westwhere | the sunken

THE SUNKEN | PART II

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Get your toes wet in Part II of The Sunken, stretching until 28 June.

THE MORNING AFTER

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Waking from Yancai’s undead attack, you find the village has gone three years back in time.

■ Yancai remains flooded, but there are fewer waterways and some dry grounds. You can safely transit by raft, alongside row boat, though the waters run more turbulent.

■ Houses are sturdier, less drenched, their paints and furniture less eroded. There are fewer piers and minimal mould. The dual moons appear less… bloodthirsty.

■ Most locals don’t recall the future. The elder council, including leader Quanze Tsaymien and Kuthuba, remember, but feel compelled to re-enact the past, like an itch they must scratch. Those dead in the undead attack are alive, feeling as if they never perished.

■ Telepaths can hear echoing screams from the undead attack over the two days that follow the time travel.

■ The House of Commerce is less sunken, its beacon offline and musical boobytrap unarmed. The Master of Commerce yet lives and may be contacted.

■ Some struggle with partial or full amnesia, or might undertake their assumed identities. These effects wane within 24 hours — but vertigo, nausea and a sense of displacement may persist.

LIVING FIRE (NEWCOMERS, OPT-IN)

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Spooked by the memory meddling, party witch Karsa rallies newcomers, who have least experienced Yancai’s magic, to assemble ingredients for an elixir that will help settle clouded minds. ( ”Minds? What minds? You learn to use them now? You’re too old. You only take your little drink to stop staring like fools.” )

■ You must locate red-eye root on the outskirts of the forests that border Yancai. The plant lives in ancient, immense trees that have been burning from the inside for decades.

■ The red-eye root grows within these endless fires.

■ Briefly stop, divert or enter the fire wall to collect the root — but beware that flames stoke, if you loiter nearby. You can also find the resident fire gnome, who’ll surrender a handful of roots — if you amuse them by fulfilling requests ranging from playful (songs, dances) to humiliating (pretending to be animals, sharing uncomfortable secrets) to cruel (asks for blood, punching a comrade… )

■ Dilute the red-eye root into a painfully bitter elixir, then distribute it and coax the reluctant to drink.

■ You can enlist anyone’s help with the quest!

HOME AT SEA

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Slowly, surely, Yancai sinks — a fresher reality for villagers who reward help to raise piers, wade through waterways to reach their families, or design new boats, infrastructure and safety mechanisms. Cash in on your good deeds here.

You overhear veteran fisherman Temiu mutter that mould dregs have knotted his nets — while newly arrived Captain Alia of the New Brigade wonders how Yancai can be so flooded, amid quiet seas. The population seems tender, weary.

FARE THEE WELL

Once more, the village observes a funerary rite — this time, setting dead bodies at sea. Hostile, sullen and silent embalmers contracted by the elder council prepare corpses for final farewells before laying them to rest in one-man casket-vessels. The ships are bound with thick, weighty chains, closed and set on water — destined to return empty after the dead are claimed.

Drifting distantly at sea, the Man in Black of hauntings awaits them on a ragged boat.

■ Some villagers murmur that many casket-ships have gone missing, leaving those dead without rest. They argue the wisdom of burying their dead at home — but superstitious family aggressively object.

■ Stay among the grieving to collect information on the dead. You can also inspect the bodies by… borrowing coarse, greyed robes, and painting your eyes and lips with wood ashes to mimic the embalmers.

■ You recognise a small minority of the bodies sent to sea as the undead who attacked in the future.

■ There are unused casket-ships, built for lovers who perished together. Partner up, descend into a casket and fake… perfect… stiffness, to experience the disappearance firsthand.

THE MOON, HOWLING

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A sight to be seen are the twin moons that steward Yancai, one true and one diffuse. In the future, they gleamed cold and waiting — here, those with a lunar or astral connection become increasingly and inexplicably convinced that these moons are… not real. No distraction, no reason, no proof convinces you. The true moon is captive.

In your moon-hunt, you are drawn to the dam-fenced, heavily flooded south-western district of Yancai — into the now deserted former seat of the elder’s council, the drowned but majestic palace-mansion of the Storm’s Stage.

■ Can’t hurt to tell other party members your suspicions and enlist help. Alternatively, they might follow you because of your strange behaviour.

■ Scale the great wooden dam, mindful of guards.

■ You find the district overwhelmingly submerged, with waters thick, unnaturally cool and darkened (but not black). Refugees have removed row boats, and remaining rafts are threadbare, forcing you to swim, leap or scale rooftops and balconies to advance. Beware deep rotting and crumbling architecture.

■ The Storm’s Stage is a flat, one-level building, where waters run 1.5-2m high. Its large, wide and labyrinthine corridors have made it a favourite hunting ground for Weepers: carnivorous 1m-long sea creatures with cruel teeth and human intelligence. They produce a sobbing, hiccupping sound — their cackle of enthusiasm, before they attack.

■ These obscene creatures spear the decaying bodies of their former human or animal prey in their teeth, propping them up and mimicking voices to lure you closer.

