TokyoPewPew

Regalia

The luckiest were a mile inland, filming the lanterns and the comets and the sunrise from their third-story tenement windows; beyond earshot of the gunfire, the screams of the devoured inaudible. They learned of the disaster through the blaring of a radio, or the impersonal, flat-cadenced droning of a TV reporter standing in front of an emergency broadcast, scanlines striped like neon seersucker; any live feeds too shaky, too frantic to convey the gruesome details. They went back to bed, or back to making their morning chai who didn't traipse over to a neighbor's shed, or a cellar, or whatever door of whose locks and hinges they were so assured. They waited for the prank-drill-false-alarm to be over so they could return to their rubbery eggs and their weekend morning reruns, blithely oblivious to the devastation wrought mere streets away.

Next in fortune were those standing the food lines; and waiting to use the bathrooms and taking photographs at the shrines and souvenir stalls. Though they, themselves, had heard the screaming, seen the gushering of the water as heaven's fires struck the harbor, Etroi had seen fit to spare them the sight of bodies washing ashore, chewed and broken. Pink scum buoyant atop frothing, blood-thick tides. Tasting the panic of the throngs, the hired guns were quick to take positions along the dunes, forming the first meat-wall between hunter and prey; the horde and its panicked, bleating food. And the Regalia, already mobbed by their camera crews and their gormless, adoring lickspittles—to them the stragglers flocked all the fiercer, trampling and crushing each other to have their guarded place at a god-chosen's side. Yes. Comfort and consolation abound for those who just minutes ago had been stuffing their mouths with deep-fried sugar, and their brains with carnival games. The assurance that they were important, and precious, and cared for—the perverse pleasure of watching others die to save them—for some these flowed bountifully. But only some.

What comforts, then, to those treading the harbor, clamoring the beach?—with no clean distance whereby to observe the horrors as bystanders, and no sweet words from a do-nothing Dominant cooed into their ears, no healing residues pumped into their capillaries—and still worse, no way to reach these things except over the piles of the writhing dead, and through the knee-high, brackish blood-water, and over the no-man's-land of the horror-scuttled sands—what had they done to deserve such disownment where others had been claimed, why abandon them when so many others were rescued? Gaia's chosen burgeoning a green sanctuary up from beneath the asphalt, and stroking the fur of so many of her huddled children; and before her, the cool composure of the gunmen; but before them the featureless sand, utterly devoid of shelter, a hundred feet which may just as well have been a league......No avenue existed for these forsaken souls but to run regardless of the futility. And run they did, hunted and swarmed, dragged down by two, then four, then ten of those scuttling horrors snipping their hamstrings and Achilles heels first, then their carotids.

What solace to the fleeing, the terrified, the chased, the felled, the eaten-alive?—that one or two wayward Regalia dashed for the waterline to have the glorious moment they'd thirsted for?—that the meteors had to stop falling, that eventually the heavens would run dry of torments to cast down on them and the pitiable earth?—or that a lone woman stood the sands, her sword floating from her scabbard, her resolve silent, furious, and unquenchable?

Her skin a-clad up to the elbows in liquid metal, the stuff condensated to her hands like a quicksilver dew, she continued to pray. To invoke. A human wick dipped in molten steel, every moment it solidified thicker, further up her extremities. It reached up to her hips then, and the sockets of her arms, clasping, clenching, biting her flesh in its austere embrace.

From the urgency in her eyes and the trembling in her uplifted hands the fleeing masses knew her for an ally. No one would have had reason for such fear who had played a hand in this—whose thousands of ravenous allies slithered up the beach. They fled and they knew not to stray too near, lest the imminent residue slowed their escape, or the radius of some devastating attack expanded beyond her control; still, they fled past her, behind her, wanting her between them and the sea. Some drew near enough in their flight to see her painted face in detail. Her tears resembled the hellish waters from which they had managed to trudge: salt diluted with blood.

