Member
ctrlsaltdel
Noctis
Thanqol
Phoe
rabidbacon
Damycles
Cao the Exiled
Bugman
shylarah
Guardian Angel HarukiEclair!
Well played! You are, despite yourself, despite the things that isolate you from those around you, a good player of the Great Game- and any other player can see that. And Ruthmoreness, with her clumsy-cute charm, has to concede that, too.
So she cracks open the book and makes... let us call it an attempt at reading. You're quite distracting, and she reads the same sentence over and over, and she reads the same sentence over and over, and she peeks up at you, and she reads the same sentence over and over, and she flutters her eyes, and she reads the same sentence over and over... but eventually she manages to get some headway.
"She's making a mess," Ruthmoreness concludes. "She's making herself some sort of... antimaid? Negamaid? Unmaid? Daim? Dame?" Her brow scrunches up with the effort of thinking about a maid outfit where all the whites are black and all the blacks are white. While she does that- what do you think of that theory, Eclair? Is there something to it, or is this just another tree that Timtam has you barking up?
Perhaps she's sent Ruthmoreness here just to convince you that she's an antimaid so that she can then wrong-foot you by being extra-maidy the next time that you meet. How far do her plans reach? Was she ready for this very moment? For all you know, she could be out there in the rain, tucked neatly underneath an umbrella. Don't look. You'll just be disappointed by the shape of her absence.
Yuki!
"Thank you, Radiant Edogawa," Pasenne says, with a flick of her rattling tail. That must be very tricky for her to keep quiet as much as she does, and perhaps the ribbons wrapped around it are meant to dampen the sound. "Since you asked," she says, a little daring, "I'm so glad that you're going to help our Princess get her crown." There's certainty there; she refuses to even consider anyone else the rightful Queen. "Once we expand Crevas, some of the floodwater will drain out of the housing market, and I might be able to get my parents their own place in a few years."
(And in that, the implicit: of course Sulochana will tend to Crevas's needs first.)
>[.rockamt]
>Well, you come over here and deal with my thing instead of getting dragged into the magical deerboy, obviously.
>[.praxispacksis]
>Aadya!! That...!!
>...means you wouldn't get involved in this, I guess.
>The Khatun's assembling for
>Well, I mean
>[.rockamt]
>Wait, you're friends with that deerboy people are talking about, Yuki?
>[.praxispacksis]
>WAS THAT NOT CLEAR????
>[.rockamt]
>I've been busy. But, hey, good to know you're friends with the Queen of Light, Yuks.
>[.praxispacksis]
>HUH?????
>[.rockamt]
>?
>[.praxispacksis]
>oh shoot I have to go Yuki just please don't
>let's not
>going with Aadya sounds great!!!!
Sulochana peers over your shoulder, having made her grand entrance just a moment before while you were engrossed in the weird vibes Juni was giving off. "Or you could ignore her and come with me. It sounds as if the High Council will need our help repulsing the Khaganate, and we could use your axe on our side." A very high-minded plea... with no mention of the fact that she'll want to snatch Hazel out of Aestival herself.
Since your friend group's at loggerheads, on this subject at least, you can get your benefits by either going to Aadya or sticking by Sulochana's side, and doing anything else (like, say, going and learning how to juggle, or sneaking into Aestival on your own) will get you the consolation prize.
Sulochana gives you a reassuring shoulder squeeze. "Yuki and Suli against the world," she says, and does the hip bump that you used to do together before she slithers into her couch and starts eating like someone who is struggling to maintain proper manners in the face of an empty stomach.
Hazel!
You're a bright young boy. You've played video games before. So you're familiar with loading screens.
The Roads are loading screens.
The skies above are black. On either side of the widely-paved road are evergreens: pines, spruces, firs, and (oddly enough) bamboo, all of them sharp black on black, refusing to be properly illuminated by everyone's lanterns. There are two lanes, and usually you're supposed to hug the left and let traffic pass by on the right, but foot traffic's overspilled onto the right for today. All trudging along, stuck in the same liminality as a long airplane flight by night. There's no sense of distance, of how far you've come or how far you're going.
We're closer connected than your world, but that doesn't mean that it's a casual thing to go from one Hub to another.
