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RAMONA The cooking salt doesn't do a fuckin' thing to these ancient shades. You're in saltwater, after all - a little more salt in it makes no difference. Lucky for you, the dead are nothing if not creatures of habit, and they're as unfamiliar with the parameters of their survival Down Here as you are. For one critical split-second, the ancient shades react just like they would if you'd done that to them under the open air; they flinch and draw back, as if you'd just cast a fishing net full of broken glass at them. It's enough. BRANWEN You miss your chance to light the candle on the ghostkerfucks while they're all together in the chokepoint, but Ramona's unintentional little trick gives you the time you need to clear your head and draw on Bombarda's power once more. Your aura of protection expands and merges with the bubble-field, sharpening and clarifying its perimeter, like the frozen onset of an explosive shockwave. Now you can see through it a lot better than you could before: a boon to navigate the obstacle course ahead. SERENITY It's a standoff. The ancient shades can't come at you so long as Branwen keeps her prayers going, and you can't come at them without forsaking the safety of your little bubble of air. They're the new legislature here, if your mad cousin Scrimshaw is to be believed: the drowned and the damned, in permanent legislative session, holding court under the baleful light of an artificial sun...unless you and yours can depose them from their low office, and restore the rule of the living to Aqualantis. They seem to realize that their position is poor. At any moment the tritons might come, drawn by the sound of the Bodhi shell. One by one, their rotted visages look you over, and then they just drift away without a fight. You're sure, however, that you'll see them again in time. * * * * * * * * * EVERYONE With Scrimshaw driven off for now, it's time to make some headway. The wreck-reef still looms ahead, and beyond them, the remains of the Aqualantean shipyards....and the Visible Hand, at last.  The wreckage of commerce looms high around you as the sled picks its way through the dismembered hulks of the merchant marine, lit only by the heretic's sun and whatever lights you choose to kindle. Progress is slow and careful, the way often blocked by shattered spars or buckled bulkheads, and all the while the steady throb of the rising current beats against your ears. Here and there through rents in the hulls you can see treasure all a-gleaming: shipping containers, crates and barrels, great heaps of packaged currency. If only you had the time to dredge it up and sell it all...but you've got more serious concerns in front of you now.  Up until you entered the wreck-reef, the water had been relatively clear: nothing more than the usual load of sediment and marine snow to block your line of sight. But now that you're getting in deep, you've been seeing, and moving through, more and more pollution in the water column. Thick olive sludge coats every surface with an oily sheen, and the light slowly dims as the artificial sun becomes less able to penetrate the water. As you turn a corner, coming out into a gap between the two halves of a colossal coal barge, you see that the waters are positively crammed with dead.  The rotting bodies of tritons lay stacked like a fisherman's nightmare, two or three deep, all through this little gap in the wreck-reef. There must be dozens, maybe a hundred of them dead here - a whole company of soldiers, slaughtered in seconds. That strange oily scent is back in the air again, sweet and musty and stronger than ever, underlaying the sickening gut-punch of an ocean choked with rot and coal dust. Serenity, it's worse for you than the others, out-of-bubble as you are - your gills are useless when the water's gone anoxic! You're already starting to gasp for breath, and finding it hard to come by - what do you do? Branwen, there's more to this charnel house than just a fish kill. Through the clarified bubble-ward, you can see two or three sleek streamlined shapes cruising slowly through the gloom - sharks, as dead as the tritons, but their eyes alive with necrotic energy. None of them have spotted you yet, but as soon as you get out into the open, they're certain to sense your warmth and come in for the attack. What do you do? And Ramona, you know all this is just another roadblock on your way to the real goal -- the Visible Hand, and the fanatical nutcase who's piloting it. Sandbridge said the ship was almost ready to leave drydock, and that was days ago - how much time do you think you have left now, with McKinnin's sabotage mission complete and Scrimshaw already alerted to your presence? The sharks are one thing; the anoxic waters another; but what you should really be worried about is Savior. He's jiggling around in your pocket again, sending out little jabs of nerve pain - something has him riled. One of the ancient shades is near, and you can guess perfectly well what he'd like to do with it: enthrall it, enslave it, and use it to foment ever more conflict and chaos. What do you do? Alumnus Post fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 19:13
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Serenity HP 21/21 | Armor 2 | Load 3/9 | XP 8/15 As her breath left her, Serenity immediately doubled over and reversed course back to the sled. Once she managed to get her torso into the air pocket she clung angrily to the conveyance, glaring furiously outward. Was this simply pollution, or some sort of chemical weapon? The dead suggested the latter - they would not have all been laid to rest so neatly if they had simply wandered into a pocket of inlivable ocean. It was clear who was ultimately responsible for this, but someone much closer to the ground gave the order. If they still lived and she got her hands on them, Serenity silently promised they would be handed over to the tritons with a smile. As a gift, they would not bring these warriors back. Yet perhaps it would bring peace to those they'd left behind. Shardix fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 01:00
