westwhere | hale and whole

HALE AND WHOLE

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

a. IF YOU'VE GOT SOMEBODY WAITING | behind you.

John's greatest strength, beyond magic or knowledge or sheer bastardry, is his ability to plan. Going back to an old fight is an invitation to destroy. He waits. He sets his traps. John has many flaws, but patience isn't one of them.

Wards etched in (pink) chalk, charcoal and occsionally bits of blood are smeared around the walls. They make crude, angular shapes, looking like nothing in particular, unless you stare too long. Did they move? Does it spell your name? The face of a friend, a lover?

Of course not. You're seeing things. Turn away, and watch a mannequin become tangled in its own burlap, caught in the mess of its own limbs. John dithers by the sidelines, watching the magic take hold, torturing a thing without feeling.

Probably.

"Hsst-" he raises his hand, hushing anyone coming by. "Dunno how long this'll last. Gospel of Esau. Tricky business."

b. PUPPET ON A STRING | a magical sequence of events.

He ends up at the children's hostel by noon, or thereabouts-- despite this being a clockwork city, he can't quite get a handle on the time. It's the mid point between when he woke and when he'd like to sleep. It'll do him well enough.

You'll find him with liquor. A table has an arrangement of bottles, some bright, some dark, others big, small, strange-shaped, corked or open. But all are full, and all arranged on the table corresponding to a spiderweb of (pink) chalk. Sigils and signs run between the bottles, and John is almost done writing them down.

He grabs your hand. You're nearest, or you were coming near enough-- it doesn't matter.

His hand is clammy. A bead of sweat runs down his temple.

"C'mon, mate." A smile blossoms on his face. "Can't drink it all."

c. I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE | wet of dock's wet.

The dead are always all around, and maybe you can see them, too. For a half-moment, flickering in putrid darkness, John is surrounded by a panoply of ghosts. Nuns, priests, hippies, punk rockers, children, the elderly-- people from every walk of life cluster around his form. He stands on rotted wood, and looks up at them. He sees you, and knows you see them.

They see you, and ignore you. They look down on John, and maybe it's the weight of their disdain that breaks the wood beneath his feet.

The water breaks the spell. He moves, thrashes, calls out. Hands reach up, but they don't help. The dead want him. They drag him down.

d. SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD | (un)sheltered.

The orphanage again. He doesn't even like kids. But the Dickensian quality does draw him in, as much as he bloody loathes it.

It takes time for him to find it. The source, he's sure of it, but of what? A labyrinth can be anything, and the heart is the seat of its power. This heart bleeds fear, pumps acid, and John can be found collapsed behind a fern, holding his head.

"Can't go back," he murmurs. "You can't go home again."

And then he laughs. "Hated that fucking book."

e. WILDCARD.

[im open for literally anything lets goooo. hmu @ gambeson if you need me.]

[ Clara's risking the Doctor's ire by doing so much exploring alone, but he has others to look after, not just her. He can't reasonably expect her to not do anything at all. And she wants answers; she needs to know more than what she's been piecing together with the help of others. As she makes her way through the debris, she hears little giggles, and the sounds of children whispering. It's unnerving, hearing the ghosts of kids, and she spares a bit of grief for them. Just as she reaches the greenhouse, she feels a tug on her leg that almost sends her toppling over.

Grief over. As she continues, she hears someone disparage a good book. Not what she expected, as she looks for the source. ]

The Thomas Fern novel?

[ When she finally sees a man sprawled out, she rushes over and kneels beside him, trying to see if he's hurt anywhere. ]

What do you have against classic lit? And what happened here?

Each man walks with his ghosts, pace in slow synchrony. Lan Wangji does not ask if John Constantine names himself leader of his contingent, their prisoner, their foremost victim. Perhaps a penitent afterthought who carries with himself the weight of a dead world, like dust motes that seeps into all that will bear it, after wood's sanding. Inconsequential, accessory, accidental. A convenience of a tortured man.

But then, they crowd. They swarm. They seek to feed, and there is a point when tension should break, when spirits either achieve whatever resolution their abrupt reappearance had sought to spark — or storm. In the dark of a mould-addled, blood-curdling night, moon a pale-ink smear of herself and blushing arrogantly down — Lan Wangji does not have the chance to ask.

It's a crack when the wood ruptures, the sort of sickly dry sound he had not anticipated of the docks. Running, his feet skid, nearly stumble. When he kneels down to catch John, it's half strategic descent to the lip of the fresh hole, half collapse. His hand chases John's palm, or his wrist, or his forearm in the chasm, it's cold and spumes, cold and dark, and one of the ghosts mocks him with encouragement, and he hisses back — puts his shoulder into it, and recalls all at once the wounds of old that savage his back — until he latches and grabs onto John —

"Keep peaceful, do not move — "

...only for Lan Wangji to also be drawn into the waters, on heels of his catch, the last spoonful of his foresight turned to sparking aflame a shrapnel-piece of talisman paper that flits and hovers above the water's line.

And rasped, before he dives to seek John Constantine again, "Swim to light."

Too many men are lost at sea to the impossibility of recognising the depths from the dark shoreline, even with the dead discounted.

hale and whole

john constantine | ota.

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