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westwhere2023-07-02 05:47 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2023-07-02 05:47 pm
Entry tags:
- 911: evan 'buck' buckley,
- arcane: caitlyn,
- doctor who: clara oswald,
- doctor who: the doctor,
- game of thrones: jon snow,
- harry potter: hermione granger,
- kingdom of the wicked: emilia,
- kingdom of the wicked: wrath,
- legend of fei: xie yun,
- lockwood & co: anthony lockwood,
- mcu: america chavez,
- mcu: kamala khan,
- oh! my emperor: beitang moran,
- owl house: eda clawthorne,
- penny dreadful: vanessa ives,
- star wars: cal kestis,
- tian guan ci fu: xie lian,
- umbrella academy: five,
- untamed: wen ning,
- untamed: wen qing,
- warcraft: wrathion
the sunken | moonrise
The final Arc VI event lasts three days ICly and until 23 July OOCly. Yancai goes back another two years in time to the Huntress’ visit, Miang-Si’s corruption and the memory-meddling rite of the ladies of the lake.
The party can choose to stay neutral, only heading to the House of Commerce to access its now-active beacon — or they can inevitably get mixed up in the affairs of Yancai and endanger the village’s time loop.
For a quick catch-up: the latest clues | everything about Arc VI.
BOAR’S HEART
Rattled, on high alert, feeling watched and skin prickling from static electricity, characters wake to find Yancai has gone back another two years in time. It is now nearly dry, barring rare waterways. Mould is absent. The village bustles with activity: a heavy influx of new arrivals comes by sea, and frequent fishermen’s and merchants’ markets set up in the open road — enjoy fresh fish delicacies, discounted pearls, rare cloth textiles and dyes that include the unique Yancai green!
- ■ No more hauntings take place, and only one moon loiters above the village. Villagers still remember the party under their false identities.
■ Word has spread of the conflict between elder Quanze Tsaymien’s council and a beautiful woman who has taken up in the forests at the village’s outskirts. Gossipmongers say she wastes away in the woods weeping — while ground cracks beneath her feet, grass wilts, waters poison and animals drop dead nearby. Young men are drawn to her and are later forcibly recovered in a state of rambling, feverish exhaustion. Village healers gladly accept your nursing help.
■ Village elders have given the woman — correctly identified by the party as the Huntress — until the following sunrise to leave Yancai on pain of death. You have 24h to encounter her.
■ The forests are livelier than in previous iterations of Yancai, but you feel perpetually… watched, as if sharp eyes follow your progress. These heavy gazes may belong to the young men bewitched to protect the Huntress, or to razor-clawed venom-spitting creatures that hunt her.
■ You may find some of the aforementioned creatures bleeding on the forest path. They possess slightly above canine intelligence, cannot communicate in human tongues, and hesitate to let you approach — but nursing one might reward you.
■ The death-touched (necromancers, those who died or revived, or otherwise marked) may optionally feel compelled to join the Huntress. Physical distance dwindles her pull, as can your own magic or solutions.
■ Luck (?) leads you to a silent and bloodied forest clearing, come sunset. Here, two dozens of Yancai’s recent dead have risen alive and surround the Huntress, some battling the creatures that assail her, while she speaks to 16-year-old village beauty Miang-Si. There is a gaping, if regenerating hole in the Huntress’ chest; in one hand, she holds her yet-beating heart she cuts in several parts she wraps in parchment. She asks Miang-Si to bury these pouches near Yancai to ‘hold her power close,’ in exchange for permanent and ever-blossoming beauty.
■ Wait as the Huntress and her forces retreat — then catch up to Miang-Si, capture her, or find the pouches. The ground where they are buried is desaturated, brittle, nearly pulverised. Hawks and ravens circle above and plunge down to claw at intruders, or attempt to pick up children or feebler adults. To the magically or death-sensitive, the pouches emanate a revolting aura of withering death.
■ Beware if heart pouches were buried beneath aged, thick trees — their roots burst out like nooses and writhing spiders’ legs, looking to either slam you against the tree trunks or entrap you within.
■ Finding at least two heart pouches prevents the dead from rising in Yancai in the years to come! Keep the heart cuts fettered — touching these parts directly can overwhelm you with the need to consume this or other hearts, to compensate for the sudden and unfeeling… coldness in your chest.
