the chainings

[groundrules]

THE CHAININGS

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Escorted by shepherds, the party reaches most decadent Ephes — a citadel with a newly-raised, lethal army and ambitions of imperial expansion. The undead lady Messalina has approached the Senate of Ephes, asking for the citadel’s forces to liberate the unliving from the undead Brotherhood that “enslaves them.” In exchange, she pledges Ephes any territories she frees.

Ephes hides a beacon within the main temple of the world-making and world-ending chaotic Chained God, currently closed off while Senate leader Caius Justus considers Messalina’s proposal.

OBJECTIVE: Survive Ephes until the temple opens.

This first event of Arc VII lasts until 3 October. Use your character roles, pursue leads or nudge NPCs for clues!

POLITICS

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Politically-minded characters take residence with their benefactors and receive two iron chain bracelets, which represent the Chained God. These bracelets and the red-purplish trim of your white cloth identify your political standing and attract the nagging, desperate or aggressive public pleas of your petitioners.

You hear, hastening to attend Senate sessions, that long-serving leader Caius Justus is unlikely to earn a new mandate. His peaceful, sedentary governance is unsuited to Ephes’ military ambitions.

Pair up with party members and submit threads by 23:59 GMT on 27 September of bribing, cheating or outright fulfilling the needs of one of the politicians below, to secure their vote for or against Messalina.

■ War veteran-turned-politician Sextus Longinus wants to leave his mark permanently on Ephes.

■ Senator Publia Secunda has been struck with court summons on charges of tax evasion. The court claims it has proof she has been passing the precious wares on her ships as geese.

■ Senator Ovidius Petronius’s wife fled home, ruining his image as a family man, after he was caught in compromising circumstances with another woman.

■ Severus Silvanus was overcome by sickness and wishes to throw a party worth remembering as he lives out his final year.

■ Once a formidable soldier, Senator Cassia Floriana has been for years denied an audience by the priests of the temple of the Chained God because of the blood on her hands.

■ Maximilianus Tacitus wishes to eliminate his reputation for stinginess — while spending not one coin.

Note: if multiple players go for the same Senator, we’ll assume they had more than one vote to cast!

GLADIATORS | non-gladiators can spectate or patron

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Those assigned as gladiators are received by arena leader Laetio and housed in single or shared barracks cells in grounds near the largest stadiums.

Accommodations are scarce — pallets, hard stone ground — but food, healing and care are generously provided. Veteran gladiators are frequently measured and assessed. Strife is contained, and brawls are forbidden, while priestess of the Chained God visit periodically to bless warriors as ‘his children of chaos.’

At times, as you train or sleep, you sense you are watched. On other days, you wake from violent nightmares to see your wounds and bruises have vanished.

■ Newcomers are paired and taught how to throw fights, exaggerate their reactions and create slogans and outrageous personas. They are offered tattoos, haircuts and makeup.

■ You experience the first day in the arena around the OOC date of 18 September, when gladiators re-enact the Chained God’s first defeat and Chaining.

■ Characters can fight NPCs, each other, or demonic large beasts. These hefty creatures attack head first and thrash the arena, often striking spectators.

■ Injuries can happen when fighting beasts, but unlikely from other gladiators. The highest official attending a fight may choose the loser’s punishment, but must pay exorbitant fees for losses to the arena. After a noble boy orders a veteran gladiator severely beaten, you hear Laetio threatening the child’s anguished father with repercussions from Narula, leader of the Hand.

■ Submit a fight thread by 23:59 GMT on 27 September for the winner/s to address the stadium.

■ Other party members can pay or coax Laetio to receive their ‘favourite’ gladiator(s) overnight at their villas. Return by dawns.

WHITE NIGHT

One night (OOCly: 24 September), after gladiator games on the sixth of twelve Chainings, you wake up in a bleary haze, your thoughts and movements slow. Stifled screams and heavy footsteps erupt distantly. In pitch dark, you spot the slithering, deep silhouettes that are checking cells — progressing towards you.

