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you’ll meet my resistance every day
the second-least unique adventuring party in Pu’er
Permalink Mark Unread

In the Consulate of Stars, on the Pu’er continent, there is the city of Theophrastus. It contains 170,000 people, at any given time, packed loosely into twisted spires and crooked alleyways and more ordinary businesses and homes. In it, walking through one particular alleyway, there is a neko - androgynous and slender, with pointed cat ears and a slowly swaying black tail - and an improbably tall and athletic drow, walking beside him.

The neko - Jade - is considering going to a tavern.

This is never a good sign.

Some people go to taverns very casually; otherwise they would be a less viable business. This is fine, if you’re a relatively ordinary person. It might even be fine if you’ve been interesting for a very long time; hundred year old adventurers who’ve yet to learn their tenth secret can grab drinks without any particular concern.

Jade Bushida is only twenty three. He has already learned fourteen secrets. He is ordinarily far too sensible to go around visiting taverns.

But the other person in his head wants to, very badly, and so he is considering it.

‘... why do you want to go to a tavern,’ says Jade, internally.

Um,’ says the other person in his brain. 

Um’, they repeat. ‘We’ve been on the road for a while now, and, um. I thought it would be fun?’

Taverns are not fun.’

I, um. I’m sorry if this is a conflicting need, but I really want to go to a tavern and we’re supposed to have joint input on stuff and everything, so I think that we should do it.’

That is not an explanation.’

‘We just spent the last week trekking through the wilderness and I’m really very lonely and sad and I think a tavern would be better for me than just finding an inn?’

I don’t think that it will help.’

Um. I think that it’ll help, and I think that I’m still allowed to make decisions sometimes, even though decisions are hard, and I don’t think the overall risk estimate on going to a tavern is actually high enough for you to exert your veto?’

This is going to end poorly.’

I’m okay with my decisions occasionally ending poorly. You’ve also made decisions that ended poorly and I really don’t think that means that you shouldn’t make decisions at all or anything?’

‘... fine.’

 

He turns to his… traveling companion… what would even be the word for ‘the person his headmate is dating’...

“Kamin wants to go to a tavern.”

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“Cool! Does he, like, have one in mind, I’m not super familiar with the area but I super know a few places.”

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Jade sighs, slightly, and does a few consecutive pirouettes. His coat turns into a glittering swirl of glowing specks.

”By promise of night, I wait, until -“

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“- the promise of dawn has since been fulfilled.”

His coat resolves into a heavily embellished jacket, covered in rhinestones and elegant sunset gradients; the rest of his outfit is similarly embellished, if more subtly. His hair and his ears and his tail bleach to a pale blonde; his posture and his gait change entirely.

”Um! I don’t really know Theophrastus very well at all, I’m still mostly used to the southern coast, so I definitely didn’t have anywhere in particular in mind?“

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“I went to the Yew Berry when I was here for that basilisk thing but I dunno if you’d, like, like it. They have strippers and stuff. I super like strippers but they’re not super your thing and you’d maybe feel weird about it? - let’s go to Mal’s, one of the waitresses was cute but it was pretty tame.”

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“I don’t mind strip taverns in the abstract, but I don’t think that watching you give money to professionally attractive people would be very good for my self esteem? We can go to Mal’s.”

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“Cool.”

 

They navigate through several more alleyways, and eventually reach a large, bustling tavern. It has a alchemical neon sign in front of it, simply saying ‘MALEVOLENCE’; whoever decorated the dimly lit interior was clearly very fond of black leather, spikes, topless waitstaff, and tiny little aquariums filled with snails.

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Kamin is unsurprised by the fact that Zeke considers this sort of establishment ‘tame’. Jade sighs, inside of his head.

”It’s very, um, art mautalant?”

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They find an empty table.


“My auntie talked a lot about all that stuff, she kept asking my mom to redecorate the house and my mom was always, like, ‘no!’, and then she would drop it and then there would be something else next time about about the curtains or whatever.”

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“Are you two still in touch?”

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“I hired a teleporter to talk to her, and it turned out that she was super dead, so then I hired a medium and apparently she has a ghost girlfriend and stuff now and doesn’t wanna come back, so... not... really? Giant spider ate her. Lots of giant spiders where I grew up, they were scary when I was a kid but now I can murder them with my bare hands and they’re kinda adorable? I want one as a pet but I dunno any druidism stuff and I’d be really bad at it.”

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“I think that I would enjoy learning druidism, but everything that isn’t healing seems terribly inscrutable. Although I’ve been watching the way Jade does psionics and I think I might be close to figuring some of it out?”

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“You’re working on telepathy, right?”

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“Yup! Or, well, um, Jade is working on getting better at telepathy and I’m watching him do that? And I’ve also been watching him try to crack clairvoyance but that’s even less scrutable to me, watching him work on telepathy is like watching a painter when you don’t know how to paint and then watching him figure out clairvoyance is like watching someone, um - try to mold invisible clay? I can see his metaphorical hands but the rest is just inexplicable. And he’s also poking at teleportation but that barely makes any more sense to him than it does to me.

If I can figure out telepathy and clairvoyance I can learn how to do sense sharing, I think. I thought that might be - nice.”

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“... yeah.”

 

A waitress stops by their table; she’s precisely as topless as all the other waitstaff, but her general resemblance to a humanoid lizard makes this fact less relevant than it might be otherwise.

”Hello,” she says, in a bored monotone voice. “Welcome to malevolence tavern. We have food to sate your every dread hunger and drinks for your every dire whim. Do you need to look at our menu.”

”We’re, like, fine? I want two pints of beer and the mushroom bread, and my boyfriend can have whatever the spiciest thing on your menu is and a thingy of watered down mulsum wine.”

The waitress makes a vague affirmative grunt and proceeds to wander away, presumably in the direction of the kitchen.

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“- thank you!”

 

They eventually receive, and consume, their dinner; Kamin drops some hidden tension in his shoulders, listening to ambient laughter instead of ambient birdsong and eating warm food and in particular eating warm food that his boyfriend(!) ordered for him. Zeke orders a second round of mushroom bread and a marinated flank of lamb; Kamin nibbles on the incredibly spicy remnants of his incredibly spicy meal and stares at his boyfriend(!) and occasionally turns inward to respond to some comment or another from Jade. 

He’s so happy. Other people in the restaurant might not feel happier per se, but the neighboring few tables do feel a bit of a glowing restfulness on the edge of their souls.

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A human woman in an eccentric outfit approaches their table.

”Aren’t you two just the cutest little schnapps I’ve ever seen! Do I have to call the cuddle police?”

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“... we’re kinda in the middle of a thing, here.”

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She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms.

”The cuddle police cause three giggle fatalities a month in this jurisdiction and people like you just don’t give a damn! Why, if I didn’t know better I’d think you were a no-good scoundrel and a down-dirty cheat, Mr. Byrne. If that is your real name.”

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“That’s not... a thing... will you go away if I, like, punch you in the face? Super cool with doing that.”

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(Jade does not bother suppressing an exasperated sigh in the back of Kamin’s mind.)

“Um?”

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“You would strike a blow at a poor defenseless maiden, Mr. Birdiewhatever? For shame. I am but a humble servant of some person who definitely exists, sent on a noble quest to do nothing in particular.”

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“... are you, like, a bard. People who aren’t bards are, like, bad, at being this annoying.”

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“I’m a sugarplum pony from the magical realm of dreams, sent to fulfill your deepest wish!”

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Zeke attempts to punch her in the face. 

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She trips on a corner of her skirt at the precise right moment and ends up on the floor, remarkably unpunched.

