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groundrules) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
westwhere2024-02-03 06:09 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2024-02-03 06:09 pm
Entry tags:
- arcane: caitlyn,
- blade of the immortal: asano rin,
- kingdom of the wicked: emilia,
- kingdom of the wicked: wrath,
- last case of benedict fox: benedict fox,
- mcu: america chavez,
- mcu: kamala khan,
- mcu: natasha romanova,
- penny dreadful: vanessa ives,
- umbrella academy: ben,
- umbrella academy: five,
- warcraft: anduin wrynn,
- warcraft: wrathion,
- wheel of time: elayne trakand
bygones be bygones
Welcome to the finale log event, stretching until 22 February. You can find a summary of recent events here. The finale log is broken in four sections:
- ■ Anurr’s attempt to enter Hatthevar by corrupting party members
■ The citadel’s increasing hauntings and abductions (largely CR-building scenarios)
■ Investigating a ghost ship, for final clues
■ The fall of undead creator Matthias
Thank you for being here & enjoy!
WALLS, WAILING
The tide of war are turning: his scorpions and sand lurkers defeated by Emilia, Wrath and Benedict, the undead Brotherhood’s foremost general, Rathakku, pulls back his armies. A handful of monstrous creatures remain and will grudgingly serve the trio as their new masters.
Wind master Anurr, foe of the Brotherhood and its maker Matthias, continues assaulting the citadel with ceaseless blizzards. Those exposed to the storms may hear dark or saccharine voices that corrupt, threaten or woo them to open one of the four (north/west/south/east) gates of the citadel and allow Anurr’s forces inside.
- ■ Those prone to loneliness, despair or self-doubt are the most vulnerable to Anurr’s coercion and can easily turn aggressive, if anyone attempts to prevent them from their goal. A burning need to free the winds and a hatred of Hatthevar overwhelm you, while Matthias’ very name sets you off in a rage.
■ Those coerced are invulnerable to Anurr’s blizzards and the broader cold but highly susceptible to heat and flame. Their skin turns pale, limbs stiff and nearly gelid. They are slower but much stronger, and their touch can chill. They must be warmed — either by fire-side or trapped into heated rooms — to regain control of themselves. It may take up to 48 hours before they’re fully back to normal, waking up at night with a longing to walk into the wind.
■ The gates of Hatthevar remain guarded by enormous man-eating ghosts, but these sentinels have been worn down by war and are more easily overcome. Pass them and your companions and open the gates — and you will win Anurr a healthy advantage.
A HAUNTED PLACE
Two of Matthias’ beacons have been conquered by Vanessa, Wrathion and Five, who retain them as long as they stay along. Inevitably, they are often hunted by spirits.
Not realizing why his summons have weakened, Matthias directs more and more energy towards the three beacons under his control. The turbulence agitates the spirits of Hatthevar, who become secretive, paranoid, prickly and increasingly riotous.
■ Some scatter quickly as they see you — others gang up, mutinously targeting ghost slavers or anyone who reminds them of those who wronged them when they were alive. Hauntings multiply, while ghost slavers take advantage of the riots to conquer parts of Hatthevar.
PART & WHOLE
Combative crowds, often led by ghost slavers, are especially drawn to characters who own any of Matthias’ limbs or organs. Promised rewards, they seek to abduct such owners or anyone unlucky enough to be mistaken for them, dragging them to decrepit, barely standing and abandoned Whispering Houses while they barter payment from Matthias.
- ■ Ghosts are fiercely attentive but also superstitious watchmen: spook them, organise a rescue party or sneak out.
■ Watching the walls, you see ink brush paintings of the silhouettes of men, their beady eyes sometimes shifting to look at you. At other times, their limbs seem to shift minutely, as they begin to run towards you, until shadow men burst out of the wall to detain you. They pull back, if you also stop moving.
■ Those who possess Matthias’ parts may find ghosts are unusually submissive to them. Their tokens will likely get seized, if they are captured.