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Ramona 17/26-1 HP; 10/14 XP; 1 Armor; ?/11 Load I shout and give chase to the greedy specters, making myself and the stupid pearl and offering they can't resist. Bait. I know ghosts, they think just because they can be invisible that they can ambush anyone and make quick work of them. Predictable. They also hate listening to people day and night and never being able to shut them up, not having the power to manifest and strangle them. So I give them the chance. They take it, and I make it the last chance they take. Doesn't matter if they take a shallow bite out of me if I destroy them for it with the balancia's current, I have two women here who can fix me. All the queen's horses and men couldn't put them back together again. @clock: 2d6+4 waywf+gdtd = (3+6)+4 = 13 @clock: 2d6+4 hnsgdtd = (5+2)+4 = 11 [should be 9, dex based not str] @clock: 1d10+4 mfdamagebalancia = (10)+4 = 14
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Mar 23, 2019 08:31
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Branwen McAlister HP 20/20 | Armor 2 | XP 14/12 | Load 7/12 Spells: Light[ ] Sanctify[ ] Guidance[ ] CLW[X] Bless[ ] Cause Fear[ ] Magic Weapon[ ] Sanctuary[X] Boom[ ] The moment Ramona rushes out from the sled Bran follows, trying to makeup for her previous hesitation by helping her with, whatever she was dealing with... SidekickBOT @ArkInBlack: 2d6+2 = (2+1)+2 = 5
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Mar 23, 2019 13:58
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RAMONA The ancient shade takes your bait, just as planned. It erupts from the wreckage of the coal-barge -- a drowned galley-slave of ages past, clad in chains and rower's brand -- but you're ready for it, you know how a monster like this thinks, and how to anticipate its pounce. When it comes roaring up at you, toothless jaw hanging down to its chest and brandishing its links of chain, you've already begun to strike. You thrust the boiling tip of the balancía right under its collarbone and let the currents take it. The thump-flash-boom of golden light nearly blinds you, even though your eyes are shut tight -- you feel all the skin on your face and front go all hot and stretched, and a scalding flush of sudden sunburn heat -- then, when you can open your eyes again, the ancient shade's just gone. There's nothing left of it but an enormous cone of flash-heated seawater, the pain of a second degree scalding on every square inch of your exposed skin...and a disturbing, nerveless lack of pain in your ghost-stabbing hand. The balancía is a dangerous weapon, and operating it without safeguards is hazardous to anyone nearby. You take ten damage from the backlash of its unrestrained power, but you've rendered this ancient shade extremely redeceased. One down, twelve to go.  * * * * * * * * * * * * BRANWEN You're just a couple seconds behind her -- but in a fight like this, against opponents as wily as these, seconds are life and death. Ramona's ridiculously overpowered balancía stop-thrust catches you and the ancient shade both by surprise, and by the time you can knuckle the spots out of your eyes you're about to be eaten by a shark!  One of the wily old hunters snuck up behind you while your sled was approaching, winding its way through the labyrinthine wreckage of the coal-barge nearby, and now it's close enough to come in on you for the kill! You manage to keep your mouth shut and not swallow any toxic seawater as you realize what's coming, but you've got a great look at its rotting ragged tooth-studded jaws as the undead predator comes bearing down on you... Defy Danger or take b[2d8] messy damage! On a 6-, you're additionally still stuck in the shark's mouth! What do you do?  Ramona, after Branwen does something, what do you do?
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Mar 24, 2019 23:43
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Serenity HP 21/21 | Armor 2 | Load 3/9 | XP 8/15 you see all of what just happened there with ramona and bran, and also you're picking up on some triton song coming from the gibberwock battlefield roll spout lore for anything more than the song's general emotional tone: martial, sorrowful, judgmental, and final As Ramona rushed off, Serenity held her tongue. It didn't matter what era it might be; a warrior must go to war and nothing you might say would stop them. That Branwen followed right behind was equally unsurprising. As she prepared to shuck the harness and follow after in support, a song caught her ears and sent them twitching. She was caught in rapture for just a moment as she tried to glean its meaning. Whatever one might say of incomparable skills of the elven Choir supplicants, they paled in comparison to Triton music. And how could it? Elven lives were not defined and molded by it the way these people were. Spout Lore: 2d6+2 8 As the song released her mind, Serenity caught sight of Bran and the predator that was honing on on her. With a cry, she slipped the leather straps and whipped her body forward like a knife. The angle was awkward unarmed blows were less than ideal in the water but a solid left hook into a gill ought to make the undead beast think twice. Aid Branwen: 2d6+3 9 Bran gets +1 to her Defy Danger roll. Shardix fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Mar 25, 2019 |
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Mar 25, 2019 01:51
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Branwen McAlister HP 20/20 | Armor 2 | XP 14/12 | Load 7/12 Spells: Light[ ] Sanctify[ ] Guidance[ ] CLW[X] Bless[ ] Cause Fear[ ] Magic Weapon[ ] Sanctuary[X] Boom[ ] No time to move, no way to outmaneuver an aquatic creature, decayed or not, Bran what might be her only sensible defense against the undead shark and jams both arms forward into its jaws as it gets close and simply tries to keep it from getting any leverage against her armored body. SidekickBOT @ArkInBlack: 2d6+3 Defy Danger Str = (4+2)+3 = 9 SidekickBOT @ArkInBlack: w[2d8] Shark Damage =
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Mar 27, 2019 13:51
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Ramona 7/26-1 HP; 10/14 XP; 1 Armor; ?/11 Load I ike jime the shark in one smooth thrust, destroying the hindbrain and severing the spinal cord, and making all its muscles slacken. This way, if it were a fresh catch, it wouldn't sour its meat by thrashing reflexively in agony and terror, but its heart would still beat, allowing it to be easily bled dry. I also wouldn't need to beat it to death, bruising the flesh and degrading its texture. None of that matters now, but I figure it'll keep it from carrying Bran away or biting down on her. I sign, "Heal me now, 12 more foes." Don't want this stupid weapon to backfire and kill me the next dozen times I need to stab another ghost before we're safe. @clock: 2d6+2 = (6+2)+2 = 10 hns @clock: 1d10+4 = (2)+4 = 6 mfdamage