And still that massive sword hummed in the air, wielded by a hand immaterial, or perhaps by naught; and any moment then she should have reached to pluck it from the air, or it should have returned, terrier-like, to her expecting hand, that she-knight who by then was almost entirely metal, with but a face emerged from between the two hinged jaws of her helm and gorget, and a naked breastbone around which the ethereal armor continued to close—spreading across her like a mildew. But then it happened. The slender blade, that curved sliver of shadesteel, a god's toenail clipping given hilt, yawed in the air. It aimed true. And thrust forth by some unseen power, it impaled itself through the Regalia's spine, through her heart, out the other side of her shattered sternum. She stumbled forward a step, blinking at the protrusion in her chest which dripped and glistened with her life-stuffs, gasping for air which leaked out of her ere it could quench the burning in her lungs. Her last breath creaked out of her like the snapping of a dry branch over one's knee; and her final strength, failing in her legs, sent her plummeting to the sands.

Usually Beth died in callous silence, but this time—this time as the darkness swallowed in around her she was sure she heard screaming. The screams of those who, if but for a single moment, had placed their faith in her. It was oddly comforting.

Witnesses knew not what to believe. Had a Regalia just taken her own life, devoured by her own despair? Had she had her own powers sabotaged, subverted, turned against her? Or more frightening still: had she just lost an unseen battle against a hidden foe, invisible hands knotted and wresting for control over the vicious weapon? Either way, writhing and sputtering her last was the woman in the eerie corpsepaint, her defiance brief and futile, her little body draining upon the blade like a tuna bled for market. Those few who had believed in her fully abandoned her then, kicking sand into her face in their mad, desperate scramble up the dunes, even stampeded over her, anything, everything to escape before those beaks had scraped her clean, and those glassy eyes had scanned the trees, and those chitinous legs had clicked forth in pursuit of their next course in a voracious, neverending feast.

They had reached the body before long, washing over her like a ruptured seawall, like bursted riverbanks. Few people spared her any thought by then, enraptured by their terror, frenzied and bestial. But those who did, in a final gesture of mercy, now wished her dead; as the carapaces mounted her body, and the mandibles set to work, rasping, ripping.

But something was not yet dead beneath that mound of claws and teeth and stomachs.

Two, three, six concussive blasts launched the insectoids skyward, and skidding across the sands, and in all directions, their bodies shredded into a strange, fine dust, their legs curled up dead against their ruptured thoraxes. And in the same spot as where the girl had fallen rose something else, like a black flame reborn from her pale ashes. Something immense and hulking. Something unwhole.

Still sloughing pieces of her from its many orifices—bits of hair and lip and half an ear leaking from its helm, skin shedding placenta-like between the joints of its vambraces, the girl entirely parasitized by this demon dwelt within her—the entity stumbled to its feet, sprawled, stretched, a newborn foal testing its legs, a freshly-laid insect testing its wings. One of arm and one of eye—already maimed and chewed by those creatures despite its thick, gleaming cladding? Or was this a mutilated god, a crippled one they now witnessed? Regardless, of the girl it coughed and vomited the last, its voice like the gnawing of beaks against wind-stripped bone, its limbs groaning like the chains of hell. Its gorget glistened with her liquefied insides, but in its helmet shone an impenetrable darkness, a darkness which allowed only that single eye to pierce it. An eye like the spark flown from a baleful fire. An eye bright with cruelty.

All along the tips of the dunes, breaths were held; reticles were trained, unsure of this monster's allegiances. Until, hilt still jutting from its back, and wet, red tip from its bosom, the infant god turned toward the sea.

Cards {15/15}

Regalia

Loving the cards so far. How much Posture does each character/NPC have? Or is that one of those hidden, GM-only stats you alluded to earlier?

Regalia

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^{【Location】landow: harbor
【Time】sunday, 7:30 am
【Interactions】n/a}

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Red......stars?......

Beth leapt down onto the damp sands, scrabbled up the sloping dunes; unsure of where she was going, who she sought. Even what could be done for such a circumstance, only that there had to be something. Anything. The day had come. It had come and people were dying and they had prepared her tirelessly for this moment and—......no. No, .ENE's prophecy was clear: "While the Red Star of the Morning hast not yet ris'n."

The star, it said. A star. She'd said so. And though Beth had had her doubts about some of Ultima's "wisdoms," in this singular matter the Lady of Light had not yet erred. That same prophecy had led the Resplendency straight to Beth; even given them a way whereby to identify the prodigal child they sought. But this—interpretation be damned, this was no singular star but dozens of them, hundreds, and themselves reproducing!—each striking off into showers of sparks and plasma as it burned up. Only the very widest pieces landing in the harbor in great geysers of mist and steam and smoke.