■ If you glimpse their coarsely carved masks depicting wolves, you are overcome with a sudden, insurmountable terror and the certainty that your visitors are inhuman.

■ Stumbling, you flee your surprisingly open cell, overcome by dread that won’t abate until you find living company. Some of the emptied cells you pass by have been clearly ravaged. On the walls of three untouched cells of veteran gladiators, you see a wolf’s head coarsely painted in fresh blood. Hide with your companions, until sleep suddenly claims you.

■ The next day, you wake back in your sleeping quarters. Laetio accuses some gladiators of going mad from last night’s celebratory drink and destroying the cells. Servants have been cleaning attentively, with all blood paintings gone.

■ Your memories of the night are increasingly diffuse: at times you describe the intruders. At others, you speak of creatures or people from your own past that terrify you.

■ A veteran gladiator, the Beast of Brenne, is absent from the morning call. Laetio regretfully informs he perished from wounds incurred in yesterday’s games. He calls a toast to the Beast of Brenne and bans drink for the rest of the Chainings.

THE HAND

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Characters reach the barracks as part of a set of 100 new recruits. They are subjected to three days of intense training, ranging from running and parkour basics to weights and strength building, basic dagger combat and surviving hard (magically induced) weather conditions. The recruit batch is overseen by Hand leader Narula and members depend on each other for food or care.
Throughout this, recruits are made to heavily depend on Brother Narula, who negotiates and awards privileges and regularly visits for interviews not unlike interrogations. Recruits are largely orphans, convicts or disinherited — lone wolves, says Narula, who only find their pack in the Hand.

Every ten days of the 100 after recruitment, the worst performing five conscripts are removed from the ranks, stoking vicious competition and internal sabotage that Narula allows on the premise of soldiers needing both brawns and cunning.

Permanent injuries are banned. Beware blades left in your shoes and itchy, ground nettles powder on your uniforms.

HONEYED

Within days of receiving your assignments, you must shadow a group of Hand veterans and guard a Hive — an agricultural cluster outside of Ephes — during a grains transfer.

■ New recruits follow veteran soldiers into the eerily silent, vast farmland dominated by high rows of wheat and corn. You feel watched and something touches your legs and thighs. Within farmers’ hearing, veteran soldiers laugh it off as rabbits, snakes — but privately tell you to walk outside the line of vision of scarecrows littered in the fields.

■ The transfer proceeds peacefully until midday, when alarms blare, and a brawl starts near a defunct watering well: a dozen Hand veterans have gone berserk and attack indiscriminately. They are dark-eyed, heaving and struggle with speech and coordination. They seem less wrathful than anguished, desperately calling to ‘Make homes’ as they slaughter and sever limbs.

■ Immobilise the attackers, or take civilians to safety in warehouses.

■ The berserk soldiers are removed — allegedly taken for healing and discipline, but never seen again. At the barracks, Narula says the incident was the result of heatstroke.

MESSALINA’S INFILTRATORS

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Some party members join Messalina’s group as paid campaign aides. Stationed in the Senate’s summer villas outside of Ephes, the lady’s eclectic group comprises volatile magic users and necromancers, the undead and demonic creatures — who coexist in tenuous peace. It’s every wo/man to themselves after dark, when the villa walls and defences are drawn up and gates lock to prevent the indiscreet exit of a blood-thirsting demon.

Mid-summer

It becomes rapidly clear that Messalina does not trust the good will of Ephes and wants to cut a deal quickly by bribing, blackmailing, or interceding with Senate leader Caius Justus. She also seems unsettled by the Chained God, who she fears is a hidden undead liege controlling Ephes.

”Not every Sleeper sleeps deep.”

Messalina assigns party members to bolster the campaign of Maximus Faustus — previously a young, promising and popular politician with hopes of becoming Senate leader… who has been replaced by demonic shapeshifter Alir.

