Enarr

Word association Game!

Murder-Hornet

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-136

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-136

Men vs. Women Race to 1000: Version 2.0

-136

Word association Game!

Arsonist

The Blighted Kingdom

Alden The Black 2.0

A L D E N T H E B L A C K

---

^{A L D E N K O L E ◼ 3 0 ◼ M A L E ◼ K A F A A R A}

^{"Everyone deserves a second chance. The fact that I'm here means that you must have already blown yours."}

▼ A P P E A R A N C E:

---

Alden is of short, burly stock. He'd once been covered in a bushlike robe of rock-hard, jet-black fur but the fire has left him as hairless as a looking glass. His sagging, roasted exterior betrays the otherwise enviable colony of muscle that lurks beneath his surface. His once proud demeanor has largely given way to a reverent silence, as he stands idle with his arms at rest, folded neatly across his barrel chest. He conceals his once-handsome face behind a stainless steel helmet, and every inch of his flesh beneath an all-consuming shroud of black fabric, having been humbled by his injury.

▼ B I O G R A P H Y:

---

Alden was born outside the city limits of Kafaara, to the Kole family. Their surname was owed to the fact that Alden's father, Arlen, owned and operated The Blackstar Mining Company, the primary supplier of coal to the majority of the Kafaaran peninsula with a healthy exporting business to boot. While they were, by all means, thoroughly financially secure, they had not yet gained the social acceptance of the nobility proper when their troubles began.

Around the time that Alden was twenty-six years old, having lost his elder brother to illness, he was being groomed to assume leadership of the company in the coming years, as his father turned his attention toward more social endeavors, shoehorning himself into whatever political intrigue he could. His mother, on the other hand, had been staying in Kafaara, just as she often had ever since Arlen's business had taken off, giving most all of her time and attention toward her devout study of the doctrine of The Barbed Church.

While The Blackstars were mining one fateful day, both Arlen and Alden, father and son, and many of their men were trapped in an underground coal fire that resulted in a cave-in, as a consequence of a burnt support beam giving way. Trapped within the toxic subterranean oven, most of the men died agonizing deaths. But it would seem that the world had other ends in mind for Alden. As dire as things were, he clung to life, even as the mine's infernal vapors seeped into his lungs before he was ultimately dug out by the company's response crew. Things were never the same again.

Alden's youngest brother, Adler, assumed control over The Blackstar's operations. If rumors were to be believed, he had orchestrated the cave-in in a fratricidal coup. No one ever seemed to have bothered investigating. In the fire's aftermath, Alden's molten skin took on a permanent ghoulish quality, like a wax sculpture that had been left under the summer sun. Beneath the surface, his lungs had also been marred, giving him a persistent cough, courtesy of the severe case of pneumonia he'd developed. Due to the ashen coat that he had been fished out of the mine wearing, he was gifted with the moniker "Alden the Black".

He'd never considered himself particularly religious, but nearly losing his life gave him a new perspective on things. The shame that came from his appearance led to him shrouding himself in an impenetrable wall of fabric, shielding every last inch of his skin from sight.

▼ C H A R A C T E R G O A L S:

---

Having thoroughly aligned himself with The Barbed Church following his near-death experience, he imagines that helping the kingdom find salvation from its penance is the reason for which he continues living. Anything less than answering the High Lord's call would be a demonstration of ingratitude for the mercy he was shown when he was rescued from the fire.

▼ S K I L L S:

---

//SKILLS AND ABILITIES:

◼ Brute Strength | From years of working in a coal mine
◼ Chivalry | Literally the discipline of riding a horse learned from journeying on horseback to Kafaara with his father
◼ Eyesight | From years of working in a coal mine
◼ Hearing | From years of working in a coal mine

//FEARS AND WEAKNESSES:

◼ Gullible | If an official of The Barbed Church says something, he'll probably believe it.
◼ Insensitivity | The fire killed many of the nerves in his body. Sometimes he is entirely numb for hours. Sometimes he feels random pain. Sometimes, he mistakes the extent of his injuries.
◼ Miner's Lung | While he would otherwise be quite good at sneaking, his ability to remain silent is impeded by uncontrollable bouts of sudden, violent coughing
◼ Pyrophobia | It twists his gut up into a know just to think about being close to another flame

▼ N O T E S:

---

//PARAPHERNALIA

◼ Nightstick | A relatively lightweight, though dense, blunt instrument particularly well attuned for inflicting concussions
◼ Rope (Spider-Silk) | Just enough to hang himself with. Or someone else if it came to that.

