Rapid Reader

UNTOLD STORY: Final Dungeon

@Rapid Reader She looks great so far! Once I can look at the complete thing, I'll hit you with that weird relic. I've got some ideas so far.

@Utrax

My body/brain are ready for some weird relic (updated my sheet again).

UNTOLD STORY: Final Dungeon

Updated my first post, will most likely edit it tomorrow and add the requested moments.

The Night Shift - Gas Station Horror Simulator (OPEN)

Ada emerged into the gas station proper from the Stockrooms, where she had meticulously hidden her sword amongst the dry goods. She felt naked without her sword on her hip, but she did not wish to anger Management. They had sent out several memos explaining that employees were in fact not permitted to carry out the solemn duties of their shift while wielding fully automatic rifles or battle axes. Customers had complained. Management had been angered. Grave policies had been etched in stone and she had been temporarily disarmed by a pen wielding lawyer.

She knew the workings of the strange clock that Management had seen fit to install. The clock could only generously be described as keeping an accurate count of time and Ada had begun to suspect that through some eldritch magic the clock revolved more slowly when an employee looking at it was on the clock and more rapidly when an employee had not yet punched in. She often marveled at the strange, alien powers that Management seemed to command. Where other employees despaired at the strange machinations of the company, Ada saw them as a challenge. A perennial series of obstacles for her to complete and quests to surmount.

To preserve her honor, Ada had thus made sure to clock in five minutes early. No one would judge her tardy if she could help it. She would not stain her reputation with unholy stain of slothfulness.

The newly minted Stock Room clerk had only managed some fifteen paces before she was interrupted by a booming voice and the familiar visage of the Earl of Pembroke.

"Sir William," Ada said, offering a quick bow.

The ghostly figure offered his own polite bow, no small feat in his mail hauberk and gambeson, "Sir Ada, what fool notion has possessed you to discard your weapon?"

"I have not discarded my weapon, Sir William, merely stored it for the moment."

"It is unseemly for a knight to be unarmed, Sir Ada."

"My Lord, I am afraid Management has been most particular. I cannot honorably refuse their most reasonable request."

"There are dark things at work here, Sir Ada. I can sense a great danger. Men of ill-repute and habit surround you. Monsters lurk in the shadows. Your must steel your sword and heart."

"Sir, I remain as ever ready to do battle in the defense of the weak and innocent."

"Well said, Sir Ada, well said," the ghostly knight said with a smile as he faded out of view with a nod of his wise head.

"Farewell, Sir William," Ada replied with a soft smile of her own.

"Phone call?" A customer interjected as he appeared next to Ada in a flurry of grime and the smell of old Doritos.

"Sure," Ada replied with a beaming smile.

"Say," The potbellied trucker began with a confused expression that suggested to Ada he was either deep in thought or close to having a fatal stroke. "Do you happen to know where I can find a copy of Big Booty—"

Ada interrupted the customer with a polite raising of her hand. She had spotted the Assistant Manager and one of her red vested comrades in arms. She had no time to discuss pornographic magazines with a customer. He would have to navigate the binary sea of pornography on his own. Ada resisted the urge to judge the man for his illicit request and readings. While no prude, she did not think that people still sought out their smut in print. The idea of the most honorable Gas-Way company stocking their shelves with vile pornography also struck her as unlikely.

"Forgive me, dear customer, but I must go speak to the Assistant Manager. No doubt he has received word from Management," Ada muttered leaving the customer shaking his head in her wake.

---

With the deft movements of a professional dancer, Ada ducked between departing customers, now sated in their lust for meat, and approached the counter where Rory and July.

"Gracious Assistant Manager, I am at your service," Ada said, placing a hand dramatically over her heart as she bowed low.

The knight turned her gaze thoughtfully over July. She had not met him before, but she thought he seemed like a Jenn. She smiled briefly at his hideous visage before returning her full attention to the angelic Assistant-Manager who's divinity she felt certain stemmed from his close relationship with Management, "Respectfully, my Lord, I ask permission to address the pest problem plaguing the parking lot. I would not wish to see our customers injured or inconvenienced by the vile creatures that hide from the light."