■ Infiltrate noble functions and learn what would steer patricians towards Faustus’ cause.

■ Patricians widely feel that Caius has been too sympathetic towards plebeians and neglectful of his own people. They want to see more grand gestures celebrating Ephes’ noblest class. See to it.
■ Some superstitiously associate Caius with the cult of the Chained God, whom the Senate leader brought back to forefront.

■ Alir is fiercely intelligent, quick-witted, dry — with little regard for humans, beyond their delicious hearts. Watch him while in public, as he succumbs to his hunger and lures innocents in dark corners to rip out their innards and feast on their flesh. Pay off or exterminate witnesses.

■ A derisive Alir questions Messalina’s plans for peaceful coexistence and the innocence of Ephes. He urges his caretakers to inspect Caius’s private home on the night of the full moon (OOCly: 20 September). You may take along other party members.

■ That night, Caius’ villa is well lit, bursting with song and closed from the inside. Scale the walls to enter and find a feast held by shadowy silhouettes of Caius’ ancestors. First they interact with you, then ignore you, then, increasingly inconvenienced, seem to recognise there is something wrong about you, before giving chase, daggers in hand.

■ On a high table in the great reception halls, you can find the entombment masks and personal effects of all of Caius’ ancestors who are present at the feast. Caius’ personal study contains nearly year-old letters of trade, reports on the fragility of the then-6,000-strong Hand and a broken worship tablet depicting the Chained God’s fourth Chaining.

■ In the kitchens, you find well-secured barrels of fish and wine — jump in together, or hear movement from the servants hidden within. You have time for one question.

CIVILIANS

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Characters assigned civilian roles may safely assume their Ephes posts for a handful of days, before the religious celebrations of the Chained God’s twelve Chainings start. The all-Father of the universe, the Chained God is set to birth, consume and rebirth the world, and was chained twelve times by the first heroes of humanity to contain his destruction.

■ The numerous priests of the Chained God wander the roads and mark the foreheads of civilians with salted ash — which briefly brings out your anger, greed or selfishness.

■ Priests say you feel the frustration of the bound Chained God. Some of those ash-touched experience visions of a heavily fettered, amorphous creature, struggling in agony in a cavernous room. Those with supernatural powers find their abilities are volatile for a day.

■ Those who ‘see’ the Chained God are brought and tested for holiness by Priestess Valeria, for it is known the Chained God chooses brief emissaries during the days of Chaining.

■ Newer acolytes greatly defend the religious cult: a great earthquake rattled the main temple of the Chained God last year during the Chainings, and falling debris only spared the faithful who prayed within.

Off with his —

On the sixth day of Chaining (OOCly: 23 September), the news shouter of Ephes’ main marketplace receives a pouch containing the decapitated head of Tavernus, brother of Ephes army leader Narula.

The shocked newscaster drops the head, shakily reading out the message stitched on the pouch: Animals die for men to live. Men die for gods to prosper. — a quote attributed to the Chained Gods and carved on his main temple’s outer walls.

Locals may share Tavernus was a taciturn man who previously served as Narula’s lieutenant in the Hand, before retiring five months prior and taking up agricultural trade.

Group up to investigate — and throw your hat in for a RNG pick to win the head.

NIGHT OF KNIVES | EVERYONE WELCOME

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The twelfth day of Chaining (OOCly: 29 September) ends the yearly religious festivities of the Chained God with multiple street celebrations and private dinners.

Popular political upstart Maximus Faustus holds his own night-long banquet, opening his doors to all.

The affair sprawls over multiple floors of Faustus’ enormous villa, with entertainment ranging from poetry, theatre, artistic and magical recitals on the lower floors to a gladiator performance and heavy opioids upstairs. Conveniently, the guest list includes every figurehead of Ephes and their main political and financial backers. Patricians seem amused but flattered by Faustus, who was ‘no one’ before Messalina’s support, but who has been generous in his appreciation of the city’s elite.