Had the prophecy been wrong, or was this—something else?

Another meteor broke through the troposphere, dragging behind it a swirl of clouds, a tail of ionized flames; another fizzle through Beth's artificial eyes, another spurt of blood from her tortured sockets. Screaming, she fell to jellied knees, and with trembling hands clawed ineffectually at the loose, loamy beach; the sand pushing up between her fingers, drinking the crimson drops which pattered its surface. Looking back toward the shimmering, morning-encrusted waters, that charter boat banked hard to starboard, seeking whatever shoreline or sandbar would allow those dozens of passengers and crewmen safe evacuation from the roiling waters. Sprayed and heaved by the falling detritus, some didn't wait for the grinding of sand against the keel, or the shoving of the bow into a crumpled wharf; those with life vests affixed them to their wives and children. Those who didn't, took their chances in freefall.

Beth was expecting the meteorites to get them; their bodies crushed, or carried away by the agitated surf, or buried beneath wave after wave after brutal, exhausting wave as more and more heavenfall churned the harbor. She had just begun to make her peace with her own uselessness. That she would have to stay not as a rescuer, not a hero, but as a presider over what followed. The silence, the rummaging through soggy pockets for ID. A mass grave for the unidentified, and the memorial service to the unrecovered.

She was not expecting legs, claws, and mouths.

The first chitinous jaws breached the water, snatching at treaders and butterfliers and doggy-paddlers alike regardless of their speed, regardless of all the athleticism in the world, and her scanlining, jittering eyes did not accept what she'd just seen. And her brain scrambled to rationalize it, filling in details which she most assuredly had not; constructing sharks and sailfish and Humboldt squids where there were none. Then she saw it again, carapace glittering in the wet, mandibles slick with blood and seawater. No. Something else had infested Landow harbor, and it feasted.

Beth struggled to her feet. By then some of the men with pulseguns and crystal harnesses were performing target acquisitions fifty, a hundred meters up the banks, those more confident shooters taking their first potshots, the projectiles producing their little splashes (dwarfed by the meteors' spouts, still bursting all over the bay). She didn't see shots connecting; or, more worrying yet, maybe she did, and against these things' shells their pulseguns were useless.

And Odin be good: if firearms didn't work, what use would a damned sword be?!

Flee with the others and maybe help evacuate the civs? Or stand and die like the stupid, ineffectual hero the Archlictor had always wanted? Before Beth could make her choice, the question pounding in her chest, pounding in her ears to the rhythm of her fear, the distress signal went out; the Knights-Penitent arrived.

......And their vertibird, without firing a single shot, crossed over the harbor, over Beth, over the beach; and hovering somewhere above Landow proper, ascertaining their target, they touched down.

"Cassiel," Beth realized, with a shake of her head and a vengeful hiss between her teeth. Was he just abandoning these people? Could he not even muster the pluck to pretend he gave a shit? "You worm—you sack of goat's guts—Dominants damn you!"

Forsaken by her countrymen, and very nearly trampled by the panicked masses—and no sign of the other Regalia, of course, the useless shits—Beth, vision still jittering, and filling up with blood besides, turned back toward the waterline, where those carnivorous beetle-things had not only mopped up what remained of the stranded boats but also mounted an assault toward the town. As the first rows scuttled forward, more filled in behind, emerging from the froth and the foam, more and more and more seemingly without end.

And worst of all, she'd gone through all that irritation and trouble getting that damned duelist to leave her be. He was probably nearby somewhere, watching her. Waiting to see what she was made of. Getting exactly what he wanted.

Beth could only laugh. An envenomed rasp of a laugh, dripping with bitter glee.

"This is bullshit," she seethed, reaching up toward the clouds, the first scraps of divine armor already materializing at her extremities, swathing them. Gauntlets and greaves and sabatons, rattling with the terrored shake of her hands, the quake in her knees. The sword already loosing from her back, escaping upward from its scabbard although she herself made no gesture to draw it. He heard; He arrived. "SUPPLICIUM!"