WAKE, UNWAKEFULLY
Sunrise finds the Huntress gone from Yancai — while waves of the dead rise from the sea to attack the village. Some come chained, or dragging pieces from the casket-ships in which they were set for water burial.
This is the first undead attack witnessed by Yancai villagers, who are largely clumsy, slow and petrified. Some sentimentally believe their revived relatives never died and plead not to kill them. Many are caught in undefended areas, such as open port harbours, fishing boats, markets — and need help to travel to their families. The Huntress’ spell starts dissolving by midday, with the dead largely pulling back into sea and lake waters
- ■ Beware the village waterways: touching the water replenishes the strength of the dead and saps yours. Look closely at the bottom of the waterways, and you find them lined with dozens of resting corpses. Some wake slowly, as they clutch shards of glistening black mirror — best to… use a very long oar… or plunge very quickly to recover shards.
■ Carrying a mirror shard puts the dead around you to blissful sleep. Those who possess a cut of the Huntress’ heart can take control of up to 20 of the risen dead. Necromancers can control up to 10, even without such a token.
MOTHER MOON
Come midday of Day II, Yancai villagers start to move freely and reunite with loved ones. Waters begin to gently rise and flood the grounds, while the first spores of black mould appear on walls.
The first to help the injured are the washerwomen of Yancai, who favour the young and magically sensitive. You notice they work in perfect synchrony and have developed a hand sign language they can teach you. Keep an ear out, and one might entrust they are hedge witches, the so-called ‘ladies’ of the lake.
■ Join them, either invited or unseen, when they gather at one of Yancai’s three great lakes. Each lady picks up one of the silver coins tossed in the water for luck-bearing. Take one yourself, and you will be able to breathe and speak underwater, following as the ladies dive and swim through thin underwater passageways. Beware countless skeletal remains that line the lakes and sinister fish — both burst out to shackle your limbs, or sound the alarm about intruders.
■ You find the ladies have begun to shelter and ward the dead in lake caves, to avoid their rising up again. The ladies re-emerge in the forest, speaking of a protection rite they agreed with the elders’ council. They are not strong enough to break the Huntress’ lingering spell, but hope to later recruit nascent witch Miang-Si, who teases she has power from the Huntress. For now, the ladies have decided to create a five-year time loop, moving Yancai back and forth in time whenever the dead attack.
■ To achieve their rite, the ladies use large pieces of black mirror confiscated from the Huntress’ dead and the energy of the hunter’s moon that shines down a bloody red tonight. Those with a lunar connection feel the moon aches, disgusted by this violation. Even those unaffiliated with the moon feel irascible and prone to violence while under its gaze.
■ Interrupting the rite rescues the moon, earning you a reward, and breaks villagers from the five-year loop, allowing them to live their true lives. It also exposes Yancai to the dead, unless you remove the heart cuts. Co-ordinate and choose wisely.
■ The ladies conduct their chanting, rune-painting and summons throughout the night of Day III in the forest. You have a wealth of options to break their spell: interfere with the magic flows, disrupt the guarded ash circle of convened witches, summon irate villagers to raid, persuade Miang-Si to intervene, break or steal the rite’s black mirror pieces… You can also reach out to the coven’s strongest witches, who agreed to sacrifice themselves to become overseers in the time flux — the Lumberjack, Red Lady, White Woman, Man in Black and the Milk-Toothed Babes. You can still sign up for a RNG draw to chat.
BAIT & BEACON
To take attention off the ladies of the lake, Yancai’s council organises a sumptuous masked banquet and charity auction for the victims of the undead attack at the lavish House of Commerce. The House has been thoroughly cleansed by the time of your arrival, with only faint, clumsy traces of blood, decay and debris lingering from the previous offensive.
On site, servants are still jittery from the undead assault, while openly armed guards walk the grounds and answer any small provocation. Be kind to the staff or offer sympathy for their likely recent losses, and they might let you in unnoticed, or offer a hand.
- ■ Anyone who brings an item for the auction or who
can pretend s/hepossesses massive wealth can join the banquet. Show up with anything you can brazenly talk up as elite, exquisite or one-of-a-kind — or perhaps auction your services?
■ The House of Commerce contains a locked room with the village’s now fully active beacon. The Master of Commerce has the only key-tokens to access this quarter, somewhere in his study room — pick a lock, sweettalk the staff, or work your magic to get inside the study and grab one of the rune-inscribed tokens. The study room brims with scrolls, globes, letters to and from the Dawn’s Reach Trade Company and maps of… Arc I’s Sa-Hareth in the west, where hand-written news reports say the dead are rising.