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Mar 27, 2019 21:40
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SERENITY Curious, you reach for meaning in the tritons' distant song - and the weight of its accumulated aeons strikes your heart still with awe. Ancient, droning plainsong, vast and unhurried, as implacable as the tides. It's an invocation of sorts, you realize suddenly -- a fragment of ur-story, a section of the tritons' primordial epic -- with hints of linguistic roots reaching all the way back into the species' hazy, presentient past. It's old, old stuff. So old, in fact, and so slow, that you can't even catch one syllable in three, let alone one word. You have no idea who it's for or who it's supposed to be about. Perhaps the tritons themselves have forgotten. How did you come to learn of this ancient-most tale? Your left hook thumps solidly into the shark's flank - so solidly that it squishes right through the jellied flesh of its rotting gills and sticks fast into a nodule of decaying cartilage. It hesitates long enough for Bran to set her feet and hold its terrible jaws apart -- but then it starts threshing wildly in the water, driven to blind frenzy by the scent of your daughter's blood, in the few scant seconds before Ramona can execute it. You're whipped around like a kelp-frond in a typhoon, shaken until you forget which way is up, then ripped off its side and sent tumbling away from party and sled until you crash dizzyingly up against an iron hull. When you regain your bearings, the feeble lights of your travellers-in-arms are uncomfortably far away, and the blank blunt wreck of the coal-barge is cold against your scraped cheek. You're starting to feel a bit light-headed. Thick dark water presses in on you from every side. You're okay. You're okay, nothing hurt, just shake it off and get back to the light before something You get -1 forward on your next Defy Danger roll. You're now at reach from the cargo sled and from the party, and at hand against the wrecked half of the coal barge. What do you do? Alumnus Post fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Mar 31, 2019 |
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Mar 31, 2019 01:18
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Serenity HP 21/21 | Armor 2 | Load 3/9 | XP 8/15 Isurus had mentioned something like this when the two of them had spoken during her time in the medbay. The details escaped her now - she had been heavily sedated and mostly broken at the time. Yet what she could recall implied it was a song of ominous import. Akin to her own people's True Songs, called upon only in times of import to the whole of the species. Whatever was happening was something to be respected, and perhaps feared. But that was not here and not now. For now, there were foes to crush. With a flick of her tail, Serenity propelled herself back towards her companions as she brought the conch to her lips again, letting loose another call to battle. She knew Ramona's rhythms intimately by now, and the means to stir her blood to greater heights. Woe to those who stood against them in even the least thing. Arcane Art: 2d6+3 9 Healing Song: 2d8 11 Ramona heals 11 hp, and +1d4 forward to damage Shardix fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 01:57
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Ramona 18/26-1 HP; 10/14 XP; 1 Armor; ?/11 Load I can't see Serenity but I can hear her, playing one of my songs, nice and syncopated. It's distracting like always, catch myself thinking I could be content going forward just knowing that she's playing my song somewhere, and if she knows what's good for her she'll come back to me... I shake my head and smirk, playing it overconfident for the dozen specters looking to stab me in the back. My elf's only three hundred, maybe when she's grown up a little. Sometimes a song is just a song. She knows one of my names now, the nickname, the most proximal one to her expertise. It was all but inevitable that a bard could be trained to demonstrate understanding of my beat... Nevermind that, If the ghosts are such cowards that they won't take the bait, I leave. I can destroy them later.
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Apr 4, 2019 01:12
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Branwen McAlister HP 19/20 | Armor 2 | XP 14/12 | Load 7/12 Spells: Light[ ] Sanctify[ ] Guidance[ ] CLW[X] Bless[ ] Cause Fear[ ] Magic Weapon[ ] Sanctuary[X] Boom[ ] Bran's lungs ached from the exertion of fending off the animated shark, and when no more threats pushed from the inky dark waters Bran moved through the water as fast as she could manage towards the atmosphere generated by the sled.
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Apr 10, 2019 14:27
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SERENITY The mournful cry of the Bodhi shell sounds loud and low, and by some chance you hit just the right note to harmonize, perfectly, with the great glacial drone of the tritons' distant plainsong. Your sight is briefly blotted out by an unbidden vision - a bleak and arctic gale-wracked sea, crashing against a stark black cliff of ice. Great building-sized bergs calve off the black massif and plunge into the heaving waves. High above, amidst a spangle of pitiless white stars, the pale face of Nashira is blotted out by eclipse. When you return to reality, your lips are welded to the Bodhi shell's mouthpiece and your call to arms is growing impossibly loud, impossibly prolonged. The water shakes with it, your scales prickle with its overtones - and the steel of the broken coal-barge groans under sudden stress! You break off the horn-call at last, tearing your lips from its mouthpiece as your head whirls with dizziness, but it's too late now to turn aside from what you've inadvertently set in motion... The edge of a broken porthole cuffs you sharply on the back of the head. With a plaintive creak, the hull you rest against tilts ponderously underneath you. The barge-half is starting to topple over into a more stable resting attitude, and you and all your party are still beneath it! Defy Danger, applying your -1 forward from shortness of breath. In addition, take -1 ongoing from your now rather acute shortness of breath, to apply to all the rolls after you Defy Danger. This goes away when What do you do???
