Viatos

Gaslit Guardians

As a long-time fan of Girl Genius and the spirit, if not necessarily the implementation, of Genius: the Transgression, and the genre in general...yeah, this looks pretty awesome.

Against the Fangs of God (Mecha / Necromancy Interest Check)

No spot-saving. No first-come first-served either, though, so you're fine. I'll be taking the best applications over a time period when I get the recruitment thread up, not the first through the door.

Against the Fangs of God (Mecha / Necromancy Interest Check)

@TheHeretic 4-6, no more, to keep any splits in physical or philosophical direction manageable.

@BCTheEntity Not by design, but you know what game retention rates are like, so it's not impossible either.

Against the Fangs of God (Mecha / Necromancy Interest Check)

In what is now to be known as the First Canticle - formerly Year 347 of the Seventh Aeon - mankind's sins rose up as if to swallow him. War set fire to the Known World, terrible beasts swarmed from the jungles of its edges to devour his most ambitious holdings, and in the kingdom of Yachiel, ruled by the city of Dais at the world's strong center, a black flower of corruption took root and then blossomed. Men gave themselves over to unnatural pleasures - astrology, meditation, the seeking of visions, taking council with unclean spirits - and grotesque arts and theatre, and in this way Dais turned its eyes from the world, as it burned and was ravaged, and those wisest gathered in its defiled universities to whisper that all was lost.

But God had not turned Her eyes from the Known World, though it had rejected Her long ago, and She sent Her angels to save us.

Rejoice! In our blackest hour She smote the Black Flower of Dais and burned it clean with Her light - and though the city was destroyed, its people were saved! Reborn as Blessing, the City-upon-the-Altar, it has been made beautiful, pure, and a refuge for all Her wayward children, wicked or unworthy though they be. Now Her Blessing flows forth to blanket the Known World! Her angels soar to do Her work, raising men and women of good heart to an incredible holiness, charging them to strike back against the darkness and bring Her light to this awful world. They offer peace, freedom, and strength to us all without let or lien, asking only that we keep the least of Her graces:

Do not raise thine eyes to the stars.
Let not thy mind be empty; let not thy flesh fall idle.
Seek out no false truth, no false future.
Never must thou take council with an unclean spirit...

So! Checking interest for a non-traditional "sorcerous mecha" game. Players will be sorcerers - warriors, thieves, mages, or more ordinary citizens who have opened their mind (or had it opened by force) to the Sea of Dead Stars below the world and become versed in forbidden arcane lore under the tutelage of its unclean spirits. As a result, or possibly as a continuance depending on your life was going, you find yourself arrayed against the forces of God as the world crumbles under an omnidirectional assault from Her Circle of Light, the beasts beyond the Edge of the world, and the treachery of eight surviving nations engaged in a mad struggle for survival and primacy. This stuff is to some degree your problem. Especially that first part: just by existing, you violate God's four 'don't you do it' commandments: you regain magical power through meditation and learn or refine your knowledge by observing the stars, receive visions, and go among unclean spirits to interpret those visions before they end up driving you mad.

All sorcerers can see and speak with unclean spirits, drown themselves temporarily to visit the strange dark islands of the dead, and call upon lifeless power to achieve various ends - weirds, of which each player will be able to choose or develop a few - including one particularly important feat: the power to resurrect and dominate one of the Nephilim, the gigantic and monstrous children of angels and men slain to a one in the ancient world. The Nephilim are at least loosely humanoid and loosely conscious, though the precise shades along those spectrums of form and sapience will be up to each player. These terrible beings are not beyond the strength of the world's legions to bring down, but angels are - and for some reason even angels fear to tread where dwell the Nephilim. Though God's desire is crystalline in clarity - that all sorcerers be destroyed and the Nephilim butchered, broken, or captured - her angels do not join the Circle of Light in hunting you. Why, who can say? Who can know the mind of God?

