blood & sand

[groundrules]

Hi folks! Welcome to Eastbound’s last test drive meme and the second event of the Ephes Arc, stretching until 25 October. Applications next open over 20-25 October, with invitations required for new players (but not returning ones). Individual cast and game caps are off.

Test driving characters can use this space for both network and log prompts, as well as play both the newcomer and shared prompts. Enjoy!

BLOOD & SAND

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NEWCOMERS-ONLY PROMPTS

You wake to the creaky swaying of a large wooden cage, in the back of a cart. Balmy sun pinches your cracked, dried skin. Haziness and nausea assail you, your legs weak. Your supernatural powers are muted, due to recover within 48 hours. Several other carts trot by. You share your cage with a dozen others — largely farmers — and sacks of freshly harvested wheat, their bottoms stained dark.

The farmers point you towards a heap of rusted pendants that allow you to speak and glean local tongues, and access a network. They say you were recovered following an earthquake at a Hive — one of the agricultural clusters feeding the extravagant Senate-led city of Ephes. The Ephes army, the elite Hand, was patrolling nearby and is taking you to the citadel for healing.

■ Gather your bearings and distribute the scant water that Hand soldiers dole out — the earthquake, you hear, has dried the Hive wells.

■ You quickly learn why the Hand encaged all of you, as one of the Hive farmers starts to jerk, growl and shake, weeping black water as he strikes at anyone around him. Fend for yourself, before the Hand soldiers come to remove him!

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You arrive at the main gate of Ephes, where crowds vie for passage. Your carts are inspected, and an irritable woman enters each cage, checking each passenger — before taking you and a handful of others for ‘further customs investigations.’

In the back of an alley, she introduces herself as the sorceress Karsa — and says you are otherworlders brought into the realm of Akhuras by undead lieges of the Brotherhood, who seek to weaponise you in their wars. Her patron, the Merchant, leads otherworlders to ancient transport beacons that can deliver you home.

One beacon sleeps in Ephes, where the rest of Karsa’s party is scattered. The citadel has mysteriously accrued an elite, nearly supernaturally strong army that the undead lady Messalina seeks to borrow from the Senate, in her quest to free her undead companions from the Brotherhood. The Senate is yet to vote on her request.

The black water that has touched you, Karsa says, has previously been found where the undead rally. For now, Karsa gives you a little coin, passport papers identifying you under various civilian roles (player’s choice, but keep it Ancient Rome-themed) and an iron pin of an eye with a sun for a pupil to identify other party members.

SHARED PROMPTS

Decadent Ephes is overrun by rumours, after several Senators who intended to support undead lady Messalina were mysteriously assassinated at the banquet of prominent Senator Maximus Faustus — who, Karsa informs, is one of Messalina’s shapeshifting creatures. Messalina offers her protegees demonic hound escorts.

Hand army recruits protect official buildings, while the rich hire gladiators to watch their homes. Both move freely.

The Senate fears further retaliation against those who champion the dead. Senate leader Caius Justus distantly mourns the Senatorial murders from seclusion at the temple of the Chained God.

Civilians face increased tensions and whispers of curfews in the market. Crowds frequently quarrel over undead allegiances

Following an exercise in divination, priests of the city’s patron, the Chained God, spread word that the deity holds strong despite his Chaining, and he still wishes to destroy and rebirth the world.

Karsa informs the existing party that more otherworlders joined Ephes and wear iron pins depicting an eye with a sun for a pupil. She gives the party similar pins for identification purposes. Newcomers and old timers can recognise each other by their pins or engage over the network!

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THE PROSCRIPTIONS
OBJECTIVE: procure proscription lists.

You hear from the city crowds that partial target lists are circulating with the names of politicians targeted for bounties. Karsa tasks the team to recover the lists, which can be used as political currency. Find them by either:

■ Infiltrating a tavern run by the ruthless city gang of Livius Decimus and packed with unscrupulous bounty hunters, thugs and professional assassins.
A local ‘delicacy’ drink of wine and pickle juice is often inflicted on strangers. Brawls erupt randomly. Coax shady patrons to share target lists.