■ Back at the banquet, the richest wine and… relaxing herbs and powders are offered freely or sometimes slipped into food to ease spirits. Aiming for levity, participants don comical animal masks or play a local game of ‘bait or hook,’ whereby they approach you with the aforementioned fishing bait or fish hook in closed fists, asking you to pick one. Depending on your choice, you must ‘bait’ the audience with a song or dance, or ‘hook’ them in with a joke or anecdote.
■ Around midnight, attendants are invited to an increasingly competitive auction, punctuated by elbowing, loud voices, crowding and the occasional threat. Beautiful concubines might stick to your arms, asking to be purchased this or that (exorbitant) small nothing as a gift. Participate to keep up your cover, but beware landing in hard debt!
■ Most banquet goers pretend they are indifferent to the undead attack, but some question whether the woman of the forest was to blame — while others mention that the mysterious, far too independent coven of the ladies of the lake is meeting even now, and might be cursing Yancai.
■ However you spend your night, the witch Karsa asks you to infiltrate the House of Commerce by dawns and attempt to leave through the beacon. This will only be possible if at least one person has picked up a key-token…!
■■■ xichen
( The woods once more, a path now trodden — but younger, lavish, green beneath his step. He remembers, last Xichen and he walked it, the empty slate of skies above unending, like a blind eye gazing. How the forests sang barren, and now they thrum and thrive and every quiet exhalation of leaves, dancing, is perhaps the wind’s whistling or a withered heartbeat.
They saw the girl, together, receiving her gift of viscera and gore and the strange, slithered promises the Huntress shared between hisses and howls of a pain stabbing. He has never glimpsed a part surviving the absence of the whole, yet there, in Miang-Si’s hands, cuts thrived
Then, the girl fled. Would they might have followed, but a skirmish of the Beastmaster’s creatures and the young dead that rallied and salivated in the Huntress’ train barred their path. Pursuit was a distant ambition, cruel for how it tempted them with odds of great, indefatigable success.
Now, they give chase, and for all their merits, their knowledge, their skill — they are monks and soldiers, exorcists and scholars. Not hunters, not accustomed to track scents and stains. Still, the heart parts betray themselves: nature expels them, the ground that digested them barren and brittle and pale. Where they are dug, grass burns, the roots of a nearby tree have recoiled, withdrawing flinched and staying arrested away from the point of burial, as if to avoid contagion.
Lan Wangji kneels by, hound on the hunt, fingers suspended over the intelligent corruption that licks at the land, the scent and feel of its wrongness. )
More perverse than necromancy. Old sorcery.
( Primitive, base. Like metals spun off grit and gravel, ore startlingly glistened in deep-dug mines. He reaches a hand in, excusing Bichen’s chilled blade from the game afoot —
And finds, suddenly, his wrist shackled by the tree’s roots, binding. Ah. )
Draw back.
no subject
He does not retreat; Shuoyue flashes in a wink of silver to sever the roots higher up. ]
With me.
[ A grip hooks under Wangji's arm to tug him back, past the perimeter to safety so they can judge the soured space better. ]
no subject
( With him. Yes, with unwavering, flustered certainty. He nearly falls back, propelled by the momentum when the roots disentangle and he is his brother's own to catch, flimsy and petulant weight. At the last moment, his leg bends, he breaks his fall —
And he calls on Bichen, swinging less to strike an invisible enemy than to balance himself back to form. A nod, after — gratitude. )
We sit hand again, it will bind us.
( And he is... lacking in the appetites to attempt to cut down the roots, should they wrap against hands, should they swallow arms whole. )
...fire?
( Hells hath no fury like a well-placed talisman. )
no subject
[ There's no telling how many things they will have to burn, after all. He nods to Wangji, looking around for a decent defensive position before they immolate the patch of decayed forest; he suspects the whole place will go up like a wildfire. ]
no subject
( Save their paper. Yes, with certainty. The old moderation of a war campaign, where each day wages battle against attrition. He sees brother's caution — yet cannot help but murmur, hands gathered to relieve his sleeves of ribbon of weathered parchment: )
Wei Ying may supply more. ( The one advantage of introducing his brother to this marriage: Zewu-Jun too may benefit from the fruit of its alliance. There are some merits to fealty sworn from one of the craftiest minds of their generation.
