hale and whole

[groundrules]

HALE AND WHOLE

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BEHIND YOU | MAGICAL SERIES OF EVENTS | THE SCENIC SCIENCE ROUTE | SPREAD YOUR JOY

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Talismans burned, Serthica’s undeath reveals itself:

■ The dragon eye allows indefinite access to the undeath-sight pendant feature. Use it 15 minutes at a time, with a 45-minute cooldown.

■ Those who delivered talismans or the eye have residual immunity: they cannot be sensed by mannequins or by undead linked to the curse-sickness. This is transferrable once.

The Merchant presents the Serthica findings, recommending evacuation. Outvoted, he agrees to sponsor the group until the beacon’s annual start-up. To heal Serthica, the party must destroy the magical anchors of the curse-sickness, develop its science/herbal cure, then distribute it across the overground citadels.

BEHIND YOU

Courtesy of Five Hargreeves, the Child of the Unwinding you slayed his father, the undead lord Beastmaster. The burlap mannequins released from Remembrance actively hunt you.

■ They are constantly watching, stalking, hunting. You always hear the deep asynchrony of their footsteps. Some mannequins bear an uncanny human likeness: staring extensively chills you.

■ Most mannequins cover up in excess clothing and swarm you in crowded spaces to stab. They borrow your appearance, if they touch you. Some devolve into eldritch forms, mimicking voices or puppeteering husked corpses to lure you.

■ Each mannequin has a one-word code on its nape or right calf — once spoken, the creature glitches, letting you run.

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A MAGICAL SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

The corrosive magic that spreads throughout Serthica is anchored in two areas: a port dock and a former Mouse House shelter. Cleanse it through exorcism, purification, healing spells, or by planting wards borrowed from Karsa.

This magic feels hot, asphyxiating, aggressively proliferating, intrusive. Uncontained, it gradually feeds off your power. It might drive you to anger, bitterness, doubt or violence.

To Arc III survivors, it feels like the overwhelming power native to the Ke-Sanwon volcano (not dark water).

■ Once you’ve destroyed both magical anchors, inhuman-looking mannequins deactivate. Human-presenting ones seem sluggish and inattentive.

■ Finn’s mannequin remains alive when supplied life or magical force (think 5% of someone’s reserves) — either through weekly transfers or a rewiring of the magic that sustains her (by a party magic user, or Finn can learn the skills in later travel.)

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✘ WET OF THE DOCK'S WET

At first, locals don’t remember the putrid inactive dock exists as a distant extension of Serthica’s port, located past a familiar deserted marketplace. Here, rotten wood, a stench of perpetual moulding, torn ropes and rusted chains.

■ Thinking extensively about the dock before finding it incurs nausea, vertigo and the animal instinct to flee.

■ Persist, and you learn this dock was once used to smuggle in illegal arrivals from Ke-Waihu. Later, it loaded the bodies of the plagued that were burned at sea.

■ Rotten wood planks can break, dropping you into paralysing waters. The dead might reach out from the depths to drag you in.

■ You hear alluring, wind-born whispers of, How chilly it is, while the cold abruptly intensifies, and, It’s warm in the waters.. Won’t you… jump in?

■ Ships no longer call here — yet a small boat stops for you. You might feel compelled or curious to join the lone passenger — a man in white, whose features you forget after. As the boat drifts, attracting the swimming undead that seek to climb in, the man offers safe return, if you answer: What do you most want? Where would you stop to obtain it? Lie, and the boat capsizes, leaving you to swim back amid undead. Answer honestly to return unharmed.

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✘ (UN)SHELTERED

Visit the impoverished, underground Mouse House and avoid breathing in the thick, memory clouding sedative infusions. The grandiose shelter is familiar, its recalling the ruined mansion of the Unwinding. Locals say the house — which preceded Ma’am Mariol’s shelter as an orphanage — is haunted. The coal sickness spread overground after a child was adopted from here.

■ Spirits jump to throttle you or trip you down stairs, throw knives or lock you in claustrophobic rooms. Stair steps, window sills and roof beams readily collapse.