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Apr 15, 2019 00:43
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BRANWEN You seize the opportunity to return to atmosphere, and soon your head and arms break through to good dry air. You land cleanly back at the helm of the bubble-sled, your palms throbbing with pain and slicked pink with blood and salt, your ears ringing to a sound like a tolling church-bell stretched out over hours. Frantically you scan the waters and spy the holy light of Serenity's moon-sigil - but something seems blocked up about it. It gutters and spits like a dying fire - what happened between her and that cursed pearl Ramona can't help but cart around everywhere she goes? She's sounding that conch so loud it shakes the water, no concern for her own air or safety. You see the balancía in Ramona's hands take the sound in greedily, swelling with heat and glaring light as the elemental within flexes against its confinement, so bright and hot you have to turn your face away. More ominous still, though...for the last few seconds before Serenity can tear her lips away from the tritons' horn, the lifegiving borders of your bubble field tremble and flicker like a candle-flame brushed by a cold night wind. The all-encompassing sound of the Bodhi shell stops short, cut off by a groan of tortured steel. Your bubble-field reasserts its stability. The great barnacled wall of the coal-barge shudders, shifts and slides -- then, with a dreadful unstoppable slowness, it slowly begins to tilt downwards upon you... You have the helm. Now, Defy Danger - what do you do to get yourself and your ship out of harm's way?
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Apr 15, 2019 00:43
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RAMONA You deal a swift end to the undead shark, gaffing it clean through the spinal cord just like you planned - its muscles spasm, tremble and all go limp, freeing Branwen to get back to relative safety at the helm of your She's clearly addled by her thrashing and by the lack of air, her heartbeat on the monitor is rapid and weak, but she's still sounding that horn of hers like she's calling the whole ocean to arms in aid of you. The sound and its overtones tingle in your fingers and toes, driving away some of the numbness in your weapon hand and replacing it with a feeling like your all the veins in your hands have been cored out and filled back up with magma. You look down - the balancía is shining in your hand like the heart of a newborn star, so bright and hot you can't look straight at it anymore. It feels heavier than it did before, and it tremors in your hand like a live thing, almost leaping towards the foes that your elf and her horn have so kindly revealed to you, like a hunting dog begging to be let off its leash. Savior jumps and rattles in your pocket like a pounding heart. The balancía is growing dangerously oversaturated with power, and the captured elemental within it strains to break free. Any attempt to use it for something besides a spectacular act of destruction courts danger. You will need to find a way to discharge, dominate, or make docile this power, or you will soon risk catastrophe. * * * The walls of that coal barge must be ringing like a whole chorus of bells right now. It would be deafening, unbearable, to anything lurking within - as it must be to the not one, but three ancient shades you now see abandoning its capacious holds. One looks like a great deep-sea gulper eel of the distant past, flat and ragged and long as a pennant, its tusk-studded outsized mouth working with absent hunger as it flees. Its outline seems indistinct, frayed at the edges, like it's begun to forget its own shape.  Another is a creature from your ancestors' troubled dreams - a shade of the long-extinct sahuagin folk, those bloody-handed ravagers who roamed the shallow seas in centuries now long past. Her shade, clad in the ragged finery of an antique pirate-queen, spares a shark-toothed grin of challenge for you as it flees. The spiral tattoos carved into her arms and cheekbones look entirely too similar to the ones that idiot Scrimshaw had. The third one doesn't even look like a living thing at all. It reminds you of a ghost net, all crusted with kelp and bones and rotting meat, but no ghost net ever billowed like a living thunderhead, and no ghost net's living victims ever worked together to steer it. Great frondulent tendrils of rope hang heavy from its belly or drift off to its sides, twitching and probing the waters around them, as it slowly unfurls its wadded, silvery immensity out from the slowly tilting coal-barge. The other two shades don't wait up for it - they swim high, going for the open sea above the wreck-reef - but the two undead sharks swim a little too close. A drifting tendril touches first one, then the other - and at once, they're swiftly drawn into a churning cauldron of bone and rope and tooth. The water clouds brown. As the barge half slowly, inexorably begins to topple down onto the sardine-pack of dead tritons, down onto Serenity and Branwen, you know the time to act is now. You don't need to Defy Danger unless you go to Aid your friends and roll a 7-9. Take +1 forward if you can figure out a way to use the capsizing coal barge to your advantage in an attack against the ancient shades. What do you do? Alumnus Post fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Apr 15, 2019 |
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Apr 15, 2019 00:44
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Serenity HP 21/21 | Armor 2 | Load 3/9 | XP 9/15 Serenity's mind and body hummed as revelation and oxygen deprivation both entwined themselves through her. A vision of the ancient past? It seemed so - the Triton song had ensnared her and though the words escaped her the intent behind them seemed clear. No time to dwell on it however. Tearing open her eyes as she was struck from behind she became aware of the ship's post-mortem throes. It and its contents would sink to the far depths at her hand, and it would take her and her daughter with it if it could. She acted on instinct rather than thought, her hand tucking the shell away even as her body whipped itself wildly about at muscle tearing speeds to face the sled. Her vision was growing hazy at the edges as her air dwindled. It was of little concern comparatively. With a wrenching thrust of her tail she jetted forward, aiming for the harness. With luck she could seize it as she passed and haul the whole thing along with Bran out from under the crushing weight that was bearing down. @Shardix: 2d6-1 DD+STR = (3+1)-1 = 3 Shardix fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Apr 15, 2019 |
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Apr 15, 2019 01:59
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SERENITY You grab onto the harness and haul yourself desperately back in train. With all your strength, you pull...but you're too far gone, and you're finally out of air. Your muscles cramp and seize. Everything gets kind of echoey and spinny and very far away. Blooms of blackness block out the bulkhead descending above. You plunge headfirst into the rapture of the deep, your head awhirl with mingled delirium and revelation. The last thing you hear before you go under is the mournful drone of the tritons' distant plainsong. * * * BRANWEN Even as you get to your feet and start examining the sled's jury-rigged control surfaces, Serenity's in motion - but she's too rash, too quick, she doesn't even stop for a breath of air. She darts for the sled's harness and starts to heave, thinking she can pull all of you and the sled with one last feat of strength - but just as your sled gets turned around and starts to lurch forward, that strength finally gives out. Her thrashing tail moves more and more weakly; her gills, fully extended, ripple desperately in the thick choked water - and, presently, she's lost consciousness. She starts to drift. The great barnacle-studded bulk of the coal barge's hull looms above....it seems so far away but it's coming down faster now, descending like a giant's boot-heel as the wreck starts to pick up speed... What do you do?