■ Visit the empty marketplaces just before dawns and raid the chained wooden submission boxes of news shouters, who receive anonymous tip-offs about fresh bounty lists. The boxes are pinned to the ground and tightly locked, but rusty from the cold seasons — allowing you to break them or pick their locks, while someone keeps watch. Tampering with a news shouter’s box is a jailable offence.

■ Turn in a finished thread to receive a clue!

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AT SEA
OBJECTIVE: investigate abandoned ships and rescue sailors.

One early morning (OOCly: Oct. 13), as you entertain sailors for gossip on the docks or fish breakfast, you witness the port authorities screaming for help as several small merchant ships appear abandoned at nearby sea for reasons unknown.

Lookouts spot no activity on board, while sailors organise rescues.

■ Row a small boat some 15-20 minutes to one of the merchant vessels. All merchant ships have roughly three hours afloat, as they slowly sink from numerous small erosion holes in their sides.

■ You find no crew on deck, and doorways to the cabins below are locked from within. Below deck, you find numerous sacks of wheat from the Ephes agricultural clusters, the Hives. A black liquid, thick and tar-like, is seeping out of the sacks — corroding the ship’s wood and creating leaking holes.

■ You find a handful of dazed sailors who claim a dark, slithering creature knocked them out. They were selected by Narula, leader of the elite Ephes army of the Hand, to transfer grain onto the vessels of the ‘merchant’ Matthias, much farther at sea. If you mention Matthias to Karsa later, she reveals he is a man (?) who potentially created the undead Brotherhood.

■ Seven sailors who did not know each other were chosen to man the ship. Eight men are in the room, meaning one ‘man’ is the assailing creature. You must decide who to release upstairs for evacuation.

■ Tips: the creature, disguised as a human sailor, has no pain receptors and isn’t afraid of typical dangers (fire, drowning). It does not bleed if hurt. It sometimes forgets to blink and increasingly, unwillingly, slowly morphs its features into yours, the longer it speaks with you. Lastly, the creature has a tattoo on its forearm identifying it as a soldier of the Hand.

■ Once found, the creature turns violent, dissolving into wisps of shadow and materialising once more to strike from behind you. The shadow creature cannot be outright killed — but you can lock it inside the ship.

■ Leave by small boat before the vessel sinks & claim a question if you saved sailors. Merchant vessels can be patched up, if successfully returned to port.

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THE RATTLING
OBJECTIVE: survive & explore the arena.

To stoke her popularity in Ephes, undead mistress Messalina organises a sumptuous gladiator game at the Colosseum (OOCly around Oct. 20), inviting plebes, patricians, politicians, soldiers — and you.

Gladiators may be hired (or coerced) to perform, while servants supply copious amounts of wines, oysters and honey pastries. A tiny mechanical golden mouse, passing by each seat, drops folded pieces of parchment with fortunes and riddles, ranging from teasing to morbid to philosophical or sweet. Pick up yours and make sense of it with your neighbour!

Politicians often interrupt the games to announce donations or make elaborate speeches. Toss peanuts to signal your discontent — or join in with your own speech.

■ The games start with matches between humans, but are building up to face-offs with reptilian demons, mounted rhinoceros and flying gargolyes whose voices thrall you frozen put.

■ During the games, you feel slight vibrations, and — if supernaturally sensitive — an undefined magical tension. By 15:00, this ramps up into earth tremors that worsen over 12 minutes — as columns and seats topple over, and the ground breaks in deep rifts, releasing black, chilled, tar-like water.

■ Crazed mobs rush for the exit, stampeding carelessly, while columns and decorations tumble down.

■ Dozens of the monsters brought to gladiate free themselves and hunt down spectators. Soldiers of the army of the Hand — disturbingly fast, strong and disciplined — intervene but it’s best you look after yourselves. Some spectators shout these Hand recruits practise some of the techniques performed by a recently missing gladiator — the Beast of Brenne.