UNTOLD STORY: Final Dungeon

Here's a character of middling quality with writing appearing as I add it.

Updated: June 15th, Midday

Clara the Heroic Modern Necromancer

Clara

---

_{"Look, just because I'm a necromancer doesn't mean I'm evil. Unleashing armies of skeletal warriors just happens to be a very effective solution to most problems."}

---

Name

Clara Vale

Aliases

The Dread Necromancer, The Smiling Necromancer, The Pale Wizard, and The Grave-robber*

Age

25

Appearance

Clara stands just above average height, and possess the physique of an unexpectedly active wizard. Her skin is an ever-shifting shade of light brown, and an observer would be hard-pressed to limit her to any single race or ethnicity. A fact that Clara takes great pleasure in and only the faintest hint of an English accent gives any suggestion of her true origins. Her soft face is framed by a forest of springy coils that dance with each movement that she makes. Her eyes are diamonds cast in midnight that sparkle equally with arcane light and boundless curiosity. Lips painted with violet rest most often in a warm smile.

Living her best Goth life, Clara prefers to wear alternating shades of gray or black. She pairs black jeans with plain black t-shirts only occasionally superseding the colors of the void with a collection of band t-shirts almost always depressing in nature. Clara wears minimal jewelry, her left wrist is adorned with three bangles of gold and she wears a silver ankh on a chain around her neck. Canvas sneakers are her jam and she vibes in a perfectly midnight pair of sneakers. To sanctify her coolness, she wears a black leather jacket at all times.

Personality

A necromancer hailing from a cyberpunk future, Clara is a fast-thinking spellslinger out to save the world. She is strange, enigmatic, and oozes with arcane energy from every pore. A modern necromancer in every way, Clara believes that it is her mission in life to show the multiverse that necromancy is a force of great good.

While steeped in death and the occult, Clara is intimately fond of people and the dead in equal measure. She is a vivacious creature full of life and warmth who does best when surrounded by others. She is generous in her disregard for money and values having fun above having a healthy bank account. She does best in loud places that are full of people, greasy food, and brilliant drinks. Left to her own devices she is prone to melancholy, long naps, and arcane experimentation that can threaten entire cities

Dishonest, but in the kindest way, Clara cultivates an air of mystery about herself, telling vague and ever-changing stories about her origins, travels, and adventures. The only recurring hints to her past are buried beneath cheerfully told noise.

Habits/Quirks

A research rebel, Clara enjoys filling the margins of her grimoire with sketches of people she meets and badly written poetry that a friend once described as "the sort of fan-fiction a thirteen year old girl would write as a joke."

Clara is alarmingly willing to read her poetry to recite her poetry at the merest mention of her mad scribbling.

Past

A wizard in a cyberpunk land, Clara is necromancer from a reality long since lost to technology and the promise of the future. The culmination of a particularly strong and noteworthy line of magicians, Clara practiced magic far beyond the printed expatiation date specified by the demands of her universe.

Planted in the binary sea of the digital matrix, Clara grew up in the sprawling megacity that had once been the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America. A gifted necromancer from her youth, she studied under the few great masters that remained. Brilliant in her capacity to harness horror for good, Clara occupied a niche in a world that had abandoned magic as impractical and neglected defenses against what had been deemed to be nothing more than idle superstition. Vanishing into the sprawl as soon as she was able, Clara cut her teeth as an arcane consultant operating in the shadowy realm outside of the corporate world.

Where others found darkness and lost themselves to hopeless cruelty and endless greed, Clara found purpose and came to believe that necromancy represented a novel way to bring great good to the world. Finding others like her, Clara became a legendary figure. The Smiling Necromancer who appeared from the shadows, not to murder cities with her armies of undead monsters, but to do what good she was could and to make the world a better place.

Eventually, Clara wandered across what remained of the United States after the megacorporations had taken over on a storied quest once posted on the electronic boards of her world. She traveled into the Walmart Economic Zone from the ExxonMobil Industrial Cities. She crossed the Ford Empire, traveled through the Hewlett-Packard Federation, and eventually arrived in the Western Kingdom of Apple. When asked by members of the party, she claims with a wry smile that she was simply searching for an old friend, the wizard FastSpell, last seen in what in the megacorporation glassed desert that had once been Silicon Valley.