■ Sign up for a RNG draw for a conversation with Faustus by 23:59 GMT on 18 September.

■ No better time to publicise your feats or generosity. Why not have your character (including gladiators) perform or bring an offering?

■ Servants apologise as you smell an excess of musk and oud, hiding, they say, spillage from an accident caused by a fired manservant. You can still glimpse glinting trails of cleansed lamp oil.

■ Messalina attends the banquet for two hours, but hastily withdraws at midnight, after receiving a letter.

■ Towards the middle of the night, priestess Valeria asks to conduct a religious séance, allowing one person to channel the Chained God and speak to Ephes.

■ After 2 a.m., torch lights dim down, as twenty masked pantomimes enter the main banquet halls, shushing the rooms silent. In good spirit, they ridicule the partygoers, even poking fun at you with inside jokes they should not know about…

■ …before slashing the throats or stabbing some of the high-profile Senators present, sparking a chaotic stampede.

■ The main villa doors have been closed from the outside. Fire broke out within and spreads rapidly, after the rims of main halls curtains were drenched in lamp oil. Rescue some of the Senators, or help the crowds escape Faustus’ burning villa.

■ The assassins are exceptionally strong fighters whose combat style some might recognise from the Hand’s drills. They fluctuate between having physical bodies and merging with shadows.

■ Come morning, a list is found on the main hall floor of Faustus’ villa with an assassination contract for the murdered and targeted Senators. All had intended to support Messalina. The contract is signed with the seal of a ring showing a wolf in profile.

QUESTIONS

Comments

[downswing]

( A plethora of measures, of steps, of resolutions. A man like a summer storm, woken, and it strikes him fleetingly that perhaps this, more than Wen Kexing's violence, is to be feared: his utter, marrow-deep volatility. How he shifts between states like snowmelt in spring, never betraying himself, for in truth he did not have a form. He lives in moments, sooner than sum and continuity.

It startles. Leaves Lan Wangji to blink and stare and calculate, if not his next words, then the negative space that may house them. Where can he situate Wen Kexing's next bursts of... proactivity? )

It may wear different skins. ( No. Too subtle. Permit him, then: ) Oft, human.

( Painfully passably, better mannered than Lan Wangji himself. Possessed, certainly, of far more social grace. It should singe, but does not. )

Messalina wishes it unharmed. ( Ah, but to be a mass murderer with well positioned friends. )

[wifedup]

A shapeshifter?

( That is infinitely more troublesome. Wen Kexing could close down the pleasure houses but then those who rely on it's income to live would suffer. A fast death or a slow one is no real choice at all. Lan Wangji would have mentioned if there were ways of telling to look out for though, and so Wen Kexing has to believe there are none known.

The unharmed comment makes him laugh, a bark of sound. ) Of course she does. What good is a guard dog made lame?

( He looks to the other man now, thoughtful once more. )

You're a man of principle, Master Lan. What do you think of Messalina? Surely her preferences must rankle. People are dying.

[downswing]

( People are dying. Corpses ever litter each path ahead, steps stumbled in this muck.

There is a moment, fleeting, when he suspects Wen Kexing of knowing his discomfort. Worse, of knowing his nature, unpeeled. He does not suit easy connection, a game of forthright confessions. Better, his hand walking barrels of wine, tapping, reconstructing he beat of the wind he had abandoned outside, hard and ill tempered, before disrupting the peace of Wen Kexing's... business.

He does not suit this, head bowed and brow furrowed. Does not suit the poorly stitched silence of shame, a brother to Messalina's madness. )

I would not swear us to her service. Only to mitigate it. ( Better to know and influence than to play no part at all. )

[wifedup]

Do you think you can?

