Find the captain and ask him to go faster
((Shit, I won't get rid of it until it explodes, right?))
You locate the captain, but he seems to be following the ship while not actually being on it, evaluating the work of his shades from afar. Undeterred, you shout to him.
"Captain! Go faster!"Regrettably, he seems to be too far away to hear you, no matter how much you shout. You find yourself feeling rather insecure for a moment. This feeling is amplified manifold when you turn and notice that the focus paper appears to be right next to your face now.
Traveling on the Sea of Pleasant Winds, day one...Sigmund, in the time when he wasn't hounded by clingy paper of death and destruction, spent the day doing two things, mostly - fixing foci, where he didn't meet much success - he got one good focus and all, but that's it, pretty much - it didn't even have anything written on it. Depressed, he decided to tie himself to the mast and practice wind magic as penance. After getting the same spell off a few times, he realized he couldn't really see if what he was doing was really working, considering that the wind is entirely invisible. And the already windy conditions did not improve things any, as he could hardly even check the flow of the wind with his own trusty face. Dejected, he sought out Evelyn to find out if there's something she can say to him that would make his altogether crappy day complete. Fortunately, she did! And from there, his real debacle of the day began.
Niklas tried to meditate to get his chair powers back. For some reason, though, he found he could not concentrate of the idea. The magic has faded, both literally and figuratively. Not being one to dwell on loss, though, Niklas decided to spend quality time with his family. Sadly for him, however, Torkel had gone to the forest on a herb-gathering adventure that day, and couldn't be expected to return until tomorrow - Helsvar said it was quite okay, the boy was definitely young and curious, but the spirit of the North was in him, and he had already successfully wrestled his first bear the previous winter, a fact that made Niklas a little proud - though the child's mandatory bear-wrestling was a touch overdue, he obviously did the best he could, which is good if you consider he had to face growing up without a strong male role model. With Torkel gone, Niklas had the idea to try to hang out with Helsvar that day, but sadly she had to rebuke him, being a bit busy that day, as she had to take part in a ritualistic women's gathering that day, which precluded spending time with any men, chairmen included. Having faced failure today on all those fronts, Niklas nevertheless did not lose hopes for getting something done, and asked the Artiste to get his moving privileges back, which he granted. Obviously, Niklas had to wait until the Artiste was passing by close enough to hear what he's saying, which took a few hours of waiting, but hey, he was free from that moment on. And to celebrate his freedom, he decided to cook a grand feast with the available materials - something he is quite good at, unlike socialization and meditation! At the end of the day, he had created a feast so grand and elaborate that not only did it completely deplete the ship's food supplies (granted, there were only two people on deck that actually required food, and Niklas suspected that the Artiste has some kind of snack supply - possibly sea biscuits he may have appropriated before Niklas occupied the kitchen) he decided that nobody could have it, to increase its potential deliciousness, and devoted it to the god of cooking and yelling. Unfortunately, though, he realized there is no god of both cooking and yelling - he supposes the cooking he does is more like art, so that would be Narcillicus' domain, while yelling... he's not quite as sure, really. It's one of the lady gods, he knew - on one hand, Rysinia's the goddess of war, combat and industry, but also of strategy, while Almiria's the goddess of order... ultimately he decided in favor of Rysinia, as she seemed to represent his interests more. However, either the gods didn't like to share or they aren't generally impressed by food, because Niklas did not feel very blessed. He wondered then if it was bad form to have someone eat a sacrifice that didn't seem to get accepted by the gods.
Morton remained blissfully oblivious to the antics on the ship because he was too busy practicing his mind-altering chants. He practiced chanting the Single Thought Chant all day with a singlemindedness normally reserved for those who have already chanted the Single Thought Chant all day. Through extensive experimentation, he discovered the shocking fact that the Single Thought Chant does not work too well with complex concepts like home, life, the universe, everything that isn't a single object, thought or activity and people, as evidenced by the fact that these words lost all their meaning after he focused on them for longer than an hour. Tea, though, remained entirely interesting and exciting the whole way through, which gladdened Morton. He was, however, somewhat impeded by an emerging compulsive desire to serve it excessively, which cut into his time significantly (though the Artiste, Erin, drunk as she was, and even Tailor Craig seemed entirely satisfied by it, if a bit creeped out after the fifth time in seven hours they were offered it).
Mark decided to devote his day to fishing and sacrifice to please the dark powers that brought him out of the pits of eternal darkness. He, unlike his fellows, met with stupendous success on that front, catching eighteen fish of varying size and weirdness with the help of expertly chosen organ bait and sacrificing them equally to all three of his old friends. Only thirty seven souls left! And now he's got somewhere under 30 kilograms of assorted fish parts! Double hooray, indeed! Slightly more depressingly, though, he found that Erin did not sober up one bit during the entire day, and remained distressingly physically dysfunctional, if outwardly jolly despite the fact that she seems to have drunk several liters of tea during the time he saw her. Either Morton is running a side business, he thought, or he had a bit to learn about magical drunkenness.