Clara was said to have received an electronic chip from King Steve Wozniak XXI himself after saving the city from a demonic invasion. However, despite growing accolades she remained aloof and unaffiliated with any guild in the Western Kingdom of Apple. For a necromancer, she managed to maintain a surprisingly positive reputation despite her unapologetic status as a paid-by-the-hour mercenary. Not all trusted the necromancer however and many citizens of New Jobs City did not take kindly to her practice of the deathly arts and her habit of reanimating the recently dead. As her arcane power grew, the few wizards remaining on the Western Coast began to chafe at the many interesting ideas that young necromancer proposed.

Clara nonetheless established herself as a skilled mercenary and fearsome mage. Generally viewed as an affable, even kind figure, Clara maintained a surprisingly positive reputation for a necromancer and paid-by-the-hour criminal. However, not all the residents of New Jobs City had taken kindly to her fondness for the school of necromancy and her habit of reanimating the dead.

Despite the modest support of the royal court, Clara found herself fighting a losing political battle with a powerful cable of wizards that remained in New Jobs City. When the subject is mentioned, Clara explains with great indignation that her colleagues were offended by her alarming lack of greed (threatening the market value of magical services was widely seen as a most heinous crime) and to a lesser degree as a result of what she called misguided compulsions against necromancy that existed even among wizards. What began as a political battle, soon turned to bloodshed, and Clara found herself fighting for her life. Objecting to rumors that filled the net, Clara maintains that she killed other wizards strictly in self-defense.

It was a spell of seeking cast in the heat of battle that saw the young necromancer summoned before the first door. Clara remains uncertain why exactly it is that she was tasked with joining the party in their current quest to defeat the final boss. Especially given the low view of necromancers that she has discovered prevails across almost all of the multiverse. However, Clara harbors a suspension that her current situation might have something to do with her relatively recent reanimation of the Dread Empress Joanna IX.

Nonplussed, Clara has embraced the present dungeon dive as chance to do further good and redeem the proud school of magic known as necromancy.

Moment of Heroism

Clara's shining moment of heroism came when she saved the party from the clutches of a lich that had managed to incapacitate everyone but the necromancer. She feels that saving her comrades from being turned into hideous mockeries of the living eternally enslaved to the wills of a mad undead wizard can be widely concerned a big win for Team Necromancy.

It was either that or the time she taught a settlement of space primitives to read, resulting in the formation of en early society of Space Vikings.

Moment of Tragedy

Clara's moment of tragedy involves her role in the destruction of a small village the party had encountered after passing through one of the strange dimensional doors. Faced with five chapters of corrupted crusaders, the party was faltering when Clara resorted to an arcane ritual forbidden since time immemorial. The horde of undead spirits that Clara summoned consumed several armies worth of enemies and turned the tide of the battle. However, pushing beyond the her limits, Clara lost control, and the entire village was devoured by the ravenous spirits before she could banish them.

Strengths/Abilities

You're a Necromancer, Clara: Clara is a talented wizard focusing on the much feared and reviled art of necromancy.

Cyberpunk Survivor: Born a spell-slinging wizard in a dystopian cyberpunk city ruled by merciless megacorporations, Clara knows how to survive in environments filled with high-tech weapons, gangsters, corporate assassins, and enough pollution to kill a planet.

Friend of the Dead: Guided by the whispers of the dead, Clara has a knack for navigating dangerous environments and hostile situations despite her own disregard for pragmatic concerns. Some might call it a supernatural sixth sense, but Clara calls it game of necromantic instant messaging.

Hard to Scare: Dealing with the undead on a frequent basis has left Clara with a remarkably casual attitude towards all things related to horror and death.

Speaker of the Dead: Clara has a knack for conversing with the dead, managing to successfully interpret their often disjointed thoughts and understanding the strange, long dead languages that seem to be in vogue among the deceased.