■ The last entries of house logs, found open on a library desk, mention seven freshly arrived children — six native to the Mouse House, including Gavroche, and one heavily burned boy from Ke-Waihu.

■ The ghosts of orphanage caretakers are enjoying a tea party. They ask if you are a servant or a guest. Answer ‘servant,’ and you must pour tea, as attendants stab you with cutlery when you’re within reach. You are dismissed once you finish pouring. Answer ‘guest’, and you must join them at the table and perform whatever they ask: slap yourself, dress up as a doll, answer inconvenient questions, etc. You can leave once someone else has poured tea.

■ Find the dark magic source in the house greenhouse that has been overrun by ruinous mould. While physically unharmed, you feel overcome by crippling fear, loneliness, abandonment or futility. Talking about it helps soothe it.

THE SCENIC SCIENCE ROUTE

The science-based cure requires retrieving resources and researching an answer. Godspeed.

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✘ THE SEED & THE STORM

The Unwinding revealed strands of juniper and rosemary that cure the sickness. Cain d’Ubiq confirms quantities of each plant remain cryogenically intact aboard the Serthica Aerial Healing Unit ships that were caught in the crossfire of the Sibilant Sands, when Eidris and Minaras fought their last battle. Find the vessels to retrieve the goods.

■ Take your transport flier or one of Cain d’Ubiq’s martial, fire-breathing dragons to traverse the Sibilant Sands, roughly one day’s flight each way of Serthica. Expect a hard ride, amid the growing howl of winds whipping your face and the accelerating pulse of a breaking storm.

■ Martial dragons challenge inexperienced riders, but fly sturdily through intermittent sandstorms and whirlwinds.

■ The ships can be found near dragon bones and human skeletons, in stages of burial or disrepair, stranded between rocks, or threatening to collapse once rattled.

■ Beware serpentine barbed wire animated by dark water, which jumps up from the sands. Just as vile are buried vermin-like creatures that send their razor-blade-ended tentacles to strike out from below ground.

■ Members of protest group Remembrance are also unearthing ships. They plan to board mannequins on the vessels, pass them as Minaraian and attack Eidris once more.

■ Their volatile leader Chrichter is personally fixing a ship.

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✘ THINK, TANK

Time to liberate a lab. Minaras’ foremost medical unit is the Conclave Healing Academy, comprising research labs, libraries, equipment rooms and sample collections, including some of the coal sickness.

■ The Academy connects to the centre that treatsZenobius and brims with healing apprentices. Bring juniper and rosemary samples, pose as a bright-eyed novice healer or a concerned relative of Zenobius, or barge in.

■ The Academy is cold, sterile, clean and swarmed by practising medics and academicians. Some even debate resurrection and immortality. Access is barred below, where you can hear occasional, sharp… growls.

■ Several basement laboratories are marked to study the coal sickness. Steal the entry codes from guards or tease them from a lowly medical intern — but don’t linger on the corridors long. Large clockwork hounds patrol and are attracted to sweat, a heightened or rapid pulse, shortness of breath or other biological signs of fear.

■ Take over a lab to concoct a cure elixir from the herbal strands. Test it against the coal sickness samples. Work safely, or the start of a blood cough might announce you’ve taken sick.

■ Hold the fort until your cure’s done, while guards and hounds try to enter your lab through air vents, windows or ram the door. Fight back, distract them or persuade the Academy protective droids they’re the enemy.

■ Anyone affected with the sickness can drink the cure without waiting to destroy the magical anchors. Symptoms fully disappear within 24-72h. Characters remain sensitive to the un/dead.

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SPREAD YOUR JOY

Mass-production time: take over the former underground Remembrance headquarters, one of Cain d’Ubiq’s factories, or make potions in your back yard. The cure can be drunk or absorbed through skin and must be spread overground.

You can pursue your own ideas, but some suggestions on the house:

■ Take your dragon or hijack a Minaras airship and a diffuser to spray down an incense mix that contains the cure. Minaras airships sleep in secured bays you’ll have to infiltrate. Careful taking a dragon into Minaras or an airship to Eidris — local authorities may perceive this as a security breach.

