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In Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol) → 2 mos ago Forum: 1x1 Roleplay
Edits made!

I swapped Ko Mao to a fighter pilot rather than power armour.

So when I'm talking about Goetic sorcery, I'm not talking about a fantasy wizard, I'm talking about IRL wizards. Goetia is a real magical tradition dating back to ancient prehistory, practiced by real figures like Alistair Crowley. Goetia is, among other practices, about defining aspects of your personality as daemons, meditating until you can imagine themselves separate from you, and then fighting and binding them. Think of it like cultivating a multiple personality disorder so that instead of being angry for no reason you can say, 'ah the daemon of Wrath is possessing me, I need to cast them out'.

Lu Xing is an AI whose brain architecture is built around doing that extremely quickly and easily. Her power can be thought of as being able to be in a dozen places at once, operating a dozen pieces of heavy machinery at the same time.
In Return to Thellamie → 2 mos ago Forum: Tabletop Roleplay
Cair!

Man, this guy had some sass to him? When had that been allowed to happen?? She'd been operating under the impression that Civilia's divinity was sustained by feeding on the sense of humour of her followers. Maybe she had lost her appetite lately? Cair made a note to check it out[1].

[1] Cair has tried several times down the centuries to cheer up Civelia, all operating under this assumption regarding her eating habits. The process always goes similarly; Cair starts the worst comedy routine she can concoct, and the Goddess gives her a look communicating exactly how Not Amused she is. Cair then feels so self aware about her bad jokes that she stops doing them, then takes that as delighted confirmation that Civelia just ate her sense of humour, and happily departs after declaring mission accomplished.

The consequence, though, was that she had to double down. Not even the flicker of a smile or offense, just Pure Hero - this guy was flexing on her and it'd be rude to interrupt him. "How many maids were there? And what did they take? And any notes on their dresses? This sounds like an undercover job and I need to get the style right."
In Breathless Dead → 2 mos ago Forum: Tabletop Roleplay
Around other Azura worlds and installations, there is protocol. There are rituals to perform, soldiers inspections and the clear movement of the security apparatus. They dressed it up, drowned in the light of glory, but the wise sages of the Endless Azure Skies always understood that the architecture of military splendor and authority was but a simpleton's vision of what Heaven should look like.

Birds approach the Plousios. 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them.

The flock orbits the outer atmosphere of the Skies, the mass of an entire star reconstituted into feathers and claws. Each one is a riot of powder blues touching almost on white, deepening with vivid stripes of green blues that set them apart from the Skies. Their wingspans are vast and they touch them into the ring-shaped formations of the Grav-Rail to accelerate themselves along the twisted gravitational ley-lines that interweave the Skies. The Plousious approaches the Skies as an ugly and ancient thing, a brutal warship from the time when strength was measured in rectangles. Its armour plating can survive direct impact with a planet, its construction so powerful that it can endure the depths of a star.

It unfolds like an origami crane beneath the claws of the Skies.

Every panel is ripped and torn from its place. Fusion welds are undone by laser beams that glitter from eye lenses. The hull is breached and fresh air rushes in, and so do the birds.

Ancient cisterns are cut open and erased. Old skeletons still in cursed embrace are boiled down to their molecular components. The Engine is disconnected from its housing with delicate claws and lifted gently above the ship. Clothes are torn from bodies, personal possessions are ripped apart, everything that made this proud and ancient ship what it was is destroyed utterly. No fires could stop this, no blade, no rage; the birds undo every strand of inorganic matter as surely as a tidal wave washes over a sandcastle.

And then they rebuild.

Everything in the Skies must be worthy of the Skies, and so they reweave the Plousios anew. No longer the squat, lumpen warship of inert metal, now it is a delicate and unbreakable thing of sweeping arches and white crystal, of ultratensile fibers and glittering feathers. They weave clothing around protesting bodies, dresses and gowns and vests inspired by the ones their guests had arrived with but better in ways that could not even be imagined. They inject the stellar virus that makes the Engine burn with blue light and place it like a diadem atop the ship's crown. They rebuild the skeletons, but arranged in harmonious glyphic shapes that they might not cause a single flicker of dissonance with the patterns of the Skies.

They rebuild it all blue.

Some visitors harbour delusions of individuality when approaching the Skies. The Publica dresses in red as a show of defiance, the colour of blood, suggesting that the glory of the Endless Azure Skies takes second place behind the demands of life and suffering. A futile defiance, made by those who do not comprehend the scope of this vision. The right to choose your own colours is stripped away, as an adult might take a stone from a child's mouth. You are all recast in blue, and are so much better for it.
In Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol) → 2 mos ago Forum: 1x1 Roleplay
There's an initial three - take a look, tell me what you think and if I'm in the right ballpark!
In Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol) → 2 mos ago Forum: 1x1 Roleplay
Soldier



Special Forces

Civilian

In Sunshards: Chaos Sequence → 2 mos ago Forum: 1x1 Roleplay
Berserker looked over at the Labour Market.