”Foul! Foul! Mr. Brontosaurus -“ 

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“Byrne.”

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“- Mr. Barnacle, I’m afraid that’s going to be a ten yard penalty and detention, at midnight, in my office! Bring an electric eel, a raven, and a connivin’ little putty tat, for good measure, we’re getting frisky.”

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Zeke decides to bother standing up. Neighboring tables are either staring at them or pointedly-avoiding-staring-at-them.

“Say whatever weird cryptic riddle you came here for and then fuck off.”

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“Try more aerobics, sugarplum, that shirt makes you look fat.”

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“Literally gonna murder you in five, four, three, two...”

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“Your writer needs to give you more filler episodes, jeez. Go find someone dead, then one in a guise, and watch out for the man with a colorful eye. And eat fewer carbs, we’re not paying you to eat all the hors d'oeuvres on set.”

And then she... disappears in a puff of smoke?

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“Everyone totally knows that you’re just invisible, there are way more invisible bards than there are teleporting bards, you’re, like, not as cool as you think you are - whatever.”

He sits back down.

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Elsewhere in the city and slightly elsewhen, a blackbird is flying . . . strangely.  For one, it darts and weaves between and around spires and crooked towers, occasionally circling one entirely; for another, it's going a lot faster than most birds bother to, even though it's not covering much distance - ahem -  as the crow flies.  For a third, after a relatively lengthy display of aerial acrobatics, it dives, straight down, before pulling up about two stories from the ground to descend at a bit more of a reasonable speed, and finally alighting on a well-muscled shoulder.

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"I think these routes are fine during rush hour, but we should probably either add a bit to mine or take off a bit of yours for when it's less crowded," the owner of the shoulder says, reaching into a pouch on her belt and taking out a bite-sized bird snack.  "It's just too much of a straight shot; I was waiting here for a really long time here before I even saw you."  She pops the snack in her own mouth and starts walking to an edge of the plaza.

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"Uh, iono, like, twenty or forty seconds?  I forgot to count it."

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"Well next time you be the faster one, and then you can remember to count it, how about that."

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This gets her ear bitten, although not hard enough to actually hurt.

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"Ow - okay, sorry, geez - "

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- someone suddenly falls onto them after appearing in a puff of smoke! 

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She squawks in alarm.

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The mysterious falling woman huffs, dusts herself off, and stands up.

“Rude.”

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She checks to make sure the bird is okay, then turns to the dropper.  "Are you all right?"

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“My poppycock is irreparable, my gibbers are jibbed, and within a week the embarrassment of this event will make my willpower dissolve into a fine, delicious stew, heated over the flames of my despair, lightly salted with smooth jazz. I’ve never been better.”

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". . . Good?"

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“I bet you use ellipses with all the girls. Do you want to hear a secret?”

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"Yes."

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“Promise not to tell? Just you and me, no third person involved.”

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"Ye - "

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Caw.

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"Uh, no, actually.  But," a bit rote, "is three people really so much more than two?  If it's just three?"

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“The writer’s room can strike ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ from the script and we can call it square. Do you like squares?”

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"Uhhhhhhhh.  They're fine?"

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“Stop by the square with a blue bush and three street lamps around it, on the road that passes the clocktower; do not pass go, collect three and a half adventurers for your trouble. I already talked to some of them, later, they’re fun. Go then into the catacombs beneath the heavenly train, yada yada. Toodles!”

She disappears in another puff of smoke. 

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Well.  This wasn't actually that much more confusing than most interactions she has with people who don't fit on her shoulder.

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Time to go find out what's around . . . just about every clocktower in the city, apparently.

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Probably she'll be more help if she -

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- takes to the air as well.

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Elsewhere, later -

“We’ve been walking around for, like, fifteen minutes, and the sun is setting and stuff. D’you wanna just find an inn?”

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(Kamin isn’t sure that ‘we’ is the appropriate term, there, given that Zeke is feeling justifiably paranoid and has therefore opted to bridal carry him around town.)

“I don’t really know that much about how fatespinning works, but, um, Jade says that we should keep going for at least another fifteen minutes? And if we don’t find anything interesting in that time frame then it was probably a more long term prophecy.”

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(Zeke feels justifiably paranoid an awful lot! His boyfriend is very adorable and very fun to carry around and also very squishy.)

“Cool. I’m bored, so we’re gonna go roofhopping instead of staying on the ground, unless you super object?”

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“That seems fine?”

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“Nice.”

He casually hops twenty feet up onto the nearest rooftop, Kamin still in his arms, and then leaps onto the next one over, and then the next one, and so on. Someone dead, someone in a guise, watch out for the man with the colorful eye, someone dead, someone in a guise...

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A blackbird swoops in a few feet off to his side, and falls into - step? flap - with him.

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... probably it would be rude to just, like, grab it. Not that rudeness usually stops him from doing whatever he wants, but he doesn’t want it to suddenly turn into a dragon or anything and it seems like that sort of day.

He stops after a few more rooftops and turns to face it. 

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It circles him a few times, spiraling until it's pretty far above his head, and caws.

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A moment later, it's joined by another bird, more than twice its size, who glides down in front of Zeke and -

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- turns into a very buff (compared to baseline; she looks rather scrawnier next to Zeke) and attractive human woman.

 

"I don't suppose either of you is in any meaningful sense half an adventurer."

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“No comment. Have you, per chance, made the recent acquaintance of a witchy-looking human woman speaking exclusively in riddles and quips?”

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"We did."

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“And what exactly did she tell you?”

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"'Rude.'  'My poppycock is irreparable, my gibbers are jibbed, and within a week the embarrassment of this event will make my willpower dissolve into a fine, delicious stew, heated over the flames - '"

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“Less exact than that.”

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"Uhhhhhh.  We're looking for three and a half adventurers.  Here."

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“We were told to look for someone dead and someone in a guise, and to watch out for a man with a colorful eye. I assume that you’re probably the person in a guise?”

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"Seems possible."

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“Bards totally suck. I wanna find the dead guy, did your crow senses pick up on any dead guys?”

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"Uhh.  No."

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“Laaame.”

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“I suppose their deadness is metaphorical or otherwise non-obvious? Or they might just be about to die momentarily, or - I really don’t understand bards at all.”

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“Ugh.”

He hops off of the rooftop - probably the druid person can get down on their own - and looks around for anyone vaguely interesting.

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Yup.  She leaps off, turns into a bird on the way down, and - crashes directly into someone in the air.

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She rights herself and turns to float briskly away without responding.

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Zeke jumps up, grabs onto a street lamp, holds onto it with one arm, holds Kamin with his other arm, and blocks her path.

”- hey, are you dead?”

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“- um, that’s not a threat or anything, there was a cryptic bard.”

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“Yeah.”

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"Not that I'm aware of."  She rolls her eyes.  Floats back from them a little bit.

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“... um, what are some other distinguishing factors - do you know fourteen secrets?”

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"What's it to you."

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" - We know fourteen, too . . ."

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“Um! The bard seemed like they were trying to set up an adventuring party, and normally adventuring parties all know the same number of secrets, and Zeke and I both also know fourteen. So you’re probably the fourth person and you’re just metaphorically dead in some way.”

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"Uh-huh.  Sure."  Time for her to turn and fly away, she thinks.

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Zeke hops down from the pole.

 

”This is dumb and we’re going to an inn. Birdy Mcbirdperson can follow if they wanna, I’m gonna go find a place with really nice sheets.”

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The crow appears from between some buildings to follow Zeke.

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The raven flaps after the flying woman.