Cards {6/15}

Regalia

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^{【Location】landow: food stands 🠞 harbor
【Time】sunday, 6:30 am 🠞 7:00 am
【Interactions】@teyao}

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What kind of man presumes to tell a demigod where she can go, what she can do, by what mode she must travel; how she will behave and conduct herself? These masked men who placed their trust in CBRN filters to protect them from the microfine, all-pervasive residue?—whose bodies would not be crushed for all their fanciful magnetorheological T-drip armors?—whose Crystal-pricked adrenal glands would surely see them speedily to shelter in their hours of need? Or was it the men who controlled those men: the highest bidders in a room full of politicians, bureaucrats, and shareholders? All praying to the same superstitions, clinging to the same fetishes: stunsticks and pulseguns and riot shields for some, but to the rest, contracts? NDAs? Parapets and oubliettes of red tape?

It should not have surprised any one of these men when their metal baubles and paper trinkets did not frighten the divine; when she flouted all the little rules they built up around themselves like so many feeble bricks. And yet......

One more warp later and Beth had safely evacuated the densest thickets of shrine-goers, breaking line-of-sight through a threadbare treeline. Another and she'd infiltrated the food stands, bypassed the breakfast lines; plucked skewers of grilled fish and glazed dango indiscriminately from the charcoal-blackened grates, from the sticky hands of eager customers, or wherever she found them waiting for her, soft and glistening. The smoke rising from the troughs of glowing coals, and the breaths which steamed and dewed in the morning chill, and the diesel exhaust guttering from rust-licked fishing boats, all of these shimmered, stiff in the congealed air of Godtime. And from this once more she emerged, this time stepping out from behind a cluster of dock pilings as if from the very shadows, giving the disquieting illusion that she had all that time been crouched there just beyond purview. But with her precious loot in tow she chose for herself the most secluded spot by the water, and sat there peacefully among the barnacles, spitting up bubbles through their clamshell smiles. Tired planks sighed and sagged beneath her weight, slight as it was. They needed replacing.

Working her jaw against the dense, tacky treats, she placed a finger to her temple, feeling for the tactile click of the button hidden just beneath the skin. A moment later and a faint, downpitched whine ushered in a darkening, a blindness, as her ferroglass eyes powered down within their sockets. A mere functionality—for maintenance, recharging, the occasional refitting or adjustment—but the waifish death-priest sought none of these. It was, in fact, that very blindness she sought; or, more precisely, what followed. For as her vision relented—not to any mere blackness, but to a kind of nothing which only one without eyes could see—in minutes her other senses, like so many courtly pretenders at the death of their tyrant, sharpened. Emboldened. First the nose, detecting more easily than before the distant whiffs of charcoal beneath the reeks of salt and rotten seaweed, of dead mossbunker floating belly-up in diesel-choked harbor. The tongue followed, coaxing sesame oil and delicate, sweet mirin out from underneath the all-smothering soy sauce, perfuming the chewy rice balls with a newfound complexity. And her ears. Whetted to the world around her, it seemed to come alive, in panoply and panorama. Out on the bay winches creaked and whirred as crab pots were reeled up from the churned, silt-swirled seabed. Only a few hundred feet from shore, a child aboard a charter boat squealed with delight as he pulled in a struggling flounder, twirling and pirouetting at the end of a snapper rig. Carnival games gulping up coins with blinking, chiptune laughter. And footsteps. So many footsteps as those dejected crabbers hopped from gunwale to wharf, piled their empty traps thereon; wound up their shrimp nets, untangled their lines. As a pair of bird watchers oohed and aahed, wondering aloud whether that shearwater skimming the shallows for sand eels was longtailed or blacktipped or Cordessan.

Beth shrugged out of her baldric, allowed the immense, clumsy thing on her back to loosen its grip on her. The sword she propped more lazily against one shoulder as she sprawled out in the legs, throwing one by one into the bobbing, buoyant water all the skewers she'd picked clean already of their contents. The dango all eaten, she nibbled then around the pinbones of a grilled mackerel, delicate flesh melting against her tongue, the skin crispy and brittle, and rasped with salt which vanished in her mouth. The rising sun's first needles pricked the sweat from Beth's wan skin, broiled her in her raiments black; she cared not.

More footsteps; beginning at the farther end of the pier, and pursuing some purpose which brought them past Beth's chosen resting place. At first—before the person to whom those footfalls belonged—before they'd paused so purposefully while crossing her shadow—Beth found them easily enough ignored. It was in the silence—the weight-shifting, board-creaking silence—that she began to wonder.

