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

[downswing]

( ...and here they are. A thin, careless blade, half claw, half trinket. Habit stirs him to balance it between his fingers in a storm of practised twirls. Then, in a snake's leap of a stab, he plunges it into the wall, an extension of his hand, of the qi energy he directs through dull, listless metal.

No blade's cries answer him. No pulse, no liveliness, no fury from the wall. No blood, no old bones, no dust or perspiration. Only this: a system, not a carcass. A fortress, a shell. He shutters his eyes, and the only thing that breathes around him is the Doctor, distant. The little girl barely imitates the rises and falls of her chest, a caricature of exhalations. )

...this is not the source.

( Not here, in the ribs of the house, then. Not below, in the creaking, squealing floors. Not in the barren gardens, not on the scaly roof, not in the cloying air — he pivots, twirls, scrutinises everything that comes in the line of his sight — not in the gold that arms the chair's feet, not in the silver of a cracked mirror, not in the water that swells and bloats on hard floor, not in the —

He stills, all at once. Unfailing. Unfeeling. The little girl's grin is a shy thing, cleaving. Unbidden, he seeks out the Doctor's gaze. Points the girl only once with the spade whose tip darkens and drenches in mould, once it threatens to touch her. )

...here. Her.

[thedreamer]

[ Obvious, perhaps, or it should have been, the Doctor chides himself. With all that he's seen, all that he's ever been able to know and sense and figure out, here at least, in this haunted greenhouse, he's not the master of anything at all. But shouldn't he have suspected something strange about the girl, something more than the obvious. Perhaps his disappointment with himself is overly influenced by what lurks here. Would it have even mattered?

He's thankful for his companion's talents, to root out the source, and when he meets Wangji's eyes, there's a mixture of emotion in his own; resolve, sadness, regret.

Wangji has abilities beyond what he possesses himself, and the Doctor trusts in him, both his judgment and his ability to do something now. ]

A child we would want to protect. [ Insidious, playing on the instinct to protect and not to harm. A little girl lost, seemingly, lost to the world and alone, yet harboring the darkness within, behind that smile both so familiar and so haunting. ]

The wards, I have some left from Karsa. [ To use them against this child, despite knowing the truth, is not the easiest thing for the Doctor, but he's unfortunately all too familiar with making these kinds of choices. Is the girl a visage used by the dark magic or was she a girl who died here and whose form is now overtaken by it? Either way, it's a troubling thought, but they can put her soul to rest. ]

[downswing]

( Of course it would be this, the beloved, tender shape of a child, irresistibly defenceless to Lan Wangji's eye. He aches to protect, to shelter, to heal — to wrestle her frailty in his arms, to flee with her.

Instead, he accepts the loathsome impossibility of his assignment. This spirit is wine-old, coy, teasing. It knows the shape of his hurt like ink stain, like burning. Knows he'll be cinders and smoke, residue under fingertips, by the time this exorcism is done.

He has asked shelter and kindness for one child. He cannot so shield another.

When his zither flinches into existence, startled alive in the wake of trembled power, his hand shivers. Teases, but misses the strings. Then, with the first taste of sorcery: )

Seed the wards. ( Better done quickly, if it must be done at all. )

[thedreamer]

[ That Wangji finds it equally troubling is a comfort he wouldn't know how to articulate. He assumes anyway; he sees what he believes is the same heaviness in his companion's eyes.

The Doctor can almost hear others whispering at him, that the little girl must be destroyed, naturally, that there need not be a moment of indecision or heartsickness about it. This is no time for soft hearts, et cetera, et cetera. But the Doctor is a man who has pity and kindness for the innocent and the monsters of the universe alike.

He'd hoped they might be able to free the little girl in a different way - not this, never this - yet he must tell himself the lie that peace will find her still. A clever lie for his own comfort, to carry on from this.

It is, perhaps, answer enough that for as talkative as he is usually, the Doctor is bereft of words now. Now, until the deed is done at least. He can't spare a moment, otherwise he might question himself further.

And so, working quickly, the Doctor plants the wards given to them, working in a circle around the room, trying not to look at the girl, trying not to think of her soft features, of small, tender faces he hasn't touched or traced in hundreds of years, of his own children lost and safe only in memory now. ]

She's not alone, at the end.

[ Comfort for whom? Hollow. Nothing more. ]

[downswing]

( In the end, a slow song, withered. If he were asked — he is never asked — it is better to expedite than to prolong an exorcism, an effective execution.

The wards activate, magic corrupts the air, cleanses it sharp — Lan Wangji drags it in with a shrill inhalation that singes his lungs — and the zither's song cuts through, weaponised, avid.