Word association Game!

emptiness

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

"Getting to Leotard's vacation house back on Earth is probably not happening if you do this -”

Did she just call me Leotard? he asked himself. I kinda like it. I wonder what everyone else’s codename is. Packet, Leotard… He took a gander at Eli: Angel before balling his hand into a fist. No, it’s too soon. There’s no way in hell that you can suggest that.

“I'm going to the Spire. But if you go, we're probably going to have to kill someone and if that's not your shit, then that's fine. But you should all decide right now if you're fine killing whoever's up there. They haven't been keeping kids under lock and key without making someone a fuckton of money. They're not going to let them walk away,” Lynn announced performatively. She seemed to speak with every part of her tiny body and the way she moved as she spoke made it seem extremely ironic that he was the one in the leotard.

I’ve basically killed tons of people. No biggie, Nic sarcastically bemoaned within. I mean, I’ve never actually killed anyone, personally, per se, but I’m complicit as fuck. He thought back to all the times that he’d seen through the eyes of his fellow militia-men, as he provided their single point of contact, telling them where they could find necks to snap. Like playing the domestic terrorist version of Gran Turismo’s B-Spec mode.

* * *

Eight Years Ago
The Militia Compound, Nebraska

Nic felt the weight of the ice-cold scalpel in his hand, disarmed by the way that it stuck to his almost amphibious, slimy palm. It shone like silver, felt as light as a feather yet, and yet, as he held it, he found it challenging to move his wrist.

“That’s my boy,” Nathan Adair proudly bellowed. “Steady eyes and steady hands.”

Like he was playing a crane game, Nic extended his arm over the operating table, where a small creature, a squirrel was strapped in place.

“I know this isn’t particularly fun, son. But the sooner you get used to this, the better. I’ll be the first to acknowledge the ethical uncertainty of this exercise, but everything I sacrifice in my integrity is an investment in your development. So, tell me what you have to do.”

Little Nicholas Adair, looked up at his father, framed by the harsh light blazing out of the lamp. He held the scalpel in front of his face, feeling every sphincter in his body clench tight as he tried to speak. He tried to open his mouth, to spread his lips, but he only felt his fist clench the scalpel tighter.

“Well,” Nathan sighed, “you need to get used to the idea of doing things that other people object to. So, without showing any malice, without being remotely disrespectful to the sanctity of this little thing’s life, you’re going to make him scream until you can’t hear it anymore. You don’t savor the pain. That’s sadistic. That’s evil. But you just have to be okay with it. You have to love it. And you have to kill it. Wanna tell me what we named this guy?”

“Nolan.”

“Now, remind me why we named him Nolan.”

“Because he’s got those pointy little ears like Batman.”

“That’s right,” Nathan said, kissing his son on the forehead. “Now go ahead and give Nolan a kiss, and do what you gotta do. You’re not leaving this tent until the lesson is over. I know you think that it would be merciful to just give one of his arteries a little nick and bleed him out but I’ve got a whole room full of squirrels until you learn to do this right. So unless you wanna say goodbye to Nelly and Norah, do a thorough, respectable job on Nolan. Okay?”

Little nine-year-old Nic looked at his dad, suddenly feeling even weaker than before. Somehow, saying even less than the nothing that had escaped his mouth. He stood still, hoping that if he were just still enough, he would eventually stop being there. He would eventually just not have to do this. Maybe he could just stand still until he was an old man. Maybe he could’ve. But he didn’t. He left the room an hour later. And Nelly and Norah were fine.

* * *

Present Day
The Promise

“We should probably share our powers too if only to make things easier for Nic. No reason he has to get into this without knowing who he’s getting into this with. I’ll start. In cases where I’m guessing and have enough information, my power tells me when I make a correct guess,” Keaton informed him. It drew a smile from ear-to-ear across Nic’s face.

“And here I was thinking that you were smart,” he teased.

"Do we need him?” Lynn asked, referring to Packet. “If he's as young as Eli says he may not be trustworthy. I don't want to work with someone who narcs us out for a Playboy and a pack of cigarettes."

“Well,” Nic said kicking one of his boots with the other. “It’s entirely possible that he could get the schematics for us. And it’d probably be smart to keep tabs on him anyway, which could be accomplished by making sure that he remains in range of The Spire. I’ve been wrong before but I bet Keaton could probably suss out whatever we’d need to do to make sure that it’s a win-win for both him and us,” he said, trying to brush over the fact that he was implicitly suggesting blackmail. “But either way I would imagine that someone like him would be unlikely to sell us out.”

"How long are we thinking we'll need? The sooner the better,” Lynn, the one-eyed overseer said, “Today."

