"Hoi Baldr, what I'm doing wrong here?"
As far as funeral rites go, burning the body is fine way. Help and pray original owner of the cloth got taken to Valhalla, Fólkvangr or Gimlé.
Baldr isn't quite sure what went wrong. Hitting on women while they're asking you to respectfully obey the funerary rituals of their culture has worked pretty well for him in the past. Then again, viking funerals are pretty hot, and it's just not the same if you can't romantically watch a boat float away while it's on fire.
[A Lovely Funeral: 5]
You decide to help Lee out, gathering twigs and dry grass for a respectable fire that it takes the two of you only a couple of minutes to get to smoke gently, then eventually erupt into a small flame after a few minutes of blowing on it. The flame crackling away, Lee unfolds the robe and, rising to her feet from a previous kneeling position, lowers it gently into the fire - a tongue of flame licks it, and it begins to slowly smoke, then catch on fire as well. She adds it to the fire in a ceremonial fashion, folding it into a neat pile that begins to joyfully burn, and kneels back down. She begins to mutter the requisite words, closing her eyes.
[You Will Never Break The Chain: 6]
You do the same, but you continue to see her, a bright kernel of memory in your mind's eye as she brings back what she was once taught to recite by heart. A little inebriated and curious, you fail to resist. You engage.
Let your way in the world be silent, dear Moth, and let your colors be invisible. And now that you have passed, let no trace of you remain, and let nothing slow you as you go into the night where you belong.
You travel up the chain, and start picking away at the sensations - the night air, the crackling of the flame, the smell of smoke as the robe's strange fabrics slowly burn away. You drag away the subtlest first, the sounds of the wind disappear unnoticed, then the sound of distant motions in the camp, then the light of the fire shining through your eyelids, leaving you in perfect darkness.
Let your name be gone, and never said again upon the sunlit earth, so that you may be in death as you were in life. Let no eyes behold you in the halls of the dead, and your passage be as easy here as it is there.
You compact the fire into its component sensations, and operate upon the knowledge they bestow. You formulate the fire as a perfect image - not what your senses bestow upon you, but the underlying reality that they reflect. The fire becomes not a phenomenon, but rather a concept. An abstracted concept between your two hands, momentarily limitless in potential. You press them together around the flame, and the crackling quiets, the smoke ceases, and for a moment you (and Lee, for your perceptions are very much shared in this moment, even absorbed as she is in the chanting).
Let your flight be quick, and carry you to the hidden place behind the veil of knowledge, so that you may find the ground from which you were spawned. Let nobody follow you into the home of the Moth, and your soul find eternal quiet and rest in the nothingness that awaits.
You pull your palms apart without a sound, and you and Lee open your eyes in perfect sync as you exhale. The fire is gone, as is its fuel, extinct without a trace beyond the two of you still kneeling around its former place. The only thing that remains is a profound sense of never-there, and Lee leans forward as she puts her hands where she recalls the fire to have been with a look of genuine wonder, finding nothing. No ash, and the grass seems almost primordially undisturbed.
No mere minder trick, she says with a noticeable sense of relief. Not any she has seen. You keep the feeling of closure in the air as she chooses to say no more, and merely smile as she looks to the sky, quietly reveling in the nullification. You keenly sense her emotions through the haze of alcohol as they radiate in gentle ripples from her mind, drinking in her satisfaction to the point where you involuntarily begin to smile as well. You regard the perfect symmetry for a moment before a distortion begins to sneak in, a little tapping on the side of this ideal picture of coherence. You frown, the high of the moment beginning to fade, and look to the side.
It's Rose, standing behind the tree, wondering why you're naked and kneeling face-to-face with the Moth woman - she inhales sharply as your eyes fall on her and ducks behind the trunk in a heady mix of fear and wishful thinking. Oddly enough this only makes her easier for you to see as you look on in the strange hyper-awareness and clarity of a man awoken from a vision.
Thomas's eyes glazed over a bit. "Um, sure, meteors. Hey, that sounds like something my sister said once, about shouting against the storm. I can't remember the context, though. But, uh, I don't think one can really strike against a force of nature, no?"
Thomas found himself edging away from the crater a bit.
Keep talking. Also back off a bit.
The guard follows you in lockstep with serpentine precision as he keeps up the monotone. Very true. Nature
is indifferent, as you might expect. But there are many elements of it that hint at greater and deeper influences such as deities, demigods, overgods, spirits, djinn, faeries and any other variety of hobgoblin that you may be able to think of. These are the unnatural elements. For instance, would you believe that this pool of toxic waste illegally disposed of in the middle of the wilderness is explicable by a perfectly natural phenomenon? Indirectly, perhaps. Disobedience of sensible regulation is not unexpected. Despite this, there has to be someone disobeying such regulation. And someone with a motive for doing so.