Kevin, after turning the dial on his drunk-ring way down and finding himself pleasantly sober without the mortal inconvenience of a hangover, squirreled his call-stone away in a secure location on his own person, the skill of doing which he perfected early in his jesting career because of how much it amused his king. His king was strange that way, honestly. One had to wonder whether he didn't have some repressed issues in that regard, though anybody who did so openly would doubtlessly have gotten executed. The idea of jesting having reemerged in his mind, Kevin decided to practice and improve his routine for the rest of the day. What he realized during the day was that, to be honest, he wasn't all that good of a jester at all. Most of his jokes were old and tired beyond belief, having come from over 50 years ago, and his more physical routines had suffered quite a lot from age. This was probably why not that many people find him funny. And honestly, what laughs he did get from people, he probably did more from being a natural fool than a licensed one, depressing though it sounded. In a way, he was only as funny as the rest of his companions, possibly less. He realized that Morton, with his inherent absurdity and generally chipper, overly polite demeanor, plus the whole butler and tea thing, was probably way funnier to most people. And Niklas, though highly obnoxious most of the time, had more fool cred than he did - a natural fool without a doubt, seemingly incapable of behaving or responding reasonably to anything, had a sort of edge to his behavior, particularly to his cooking, that amused one to a certain level. Sigmund was a great straight man with his generally productive intentions, plus he has a propensity toward everything he did going wrong amusingly, not to mention that he gets reduced to a gibbering wreck by crossroads unless led with his eyes closed by someone else, and on top of that he was a
funny-looking vampire, unlike Kevin! Mark also looked pretty funny, with the face of a tree and all. Then there was his obsession with fishing and surgery that, while highly disturbing to Kevin, somebody probably found funny or at least intriguing. Like that time he stitched Niklas' head on a fish. And Scott was basically a walking (now floating) one-man comedy act, though also not entirely unintentionally. And the Captain was also quite ridiculous. Though the mages were probably less funny than Kevin, and the Artiste wasn't one for much comedy, this was but a cold comfort to Kevin - he realized that, despite his vocation, he seemed the most normal, serious and all around generic person on this ship. He has been outclassed by a cadre of gifted amateurs. This realization was enough to make him crawl into a corner to think about things for the rest of the day.
Scott spent the day investigating his ghostdom, trailing the shades operating throughout the ship and studying their capabilities. From several hours of observation, he concluded that ghosts should probably be able to move objects with their minds, even if he seemed to be having trouble on that front. He also noticed that the shades seem to be able to move great distances on a whim - they seemed to pop out of one place and move to another all the time, usually when they heard one of the Captain's orders. It may not have been entirely intentional on their part - the shades were evidently an easily frightened lot, and they had a very pronounced tendency to lament audibly while they worked. Mostly they were empty lamentations - they seemed emotional about something they did not even properly remember, and they would occasionally call for somebody they seemed to know, and when one of the shades asked who they were calling for, they could not answer coherently. Nevertheless, the shades seemed to be doing their work acceptably, and the noise they made seemed to be the only problem - it was quite unnerving to hear it for long, honestly.
In the streets of wherever...Taking advantage of his invisibility,
Timothy follows the woman into the alley, where she seems to stop for a moment to catch her breath a little. This exercise in maintaining her calm fails spectacularly when Timothy begins to whisper to her.
"Pssts! 'Ey! 'Sme! Is dere a problems happening here? Does you need a help?" The woman is once again quite startled, and Timothy hears a faint *fwish* and the sound of something impacting stone.
"Damn it! Why are you haunting me? I can't help you! With anything!" she furiously whispers to the air, shrinking back against the wall and glancing about wildly, trying to locate Timothy, but failing quite miserably.
In the engineers' quarter of the City of the Dead...Darren bravely suggests the other parts of the city as optimal ghost hangouts for the lady, insinuating that they may have money to give her.
"I didn't check, but I'm certain one of them must. Also, wouldn't it be nice to go out and meet others, instead of spending all your time with only your pets?""I can't leave. Not for long. Somebody will take things from the store, the little rat-machines scurrying in the streets will remove things from their places and use them without permission. And then I'll have nothing to give the taxman, so it'll take my pets! I can't allow that. If they wish to buy things, they must come to my store, yes? It is in a convenient place, and the prices are good, and... and it'd mean much to me if they bought one..." she begins and trails off. The idea of not being able to leave seems to have struck her suddenly, igniting some sort of emotional spark. Her morose mood seems to be giving way to nervousness again.
((Has the waitlist gotten shorter? I can't tell.))
It hasn't. But this was a breather chapter, like I may have mentioned previously, altogether much less brutal than the other ones. For one, there were few enemies outright seeking the death of the players. But don't worry about the waitlist getting shorter - even if it doesn't by much, the final chapter, whenever that'll happen, will feature more players than the other ones, to give some waitlisters a chance to shine.
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Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 564302 times)