...barring the one Xichen killed.
For now, he sets a ward first — lends the fire talisman the very inklings of his qi, to spark it alive with power — and hardly thinks himself a craven for throwing the parchment from a considerable distance, before watching it
e x p l o d e in wildfire.
A tree groans. Another all but weeps. The stench is deplorable, unforgettable. Raw.
Lan Wangji recovers the decent to look — slightly abashed. ) We must now dig below flame.
( ...about that. )
no subject
... That. Is going to be somewhat difficult.
[ He looks around at the untouched forest, trying to think of an alternative. ]
If we make a perimeter of rocks, it may cut off the flames.
no subject
( A perimeter of rocks. Perhaps, though their hands must yet enter, and they have not the time to trickle and waste, while the flame perishes of its own lifespan. He considers, then mutely nods, accepting of the plan —
And offers the tender continuation, his own proposal meagre. Flame crackles and bursts and burns beyond. He gazes, at peace with an ash-covered world. )
Wards, around our bodies. Perhaps.
( But then, wards also guard a perimeter. They cannot hope to simultaneously enter the fire undeterred and keep entirely protected. Only to minimise what damage reaches them. )
Or speed. Unbury with our swords' tip. ( Metal will serve as an extension of their arms. ) Hard healing, if burned, after. Wen Qing.
no subject
[ Let's not hope to outrun a fire, brother. ]
no subject
Not so damp.
( ...it seems, almost, as if Wangji visits two attitudes: either one of perfect, sterling resignation, to think he must cook his arm from raw to pleasantly chewable, or enthusiasm to see the matter done.
To the surprise of all those who think him a patient, logical or attentive presence, allow him to correct that misinformation with a tentative gaze beyond. The majesty of the forest compels the proposal. )
Perhaps, if we carry water. ( In their cupped hands. To put out a rapidly growing blaze. )
no subject
Your guqin, a note can carry wind with it as it travels. Play, Wangji, blow out the flames with the air.
no subject
) Play.
And so, unceremoniously, one wave of his hand and the deed is done: the guqin summoned with crackling bursts of false electricity, from the nethers. Wangji is a pretty, slight thing against a vision of bursting chaos, fire reaching out like covetous tongues.
Says brother, summon the wind. Less so than echoes, vibration, movement. He plays the appropriate notes, and the world shakes, wind coalesces and storms, blows hard and quickening over the horizon —
And at first the flame answers, shifting, thinning, providing relief —
...only for it to turn, suddenly, and blow in their direction, harder than before.
Excuse Lan Wangji, releasing his zither to disperse from the rushed conjuration, and instead calling up a wall of wards. )
...apologies.
( This, while the fire keeps bursting into their faces. )
no subject
He does not flinch or make any attempt to call a ward, knowing his brother will. Trusting him to. It shows him respect not to take the initiative. ]
We may ride the sword, as a last resort.
[ Shuoyue is made ready a foot off the ground, thrumming with determined spiritual energy, icy and unafraid of the flames. He steps onto her and offers Wangji a hand up. ]
You and Bichen will have to carve out what we need when we get to the middle of the copse, I will ensure you do not fall.
no subject
( It... is a wretched thing, to abuse a sword so. To step, physically, upon the contorted body of a spirit. Yet, they must, as last recourse. Hand trembled in his brother's, he assumed position, arms balanced artlessly at each side as he remembers and recalculates his footing. Always different, to ride the sword of another, and not your own.
In his hand, Bichen thrums in waiting howls, anticipating her moment, begging action. He turns her, sharp of her facing the ground in silvered chills, and waits until Xichen has commanded Shuoyue in proximity of the flame.
A blessing, as heat starts to lick at their feet, to threaten but never deliver crisp charring: Bichen may travel down without requiring his arm, his strain, his exposure to open fire. She thrusts once, again, at each turn returning hot and strained to his hand — until he hisses, once, at the blistering of it, and turns his face away, deploying her once more. In the end, the unburial is done, and the last of Bichen's assignments delivers the sliver of heart, now nearly darkened as it stays vulnerable to open flame, on the tip of his sword.
He holds it parallel to the ground, knowing to accept it with them — yet loathing its presence. )
Retreat.
no subject
Well done, Wangji.
[ Time to head back to The Cave(TM). ]