Eventually, Amali taps your shoulder. "This is a good place," she says, pulling out some tins from under her seat and hanging a red lantern on the side of the rickshaw. Almost as soon as she does this, you notice that there's a rest stop up the Road. (And before you ask: yes, it did just appear, and no, it wouldn't have appeared if she'd just hung that lantern up right as soon as you got onto the Road.) You pull over into this side street, park the rickshaw, and help Amali down the steps into one of the stations. As this isn't your first trip on the Road, you know what happens next: someone has to join you in here, this cramped barrow which smells of Christmas: pine trees and the crispness of snow and the curry that Amali's cracking open and the crackling, smoky hearth in the center of the station.
(Oh, this is one of our sources of, as you call them, urban legends. Stories about people who think they can just ignore the need to pull over and eat. About people who start eating before someone comes to join them. About people who are violent here. The rules of the Road are drilled into children's heads with as much strictness as your teenagers are taught to respect cars capable of traveling dozens of miles per hour, and for similar reasons.)
"I hope you don't mind," says a melodious and familiar voice, and your heart skips a beat, doesn't it?
Anat Amora-Ugari is here, tossed in with you by the chance of the Road, and she's brought a tin of hot wings for the table. Like most Nagi, she takes up so much of the station, as if it was built for people smaller than her. You'll have to squeeze in. Maybe there won't be enough room and you'll have to sit on her. Plenty of things to think about.
"Come in, dear," Amali says. "Don't you mind my great-nephew here, he'll behave himself."
Tsane!
"Our recommendation is as follows, Lady Civelia," the General Secretary says, summing up the past... hour? Closer to two. "Firstly: that our priority for the sake of Thellamie's stability must be ensuring that the conflict over the Golden Fawn is resolved without lasting violence. Secondly: that in the light of her actions last night, the Khatun of the Khaganate must be formally censured and informed that we reserve the right to take actions to bar her from the contest to tame the Golden Fawn if she continues to act in a way that disturbs the peace of the Hubs. Thirdly, that the Hero of Ages be dispatched to discover the identity of the maid-knight who attempted to lay hands on the Goddess herself. We thank you for taking the time to consult us and for blessing our efforts to come to consensus."
This is typical. The Civils are great for charity, construction, bureaucracy, anything that requires planning and hard work and big hearts, but they're spooked. And a spooked Civil is one that's going to minimize action, urge for patience, threaten vague consequences, and generally wait to be rescued. To be fair, Heron's usually pretty good at rescuing the church when necessary - and Civils tend to be in need of saving when she's around.
"I, in turn, thank you," Civelia says. The Sleepless Charm has been lying inert and dead in front of her for the past forty minutes, but now she gestures and draws it to float just above her palm. "Let us carry this out with all due determination- but there is one thing that I would have my dearest Hero do for us all before she pursues her Quest."
The Civils start to hum, looking for the right frequency to match the way that the charm spins. "There is a boy lost within Our world, ensnared within prophecy, bound by the will of the untouchable Stars. He must be fearful, desperate, lost, in need of solace." Chains- silver and gold- glow on the surface of the charm she is creating. "We shall not let this be so. We shall not. O Golden Fawn, for you alone I grant authority."
Injimo!
If you ever had to fight Civelia, which would require her to actually be willing to fight in the first place, this is how she would fight. You'd have to close in fast before she could command you to kneel, or command others to defend her on her behalf. But that would be a betrayal of the bond between the Goddess and her Hero. A white room fight.
The charm falls to the Goddess's palm as if too heavy to hang in the air any longer. Mana rises off it like smoke. It is a badge in the shape of a shield, one half silver and the other half ruby. The silhouette of a stag's head is done in onyx limned in gold, the tips of the antlers rising above the shield's rim.
This she offers to you. Its magic (and its Move) will not activate for you; it will be heavy and slightly too cool to the touch. "My most beloved champion, I ask you to deliver this to the Golden Fawn and teach him how to use it. By this gift he may dictate the contests of his taming. Once this is complete, seek out the maid who your handmaiden fought last night and learn her purpose."
Kalentia!
"This is the sickness," Fallen Far says, laying her head back down, though still trying to cover herself up. "Thellamie is the impurities of sickness. You are the infecting of passions." She says it like an obscenity, but not one directed at you. "The detestation of passions are the murdering of me. Your cha is the disordering of passions; the desiring of action both unbidding and unwanting. This is the cessation of my deserving: the nakedness and the wanting and the... and the..."
She sniffles. She raises her good hand to her face and turns it away from you, shoulders trembling.
"...I am not deserving the presence of her. I am the risk of infection, the punishment of passion. I am the murdering of her if she was present. But the wanting of her is, is, is. I am the impurity."