“Well, it takes about nine-ish hours after a single exposure for my virus to take root in a host, just depending on their health. So, if we can figure out the Spire guards or workers' preferred entryway but the longer they’re exposed, the longer a range I have on them and the clearer the signal becomes. So, once we know where I should be infecting, I’ll probably need a couple of hours to make sure that I catch everyone going in and out without drawing too much attention to myself.”

“After that, I should probably dedicate a solid couple hours towards hanging out, within range and taking notes on The Spire’s insides,” he says, tapping the notebook he carries within his satchel, “which we can cross-reference against the schematics that you guys lookup. So, if we start picking targets now, I figure two days of reconnaissance plus however long we wanna spend picking our tactics.”

* * *

<sub>“Once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships
and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel...
There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music, movies, microcode (software), and high-speed pizza delivery”
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash</sub>

Mario’s Pizza, The Promise

It was another busy day at Mario’s. Ever since the cafeteria incident and the curfew being instated, the business had been booming. Since nobody was particularly excited to be beaten within an inch of their lives by the guards, there had been a lot less foot traffic. And with everybody staying inside, demand for onboard pizza delivery was higher than ever.

It didn’t make sense that he only got paid three dollars an hour plus tips. If the guards decided to confiscate his pizza because his Japanese heritage meant that, if you squinted hard enough, he kinda looked like he could be one of those Silent Court operatives here to fuck shit up, there was nothing that anyone would do to stop them. Ever since the whole damn ship decided to become the embodiment of the suckiest parts of the fucking Patriot Act. It wasn’t worth it. No matter where he went, he couldn’t seem to get the faintest whiff of respect.

He thought about quitting about once every fifteen minutes. There was no part of him that wanted to be a pizza delivery boy. But there was a part of him that needed to carry on because it was something that he was good at. Every time that he thought about going apeshit on his boss, who wasn’t even really named Mario, he thought back to something that the great Homer Simpson had once said. If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That is the American way! And it gave him the strength to carry on, trudging through the ship’s walkways with his resolve intact. Though he was Japanese by heritage, there were relatively few ways that he related to the culture. For starters: He had memorized every single line to the first twelve seasons of The Simpsons, watched every episode of Friends at least four times and he was the best pizza delivery boy on the entire goddamn spaceship. Just as there was said to be no preacher like a convert, there was no one more American than an immigrant.

With the steaming hot pair of extra-large Meat-Lovers ‘Zzas loaded in his backpack, he biked across the parkway at speeds that would make Hermes, the patron god of all mailmen, jealous. He had the onship guard patrols committed to memory and, like clockwork, he always slipped through their fingers, unseen on his bicycle as he made his deliveries, never taking more than thirty minutes to make his delivery. No one had ever managed to pin him down when he was on his route. Not even the supervillain breakout had stopped him from making his delivery on time. Thanks to his repulsor power, Gen doubted that even God himself could do a damn thing about it if Gen wanted to drop off a slice at the pearly gates.

Then Cara notified him, <The order has been canceled and Boss Mario said can keep the pizza since the restaurant has been ordered closed by the Promise’s administration. He apologizes but suggests that you go ahead and file for unemployment.>

Somberly, Gen paused his bike-ride. He was the greatest pizza delivery boy that The Promise had ever known. And now he couldn’t even do that. ”D’oh!”, Gen shouted, throwing his phone to the ground. <How am I to return to my father’s good graces if I can’t receive my employee of the year award, Cara-san! Months of hard work, sacrifice all for nothing! What the hell, Cara-san! I gave up my chance to have a social life for this. I could’ve been somebody. Those Promise-making dream-crushers will pay for what they’ve done. I swear upon all the honor belonging to the House of Houjou!>

<It’s never too late to make friends> Cara offered.

Feeling the crippling isolation get to him, his heart was swallowed by darkness as he realized just how far “being his best self” had taken him from “living his best life”. ”What must it be like not to be crippled by fear and self-loathing?” he asked aloud, channeling his best Matthew Perry impression.

<Cara-san, those people from the bonfire, who were they? Where can I find them? I will offer these pizzas as a gesture of good faith before acquiring their friendship.>

<They’re all offline for the moment. I’ll send them a request for their geo-locations when they get back online.>

”Offline? No one goes offline in this day and age unless there’s something very wrong. Something terrible must have happened for them not to be online when there’s nothing remotely fun to do outdoors in this dystopian police state!” Racking his mind, he tried to remember their names. It was all kinda fuzzy but eventually, he remembered! The boy who elbowed him. He had introduced himself as Nic. There could only reasonably be so many teenaged boys named Nic on the Promise. And so Gen determined that he would scour the student databases, the proprietary social media platforms, and find him. He had gone too long in life without having any friends to call his own.