Maybe you chose to be a sorcerer, practicing the "unnatural pleasure" of astrology to seek eldritch truth among the stars, meditating yourself into the terrible nirvana known as the death of the self, or taking part in the damned sacrament of angelflesh offered as a luxury or reward to the rarest of individuals by the enigmatic Black Knives. Maybe you were forced to be, your brain nested by the instructional red worms of the First Sorcerer, your third eye torn open by the ritual spike of an unclean spirit, exiled from death by the hideous Rite of Twice-Damning. Maybe it was all a terrible accident, your soul wrenched open by a botched exorcism, your heart captured by a wind bringing the alien dreams of the dead Nephilim you're destined to animate.

Being swallowed by, nestling within, or even riding these armored and undead giants is not a proposition for the faint of heart, but with such power to augment your sorcerous might, what working could be out of reach? Rally to the far corners of the world to fight back the bestial invaders. Break the Circle and its coup of the human destiny. Develop your necromantic powers and walk the enchanted palace-tombs of the Sea of Dead Stars. Loot the treasures of fallen empires or the occult graves of a doomed prehistory. Gatecrash Heaven. Sell flowers on the corner while the world burns around you, hey, the power is yours.

Aesthetics: A little Evangelion, a little fantasy-horror. The world takes its cues from an Aztec/Nordic mashup at its edges - jaguar berserkers, feather-strewn longhouses and huge iron ziggurats - and gets steadily more Indoeuropean as you move inwards. Nephilim themselves are monstrous, but their armor (burial sarcophagus, really) allows for more traditional mecha designs to be selected. Because I know people like images and I know the specific aesthetic I'm thinking of would be a nightmare to find art for we're gonna lean into ancient futurism for all those sleek-but-clearly-serial-number'd mecha designs out there. Cthulhutech Engels, custom EVAs (preferably aiming closer to the 05s than the 00s) and the kind of things that show up if you search Five Star Stories Mortar Heads are all fine, as are less humanoid examples.

Nephilim have names, or possibly epithets, inscribed in their tombs. Some communicate these names as their own; others do not, or are unable. These ancient names are things like Fantastic Howl, Maw of Sunset, Fleshless Fang, and Wolfkiller - modern sorcerers may name them as they like, and their enemies will surely do likewise.

Sorcerers can dress like traditional spellcasters of a necromantic bent, use the suspiciously-plugsuit-like (keep it tasteful, please and thank you) ritual vestments often found buried with Nephilim, or take up any of the world's styles of dress, really. Depending on their cultural background, names tend to sound like South American/Scandinavian or Indian/Medieval European mashups. Some people instead take on god names, made up of one or two natural things, to show their devotion. In the Circle of Light, taking names that instead reflect virtues or positive qualities have become popular.

Random Lore

The Eight Nations have a technological level that varies from early medieval to early Renaissance. They have a variety of cultures united in a general worship of the gods of grove and orchard and a rejection of God, who they name the Exile, which is what She was before She came back. Exact details unknown. The Eight Nations have relaxed many of their stigmas and practices, including against sorcerers, and scheme and undermine each other as often as they ally against the Circle or the ravaging beasts - according to some rather suspect prophecy-work by a sorcerer known as the Black Vizier, three of the eight will survive the world's end. They've interpreted this to mean that if they can just kill off five of the others without falling prey themselves...

Priests are holy men and women given divine power to slay monsters and pacify God's enemies. Paladins are ascendant priests rumored to no longer be fully human after receiving angelic mandate, capable of facing off against even the most terrible beasts, the behemoths of their kind. Beasts are creatures from beyond the Edge of the Known World, invariably hostile to humanity and possessed of strange, fiendish intelligence. Behemoths, also called greatbeasts, are the ancient village-devouring kings of their kind.

The fey or the Children Who Never Grow are humanoids with bestial features and bizarre metaphysical ambitions. Gods are notably similar to fey, and they seem to have some relationship, except they display plant features rather than animal and have entirely comprehensible worldly ambitions: sacrifices of treasure and crop and human life (those 'sacrificed' are not killed, but rather made sacred attendants for their natural lives, their souls then passing into the care of the gods to unknown ultimate end). Witches are those humans with supernatural power over the natural world, given them by either fey or the gods.