■ Passing by the earthquake rifts, you see wisps of the tar-like liquid that gushes from them is gradually assuming the shadowy shape of humans. Stalking after you, they do not speak or bring you harm, but slowly steal your likeness and drain you of vigour and stamina. You get the sense that all they want is a shape. Encountering shadow creatures leaves you with a sense of bitter loneliness that only living company can soothe.

■ If you study the arena, you see the same black liquid is gathering around freshly downed corpses, slowly reanimating them. These newly-crafted undead struggle to walk and speak naturally and remember their lives, often unaware they died. Anguished, they beg help to escape, before inevitably succumbing to the instinct to harm you. Remind or convince them they are dead, and they withdraw.

■ The largest earthquake rift in the arena is overrun by the black liquid and by nearby undead. Within it, you notice a bloodless hand that seems to never sink — Enter a RNG draw to collect it and its clue.

■ As you gather your wits outside, you see followers of the Chained God rallying in the streets, comforting the traumatised crowd that all will be well now — for the Chained God’s destruction will be mercifully swift.

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THE QUIET HOUSE
OBJECTIVE: Explore the abandoned gladiator barracks.

NOTE: a Halloween special, this area is entirely opt-in and features several frights. Mind the warnings!

As chaos consumes the Colosseum, you notice the earthquake has destroyed a previously locked arena gate, revealing a decayed tunnel. The corridor leads inside a closed-off barrack whose doors and windows have been barred from the outside with wood planks and chains. Touch these restraints, and your unhurt hand leaves behind a fading blood print.

The barracks building is withered and clearly abandoned, with scarce furniture and a few weapons in a training room.

Several discarded torches stay alight on wall fixtures. Pre-prepared braziers have been filled with spirit-fending incense of sandalwood and sage. Explore for clues.

■ THE HALLWAYS ( cw: guilt haunting ): corridors flow into each other, often leading back where you started. You run into shifting wall engravings, some listing the name and ranks of Hand soldiers, or precepts such as GODS OF THE ARENA and BECOME AS STRONG / AS FAST, AS NIMBLE / AS GLADIATORS. A large portrait of Hand leader Narula is increasingly more scratched, every time you encounter it, while the painted man looks healthier, younger and stronger. Inevitably, you hear heavy steps — a deep-shadowed spectre, the Drillmaster, who starts to stalk you with slow persistence. Visible to you and your companions, the Drillmaster fluctuates between assuming the appearance of Narula and the distorted, monstrous figure of someone from your past, who heavily criticised or intimidated you. The corridor lighting changes depending on your proximity to the Drillmaster: green for safe passage, white to tread lightly, red to stop. You can make the Drillmaster disappear out of your way by facing or acknowledging whatever weakness (true or self-perceived) you have that has caused extensive criticism or self-doubt.

■ THE BATHS ( cw: doppelgangers): a long marble hall featuring a large swimming pool, now drained and filled with mould and debris. Steam overwhelms the room, except for a wall-length black mirror at the end of the hall. The more you look into the mirror, the more the black substance that covers it slips down, flooding the floors and also dripping from walls and the ceiling. As the mirror clears, you see your black-eyed reflection that suddenly screams out verbal abuse or plunges at you. Once you subdue the doppelganger (claim a clue), it dissolves into more black water, while the mirror shows scratched inscriptions of A RIGHTEOUS HAND SHAPES EACH OF ITS FINGERS.

■ THE DORMITORIES ( cw: membranous cocoons): hollow, empty, quiet, the dormitories sport strange membranous cocoons in the walls, from which shadowy hands reach out. You hear young wo/men, whimpering and murmuring that they aren’t afraid and want to change to make Brother Narula proud, before erupting into screams or laughter. Break the cocoons without getting trapped into their webs — only to find nothing inside, except stone dog tags, engraved with the names of Hand soldiers. On the floor, you find primitive tattoo needles and ink.

Luck strikes at sunset, when a previously barred door opens to release you from the house — back into Ephes.