"It's uhhhh.  Pretty dangerous to ignore bards, you know."

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"You must think I'm pretty idiotic not to know that, hm.  Well, I'm also not idiotic enough to think that everyone - or even most people - who say they were sent by bards aren't lying.  Especially when they don't actually say anything prescient."

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"Uhhhh . . ."

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"I'll see you later if it turns out you weren't just trying to get a master of transmutation on your side for free, I assume.  And if not, well."  She shoves the bird away with a gust of wind, takes off flying in the other direction, and makes a bank of fog to disappear into.

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Well.  She tried.

She flaps off to catch up with the rest of the party.

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Zeke is pretty easy to spot! Slightly harder to catch up to, but not very, when you’re a magical bird.

He’s pretty sure that he’ll break something, if he enters an inn while he’s this annoyed, so he’s just going to bounce from rooftop to rooftop for a few minutes. The city seems a lot smaller, this way, and he might get a chance to punch the bard in the face later, and Kamin’s in his arms, and the sun is setting very prettily. Leap leap leap leap leap.

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The two of them hang back until he seems ready to go inside.

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He eventually calms down enough that he feels capable of calmly negotiating room payments; he hops down to the ground beside the inn he picked out, and sets Kamin down on the ground. 

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“By promise of day, I wait, until -“

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Sparkles, pirouettes, etc -

“The promise of dusk has since been fulfilled. 

Taverns are terrible.”

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“I liked the earlier part!”

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“I told Kamin that it was a bad idea. This did not phase him.”

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“I’m not gonna stop going out to eat with my boyfriend just because sometimes annoying stuff happens. Annoying stuff happens to us all the time anyways, we’re, like, adventurers.”

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“I don’t expect to convince you.”

He turns to the birds and... waits for them to do something.

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The larger one steps into her human form; the smaller lights on her shoulder.  She walks over to them.  "Oh, is that the half, then - "

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“Yes. Who are you, exactly.”

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"Morgan."

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Jade reminds himself to keep working on lie detection. 

“Last name, class, broad skillset and goals.”

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"Uhhhhhhhhhhhh.  Rave . . . n.  We're a druid and a bird.  She can also turn into a cat and an eel?  And I'm pretty strong.  We'd like to learn more secrets."

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“Jade Bushida, psion on this side and a healer on Kamin’s, working on improving psionically -“ he makes a gesture towards Zeke - “and Ezekiel Byrne, brute, boyfriend of my alter ego, working on hedonism.”

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"A pleasure."

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“No.”

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“... I dunno, she seems pretty cool.”

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“That wasn’t one of my criteria.”

He turns around and walks into the inn, tail swaying from side to side.

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... Zeke leans against a nearby streetlamp.

”I still dunno how he made Kamin. Uh, we’re, like, probably gonna be in a group for the next while, do you have any hobbies or other stuff you like talking about or whatever?”

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"Nnnnnnnot . . . really.  - Do you?"

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“I really like killing stuff and traveling and my boyfriend! And I’m totes learning how to speak nekomata - or, like, one kinda nekomata - from Kamin, and that’s super fun.”

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"Uhhh.  Neat."

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“Yeah.”

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Jade walks out of the inn.

“They’re out of rooms.”

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“Ugh. Wanna try the other place I know here?”

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“Yes. And we’re going to walk to it.”

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“Yeah, sure.”

He sets off walking in the direction of the other inn he knows in the area, presuming Morgan doesn’t produce an objection! Twisty little deserted alleyways, varyingly bright street lamps, broad avenues, queer little lights peeking out of windows...

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And a body, face down in one of the alleys.

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“- by promise of night, I wait, until -“

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“- the promise of dawn has since been fulfilled -“

He hurries over to the body and lays a hand on its shoulder; the same sorts of glimmering specks that appear during his transformation sequence swirl over it, condensing into a tight coil around its neck and then fading into the skin.

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It feels like a force hits them all at once, pulling down on them, making it harder to move.  The ex-corpse gasps and shudders.

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- Kamin does not really approve! His balance is solid enough that he doesn’t sink down to his knees or anything but his tail droops down very abruptly and his ears flatten against his head.

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And Zeke... doesn’t really look like he notices. Although his hair does get less fluffy.

”Don’t super recommend continuing to do that,” he says, to the former corpse. 

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She curls into a ball on her side and groans.  The gravity around her remains twice as strong.

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Morgan steps back until she's out of the effect's circle.  It's not terribly far.  Her bird gets taller.

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Kamin also steps out of the circle; his ears and tail perk back up. Zeke doesn’t bother.

”- um, I don’t think that she’s actually hostile, I think she’s still reacting to whoever killed her? - and there are only going to be so many major elementalists in the city with that outfit and her hair, I think that she’s the same person we ran into fifteen minutes ago?”

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She is far too damaged to attempt taking literally any actions.

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Yeah that’s an unsurprising amount of response.

“... I guess it’s probably, like, safeish, for you to heal her up the rest of the way, then?”

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“Yup, I suppose that’s a thing that I can do...”

He gingerly steps back into the heightened gravity and pokes her; the blood pooled around her and on her dissolves into softly glowing dust, a dim light pulses, and now she should be back to full health.

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Probably she should say something right about now.  She does not seem to have that ability at the moment; after several seconds of trying she starts counting down from ten, and she hits negative twenty before she manages to start the process of standing up, but she's definitely not steady enough to aim for one number per second and they're ticking by quite quickly so probably that's fine.  She lifts herself with flight rather than pushing against the ground to haul herself up and oh, she's still doing double gravity but fixing that is just going to have to wait until she's upright.

 

Okay.  Deep breath.  Gravity: back to normal.  And -

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"So, how are my new best friends doing?  My new best friends, as enforced by the universe and also random rogues on pain of literal death.  How're they doing, what's your deal.  - If you hired a random rogue to kill me so you could swoop in and I'd join up I will be extremely angry, but if you tell me about it now we'll part ways with you all still breathing, whereas if I find out about it after we've been buddy-buddy for months I will definitely kill you."

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“We didn’t hire a rogue to murder you. If you have a psion you trust for verification I’m fine with being mind read - I suppose I don’t definitively know that Morgan didn’t put a hit on you, I don’t really know her, but that also seems very unlikely?”

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"Uhhhhhhh.  . . . No."

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"For the moment I'll take him also saying he didn't."  She gestures to Zeke.

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“If I wanted to murder you I wouldn’t get someone else to do it, that would be super weird.”

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"Alright, best friends it is."  For the moment.  "Now what."

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“The bard didn’t, like, mention a next step, to me or Kamin, dunno if she said anything to Morgan?”

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"'Go then into the catacombs beneath the heavenly train, yada yada. Toodles.'"

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"Were you planning on starting that tonight."

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"Uhhhhhhhhh . . ?"

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“I wanna go to an inn.”

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"Well by all means."

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Kamin is present again and that means he can be scooped and that means they don’t have to walk. Such a convenient boyfriend he has. Scoop. Hop onto a nearby roof, hop to another, etc etc etc.

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Ex-corpse really does not feel like physically moving parts of her body in order to keep up with that, but luckily she doesn't have to; she floats along at a reasonable distance.  Flying is the best.

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The birds do have to work in order to fly, but they might agree with her on the last part anyway.

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And so they eventually reach an inn - a fairly snazzy one, even, advertising running water and personal baths and limited psionic wards and other small alchemical conveniences - and it transpires that they have three rooms available.

“Zeke and I can take one, Morgan can take the other, and, um - I’m sorry, I don’t think you mentioned your name?”

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"Correct."