( Would Lan Wangji have tried so carefully to contain Wen Kexing, had they met under different circumstances? He is similar to Messalina, he thinks, the keeper of all manner of beasts and willing to do vicious things with them. He has done. Would he have been mitigated too? Or would that pretty sword of his found it's way between Wen Kexing's ribs. He's quick to judge, righteous in it, judging even with the Ghost Valley's crimes a carefully kept secret. That he might be faltering now is strange.

There are too many things he does not know. )

You know I do not recall any of my previous times here, the politics of this situation escape me. But I ask you plainly, Lan Wangji, what do you think we should do?

[downswing]

( There is a moment, pained and strained and thinning, when he watches Wen Kexing and sees not the man but his potential, a childhood and growing of possibility. Who he might have been, had the Heavens proven kind and his path less bloodthirsting.

Had righteous, kindly, saintly men discovered him before hardship might. His mouth staggers, trembled — here, now, his stillness might charm water into icing. In the space of this cavernous, monstrous cell, the anticipation lives like a dark thing, many tendriled, unending.

He rasps. ) ...to stand with justice. Live with no regrets. ( And bitter like bile: ) To slay those who oppose so.

[wifedup]

Yes, I thought so.

( From what he knows of Lan Wangji, and by extension Lan Xichen, he comes from a place where honour is held above all. That he's struggling so clearly now must mean there's something stopping him. He keeps tapping his fingers against his folded arms, expression thoughtful. )

You've been tasked with keeping it somewhat under wraps, yes? So your hands are tied. ( Should he be considering going so against the grain? Probably not. Is he going to do it anyway? Yes. ) Mine aren't.

Could we trap it somehow, do you think? Possibly harder than it would seem considering it keeps getting away from you. ( High praise? Maybe. ) It would give us more time to think.

[downswing]

( ...there is a moment of understanding, of indulgence, when he allows himself to feel pierced by another man's gleaning, to be known in the entirety of his wavering, tight-lipped indecision. When he strays from himself, eyes misted with incomprehensible hope, and dares to presume someone else might deliver him from hardship.

He believes, once upon a time, his mother plays this part. Has no certainty. Cannot begin to assume it shall happen now, as if snow might ever erase blood stains. The cellar reeks of wine, of vice and devastation. He must remember this, now: who Wen Kexing is, how he achieves what he schemes to do. )

He is mandated to roam freely. Wearing the skins of a man. ( One of high visibility, of importance. May he yield the name? What difference will it make? ) At Messalina's behest. Her creature.

( She will know, as she knows all things, somehow, despite her physical absence. She looms over them, all the same. )

[wifedup]

Do we have anyone here who knows how to disguise themselves? Create false faces?

( Zhou Zishu would have been able to, he thinks, and they would have found a way to mimic the monster long enough that the scheme would have won out. Wen Kexing could have played that part well. And if not Zhou Zishu, then Beauty Ghost, her skills akin to shapeshifting too. He's aware, suddenly, that he is very much alone here. He had thought himself alone in Ghost Valley too, but at least there he had people to command. It has been a long time since he was without.

No matter, he has survived by sheer force of will before. )

Or perhaps, is there a way to feed her information? If the creature goes where it wants, surely it being absent would not be surprising? You already have corpses, who's to say those cannot be rearranged to look like fresh kill. ( He's aware the idea is abhorrent, he'll take the judgement for it. ) Would she look too closely?

[downswing]

( Wen Kexing, unbelievably, unexpectedly, beyond protest or criticism, takes this moment to comport himself as a man of reason. It chills the blood in his veins to understand they may have had strategic assistance all along.

Yet the man withheld himself, in previous visits and incarnations. Perhaps Lan Wangji should not begrudge this iterations for the sins of its shadows. If they survive Alir. )

She has positioned him as a man of public standing. ( Messalina will know, because the Senate will learn before her. Because Maximus Faustus occupies the forefront of political praise. )

Some of the party know sorcery. The exchange of shapes is — ( He shudders, fleetingly visited by the spectre of his Uncle, decrying unorthodoxy. ) Perhaps within their trade.