Spell List

Animate Undead: Creates an undead servant from a pile of bones or a corpse. The spell imbues the target with a foul mimicry of life and raising it as an undead creature that serves the necromancer in a mostly mindless fashion. Casting the spell on a pile of bones results in a skeleton, while casting it on a corpse results in a zombie. If desired by the necromancer, the undead servant can communicate and if it still possesses a mouth, it is possible to converse with the unliving being.

Summon Undead: An undead creature (humanoid) appears in a burst of smoke and fog. Once the vapor dissipates, the undead creature follows the commands of the necromancer until it is killed or banished to the grave once more.
Spectral Hand: Using their own life force (or that of a close by creature), the necromancer materializes a ghostly, glowing hand. Despite being incorporeal in nature, the spectral hand is able to influence the physical world and can be used much like a normal hand.

Insect Plague: A swarm of exceedingly violent and fierce insects surges from the caster's hand. Fanatical in their loyalty to the necromancer that summons them, these insects will ceaselessly attack any creature that stands in the way of their new master, stealing life essence from their victims, triggering anyone with a fear of insects, and disrupting the concentration of all but the most disciplined of combatants.

Ray of Ruination: Enfeebles and exhausts a target with grim reminders of the inescapable certainty of death and a mountain of regrets.

Vampiric Touch: Wreathing their hand in terrible shadows, the caster harms a foe by touch, causing necromantic damage and siphoning a measure of whatever force drives the creature into their own being.

Blackfire: With dark words, a ray of necromantic black energy springs from the necromancer's hand, engulfing a target in chill black flames that feed on the fuel of their victim's life force and absorb any heat they contain. Crackling and hissing, the arcane flames emanate the smells of hot metal and sulfur, sickening the target, filling them with nausea and existential dread, and worse, it can spread rapidly to other creatures within range. The ghastly flames commanded by this spell cannot be extinguished by non-magical means (e.g., immersion in water or smothering) and any creatures killed by the spell are reduced to piles of nondescript black ash.

Chill of the Grave: A pale ray of icy cold death that erupts from the pointed finger of the necromancer, accompanied by the crackling moans of breaking ice, this spell freezes a target causing great harm and potentially immobilizing them.

Veil of Death: Flame-like shadows envelope the body of the target until the spell ends, wreathing them in all the aspects and vestments of true death and thus obscuring them from the senses of creatures that seek out the living.

Weaknesses

Not a Physical Combatant: Clara feels that whacking someone with her staff is too much work and prefers to leave physical combat or gunplay to her allies and undead servants.

Easily Tempted: Clara can resist temptation, she really can, so long as it's not very tempting, and so long as it doesn't involve ancient stores of necromantic knowledge or tasty pastries.

Hero of Horror: Clara is deeply saddened by the negative stigma that necromancers have acquired and their inevitable association with the forces of evil. As a result, in her haste to change the world for the better and to prove that she is a force of good, Clara often forgets to consider the safety or wisdom of her actions. She is impulsive, unceasingly kind, and prone to committing suicidal acts of heroism at the drop of a hat.

Items/Equipment

Bone Staff: For self-defense purposes, Clara wields a polished and enchanted staff shaped from brilliantly white bone.

Ancient Necromantic Grimoire: An ancient tome of arcane knowledge that Clara carries on her person at all times. Chiefly necromantic in nature, Clara jealously guards, religiously maintains, and frequently updates the horrific looking book. It is easily the young necromancer's prized possession and she would kill without hesitation to protect it.

Nokia Idoru Commlink: Clara carries a state-of-the-art, for 2077, electronic communications device in the pocket of her leather jacket. Stuffed to the brim with futuristic tehcnology the so-called commlink is an electronic device that is part-PDA, part-personal computer, part-cyberterminal, and part-global communications device running blazingly hot technomancer code powered by the souls of the dead. Beyond serving as a gateway for Clara to both the Augmented and Virtual Reality of the Wireless Matrix, she also uses it to blast her Gothic jams.

RELIC

A slightly cursed item that bound itself to the character that the GM will give you ha.

*_{The villain who stole my grandfather's corpse!}

Sum up your week in roleplaying in just 3 words

Reading awesome posts.

