Thanqol

Fellowship: The Heart

Ailee lost her air of haughty superiority and faint glow of hellish energy in an instant - once again, she was all giggles at Lucien's dumb joke. Of all the figures in the world to appreciate bad puns, it was a true stroke of luck that Ailee was among them. "Stop, this is serious!" she said, taking Lucien by the wrist and starting to pull. "Come on, we need to find the others before they get transformed into dragon puppies or eaten by cosmic sin or something."

Fellowship: The Heart

"These two-bit meddlers are playing with forces they don't understand," Ailee grumbles under her breath with a divine lack of irony. The Squeakers? Those goofy parodies of true draconic power? Urgh it was like taking a shower when Jackdaw decided it was time to do the dishes - suddenly all the heat and energy went out of her hands and went off to accomplish something irrelevant. If all you eat is cup noodles you never need to wash the dishes, Jackdaw!

"I can fix this," she declares. "The problem is that there are two lightning rods here - me, and some idiot kobold with delusions. Other than Coleman. As long as that fool clings to the ankle of King Dragon I won't be able to stop this place from being rendered into a cosmic bonfire." She gets to her feet, looks Lucien square in the chest and feels more envy than she's accustomed to. "How did you... nevermind!" she said. "Listen! While you were fucking the elevator, did you happen to see any kobolds wearing stupid hats? Dragon mask, dressed like they'd just shoplifted from a counterfeit jewellery store? Also, friend Lucien, bee friends, bee friends, friend Lucien. This station is currently burning down because someone threatened something I decided was my friend so hopefully I won't need to make a second demonstration about why you should play nice together."

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

"What do you know?" she was really trying not to be snappy but it wasn't working. She was also doing her best not to acknowledge these further affronts to her mighty howling timber wolf dignity and the only way to do that was to say a bunch of words that she knew were wrong even as she said them. "You can only say that because of all the sacrifices I've already made. You've never been seriously hurt, you've never had to fight the High Gods, you get to dream that all of this can be resolved if we just tell people the truth. Do you know what teamwork means? Teamwork means I take the punches so you get to keep believing that."

[Reject influence: 4. Marking Guilty. In turn, Canada is trying to shift your Danger down and Mundane up.]

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

"I don't understand what everyone's so surly for," Canada grumbled, inaccurately. "I succeeded. I got the fleet key. I almost took down a High God. Working alone seems to have been working out for me. In fact, it's working together that -" she bit her lip in frustration as #MAT took another loud sip, "- seems to be the biggest thing slowing me down right now."

This is not a fair assessment. Her heart carries the turbulence of a meteor, and her emotions are far more complicated than this endorsement of mighty howling timber wolf ideology indicates. But she's been sitting in what she suspects is a time out corner being haranged by an irritating jerk all day with nothing to do but get ever more defensive.

[Marking Insecure]

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

"Ah," said Robena. Again she's caught by how much Constance has grown, how professional and how proud. Her burden must be weighty indeed for her to have developed such gravitas. She seems so far from the wonderful, horrid child she'd known all those years ago, as far as the caterpillar is from the butterfly.

It is not as though Robena considers herself childlike or naive. She has seen more of the world than the vast majority of Albion's people. She no longer chatters, no longer flinches with fear, and can broodfully stare a rooster into quiescence. But Constance has the manner of one who deals with the divine, and that is the one wisdom her pilgrimage did not give her.

"As you say, lady," she said, bowing her head slightly. "Do you wish to ride?" she asked, gesturing at her horse - an offer that prompted a protesting snort from Apricot at not having been consulted.

Breathless Dead

"Re... da... na..."

Hades looks down at you, a silhouette of icy white against the howling wind and black sky.

Above you stands the God of the Dead. Sapphire light surrounds him like a halo, the emergency lighting of the open shuttle ramp like gemstones in his crown. The red bow tie blossoms like a spurt of arterial blood, untroubled by the howling wind. Black vest, white sleeves, and so many sharp angles and joints.