TROUBLED
Hatthevar succumbs to hauntings, friendly or foul. On any given day, you might experience:
- ■ THE BURIALS: Come morning, your shoes might be missing, buried in the nearest dirt patch — or you yourself might be entombed in the gardens, forced to dig yourself out before you suffocate. The crystalline sound of chiming bells can lead rescuers to you. Ghostly hands might try to hold onto you, if you are dragged out.
■ THE FACELESS: Lithe faceless dancers dart through the crowds of the ghostly bazaars, carrying demonic wooden masks that they place on the faces of stunned passers-by, fleeing thereafter. The victims now look like the demonic masks, while the masks have copied their likeness. If this happens to you, run after the faceless dancers, steal the mask and put it back on your face to recover your original appearance.
■ THE WATCH: Walking through the streets of Hatthevar, you find yourself visibly, unmistakably watched by an increasing number of people. First, they only steal glances; then, one or two point you out; small groups begin to whisper about you; finally, you notice whole crowds are standing eerily still, watching you covetously and seemingly struggling to keep themselves back from assaulting you.
MASTER GAO’S HUMBLE HOUSE
Least said, soonest enjoyed of Hatthevar’s new fashion of culinary delights. Amid a pick-up in crime, the street food vendors disperse, leaving behind a smattering of secluded establishments drenched in dizzying incense and patroned by… ethereal diners.
Master Gao’s family restaurant promises a once-in-a-lifetime experience, amid ghosts, ghouls and the monstrously dead. Take a seat at a private table, where you are treated to a pleasantly sweet, liquorice brew — then informed politely that you have been lethally poisoned and will die within two hours. Already, you feel your body feverish, overly stimulated, your thoughts given to wonder.
Focus, focus: the antidote, says the listless waitress, is in one of the numerous incoming dishes. A game to focus you on enjoying your meal. Even one bite will heal you.
THE MENU
Still on the fence? Reviewers say:
- ★★★★☆ Came for the bao buns, stayed for the screams of endless agony.
★★★★★ most places on lotus street went to the hell dogs, master’s gao stays lit, the demon bacon’s sizzle drizzle
★★☆☆☆ Two stars for the incredible heart of virgin sacrifice, cooked al dente. But this will be our last visit, after unprofessional staff treated us as if we were at our first cannibal rites.
★★★★☆ Hand-made blood pasta, rolled like grandma used to make.
THE HEADLESS DANCER
Five and Wen Kexing share that word on the street is Matthias has favoured two hideaways. The most widely known one, where you are headed first, is the Headless Dancer: a ghost ship that appears on nights of the full moon in the misty lagoon near Hatthevar. Half-sunken and ragged, the Headless Dancer appears like a conglomerate of titans’ bones, carved and welded together. It is a proper sea vessel, atypical to sail through a lagoon.
Your objective is to search the ship for any sign of Matthias.
- ■ As the vessel passes, you hear a staggered, loud rattling: the chattering teeth of the skull heads that shape the ship’s hull. These hungry mouths reach to crush and gnaw you, if you fall in the waters close to the ship.
■ A pirate crew is hard at work to keep the vessel afloat. At first, the men appear normal, but their skeletal, corpse-like appearance is revealed when they come under moonlight.
■ Many crew members ignore you, chained to each other and the deck and condemned to perform their tasks while singing their ol’ song. Only the captain speaks liberally: cursing, whipping his men and carrying a bundle of chains as he makes his rounds. Hide — at times helped or betrayed by crew members — or risk getting chained down by the captain, your powers entirely muted until you are released.
■ Midway through your visit, the ship sails back into the fog, beneath a strange wave of clouds shaped like enormous fish and sea life . Spears and chains that resemble fish spines plunge down to pin the ship in place: they fly across the deck, at times skewering and stabbing crew members. Take cover or jump overboard.
■ After a few moments, the spear-chains latch onto the vessel’s sides, turning it over and submerging into the lagoon. Instead of sinking, the Headless Dancer breaks water, once again upright… in strange new sides (the ‘Other Side’) in the middle of an intensely violent storm of blood. The previously skeletal crew and captain are now fully human and are struggling desperately to keep the ship from sinking, despite furious winds and the vessel taking substantial amounts of water. You understand quickly this is an illusion or memory of some kind: there is no saving the ship. Spend the last few minutes before the Headless Dancer sinks trying to stay afloat and search the captain and main passengers’ cabin for clues. Within 20 minutes, you hear the mast of the Headless Dancer give way, while the rapidly flooding of the hull causes the ship to break in half. You fall unconscious, waking up battered but alive in the real-world shores of Hatthevar, the splinters of the Headless Dancer’s deck stuck beneath your nails.