■ Reprogram or con hapless droids to feed the cure as ‘novel vitamins’ to their owners.

■ Commandeer the Mouse House train that ferries supplies from the Serthica ports and spray the cure on produce and grains.

■ Minaras High Councillor Arabella has been previously targeted by Remembrance and could be subtly persuaded to help by her rescuers.

■ Vanessa’s contact, crime boss Artemius Bale, might also have his people sneak the cure into waterways — if you cut a deal.

■ …lemonade stand?

NOTES:

■ We need one finished thread of breaking the anchors and supplying, making and distributing the cure to get the Very Best Ending, but there are multiple other finale options too — link your threads by 29 November!

■ Thanks to Finn and the Doctor’s efforts to help Ma’am Mariol’s orphanage, enjoy tips, information and help with legwork from her street-smart urchins.

■ You can ask for Artemius Bale & others here or at the NPC inbox!

■ BACK TO THE TOP.

QUESTIONS

Comments

she is perhaps. lacking.

[downswing]

( ...the art of implying threat without delivering graphic detail is one of subtlety, nuance and — clearly — personal flair. It pains him to stare, blankly, at Yelena, and not ask if the vulgarity of referencing the man's kneecaps was... required.

Perhaps next time merely illustrate her weapon. Scowl. Or keep silent, as works particularly efficiently for Lan Wangji in a majority of his private and slaughter-professional situations.

But her broader approach is not without admirers: the man shudders, glances back towards Lan Wangji, seems to consider the snake-bind of rope around him philosophically, materially and at length — and decides, finally, to point northbound.

A fascinating compromise between breaking his employer's confidences and declining his help. If Lan Wangji weren't otherwise engaged binding his mouth with cloth and tying him to a defunct, waist-thick pipeline, he might applaud him.

Then, picking up their baggage of bound vials: )

He may have companions.

PERHAPS

[vdovy]

[ Required? Not really. Necessary for the sake of expedience? Absolutely. If not for the little push that Yelena gave him, they might still be waiting on the guard to finish considering his options. Even in answering, his reluctance to assist them is evident. She might have demanded more but the answer seems to have satisfied Wangji, so she lets it be. ]

We got what we needed. We can sneak past the rest.

[downswing]

( Sneak. Forgive a man his owlish glance, how he lingers solid and still, water drip-dripped and burying cold in bones around him, and he brings up the sack —

Round, clumsy, loud when the vials within rattle, sheer glass.

— in perfect illustration of his single protest: )

We sneak past. ( ...with this in hand. Easier perhaps to slither a raging bull in a sophisticated crowd. )

[vdovy]

[ Yelena has already started moving and has to double back as Wangji raises his objection. She looks impatient, with her hands on her hips and her foot tapping noisily in a shallow puddle, but she hears him out. And she must admit: he has a point. ]

Should I go ahead, then? I will make sure the coast is clear. Or clear it.

[ She doesn't wait for Wangji's answer. Following through on an idea that occurred as she spoke, Yelena moves past him and crouches next to the guard they (she) just finished terrorizing. ]

I am going to remove the gag so you can speak. You are going to tell me how to set off the alarms in this place. And I don't mean the one that goes off every other week and everybody ignores. I mean the big alarm that makes them all abandon post.

[ She rolls the cloth down and leans in so the guard can speak into her ear. Even as she listens, she turns to raise a thumbs-up at Wangji. See? This is going great! ]

[downswing]

( ...he is learning, now: it is not that Yelena necessarily thrusts herself in the midst of chaos, so much as she skillfully, unapologetically and expediently creates it. Lan Wangji, fast in her shadow, barely catches up with the great heft of his baggage, before she's already crouching before their captive, to lesson him in the many, illustrious ways of relieving himself in his trousers.

The man seems to either cooperate or breathe his last in Yelena's ear. From a respectful distance, where he may regret the entirety of his life choices, Wangji can't quite say. Only listen and nod and shoot the man a helpless look, before nodding and waving him up, to take him in custody.

...into the lavatory he goes, suitably locked in, Lan Wangji careful to deposit the key right outside of the door. It is not a matter of the guard not exiting, he suspects — only one of Yelena not having further access to put the fear of the heavens in him. )

Where you go, I follow.

