bygones be bygones

[groundrules]

BYGONES BE BYGONES

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

QUESTIONS

Comments

[somebadnews]

Doesn't this all seem familiar? Five twitches when he brings up his family; the one bargaining chip he always uses to persuade him. He hadn't said he was opening the gate, but when he mentions it, that does seem where he's headed. His hatred for Matthias and this city grows with each step, and with it his rationality shifts.

Anurr isn't the Commission, but there are certain parallels. The horrific things he's done that most wouldn't dare understand were for the greater good. As much as he's wrestled with choice, this solution seems to take it out of his hands.

They all betray him, but in this their goals align. Cold seems into his limbs and he's not thinking of what happens after. He owes him.

"A gate won't hold him back. You can thank me for that if it makes you feel better, but it's too late now." That fact seems to cement something in him. They can't stop him any sooner than they can stop the wind. "He's already here."

[weifinder]

"Five," he says, musing really, "If a gate can't stop him, then why is it stopping him?"

He raises an eyebrow, nodding his head toward the massive ghost who now seems to blearily focus on them both.

"There's this thing about barriers. No matter how you rage on the other side of one, you need a key to get past it. So why are you letting him make you into his key?"

[somebadnews]

"Why...," he seems to get caught up in the word.

The logic behind what he's saying has Five hesitate in his steps. Why does Anurr need him? He was Five's ace in the hole, his backup if everything went south and he had no other alternative. Instead he's asking another favor.

No, it's inevitable, and he scoffs away the notion that this isn't his only choice. It's been inevitable since the day he broke a mirror and it's been building ever since. All Five would be doing is to get him inside sooner, so all this can be over. He wants it to be over. Wind blows around him, through him. His skin grows cold and an unnatural strength propels him to keep walking towards the gate.

[weifinder]

For a moment, he sees that hesitation. He sees where Five's logic, his paranoia, his love of family taps into something beyond what Anurr influences, questioning.

The moment passes, consumed in the morass of Anurr's whispering, shrieking winds, the cold that numbs and then suffuses, until there's no difference between the urges passing through and the ones commandeered by cold winter vengeance, the inevitable encroaching of glaciers down fertile mountain valleys.

"Why is always worth asking."

Said with his fingers flicking toward the gate, the massive ghost guardian, and then he's moved swifter than eyes follow, a strike to a pressure point meant for rendering unconscious, for just long enough. So smooth, so without any intent of violence, as to hopefully be surprising.

Is it enough?

[somebadnews]

The wind continues to howl, but the cold seems more and more distant. That should be alarming, but every time he questions it, he's reassured that it's only the protection of a friend. Wei Wuxian's words are swallowed up by Anurr promises, and his call to let him in. He's not the enemy. Anurr was here before Matthias, before any of them. The land is rightfully his.

This isn't the first gate Five visited, but it's quieter than the last. Barely protected. The wind tells him that the guardian will be easy to defeat, and his hands glow blue as he prepares to jump. It really isn't too much to ask.

Timing is everything. A few more steps, and Five would have been too far gone to reach. And if not for his frozen limbs hampering his reaction time, he would have blinked away before the sudden sharp pressure drops him in an instant.

He falls in an ungraceful heap; the winds still blowing over him, with one hand wrapped around the finger tied to his neck.

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian catches Five before he strikes ground; Five is small enough, even with growth over these last two years, to be easy to lift. He has the younger old man in his arms and lifted, turning on heel and walking away from the gates and the massive ghost lurching upward, reaching out.

A sharp three notes whistled, and the ghost hesitates. Stops fully. Settles back to its duty, such as it is.

It's not until he has Five inside one of the warmed buildings, settled on the flat pallet bed, that he gently, firmly, pries fingers apart. Exposes the one he knows is from Anurr, gifted to Five for a favour that pulls him too close to influence now. Carefully takes the finger away, sealing it in a pouch that contains all death energies, a seal against whatever bond it calls.

Messages his husband, his son, his sister of the heart, and settles in to make... soup. Never as good as his shijie's, won't have the time for a second day's perfection, but there is meat from an animal, there is broth made, there is a lack of proper heat in spices, but flavours enough.

Five may find himself coming awake to the smell of soup in the adjoining room, the indoor kitchen connected to the sleeping area of this particular small home within the city of the dead.