HE BLEEDS
Following our latest vote, the People have overwhelmingly chosen that undead creator Matthias will die.
Carrying out the plan is open to everyone, whether you did or didn’t get involved with the voting — jump in freely!
Matthias will be discovered in the second lair location uncovered by Five and Wen Kexing — the Whispering House of Hatthevar’s foremost wish maker, the Red Lady. He dwells on the first floor, which has been turned into an immense room decked in dark mirrors, whose windows have been entirely barricaded.
There are two types of mirrors: some show you exactly what you most wish to see, progressively captivating you while rapidly depleting your stamina and vitality, until you are reduced to dried husks and bones within the hour.
Looking into the second type of mirror, your character sees a person of tar that reaches out to touch them until their hand exits the glass. Upon contact, your character is overcome by a feeling of intense, spreading coldness, as if their insides are being infested by a rapidly propagating alien creature. They may feel its highly primitive, emotion-led thoughts: a jumble of jealousy, the wish to have a shape and manifest, hatred that your body is not malleable, fear, hunger. The creature takes your body over within the hour.
You can escape both types of mirrors if you cover them, do not look into them, or if someone breaks the thrall (by taking your attention away from the mirror or by physically removing you).
Matthias is often away from his hideaway, giving you valuable time to plot and tinker.
Killing him will involve:
- ■ Scouting the Whispering House. The Red Lady, a powerful sorceress, is unlikely to allow intruders to go where they please inside her home. But the ‘I’m just a poor wish maker, looking for the bathroom’ excuse is a time honoured classic!
■ Using Matthias’ severed limbs and organs to reduce his power: this can be done by destroying the parts. Fire will do the trick.
■ Setting down traps (tentacly or otherwise!) in Matthias’ quarters to detain him.
■ Creating an illusion or shapeshifting someone to look like Matthias’ daughter Cosette and distract him, when he returns.
■ Feeding Matthias a memory potion that will force him to remember his part in Cosette’s demise.
■ Killing him. Per RNG gods, Emilia gets the dubious honour of delivering the killing blow (most likely, with help from a special tool obtained from the Headless Dancer). Everyone else is still free to char, sting, entrap or force feed memories to Matthias!
Since several people might get involved, it’s probably logistically easier if you play out prep work or threads in groups of no more than 2-3 and assume other party members are around.
You can either NPC Matthias yourselves in your threads or ask for mod involvement.
Note: everyone who threads out any of the events of Matthias’ capture or demise can “inherit” some of his power over undeath once he is killed. Your character will then have to choose what they do with this power (keep, transfer or disperse it).
master gao's humble house
As the server drifts away from the table, Anduin's eyes flicker to the other occupant of the table. He should feel horrified at the news that they've both been poisoned, but mostly? He just feels tired...which works well for his disguise as one of the deceased, he supposes. ]
That's one way of ensuring the clientele stay and order their share of food. I can't say I'm a fan, but as techniques go? It's an effective one.
[ He reaches for the plate in front of them, plucking up one of the bao with a dubious look. What he wouldn't give to be in Pandaria again, where he'd know what to expect taking a bite into one of these. ]
no subject
( As deathly conspiracies go, his core's longevity ensures a restricted impact and lesser urgency. He perks his brows, sours the line of his mouth, diligently hits all the performative notes of righteous indignation — before, like Anduin, allowing his incipient anger to gutter down to wisps and fickle tendrils of resignation.
The bao seem obscenely round, steaming, tender. A brazen display against the scratch-marred, pale and forgettable spread of the barely hanging table. His chopsticks cradle a dumpling, turning it each way to measure the extent to which the glistened oils have permeated the skins, then tapping off the excess.