That's a familiar bit of self-loathing, isn't it? Even through the language barrier, that kind of raw you-are-perfect-and-I-am-garbage longing is... well, better that you're here than anyone else.
Well played! You are, despite yourself, despite the things that isolate you from those around you, a good player of the Great Game- and any other player can see that. And Ruthmoreness, with her clumsy-cute charm, has to concede that, too.
So she cracks open the book and makes... let us call it an attempt at reading. You're quite distracting, and she reads the same sentence over and over, and she reads the same sentence over and over, and she peeks up at you, and she reads the same sentence over and over, and she flutters her eyes, and she reads the same sentence over and over... but eventually she manages to get some headway.
"She's making a mess," Ruthmoreness concludes. "She's making herself some sort of... antimaid? Negamaid? Unmaid? Daim? Dame?" Her brow scrunches up with the effort of thinking about a maid outfit where all the whites are black and all the blacks are white. While she does that- what do you think of that theory, Eclair? Is there something to it, or is this just another tree that Timtam has you barking up?
Perhaps she's sent Ruthmoreness here just to convince you that she's an antimaid so that she can then wrong-foot you by being extra-maidy the next time that you meet. How far do her plans reach? Was she ready for this very moment? For all you know, she could be out there in the rain, tucked neatly underneath an umbrella. Don't look. You'll just be disappointed by the shape of her absence.
Yuki!
"Thank you, Radiant Edogawa," Pasenne says, with a flick of her rattling tail. That must be very tricky for her to keep quiet as much as she does, and perhaps the ribbons wrapped around it are meant to dampen the sound. "Since you asked," she says, a little daring, "I'm so glad that you're going to help our Princess get her crown." There's certainty there; she refuses to even consider anyone else the rightful Queen. "Once we expand Crevas, some of the floodwater will drain out of the housing market, and I might be able to get my parents their own place in a few years."
(And in that, the implicit: of course Sulochana will tend to Crevas's needs first.)
>[.rockamt]
>Well, you come over here and deal with my thing instead of getting dragged into the magical deerboy, obviously.
>[.praxispacksis]
>Aadya!! That...!!
>...means you wouldn't get involved in this, I guess.
>The Khatun's assembling for
>Well, I mean
>[.rockamt]
>Wait, you're friends with that deerboy people are talking about, Yuki?
>[.praxispacksis]
>WAS THAT NOT CLEAR????
>[.rockamt]
>I've been busy. But, hey, good to know you're friends with the Queen of Light, Yuks.
>[.praxispacksis]
>HUH?????
>[.rockamt]
>?
>[.praxispacksis]
>oh shoot I have to go Yuki just please don't
>let's not
>going with Aadya sounds great!!!!
Sulochana peers over your shoulder, having made her grand entrance just a moment before while you were engrossed in the weird vibes Juni was giving off. "Or you could ignore her and come with me. It sounds as if the High Council will need our help repulsing the Khaganate, and we could use your axe on our side." A very high-minded plea... with no mention of the fact that she'll want to snatch Hazel out of Aestival herself.
Since your friend group's at loggerheads, on this subject at least, you can get your benefits by either going to Aadya or sticking by Sulochana's side, and doing anything else (like, say, going and learning how to juggle, or sneaking into Aestival on your own) will get you the consolation prize.
Sulochana gives you a reassuring shoulder squeeze. "Yuki and Suli against the world," she says, and does the hip bump that you used to do together before she slithers into her couch and starts eating like someone who is struggling to maintain proper manners in the face of an empty stomach.
Hazel!
You're a bright young boy. You've played video games before. So you're familiar with loading screens.
The Roads are loading screens.
The skies above are black. On either side of the widely-paved road are evergreens: pines, spruces, firs, and (oddly enough) bamboo, all of them sharp black on black, refusing to be properly illuminated by everyone's lanterns. There are two lanes, and usually you're supposed to hug the left and let traffic pass by on the right, but foot traffic's overspilled onto the right for today. All trudging along, stuck in the same liminality as a long airplane flight by night. There's no sense of distance, of how far you've come or how far you're going.
We're closer connected than your world, but that doesn't mean that it's a casual thing to go from one Hub to another.
Eventually, Amali taps your shoulder. "This is a good place," she says, pulling out some tins from under her seat and hanging a red lantern on the side of the rickshaw. Almost as soon as she does this, you notice that there's a rest stop up the Road. (And before you ask: yes, it did just appear, and no, it wouldn't have appeared if she'd just hung that lantern up right as soon as you got onto the Road.) You pull over into this side street, park the rickshaw, and help Amali down the steps into one of the stations. As this isn't your first trip on the Road, you know what happens next: someone has to join you in here, this cramped barrow which smells of Christmas: pine trees and the crispness of snow and the curry that Amali's cracking open and the crackling, smoky hearth in the center of the station.