Many people found themselves over time picking up roles in the community. Maybe someone had started cleaning an old bridge, or putting out water for the local cats, or maintaining mystical wards over a stream connected to the Underworld. First it was fun, and then it was a habit, but one day it was time to leave it all behind. So the task was written out on paper - sometimes an entire manual depending on the complexity - and placed in the Labour section of the Dumping Festival. Sometimes there were photographs, sometimes the person was on hand to walk the new apprentice through it, or sometimes you were told about a run down little farm in the hills and given a front door key and cryptic warning about 'the ghost'.

The Civil Servants were out in force in this section, nearly twenty of them, wearing their brilliantly embroidered blue and golden robes and hats, contemplating everything and asking questions. Their presence was at least a little bit intimidating, for they held the power of Conscription - the power to outright tell someone to perform a certain task, perhaps backed up with a geas or curse for the recalcitrant. Not all adventures were voluntary, and sometimes the material world came calling when a Civil Servant knocked on your door with a mission from the province. Sometimes things needed to be done despite no one being interested in them, sometimes people needed to be shaken out of harmful or stagnant routines, and sometimes the kind of utopian tyrant who climbs the ladder of power wants to make the world a better place wants to try something new and everyone has to go along with their experiment.

Generally, they wait until the end of the day and pick up things that have been overlooked and do assignments. Sometimes they have a vision and move sooner. And yes, the Civil Servants absolutely sometimes decide that certain people should be dating and instruct them to begin a relationship until at least next year's festival. It works out more often than you'd think - some people are much better at being in a relationship than starting a relationship.

Berserker watches all of this and considers. Then she shakes her head mutely at Katherine. Instead she walks decisively over to the stand of a young boy where the sign reads SCARECROW DUTY. In crude handwriting, the child has written 'please keep the birds off the lawn i want to be a horse racer instead'. He quails as Berserker, a giant of black steel, towers over him (inasmuch as she can tower over anybody), and takes the notice in her mailed fist.

She looks at a distant mountain, and taps her finger pensively against her armour. She does not know if she will have time, but she had long wanted to see if she could learn to keep swallows away.
In Return to Thellamie → 2 mos ago Forum: Tabletop Roleplay
Cair!

Each of them has a different angle on the Princess Heron's disguise - Sayanastia's mythic disaffection, Injimo's barely restrained violence, Rurik's dutiful protocol, Tsane's brilliant inspiration. Cair, in her heart of hearts, thinks that they're all shit at it. They all treat Heron as something other than a person.

Because the Hero of Ages is a person. She has a deep sense of humour - sometimes expressed through joyfully oblivious compliance with stupid instructions, sometimes through insanely over-engineered solutions to basic problems, sometimes just through a general gremlin energy. Injimo might have spent her entire life locked in sword-duels with Heron, but the two of them didn't have a single secret handshake. Cair and Heron had four[1]. They actually vibed together, and she'd always thought the others were to blame for not making the attempt.



She was wearing the Heron disguise now. Pointless not to. Insane to try going without it - she'd just be stuck in non stop 'but thou must summon thy manager' loops. Would be nice if she had some backup on it, though, but nobody was talking to her right now.

"What do you think we should do about it?" she asked. Heron's sense of humour wasn't to smart mouth, quip or argue with people no matter how stuffy. Hers was an approach that required restraint and absolute deadpan severity. So she kept any hint of a smile out of her face and delivered her line with all the gravitas that her outfit - a dart board face mask surrounding her face like a halo, on top of a red and black striped dress-cape with another full sized wooden dartboard hanging over her chest, attached with mithryl links - would allow.
In Sunshards: Chaos Sequence → 2 mos ago Forum: 1x1 Roleplay
A wise man once said that his favourite thing was getting dumped.

When you've been dumped then you've got unlimited license to Be Dramatic. "How are you?" "AWFUL. I just got DUMPED." - and whoever you're talking to will have their face crumple in sympathy. You can Wallow. You can Grieve. You can stand up on stage and let your feelings out in a furious karaoke ballad and every one in the crowd will Get It. There are so many complicated, powerful feelings to work through in Getting Dumped - the twin enlightenments of 'I will become better' and 'fuck you'. It's liberation, and like all liberations it is both harsh and joyful.