The Black Knives and their bearers are a mysterious, vampiric cult that offers unique culinary experiences to the rich, the powerful, and the very lucky - or unlucky. The Rose Lich, once known as the God-Eater - before She came, when gods were smaller and more palatable - is the most powerful witch in the world, and they hate and hunt sorcerers and paladins alike.

Unclean spirits are pseudo-human entities born of particularly strange, painful, or frequent death; they are loathed of fey and gods and willing contact with them is one of the four sins that can draw down God's wrath within the borders of the Circle of Light. They know things the dead knew - for humans lose their humanity and memory when they descend to the Sea of Dead Stars, all save sorcerers who may visit as they please - and sometimes things no one else does. Dealing with them can be just as dangerous the punishments for being caught dealing with them.

Angels, of which there are at least seven, appear as slender, beautiful, slightly androgynous humanoids that can read minds, teleport, send the faithless hurtling upwards into Heaven, and tear through human legions like hurricanes, among other feats. Their approach is heralded by the song of Heavenly choirs, and each angel draws the light, creating fields of deep darkness in which they are often the only thing visible as more than silhouette.

Three realms make up the game's primary setting - the Known World, a geographically complex terrestrial region; Heaven, also known as the Kingdom of Night, which exists somewhere in the sky and whose intrusion into the world is marked by luminous golden clouds rolling across the sky, and the Sea of Dead Stars, a vast underworld archipelago where the dead build their Cyclopean temples and live, love, and war for scraps of identity or the delights of unspeakable decadence. Other realms may exist.

Beyond the Edge of the Known World is limitless jungle, as far as anyone has ever explored - which isn't terribly far. Beasts live, breed, and devour each other ceaselessly, and here too dwell behemoths, the truly ancient and powerful among the man-eaters whose advance drives even paladins of the Circle to caution. Their sudden, coordinated invasion was the first omen of the apocalypse. The three empires fallen to their onslaught are charnel-houses now, whose survivors are few and grown feral.

HIGHLIGHTS

Small, loosely-regulated group to allow storylines to split or conjoin as desired, following a short introductory period. I'm looking for 4 - 6 players, no more.

Mystery! Where did God come from, and what is she really? What happened to the two Vanished Principalities, the ones no one can remember except from pre-written histories, chronicles, and trade agreements? What exactly are the Nephilim and how did they come to be? What's beyond the Edge of the Known World, through the ivory gates of Heaven, lurking at the heart of the Sea of Dead Stars?

Intrigue! Eight nations have withstood the conquest of the Circle of Light, using terrible means to keep four of the angels at bay. A vast increase in beast rampages seems to occupy the others. These nations scheme, maneuver, and surge against their enemies - which sometimes include each other. Thirteen stand conquered, but corruption and rebellion are truly unavoidable traits of the human spirit.

Horror! There are realities inimical to mankind. There are those things that crawl in from the Edge, not all of which can be faced in battle, or faced at all. There is something that writhes beneath the Sea of Dead Stars. There are certain rumors about the angels and those who would serve them best, of spasms in the Light...

And of course, combat in giant Evangelion-esque undead angel-children as the main selling point. Face off against living armies, terrible beasts, the transformed paladins of the Circle of Light, enemy sorcerers, and even the seemingly-unstoppable angels of God.

Flexible character designs - choose whether you want your magic to act as supplement to your (heroic and extraordinary) mundane skills (a warrior who drains the strength of his enemies or commands a cadre of skeletal soldiers, a thief who can step through walls or wear the faces of the dead, a flower girl whose undead blooms are pretty all year round, whatever) or if you are a savant of sorcery in all its dark majesty.

Flexible mecha designs - the Nephilim were not a particularly united brood. Develop eldritch powers and mutations to customize your Nephilim, refining or exchanging them over time - or even ripping fresh parts from the Nephilim of other sorcerers and similarly compatible entities.

