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westwhere2023-01-06 07:33 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2023-01-06 07:33 pm
Entry tags:
- 2ha: chu wanning,
- arcane: jinx,
- arcane: vi,
- arcane: viktor,
- asoiaf: daenerys targaryen,
- better call saul: jimmy mcgill,
- better call saul: kim wexler,
- doctor who: clara oswald,
- doctor who: the doctor,
- final fantasy xiv: vrtra,
- game of thrones: jon snow,
- mcu: kamala khan,
- mcu: wanda maximoff,
- mcu: yelena,
- mo dao zu shi: xiao xingchen,
- oh! my emperor: beitang moran,
- original: licyn mansbane,
- owl house: eda clawthorne,
- penny dreadful: vanessa ives,
- star trek: leonard mccoy (aos),
- star wars: merrin,
- test drive,
- the gifted: marcos diaz,
- tian guan ci fu: xie lian,
- touken ranbu: kanesada,
- umbrella academy: allison,
- umbrella academy: five,
- warcraft: anduin wrynn,
- warcraft: wrathion,
- warframe: kahl 175,
- x-men: charles xavier,
- zettai karen children: kumoi yuuri
sand in your eyes
And onwards, through the cursed desert. The mini-journey Arc covers 6-21 January and doubles as a test drive meme. Participants do not need an invite to apply this round. Have fun!
A HOUSE UNITED WILL SAND | SOILMATES | A PYRAMID SCHEME
A SANDING OVATION
Sand in your eyes, down your throat, stifling. You wake half-buried in high dunes, crawling towards helping hands. Thirst vanquishes you.
You are quickly offered a translation and communication pendant and introduced to the leader of the caravan that saved you — good Mazyar, who thanks the stars for your most incredible luck to be rescued by his generous and humble self. For he is not a man for idle praise, but he has sold salt to salt makers, he was courted by seven of the five great trade guilds and brought peace to the Stairs of Sighs…
Mazyar reveals you are in Akhuras, where undead lieges seek to weaponise you in their war for dominion. Mazyar’s good but less successful friend, the elusive Merchant ferries otherworlders east, where ancient beacons can transport them home.
Retire for now and regain your strength. Come morning, further otherworlders will arrive from Serthica — and your journey may begin.
ONE SAND WASHES THE OTHER
The veteran party reunites with newcomers in the desert, and with the merchant Mazyar — who once guided them through the Stairs of Sighs. His caravan is protected by the Scavengers —deathly a tribe of hardened desert raiders. They bring water flasks, supplies, cooling suits and tents to share. Their snail-like carriage mounts can transport the weak.
You are bound for the seized citadel of Alem, swarmed on each side by undead battalions. To access it, you must obtain one of the enormous sand worms that trawl the deserts, which can be deployed to create underground passageways.
The Scavengers will lead the caravan through haunted dunes, the worms’ traditional hunting grounds and temple-fortress Uruksithar.
A HOUSE UNITED WILL SAND
The group first reaches the Valley of Unchaining, bordered by high cliffs and fang-like stones. Here and there, discover bloodied footprints, half-buried shackles and red chains. You might even stumble upon an eroded tombstone inscribed, H R SL EP THE UNCH IN D. At its feet are dulled dagger blades and rough calcar stone.
COULD DIE FROM LAUGHTER
You fool, never eat alone. Happen by the camp’s outskirts with your dinner, and you might glimpse the silhouettes of starved desert hyenas, their eyes glistening green. They will come close if you bear raw meat or bleeding wounds.
- ■ Scavengers say, if you see the hyenas, throw them food or a cloth drenched in fresh blood, then run without looking back until you no longer hear their cruel cries.
■ Some hyenas mimic rasped human voices, begging help or calling your name. One feeble hyena wears a chain of red shackles around its neck.
■ If you look back while chased, you find the green stare of the hyenas fixed upon you. You are gradually overcome by starvation, violence and the urge to dismember prey and feast on raw flesh. Player’s choice on whether characters can resist this compulsion, which disappears at dawns, or if they taste blood.
■ Scavengers will deny you entrance into the camp if you appear possessed in this way.
SANDIMENTAL VALUE
You walk the Valley, Scavengers say, and Mother Death walks with you. A once handsome crone might appear beside you, bare-footed and dressed in clean linens. She remains silent unless spoken to and flinches if you move suddenly, as if she fears being struck.