NOTES:

■ QUESTIONS

■ NPC inbox (for test drivers)

■ Event title shamelessly pilfered from a gory gladiator show!

Comments

[downswing]

( He does not breathe, does not think. Allows the needle points of quiet, lancing horror to ache and bloom and travel his limbs, to flower in his heart, to >spread. Thinks of the reality this fiction trickled like thick bleeding off Wei Ying's heart promises: a shuddered, all-sundering nightmare.

To make of men no more than their meat, the puppets of children, playthings of war. To break their backs and their limbs and stitch them back together again, only so they are faster, stronger, more dexterous, more cunning.

His hand hunts Wei Ying's, the dreary cold of his fingertips seeking out the ravines of his husband's palm. And, singeing, he remembers — exhalations. )

It would be inhuman. Unjust. To abandon men only to make — soldiers.

( He remembers campaigning, the toil and toll of Nightless City. The blood and gore and aches, and his steps skidding, and his feet slow. Remembers the agony of making an instrument of himself, no more than a tool for his brother's wielding, for Chifeng-Zun to set upon a map. )

[weifinder]

( Fingers curl and clutch and ache like the pains of long bones and thin flesh, warm in turns and cold again, hard. He half closes his eyes, ignoring for the moment the laughter, the murmurs, the shrieks, the screams, having remembered other times, other places, as thick with echoes of the departed.

He's made his own echoes, time to time. )

The Wens were not the only ones. ( A note, a nod, a consideration of a shared time in their lives he does not speak about. ) Only the most obvious and consuming.

( People cursed to lose the sanctity of their own minds, unable to be brought back, persisting in living. He remembers. He prefers the fiction of forgetting.

And so he does, now, smile in the flash of teeth of a predator aware of what games must be played in terms of dedication to find a meal that might, for a while, sustain. Tugs on interlocked hands and weaves forward, between cocoons, empty but for the painful hopes of those who'd been within them. )

You're right, husband. I have seen these stones with soldiers.

( Scared ones, two days past, and a different exhaustion and consideration. He strides through dust, spies footprints as recent, or slightly older than their own. Inevitably there are more eyes crawling in here to see than their two sets; inevitably he turns away from them, to forge his own path, deeper. )

Ones frightened of those they were overseeing. The training session that Emilia and I found ourselves wrapped up in, the day before the arena fell.

[downswing]

...the ones unaffected by strangeness. ( Past, to hear Wei Ying speak, the natural and inexorable dread that accompanies exposure to wicked weirdness, to strange and fatiguing oddity. ) Those bore these marks?

( These... numbers, writ in ways their pendants glean, entirely and forgettably alien. Nearly mundane in their innocent normalcy. With a murmured apology, he releases Wei Ying's hand, drifting to catch a name tag and bring it closer for inspection, mindless when the tendrils of the spider's long web dangle and tremble and reach for him, when they ensnare his wrist and fingers.

He should pay them mind, should look down, just as another set of trailing ghostly fetters cling to his legs, climb up his calves. But then, they would not be the men they are, if Lan Wangji were not wholly, entirely enraptured by the trinket of malign energy surrounding the tag. )

There is anguish here. ( Erupting from cocoons, pulsing through the walls like heartbeats. ) Those who wore these... did not wear them well.

[weifinder]

( The dull blade moves, swift and sure and outwardly seeming toward careless, metal dragging across dirt and stone, collecting the fetters that would consume Lan Zhan, if they had their way. It would not be so even if Wei Wuxian were not here; distractions pass, and Lan Zhan isn't injured or inebriated or otherwise drugged or trapped within an array. He has not lived a coddled life without danger.

He forged himself within it, as so many of their generation had. As they'd survived by doing.

It still looks like the chaotic layering of floss from dragon's beard, without the promise of a sweet, a treat, as he moves around Lan Zhan, no comment on his observation of the engraved names. Only the cluck of his tongue and the picking away of strands now attempting to wed his husband as thoroughly as his husband kept wedding him. )

We hear its echoes, yes. It's unlikely that's all we'll find here.

