let's set d o w n some (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
groundrules) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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.
QUESTIONS
Don't cog it up.
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NPC
You can ask for Artemius Bale, Ma'am Mariol, helpful orphans or whomever else you want to rope into your definitely-legitimate-heist-adventure here.
Or you can hit them up at the NPC inbox!
→ yelena
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→ wrathion
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Artemius Bale pls.
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TOIL & TALLY
Link your threads with the finished task by 23:59 GMT on 29 November. Note: you only need to have completed the mission assignment part, not the whole thread!
To get the Very Best Ending, we need 1 x herb retrieval, 1 x cure making, 1 x destroying magical anchor 1, 1 x destroying magical anchor 2 and 1 x cure distribution.
But other combinations can still lead to interesting outcomes, so do not worry! And blowing the place up is still an option.
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herb retrieval.
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number one ► star trek
☆ the seed & the storm
☆ spread your joy
Wrathion | Warcraft
✘ Wangji: Docks
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✘ Hermione: Sibilant Sands/Flying
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✘ Anduin: Mouse House Shelter
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✘ Xiè Lián : A Tea Party
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✘ The Doctor: Ruined Mansion
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moiraine damodred ► the wheel of time
☆ think, tank
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☆ (un)sheltered
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[ OOC: Wildcards welcome. Quickest way to reach me for plotting or anything else is cosmology#1563 on Discord. ]
thinks, tank, thank
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behind you
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the seed & the storm
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behind me 😱
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boat ride
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think tank
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Anduin Wrynn | Warcraft
It fills him with a heaviness that is difficult to shake off though, at first. There is a chance after all that these people are beyond their help. That the whole city is beyond their help. And when a vote is put up amongst their group, Anduin is torn on how exactly is best to proceed on it. The healer in him wins out in the end, of course. If there is a chance that they can save these people, or at least stop this terrible blight from spreading further than Serthica's borders... Then at least they must try.
It is the chance that they may just succeed in eliminating the disease -- and therefore the majority of the population -- that has Anduin initially convinced he should go to the leaders of the citadel and warn them of said possibility. But a careful conversation with Wrathion convinces him out of that plan. There is a history, in Azeroth, of cleansing the population of sickness with the mass slaughter of any who showed the slightest sign of illness. Anduin cannot take the risk that Arabella might choose to follow suit. Not when there may still be hope for these people yet.
((ooc: prompts are below! feel free to respond in either action or prose, i just default to the latter! also if there's something you want to write with me that i haven't written out here, hit me up by PM or find me in the discord!))
WET OF THE DOCK'S WET
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(UN)SHELTERED
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THINK, TANK
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❂ Clara Oswald | Doctor Who
❂ 𝐵𝐸𝐻𝐼𝑁𝐷 𝑌𝑂𝑈
❂ 𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑊𝑟𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑜𝑛
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❂ 𝐷𝑂𝐶𝐾'𝑆 𝑊𝐸𝑇
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❂ (𝑈𝑁)𝑆𝐻𝐸𝐿𝑇𝐸𝑅𝐸𝐷
i.
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ii.
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i.
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Kahl-175 |⍓| Warframe
(Un)sheltered - Greenhouse
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hermione granger (harry potter)
THINK, THANK
[ooc; If you have something particular in mind that can't fit into these three scenarios, feel free to poke me here, or just bring your own scenario. I'm always down for S H E N A N I G R A N G E R S.]
(Un) Sheltered
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think, thank | I was not going to touch this scenario but this is too funny
oh no
oh yais
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wildcard.
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think, thank
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bubble bubble
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password please
The password is cupcake
sorry for the long delay, it's been a crazy few weeks
a. the password is 12345
I kept trying 00000
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think tank b
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Xie Yun • Legend of Fei
[ Of course when it comes to the Mouse House he's bound to head inside. Especially when his wife had been very passionate when it came to Ma'am Mariol and those children. Something that he, himself, had been passionate about too.
He's quiet as he heads through, if him and his companion suddenly find the greenhouse... then so be it. ]
Think, Tank
[ It's possible due to his 'job' that he doesn't have a problem getting in to study the coal sickness. After all, when one deals with coal and mining, it can be used to one's advantage, right? So, if someone needed a lab for a cure they could possibly come find him.
He will do whatever he can to help and keep guards and hounds at bay, if need be. He won't hesitate to protect those trying to come up with the cure. ]
[ OOC: If you want something else, or something catches your eye, PM me or throw me a starter and we'll go from there! ]
(Un) Sheltered
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wen qing | the untamed
The tea party this time is not much more enjoyable than the first tea party Wen Qing encountered in this mansion. The guests, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued to a fault, are no more delightful than the murderous ones of days past. Perhaps even less delightful, as those sharp, ghastly eyes gleam, and one guest asks Wen Qing what she is.
Guest is the wrong answer but the one that comes out, and Wen Qing is dragged to the table, ghostly hands pinching her cheek. "A delightful doll, isn't she?" one coos. "My dear, you aren't dressed for the part. Hurry, you must change," another says, while shoving a dress into Wen Qing's arms. "We don't want to disappoint."