So why save that feeling for a relationship ending? Human beings are inherently animistic, and that means that we form bonds with objects as readily as we do with people - and those bonds are no more guaranteed to be positive than our bonds with people. Perhaps rather than adapting to the clunk and ache of your car's gear shifting to third it has become a gradual annoyance that has made curse words part of your driving experience. Maybe you haven't read a book in six months because you're halfway through a turgid and uninspired volume that you feel like you need to finish first. Perhaps there's a little goat path through the lawn where people regularly cut across at a direct angle rather than following the trail of concrete. Patches develop over broken things naturally, but every year at the Dumping Festival it's time to rip those patches off and fix the underlying problems.

Part of it is the market; the huge open-air garage sale, the trash-and-treasure where people have bought out all of their material possessions that no longer spark joy. Sometimes it's racecars, or houses, or pet elephants that turned out to be more trouble than necessarily predicted. Sometimes it's more conceptual; photographs, mementos, trophies, the physical things that make memories. Another part of it is, of course, Breakup Bridge. It's a comfort to a lot of people coming off the back of a failed relationship to find themselves in a crowd of people in similar situations. Even if a relationship has been over for months, most former couples still find the time to make it official by leaving in different directions over the Bridge.

But for every moment of someone getting rid of something or someone, there's a moment of something or someone being picked up. There's no better dating mixer than the crowd outside Breakup Bridge - everyone is guaranteed single, and everyone has something in common. There's no better place to fall in love with a new object than seeing it on the mat in front of someone who cannot love it any more. Desire is often a transitory thing; for every love that can deepen into the ocean's eternity, there's one that will glance off still water like a skipping stone. So, every year everyone airs out all of their dusty rooms, picks up the broken vacuum cleaners they were holding onto, or forgotten pool pump, or old allan keys for furniture assembled in the distant past. They let light into the dark corners by placing everything that had grown dusty into the open. An exorcism of possession, beneath the light of a single sun.
In Breathless Dead → 2 mos ago Forum: Tabletop Roleplay
Vesper!

After so long not having her shit together, after all the pain caused by not having her shit together, the least she could do was have her shit together.

The thoughts still emerge from her head, the glyphic patterns of cascading lightning bolts. Every idea she has arcs up and out away from her, forming a crystalline digital lattice, expanding through space. And whenever they grow too large or terrible, Gemini severs them at the root with a swing of that silver sword. She can't stop her thoughts from spiraling on her own, not at this stage of her ascent, so she relies on steady hands and sharp edges to keep her in check. It's a bit like a haircut.

"We've got some distance from Liquid Bronze," she said. One of the neat things about having her thoughts visible in this way was that she could now use them as visual illustrations of concepts, pointing out the whorls and intersections of the pattern to mark clearly each step in logic. "But he'll still pursue us. Every eventuality has him cross our paths before Gaia, and even the scenarios where we win come at horrible cost. So - cut here, please," she said, indicating a branching lattice that was turning into an endless re-run of how to say as many emotionally meaningful things to all her friends as possible before they all died. Slice! It was gone, and she breathed easily for a moment.

She was going to have to learn how to use that herself. If she could? It didn't feel like the sort of thing that you could use while being alone, but still...

"The problem is that the Biomancer-General is operating on a different conceptual scale from us. He seems ridiculous and monstrous but none of that is by accident. He's a specialist. Smart enough to solve the problem presented to him, stupid enough to not pose a meaningful threat to the Skies should they decide to remove him. And in that is his downfall. Just as we could no more challenge him than an ant an anteater, he could no more challenge the Skies than an anteater a combine harvester. He represents a dirty, messy, unpleasant job that many in the Skies have gone out of their way to avoid thinking about even as their entire society relies upon it. If they saw him on their doorstep they'd be shocked, recoil, call it dirty and ugly and even evil. And so they'd undo him, and call it good, even as the machinery of Biomancy worked without hesitation to promote someone to his old position."

She tapped the branch. Even here, her thoughts ran blue.

"So we go to Capitas. The center of the galaxy. The place where the Endless Azure Skies isn't just a fantasy. An in-atmosphere star system, the system with ninety-nine planets and nine hundred moons. Where every blade of grass, every mountain peak, every waterfall and deep-ocean grain of sand has been placed for maximum effect. The seat of the Shayoshant and the ultimate work of civilization. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, the most dangerous place in the galaxy."

Here the blue deepened, brightened, every branch of the thought pattern becoming hypersaturated.