Hey, guys! Glad for all the interest. I'm gonna kick up official recruitment at the end of the weekend, but for now I'd like to open the Discord for character workshops, questions, coordination, et cetera. Link's here: discord.gg/ce4FPDp

@Viatos

Falling Skies: Wavering Valor (Mecha, Space Opera)

Is the deadline midnight tonight, or was the deadline 12 hours ago?

Worlds Apart

Something was wrong, but that wasn't what was eating at Tristan Traeger.

Something was wrong, and it was the same wrong thing, the same twisting-out-of-true that had begun at least since the first time she had come to him, her eyes shining in every color but human. Maybe since the start of his life. Maybe longer. Maybe all of history was just this, these

events which would prove beneficial to your understanding

landmarks on the path to some terrible final fate. Isn't that what she'd told them? The fate of two worlds, hers and theirs, only...something in him rebelled against the association. Is this really her world? Or is that just...what she wants to make it? Those thoughts were too threatening, though, to harbor long. Thoughts of conquest and making. Forging. Blades. They were all changing. An eye found Tabitha, and then another, and another. Even if we can go home... Tristan shuddered. If his constants were to permutate...

The truth is invariable.

He'd fought it. He'd died...

...he was here, like any of the rest. The rest...

The newcomer - Zino - was acclimating well. Too well, maybe. Too calm. Did she send him? What was he for? Their captive was insane, and yet in some ways...some of the things he said were too clear, too aware. He didn't just rave; he was contemplating, paying attention. The homicidal intent was a problem, though. Unreachable? He wondered. The boy with wings - Ascot - oscillating between murder and lust had startled him almost as much and made him thankful for his new body's difficulty communicating emotions.

They're closest. The ones that kept flickering through the places in his brain the Semblance had hijacked, or altered, or created. The ones that were beginning to take on the same cognitive overlay she inspired. Edged in that light, edged like blades.

And what about Tabitha, who's following the path and wearing her mask? Easy to leave her out, isn't it? Easy to let your guard down, and then they burn - no, that's not my thought - and where are you, Tristan T.? What would your overlay look like, if you weren't too afraid to find a mirror? Why'd Ascot choose you to be a killer, exactly? A fourth eye slid to Tabitha. No. No. I have to -

Like something from a nightmare, bound up within secret edges of his own, Koda lunged for Stormy, otherworldly teeth tearing her flesh. The spatter of blood flared in Tristan's eyes, and he almost didn't feel the tendrils sliding loose from his stomach, taking the uneaten fruit he'd been carrying around out of his fingers, carbon knives and silver needles going to work. He didn't feel it when the collection of reductive tools drew back inside him, either, or the strange rushing feeling of the resultant slurry filling cylinders rising out of his back. I guess that's how I eat, a sudden inane flash as shock made the world into an incoherent disaster of chaos. There were teeth gnawing at his mind, a rush of

hunger
curiosity
hunger
help me
hunger

alien thoughts flooding out from Koda, or Koda's Semblance, like a wave - something let loose as the scientist lost himself to the demons he'd invited in. In that moment there wasn't time to understand what had happened, was happening. There was just the question of whether or not Tristan would wait for the train. Eyes like red embers found eyes like golden pools, and something new slid into his mind. Triangles. Red, sharp...

Oh, fuck, he's looking at me. Why -

Because he'd fired, of course, because he'd been halfway to drawing his gun ever since they'd arrived, and when Koda had lunged part of him had known exactly what to do. Balance the equation. Eliminate the threat - But he'd...had he missed? A warning shot? The Koda-thing was turning, and Tristan's subroutines were conscious this time, his awareness extending into the gun, a tiny piece of his architecture. Its ammunition was something bright and sharp and beautiful, a shard of opalescent crystal, sublimated by the trigger-pull into a wave of killing starlight, roiling out into the world and then returning to crystallize again, a perfect circle that left the world a little cleaner with every iteration. All he had to do was -

Koda's phantom remnant screamed without sound, a sudden psychic burst that hammered away his intentions, shattered his consciousness, sending hot spikes of agony through his head. Circuits sparked and went dark, and Tristan's knees hit the ground. His eyes guttered out. Empty. The phantom flowed around Stormy, its mouth stretched open, its whole body - tendrils of mist, unnaturally stretching extremities - reached for him, and -

The cylinders in Tristan's back slammed home, pumping a flood of alien material through his spinal column and into his veins, the impact and the mind-searing rush driving his upper body down, just beneath the phantom's pounce.