Your fingers scrabble at the edge of the shuttle's ramp. Does he look at you with pity in that moment? Does he look at you with sadness? Does he look at you with forgiveness? You look at an expression of a man who has been suffocating for a hundred years, long enough to see his own pain wherever it occurs in the world. Is he going to reach down to lift you up?

A spear erupts through his chest. It passes through him in seeming slow-motion, a dividing line of black and white that divides the world into two. Down through the left, where all is black, cascades blood comprised of hearts. Down through the right, where all is white, the blood flows as diamonds. The spear itself is a spade, and the flesh of the God becomes clubs. The Lord of the Dead bleeds card suits as your fingers slip and you fall.

For a moment you hang in the air, caught perfectly bisected between white and black, surrounded by glittering hearts and pulsating diamonds. For an eternal moment you fall not through wind and air but through the realm of the divine.

The diamonds and hearts congeal into two blood-red shapes, standing on either side of the spear as though its narrow line was the curve of the earth. They are identical in shape and form but utter opposites in bearing. One figure moves with the slow and mathematical precision of thought, the other crouches and rages in the madness of the heart. They fight but an infinite line of perspective separates them; they fight as inverted reflections. They soar together towards the lurid painted eye that dominates the sky and pierce into it even as it transforms into a roulette wheel. The spear shatters against the cthonic eye, causing it to burst open like a punctured dam sending a waterfall of spades and clubs pouring down alongside you with the hearts and diamonds.

You fall through a waterfall of striped red and black, so thick and heavy it blocks all your vision of the wider world like curtains of velvet. Moving through this bisected reality are two figures, again equals and opposites - one of which is tall, slender, graceful and golden, the other is huge, ancient, bearded and silver. Through the blood of Hades, Nero and Molech duel - spear against spear, clashing and clattering together. The golden silhouette in a move so swift it doesn't even feel like a finisher pierces the silver through the chest and rips his heart from him. In the spray of vital blood, glittering hearts and pulsating diamonds, a new silhouette emerges - a slender woman with feline ears and a beautiful dress. Without missing a single beat of the battle's rhythm she spins her spear and drives it against the golden figure.

And then the waterfall passes you by, falling faster than you, faster than gravity, leaving you as a dress before the gaze of a lover. Revealed all around you are thousands of eyes hovering in the black. Each one is painted in colours so vivid and vital they seem to emanate light rather than reflect it. Each of the eyes comes with enormous invisible bulk, indistinguishable against the black, like the difference between the light of the anglerfish and its colossal mass.

Then the painted eyes blink. One by one, asynchronous, a flowing cascade of vivid light and darkness. The patterns of eyes become disrupted, impossible to keep track of, and then they all come together in the shape of an enormous skull comprised entirely of eyes. It grins at you through its polychromatic chaos and then opens its jaws to consume you whole.

And within its depths, Aphrodite walks towards you. Suit and tie and pistol in his hands and every intent to kill. He fires his shot and it pierces invincible skin and lodges deep. You collapse to your knees and upon velvet, the fallen velvet curtain-carpet of Hades' blood. You kneel and look up at the distant figure on the golden throne as glittering hearts stain your hands and drip from your chest. You cannot perceive her face because the sun hangs behind her head like a halo, like a crown.

And the figure on the throne throws back her head and laughs in the voice of a woman, a man, a girl, an elder, and an entire live studio audience. She opens her eyes and they are painted and glowing. She stands and the black flesh of Hades falls from her in a sooty rain of spades, revealing robes and mirrored chrome and a reflective smooth black visor - a vision of a god who had never visited Tellus. And all around you ten thousand more painted eyes open.

And as they do, so do yours. The vision of the divine has seemingly come to an end but the world is no less strange for having done so. Damage your Sense as you grapple with your vision.

*

You saw Princess Epistia's throw, Alexa. You saw how Ares guided it just so. You saw how it somehow brought down the entire armoured assault carrier in sheets of impossible flames, the victim of divine improbability. As you fell you saw how it crashed into a dozen others of its kind, bringing down painted flying ships in waterfalls of flame. Such disastrous, random power has never been allied to you before and it is as fearsome a thing as being its foe.