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Apr 15, 2019 02:24
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Ramona 18/26-1 HP; 10/14 XP; 1 Armor; ?/11 Load Sign to Bran with my free hand to hook her to my air tank and get the sled off the sea floor and a little distance, then I swim into the half-upside-down collier and make my way to the cargo. On the way I tell the elementals in the balancia stories about where they are, in a big metal boat that they crammed full of their rock people that they dug deep into the ground to steal from their beds. They'd sell them and carry them far away from their land so they could be burned, because there was so much more heat released from within them when they burned. I said they should be broken out of their boxes, and I told them how to do so in a way to catch and kill the Dragons that had been sitting on them like their hoard for all these years. If they each went into different boxes, riled up all their coal people and then ignited them all in sequence, this thief ship would become theirs, like how when my people were forced to row old ships until they organized and took them over. I rowed, they could propel their ship to freedom with an explosion of steam, and when they caught up to those fat specters that were floating up there, they could blow up the compartments at the far end of the ship to make it spin like a shamshir, and magnetize and charge the alloy hull of the ship to make the dull edge deadly to them. I would steer, not by being the wheel, but the rudder, by jamming the balancia into the propeller at the stern of the collier, turning it into the handle of the world's most oversized sword. slydingdoor fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Apr 15, 2019 |
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Apr 15, 2019 22:36
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RAMONA Once more, a white-hot spar of thought extrudes its way into your consciousness; once more, you perceive the blazing, roaring presence of the genius loci imprisoned far beneath the seabed. It flexes its molten muscles, straining against its chains...and finds them weak and overstretched. More and more of its immanence floods you, forcing its way through the balancía to find purchase in the world - and then, with a psychic shock like the birth-cry of a thousand cast-iron newborns, the wreckage of the collier comes rushing back to life. Bubbles burst from the shattered piping. The hull groans and shudders and screams. A ripping belch of superheated gas and flame kindles in the cargo hold, catches, and spreads. Then - with terrifying suddenness - a hammerblow of scalding steam roars out of the engine room, blasting out of the cross-sectioned half of the ship like the world's biggest jacuzzi jet! With a scraping screech you can feel in your bones, the keel grates against the seafloor and starts to move. The shade of the gulper eel is too slow and stupid to evade its destruction. In a matter of seconds, it's parboiled by a ravening torrent of steam, smashed against a wall of electric charge, and obliterated from existence. The ghost net's too big to be missed. It takes the steam explosion right in its center mass, and those tangled folds of bone-crusted spectral netting are messily torn in two. Well, the good news is that the ship isn't capsizing any more. In fact, you think you're starting to move at a pretty good clip. You're clinging to the stern of the collier - what's now its bow, since the exhaust jet is coming out the other end - and you're not wielding a sword so much as you are standing on the nose cone of a red-hot underwater cruise missile. The balancía's jammed right into the propeller's center, not blinding-bright or yellow-hot any longer, but still hot enough to boil water. Lines of light like pulsing veins are starting to spread from it, coiling deeper into the steel of the hull... If you don't have your air tank, are you holding your breath right now? What do you do? * * * BRANWEN You swiftly get the unconscious Serenity hooked up with Ramona's air tank and strapped down to the deck as safely as expediency will allow. You haul the sled up off the seabed, angling to get away from the collier before it rolls over and crushes you all, when Ramona swims into the capsizing vessel and brings it back to life. Light bursts from the shattered portholes, the hull shivers and shudders like a stretching cat - and a ravening jet-exhaust of supercritical fluid blasts from its broken end. It must be the balancía - you knew she was a medium, but speaking to the elements? that's new. What else could make such a spectacularly destructive blast of steam? It obliterates one of the ancient shades completely, tears the other one in half - and it's powerful enough, too, to set that halved ship into precarious, headlong motion! It's still grating against the seabed and the other wrecks, pushing its backwards prow up into clearer water. You don't have to worry about it crushing you anymore...instead, you have to worry about whether or not you can catch up. What do you do? SERENITY You're back to clean air again. You can wake up whenever, and your penalties are gone. What do you do?