All five of Tristan's eyes flared white.

The world was crystalline, everything etched in lines of perfect clarity. Structure and design. Had he imagined disaster, earlier, in his shock? But there could be no disaster. Everything could be correctly arranged, even - the phantom was turning, twisting around itself, an amorphous flow of ripping death, a thing of chaos, disordered, Unfettered - Tristan was faster, adrenaline and catalytic oils rushing through him and coupling with his clean, clear high, and he was well out of the way for the second pounce, rolling and rising to one knee. His gun stretched out towards Koda's phantom. Chrome and ivory, a basket hilt of silver filigree. Beautiful. The perfect tool to contrast that filthy thing's -

Koda.

Tristan hesitated. So did the phantom. Did it perceive the threat? Was it contemplating its angle of attack? Or...

...its thoughts were still 'audible,' a constant hissing babble of desires Tristan profoundly wished were left incomprehensible by the projection. He hadn't known the other man very well, but there wasn't anything coming from the phantom that suggested humanity, empathy, recognition, the capacity to stop. But if he fired...I'll be a killer. This was a person. Like me. Oh, god, like me, like Tabitha... What had happened on their journey? What had Koda seen or heard, what had changed him, destroyed him? Was it

that scream

something from his Semblance? In the Ghost Girl's words? Breathed in from the air of this place, the soil, some pre-existing condition, there had been a person and now there was a monster, there had been a man and now there were only

red triangles
blades

eyes like embers and jagged teeth. Blackest mystery. He was the scientist. The one with the smart questions. He kept asking about the details. He wanted, oh god, to understand what was going to happen to us. Looking for the truth...

Eventually, you will come to realize the truth.

The two beings regarded each other, dark against the bright of the day and the green of the grass, there in the shadow of the tower. A faint wind stirred the world, but not the man of iron and not the beast of shadow. Red eyes watching white. Tristan let one eye, just one, look to find his friend, and the phantom leapt, and starlight swelled, and whatever Koda had realized and become, whatever he might yet have been, was burned to ash and carbon on the evening breeze.

NEMESIS HEARTS: You Are Worthy Of...

Zeke stared mournfully at the corridor floor. He was inconvenient; people kept bending their paths around him, giving him looks that ranged from uncertain to irritated. But such gifts went unnoticed, he was occupied, the floor had priority. A younger girl actually stopped to look at him, her gaze flickering back between the floor and his face, asking him something he didn't really hear. But she moved on, glancing back over her shoulder.

Could this be the work of an enemy's Tablet...? A frown curved his lips, a precise gesture. His facial expressions were like masks exchanged according to context, iconic, defined, immobile. Only his blue eyes moved as he took in the scene, considered, discarded. No. Such a power...could not be permitted to exist in society. Therefore, the answer is...

Voices wandered through the open door a dozen paces away, some familiar, fewer than that welcome. He shifted to Frown #2, which was deeper and had especially stern accenting, suggesting not just his displeasure but the existence of its gravely erroneous source somewhere in the world. A frown of judgment. Hammer and sword would serve for the awful Monsters that came lurching out of 'nowhere' to prey upon mankind; Zeke's frown was a weapon reserved for a far more dangerous class of entity, one whose pervasive corruption struck even to the heart of his beloved society. Someone was leaving the room, had difficulty with the catastrophe Zeke was observing. He offered absent-minded condolences as they went past him.

Ruffians. Riffraff. Class-skippers.