( A gentle push, at Lan Zhan's hip, spurring him toward motion. The shuddering sway of the unsilken tendrils around stir in the vast breath of an unseen beast, and make to reach forth again, lay claim. Fill their empty bellies once more, desperate for repeated impregnation, the loss of their transformed children.

No. He won't let such thoughts linger. )

The unaffected wore these on their persons. Names, I suspect now. Identities made into tokens. Here, here, this reminds me of that silly not-quite xuanyu, do you remember? That creature's shell was its own qiankun pouch, I tell you.

( Being the part he doesn't choose to recall in great detail, but yes, that journey, the walls within, tissue and sinew and silk-like dangling protrusions, and a sword he likewise chooses to forget. Move forward, away from these hauntings, and onto the next. Into the smaller side hall paralleling the one he first eschewed. Dampness taints the air, something not quite clean and not quite ready and too dusty from sitting and too deprived of sunlight to grow any of what might have come in time elsewhere, even in a place abandoned and purposefully forgotten as this had been. )

[downswing]

( The dance steps are simple, trickled, slow. Oh is a mute, stifled gasp and the unhinging of his mouth, as he drips back, one step and the next, and Wei Ying's blade bartering his path open. Pale tendrils unravel, peel back. His husband pushes him forward.

And he retaliates, round of his arm knocking a soft hold on Wei Ying's nape, dragging him beside Lan Wangji, until they skid through matter organic in the middle of the hall. The pulse of his heart rains, slow and steadied and syncopated, in the beatings of the web against wall. He watches them swell and heave, watches the quiet glint of their medallions, waiting.

He thinks to kiss his husband, soft. Wei Ying speaks first. Reroutes them. )

...was it? ( They do not speak of it, belly broad of a battered beast, and what Wei Ying plucked from the great Xuanwu. They never discuss his hurts, his unmaking. How the Yin iron slept in every hand, but stirred in Wei Ying's. )
What did it speak to you?

( How did it coax and conquer Wei Ying, who had yet to lose all that there was to surrender? How did it tease and compel him? )

[weifinder]

( A momentary laughter, hooked and dragged and smiling for it, brief and breaking the grim set of his sincerity of seriousness. The flash of life back into the depths of a great, deep pool within himself, and it's true, shining, and for that moment, Lan Zhan's alone.

He doesn't so much free himself as lean into Lan Zhan for a moment, duck out of grasp with a sliding brush of hand over sleeved arm, the check of one jutting, thin hip against another. No generosity there, not for either one.

Damp and dust and unsettled not quite tombs surround, and he hitches shoulders, makes blithe reply. )

Nothing. The only thing that screamed within that place came out with me, and you heard it, didn't you? Or maybe you didn't. I didn't want you to.

( Softer in the end, a confession that was as much the reason behind the unremitting strength of his hold through fever and unconsciousness as was another truth: Wei Wuxian would a thousand times and more invite the danger on himself that he would wish to spare others. )

It was death inside. Some of the dead yet wrapped like these.

( Less secure, than the cocoons now behind them, but he nods back toward them, a flick of fingers that follows before he uses cloth to swiftly, nonchalantly clean his temporary blade. He creates distance for himself again, a matter of habit, only pausing when the thought catches up with him.

He pauses, in step and manner. Breathes out, not quite as a sigh. Looks askance at Lan Zhan, at Lan Wangji. )

To this day, why was it I heard the same cries in the Burial Mounds as I did inside that shell? ( He knows why. The gossamer truth of it catches the scant light around them and reflects it, turning, turning. ) Turns out the dead can teach, if the living are desperate enough.

( Do not ask, never ask, what it took to survive. That darkness clings to Wei Wuxian as memory, sloughing off him as a reptile sheds an old skin. He steps forward again, shakes himself, dog like, and strides forward with quiet footfalls disturbing dust: forward, not backward. He will never enjoy looking to the past. Better to forget, and if the forgetting has not yet been total, then pretend it has been so. )

[downswing]

( Why was it that he heard —

Why was it that Lan Wangji could not hear? Whatever winds and storms whispered to Wei Ying, why could they not brew for him? Why could he not give them answer, why could he not face their folly and weather them through?