And he bites down, at once relieved by the wash of tepid soup within and resigned already to the impossibility of maintaining the Gusu Lan edicts against speaking during dinner service. )
Unexpected that the establishment has not been burned out by vengeful patrons.
( ...well, now, tell people how you really feel, Lan Wangji — ) Yet.
( There you go. )
no subject
Well. They're all showing new colors, aren't they. ]
Most would be content with the relief of the antidote, I imagine. As much a relief to the fear and anger as to the poison.
[ Unless someone present has other designs. ]
no subject
Their memory, short. ( Danger, once exorcised, may be slowly forgotten, but is seldom forgiven. The culprits sleep beneath these rooftops, their faces known. He indicates one, a server passing. Another, bearing the cloth of the kitchens, peering behind screens. )
They may be innocent of the deed. ( Their hands unknowing, clean of introducing poison. Perhaps they only tackle the ornamentation of the tables, the delivery and presentation of each dish. ) Yet they know. They tolerate.
( There are few secrets in a shut-in house, and Master Gao, surely, cannot be the only man of business who has perfected the art of disciplining his attendants into perfect secrecy. They must gossip, among themselves, clever tongues and bright eyes and easily spilled tales. )
Accomplices. Not so?
no subject
[ His eyes follow to the staff, and he cannot bring himself to feel anger, even as the poison creeps through him. If anything? He feels pity. ]
Almost everyone is some combination of the two.
no subject
( He hesitates, mouth soft as he reaches for a dumpling, fattened and tender and appetizing, decisively swollen. His teeth graze its skin, dipping in, until teardrops of broth seep out in rounded trinkets.
Eat before you speak. Recall, always the principles. At times, watching Anduin as if he were a hawk, Lan Wangji suspects so many of the precepts were written to preserve the patience and appetite of he who heeds them. )
Only if men are shaped by their hurts. ( Earned, received, or inflicted. Defined by agony, wounds and torture. ) Do you think them so?
( Or perhaps can they rise above fear and pain? To represent interests? ) Are you?
no subject
[ Ah. That honest streak that's taken hold here, now and then raising its head -- and usually at inopportune moments.
Yet he doesn't feel any shame in that admission, the bao still resting gently pinched between his fingers, unbroken. ]
But not only my hurts. Kindness can shape a person, as well, though the former does stand out more starkly in moments of crisis.
no subject
( Kindness can shape a person. Like a water stain, like oil paints. Like a gentle, meticulous, detailed erosion. Creating shape through subtraction and perpetual, decisive deprivation.
He cannot speak words that would unmake whatever has fashioned Anduin, from boy to man. Has withered him, like sand does deserts. He hesitates, then eats, motions slow, perhaps calculation with precise acuity to postpone the inevitability of their exchange.
Then, slowed: ) Does your kindness harm you?
( As it did, once, Wei Ying. )
no subject
And yet how had that injury that almost killed him come about? By trying to bargain, to reason. To search for a kernel of integrity and honor in a warchief who possessed neither. ]
No. Kindness never hurts anyone. It is what people choose to do with that kindness that can cause true harm.
[ He lowers the food, still untouched despite the impending danger. But his expression is steel. ]
Others would argue that to be kind is to show weakness. I'd argue it takes every sort of strength to be kind in the face of the worlds we have seen. And I pray to the Light every day that that strength will endure.
no subject
( But is the requirement of strength not to say that kindness, then, is unnatural? That it requires choice, performance, showmanship and exertion? Should that which pertains to a person and his soul not be entrenched in him, coalesced and glistened?
He does not answer for far too long, dragging and dividing more of the brunt of the dishes equitably between them, for all the vinegary acidity in his stomach will likely prevent more than a token few mouthfuls, to explore the antidote. All the same, a distraction.
They are two men without purpose, drifting. All talk does not weigh as much as a single deed. )
And if it does? ( If you do not? )
no subject
...Then I have seen the consequences.
[ He pauses then, realizing that he still needs to eat. He finally takes a bite, the salty-savory juice of the meat within the bun filling his mouth, and he takes his time in chewing as he observes the other man's expression.
Conflict. Uncertainty. Feelings he knows all too intimately, as a king. ]
Has it hurt you?