"Oh, no bother, truthfully," Daniels says as he sits up. "Defeat helps just as much as winning a fight for learning things, I've found. Hopefully she isn't too torn up about that, I'd quite like to go again whenever she has the time. Oh hello Dan. Thank you for the concern, but I'm alright - that doesn't even rank on the top 5 most painful things I've had happen to me."
He stands up, assuming Peaks lets him, and stretches. "Oh Peaks, I have a question for you. Do you know anything about how those manikins of the Captain's work? I recovered one of them last night and it seems to have gone kinda still. Ran out of charge or something?"
Shores was mostly worried she'd accidentally caused permanent damage, especially to that fascinating thought-construct. She would emphatically state that this was a purely professional and not at all personal concern for a useful sparring partner, Peaks relays amusedly, lest someone get the wrong idea.
Personally though, she thinks Shores likes you, which is even worse.
[Completely Knackered: 5,
2]
When you produce the manikin, Peaks is surprised. Nabbed that during the feast? Yes, yes. It's not out of charge or anything, they last for a good bit of time. It's instead a failsafe of sorts, she explains - you'd be surprised at the kind of trouble a tiny clay man can get into when lost in the world without its master. In fact that's how the inventor of the manikin died, a very interesting-
-anyway, it's turned itself off for safety reasons. Suppose she could circumvent those. Give it here and she'll get back to you a bit later, it'll take a bit of work. You're going to be stuck here for a few days anyway as you proceed toward the Sky Rig, and from there into the heartlands.
It occurs to you that you'll probably have a lot of free time on this ship in the coming days. You may want to plan accordingly. Dan may need amusement as well, and your mildly paid minions presumably would be prepared to help you with things as well.
"Ah! Did not see you there, quite sorry. I'm Thomas. We should be able to get out of here; Gamble has the rope held for us. We'll just say goodbye to...
sorry, I didn't catch your name. Also, I'm sure I will regret asking, but what do you mean by fulfillment?"
What is that anyway?
Your answer: a fulfillment is made in response to a request in a manner different from merely the provision of trivial amounts of information, which is covered by the separate category of answers. As answers require far fewer resources than practical assistance, they are more freely given and tracked separately. Possible fulfillments include template customization (see: selective untethering, identity reassignment, integrated weaponry), Word provision (see: Words, research initiatives, deconstruction) and others. If you have a fulfillment that interests you, asking for it costs nothing. All available information on Albany, due to quantity and retrieval expenditures, would be a fulfillment whereas a question about Albany's location merely necessitates an answer, to illustrate.
Due to improvements in interface design in response to feedback from dissatisfied templates, the above answer has been made free due to relating to the reward mechanism, thus being deemed equally beneficial to both parties to share as needed.
Your answer: what you currently refer to has many designations: "well" (non-descriptive, efficient), "voracious dark" (descriptive, incomplete), "mother of ghosts" (incomplete, uninformed), "death-which-lurks" (misleading), "eater of souls" (imprecise), "unmaker" (close match, incomplete). The alternative preferred suggestion would be "student-of-templates", companion to "student-of-substrates" (active), "student-of-kingdoms" (discontinued) and "student-of-worlds" (idle) (see respective entries for more information).
You have one answer and one fulfillment remaining.
Ultimately all that matters is that gods have living world to play with.
"To be entirely honest, I only made this place. It was the elder who invited you all there probably, not that I oppose this in anyway. Say, while we are talking about freedom of mind, who do you want to wake up next to? I think I can arrange that, since I'm not fully asleep yet."
Arrange sleeping conditions in other reality according May's wishes. Also consider possibilities of this for minding; shouldn't levitation and spontaneous matter generation be easier now since these people are more connected with me? Less minds to object and more inclined to agree with me?
May would prefer to wake up next to her actual husband - as fun as these fantasies are, their appeal is greatly enhanced by their impermanence. When the dream is done, all things should return to their assigned place, wouldn't you agree?
You're not really in a mood to argue, so you just pick her up in the actual world and lay her down next to a small and hairy fellow who looks to be in a bit of a state, kicking and rustling in his sweet dreams of Jehwlheimr. You then turn your attention to broader concerns - the concerns of minding.
[Mining of Minds: 5]
... hm. The Moth Clan may indeed be useful, you reason - the powers of the elder in particular seem rather useful in directing the rest of the clan, and the unmistakable power that your catastrophic combination of the mead of poetry and the crystallized insights of minding possessed is also nothing to scoff at.
