, he states, as though he understands the sentiment keenly.

Emilia suspected he would, or perhaps she would have said nothing.

"Mm. It can be. Wrath says I am ruled by fire," is an answer that comes with the slight twitching of her lips. She makes no apology for her passions, for her forcefulness. "I suspect Wangji would agree. But there is a line between patience and complacency, and I worry about ever falling prey to the second."

Being here so long that she starts to accept what should never be tolerated. Compromise is important, and she decided long ago her ambitions would be achieved through a slow burn, but —

Sometimes it's hard to remember the ground they've gained, as well. It's good to have the reminder.

[weifinder]

Eyes closing, he chuckles, a low rumble in his chest that slips past his lips as so many secrets he never told had not.

"Complacency is what Serthica has steeped in. What Taravast was drowning in. It's saying it's okay that this happens, that it's good enough, and losing the will to move forward. Or backward. Or any direction at all, if you're just still enough, if you just hold your breath a little longer..."

A sigh, slow inhalation, long and slow in exhalation.

"Patience is stepping forward without rushing. Observing, to take action. Not hesitating when everything goes poorly, but not letting anger be your only guide when it flares. Or something," he says, flicking his fingers and slitting his eyes open once more. "Fire cleanses and consumes. There's a good and bad in all of us. How we balance that, that matters more than most things."

[valeas]

Or something.

She arches a brow at him in mild amusement, though she continues to listen. It isn't the first time this lesson is imparted to her. Wrath once said mortals live by archaic notions of light and dark. Celestia, too, suggested there is a hero and a villain in them all. Nonna raised her as a light witch, but Emilia does know now magic is a neutral force, determined by their intentions. "As above, so below," she tells Wei Wuxian in agreement.

Balance.

Destruction and creation are ever present themes in her life, in her power so rooted in nature. Emilia turns her hand over to summon a frangipani blossom. The control she's been learning keeps the flames back, though the petals do glow with a bit of moonshine. The blossom hovers above her palm, and she stretches it out toward him in offer. Her voice is quiet when she speaks again after some prolonged silence. "You seem tired, Wei Wuxian."

The kind of tired that reaches the bone.

[weifinder]

His eyes slit open, studying the flower before it's offered, studying it further as the light of it dances in reflection where his eyes would otherwise swallow the sun. Three warming stones thralled for their purpose slip beneath the collar of his outer robe, and he holds out a hand, not first to take but to touch one petal, to see what it is, to be the man he's always been.

Not gentle enough for some things, too willing for others, in fascination with a world that claimed certain truths he challenged simply because accepting what he's told is as foreign as it is to trust that others intuit a world they do not question better than one which is tested, proven, true.

"Beautiful," he remarks, as if that's all there is to say, as if the pause that follows means he might gloss past her words that parted the silence.

Perhaps he's a more honest man in the company of women. Or perhaps he learned at his shijie's feet what it meant to trust, and at her mother's whip what it meant to persist in the face of spite, merited and not.

"I ache from death. I shouldn't, in enough ways—I resisted death until I sought it, and then death denied me, until one who sought death pulled me out of the lightless abyss. Then here, it never stops calling."

The rise and fall of Lethe's ribs beneath them a subtle reminder of what should be, but may not be.

"Finally it quiets, and I worry more, because it's the lie that hides so much worse beneath its surface. I keep hoping exhaustion will be enough to let me sleep."

Instead of dreams wrenching him into nightmares and poor rest, night after night, waking up to silent screams and tears or heart-racing confusion, settling back while Lan Zhan sleeps, before the dawn calls to him and he leaves the bed as cold as Anurr's touch.

[valeas]

His answer is expected, in some ways. How could it not be when they find themselves in a world so death-touched? But it is strangely comforting to hear him say it, to hear him give name to the weight. Less strange the comfort that comes when he touches the petals of the blossom, and they do not burn him.

Emilia lets the silence rest where it may. For what feels like a lifetime, she has been driven by a near-frightening need to right some terrible wrongs. But she also knows certain things are not meant to be rushed. He does not make his admission so that she may fix it, only that he found her ears willing.

That she cares for him and this group they have made, even when it would be smarter not to, to sit with it. With him.

Her chest rises with a lasting inhale. She has tended to the grief of her own deaths, largely by turning them into anger instead, with the understanding that loss in itself is so unremarkable.

"I don't know if the ache will ever cease, if it should. The truth we will find, one way or another." Whether they are prepared for it is another matter entirely. "If it is sleep you seek, I've a spell that may help."

Emilia would not hold it against him if he is not trusting of the method, so she does eventually add, "And if you do not wish it, we can at least remain sleepless in company."

Each other's company, and the light snoring of their dragons.

[weifinder]

"Without dreams?" He says, half smiling when his eyes open and he turns his face toward her. "Might be easier for you. I can't stay waking forever, and I'd hate to disturb you when I wake."

Which he will, he always does. He knows it well enough to be honest, caught between wings and gently lifting lungs, with the winds howling outside and the cold slipping closer, nipping at whatever it may find.

"Unless you sleep as soundly as Lan Zhan does, in which case: the company, please."

There are no solutions, only stop-gaps before the next night, the next day, the enduring persistence of a universe that will move forward, expansive, until it consumes itself, if it ever does.

To be small in the face of a vastness that extends beyond all their selves, their worlds, their anythings. And to be infinitely treasured, each moment lived, for existing, for having been present at all.