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westwhere2022-11-13 04:42 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2022-11-13 04:42 pm
Entry tags:
- arc iv,
- arcane: caitlyn,
- arcane: viktor,
- better call saul: jimmy mcgill,
- doctor who: clara oswald,
- doctor who: the doctor,
- harry potter: hermione granger,
- kingdom of the wicked: emilia,
- kingdom of the wicked: wrath,
- legend of fei: xie yun,
- mcu: kamala khan,
- mcu: yelena,
- oh! my emperor: beitang moran,
- penny dreadful: vanessa ives,
- shadowhunters: magnus bane,
- star trek: leonard mccoy (aos),
- star trek: una,
- tian guan ci fu: xie lian,
- touken ranbu: kanesada,
- untamed: wen qing,
- warcraft: anduin wrynn,
- warcraft: wrathion,
- warframe: kahl 175,
- wheel of time: moiraine,
- word of honor: zhou zishu,
- x-men: charles xavier
hale and whole
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.
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.)
✘ 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.
✘ (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.
✘ 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.
✘ 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.
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.
no subject
( Power suffices. But then, it does not do to boast, and a man who has refused Lan Wangji once will not abruptly reconsider. Xie Lian's mind is set. Lan Wangji's must follow.
To the kitchens, down. He's slower than natural grace or training recommend, but stable, steps unhurried, unslipped. The railway nearly gives under a hard grip. His fingers tighten, steel. Hissing, a ghost's teeth graze his ankle by the corridor — he thinks it a dog first, but rouses himself to better senses, finding the small specter of a human boy, long dead, tattered, on hands and knees and playing the hound.
This was a children's shelter, once, he knows, it was writ, they came armed with learning. All of Serthica has linked to children. Yet it still startles Wangji t o see diminutive bodies so easily perished, to understand their futures wasted.
Traversing the corridor, he's nearly tempted to cast his eye into the tea room, where wispy silhouettes have been drawn to fete — but reconsiders, rushing Xie Lian over with a wave, and resists the urge to turn back when one ghost within cries, There? Who's there? Is there someone all the way over there? Come in.
In the end, he takes his shelter in the kitchen, back to the wall, breath easy — Bichen's length luminous and drawn, once Xie Lian has also entered, to bar the path. )
Make haste. ( And for all he suspects Xie Lian won't require the close instruction: ) We need not stop for tea.
( When they pass the tea room again, no doubt to another flutter of invitations. )
no subject
There's no need for it, though. He can definitely punch through the house if needed.
In the kitchen, he rummages around a bit, stopping near disaster a few times when pots threaten to fall, until he finds the one containing salt.]
There's not much in there, but it will have to do. Let's go. Better to use it from the outside, and your techniques probably as well.
[He does agree to not stopping for tea, though. One stabbing was enough for him, thank you very much.]
Can we exorcise the ghosts first, or do you think they linger because of the building? They seem linked.
no subject
( The salt, at least, reveals itself swiftly — amply armed, Xie Lian seems, for once, turned to the business of their companionship, to making use of themselves.
Agreeably, Wangji leads once more, a mother goose before her young. Bichen is a silvered line, slumped but unfailingly devoted in the slick, stubbornness of her promised violence. He thinks, more than Lan Wangji, she refutes the possibility of assault. She dares all who surround her to presume.
They abstain, drifting through the house more serpentine than the ghosts who would swarm and assail them, when Xie Lian speaks out, and Wangji — stills completely. )
Better to locate the heart of the... affliction. The ghosts may prove too numerous.
( They are but two, for all Lan Wangji's pride would name them a legion. )
no subject
[He closes his eyes for a moment, easily filtering out the ruckus of the ghosts and the creaking of the old building to focus on pure energy. H's not an arcane wielder of magic, but there are certain things that come with the territory of being a god who became one after being trained in cultivation and educated as a prince.... and eight hundred years of dealing with various imps and demon infestations, too.
When he opens his eyes again, he points.]
It's this way. That's where the darkest energy is coming from. We should be careful advancing.
[A flick of his wrist and Ruoye slithers off, becoming almost luminescent as if answering Bichen's sword glare, and starts floating in a lay circle around them, about mid-calf-level.]
The rest of the ghosts won't bother us like this. At least the ones in the tea parlor, they won't be able to go through Ruoye.
no subject
( That way. A moment, and perhaps an insult, for all Wangji would name it only the wisdom to consult a second doctor for his opinion of a grueling sickness. Ghosts are as afflictions, their combat as much discipline, learning and art.
He nods, tenuously, after the tendrils of energy he manifests in inquiry return, sharply deflected, from a distant point in the house. Xie Lian's guidance serves them well.
After, only an afterthought of wards, scattered here and there in strings of parchment by each doorway, to keep at bay pursuers and reinforce the curious, serpentine shifting of the — animal? Companion? Weapon? Xie Lian unleashes to protect them. Traversing the room, Wangji only murmurs: )
Ruoye. What forged it?
CW : suicide
He forgets that here, most of the people he interacts with daily don't know. he forgets, too, that this is a pain that has dulled, but never really gone away, even after hundreds of years, and that it sometimes pops up completely unexpectedly.