When the girl disperses, he barely looks. Feels it, between pulses of long shivers that walk his spine, his nape. Tease the corners of his eyes like strychnine, until wet flows down unbidden, briefly unknown. In wake of this storm, cold. An ending.

He remembers with animal ferocity to wipe the tears from his eyes, before searching his fingers for what he has removed as if he cannot recognise his own body's waters. No matter. The true exorcism after, walls quaking, ceilings moaning down. Empty, presumptive drama.

He does not still, for this. For anything. Not until the energies clear, and the crescendo of purification songs builds, climaxes, then rescinds. After, he remembers, distantly, to break the spell of his conjuration and allow his zither to retreat into ether.

After, he barely breathes at all. )

...I have a son. ( He has said so, often, to anyone who'll listen. It feels — like the only thing that yet matters. )

[thedreamer]

[ Were the circumstances different, the Doctor would be far more animated and chattering on incessantly about the power Wangji possesses. He wouldn't expect much in the way of conversation in return, of course, but it's hardly necessary. As it is, he's not unaware of what's happening around him, the haunting song from the zither not at all unlike a dirge for the dead, in his mind.

At the last flicker, the moment before the girl is gone completely, the Doctor draws enough strength to glance at her briefly, as though he owes it to her, not to be forgotten. She's only another ghost in a long line of them, pinned to his hearts and carried around for the rest of his days. He won't forget what happened here, though he may pretend to on the surface.

Yet, a glance at his companion, a scant second of noticing the tears in his eyes and realizing his own eyes reflect the same. They need not speak of it, but it's a shared ache, and he looks away quickly, blinking away the emotions that have welled up, unbidden.

Being alive isn't sad, he'd said once, to his oldest friend, only to be told in return, It is when it's over. The words return to him now, a comfort and an old pain all at once.

And then, something else is shared between them, after it's all over, after the girl is gone (but not gone, not completely, not forever). ]

Our children are the best of us, and loving them - the most important thing we could ever do. [ This is, perhaps, the closest the Doctor has come in many long years (with this face, anyway) to admitting out loud that he was a father once, too. Is a father. Can he be a father still to ghosts? ]

Your son... [ Clara had briefly mentioned Wangji having his son here and he's quite sure he's seen mention of him before as well himself. It feels natural, then, to extend a promise to his friend. He doesn't need to offer, probably, to promise anything at all, because he's sure Wangji's son is better protected than nearly anyone here, but if by some miracle, the Doctor's own children or grandchildren ever ended up here, he's sure he'd sleep even less than he does now and he might appreciate such an assurance offered. ]

Whatever awaits us beyond this, I promise you have one more person looking after him.

[downswing]

( It slips and spills from him, like ice thawing under a mellow morning's sun, like flooding thereafter: ) Gratitude.

( A vow well met, for all — Lan Wangji's rise and tender retreat timid, each step sluggishly dragged — he wishes it need never be implemented. Let Lan Wangji, father to a beautiful and most beloved child, honour his needs and meet each, in turn. Let him suffice and let Sizhui want for nothing but enough heartbeats to dedicate to each of these: love and luck and laughter.

And yet, something has shifted in Lan Wangji, tectonically. He struggles to contain it now, only releases in torrential increments, as if the seal of his silence now broken commands him to speak his piece: )

He is better than their lands, their plagues, their ceaseless rebellions against the natural. Their sacrifices, their stirrings of the dead. Their endless agony.

( Better than perpetual horror, better than these exterminations they must constantly and callously organise, better than a ceaseless trawl east. Better than the glare Lan Wangji shoots hard ground and dust and decay below, in the girl's wake. )

He is better than this death.

[thedreamer]

[ The pain, fear, heartbreak of a loving father; to be trapped here with the light of your heart and soul, to know that death may touch them, that pain may befall them, that darkness may come for them in places that can't be found, and that they may be lost.

That Wangji persists is a strength he understands. It could easily bring a devoted father to his knees, yet there is an anchor unlike any other in loving a child, to be able to do anything at all for them. He has a purpose in this endless toil. They all do, certainly, but something fiercer resides within the hearts of parents who would stop at nothing to ensure the persistence of their beloveds' life. ]

He's better than all of this, all of us.

[ This experience, of course, is unlike any other for the Doctor. If he had command of his TARDIS, he could have taken everyone home in an instant and come back himself to help those who suffer here. He would have preferred it that way; an easy choice. But they're trapped here, and he'll do everything in his power to keep them all safe. ]

And we'll see him safely delivered back home. We couldn't protect her, she was lost before we got here. But in her memory, I see the hope of better days. For your son, for the other children, for everyone suffering.