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This person is probably still objectively much friendlier towards strangers than his boyfriend or his headmate. He turns to the innkeeper, an amused looking elf with a dapper mustache.

”Um! We’ll just take the three rooms and sort out the details ourselves. How much will that cost?”

”Eighteen silver,” says the innkeeper. 

He plucks a gold coin out of his purse and hands it over; the innkeeper makes an appreciative surprised noise, carefully hands him three keys and a little chocolate delicacy, and bids them adieu. He distributes the keys appropriately.

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"You're allowed to ask for my name.  I just hadn't said it before."  She hands Kamin six silver.

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He resists the urge to hand it back and instead pockets it. Fighting over checks is often very tempting and also often very unpleasant for everyone involved.

”I - assumed from that response that you’d rather we didn’t know? Which would be fine.”

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She nods.  That was also not asking.

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He... doesn’t immediately say anything! That seems easy.

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“... what’s your name?”

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"Jace."

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“Cool.”


He grabs Kamin by the hand and fails to actually drag him upstairs only by dint of his enthusiastic cooperation.

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The birds go up to their fancy room that they didn't have to pay for.

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Well.  She'll go sequester herself as well.

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And while Kamin and Zeke... do things... Jade detaches himself from their body’s senses and retreats into his mindscape. 

It was the very first thing he’d found, when he’d been just sixteen and just starting to feel an inkling of power. A metaphor, in his brain; a little seedling of structure. He’d pruned and polished it into a ballroom carved from marble, and then a sprawling catacomb of crisp stone, and everything he was had been carefully carved into the delicate patterns on the walls. And in one of the rooms he had discovered someone else, some lost prince from a kingdom that had never existed, bound and shackled by the stone, and in some rooms he had discovered the patterns that belonged to other people, watchtowers carved by his curious subconscious.

And in one of the rooms he has a metaphorical bed, and there he can dream.

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... and then he’s on a tiny little island on an incredibly vast, frozen lake, being peered at by an unusually beautiful, unusually silver-skinned goblin. 

“Hello,” she says.

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- the shadow ballerina??? 

He was not really planning on talking to one of the hundred most powerful people on the continent, when he went to bed, but he can roll with it.

“Hello.”

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“You wander; it’s a bad habit. Do you know who I am?”

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“Madame Bakir, the shadow ballerina and silver goblin; keeper of nineteen secrets; born in the cloudlands. Psion and spy.”

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“Then you don’t. Do you know why we’re talking?”

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“No.”

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“Have any guesses.”

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“... no.”

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“I imprinted myself on your brain when you were a baby and turned you into a copy of me.”

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“I don’t really care whether you believe me. Do you have any questions.”

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“Why are we actually talking.”

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“You’ve come to the attention of a rival of mine and I prefer that you go unharmed by that attention.”

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“A man with a colorful eye?”

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“Yes.”

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“Capabilities, preexisting titles, goals...”

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“Alexander the Wolf Prince. Keeper of nineteen secrets, member of the Triumvirate of the Western Vesper Empire. Capable of shapeshifting into several dire wolves at once, fond of his magical armor, general of a legion of men, unnaturally charismatic and competent. Unlikely to want to kill you; moderately likely to attempt to inconvenience you or persuade you into an alliance.”

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“Oh?”

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“He likes to toy with his food.”

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“I see.”

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“Goodbye.”

She waves a hand, and the island underneath him shatters; he falls into darkness, and he lands back in his marble catacomb and resumes dreaming ordinary dreams.

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Jade wakes up, gradually takes over from Kamin - they can make do without the dramatics, if they’re willing to make a more gradual transition - and rolls out of bed. It’s a rare dawn where he can, in fact, take over immediately, and he takes a moment to appreciate it; he ordinarily has to wait for his... traveling companion... to disentangle from Kamin, each morning, before making the switch.

It’s unfortunate, that his headmate had chosen someone so clingy. 

Not that he was entirely bad. Completely unprincipled, but not unwilling to be harnessed to interesting ends. Complementary to his own skillset, and to Kamin’s. And a more pleasant party member than many of the others he’d make the acquaintance of, even given the many complications he came with.

The drow wasn’t even bad looking. Especially when he was asleep. Although Jade would absolutely never express that sentiment aloud, or even share it with Kamin.

 

He goes downstairs and acquires breakfast; if Jace or Morgan are already down he’ll sit somewhere vaguely near them, otherwise he finds an abandoned little corner.

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Jace is up and already occupying an otherwise-abandoned little corner.

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He sits in her vague vicinity and eats.

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She does not acknowledge him in any way.

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It’s mutual. 

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She stays at her table after she's done eating, looking occasionally to see if there's anyone coming downstairs.

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Zeke eventually wanders down, acquires his own breakfast, notices their corner, and sits somewhere between them.

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"Morning, new best friend!  What's on the docket for today?  I sure do love having no control over what I do with my life, how about you; didja sleep well?"

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“I dunno that fate works the way you think it works. I slept, like, fine, I only got like four hours but I don’t super need more than that with Kamin.”

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"I just learned my fourteenth secret and achieved all of my previous long-term goals, and I was going to take a month off to try out being a rich person before I figured out new ones!  And now!  I'm apparently going trekking through sewers instead!  So that's where I'm at, I don't know about you.  Life's just grand, isn't it?"

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“... that doesn’t seem like a super sustainable way of thinking about being an adventurer but whatever.”

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"I think it's probably more sustainable than literally being killed if I don't!  So.  - Who knows, maybe you'll win me over with your charming, charming personality, and we'll be the best of friends and I'll have nothing in my heart but deep gratitude for the workings of the weave of fate.  And also our undying friendship; gotta leave some room for that.  We'll get matching tunics embroidered with the name of our party real big across the chest so everyone knows how close we are.  - Where's your boyfriend, anyway, sleeping in?  He was . . . tolerable."

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“He’s in Jade’s brain; they’re, like, a noble and stuff. And they’re not the same person at all, it’s totally a whole thing.”

He gestures with his fork towards Jade.

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"Ah . . . hah.  Well.  Another new best friend.  Nice to meet you, what's your deal."

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“Psion. Decent with a knife. Without Kamin I have the equivalent of eight secrets at most. Aiming to improve at psionics.”

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"Well hey, what do you know, I've got a little psionics myself.  Barely any yet, though.  Trying to get telekinesis before I go for gravity mastery.  What about you."

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“Solid mindscape, weak telepathy and mind control at range, omniglottalism, some self-hacking from the mindscape. Specifically working on improved telepathy and figuring out clairvoyance.”

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"Mindscape buddies, all right, I can work with that."

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“What’s yours?”

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"Zero-g fog.  'S got stuff floating in it.  Yours?"

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“Marble labyrinth -“ he was not going to mention or imply the existence of the coffins that he occasionally found in his mental corridors by using the word ‘catacombs’ - “underground, with clearly defined rooms.”

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"Fun."

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“Sure. What are your other capabilities.”

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"Little bit of wind, little more of earth and time, full frost.  Mastery over flight, not-being-cold, controlling earth at range, fog, crystals, metal, and, recently, transmutation.  Solid at gravity and not getting battered around.  Also pretty okay with a knife."

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“Mmhm. Kamin is a healer; quick-resurrection, very strong wound healing, everything else covered except for disease. Not enough fine control for it. Zeke is a brute, focused on individual combat, mobility, and defense.”

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“I hit things until they die.”

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“That was implied.”

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"Well.  Overjoyed to make your acquaintances."

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“I’m sure.”

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"Any sign of the birdbrained one today?"

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“No.”

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"Should we go knock on her door or whatever."