■ Make it far enough into the twisting building, and you may encounter a magically locked room, behind which, the sensitive are certain, lies the moon. Elders’ leader Quanze Tsaymien might have the key you require — or find a way to open the door yourself. Are you in yet?

THE LADIES & THEIR LAKE

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You hear that beautiful maid Miang-Si has come of age, and her rich merchant family now accepts marriage offers. Jubilant, modestly attired, kind and in good health — this Miang-Si is a far cry from the spiteful, sly creature you met before.

Yet, in a small village, murmurs abound: some of Miang-Si’s friends hint that her reputation won’t survive more sneaking out at night. Others say that Miang-Si appears… distracted, her appetite lessened. Others, still, say the girl has returned to her obsessive fixation with a beautiful woman glimpsed in the forest years prior.

Miang-Si could have information on her future accomplices — the allegedly ladies of the lake.

FOR RICHER OR FOR POORER

Miang-Si’s parents have exacting marital standards: you must be rich and publicly righteous, all genders welcome. An exotic gift might go far to gain you a private audience with Miang-Si.

■ Choose and present a potential suitor: dress them in the village finest, polish their manners, hire an entourage and commandeer a suitable courtship gift. Swat if they complain.

■ Raise the suitor’s odds along with their public profile by flaunting their feats and virtues in the marketplace.

■ Woo your would-be parents-in-law by capturing golden scales from a rare Mura-sirri lake fish. It spits slime on its pursuers, who instantly flee, irrationally startled.

■ To the seeming ignorance of Miang-Si’s parents, their dark, dusty, mausoleum-like house appears haunted: strange women appear in reflective surfaces, or run down corridors. Joining your hosts for tea, you feel inexplicably covetous of your ‘intended,’ certain that you must have Miang-Si at all costs and that jealous rivals oppose you. Invisible to others, a beautiful woman clings to you from behind and whispers you need only verbally or physically eviscerate everyone at this table to claim your bride. Hopefully, your wingwo/man can prevent bloodshed.

■ Sign up here for one of three RNG-drawn audiences to speak to Miang-Si or investigate her quarters.

AT NIGHT, WE DALLY

You can also trail after Miang-Si on one of the nights when she slips out of her dead silent house. She leaves when the main moon is full — while the twin moon feels disapproving. Follow Miang-Si to the outskirts of Yancai, to the Silver Lakes. Here, she tosses in a silver coin and wishes for safe passage, then takes a small boat.

■ If she discovers you following her, Miang-Si firmly tells you to go home. The twin moon seems at ease as you heed, however unwillingly.

■ If you also drop a silver coin in the Silver Lakes and wish for safe passage, your ship turns invisible for two hours.

■ Miang-Si stops her boat in the middle of the Silver Lake and touches the waters with her hand. She is answered by several skeletons, who swim to surface and gather by her boat or climbing in. The parts of their bodies that exit the water gain flesh, then skin and the likeness of beautiful women — the rest stay skeletal in the depths.

■ One such woman greets Miang-Si as queen of the night and kisses her on the mouth, about to drag her in. If you only follow, you notice she disappears for hours, then re-emerges with a look of dark conviction, before returning home.

■ If you seek to intervene, the skeletal women capsize your both then look to embrace and kiss you, also dragging you into water. The kiss allows you to breathe underwater, while your lips are locked — but steadily steals stamina. Your captor progressively decays back to bones, losing sentience, as you reach the bottom of the lake.

■ Here, you find dozens of skeletons and mismatched bones, webbed in wisps of familiar black water, along with rags of clothing — including shreds of a white shroud.

■ The waters hold no bodies, once Miang-Si leaves.

A-HUNTING WE WILL GO

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Village elder Kuthuba urges the crafty and the brave to a forest incursion after several lumberjacks are a week late returning. He fears the men lost. The village’s numerous piers, pillars and boats depend on timber, and Kuthuba seeks to retrieve both wood and any prospective casualties.

■ Two dozen people leave at dawns with daggers, bows, arrows. Some say they previously entered the forests before being driven out by vicious animals, but are not keen to speak further. The grounds are inhabited by woodland creatures, but eerily silent. Predators are scarce, thin and terrorised.

■ A thick mist drenches the forest, deepening until you struggle to see past 3 metres ahead, or to spot the waning sun in a grey sky. Network devices do not work, and torches are essential. You feel increasingly paranoid and hunted, distrusting your companions.

■ If lost in the woods, villagers say to set your dagger on hard ground and spin it. If the blade lands on you or your companion, wet it with your/their blood, until it no longer does so. If it points in a proper direction, head there. If it starts to cackle, bury it in dirt or flee — it has caught a taste for blood and will now seek out your throat.

■ The forests brim with diffuse whispers, women’s laughter, shrill growling and heavy steps — until amorphous many-bladed beasts descend from trees or burrow in soft ground. Aim between their carapace plates and run. Happily, rivulets abound and the creatures fear running water.