From the length of the stride, and the heaviness of the footsteps, she could have surmised of him a height of about six foot. Give or take a thumb. Well-built, but nothing clumsy, not so lumbering or corpulent. Light on his feet. Some kind of athlete.

If thoughts could kill, Beth's would have scorched to ash this meddler, this intruder upon her peace, ere he could ever have opened his mouth.

"Hello, miss."

Thoughts alone, of course, cannot kill; nor beggars nor residue addicts nor any other breed of miracle-seeker; leaving Death's champion, Odin's poor Regalia, bedeviled and exposed, like warm skin to all a summer evening's legions of mosquitoes.

The taste of the mackerel, a moment ago so oily and smoky and delectable, then curdling to ashes in her mouth, Beth sighed, and threw the half-gnawed carcass into the water. Securing her immense scabbard in one hand and scrabbling the other up the side of the dock pilings against which she had claimed her short-lived rest, between these two effects the blinded girl rose unsteadily to her feet. Gripping her weapon by its hilt, and probing ahead of her with the chape as one would a walking stick, she started down the pier, seeking her solitude elsewhere.

An AI Made Adventure?

Well I keep on forgetting to save when I turn off my computer. I only have the bare bones structure.

@LimeTime966

just tell chatgpt to generate another one????

Regalia

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^{【Location】landow: shrines 🠞 food stands
【Time】sunday, 6:30 am
【Interactions】@tlaloc@rabidbacon}

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Before the crowd could even comprehend what had befallen it, already the great gust of wind, like from the shockwave of a fallen bomb, had delivered its intoxicating fallout. With traces of Regalian residue seeping their way into eyeballs and nostrils, absorbing through the gums and the pores and any other aperture it grazed, a score of people—more, even, within this or that a radius—all at once received an insidious, stupefying dose. For perhaps a minute or two would the ingestion thereof transfix them in place, swaying side-aside in blissful catatonia. Until then, the moment of their revivification, Beth could shelter within their multitudes, listening. Observing. Even as the onlookers at the peripheries of this ground zero inferred what must have happened; even as they pushed at the borders of this throng to suck at the turgid air, to thrust their tongues at every mote which glittered in the sunbeams, her human meat-wall afforded her a moment's respite. If only the one.

Before this long, tedious week, spent mostly in transit from hoverbus to hoverbus, from food line to food line, from speech to sedative speech, from ritual to soporific ritual, Beth had never visited sleepy Landowtown, nor the nearby Arosa City, across the bay, piercing its skyline with its towers, blued steel obelisks erected blasphemously at an indifferent heaven. Entirely and altogether unimpressed was she. True, all week she had balked at this theme-park simulacrum of a religious festival, with its souvenir stands and subscription plans and parking vouchers. But this was every Festival of Lights, and could she blame a hopeful tourist-town-to-be for giving the gormless masses what they wanted? Their Gilgamesh petting zoos and Anima butterfly facepaintings, their family photographs with grinning dragon mascots? No, hardly a girl-fool of her eight-and-twenty years, long ago had Beth come to expect nothing better from such farces. But there, erected for all to see atop the dais, stood the true Landow; behind all their appearances, and all their decorum, their true feelings laid bare. All their tenets and values giv'n shape.

Hast thou a friend whom thou trustest well,
from whom thou cravest good?
Share thy mind with him, gifts exchange with him,
fare to find him oft.

But hast thou one whom thou trustest ill
yet from whom thou cravest good?
Thou shalt speak him fair, but falsely think,
and leasing pay for a lie.

Beth did not always realize when she recited from the Words, their wisdoms so troughed upon her tongue, the gestures so worn into the marrow of her hands that at times they emerged entirely without design; and, seemingly, from naught and nowhere, alike to groundwater bubbling up around the blade of the well-digger's pick. This prayer she muttered, as if to purify her mouth where her eyes supped of this place's artifice and idolatry.