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“I dunno.”

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"You - or the blond one - gave her the key."  She gestures to Jade.  "Do you know what room number she's in."

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“Twelve.”

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"I'm gonna go knock."  She starts heading towards the stairs.

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Jade and Zeke... continue to eat breakfast.

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She's back after a couple minutes.  "No answer."

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“... huh.”

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"Yeah."

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“That is concerning.”

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"Do you think so?  I'd be kinda iffy about answering knocks at my room at an inn."

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“I don’t know whether we’re still in bard territory or if normal reasoning applies.”

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" - Mm.  Well, I won't stop you from going and checking."

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“Mmhm.”

He gets up from their corner with - ‘catlike grace’ would, perhaps, be an offensive term - with extraordinary grace, tail swaying, and prowls up the stairs in a similar fashion.

He locates Morgan’s room and knocks.

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There is not an immediate answer.

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Jade briefly regrets having failed to psionically specialize for this exact situation. 

”Hello,” he says.

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There's some rustling, and the sound of someone walking up to the door.

 

"What," says the person on the other side.

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“It was advisable to check whether you were dead. Should I go away.”

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She opens the door a bit, bedheaded.  "I'm up now.  Uhhhhhhhh.  Did you want anything else."

 

(There's the lumpy silhouette of a blanket-covered figure visible in the bed behind her.)

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(Jade is disinclined to judge.)

“What’s your timetable for the day?”

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"Can you come back, uhhh.  Later."

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“When?”

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". . . . Uhhhhhhhh?"

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“I’ll come back in three hours.”

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"Uhhhh.  Kay."

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“... goodbye.”

He turns away, walks back down the stairs, and stands in the vague vicinity of their transiently claimed corner.

“They’re... occupied. I said that I would be back in three hours.”

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“... that’s a mood, I guess - I’m totes bored and we should spend that time, like, doing things.”

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"'They'?  - Do you want to go spar or go shopping or what."

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“The fact that common Vesper still pretends to be a unified language annoys me. ‘They’ as in ‘multiple people’; she had a companion. I do not have a strong preference and Kamin will refuse to provide one.”

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“We should totally spar.”

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" - I'm glad our inter-party cohesivity is already strong enough that you trust me not to take offense if you imply I don't understand extremely basic vocabulary when I was clearly asking for additional information, Mr. Omniglot.  Let's go spar."  She levitates herself out of the corner and heads for the inn's door.

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“Mmhm.”

 

Jade and Zeke follow.

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She doesn't go fast enough that they can't reasonably keep up.

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Zeke could keep up with her top speed without much fuss; Jade could not and does not particularly care to try, although he’s very very quick by more mundane standards. 

They encounter a small delay, in short order - some random baker notices Zeke, starts crying, and asks for his autograph, which Zeke enthusiastically gives. But they can find an empty field within a few minutes after that; most cities are mindful to keep several close to hand, since otherwise adventurers tend to make do with busy streets and storefronts full of terrified civilians and so on.

This one looks... weathered; there are odd little patches of stone, stray pillars and spikes that seem entirely out of place, carved out puddles, queer trees in twisted shapes, scorch marks, and more dents than solid ground.

”- nice! Did you wanna have, like, ground rules, we super probably shouldn’t murder each other but I dunno what else you had in mind?”

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"I definitely prefer not to be murdered twice in as many days, yes.  To the first broken bone or severe blood loss?"

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“Sure. Jade can go in a corner and referee and stuff, he’s, like, squishy. Count of ten?”

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"Do we really need a ref - what if he can attack either of us but we don't hit him."

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“Then I wouldn’t have a loss condition.”

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"Are we actually caring about winning and losing here?  And here I thought this was going to be a fun team-building exercise.  Not that I have strong, irrepressible feelings on the matter if you just wanna sit out."

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“I dunno that ‘Jade’ and ‘fun’ are super compatible words.”

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“I take myself very seriously. I built an entire glittery magical girl transformation sequence out of how seriously I take myself, even, I hear that’s all the rage. Have fun.”

He slinks over to a nearby pillar that’s a touch taller than he is, hops up on top of it with a careful leap, and lounges.

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"I definitely want to see the glittery transformation sequence later - ten.  Nine.  Eight."

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He counts along with her. “Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

- aaand then he pounces with startling speed - but she’s already flying upward, very quickly, his momentum is all wrong - he does a backflip in the process of stopping himself, recalibrates, and leaps up several stories in height in an attempt to land on her.



Mechanics Zeke takes a single move action, a ‘hop’ action, and an attack action. He rolls 2d20+17 for his attack, and gets a total of 10 on that roll, for an overall total of 27. He is capable of taking another action; he doesn’t bother.
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She anticipated something like this and dodges - time is moving slower for her now; it would be enormously tedious to go through most of life faster than everyone else but obviously you want the edge in combat - at the top of his arc she doubles gravity.  She forms the earth below him into a very large and pointy spike, then transmutes it into a substantially smaller but much pointier stone one.  Gravity turns off completely once he hits the ground and she gets ready to dodge his next attack.

 

 

Mechanics Jace had the worse initiative roll but readied an action while she was counting to fly straight up, and was prepared to dodge.  She got a 27 on her 2d20 dodge roll, which was added to her +15 dodging bonus for a total of 42, beating out Zeke's 27.  As a journeyman of Time, she gets five actions per turn; she spends one switching gravity around her to 2x, one each for shaping and transmuting the spike, one to put gravity at 0x, and uses one to allow her attempt to dodge any attacks made on her before her next turn.
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This manages to actually hurt! If he had a less convenient boyfriend he’d get a pretty bad bruise on his back and if he weren’t a high-tier brute he’d be splattered all over the ground.

He breaks off the spike from the ground - not that it’s very firmly attached, after the collision - and throws it at her like a spear, and then once again leaps a ridiculous distance and attempts to land on top of her.


 

Mechanics Between doubled gravity and a fall onto an injurious material, from a fall height at 120 feet, Zeke takes a base of 5d100+3d6 damage, multiplied by two, for a subtotal of 608 damage. He subtracts 35, from his resilience attribute, for a subtotal of 573 damage, and then divides that in four from his durability foundation, for a total of 144 damage. He has 372 green hit points remaining. 

He uses one action to break off the spike, one action to throw the spike - a roll that he receives a total result of 12 on - another action to jump back up, and a final action, granted by his strength foundation, to make an attack roll - a roll that he receives a total result of 55 on. He holds back when attempting to hit her, and only rolls 2d100 for damage instead of 3d100; if he does hit, he deals 91 damage.
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She dodges the spike with a clear margin, but doesn't then manage to get clear of his air-tackle; she has both her hands up in a vague defensive position and gets both her forearms cracked in multiple places for her trouble, as well as a few of her ribs.  " - y - ield," she manages to choke out with what breath she has left.

 

 

Mechanics

Jace rolls a 16 on her attempt to dodge the spike for a total of 31 against Zeke's 12.  Her next dodge is a total 37 against Zeke's 55; the 91 damage wipes out all of her green hit points and leaves her with 41 yellow.

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He mostly lets go, although he holds onto a bit of her sleeve. Zero-G is pretty neat, he can just sorta float in place.

”Cool! - if you turn the gravity back on I’ll be, like, fine, I can land on my feet. And then you can float down in your own time and Kamin can patch you up and stuff.”

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She nods and kicks him away - telegraphing it beforehand; it's clearly not an attack - and doesn't do anything to alleviate the knockback; they float apart and soon the distance between them is enough that he's out of her radius and starts falling.  She takes a breather for a few seconds and then starts her descent, not at her top speed but certainly not slowly, and comes to a stop next to Jade's pillar, hovering at his level.