In summary, somebody is responsible. And this somebody is presumably not entirely indifferent - it is inconvenienced, therefore it can be thwarted, harmed, hurt, injured and otherwise prevented from normal functioning. And it is thus the duty of all citizens and non-citizens alike to hunt down this somebody and force them to either pay restitution or be made incapable of perpetrating similar acts yet again. Perhaps by a summary removal of the hands or whatever other appendages it possesses. He has given this some thought, he says as he draws his sword and invites you to watch as he starts to draw diagrams on the ground for several elaborate proposals on how one would possibly dismember a god, considering such factors as size, shape, anthropomorphism and omnipotence. He explains at length, and the turnkey squats by the drawings, cocking his head and occasionally pointing at imprecisions that the guard proceeds to notice and meticulously correct.
He's going to be at this for a while, the woman whispers into your ear from behind, her hands on your shoulders as she leans in on you. It's best to ignore him.
"... I'm an idiot."
Well, anyway, better get moving. El's to the West, Daniels is heading to El, so East it is.
Find Polaris, head East using that. If the constellations are even the same here, that is. Failing that, make an uneducated guess. Nothing else to do until daylight.
[Astronomical Aptitude: 2]
You find Polaris rather easily - it's the brightest star in the night sky, a brightness to almost rival the moon. It hangs in the sky circled by a ring of smaller lights. You nod, getting the sense you've established a good sense of where to go, and proceed to head eastward, to the Kingdom of the Dead. It promises to be a long trip.
And a long trip indeed it is - you head east for a time, keeping the north star firmly to the left until it's drowned out by the approaching dawn, putting a great deal of distance between yourself and wherever it is that Mr. Daniels could possibly be heading. The landscape stays largely steady, although you eventually wander into the forest once again as the biomes curve around you.
[The Land of the Rising Sun: 4]
It is midday when you start noticing a change in the environment. The leaves on the trees begin to look greyer and paler, and the undergrowth starts to become waxy as you walk on. The birds seem quieter and you see a murder of crows rise from a nearby ancient oak tree. Pushing through the overgrown forest floor you head on, occasionally crossing a black, largely silent river or two, shallow enough to comfortably ford and slowly being choked with sediment and reeds. The landscape droops and grows wetter, the forest turning increasingly swampy and dark. You occasionally see figures in the distance, but they flee at the sight of you, some of them strangely bipedal-looking for wild animals.
Midday has turned to sunset again as the swamp grows thinner and the trees become stunted and blackened, and the watery swamp floor is coated in a thick layer of treacherous red moss. You are about to pause and consider whether this is a particularly good direction to keep going in when you notice a little path - a footbridge of what look to be assorted bones connecting little islands of relatively solid ground. It proceeds in two directions, one leading toward what looks like a lone shack further east in the bog, the other stretching south and east, zigzagging precariously with no end in sight.
"Well I need one and I'm not going to get any more. Look at me, I'm 95% noodle right now. Besides, like I said, they're not gonna be killed and if you need to interrogate them again or something I can just put them back out."
C'mon I gotta get at least one please guards queen anyone
Look, the guard says, she's not sure how supernaturally devouring a stoat is going to help you become less of a grotesque noodleman and frankly she is confident she doesn't want to find out. So if you need one, why don't you go find a straggler or a pocket of resistance that hasn't been eliminated yet and grab them? You'd be doing a great service to the community.
[The Queen's Eye: 6]
Surely he can have
one, the queen mentions, briefly poking her head out from under the lord's hands before he scrambles to cover her eyes again. She starts warding him off, clearly interested in what you might possibly want one of them so badly for, and the servants start crowding around them as they try to prevent a rather embarrassing slap fight from starting between the ruling teenage monarch and her rather old adjutant.
The guards all look at you. You look at them. They heard the queen, right? They sort of shrug. Okay. Maybe you can have
one. But you better be ready to give it back if the commander comes back and wants to know something. So no chewing, okay?
"Okay, we should probably get in and out in a hurry, so there's no time to waste. Let's go straight for the good stuff."
I make my way through the door with the dead stoat guard.
You weave through the room, trying to not make anything collapse by moving in sync with the vibrations, and the doctor follows in your footsteps, imitating your motions. You scurry over to the door and pause to gently nudge the corpse out of the way with your foot.