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May 1, 2019 03:39
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Ramona 18/26-1 HP; 10/14 XP; 1 Armor; ?/11 Load I thought the granfalloon might have a trick like that, splitting apart and fleeing in opposite directions. It's one I use, with my detachable extensions in case someone grabs them and acts like they have leverage. My contingency is kicking the rudder to the side and making the ship start turning up and around, ready to smash the two halves into each other and under the keel with an overhand strike. I've prepared a trick of my own to deal with the sahuagin ghost if she tries to backstab me during my moment, too. The veins crawling across the propeller shaft happen to be carving out a fine dragonfly wing patterned spiky axe-head for the normally fussy needle. As soon as that idiot ghost gets in range, thinking I'm just holding my breath and clinging to this propeller for dear life, no idea what I'm doing, I'll rip the new weapon from its sheath with a shower of sparks and show her who's getting the drop on who.
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May 1, 2019 19:53
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RAMONA Your contingency plan works somehow, even though the rudder's not doing a blessed thing to steer the exhaust-jet any longer. You feel the hull creak and groan under you as the flow of superheated water alters its vector. Now your half of the collier is traveling along a wide, curving arc - first up towards the surface, then over in a straight-line course towards the drydocks in the distance, and soon - unless you change course before then - the keel will come smashing down onto the other half of your collier. If the shade of the sahuagin alpha bitch is still clinging to the hull when that moment comes, she'll be pulped. Insofar as ghosts can be pulped, anyway. Rendered into a chunky slick of drifting ectoplasm, most certainly. However. As you're formulating your plan to deal with the inevitable witch-queen backstab, you start to realize that there may be a slight problem with it. The genius loci sharing space with you in your head - the being whose imprisonment powers the balancía - is becoming a little more....familiar...with the texture of human thought, now that you and Scrimshaw have spent some time with it. It, too, perceives your plan for the conduit of its power - and it objects. Violently. Your skull seems to fill with sparks and acrid smoke. The hull growls, like a sleeping Rottweiler poked with a stick. Little dots of molten metal start to ooze from the balancía's round knobby tip and runnel down its sides, cooling and hardening into frozen iron tears. A spike of icy cold pulses through your burned hand - it can only be Savior, waking abruptly to gleeful, spiteful awareness. A single word - a single overwhelming concept - intrudes into your consciousness with all the subtlety of an earthquake:  You will have to Defy Danger to remove the balancía at this time. If you succeed in doing so, you'll also shut off the collier's "engine". If you fail in doing so, you'll make the genius loci very angry indeed. What do you do? * * * * * * * * * BRANWEN AND SERENITY What the hell is Ramona thinking?! The collier's exhaust jet is coming entirely too close to your position for comfort! Worse still, as that furious column of superheated seawater slams into the seabed, it's stirring up a disgusting tsunami-front of toxic sludge, flying bits of ship debris, and dismembered triton corpses...and now that roiling blast-wave is headed straight for you! You will have to Defy Danger to ride out the blast front. Ramona's course change has made it so you don't have to Defy Danger to catch up with her....as long as you move quickly. What do you do? Alumnus Post fucked around with this message at 00:02 on May 5, 2019 |
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May 4, 2019 23:54
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Serenity HP 21/21 | Armor 2 | Load 3/9 | XP 9/15 Serenity's eyes shot open, the shock of clean air hitting her system with all the subtlety of an air raid siren. Trying to blink away the shadows in her eyes, she sensed the support she was on was rocking violently. They were still underwater...which could only mean tidal forces. On on instinct, she wrapped hand and her tail around whatever was immediately available and prepared to hold on tight. Defy Danger...by holding on (+CON): 2d6+1 8
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May 5, 2019 05:03
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Branwen McAlister HP 19/20 | Armor 2 | XP 14/12 | Load 7/12 Spells: Light[ ] Sanctify[ ] Guidance[ ] CLW[X] Bless[ ] Cause Fear[ ] Magic Weapon[ ] Sanctuary[X] Boom[ ] Scrambling to find something to help tether Serenity to the sled, Bran nearly jumps out of her skin when the scaled tail lunges and coils around the sled itself. She then lurches forward to find some kind of handhold as the wave of debris approaches. Defy Danger Con: 2d6 6
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May 6, 2019 07:40
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Ramona 18/26-1 HP; 10/14 XP; 1 Armor; ?/11 Load I snort out smoky bubbles to clear my head, and start negotiating before Savior starts fomenting any more animosity in any of the elementals, "Bitch, fine, you wanna stay linked to the boat, just charge this chain and I'll bash her with the shield spike. If you don't treat your teammates with respect you lose 'em, and I don't think you preferred the others." It's a little scoldy but sincere and quick, I know I don't have time to play Ramomma with a the pressure of a nearby, hidden enemy. I hook up the end of my chain to the balancia and get ready to swipe with the spiked shield it's spooled up around, displeased with the elementals for depriving me of the longer weapon and greater range of motion that my plan offered. As for eventually removing the rod from the ship, I bet they'll get bored with it once it lands and stops moving again, and all their coal buddies are burned out. Otherwise I can reopen negotiations in earnest with all my nearby foes dead, if I have any luck.