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He stands on top of it and twirls.

”By promise of night, I wait, until -“

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Sparkles, sudden sunset motifs, and a revised color palette ensue -

“- the promise of dawn has since been fulfilled. Hello! I, um, probably shouldn’t use a saturation approach, since we’ll be adventuring later, so this’ll take a minute or so I think...”

He stares at her and she gradually ceases to be injured.

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The transformation is enough to make her grin; on the whole she seems quite unaffected by her level of injury, although she doesn't try to speak until she's relatively patched up.  "Nothing to cheer a gal up like a sequins sequence from the comically-dour party member - let's go again.  You want in, blondie?  Same offer; promise I won't hitcha."

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“I’m a pacifist! Or, well, not by enough of a margin that I won’t indirectly help with all the gratuitous violence that Zeke gets up to, but still. I’m sure you’ve met the type before, I’m very cliche.”

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“My violence is super ‘tuitous,” says Zeke, having wandered in their direction. “I only kill people if I don’t like them.”

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"How often don't you like people?"

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“Does it still, like, count, if Kamin resurrects them right after?”

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"Do you kill every person you don't like."

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“Nah. If I got super hardcore about it I’d, like, start pinging evil, and then I’d be a devil when I died and being a devil sounds kinda okay but then you’re around other devils all the time and they’re assholes! And you can get sacrifices and stuff but I bet most of them aren’t, like, fun to be around, or they’d do that thing where Kamin was really scared of me at first all the time. All of the cool things you can be when you die kinda seem like they actually suck.”

(Kamin stares intently at Zeke; this also often happens on other occasions, but this time it’s accompanied by magical sparkles.)

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"Yeah I'm definitely not going to be anything special and I'm entirely fine with this.  - Hey, can you do anything for fatigue or do I need to hold off on frost stuff in order for us to be good to go later."

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“I can manage it pretty well but I’m not as miraculous with it as I am with injuries, it might be better to avoid it? - oh, um, and Jade wants me to mention that he had a dream vision last night saying that we’re going to get into a conflict with Alexander the Wolf Prince? It didn’t occur to him until just now, apparently, dreams can be slippery that way.”

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"What - level . . . of vision-y.  Like, plausibly just a weird dream or definitely, for sure, this will happen; where are we on that scale."

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“Jade says that if it isn’t true it’s going to be in a ‘deliberately malicious or misleading vision’ way, and not a ‘weird dream’ way. It was communicated by Madame Bakir, apparently, so that’s... a note in favor of it being some odd manipulative thing, probably, if her reputation is accurate? - it’s really very strange that these are people that we can casually interact with and I don’t understand why we’d be dealing with southerners when we’re all the way up here.”

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"And here just when I was thinking maybe it wouldn't be the actual worst thing to be stuck all irretrievably tangled up with you guys."

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“Harsh.”

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“I - think that’s a reasonable emotional reaction to have? The past few days haven’t been a pleasant stroll and the next few days presumably won’t be either, it’s very reasonable to be upset about it.”

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"I consider myself a reasonable person.  Do we have any idea why you've attracted attention from high-level adventurers from the opposite side of the entire godsdamned continent."

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“Um. No? - and I don’t think that the bard would’ve gotten you involved at all if you weren’t going to be already, and that seems supported by the fact that you were then murdered - and I think that we also count as high level adventurers, although less so - and Jade says that Madame Bakir claimed to ‘want us unharmed by the attention of a rival’, that rival being the wolf prince, so if we believe her then we only need to explain why the wolf prince cares about us? 

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"That's a big 'if'.  I could transmute that 'if' into like a pound of gold.  From how big it is."

 

 

Mechanics A pound of gold can be transmuted from 1562 cubic feet of dirt.
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“I wonder if she really eats babies. Probably there are, like, any people who think that I eat babies, and I don’t.”

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“I think that every powerful goblin is accused of being pointlessly awful with very little justification and I don’t expect Madame Bakir to be an exception. Presumably she’s, um, within regular-awfulness range, I haven’t seen any verified reports of her pinging properly evil? - or, well, Jade hasn’t, he pays more attention to major psions than I do. But then people who are regular amounts of evil are also often untrustworthy, especially when they’re best known for being invisible teleporting mind control people.”

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"Is there anything we should do about this this instant or can I go back to beating up slash getting beat up by your boyfriend."

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“The second one, I think?”

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They count off again;  Jace shoots off at an angle and dodges two of Zeke's attacks, then activates zero-grav, gets below him, and blasts him up with some wind while following a fair distance behind him until they're both quite high before doubling gravity.  She's too high for him to jump up to in doubled gravity, but he gets out of her radius and comes at her from above through the side of it, landing a hit that shatters her shoulder.

On the third round Jace flies parallel to the ground and Zeke leaps after her, landing a bone-breaking hit; on the fourth, she aims straight up again but still gets tackled immediately.

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And Kamin can heal them up after each round! They don’t even need to stop by the little pillar he’s perched on, each time, touch-healing is easier but he can do it from just about anywhere in sight.

The fact that his boyfriend is extremely, ludicrously good at hurting people continues to be both distressing and erotic.

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"Alright, fifth time's the charm let's go."

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“I only have one working strategy here and I’m getting kinda fidgety? Like, jumping up super high and breaking bones is fun and stuff, but it’s sorta repetitive.” 

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"Fair enough, yeah.  You wanna keep going with different rules or go do something else?"

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“Let’s do something else. Wanna... go watch a talky, or something?”

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(Kamin has, at this point, scampered over in their general direction.)

“That would work for me?”

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"Nnnnnot really?"

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“Why?”

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"I saw a talky once and I just didn't think it was that good."

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“They’re... different? Like, it’s not like everyone likes all of them, I didn’t super like any of the ones I saw back in the territories...”

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"If you feel like paying for me I'll tag along I guess."

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“Sure!”

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And then they can wander away from this random field and go to a talky! There aren’t that many places in the city for it, but they advertise well and they’re not that hard to find. 

The place that they find first is a fairly extraordinary structure; one of the many tall towers of the city, with a small theater dominating every level. Only the top few levels have talkies; the rest display silent movies, instead, and the bottom few only display them in black and white. Zeke pays their entrance fee into the top level - people keep giving him money for things and he can only bury so much of it in interesting treasure chests - and then they can watch a talky!

The decor is tasteful and ornate, the chairs are comfortable, the lighting is dim, and everyone is offered their own small platter of hors d’oeuvres; a gnome with strikingly purple bangs and no discernible gender wheels in an alchemical contraption, and then the talky begins.

The stage ceases to be a stage, by most measures; it looks more like a portal, more than anything, to a very strange looking world full of bug-men and alien flora, who promptly begin singing in tightly rhyming couplets. 

The bug queen is dead! Mournful, baritone singing. The new queen has been announced! Bright, cheerful soprano overlays upon the previous song. The view switches to the bug queen’s chambers, where she sings a mysterious melody that probably contains foreshadowing. Intricate courtly drama ensues, and the bug queen spies on it in the guise of her alter ego - a dashing, androgynous mantis swashbuckler. New songs introduce new characters, including a fragile ladybug maid, and the ladybug sings of her unrequited love for the queen; she treats the queen’s alter ego with contempt, however, and receives it in return.