- ■ Treat the Crone kindly, and she entrusts you with a small pouch holding a fraction of her ashes, which she wants scattered from the hills.
■ Use rope and climbing hooks and take cover behind stone formations. Beware the violent sand whirlwinds that batter the cliffs, threatening to plunge you down or choke you with sand.
■ If you succeed, the Crone appears to watch her scattering ashes and bless you with good luck for the rest of your journey. Your kindness, she says, reminds her of her daughter.
SOILMATES
The three-day walk to Uruksithar traverses the sand worms’ hunting grounds, where dunes shift periodically in sharp, tectonic waves. Watch your step and don’t be surprised if your tent sinks at night.
- ■ The Scavengers organise daily reconnaissance parties in the desert hills. Stay with them to unbury dune treasures.
■ The brave & brazen can try to catch sand worms. The massive creatures erupt overground periodically, catching prey in their large mouths, or crushing it beneath their heft as they plunge in the depths — creating large sinkholes in the process.
■ On its back, each sand worm has a few darker scales that draw the shape of a rune. To tame a sand worm, you must find its rune, then write the symbol on the worm’s back using blood from your hands. Report your catch by 23:59 on 17 January!
■ The sand worm bonds with you for three weeks until the next full moonrise, or until you draw the same rune on your cut hand.
■ Those who secure a sand worm find it grudgingly follows them underground for the rest of the journey. The creature can only be steered or ridden.
■ Some sand worms are vicious, old and sufficiently magical to retaliate by taking the link over and forcing their bonded humans to experience their lives — briefly sensitive to light and strong sounds, or unable to speak. Some might experience mild fevers. All symptoms disappear when the bond breaks.
A PYRAMID SCHEME
At last, welcome to Uruksithar, former jewel of the desert — now reduced to rusted gates and tattered walls of wind-lashed stone.
The abandoned palace-fortress features a row of minor temples and barren gardens that surround a great, ruinous pit. The state of residential furnishings suggests the grounds were lived mere years prior. Walk north to find a a large pool of thickened black water that exudes a cold, unsettling presence. Veteran party members know what to expect.
Nail scratches on some temple walls read, we, who did not sleep or i ask the wind to grieve our chains. By the pit, a stone plate helpfully says, drop by drop, even base water turns to poison.
The Scavengers disperse to raid the temples, advising you to carry water everywhere. One raider mentions that the local Temple of Ra’esh stores silver waters that can woo sand worms.
OCTOPUS PRIME
Uruksithar’s great gong strikes every two hours, to groans and shudders from the abyssal pit. Scavengers immediately take cover behind walls, bind themselves to columns or rush into crumbling residences.
- ■ For five minutes, as the gong sounds a pathetic dirge, a bouquet of tentacles erupts from the pit, sweeping nearby streets to capture living things.
■ Throwing water on the tentacles forces them to retreat, while black liquid from the northern pool burns them down. Further tendrils emerge until the gong quiets.
■ Should you fall into the pit, use your climbing hooks to latch onto the walls and don’t look down. A grotesque, sharp-toothed mouth awaits below to devour you, amid the squelching sounds of the tissue and material it has been masticating for decades. It won’t give up its lunch easily.
TOMB AND GLOOM
Ra’esh the Bright-maker, he who saw but peace beneath the skies. His humble temple is anonymous among numerous worship grounds. Scavengers say, four years ago, a wanderer sculpted an eye with a sun for a pupil on the entrance door. Take a torch and head in.
- ■ Long-stripped of its glory, the maze-like Temple of Ra’esh is now cold stone, stale window-less corridors and heavy doors that snap down from the ceiling.
■ Distant susurrations of water point you towards your destination.
■ As you walk in, pay attention to the engravings near the entryway of each temple room. Some depict arrows, forecasting spikes will burst up from floors tiles. Sculpted drops hint pouring water in this spot will open a door. Open a door with an engraving of large serpents, and… well. The engravings can help characters navigate the maze and completely avoid its traps. Feel free to make up your own engravings & traps, if you want!
■ The altar room contains a pool with pearlescent waters that surround a woman fully bandaged in gauze, her sight obscured. She is bound to a column with chains and shackles akin to those found in the desert. Rare peeks of her skin show it rotting or sickly pale.
■ She asks either if you are her mother, come for her at last. Do you engage?