(Oh, this is one of our sources of, as you call them, urban legends. Stories about people who think they can just ignore the need to pull over and eat. About people who start eating before someone comes to join them. About people who are violent here. The rules of the Road are drilled into children's heads with as much strictness as your teenagers are taught to respect cars capable of traveling dozens of miles per hour, and for similar reasons.)
"I hope you don't mind," says a melodious and familiar voice, and your heart skips a beat, doesn't it?
Anat Amora-Ugari is here, tossed in with you by the chance of the Road, and she's brought a tin of hot wings for the table. Like most Nagi, she takes up so much of the station, as if it was built for people smaller than her. You'll have to squeeze in. Maybe there won't be enough room and you'll have to sit on her. Plenty of things to think about.
"Come in, dear," Amali says. "Don't you mind my great-nephew here, he'll behave himself."
Tsane!
"Our recommendation is as follows, Lady Civelia," the General Secretary says, summing up the past... hour? Closer to two. "Firstly: that our priority for the sake of Thellamie's stability must be ensuring that the conflict over the Golden Fawn is resolved without lasting violence. Secondly: that in the light of her actions last night, the Khatun of the Khaganate must be formally censured and informed that we reserve the right to take actions to bar her from the contest to tame the Golden Fawn if she continues to act in a way that disturbs the peace of the Hubs. Thirdly, that the Hero of Ages be dispatched to discover the identity of the maid-knight who attempted to lay hands on the Goddess herself. We thank you for taking the time to consult us and for blessing our efforts to come to consensus."
This is typical. The Civils are great for charity, construction, bureaucracy, anything that requires planning and hard work and big hearts, but they're spooked. And a spooked Civil is one that's going to minimize action, urge for patience, threaten vague consequences, and generally wait to be rescued. To be fair, Heron's usually pretty good at rescuing the church when necessary - and Civils tend to be in need of saving when she's around.
"I, in turn, thank you," Civelia says. The Sleepless Charm has been lying inert and dead in front of her for the past forty minutes, but now she gestures and draws it to float just above her palm. "Let us carry this out with all due determination- but there is one thing that I would have my dearest Hero do for us all before she pursues her Quest."
The Civils start to hum, looking for the right frequency to match the way that the charm spins. "There is a boy lost within Our world, ensnared within prophecy, bound by the will of the untouchable Stars. He must be fearful, desperate, lost, in need of solace." Chains- silver and gold- glow on the surface of the charm she is creating. "We shall not let this be so. We shall not. O Golden Fawn, for you alone I grant authority."
Injimo!
If you ever had to fight Civelia, which would require her to actually be willing to fight in the first place, this is how she would fight. You'd have to close in fast before she could command you to kneel, or command others to defend her on her behalf. But that would be a betrayal of the bond between the Goddess and her Hero. A white room fight.
The charm falls to the Goddess's palm as if too heavy to hang in the air any longer. Mana rises off it like smoke. It is a badge in the shape of a shield, one half silver and the other half ruby. The silhouette of a stag's head is done in onyx limned in gold, the tips of the antlers rising above the shield's rim.
This she offers to you. Its magic (and its Move) will not activate for you; it will be heavy and slightly too cool to the touch. "My most beloved champion, I ask you to deliver this to the Golden Fawn and teach him how to use it. By this gift he may dictate the contests of his taming. Once this is complete, seek out the maid who your handmaiden fought last night and learn her purpose."
Kalentia!
"This is the sickness," Fallen Far says, laying her head back down, though still trying to cover herself up. "Thellamie is the impurities of sickness. You are the infecting of passions." She says it like an obscenity, but not one directed at you. "The detestation of passions are the murdering of me. Your cha is the disordering of passions; the desiring of action both unbidding and unwanting. This is the cessation of my deserving: the nakedness and the wanting and the... and the..."
She sniffles. She raises her good hand to her face and turns it away from you, shoulders trembling.
"...I am not deserving the presence of her. I am the risk of infection, the punishment of passion. I am the murdering of her if she was present. But the wanting of her is, is, is. I am the impurity."
That's a familiar bit of self-loathing, isn't it? Even through the language barrier, that kind of raw you-are-perfect-and-I-am-garbage longing is... well, better that you're here than anyone else.