( Lan Wangji, possessed of talismans and musical synchrony and vibration can only achieve so much, destructively. )

An imposter might betray themselves. ( ...even more so than Alir might have done. )

[wifedup]

Usually politicians hide their bloodthirst.

( There is perhaps a note of bitterness there, badly contained. )

So we cannot kill him, and we cannot replace him. ( His head is full of useless, awful things, the kind of options he dare not breathe in front of a man like Lan Wangi - choosing Alir's victims for him, finding the sick and already dying, gravedigging - they coat the inside of his skull like dirt, leaving him stupid and clumsy. Badly, he wishes Zhou Zishu were here so he could find an even ground with him, a half-step away from monstrous but still willing to do the dirty work. He might not know Wen Kexing's true identity, but he's ... aware of the violence in him, it's been tempered a little of late after the awful state of the Heroes Conference.

He doesn't know how to keep a hold of the creature he'd been becoming, alone as he is. ) Not that I doubt your prowess, Master Lan, but I take it having someone follow it at all times has also proven fruitless?

[downswing]

So far. ( But his mouth is slowed, soft, careless. Head woolly, thoughts clouded in cobweb. He sees before him a man reduced by the burden Lan Wangji could not bear, contorting himself to strategise and spawn solutions to a problem readily resolved.

It should have been done, before. Lan Wangji comes as a pauper, begging the scraps of Wen Kexing's assistance to hunt down a dog turned bestial. The hand that forgot to feed Alir has been repeatedly bitten, torn off the wrist.

He gazes away, at their feet, the crackling and lattice of ruinous scars on the floor stones. )

...he will perish. ( And he speaks it not in the way of heat and rancour, so much as the fungal, spreading certitude of a rapidly foregone conclusion. Messalina has chosen her champion, ill done. He persists in the foolishness of undiscriminating carnage, red-wet on his fangs and claws and glistened on the swell of his arms, the knots of his numerous, criminal fingers.

Before, he had dismissed the prospect. Now: )

Master Wen. Neglect this moment. Shed it as a snake's skin. ( The duty is Lan Wangji's, in this. )

[wifedup]

Let me help.

( It's out of his mouth almost immediately, something as stubborn in his tone as it is in the shape of his jaw. Oh, it would be easy enough to do as Lan Wangji bid, leave this little room pretending he has heard nothing. It has very little to do with him beyond the threat it poses to the women here, and he'd already been making moves to bolster the houses with some security. He could go back to doing just that.

And yet -. )

It would be better caught with two. Better covered up, too.

( Because they'd have to be subtle, he thinks. There are too many spinning plates. He doubts Lan Wangji knows how to hide his crimes all that well. To Wen Kexing that is old, familiar, worn. He is used to corpses and the gruesome work of hiding them. )

[downswing]

You distrust me. ( Simple, cutting. A wound he dare not let bleed, for pride to fester. He hears the unspoken, an offer of help born and nurtured under the auspices of uncertainty.

Wen Kexing wishes to entertain a joint venture because he cannot trust a job assigned to Lan Wangji will be completed fairly or fully. He cannot believe in Lan Wangji's offer, the odds of his success.

It is not the first time Wangji's ability to avail himself of duty has been questioned. It stings no less. ) My skill in this.

[wifedup]

I distrust a great many people, Master Lan,

( Matter-of-fact. There's no point lying, especially not when Lan Wangji already has the measure of them. )

But do I think you incapable of slaying a monster? No. Your brother sings of your exploits too readily for me to believe you nothing but a pampered young master. I merely thought to aid you with some of the more ... distasteful parts. ( A smile that doesn't reach his eyes, teeth in the candlelight. ) That would be my skill.

( And then, a cluck of his tongue, a sigh, the mask falling more firmly back into place. )

Very well. You'll tell me when it's done? I have people to account for, you understand.