Technically, Zeke was skipping class as well, as he stood contemplating the horror of what he'd discovered. But only in a very technical sense. He was there, after all, taking notes and listening intently, just like he was hunting down rogue flyers for the Monster Hunting Club with a passion that bordered on fanatic, and wandering around the third floor, looking for trouble, and the first floor, following up on reports of some kind of cyber-organic animal that had gotten loose on the grounds. But those theres were a little different. A feed from the Enlil Network let him check in on those other selves, his shards, but he wasn't experiencing what they experienced. Mostly they had to relay that stuff back to him, which they were good at, so mostly

Recollections Like Breaking Glass

Last summer, the night of the storm. Lightning crawling the sky like a spider of light. Seven hours since it had happened.
Zeke was in his room, in bed. He'd been drifting off, but he was completely awake now, his nerves all set to jangling.
The were-light of the storm was all there was. His room was a soft mess of shadows, everything reduced to suggestion, except the shard standing still in the room, head down, wet from the rain. It was dripping all over his carpet.

Not just water.

Are those wounds accidental? Has it been fighting?

Seven hours since it had shut off its active feed and stopped responding to Enlil pings.
Since one of his shards had just...gone missing.

Or did it...

Its horns had overgrown the daemon template, a twisting curtain that flowed down the side of its head, and the way it spoke, its stumbling, distorted sounds, suggested something was wrong with the shape of its mouth now.
Changes he hadn't approved. Some he wasn't aware of.
But it was what it was saying that had all of Zeke's attention, as the lightning flashed, light and darkness warring for its silhouette.

"You're not God to me, you know."

it worked out.

People were leaving the room in a clamor. Too many people. Zeke tore his gaze away, finally, from his personal abyss: a trail of stinking drain water splashed carelessly right up to the door of the Club. His heart sank as he saw the company Aito was keeping. Ruffians. Delinquents. Chaos...oh, Aito, couldn't you have picked a less harmful addiction? Hard drugs, loose women - well, looser, gambling with Club funds...

...anything but the adoption of these lost and suspiciously-discolored sheep. 'My fleece is white as snow' takes nurture as much as nature, you know. The taller boy sighed, and fluffed his immaculately-feathered hair, moving on to Frown #3 - one that blamed not only its subject but the shirkless world that had conspired to aid and enable wrongdoing - as he saw where Aito was headed. Oh, come on! Technically he could ignore it. There were application stacks to review, interviews to arrange, duties to perform - the opportunity for elegance. Where his friend was going, only gracelessness and disorder could be found, he could report to Cannon, bring things back into their proper alignments, but -

- but Aito was his friend. Sigh deepening into a groan, Zeke followed - almost making George's mistake as he skidded on a patch of water he hadn't yet added to his portrait of fell misdeeds. It got on his shoes, which were expensive, neat, and perfectly-fit. He hadn't yet developed a frown number high enough to encapsulate the experience; his face simply went blank at the sensation. The shard on the third floor, meanwhile, picked up his warning ping and made its way to the stairwell just in time to meet Vatalla with a close equivalent, Frown #7 - less a progression than a sideline into sorrow - a face that had 'for what blackened acts am I now made to suffer in this particularly terrible way?' written all over it.

"Well and welcome, hopeful Hunters! I see you're experiencing firsthand the courageous initiative and mastery of the present moment for which our Club has earned prominence - alongside our success rate, of course, and our delightfully low yearly fatalities - and eager to join us," he said through gritted teeth, raising his voice to be heard across the short distance and walking faster than was entirely dignified, "in this eminently approved and above-board field expedition Aito will of course assume full responsibility for having launched."

There would have been addendum, the increasingly-tortured use of formal language he knew was nails on a chalkboard to his closest companion - and serves him right! - but the Monster Hunter Secretary caught up to the herd just in time to hear Aito call Vatalla a 'freelance Hunter,' and the awful shock of that silenced him more effectively than would one of the Displacer's world-warping blasts. Damnit, Aito!

Shadow Smiles

"What - " Martin's head reeled, and he stepped back from the shield, as much from the horror of what he was hearing as obedience. "I'm, I'm not..."