Thus far you've been toying around with the possibilities of the power of minding and mindscapes, experimenting playfully with the combinations thereof like the supernaturally enabled dilettante you are. Maybe it's time to get serious about it, you think as you look at the 200 or so Moths you've gathered in Jehwlheimr, some of which aren't even present here. You've enabled some measure of minding for them as well, in a sense. You could use this...
... yes, you think you could indeed use this. Instead of waiting for them to wake up you could do the opposite, softly deepen their dream, let Jehwlheimr envelop them softly and draw them into thoughtless, deep sleep. It wouldn't harm them in any way, you don't think, only put their talents to use. When you're done, they could wake up.
Wouldn't take more than a day or two of them sleeping here, if you forfeited sleep yourself. And with their minds at your back as completely as they surely would be during the deepest parts of their trance you dare say you could guard them from a great deal more than a few hungry dragons. You could become a true mastermind.
Uh oh, I haven't heard good things about the speakers. Just one of them couldn't be that scary, though. Hopefully.
"Okay, we'll go, but we don't need a whole armed entourage. Just one guy to show us the way. Trust me, you'll want as many guards stationed out here as you can get. I've been tracking a dangerous beast through the area that could endanger civilians."
It's no trouble at all for them all to go with you, the sergeant leading the patrol insists, they've gone about far enough as it is and found no trouble yet. Besides, if there really is a dangerous beast running about, surely they'd benefit from a briefing about it back in town rather than, say, running straight into it by accident and getting partially, if not entirely eaten.
[Our Old Bridge Is Falling Down: 4]
The other guards seem to find this wise, and all of them choose to escort you back to the city. For stoatmen you find them not at all unfriendly once the initial routine of accosting you on the way is done, and seem outright intrigued by your self-description as a monster hunter. What kind of monsters have you hunted, one of them asks, and you volunteer a semi-accurate description of that king-creature from down beneath Anglefork Castle (you don't specify the location, obviously) and a not entirely untrue description of how you managed to defeat it, which goes a long way toward breaking the ice. You also mention the dread fungoids of the northern plains, which lurk at night and seek corpses to make their own - their weakness, you see, is that they only move when you're not
looking at them...
The conversation becomes quite lively before long as the stoatmen ask you about various monsters they've heard of or, more likely, personally invented, and the doctor gets involved too with her own passing knowledge of various bestiaries. The sergeant seems like they'd disapprove of the fraternization if it weren't so fun to listen to. Patrolling Speaker's Bridge doesn't appear to make for a stimulating day's work, apparently. One of them asks if they can touch your pet monster, and you carefully advise them not to.
Meanwhile, city itself looms in the distance and bustles with activity, the first proper city you've seen in this entire world - it's nothing compared to the cities back home, but in comparison with the ruins and desolation of Anglefork Town the place looks to be teeming with life, the memory of the civil war that ripped the old Kingdom of Benzerwald to shreds carefully quashed at every turn. This is most emblematic in the centerpiece of the town, the Kingsbridge, permitted to keep its name because it seems to be in the process of being torn down by several hundred stoatmen and humans alike, the stones of it going directly to the construction right next to it: a new bridge, grander, longer, designed to be so robust it'd put most fortresses to shame and so ugly it'd petrify any well-trained architect.
Just as contrary to Anglefork Town is the liveliness of the city itself and its immediately surrounding lands, free of war and allowed to nurse itself back to health. Lumber mills operate at full capacity along the riverside, their water wheels spinning contently in the calmed-down waters of the Southbound, mostly human farmers till their fields under stoatman overseers, who seem more bureaucrats than slavemasters. Boats travel up and down the river, the docks filled to capacity in lieu of a functional bridge to carry goods over. And life inside the walls seems to have grown even wilder. Every public house you pass seems to host either a party, a massive bar fight (usually with the involvement of the guards) or a mixture of both, and stoatmen and humans in revealing outfits stand on many a corner, keenly showing you their teeth and wondering if you see anything you like, the guardsmen making promises to come back when their shift is done and asking occasionally if you'd like an introduction as well.