Ultima—lotus-seated Ultima, in all Her soapstone glory, headdress and nipples and fingernails all leafed in gold upon the dark and greenish rock of Her flesh—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of likenesses exactly like this one laid strewn across the countrysides, and no different was Landowtown, paying acquiescence to the greatest of the Dominants, and the most widespread of Their worldly cults. Second was She in size and majesty upon the stage, wrought by the town's more competent craftsmen. In all, a perfectly dutiful depiction, if a dispassionate one; imbued with none the reverence, none the inspiration, none the terror and ecstasy corded through the streets of Malkuth. Coincidentally, the dais and all its constructs arranged as they were, row behind row, as the hour arrived for the sun to appear from behind the sea, and for dawn's first light to glisten diamond-like upon the waves, all the shrines cast long their shadows. And it brought Beth no small amusement to see not only how Landow's chosen tutelary dwarfed the ersatz Ultima; but how for a few delectable minutes, She quite literally sat in that other Dominant's shadow. A sight so delicious it could only have been intentional; purposeful; spiteful.

That other Dominant, of course, was none other than the Storm-soother, the Tidebringer; She Who Smashes the Fleets of Our Foes; Leviathan, the Deep-queen. Leviathan, whose serpentine body the Landowmen first knapped from an immense whalebone, then strung with painted shells for Her scales, these drilled through with artistic perforations, that the breeze from the sea sang through them. Leviathan, Her ivory body rasped by shipworms, bleached by salt. Leviathan whose antlers were driftwood, whose whiskers were the fronds from dried swordfish tails, whose teeth were the hollowed claws of gaily colored crabs. Steam-breath scrimshawed across Her neck, Her plumage streaming in the morning wind as pennants of silk and seaweed.

Obliging enough were the likenesses of other Dominants: a Titan of crumbling sandstone, an Ifrit of a composite fire agate, a vine-and-wicker Gaia......but much like Ultima, relegated were these to mere accompliceship; an entourage to flank the town's true patron, around whom the limelight-sucking Regalia, and, ergo, the attention of all the town, gathered. Her brother was there, as expected. His smile easily fooled the others, crinkling the skin around his eyes, seeming so warm and curious and sincere; he'd gotten so very skilled at smiling. But Beth saw Cassiel as only a sister could, and in that hypodermic smile glittered a familiar rage, waiting just behind the teeth like a venom sac. One of the others had done something to offend him, or, more likely, to compel him to pageantry thereof; the one in purple? Or the blonde in the sharkskin suit? The first Beth did not recognize, and so dismissed from her mind; as for the latter, she could not so easily banish the feeling that she'd seen that person elsewhere. Beth seldom left Cetra but to grudgingly attend the Festival of Lights, and other such travesties; a laymember of the Resplendency, then, a common sight in the Lower Circles? Perhaps a dignitary to the Crucible? Beth recalled moment after moment, scouring her memory for those pretty pale eyes, those forlorn and sullen lips. She did not realize she was staring.

But just at the moment the other Regalia—Leviathan's, judging by the guarded, sheltered way in which the woman strayed none too far from the magnificent whalebone statue—might have befallen Beth with her yearning gaze, the sleepers began to stir, and piece together one by one why they could not remember the last few minutes, and so the time had arrived to slip away from this throng and find refuge in another. Narrow of breast and subtle of step, scalpel-like did Beth sliver between the waking celebrants, pointedly ignoring all hands which descended her shoulders, all moans and cries which petitioned her to hear their ails, suspecting she to be the one who had so bewitched them, so anesthetized them with her residue. She still wanted to see. Despite how the answer always hurt her, she had to have it. Hold it in her hands and taste it on her teeth: where was Odin, and how did these Landowmen mock Him with their depiction? But then not only did the festival-goers begin to stir all around her but those masked mercenaries, the ones circling the stage to guard Cassiel and the others as if from a rabid horde. Wrist units were placed to earpieces; chins were lowered, dangerous words muttered into radios. Soon a contingent of these men had broken away from the dais, beginning to sweep through the crowds. Beth hardly needed linger and eavesdrop to infer what they sought. Nudges became shoves, skulking broke out into a hurried stride; and with one last inquisitive glance back toward Leviathan's champion, the corpsepainted girl, Death's Regalia, vanished into the masses.

Regalia

I'm guessing there's some kind of cost system, where each card is allotted a point value based on how powerful it is, and then each of us can have X points active at a time? Or maybe we have mana pools?

Anyway, in the Discord you said "Dominant-specific abilities" and I was sold lol I am overflowing with ideas for based Odinism