He could not answer. He could invent something. But what would be the point. It's not like this man here has not known tragedy, and he can tell this without being flippant or self-pitying.]
... My parents' death. They took their own lives with it.
[A length of white silk, the one grace afforded to people of royal descent to spare them the infamy of execution.]
I tried to join them, but of course, it didn't work. I had already ascended by then, so something like that could not kill me anymore.
no subject
( ...a weapon of murder, blood-bound. And what is the greater perversion? To hold on to that which claimed the lives of beloved parents, upon which Xie Lian's mother and father no doubt breathed their last? Or to discard it readily, easily, as if it were a rang?
In truth, Lan Wangji cannot say which would define the greater transgression — only reaches out to walk the serpentine, fluid length of the rope with curious fingertips, the stroke unassuming. Greeting, as he might do Bichen at the end of a long travel's day when she has not gone drawn, and he only wishes to share nips and bites of his qi and the pleasure of his companionship.
After, they flee the room. The corridor. Up stairs, down a different, twisting, convoluted set. He assumes nothing about the topography of the house, but welcomes it when the pulse of his starting migraine builds and stokes and blooms, and he knows, instinctively — they are close, so very close. Here.
He stops. )
Here. Set the witch's wards. ( Unbidden, he surrenders his papers also — accepted from the allied sorceress to reinforce Wangji's own purification. Then, with a wave of his hand, he summons forth his guqin. )
no subject
Lan Wangji might be able to sense the soft barrier emanating from it, isolating them from the spirits around. The barrier doesn't get weaker as they approach the source, but Ruoye tightens a bit around them, making a slightly smaller circle.
He accepts the paper charms, but before he puts them up, he also sprinkles some salt, sent to the corners of the room, the ones he can see at least.
It sort of lifts the stuffiness in soft, small ways, but the place will require more.
Once that's done, he'll take the paper charms, and infuse just a little qi in it and then start walking around to put them vaguely in the form of an array.]
no subject
( Between them, they are armed, if not impenetrably: Karsa's spells curiously distort, then play on the energy around them. The slow, swelling synchrony of sorcery combines, layers, shifts, blooms.
He tinkers with the strength of the call for purification he directs towards the room, its ghosts. Better to be subtle, slow, delicate, kind. To tease out the trouble of the space, than to crudely, cruelly extricate them in a jarring stroke.
It works, in subtle increments: first, ghosts weep distantly. Then, they seek to claw his face, to live in the rivulets of torn flesh off his back, in the jade and onyx of his memories. Then —
Silence. Unearthly, calm nothingness.
And the weight of the world shifts off his shoulders. )
I believe it is done.
no subject
Karsa's sorcery is really powerful...
[Not that your powers are anything to scoff at, Lan Wangji, but cultivation is a more known entity to Xie Lian.]
Your Clan's musical techniques are impressive too. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it with my own eyes before, even though I knew it existed.
no subject
You honour the sect.
( A nod, cut short and forlorn, must suffice him; when he attempts an open bow, his back nearly creaks, head lead, mouth slackened. He hesitates, then rights himself — deplorably drained, but still a vestige of the Gusu Lan, tasked with composure.
If he is only half the measure of himself in fulfilling his duty, pray excuse him. Each of his bones feels depleted of marrow, mere parchment torn. His feet drag. His sleeves. )
We owe the witch a debt.
( But then, he remembers: Jin Guangyao, master of dolls and strings, manipulating their progress, their balance. The sects rushing to create an opportunity for their own glory, where only duty should persist. Too much of their interaction here feels — transactional. )
Or perhaps she owes us the same.
no subject
[Ruoye comes back to wind around his arm, joyful and puppylike until it seems to be back to looking just like a bandage.]
Still, it was a bit weird to suddenly have ghosts and spirits after weeks of just ... not seeing or feeling any. I wonder what changed to make them appear.
no subject
Perhaps they always lived among us.
( As memories do, as spectres of revenge, as shades and nuances of colour the open eye might miss. Brush strokes create pictures that divert the eye, captivate the senses.
They searched a city for its dead, not nooks, not crevices, not crannies. The difference, then, between focus diverted and concentrated.
He hesitates: )
The dead here did not answer Wei Ying.
( A stubborn oddity, when the dead reject a necromancer. )
no subject
[He's certain of it. That someone like Wei Wuxian could not feel them is already a telltale, but that he himself, a god, could not feel any lingering souls? He doesn't believe there's anything powerful enough to block something that's pretty much a basic ability for him.]
Something happened to draw them back, but I'm sure they weren't there before.
no subject
Perhaps... the child. We startled him.
( Frightened him, to his withered, collapsed core. And how did he seem, glass-eyed, lost in the rain, a diffused silhouette? Dust mote in their greedy hands, another trinket they've failed to salvage.
He starts, gingerly, to raise himself. To commune with a reality where he is a sum of parts that remember themselves, the shape they combine to. To walk and steady himself. )
If this world lives of his control, its fissures unearthed the reality beneath.
no subject
[Aided with whatever unearthly power the figure in white might have given him, it's no wonder something like this could happen.]
Spirits will flee if something too powerful settles somewhere. Either they disappear entirely, or they hide.