After no small amount of detouring around the Bridge's many diversions you come to the Speaker's hall, which isn't quite what you'd expect from apparently the most important building of the local government. For one, it looks nearly deserted, and the guards seem unwilling to accompany you inside. The door is open and doesn't appear to even have a lock. Several windows look freshly mended. If you had to guess, this might have once been a workhouse, or perhaps an orphanage. Now it looks more like a temple, so solemn and strange in the middle of the city that the rest of the city's traffic seems to take great pains to go around it.
You are ushered into the lobby, which is unlit and quiet. A minute or two passes as you look at Oggie and the doctor, who appear to have little idea what's going on either.
Eventually somebody comes down the stairs - a small (a full head shorter than you, in fact), sad-eyed stoatman wearing a sumptuous gray-gold cloak that only mostly conceals the fairly plain clothes they're wearing underneath. They stop in front of you and each of your companions for a moment, examining you dimly for a second or two before stepping back.
Welcome to Speaker's Bridge, they say to you at last in a grandmotherly voice, seemingly having established that you're the leader by virtue of standing in the middle. Where do you come from and what is the nature of your visit?
Well, certainly not theft. Might be good to take a look, though...
Drop a coin on the counter and then hop over to take a look.
[Show Me The Goods: 5+1]
After you've put up a single coin for the trouble of examining the actual merchandise and slide over the counter, you find that the actual back room is full of a great deal of tat accumulated by unknown means. But even in the Kingdom of the Dead, a veritable land of refuse, this particular back room stands out for how replete it is with junk from an untold prehistory that you can even barely conceive of, let alone readily believe as it stretches before you. The stone floor has collapsed inward a little from the sheer weight of crap in here, so epic in scale must have been the ill-fated wholesale purchase of it all.
You find tiny rotten wooden masks, ancient clay faceless bobbleparts of fertility goddesses, styli themed after famous scribes whose names are ironically unwritten, tablets with painstaking and mostly worn-out depictions of forever-lost wonders of an ancient world, the ruins of some of which you realize you've seen in the general shapes underlying the Tell of the Setting Sun. So much stuff in here that nobody appears to have treasured enough to even bother stealing, the massive weight of buyer's remorse clinging heavily in the stale air...
... until you realize, of course, that the styli, crude as they are, are fashioned out of cheaply mined graphite, and the bobbleparts are wound with robust springs of native copper...
Leif Erikson, Miner and Lush
- Sealed alchemist's brass box
- Half-basket of apple-like mushrooms (hallucinogenic)
- Paper party crown (worn)
- Moth-robe (worn)
- Itchy Woolen Britches (worn)
- Moth Elder's prized pigsticker
- A Word: INEVITABLE
- A Word: APOCALYPSE
- A Word: DRINK
- Body Count: 228
- Mead of Poetry (2 shining revelations remaining)
- Enders' Friend: The Grave of Red Clouds Parting
- Inscribed Wooden Stylus
- Iron spear
- 0.03 gp
- The Box: ?
- Induced Lucidity: Jehwlheimr, The Land The Gods Remember
- Compatibility: Minding
- Tricks of the Mind: Perception, Memory
- Tricks of the Mind: Engagement, Negation, Abstraction, Prestige
- Tricks of the Mind: the Self, the Other
- Tricks of the Mind: the Mythscape
- Gods of the Underground: Did You Just What
- A Visit From The Stork: Is What You Yes
- The Voracious Dark: Two Deals Made
- The Voracious Dark: The Promised Sixth
- Moth's Flight: Honorary Clansman
- A Night That Burns Forever: Juicy Gossip
- The Miracle of Life: Wayward Rabbit
- A Terrifying Deadly Trip: THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN
Eileen Minett, Vinyl Collector
- Distilled alcohol (in flask)
- Spirits of salt (in clay jar)
- Soaps of elk, bear, bat and snake