If only, then —

If only, now. Wei Ying turns to find him, to see him. It has been so long since they have truly glimpsed each other's hearts as the men they were, and not those whom they have become. Wei Ying does not accuse, but he did not want him to know.

They were men of different minds, cleaved, ill known. Young, impetuous. Arrogantly believing two halves of one soul were sundered apart so they might live freely. )

The dead teach here. ( Their silence more golden than their paltry, cheaply doled out truths. The carved tags. He dallies, in the wake of Wei Ying, clutching a pair of necklaces in hand, thieving from graves. It strikes him, perhaps these are mere mementos, the signatures of men long passed who have simply graduated into an army formidable and perhaps dared one another, once, to infiltrate such a gruesome house. It could be as simple as a childish act, as innocent.

It is not. And he hastens — was this not the reprimand, so often? That he cannot keep step — towards Wei Ying, to catch his hand from behind, to pass the metal tokens like smuggled goods in a greedy palm. )

You see spirits. The dead. See them, also. ( It is a lonely thing to be overlooked. )

[weifinder]

( Fingers close around the names, engraved and warm from the lingering heat of Lan Zhan's hands. Wei Wuxian studies his face, head canted a touch without thinking, gaze dark and drinking in the paleness of his husband's expression, more so than his robes, now given toward blues instead of the hauntingly pale whites of so much of their knowing.

So much of their unknowing.

The names are tucked into his waistband, so that his hand might be free to reach out, fingers brush the side of Lan Zhan's neck, to curl around the back. Forehead is encouraged to meet forehead, and his eyes close, feeling the warmth of metal and silk and skin, the impression against his skin. The only branding he's choose, more indelible for the way it leaves only lines etched into his heart, his soul. )

As you wish.

( A silence between them, separate from the imperfect silence around them, the muffled mourning of the cocoons no longer around them, but in their remembered wake. )

Will you sleep, whatever it takes?

[downswing]

( Flesh to flesh, touching. The border and barrier of his headband, a crisp reminder of every point where Wei Ying and he cannot meet like convulsions of a spumed ocean. Cannot crest and break and burst.

As he wishes. Is then, then, who he has become? A supplicant of the Yiling Patriarch, another fool come to beg a boon. He wishes for nothing, wants for everything. Will he sleep?

He tips his head in, willing, obedient — the nictating quality of the moment drawls. He finds himself like catching water, by chance insipissated. )

What are you saying? (It isn't Lan Wangji he stirs with speech. He is so often only a vehicle, a flesh-bodied substitute for all that Wei Wuxian wishes but cannot face. ) Where must you go?

( Only one thing shatters his sleep. )

[weifinder]

( He hums, a melody unfamiliar, unweighted. Is there a space he steps toward, a self subsumed in circumstance and measuring beyond the known span of breath between them?

Always, yes. Sometimes, no.

A shift, and lips brush a cheekbone, affection wanting avenues he enthuses to explore without extra eyes watching, waiting. )

Nowhere. Everywhere. There are always parts of ourselves demanded, and sleep flees first for me.

( Sleep for him, for the edges that catch light and glint harshly when he turns too quick, too cutting. When the wishes of the dead are louder than the calls of the living. )

The dead drive me from dreaming. Will you sleep, whatever it takes?

[downswing]

( He knows the game, the steps, for all he dallies ever two-three-nine behind. Feet fumbling, rhythm broken. The dead drive him form —

Lips on his cheeks are a cold crescent, callous. They peel away like petals, thin, to leave behind cresting goosebumps. He has lost something, here and now. A moment. A meaning, a purpose.

Wei Ying withdraws in that last vestigial shelter permitted to him: his own person. )

...sleep beside me. I may. ( As if they have the time for sweet things and epiphanies. As if they do not know better. )