You fell together with Redana through a sky that burned, through an impossible tactical situation. You fell towards the Palace, that militarized mountain range. You fell towards an arena that had impossibly been constructed seemingly for the sole purpose of catching you. You fell towards a soft landing on soft sands, but still you catch Redana moments before impact. You hold her as a princess and look around you - at stands filled with ten thousand waiting battle constructs, each with painted eyes, and an Imperial box held by the most beautiful ##most-##beautiful ##Authorization codes transmitted. ##IMperial authority present. Desiiiist from $$independent thought -

You cannot perceive Bella through that halo, but you know this feeling. This is an Imperial level cyber-attack, cracking into your skull and trying to force you to your knees. But you were made to fight pretenders and stand more chance of resisting than these mere brutes - roll to Overcome.

*

You fall blind, Vasilia. Visions of the divine miracle and mundane apocalypse are both denied to you by sheltering wings. You fall blind, breaking and smashing, feeling the will of Ares through the language of bones and bruises. A tearing smash and sudden loss of control can only be the loss of a wing. It is a miracle that these impacts have not yet stopped you, but on and on you fall.

And then you hit the water.

It pours in through the open cargo ramp, washing the broken machine clutching to the front of your ship away from the view screen at last. You stare up through cracked glass and shallow blue water at a marble cathedral unlike anything you have ever seen.

The Emperor Molech allowed himself a single pleasure: the baths. The Baths of Baradissar were legendary for being the most complete and spectacular in the known galaxy. Water was tithed from every world of the empire to fill the most complete and spectacular range of water effects ever constructed. It is like you are within a cathedral, a strip mall, a beach resort. Enormous sweeping columns of white marble hold multiple layers of variably shaped pools, baths, hot tubs. In the distance an artificial ocean roars and laps in waves of perfect surf. The water that is filling your ruined shuttle is warm and gently steaming, tinted with cobalt. Red and white striped ice-cream kiosks dot the landscape, old rattling boilers and artificial suns, stained glass windows, interior and exterior spaces built as vertically as horizontally all below the massive broken glass roof from whence you came. Around the edges of the pool wait machine butlers, ready with hot towels and fizzy refreshments, and all their eyes are painted. And in the distant rooftops you perhaps perceive a movement and rustle of feathers.

Damage your Grace from the impacts of the crash, and your shuttle will no longer serve you.

*

Bella, you sit as the Emperor Molech sat. Surely this is not hubris? He was, after all, a lesser Emperor as you said - and a mere Praetor of Nero is surely an equal of the Emperor of Baradissar. The Imperial Box blurts broken telemetry at you - the constant flow of data that would allow an Emperor to command the galaxy even while enjoying the games. The signals are broken and wretched - fully half of the galaxy is listed as missing - but there is still such power in this ruined apparatus of command, if you had time to appreciate it. Instead your time seems perhaps better spent appreciating the Emperor's own personal stockpile of wine, provided to you by servile machine intelligences.

"The Usurper comes, Emperor," murmured the choir. "The Betrayer comes. The Hounds come. Ah! The Hounds! Fear the Hounds of Ceron! They howled and they crossed the galaxy on chains of lightning! They shall come for the Usurper, at her beck and call! They shall come to rescue her and you shall not be safe until they are defeated upon the field!"

Explosions shake the sky above. You have never seen such heavenly violence before. A war between unpowered atmospheric craft is a clumsy disaster and you can see the heavens come down in curtains of fire.

"They come!" wail the choir.

And from the heavens themselves falls Redana. Exactly as promised. Exactly as required. You spoke your will, and the machines made it so. You feel the rush of a promise fulfilled, an order obeyed. Already the Kaeri guards around you are readying themselves to spring into the Arena and rush the Princess - but instantly, the machines have moved between you and them.

"Desist!" blares their leader, that fluidly moving dancer-machine with the backpack showing a cute little cartoon Artemis. "Their presence here is a gift from the Laughing God. This gift must be repaid. The Dance must continue, or they will turn their favour from us."

"The Betrayer stands before you," says another machine from besides you. Its voice is far less musical, far more subtle, like a persuasive whisper. It is a hollow, floating thing of chainmail and electro-capacitators and a single glassy eye lens. "She is the best of us, our champion, our leader. She is the consuming flame of war who will undo any soldier who comes against her. She cannot be fought. She must not be fought!"