The ladybug finally resolves to confess her love, in a quiet number, accompanied by a soft kalimba; the queen sings of her growing disdain for the nobility that she governs, and decides to kill them all. Several songs and fade-to-black murders later - including a charmingly psychotic patter number - she has mostly succeeded in this task. She announces her new status as full dictator to the masses; they march and chant to the beat of drums. Later, the ladybug - having been comically deterred, interrupted, and misdirected on several occasions - finally manages to blurt out her love; the queen pauses, for several long seconds, before confessing her own adoration. She leads the ladybug to her chambers, and ties her to the bed, cooing sweetly of the life they’ll lead; that done, she spends several more seconds silent, summons a fearsome bug-like devil, and instructs it to kill the ladybug, ‘for payment owed’. The ladybug freezes in shock and horror; the devil walks over to the bed with agonizing slowness and a growing smile; soft kalimba music plays, and the stage gradually goes dark.

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"Well.  Thanks for funding the hors d'oeuvres."

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“Yeah, no problem.”

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“Why did the ladybug have to die!”

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"'For payment owed'; she literally said that.  Or did you mean why did she pay the devil with the ladybug and not someone else."

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“I, um - intended the question from more of a narrative and emotional standpoint?”

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"Good for you."

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“It was good, but, like, in the way where you’re kinda supposed to be sad about it? I dunno. And the obvious political commentary stuff was obvious - Jace, do you wanna walk down the tower or do you wanna go out a window, I wanna jump down and you can fly and stuff.”

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"Window's fine."

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He scoops up Kamin, opens a window - the theater attendant looks briefly alarmed, and then amused - and autodefenestrates; the wind whistles sharply as he hurtles hundreds of feet through the air, and he lands on a rooftop. His ankle twists a bit on landing; he pauses for a few moments to let Kamin heal it.

And then he can bounce between rooftops and meander back to the inn, presumably with Jace following.

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"If you want half-grav next time you're dealing with big height differences, I, you know, exist."

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“That sounds awesome but not, like, super close to the thing I wanted when I jumped from a thirty story window? -“ hop “- and my boyfriend is convenient and great and stuff, so it wasn’t a big deal -“ hop “- but, like, thanks.”

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If she has any verbal response to that, it's quiet enough to get lost to the wind.

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(Whee!)

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And then they’re back at the inn.

Permalink Mark Unread

Morgan is not in evidence in the common area.

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They can head up to her room and knock.

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"Uhhh.  Just a minute."

There are rustling sounds that proceed for rather longer than a minute, but eventually she steps out, bird on shoulder and dressed for adventuring.

"Hi."

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“Hey.”

Permalink Mark Unread

“Hello!”

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"Howdy."

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"So are we going to the, uhhh.  Place?"

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“Unless anyone has anything they’d rather do first?”

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"I don't think so."

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“Cool.”

And then they can proceed to the catacombs beneath the heavenly train! 

The ‘heavenly train’ seems to have been named mostly for the fact that all of its stops are about five stories high; it slithers around the center of the city at a sensible twenty miles per hour, and anything lower to the ground would have to go through a building. Under one of its stops is a commercial mausoleum - somewhere for people’s relatives to sell their bodies, after death, so that they can in turn be sold to necromancers. And below the commercial mausoleum is an entrance to the catacombs. 

Theophrastus has a very, very old set of tunnels, as is only proper for a very, very old city. Some of them have been repurposed for water and waste, or bits of the hell train (named, somewhat inauspiciously, for being the heaven train’s underground counterpart), or as pedestrian passageways. The majority, however, retain their original function as burial sites.

The entrance is a creaking, heavy door, with a weathered sign saying ‘caution: this section of the catacombs is only recommended for experienced adventurers’. The walls are inlaid with stone caskets, each with a small placard eroded into illegibility. There are little alchemical crystals, on the ceiling, radiating crisp coldness and an eerie blue light; the floor slopes gently downwards.

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They previously hadn't been walking in any particular fashion; here, Jace positions herself behind Kamin and lets Zeke lead the way.

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Morgan brings up the rear, checking behind them occasionally.

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- and then there’s a horrible skeleton thing with weird white bone tentacles leaping out of one of the nooks in the walls -

And then Zeke slams it against a wall and it breaks into a thousand little pieces. One of the tentacles is still squirming; he stomps on it and it shatters.

Onward! 

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Onward indeed.

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They encounter a few more undead abominations over the next few minutes - this one with too many eyes, that one with too many teeth - that aren’t especially difficult to dispatch, and then they reach a three-way fork in the corridor.

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"Should we pick randomly here or do any of these look promising to anyone.  Or feel promising; I'm less likely to discredit sourceless hunches in this situation than I am generally."

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Morgan shrugs.

Permalink Mark Unread

“Eh. Right?”

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"Well, it's all right with me."

Permalink Mark Unread

“Cool.”

Tromp, tromp, a couple of traps that they can contemptuously avoid, tromp, tromp -

They reach a door! It seems very innocuous; even between all of their ridiculous senses there isn’t anything obviously wrong with it. 

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Morgan tries it.

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It opens up to a large chamber, containing three doors and an animated pine tree.

”Halt! Be thy friend or foe, thou shall not pass!” thunders the animated tree, looking coniferously pleased with itself. “- I’ve always wanted to say that! I’ve only been alive for a few hours so that doesn’t mean all that much, really. Still.”

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Please?"

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“If I had been going to give in to that amount of pressure I wouldn’t have been animated at all, I think,” the tree says contemplatively. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pretty please with threats of violence on top?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I don’t think that I can surrender at all without defecting against the process that made me exist.”

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"Well, it's kind of a shitty process."

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“I don’t understand what you mean?”

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"Do you like being alive?"

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“I do!”

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"Is something specific going to happen in the next day which you think is likely to change that."

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“I like existing, and I exist within a process where I’m going to stop, so I also like the - natural conclusion - of that process? If I had an opportunity to exist within another process I would take it and I also wouldn’t defect against it. I think that treants and regular people might have a baseline psychological difference here.”

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"Sure.  If you say so.  But even given that - the person who animated you could not have reasonably expected you to actually hold back a decent party of adventurers all on your own.  The options here for you are either you fight us and we kill you, or you let us through and continue to exist.  I would argue that the former is actually the defective option, because in the latter you get to stick around for at least a short while, and keep on keeping out interruptions that are too minor to be of your animator's concern.  Which we are not."

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“Can I have a credible signal of your status as decent adventurers?” inquires the tree.

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"Hey, muscle man."

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Zeke stomps, twice, on the stone floor; the top layer shatters like a potato chip dropped from a two story window.

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The tree creakily bends down to inspect the floor, and then rises back up again.

”I think that I am less durable than stone. Although I’m not entirely sure? I think that’s enough of a credible signal that I can update accordingly, anyways.”

- it? they? - step off to the side, away from the three doors, and take on a sort of resting ‘I am definitely just a regular tree that’s uprooted and underground for some reason, don’t be suspicious of me’ pose.

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"Good call."  She turns to the rest of the party.  "How are we feeling about these doors."

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“They’re super duper doorlike!”

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“Doorian. Doorabesque. Doorable? - um, the rest of the traps weren’t very good at being traps but Zeke should still be the party member to open one, I think?”

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“If we’re not, like, trying something elaborate, then I can just go ahead and do that.”

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"I meant which one."

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“We could continue going right?”

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"Alright, all right.  After you, Mr. Tall, Dark, and Punchy."

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“Uhuh, fernfucker.”

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“... should I find that offensive?” wonders the definitely-just-a-regular-tree.

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"Not any more than mothers do, I should think," says Jace, doubling the gravity in a selective cylinder around Zeke for one and two-thirds seconds before immediately putting it back to normal.

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Zeke notices this and does not really care.

