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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).
no subject
( Excuse Lan Wangji, who now takes a moment to swallow, partly of the cowardice born of evasion. He remembers, far too distantly, to chase the swollen shape of another dumpling into Allison's own plate, then ferry a cut of another dish's egg, alongside it. Eat, then. They have scant alternative. )
Wishing for that which is not yours to have?
( A cure to death, an end to parting. )
no subject
My daughter.
[And part of her still rages against acknowledging that, that Claire isn't hers to have. But Allison lost her long before Harlan killed their mothers. So who is she to say that Claire is hers to keep.]
Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.
no subject
( Her... daughter. Truly, perhaps history repeats itself — across worlds and flavours of madness. He did not anticipate this, such a visceral and private grief, all-consuming. How is it that Allison has prevailed to hold herself straight-standing, righteous and strong, for months now? How does she smile, how does she bring fresh food to her place to consume, as if —
The world keeps turning. )
Who withholds her from you?
( After all, why else but duress would Allison be parted from her child? He after, hastily, as if in compensation and apology for the sin of uttering words during dinner.
The clan would not approve. )
no subject
[For reasons that were good ones, at the time.]
Then the world ended and she died, then I got stuck fifty years in the past, then I came back and she never existed. And then I landed here.
[So basically it feels like the universe is either conspiring against her or trying to tell her something.]
no subject
( A father, depriving a mother of her daughter's presence. Then the world. Then time. Then — and he blinks with the profuse profligacy of a man attempting to either hold back tears or a poisonous awe — both.
He cannot eat, now. Does not pretend to, expending fractions of his attention to ferry lone ambassadors of each dish into his bowl with the pick and choosing of his chopsticks. As if to delay actually minding his meal again, he replicates the performance for Allison, also. )
How do you bear it? So much grief. ( Years of it, to hear her tell it. Stuck, after all. )
no subject
[Sometimes she wishes she did, so that she could feel like herself again, but that would require some quality therapy and that doesn't really exist in the zombie landscape.]
I guess ... part of me understands where Matthias is coming from with wanting his daughter back. And I don't want to turn into him.
no subject
( He should not have asked. In truth, he hardly knows how to attend an obvious, bleeding wound — a woman cut off from that which she loves better than a limb, her lifeline. Her daughter.
And she says, she has a lot of rage. He startles, not to know it but to hear it spoken: a woman is not possessed of anger. She is not visited by passions. Hers is the yin, the inward tide, the pull unto oneself. She is a vessel, not a furnace.
So say books, and most go burned. He does not take her hand, only crawls his hand over the table until they sit together, fingers near fingers, biting from each other's warmth. )
Does your rage hurt others? ( Do you? ) Does it hurt you?
( Of course it does. Wrath is fire, all-consuming. It burns first from within. )
no subject
Even before she lost Claire for good, her anger was a problem. She thinks about the man behind the bar at the dinner who's hand she scalded with the coffee. The bar of white supremacists that Diego took her to to try and give her an outlet. Those she feels less terrible about those things, it's still her doing harm.]
I've never been harmless.
no subject
A difference between that which can harm — ( A blade, born and bared. The mouth of a starved lion. The sea at unrest. ) — and that which harms.
( A woman grieving, her hurt misplaced. One scorned, frustrated, reduced by and to her sorrow. And possessed of such an impossible immensity of talent and ability that Lan Wangji paralyzes to remember it.
The harpy, tame. The rioters, subdued. And what more can Allison Hargreeves coax? Did they need, all this time, to summon an army? Might she have supplied them one?
He fishes another dish, rapidly delivering thin slices of melon by each bowl. Refreshment, unless it is pickled. He cannot say he'll trouble himself to appreciate the taste. )
If it is truth that Matthias pulls people from time. If the beacons can be forced into such feats. Return, ahead of your daughter's ...passing. Fight.
no subject
[Maybe there's a way she could pull it off, without the Commission coming after her to kill her. Maybe she just needs to get a version of herself to Claire, and that's all that matters.]
But that way could also lead to turning into Five.
[That's a joke. Sort of.]
no subject
( ...ah. A wise fear, truth-bearing. The menace, in and of itself, stings. He purses his lips, briefly considering, before allowing: )
Eat. ( To start: so that she might survive to rescue her daughter. And softened, trickling after: ) Five is... a unique proposition.
( Unlikely to be imitated, a state only one child-like ancient could reach. Truly, he is of a kind. ) Allow him the privilege of singularity.
( And such a... particular... temperament. ) Dare. Little to lose.
no subject
I suppose you're right. I just wish I had a better plan on how to do it.