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May 7, 2019 22:39
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SERENITY You wrap yourself around the bubble sled, grab on tight, and brace yourself as best you can for the oncoming blast wave. Fortunately, the fully loaded sled, with your coils as its extra ballast, is too heavy to be tossed far - but that's cold comfort to you, since it means your meat's also the ablative armor that stops your ride from taking a hard rain of shrapnel through the belly. You surf the scalding rapids at breakneck pace, battered from below by flying chunks of wreckage, ship and corpse alike - all of it coated in olive slime as thick as tar. It's exactly as revolting as it is injurious to your health and spinal column. Eventually the sled flies free, kicked high up above the wreck-reef, blown into cleaner and more open waters by the backwash of Ramona's explosive take-off. The sled's fragile diffusion projector is, miraculously, unharmed. You, on the other hand, most certainly are not. Branwen and Ramona are nowhere to be found. You are alone. You take 1d8+1 messy damage, and your gills and injuries are coated in toxic slime. You'll get Sick from this eventually if you can't decontaminate yourself, but for right now you're okay. (If you somehow took zero damage, you won't get Sick either, you oh-so-fortunate bardsnake.) What do you do? * * * * * BRANWEN You're already off-balance when the blast wave hits. Your handhold is just an awkward corner of the footlocker with your remaining wargear in it - it slips away from you as a force like a giant's backhand hits you everywhere at once. You spin off into the maelstrom, totally helpless. You are a leaf in the wind. A pebble in a tsunami. Your body is scourged by a tidal bore of salt and iron and splintered gore - then an explosion of scarlet agony as something vast and metal smashes you in the face. When your senses return to you, the first thing you notice is a titanic, all-encompassing foaming noise, like you'd just put your ear up against a battleship-caliber spa jet. The second thing you notice is the sick throbbing of a broken nose. Your EOD suit is wedged fast against a hull breach, helmet shattered, head-down and struggling between the buckled edges of a steel wound. Your face and the point of one shoulder is jammed into the hull-end of the crack; the rest of you is scrabbling for purchase outside, a flapping flagtail at the mercy of the whipping currents.  By some freak of fate, your Dutchman's flight put you on an intercept course. Now you're a stowaway on the edge of a cruise missile crossed with a volcano - and there, up through the shattered, blasted bulkheads, at the very throat of the collier's engine room, you can see the seething elemental chaos powering this missile's flight. A boiling torrent of matter spews from an unbearable point of light and heat and flame, so dense and hot and pressurized that you're not entirely sure if it's a liquid or a gas. As the pressure and temperature drops, a ring of gas has developed around that exhaust-plume's margins, trapped by the hull, and breathable enough that you aren't about to suffocate. You're safe, for certain very particular values of "safe," but unless you get a better handhold, anywhere you can go from here is rather a great deal worse. Either wriggling free of close confinement will send you spinning hopelessly off into darkness without light or air, or drop you face-first into a hydrothermal hellbrew and then send your parboiled corpse spinning hopelessly off into darkness with neither light nor air. What's worse, you think you feel something cold and frondulent brushing your back, out on the outside of the hull where you can't see it... You take 1d10 forceful damage, and much of your inventory has either been lost or left behind. You now possess only your EOD suit, 3/3 uses of bandages, and one use of adventuring gear. You can recover the rest if you rendezvous with Serenity, but until then, this is all you have. What do you do? * * * * * RAMONA Don't touch that dial! We'll get back to you shortly.... Alumnus Post fucked around with this message at 05:27 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 05:13
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Serenity HP 21/21 | Armor 2 | Load 3/9 | XP 10/15 @Shardix: 1d8+1-2 = (1)+1-2 = 0 Nashira protects. Blessings upon her, and upon Jaira, and... Serenity quietly recited the litany of her gods and goddesses, thanking them individually for watching over her and keeping her safe. Not so much as a bruise or aching joint after that shockwave. All that remained to suggest the peril she had been in was the thin layer of putrid slime coating her skin and even that was diluting into the water, as though in fear of the holy radiance emanating from her brow. As well it should. Let no unclean thing sully Nashira's vessel in this world; let none tempt Jaira's fury. Her recitation continued, religious ecstasy taking hold of her mind again. As she sang her praises, her hands deftly sorted out the straps of the sled and she shrugged back into it before finally glancing about in search of her companions. As she did so, she withdrew the horn once more and let loose a call; a signal for valiant hunters to marshal back to her side. Serenity will cast about for a likely place to start searching for Bran and Ramona and head that way, sounding the horn regularly so they can find her. Discern Realities: 2d6+0 5 Shardix fucked around with this message at 14:44 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 13:08
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 14:49 |