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

Also, I really appreciate that the druggie had the most normal reaction to a disemboweled corpse out of everyone.

@Jarl Coolgruuf

Lol.

I'm glad people seem to have liked Val's reaction, I didn't want to make it seem too over the top, but disemboweled corpses as you're coming down off a trip seem like a terrible way to start your Monday morning. Even more so when you're just a DIY alchemist trying to make a buck or two without dying.

Which is to say that clearly Val is the moral compass of the group.

My Hider

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

I'd place my vote with going airborne sooner rather than later.

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

Val's notes:

My Hider

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

Val had listened to the recording with a growing sense of dread. She had looked around at the others hoping to see some similar emotions, but all she had seen was professional interest. They didn't seem bothered by the bodies. They didn't seem to taste the blood pooling at the back of their throats like she did. They didn't even seem to flinch after having to listen to the phone call a second time. Val felt the sweat prickle through her pores. She felt sick. She felt afraid. She hadn't seen bodies before. Not like that. Not projected in high definition onto a wall. The desperation in the Tailor's voice was familiar, it was her own voice. His fear overwhelmed her. The terror she remembered wrapped its tendrils around her neck and began to choke her.

She straightened in her chair, her hands reaching protectively to cover her own neck, and she halfheartedly listened to the conversation that followed. While the others talked, Val engaged in a battle with her breakfast, desperately trying to remain still. She didn't want to throw up in front of the others. It seemed like poor form. Val didn't have time to think, she was busy fighting off her own nightmares. Sharp teeth leered at her from the shadows. A sweet flowery smell of doom surrounded her. Cruel promises full of love whispered out to her through her fear.

Caught in her own dark thoughts, Val only reluctantly recognized the pause in the investigative musing of her colleagues. Unwilling to be called on by Ellie, she surmised it was her turn to earn participation points. The young alchemist nodded thoughtfully as she sensed that all the eyes in the room had turned to watch her. In a feat of great dexterity, Val took off her freshly stolen sunglasses and placed them lightly on the table without so much as a tremor. She tried her best to appear as if she had been paying attention. She pretended that she had some deep insight into the murders gruesomely painted onto the wall.

"He has committed the crime who profits by it," Val began, channeling what little she remembered from Philosophy 101 and Seneca. The Stoics were cool. It was too bad they only wrote sad stories. She had no idea who or what had killed the two men. Not with any confidence at least.

Frost giants? Inuit ice demons? Murderers wielding magically frozen swords? It all sounded like a bad joke. Had she been unaffected by the drugs coursing through her system, Val was sure she would have laughed. Instead she just felt numb, any positive vibes having long since been dispelled by the gruesome scenes. She did not regret her evening of Bacchian debauchery, but she regretted the morning. Without Joanna's pleasant company, she was reminded of the dreadfulness of the world. The bodies stuck with her. Jumbles of intestine floating on the water were hard to forget.

"What's the point? Why kill some randos like this? Boredom? To send a message? An ice blade seems like an oddly distinct way to kill someone unless you just really hate using a gun. And killing people thousands of miles apart? What did the killer do, take a plane? Drive cross-country? Take the bus? Or is this some group thing? Maybe a doomsday cult trying to start a magical war? Some fucked up evokers lost to the thrill?

Val shrugged her shoulders,"Maybe Mr. Tailor and Mr. Talbot were running some energy scam and ran afoul of the Frost Giant Mafia? Has anyone looked at their bank statements?"

Satisfied that she had accomplished at least the bare minimum expected of her, Val turned to eye the elderly wizard with a carefully curated smile that sparkled with glitter that fell from her hair,"And as for the coffee, I'm afraid I can't help you there, but do let me know if you need me to make you some little blue pills for your after work activities. Old age shouldn't hold you back..."

Summary

Val proposes (mostly out of desperation) that perhaps the motives are what the SG should focus on.
She decides to meet poser-Gandalf's snipe with one of her own.

The Sunday Group - Bumps in the Night

Should have a post up tomorrow and then we'll have another round done. :)

Posted and onwards we go. :D