[Impressive Constructions: 6]
The house creaks and shifts as you do so, but luckily that appears to not have been a load-bearing corpse. You pull the door - it opens slightly before you realize you're supposed to be pushing it, and after a minute of applying firm pressure, the doctor lending her shoulder to the effort, you push your way through. And not a moment too soon, for exactly as you tumble into the next hallway you hear and very much feel the room behind you start to fold in on itself as the roof meets the floor in places, all of it closing together like a set of jaws before it slowly and incompletely rises back to its original configuration.
Yes, about what you would expect, the doctor whispers. Disorderly to begin with, and poorly insulated against the madness of the earth. Best to not spend more time in here than absolutely necessary.
Speaking of, you now find yourself in a side room - a hallway, to be specific. It curves and twists, staircases leading upward into darkness and downward into light, both swaying and undulating in ways that make you dread walking upon them. On the side of either the hallways continue for a bit - there's a cubby beneath the staircase, you think, its door breathing and splintering as the staircase moves around it, and a desk slowly crawls from one side of the room to the other, an undisturbed vase of flowers standing on it, almost taunting you to examine it closer. A trail of blood leads along one of the walls, terminating at it in a person-shaped splotch, as if a man had stumbled into the paneling and somehow been ground through it. You step away from the nearby wall just in case.
Leif Erikson, Miner
- Naked
- A Word: INEVITABLE
- A Word: APOCALYPSE
- Induced Inebriation: A Bit Pissed
- Body Count: 228
- Mead of Poetry (5 shining revelations remaining)
- Enders' Friend: The Grave of Red Clouds Parting
- Inscribed Wooden Stylus
- Iron spear
- 1.03 gp
- The Box: ?
- Induced Lucidity: the Aftermath, or the New Beginning
- Compatibility: Minding
- Tricks of the Mind: Perception, Memory
- Tricks of the Mind: Engagement, Negation, Abstraction, Prestige
- Tricks of the Mind: the Self, the Other
- 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: the Unmaker
- An Ancient Sea: The Hedonist's Inspiration
- The Miracle of Life: A Dreaded Guest
Eileen Minett, Vinyl Collector
- Naked
- A Word: HUNGER
- A Weapon: Explosive Cysts
- Grenade Jumping: A Solid Technique
- The Good Doctor: Fellow Naked And Confused Traveler
- Higher Tonight: There And Back Again
Jack Daniels, Karate Man
- Naked
- Red and gold vest and breeches combo
- Leather boots
- Traces of Mischief: 90% Boneless
- Wounds: 1
- 14033 gp (in sack)
- The Queen's Guard: Unusual Troublemaker
- Powers of the Beyond: Gardener of Thoughts
- Dusty Wooden Speaking-Trumpet
- Crossbow Bolt (in throat)
- A Word: REND
- A Word: SILENCE
- A Weapon: Murder-Thought
- Uncoupled: Strength
- Wooden Door
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: Run Like Hell
- Tower of the Mind: Endless Well of Mystery
- Induced Lucidity: A Garden Well-Tended
- Elongated Affairs: Enemy of the New State
- A Place In History: Vastly Unreliable
- Anglefork Castle: the Great Worm
- 2 rats, crushed
- 1 rat, strangled
- 1 rat, live
- Travels In The Fourth Dimension: Sunday ± 2 Days
- 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 Good Doctor: An Eager Listener
- Body Count: 3
Thomas Minstep, Insurance Agent
- Troubles In Anglefork Town: Bearer of the Sword
- A Word: ABSENCE
- A Word: GOODBYE
- The Doom Guard: A Productive Discussion
- A Weapon: The Sword They Fear
- Traces of Mischief: Whole-Body Radioactive Burn
- A Bowl, Black and Knobby
- Tight Leather Pants (worn)
- Incredibly Tight Blue Dress (worn, mutilated, mildly provocative)
- Travels In The Fourth Dimension: Sunday, July 25th, 409 S.D.
- The Good Doctor: An Island of Sanity
- The Queen's Guard: A Reward Well Earned
- The New Queen: Lasting Gratitude
- The One They Fear: A Satisfactory Contract
- The Box: Absolutely Delightful
- Body Count: 2
Oscar Wilde, Chemistry Teacher
- A Word: REVELATION
- Wounds: 3
- Traces of Mischief: Glowing Facial Rift
- The Serpent's Egg: Dissemination
- Body Count: 4
- Time-ender's measure (wrapped, processing? stopping?)
- 10 m of rope
- Half a candle
- 1 rat, skinless and smoked
- 6 gp
- Poor Misshapen Dice
- 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