■ Deep in the forest, you find the resplendent vegetation thins into a small barren clearing where nothing grows. Here, even the earth has cracked, showing signs of black mould spores, while animals and birds avoid the region. You discover the belonging of the lumberjacks, but no bodies, along with a few scattered diary pages.

■ Take the belongings back to the lumberjacks’ families. The hunting party returns with sundown — only to realise three days have passed in Yancai.

NOTES

■ Feel free to investigate other regions of Yancai!

■ NPCs for this event!

■ QUESTIONS.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"What do I mean? How to explain..." He keeps his tone conversationally pleasant, clearly listening as they walk. His sense of where recent, traumatic death centres is unfailing, but that doesn't make him feel good about it, only more determined to help figure out how to stop repeat incidents.

In this time or in another one. The curses in regions usually end up linked, he feels.

"Everything is made of energy, ah? We are, the plants, the air, the earth, animals, rocks... life energy and death energy, both leave an imprint. Death from traumatic, sudden endings, that leaves a deeper, stronger impression. Resentful, you might say. Those I can feel very strongly."

The reality of this world meaning he's felt so much more than he had at home, now that it's been years of wandering its landscapes, and the most recent time in Alem with the fortress and the war... he shakes his head, slowing, lifting his bow again. The pulse of paranoia is still there, echoing in his head, the tension in his jaw, but that's not what he allows to inform him.

"Up ahead, in the trees. Movement?"

That still all sounds very ridiculous, despite how earnest and patient he sounds, but there's no time to argue the point. Despite how much Aloy finds belief in the metaphysical to be a waste of time, she has priorities.

"I see it," she says, voice low, and immediately drops into a crouch, pulling her bow from her back.

The fog makes it nearly impossible to see what's ahead, causing a sense of unease that Aloy is unaccustomed to. Is it an animal? Another searcher? She strains to see and, for just a second, thinks perhaps it's one of the missing lumberjacks—but laboriously dragging something behind him.

The thought dissipates, though, when something in the trees lets loose an inhuman shriek. A terrible feeling of dread creeps up Aloy's spine.

"What the hell was that—"

"Danger," he says, his arrow flying true. They might both hear the weight of it hitting heavy plate, and his tsk of a tongue clucked off the back of his front teeth. Another arrow already knocked, he jerks his head to the left: more movement ahead, from the right, and the bounding strangeness of the creatures moving, crying out again.

"So we move!"

Chance more than calculation means rivulets of water lay that direction, and his releasing of another arrow finds better mark: between the glinting plates of the horror's body-armour, into the tissue at the joint by the shoulder and neck. The one crashes down with heft and strangled, angry cry. The two, three that followed behind shriek and hiss and run on, angling for the two of them rather than whatever else might move in the fogs grown heavy around them.

Aloy has seen many terrible things wrought from the greed and ruthlessness of men, but nothing like this. She's used to hunting machines, not amorphous things of flesh and chitin, and she freezes at the unfamiliar feeling of terror.

As the first creature slams into the earth, she snaps out of it and belatedly heeds Wei Wuxian's call. The flesh between the armor plates seems to be a logical weak point, from how the first beast was instantly felled by it, so Aloy takes aim and with dead-eye precision, her arrow finds purchase in the exposed tissue around the eyes of the second creature.

The creature falls as Aloy rises from her crouched position, taking a few hurried steps backwards as she nocks a second arrow. "They're fast—" Fast, and closing in quickly: if they keep emerging from the fog, it might be best to run.

"Left, through the gap in the trees!"

The fog makes it an ethereal target, but enough of one for them both to aim in that direction, toward the strengthening sense of death he has, yet away from the descending creatures. Insectile and yet nothing of the sort, he runs ahead, turning to fire another arrow with annoying accuracy into a leaping creature, sending it shrieking off course and collapsing as it tried adjusting to the sudden pain and loss of mobility it experienced in a main leg joint.

"Just over the stream!"

The one he does not yet know the creatures will not pursue them beyond.

Aloy doesn't argue. She hastily fires off an arrow, which harmlessly bounces off a creature's carapace, then breaks into a sprint toward the break in the trees. She mutters something to herself about how this definitely the opposite of a rescue mission, ducking a low-hanging branch before she takes a running leap across the stream, ending in a practiced roll.

Once she's back on her feet, she whips around with another arrow drawn, ready to cover Wei Wuxian—but the beasts stop at the edge of the water, shrieking and pacing. "No way. Really?"

Wei Wuxian lowers his own bow after a few prolonged heartbeats, eyebrows climbing in shared disbelief at the visible stopping point of the stream. There are independent logics at work here, and he shakes his head, a small motion, before clucking his tongue and turning half away from the shrieking, whining creatures refusing to move over water to attain their prey.

"Stranger things prove true," he says, "Enough that I'll accept these creatures won't cross water. So let's hope they don't figure out how to dam the stream off, ah? Come, come, better continue onward."

A pause, as he listens in the lessened but persistent fog, hearing no cries beyond the creatures that pursued them to their own frustration. The other hunters, such as they were, silent in the interim, or too far off to be heard, or dead. He hopes against the last.

the sunken | part ii

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