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CODA click for bgm Metal twists and shrieks and groans, rippling like a drumhead. The edges of the gash pucker and soften like pursed lips, and with a disquieting spitting motion, eject Branwen gently away from the boiling hell-furnace and back out into the depths. The huntress and her great weapon go roaring away atop a column of foam and flames, towards the naval drydocks still far-distant... Serenity is there to play the cavalry again, swooping in with a hymn to bright Nashira upon her lips and the clarion call of the Bodhi shell ringing loud and clear. Your bedraggled, battered, slime-spattered Morning-Glory collapses against the shaft of the air projector, sucking down fresh air at last. There's nothing you or anybody can do for Ramona now. There's no way to catch up to her, no goddess to watch over her, no prayers her Savior would heed. All anyone can do now, is watch, and hope, and hurt for her. Her final weapon soars towards the drydocks in a long, lazy ballistic arc. The great glittering mass of the ghost net billows up from the wreck-reef to enfold you. The remaining tidal generators throb and churn, whisking the ocean currents into the deepening maelstrom. The tritons' plainchant alters from its sonorous drone to a high-pitched, keening whine, all a-shiver with anticipatory gravity. And now, as if things weren't bad enough, the protective shell of the drydocks opens, and unleashes the remade Visible Hand upon the world. Its vast sharklike shape glimmers like a forest of eyes. Already its torpedo tubes are launching, shoals of glittering death in the night. What's left now but to watch your thousand dooms come upon you all at once? Serenity feels a stab of coldness, a numbness in her right palm - her connection to Savior, attenuated by distance but still as full of gleeful malice as he ever was. You feel his exultation, his sense of rising triumph: now, at last, all his awful plots have come into fruition. Aqualantis will go dark; the elven dominions plunge once more into crawling chaos; the dead hand of Karthas Murgo will rule unopposed; unbridled elemental rage will scour the world clean of life. But then - - the missile impacts, a glancing blow amidships - that ram of steel breaks the flagship's back - ghost-blood gushing white and silver, a bloom of fire as the ammo stores cook off - - and the missile keeps going, its momentum carrying the other ship down with it - - a flash of deeper light as the vessels strikes the seabed, and - the balance changes.  * * * There is a terrible waiting silence. A hush of indrawn breath, a sudden shock of stillness in the ocean currents. Then, with a noise like a cathedral full of mirrors being hit by a cruise missile, existence rips itself apart around you. It looks a little like the scar left by the Bombardans, when they sabotaged the tidal generator, but multiplied a hundred, a thousandfold. A burning, hissing, steaming, roaring, singing, foaming, pluming fountainhead of color and light and sound. In moments it's consumed the remains of the Visible Hand, consumed the drydocks beneath it, chewed deep into the seafloor like a time-lapse of rotting meat. It clenches, flexes - blooms outward in a great seething flood, HERE IT COMES - - but before it can reach you the unseen tritons raise their voices as one, their plainsong striking lower notes still, lower, lower til it seems the very heart of the world is its tuning fork. The standing front of that impossibly resonant song strikes the leading edge of the breaching wave, and - * Discontinuity * » ʏᴏᴜ ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴛʜɪɴᴋ ᴡᴇ'ᴅ ʟᴇᴛ ɪᴛ ʙᴇ ғɪɴɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴛʜᴀᴛ 𝗘𝗔𝗦𝗜𝗟𝗬, ᴅɪᴅ ʏᴏᴜ? ʜᴀʜᴀʜᴀʜᴀʜᴀʜᴀʜᴀ « * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * - the last echoes of the blast (what blast?) ring in your ears and fade away to nothing. The seafloor below you is - undamaged? - - still studded with wrecks, but the naval drydocks are whole and intact, sparkling with light and frantic activity. A patrol vessel eases into its berth along the long spinal cords of the docking cradles. What on earth happened? What did she...? - but even as you reach for the huntress' memory, you find it slipping away from you. Her name, her face, all erased, as if by a gentle wave. Tentatively, you each stretch your muscles, examine your wounds. They're all a week old at least, fading bruises and healing scars, even those you suffered only a subjective moment ago. (who was she?) Something...indescribable...happened here. Must have happened. Will have happened? What words could describe what happens when reality splits itself apart and knits itself back together again without hardly a blemish? What do you say when someone you thought you used to know is gone as though they'd never been, and with them, all the threads their worldline ever spun? All that chaos, all that death....gone. Or not gone, but burnt up, transfigured...sprawled out below you in a glory of reflections and painted domes. (she sacrificed all she ever was, all she is, all she ever would have been) * * * The towers of Wunderland sprawl out whole and undamaged around the low-slung fastness of City Hall; the heretic sun of (someone) gone as though it never were. The dome of Tian is still a shattered tragedy, but there - the dome next door, once broken, is whole. The lights of the New Annidate glow gently amidst their moldering ruins, a chiaroscuro of algal softness and silver curves. And everywhere between the old domes, the relics of the city that was, networks of sealed streets, fish farms, and open-water gardens stretch forth in messy, capillary profusion. It's all still here, despite everything. A city skewed and scarred, but never broken...and look how its tale has grown. Aqualantis, jewel of the Crescent Sea. From seaborne to sea-born, from shoreline to seafloor, where the world above and the world below come together in uneasy peace. A treasure-trove of stories and a birthing-house of forms. A sun beneath the sea, shining like a jewel-box in the dusky deep.  You've seen so little of it still. Your adventures have taken you so far afield, but of Aqualantis itself? Only a few flooded streets, the ruins of Tian, the wreckage of the Big Sink, now this. There's so much more left to do here, so much to explore, so many more stories left to tell. Starchild, morning glory, O travelers returning, this is not the end. How could this ever be the end? Look. Listen. Taste the waters. Your city is waiting for you. Welcome home.  The story will continue in UNDERWATER WORLD III: THE LONG TOMORROW.
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Jul 1, 2019 06:08
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