( And no sooner has he said this, that he starts them on their way, down a waterlogged corridor. )

[vdovy]

You know, you could have stolen his uniform and passed yourself off as a guard. [ This, Yelena suggests only because she has already gotten a sense of how Lan Wangji feels about altering or abandoning his traditional attire. What's a partnership without some good-natured teasing?

She has to walk twice as fast to keep pace with him and his obnoxiously long legs, her speech taking on a slightly breathless quality as consequence. ] He said the alarm can be activated from any control room. There's supposed to be one on the left at the end of this hall.

[downswing]

( Perhaps a better man might slow his step in the face of causing the woman clear, natural disadvantage — )

Lying is forbidden.

( But then, Yelena is no child to require transport, no hapless maiden to beg a hand in help. And teasing ever suits two.

An alarm, at distance. He anticipates an obstacle course, hardships at every turn — but finds the wet of the corridor remarkably banal, footing slick and drooled, but steady. In the end, the alarm is a bell, hung slack and rickety off a frayed rope, and Lan Wangji nearly turns to ask Yelena, You are certain?

Never mind the four men playing cards, backs turned to them, who mutter about the poor luck of their latest draw — yet to notice them. )

[vdovy]

Who forbids it? [ Yelena may not be a child, but she is not above asking aggravatingly simplistic questions that challenge Wangji's worldview. Not that this is her precise intention: she is actually just curious.

She rolls her eyes as soon as they fall on the subpar construction that constitutes an alarm in this facility. Far from the blaring siren and flashing lights she was expecting, although on second thought, the fault was Yelena's for having any expectations at all. ]

Just go, [ she mumbles, wishing that she could give Wangji a friendly little shove without rattling the bag and needlessly calling attention to themselves. At least sneaking past no longer seems so challenging. ]

[downswing]

Grace and reason.

( This, hissed at long last before they confront the spread of the men's backs, stupefied by the sheer inconvenience of their lingering presence. It is not for Lan Wangji to complain of men succumbed to their duties, but — ...cards. In this, the belly of the underworld, rotten, stench-filled, declining.

To think any man's mind can turn to play.

Yelena urges him on. Lan Wangji, strangled between a the rock of the walls and the exemplarily hard place of the batalion of men before him, shakes his head. Then, as any man compelled by reason might, he gently deposits the sack at his feet, watching it sway pathetically as if it contains fluids and not individual, clinking vials —

And he calmly draws out a thin orderly bundle of diamond-powdered thread, unspooling it between his hands. Chord assassination is a fine and noble thing, expedient. The cut of his gaze meets Yelena, cast over his shoulder when he steps ahead. )

Disarm those you wish preserved.

( ...it appears, as far as Lan Wangji is concerned, everyone he cannot immediately immobilise is forfeit for wounding. )

[vdovy]

"Wait, wait, wait. Are you going to kill them just for slacking off?" Now it feels as if their roles are reversed, with Yelena chiming in as the voice of reason. If she were in the Red Room, under Dreykov's control, everyone would be collateral. The base violence necessary for success of a mission. But she makes her own choices now; she chooses who to kill and who to spare. And these are simple guards of a local utility, not hardened henchmen who've pledged themselves to evil pursuits.

"That's a little excessive," she tells Wangji, tugging on his robes to keep him from advancing.

[downswing]

"Immobilise them," he mouths back, half ripple, half murmur, the better part of his attention trained on the men who pore ambitiously over the world's least formidable card spread. Even Lan Wangji, excused of knowing both games of cards broadly and this hand in particular, can tell they've lucked out of the appropriate combination.

There is a moment, between the drip-drip of their confused negotiations over the next hand, when Wangji fears they might nearly turn around to discover the looming presences behind them. That they might wake to the danger that brackets them.

Blinking slow, resolute and owlish, Lan Wangji drifts his sword unpeeled from her sheath, carefully waving it towards the waiting world of the guardsmen, as if to simulate he is all too ready to initiate, if Yelena has finalised her objections.