The Blighted Kingdom

Alden The Black 2.0

A L D E N T H E B L A C K

---

^{A L D E N K O L E ◼ 3 0 ◼ M A L E ◼ K A F A A R A}

^{"Everyone deserves a second chance. The fact that I'm here means that you must have already blown yours."}

▼ A P P E A R A N C E:

---

Alden is of short, burly stock. He'd once been covered in a bushlike robe of rock-hard, jet-black fur but the fire has left him as hairless as a looking glass. His sagging, roasted exterior betrays the otherwise enviable colony of muscle that lurks beneath his surface. His once proud demeanor has largely given way to a reverent silence, as he stands idle with his arms at rest, folded neatly across his barrel chest. He conceals his once-handsome face behind a stainless steel helmet, and every inch of his flesh beneath an all-consuming shroud of black fabric, having been humbled by his injury.

▼ B I O G R A P H Y:

---

Alden was born outside the city limits of Kafaara, to the Kole family. Their surname was owed to the fact that Alden's father, Arlen, owned and operated The Blackstar Mining Company, the primary supplier of coal to the majority of the Kafaaran peninsula with a healthy exporting business to boot. While they were, by all means, thoroughly financially secure, they had not yet gained the social acceptance of the nobility proper when their troubles began.

Around the time that Alden was twenty-six years old, having lost his elder brother to illness, he was being groomed to assume leadership of the company in the coming years, as his father turned his attention toward more social endeavors, shoehorning himself into whatever political intrigue he could. His mother, on the other hand, had been staying in Kafaara, just as she often had ever since Arlen's business had taken off, giving most all of her time and attention toward her devout study of the doctrine of The Barbed Church.

While The Blackstars were mining one fateful day, both Arlen and Alden, father and son, and many of their men were trapped in an underground coal fire that resulted in a cave-in, as a consequence of a burnt support beam giving way. Trapped within the toxic subterranean oven, most of the men died agonizing deaths. But it would seem that the world had other ends in mind for Alden. As dire as things were, he clung to life, even as the mine's infernal vapors seeped into his lungs before he was ultimately dug out by the company's response crew. Things were never the same again.

Alden's youngest brother, Adler, assumed control over The Blackstar's operations. If rumors were to be believed, he had orchestrated the cave-in in a fratricidal coup. No one ever seemed to have bothered investigating. In the fire's aftermath, Alden's molten skin took on a permanent ghoulish quality, like a wax sculpture that had been left under the summer sun. Beneath the surface, his lungs had also been marred, giving him a persistent cough, courtesy of the severe case of pneumonia he'd developed. Due to the ashen coat that he had been fished out of the mine wearing, he was gifted with the moniker "Alden the Black".

He'd never considered himself particularly religious, but nearly losing his life gave him a new perspective on things. The shame that came from his appearance led to him shrouding himself in an impenetrable wall of fabric, shielding every last inch of his skin from sight.

▼ C H A R A C T E R G O A L S:

---

Having thoroughly aligned himself with The Barbed Church following his near-death experience, he imagines that helping the kingdom find salvation from its penance is the reason for which he continues living. Anything less than answering the High Lord's call would be a demonstration of ingratitude for the mercy he was shown when he was rescued from the fire.

▼ S K I L L S:

---

//SKILLS AND ABILITIES:

◼ Brute Strength | From years of working in a coal mine
◼ Chivalry | Literally the discipline of riding a horse learned from journeying on horseback to Kafaara with his father
◼ Eyesight | From years of working in a coal mine
◼ Hearing | From years of working in a coal mine

//FEARS AND WEAKNESSES:

◼ Gullible | If an official of The Barbed Church says something, he'll probably believe it.
◼ Insensitivity | The fire killed many of the nerves in his body. Sometimes he is entirely numb for hours. Sometimes he feels random pain. Sometimes, he mistakes the extent of his injuries.
◼ Miner's Lung | While he would otherwise be quite good at sneaking, his ability to remain silent is impeded by uncontrollable bouts of sudden, violent coughing
◼ Pyrophobia | It twists his gut up into a know just to think about being close to another flame

▼ N O T E S:

---

//PARAPHERNALIA

◼ Nightstick | A relatively lightweight, though dense, blunt instrument particularly well attuned for inflicting concussions
◼ Rope (Spider-Silk) | Just enough to hang himself with. Or someone else if it came to that.