This is how Wen Qing finds herself at the table, a teacup in front of her, waiting for someone to pour tea while she sits through a nightmare:
"Dearie, when do you plan on getting married? You're not getting any younger, you know. How old are you?"
2. THINK, TANK
A sprig of rosemary in hand, Wen Qing carefully strips it of leaves, making sure not to drop any of them. It would be wasteful otherwise. While people are bringing back more and more of both rosemary and juniper, it's likely they will need great quantities of any cure they devise.
Wen Qing is a familiar face around the academy, often having slipped into the labs to work on potions and salves under the guise of her role as a rehabilitator, but this work on a cure has led her deeper into the Academy. Luckily, there are people around, and someone else was able to liberate the lab. The pounding on the door is annoying, but she's worked through worse.
"Hand me the mortar and pestle, would you?" she asks anyone nearby, hands still gloved as she works with the plants, a veil over the bottom half of her face. No need to risk sickness, not now.
3. WILDCARD
[ nothing here works? let me know and I will be happy to write up a starter! or, alternatively, throw a starter at me. ]
2
(un)sheltered
1!
lan wangji | the untamed
( All ota, but nudge if these don't work for you and you'd like something else o/ )
behind you | this man is dry like the desert
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docks: investigation | this man is close to getting splattered
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docks: ruining your boat date | this man is cannonballing
what a terrible date
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(un)sheltered: greenhouse | this man is dripping
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(un)sheltered: the roof | this man is getting buried wet
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spread your joy: waterways | j/k this man is wet and gross again
Stop jumping in water, you're not a fish
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McCoy | Trek (AOS)
think, tank - for hermione
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vanessa ives | penny dreadful
DOCKS } the man in white drops us off at the edge
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(UN)SHELTERED } a little friendly neighborhood possession
(UN)SHELTERED } tea party with charles (closed)
Jimmy McGill | Better Call Saul
(un)sheltered
ii.
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iii
kim
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john constantine | ota.
d.
c.
the doctor ► doctor who
✘ magical sequence of events | under the boardwalk down by the sea...
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✘ think, tank
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✘ spread your joy
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kamala khan | mcu
[She shouldn't go looking for trouble. Once Kamala knows what's going down, she can't help it. She can't do anything about sickness and widespread undead people. She knows how to stop bad things from hurting people. Kamala start sneaking around in her Ms. Marvel costume to see if she can track some down aka patrolling. Is this bad? Good? Who can say? Kamala is trying to help. This is the only way she can see how for now.]
spread your joy
[Her next attempt to help is simpler. They need to spread a cure? Cool. Kamala knows how to get people to ingest something they did not watch being made. She sets up a lemonade stand. It works with her cover. A protestor would suck up to the masses by handing out free drinks to spread good will for the cause.
Feel free to grab some or say hi while she gets the job done!]
spread your joy
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spread your joy.
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Daenerys Targaryen | A Song of Ice and Fire
[It's Drogon's screech that wakes her, high pitched and sharp, breaking the silence. Having spent hours watching the incubator, Daenerys wasn't even aware that she had fallen asleep until she was jolted awake by Drogon's cry. Searching around, her focus failed to notice what was watching her, stalking closer.
Danger was close. She didn't need to see it, trusting the hair that stood up on the back of her neck. Gathering the incubator and strapping it to her side, she darted out of the dragon housing, feeling the beating of Drogon's wings at her back.
She scurried, casting a glance back over her shoulder, searching for whatever threat Drogon warned her about. She near collided with someone else, not stopping her speed.]
I apologize! You need to run before it gets you too!
Wet of the Dock's Wet
[The smell of mold and rotting wood is the only thing that grounds Dany in this moment. Even the heat from the incubator is nothing more than a whisper against her skin. She was still rattled, a dazed look on her face as she watched the waters. There was no sign of the strange boatman and vessel that had carried her to the middle of the waters. She shivered, no longer feeling warm but the cold fingers of death.
The soft wood shifted under her feet, pushing Dany to at least move, breaking her daze. She spied someone ahead and glanced over her shoulder, worried the boat would return again.]
Be careful. There is someone out there.
behind you
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Beitang Moran
[It's not that Moran is not scientifically-minded, because he is, but his interest in it is more because everything interests him and his knowledge, while more extensive than that of a layperson on many subjects, pales in comparison to that of the actual scientists they now have in their midsts.
And as a royal, if there is one thing Moran is good at, it's delegating to people who know what they're doing far better than he does, while he does what he is the best at : making sure they get every resource they need.
One may have wondered why exactly he insisted on upholding the pretense of his 'job', teaching rhetoric and public speaking to the aspiring and in-place members of the political elite of Minaras. But it comes in just fine now that he needs favors and that a great number among them would be just glad to slip a little word to someone they know for their esteemed teacher.
Several locales have bene procured but they need safeguarding, either actively, which people can do bodily, or through more administrative means, which is is very equipped to do.
Supplies need acquiring, and as it happens, he knows someone who is very good at trading and getting things for a good price.
Time to leverage some political muscles here.]
((OOC : we are super late, don't mind us. This is open for any shenanigans regarding procuring places to experiment or ingredients, happy enough to write custom starters below if needed but I juts needed this bit out.))
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