[somebadnews]

Five opens his eyes to find an unfamiliar room and the unmistakable presence of someone cooking nearby, with no idea how he got there. He sits and immediately feels wrong. The warmth that swirls around the space somehow makes him colder, and his mind jumps to the first winters of the apocalypse when he'd survived out of pure luck. But this isn't the apocalypse. He can't be there, if anyone else is alive.

He wraps his arms around himself to control his trembling and forces himself to make sense of what happened. He didn't come here on his own, that much he knows.

The wind outside howls, and he turns towards it to listen. Soon after, he finds himself shuffling to a window to peer outside with an odd sense of longing. At first his hands glow blue, but he feels weaker now. Weaker and so cold. He's looking for the latch when he finally notices Wei Wuxian's presence.

"You." He was following him, he remembers now. His shivering gets worse, and he jerks his head at the window. A threat is on the tip of his tongue, but he wavers, and only two words make it out: "The gate."

[weifinder]

"Me," he says, stirring the soup. Ladling some out into a large bowl, with a spoon, and squinting at the shivers that won't leave Five alone. This is going to get awkward for Lao Five, he knows, but he doesn't find that anything less than merited.

"The gate remains closed." A pause, as he considers, then tips his head towards Five. "For now. Hopefully, through to when Matthias's is ended."

He strode over, settling down to Five's side.

"It would have been pork ribs and lotus soup, but I could only find the pork ribs, not the lotus. So there's potatoes instead."

[somebadnews]

The gate is closed.

Hearing that makes him look to the window again, and listen to the sound of the wind battering against the walls. When he turns back to see Wei Wuxian there, he barely processes his words and stares at the bowl like he's never seen a potato in his life.

"When...," an anger not belonging to him sparks at his name, but he can't hold onto it for long, and he frowns at his own failing energy. The shaking won't stop, and he grits his teeth and pulls his arms tighter around himself. Then he pulls at the front of his shirt, finding something absent that he's long carried. "Where is it?"

[weifinder]

"Sealed away. Congratulations on being mildly possessed." Glancing over Five, he settles the bowl in his own lap. The shivering isn't controlled enough to keep him from injuring himself with the hot broth.

"Do you feel like you can swallow right now?"

[somebadnews]

Five shoots him a fierce glare at first, but his gaze grows unfocused as he lets that possibility enter his rational brain. The wind continues to pull at him, urging him to listen, and he gave in so easily to it before. He's so cold that it's difficult to put the pieces together. It feels like efforts to unhinge his jaw every time he speaks. Maybe he was possessed.

"...I can," he affirms, only after enough time has passed that it may have seemed like he wouldn't answer. Wei Wuxian and the bowl he holds seem to only exist in some baffling dream he's having. Nothing but the cold feels real, yet some part of him understands that Anurr did this, and he needs to get away from the grip he has on him.

He's turning into a man of few words. He gives a jerky shrug; he can't remember the last time he ate. Logically, he should, but his arms remain stubbornly locked around him. "Cold."

[weifinder]

He holds up a spoon full of soup to Five's mouth, only quirking his brows if Five doesn't open his mouth. This close, his knee rests against Five's curled up form, providing some point of contact, and some relief.

There are patterns. He remembers, from years ago.

"Then here we go. I won't need to chirp about little birds coming home to roost?"

He smiles, lopsided and wry, before his gaze drops to Five's mouth and his rather sincere and useful means of helping feed someone unable to hold a spoon on their own.

"I had to do this for my brother a few times over the years. For the youngest members of our sect too. Even Sizhui when he was little and called A-Yuan, ah? I'm a very gifted spoon feeder."

[somebadnews]

Five doesn't understand most of what he's telling him, up until he mentions a spoon, and he notices the one in his hand. Is he...?

He twists, and tries to untangle his arms to refuse what he's suggesting. Being fed like a child should rile him more than the weak protest he ultimately gives. But he's done this to himself, and it's impossible to turn away from the warmth that radiates from him. The wind still calls from just outside, and he can barely think clearly enough to make a choice, or so much as keep himself from shaking.

"'m not," he frowns, unable to form the question he wants an answer to. He lifts his gaze and resists the urge to fight off the spoon like it's the one obstacle in his way. "You were right about him, weren't you?"