You've been directly exposed to a Miasma carrying organ... Martin trembled, and without being aware of it a ripple passed through his flesh, a line of transformation that flowed up from the fingertips of his left hand like a wave, finishing with his right, an inch-wide shift that faded away again as the line moved. There was a moment when first one and then the other eye disappeared, others opening up along his body, that registered as a sudden visual distortion. Like dizziness. He blinked and forgot, the reaction of his observers going unobserved. Miasma... Hadn't there been something in the news? Some new disease, it drove people crazy, put their faces into rictus, caused tumors and bone growths, but...major outlets wouldn't verify, and the message board details were always so fantastic, more conspiracy stuff than anything. Miasma in the streets, alien abductions in the cornfields. Except

Wet red ropes, a spider's Eden, breathing in cobwebs of viscera...
The thunder of another's pulse, veins tearing into his veins, pumping - something...
The stink of blood, it was flooding his lungs, his eyes, his mouth, something else under the taste...
Bitter and sweet, like poisoned candy, it almost made him want to smile.

maybe it wasn't just conspiracy stuff. A disease, like rabies, except it also made people turn into monsters... My hand changed. I saw that happen. I felt it happen. It could be a hallucination, only... Only he was here in some clean white containment cell, warded off by a polycarbonate shield, and the guy talking to him had brought guns to do it. Big guns. Which...

Martin paused. He'd opened his mouth to say something about his rights, needing his phone back, but something was wrong. Luca D. Beake. Not a DOCTOR Luca D. Beake, and...no department, no...oh, fuck. Oh no. He was looking at the scientist, replaying what he'd heard. No. That wasn't official parlance of any kind he recognized, and the flanking bodyguards...was that military armor? Maybe. Maybe not. Martin was thinking not. Where the fuck am I?

The image of his hand flashed through his mind again, and something else. An instinct, an impression of - what? He looked up at the shield. His jaw rippled, teeth stretching out and melting away. I could get out. Weight, that was the impression. Force. Somehow he knew he could build up enough of it to punch whatever his hand had become, that killing spike of bone, through the polymer. One hole could become many, with a few minutes to work he could...

The hissing in the room brought Martin back to reality with a start. I could maybe get past this one obvious barrier. Assuming the room doesn't fill with poison gas or electrical current. And then...they fill me up with holes, or, fuck, I don't know, blow the whole chamber. And even if that doesn't happen, I have no idea where I am or what's on the other side of that door. A cold sweat broke out and started to trickle, and he stared at Luca, to the guards, looking for something, anything in their eyes except for...what Luca had said. About pain.

He thought maybe this was the worst trouble he'd ever been in.

Time. I need to think.

What to do? Play the game.

"I don't feel great, Luca. Like I'm Wile E. Coyote at the end of the skit, after he's been run over a few times, you know? I, uh, I don't suppose I could trouble you guys for some water. Or a phone."

NEMESIS HEARTS: You Are Worthy Of...

@RoflsMazoy Replace everyones Network Interfaces with "Technical Difficulties" Screen with a picture of Piper dressed as an electrician.

@Leslie Hall

This is an amazing image.

On the technical side, our Skills are connected to the Enlil network that registers our Class, so I was thinking none of them are really "innate" in that sense - if your Skill makes you strong or tough or implies a proficiency, it's like Neo in the Matrix, a downloaded alteration to your being. Piper can scramble the data.

But even if it were innate, we're magic. Maybe Piper can scramble the data of reality (to the degree that that even is separate from the Enlil Network, which is pretty pervasive given the lack of wires) in such a way that talent vanishes, muscles shrink, armor plating fades for the duration.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the Skill as it stands, and fluff is fluffy, you can always weave it a little differently to the same end. ^^

NEMESIS HEARTS: You Are Worthy Of...

V.2 Here we go!

Main Concern: Is the Tablet Power different from Class Skills? Ergo, we have the choice to say that we were were either born with or learned our abilities?

@Migyudon

Yes. Even Nobodies - the unClassed - have Tablet Powers, which are unique to an individual.