"The Sirens of ancient myth have nothing on Capitas. It is the throne of Desire, the garden of Aphrodite, and everything about it is literally hypnotizing. You could spend a hundred years exploring the exquisite design decisions on a single beach and not be bored for a second of it. Luckily, most of us aren't Azura, and the Azura we do have seems... different?" she touched the purple quirk that represented Dyssia. "Which means we're not totally defenseless, but even so we're still going to have to take precautions. I recommend, as a minimum, that each of us turns off one of our senses entirely. Taste, touch, sight - it doesn't matter, the Skies are designed to interface with all of them. With something missing it'll still be the greatest experience of your life but it won't blow out your entire soul. Hopefully. That secures us against half of the danger."

She smiled ruefully, and touched the blade of red amidst the blue. "Because the thousandth planet of Capitas is not part of the Skies at all. It is the Nemesis World, the seat of the Shogun and the legions of Ceron. The Ceronians are not a large species and there are not enough of them to control as much of the galaxy as they do. Rather than spreading themselves thin, the only Ceronians who leave Nemesis are scouts and rangers, stealth ships identifying new battlegrounds. When they have located a hostile planet they infiltrate it and perform in secret the Bloodmark Ritual. And then, when the Shogun decrees it, Nemesis activates and teleports the entire planet into Capitas."

She couldn't quite keep the awe from her voice. There were miracles in the galaxy, but there was also the direct intervention of a God.

"A world that had considered itself safe and secure in the laws of physics suddenly finds itself billions of light years away. Before they can react their defensive networks come under immediate assault. Drop pods rain from the sky. Ceronians arrive howling across the entire world and take it by storm. The Shogun lands personally to lead her armies and see this new world burn. And then, once it is bought to its knees, the wolves return to orbit and take their positions again. The destroyed planet is returned to its original location as smouldering wreckage, and the next Bloodmarked world is teleported into the heart of Nemesis. Through this mechanism the Wolves of Ceron live in eternal bliss, endlessly fighting through the skies of Heaven itself, transcending mere martial arms and becoming artists of violence beyond compare."

She tapped this bloody branch. It was the only part of her thoughts that continued outwards. "Nemesis is not there by choice of the Skies. It is an imposition and an insult, an eternal war corrupting the heart of their perfect peace - but War and Desire have long been lovers and the match isn't as intolerable as the Azura complain. But if we are on the Nemesis World when it is teleported away from Capitas then we can escape the reach of the Skies forever."
In Return to Thellamie → 3 mos ago Forum: Tabletop Roleplay
Giving the task of repairing damage to Sayanastia, the Dark Dragon, the Scream of Destruction, was soon revealed as one of the silliest ideas to go through the head of a sillyhead.

Not at first, though. Sayanastia seemed to be taking a perverse pleasure in her clean-up duties. When had she ever been asked to fix anything before? The shadows that clung to her damaged scales took on the aspect of frills and ruffs, and she began diligently clearing rubble and redirecting waterflow with what seemed like full maidlike obedience. It is unclear if she intended to channel it all directly into the ventilation system, if it was ill fortune, inexperience, or if it is simply the nature of the Dark Dragon to destroy what she touches. Immediately upon becoming aware of the issue Rurik drives her hissing away by firing Light Arrows at her.

This leaves Kalentia, Cair and Tsane standing indoors, water pouring from the air ducts, holding mops with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

"Okay, girls!" said Kalentia. "You know what my parents always did whenever they had a fight? They worked on something hard together! It helps remind us that we can rely on each other!"
"I did not sign up to mop floors, and especially not ceilings," said Tsane. "Being a handmaiden - the most physically demanding job implicit in that is painting the Princess' nails, not fixing plumbing issues like some kind of maid."
"Didn't you get skateboard kicked by a maid a few days ago?" said Cair without thinking.
"I have," said Tsane, who was extremely not mad, "developed a spell to ensure that sort of thing never happens again. If you would like I can demonstrate on you."
"H-hey, hey, girls, remember this is a team building exercise. Injimo's working really hard to stop the flooding so we need to work hard too, okay?"
"Why are we trying to build a team, again?" said Tsane. "We're here to pay off one of Heron's debts. We're not a team, we're the subcontractors who keep her credit in the black."
"A healthy credit score is important -" started Cair.
"Yeah, Cair, I know," said Tsane. "But let's not be naive about it. This is an important part of making sure the Hero of Ages comes into the world with allies and nobody tries to both-sides her and the Dark Dragon. We're doing our part for the unity of the land and the future of Thellamie. It's important work. But we aren't important for doing it. This is community service, plain and simple, and there's no reason to pretend we're anything cooler than that."
"Oh," said Kalentia, who had been operating under the impression that being a Handmaiden was very cool, actually.
"Anyway I'm going to see if I can figure out a spell to fix this at scale," said Tsane, turning her back. "Good luck with the mops or whatever."
Kalentia watched her go hopelessly.
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