"The Dance must continue!" said the leader-machine, and you had the strange impression this was some alien argument between these two constructs. They look to you, as though for ruling.

Fellowship: The Heart

Ailee knew a thing or two about negotiations. In particular she'd read Raptor Jvae's How To Extract Untold Wealth From Your Colonial Possessions - the secrets being, naturally, the intrinsic superiority of modern civilized magic over ancient cultural traditions ('we see further than them because we have eaten the brains of Grand Jelt's giants'), the importance of establishing dominance ('placement on the food chain is a matter of attitude!') and when to take a break from negotiations ('home owners tend to be more eager to sell after you have burned their house to the ground'). This seemed very much a chapter three kind of negotiation.

So she sits down in a perfect meditative posture, so calm and clean that an ordinary observer would assume that this was some manner of trick and there was no way the vice mouse could be so tranquil even for a moment. But Ailee was nothing if not honest when it came to her emotions and the abrupt serenity as she calmed her mind was genuine - it would have to be. One needed to be able to focus if one was to wield such powers as she did without incident.

She tapped into the currents of magic, the flows between the hive and Wormwood station, and the mystic bonds that tied her to her friends. And assuming nothing happened that disturbed her perfect calm this too would go off without incident.

[Look Closely: 6. Tell me about my friends. How can I help them? How can I hurt them? I find this answer out the hard way.]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

At no point did you pull that switch. Being ready to was a clever move - the action of an engineer, the kind of thing that would have gotten you a precious nod of acknowledgement from Iskarot. But there was no reason for you to pull it, no crash and detonation and shattered glass and wave of toxic fumes.

And yet when you look at your hand holding the lever it's in the downmost position anyway. The door blares as it opens, as the howling wind blasts into the cabin and every unattended object is hurled about. It takes all your strength to hold tight to where you are, even as the boarding ramp lowers to provide you with a view of a massive eye painted like a butterfly's wing in yellow and purple and black.

At no point did you let go of your handhold and yet the next thing you know your fingers have just scrabbled onto the edge of the drop ramp as you almost went hurling into the void. It will take all you have to hold your grip and not look at the shape of whatever it is is looking at you with that illustrated eye.

Roll to Overcome if you wish to keep your grip.

Vasilia!

You don't remember shutting the door to the cockpit, but you did - you even wrenched the handle off so you couldn't easily open it again. You're not clear why that was the course of action you took rather than going to rescue Redana, and Dolce is looking at you with evident confusion. There's no time for that, though, because the machine on the window is banging for your attention and once it has it it touches three fingers to its shoulder in what looks more like the charades code for four words than anything.

It holds a finger for the first word, then it points at its chest with two thumbs, and then expands the gesture around - us, we? Two fingers, second word. It... strikes a pose straight out of a children's film series, Princess Deadlift, doing the flex combined with two-finger point that she does when it's time to get serious. Determination? Conviction? Willpower? Three fingers, and then it places one palm flat upwards, and uses the other two to mime a ballet dancer with its fingers, dancing about and performing kicks.

We... are very serious about dancing? We will dance?

Fascinating probably but while this has been happening you've been without visuals on the exterior for the better part of a minute and you could fly into a mountain at any second. This is a serious problem and playing charades with an insane robot doesn't seem likely to help. If you want to straight up fly blind through this then you'll need to Overcome.

Alexa!

This is not how war should be.

Athena is there besides you, spear drawn, shield raised, but there is no advice from her, no muttered tactical assessment, not even commentary on your own stance. Her eyes are darting about looking for a threat as the shuttle turns to madness. Vasilia just slammed the door to the cockpit shut and locked it and Redana almost got blown out of the door that she must have mistakenly opened and there is an enormous eye staring at you through that loading dock.