- 4 flasks of lamp oil
- Oil lamp (lit)
- Linen stoat shirt (worn, plasma-scorched)
- Stoat trousers (worn)
- Comfy slippers (worn)
- Never-made scimitar (blackened, slightly dull)
- Tooth-handled hunting knife
- Black leather boots
- An assemblage of amber and amethysts
- Silver thread-necklace
- Onyx spiral earrings
- 2 oaken rings
- Rusty, bloodstained knife
- A Word: HUNGER
- A Word: SYNTHESIS
- A Weapon: Explosive Cysts
- Grenade Jumping: A Solid Technique
- The Good Doctor: Secret Histories
- Sword of the Sand People: Cleaning Supplies
- Sword of the Sand People: The Services of a Minder
- Higher Tonight: There And Back Again
- The Old Mistress: Like A House On Fire
- Our Old Bridge Is Falling Down: A Monster Hunter
Jack Daniels, Karate Man
- 1 disabled manikin (motionless, stiff)
- Red and gold vest and breeches combo (worn)
- Leather boots (worn)
- Rubber mattress (filled with water)
- 14031 gp (in sack)
- Poor Unfortunate Soul: Forever Captive
- The Queen's Guard: Actual Asset
- Powers of the Beyond: Gardener of Thoughts
- Garden of Thoughts: the Stoat-Magistrate
- Dusty Wooden Speaking-Trumpet
- Crossbow Bolt (in throat)
- A Word: REND
- A Word: SILENCE
- A Word: EXECRABLE
- A Weapon: Murder-Thought
- Uncoupled: Strength
- Wooden Door
- Induced Lucidity: The Silent Garden
- Elongated Affairs: Enemy of the New State
- A Place In History: Vastly Unreliable
- 2 rats, crushed
- 1 rat, strangled
- 1 rat, live
- Doomstones: So High Up But Such A Bitter View
- The Majordomo: A Great Divide Between Us Now
- The Voracious Dark: Decreasing Demand
- The Voracious Dark: More Specific Requests
- The Vault of Heavens: Special Treatment
- Scars of Time: Not Quite Ready For Prime Time
- The Night Sky: How Very, Very Quaint
- Petty Crimes: Minded For Safety
- Fires, Pines & Day, Minions At Law: On Retainer
- Body Count: 3
Thomas Minstep, Insurance Agent
- A Word: ABSENCE
- A Word: GOODBYE
- A Word: WORM
- A Weapon: The Sword They Fear
- Insurance contracts, signed in triplicate: 12
- Nobody Cares
- Helen Clampitt
- Lily
- Undine and Prosper Eke
- Silver
- Tabernacle, treefisher scout
- Treefisher elder
- 4 treefishers
- Make A Man Out Of You: Battle-Tested
- The Grip of Tharn: Insurance Against The Storm
- Ranging fork
- 2 feet of sinew-thread
- Tooth-needle
- A Bowl, Black and Knobby
- Tight Leather Pants (worn)
- Incredibly Tight Blue Dress (worn, mutilated, mildly provocative)
- The Queen's Guard: A Reward Well Earned
- The New Queen: Lasting Gratitude
- The Box: Absolutely Delightful
- The Voracious Dark: The Place of Lost Souls
- The Voracious Dark: Testing Run
- Proof of Concept: An Interesting Student
- Body Count: 12
Oscar Wilde, Chemistry Teacher
- A Word: REVELATION
- The Wicked King's Missive On Economic Reform (in massive silver scroll case)
- Traces of Mischief: Glowing Facial Rift
- The Serpent's Egg: Dissemination
- Body Count: 4
- Cornerstone Helm (worn, collecting light)
- Bottle of aspirin
- Time-ender's measure (wrapped, processing? stopping?)
- 10 m of rope
- Half a candle
- 1 rat, skinless and smoked
- 5 gp
- Lock of Hair (unidentified)
- Iron nail, unused
- An Inauspicious Key
- Burlap Foot Wrappings (worn)
- Burlap Hand Wrappings (worn)
- Moth-Eaten Hat (worn)
- Respectable Brown Skirt (worn)
- Old Brown Waistcoat (worn)
- Bright Yellow Tunic (worn)
- A Wealth of Burlap Ribbons
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: The Less Dangerous Friend
- The King's Court: The Greatest Gift of All
- The King's Court: The North Wind's Gift
- The King's Court: Makala's Old Glory
- The King's Court: The South Wind's Gift
- The King's Court: The West Wind's Gift
- The King's Court: A Gift For The Wicked King
- Wizzards Bargins: A Spool of Copper Wire
- Wizzards Bargins: A Roll of Your Finest Sticky Tape
- Wizzards Bargins: A Hunk of Exquisite Graphite
- In High Spirits: But Not Very Useful In The Lab
Apologies for the hiatus. If you all are still around, you might be happy to know I now have a reinvigorated interest in continuing until the very end.
Author
Topic: Our Salvation: It Is Written (Read 258539 times)