■ Take water from the pool, and you can lure a sand worm to you once you have exited Uruksithar. Hazed, but sweet-tempered, it will follow you underground and allow you to ride it for the three weeks until the next full moonrise. These sand worms won’t give you a hard time during the bond period. Report your worm too by 23:59 on 17 January!
NOTES
- ■ Test driving & in-game characters can top level logs here — test driving characters can also put up network posts in this space c:
■ Feel free to investigate the mystery of the chains and shackles, but no pressure — it’s not critical to Arc V.
■ Hit up NPCs!
■ Navigation top.
no subject
But it makes for a certain curiosity, feeding them, and so he holds them out again to Five, no comment.
"Which aspect are you asking after?"
In the darkness, laughter echoes into cracked cackling of despair.
no subject
Once they're offered, he reaches out for them. If there is magic involved, he's too starving to care. That got him in trouble more than once in the Apocalypse, no matter how much Dolores warned him, when the risk of food poisoning wasn't enough to deter him. There's a Twinkie in the apocalypse that still haunts him, and yet he hasn't learned his lesson.
This time he doesn't wait to answer before he's eating one after the other, taking too-large bites and swallowing them down as if he expects them to be snatched away if he isn't fast enough.
Eventually he remembers the question.
"This." He gestures with the remaining bite of food, as if he just explained everything he meant. There was some greater point about traveling east, but his stomach twists and he's still too hungry. "What did you make these out of?"
no subject
"Purchased stores, recipe exchanges, a challenge to the right ear for being swayed. It's a bit of potato, I think, and some root vegetable and thin slices of dried meat. Left to soak, it comes out better than I'd thought it might. Not spiced enough, but what can a man do."
There are some expenses which are too great, and some compromises for milder palates than his own is inclined toward.
"As for the flour, not sure of the grain."
As if that matters, when one starves. As if he cared, when he survived by any means. That he tries here to ensure others do not, has tried since Sa-Hareth, when they'd had to move from the citadel to the snowed-in farm.
"All decent. Clean."
no subject
"They're not very filling." His tone is mild, but there's an accusatory edge to the way he's staring back at him. They should be. Everything that Wei Wuxian just told him would have lasted him a month in the apocalypse, but here it doesn't feel like he ate anything. Something is off, and as his stomach tightens painfully the answer seems more likely. Obvious. There's a reason to waiting until he's starving to find him, and offering only placating answers so he'd have no reason to doubt.
"What else?" Paranoia flares in him the more the hollowness pulls at his insides, familiar yet unnatural. "Did you slip drugs in them, or was it the water?"
no subject
He'd be a wreck, if they were barking. Their form and sounds are just odd enough he can halfway convince himself they're terrible cats rather than canine. Almost.
"Lao Five. Did you meet one of those laughing creatures while you sat out here?"
Those buns are filling enough, and what drugs? To think that, without crying from the heat of spices in his mouth and thus Wei Wuxian's only method of poisoning or curing of poison, means there's another cause.
no subject
"A pack of them, circling." They would have chased him down, but Five is infamously hard to catch. His gaze hardens. "One had red shackles around its neck. What are they?"
no subject
Five has already spent too much time in their circling, laughing, mad company.
"Have you spoken with our escorting warriors? They have warnings, and statements. About what these might do, and what they won't allow back in camp."
Studying Five while he holds still and calm, because he's listened, he's talked, and he's figured that Five may have missed the socially relevant details, preoccupied as he tends to be by his own head.
no subject
The more likely scenario Wei Wuxian points to implies he's been infected with something. Another curse to add to the one he's been carrying since Sa-Hareth.
"Meaning?" He hasn't been eavesdropping as much as he should, so it's possible they talked about the hyena with the chains. Why he doesn't just come out and say it... "If they're not alive, shouldn't you be able to do something about them?"
no subject
He blinks, then smiles, a surprisingly sunny expression for the moment and subject material. "Lao Five, I never knew your esteem of me was so high! I could, and would, if I had more time to discern their curse. If they were an active danger instead of one wariness allows us to move past. Should I congratulate you for your distraction?"
The wryness in his expression not extending to his eyes.
no subject
The false cheer is met with a scowl, and then he's shaking his head and turning his back. He's decided he's letting himself get worked up over nothing, and he's not going to stick around out here all night with someone who wants to convince him that he's cursed. Especially when he's halfway sure he's mocking him.
So he simply makes a move to walk away without another word, wine still in hand. He'll just find something else to eat and he'll be fine. He's never killed a hyena for food, but he could. If he sees one again.