"Sylica pattern assault carrier," Athena breathes suddenly, more shocked than you've ever heard her - but as she says it so you see it. The visual effect of the eye is incredibly disorienting but once you change your perception to focus on the hard lines and shape of the frontal ram you can see that it's not the mad eye of some god but a spectacular illustration painted onto the front of a combat shuttle. You know the Sylicas, Molech made a billion of them, huge and ungainly aircraft designed for lunatic mid-air boarding actions. You spent a lot of time aboard those in the olden days.

It's up to you where you put your focus - but if you assist either of the others they can roll with Hope. You might also want to do something about Princess Epistia who is lining up a javelin toss directly at the centre of the eye and you're pretty sure you see Ares telling her to do it. You're fairly certain that means that toss is not going to de-escalate this situation.

Bella!

Captain Lorventi clicked her beak and depowered her halberd. The cut about patience landed - glancing around you can see that Lorventi was the only one of her kind who seemed emotional and flustered in this moment. "Of course. Praetor." she said stiffly, trying to feign professionalism.

Strange. She's so obviously a highly strung mess out here in field when she was so restrained and focused on the ship. Is she actually new to this? Is there something about this situation that is triggering some phobia or trauma? Is it actually Mynx in disguise? Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to matter - she's coherent enough to perform her function.

"Praetor," blurts the machine, rising to its feet in a motion far too graceful for something that spoke like an invalid. "The Laughing God has told us of your coming. You are to dance the role of the Emperor. And so we will honour you and obey you in all things." It - she? - fell back to one knee in another fluid motion, one hand to her breast, the other extended out behind her. Still a bow, but the bow of a theatre performer this time - an act, as well as an act of respect.

"And we salute you!" blasted the crowd of machines in unison, so suddenly it made Lorventi jump and ignite her halberd again. They all raised their fists to the side of their heads, or whatever passed for it. The sound of these voices made a machine symphony that was somehow beautiful.

"We who dance the dance of death!" cried the speaker-machine, voice starting to flow, somehow finding music to it. Or do you have that backwards? Was its speech halting because it was trying to speak instead of sing?

"We who dance salute you!" cried the machines again.

"We who have died ten thousand times will die for you ten thousand more!" sang the leader.

"We who died salute you!" came the choir's refrain.

"All is ready!" sang the leader. "The Usurper comes! The Betrayer comes! The Hounds come! They come riding the lightning, racing against time itself!"

"We who have become death salute you!" roared the choir.

The leader bowed to you again, as fluidly and quickly as mercury. A zephyr gesture and a snap of her fingers and her choir - who had subtly positioned themselves through the performance - lift and haul slabs of stone away. As they do they revealed a hidden staircase, concealed underneath the otherwise identical marble of the rooftop. It was furnished for an Emperor, with carpet of soft blue velvet, and lead downwards into the heart of the palace.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Robena and Apricot are in this moment a single creature, bonded by the perfect harmony that unites the most legendary of riders. Together they stare in wistful, forlorn longing at the festival - at the dancers, at the bar, but most yearningly at the little store that sells honey-dipped apples. It is the kind of stare that does indeed merit some ridiculously overwritten commentary about tears, eyelashes and the contemplation of injustice.

But they have a duty. And so the sweet-toothed duo give a synchronized sigh before Robena mutters some sound of acknowledgement and leads her horse away to re-unite with Constance.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

"It wasn't you who killed me," Canada murmurs.

She can't shake the words out of her head, Marianne's or her response. It makes sense, doesn't it? She's dead, dead, dead. Her heart doesn't have anything left in it but pain, and so receiving pain is the natural state of being. When she stands she's still so straight and tall despite the bruises and cuts all along her back that would have rendered a normal person a wreck. She just doesn't feel it any more, like a fish doesn't feel the water.

All that courage. All that conviction when she stood up to face Shamash. It didn't seem like courage now. Just the absence of fear. The inability to feel it. That's not what's making her shake.

Why had she said it? It had been so simple when everyone had hated her. Now how was she supposed to redeem herself, when even her sacrifice would leave someone sad?

When Étoile pulls her forwards she almost falls. She almost lets herself acknowledge all the pain, the unexpressed and entombed enormity of it. She catches herself halfway, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. She had to carry the weight of the world, how was she supposed to carry herself at the same time?

She follows.