He backflips over to the rightmost door, opens it, and finds himself greeted by a burst of extremely intense blue-white fire; it leaves the door and the rock around him mildly melted, and leaves him and his clothing mildly singed. 

“... ow?”

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“Meep!” meeps the tree.

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“Meep!” meeps Kamin.

(He is going to STARE at his BOYFRIEND for approximately ten seconds and there is going to be glitter and then his boyfriend is going to stop being injured, it is very unjust that his boyfriend is ever injured in the course of deliberately putting himself in injurious circumstance and they really need to make a law against it.)

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"Let's re-center.  Middle one?"

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The treant quietly shuffles over to the far end of the room and resumes half-heartedly attempting to be inconspicuous; Zeke opens the middle door and immediately blackflips away from the ensuing eruption of flame.

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"Well, what's left."

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... Zeke at long last recognizes the series of puns taking place before his eyes, and snorts.

He opens the leftmost door; it does not immediately erupt in fire, and the small corridor it leads to seems innocuous. 

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"We await your footsteps to follow in, O great and noble drow.  Or great and brute, rather."

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“Can’t wait for the character arc thingy where you, like, turn into the quippy bard you’ve always wanted to be, it’s gonna be a real thriller.”

His footsteps are thereafter followable. 

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Surly gravity-toggle, for two rounds this time.  Follow follow.

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Zeke fails to notice it.

The rest of the party also follows; they eventually reach another set of three doors.

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Jace waits to see if Zeke picks a door without input.  When he doesn't: "Well, we've eventually been picking the right doors; let's do that one."  The door she points at is neither the left nor the center.

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"That was pretty tenuous," points out Morgan in a slightly odd tone.  "We've been starting with the right doors even when they're wrong."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Jace does not gravity-toggle her for this.

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“Jade and I are both very charmed by all of this wordplay.”

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“Jade likes it too?”

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“He likes it more than than he likes most things that he encounters? That’s admittedly still a very low bar.”

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“Fair.”

He cartwheels over to the rightmost door and opens it; it declines to produce a burst of flame.

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. . . Incentives.  "I continue to find you two tolerable," she says to Kamin.

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“I’m glad!”

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"Yeah."

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A dracul, billowing cape and fangs and all, quietly drops down from the ceiling behind the door; Zeke kicks it and it makes several disturbing cracking sounds. The devil that had previously been animating it drags itself out of its chest; he smashes it against the wall and it disappears in a puff of smoke.

”Onward?”

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"If you please, kind sir."

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“Only two copper a bag, feed the birds, something something.”

Onward!

A decaying octopus with knives attached to four of its limbs squeezes through a tiny gap in the wall, to their rear, and slashes at Morgan. 

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She dodges, grasps one of the tentacles at the base of its knife, and hefts the beast against the wall of the corridor.  A few times, if necessary.

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It makes weird squelchy octopus noises and an odd cracking sound and then it stops moving.

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Yay.  She's helping.  She wipes her hand off on her trousers and pops another treat from her pouch into her mouth.

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The catacombs do not interfere with treat consumption; it is yummy.

They eventually reach... another set of three doors!

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"Do you seriously need someone to tell you to try the right door and move leftwards if that's a bad pick every time," Jace flatly asks Zeke.  "I'm going to run out of puns.  Or do you have some reason to not want to do that."

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“If I start caring less about party consensus you’re gonna hate that, I’m not, like, trying to be a super efficient person or whatever your vibe is. I can start doing it by default now that you’ve, like, mentioned that as a thing.”

He opens the rightmost door and it makes a loud, not-quite-deafening gong; the middle door doesn’t do anything in parficular, and leads to a large chamber, containing nearly a hundred doors and a large sphinx wearing a sharp suit and bowtie on their upper half.

“Answer my riddle,” booms the sphinx, “and I shall tell you which path leads to the mortal souls you seek!”

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'It's not consensus when I'm the only person leading things,' Jace does not say.

'Right, I somehow forgot you don't know any psionics and expected you to pick that out of my brain instead of figuring it out from context clues,' Jace does not say.

 

"Ooh, a riddle," Jace says.

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“I’ll allow one answer from each member of your party, to be gracious,” adds the sphinx, adjusting their bowtie and grinning benevolently. 

“Through wicked eyes do devils glimpse the vivid, brightened day,
Through holy noise may angels hear the moon, stars, milky way;
Yet gods have no such limitations, and so I must ask:
What did they crave to then create the present, future, past?”

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“... um. Intricacy?”

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“I can see how that might be a reasonable response given the threefold structure, it taps into a successful intuition, but nope, zing, splat, not what I was looking for, not what I was looking for at all. Decent enough that I might you give you, say, another riddle about the mortal souls, instead of the response that the right answer would give you, though, decent enough, if that’s the best you can do, which I hope it isn’t.”

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Jace sped herself up upon hearing the riddle, to give herself more time to think.  She slows down again to answer:

 

"The eikosi?"

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“Clever girl,” the sphinx says, as if complimenting a velociraptor, “but nada, nope, not quite. That would be the how they created the present, future, past, say, not the why.”

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"So that the universe can experience itself," Morgan says, carefully.

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“- I was totally gonna say that -“

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“Zing zing zing, correct! You’ll find your hostages down a ways through doooooor seventeen!” the sphinx says, pointing; the relevant door is then briefly surrounded by an illusion of brightly flashing lights, clapping and cheering, and a small wooden sign saying ‘warning: may trigger epilepsy’.

The illusion on the door, and the sphinx themself, disappear.

Permalink Mark Unread

THREE treats for Morgan.

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Morgan's ear gets bitten.

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Ugh.  One treat for Morgan, two for her beshouldered companion.

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Jace looks kind of incredulous.

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“Thank you for solving the riddle!”

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"Uhhhhhh.  Yeah."

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“I was totally gonna say the same thing.”

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“Thank you for also solving the riddle!” 

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“Y’welcome!”

He does a victorious crab dance over to door seventeen, and opens it; it leads to... a... void? - a corridor painted in magical vantablack, still with the same light fixtures and with occasional chips in the paint, on closer inspection. The walls and floor are oddly warm. 

He proceeds.

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The rest of the party follows in their previously determined marching order.  "Anybody else super thrilled about the mortal souls we're allegedly seeking?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“I suppose that means there’s some reason we ought to be in this dungeon other than ‘because a bard said so’ after all?”

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"Joyous day."

Permalink Mark Unread

“I’m sorry that you ended up roped into an adventure when you’d been planning on taking a break, it seems really unpleasant and you didn’t deserve to have it happen.”

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"Thanks?"

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“You’re welcome!”

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Follow follow.

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“Are you the ‘I’d like distracting conversation’ kind of upset or the ‘please stop talking’ kind of upset?”

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"No, no, I love distractions, in the middle of dungeons.  Widely known for being safe spaces."

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“‘Please stop talking’ it is, then, that’s fine.”

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Jace nods slightly at the back of Kamin's head.

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Kamin does not notice this!

Walk walk walk oh look a singular door.

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Zeke opens the door!

It leads to a... large, empty chamber, also painted with alchemical!vantablack, without any obvious exits or enemies?

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"Does anyone object to me frosting up this whole place so we can actually see it."

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“Nope!”

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“Nope.”

He steps aside so that she can do that, and so does Kamin.

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"Nah."

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"Cool."

wshhh wshhhhh wooshhhhhhhhhhhhh frost everywhere.

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... a particular patch of darkness is VERY UPSET by this, it was only napping for a little bit and now it is MILDY FROSTBITTEN.

It stops being a shadow and resumes being a devil and now they are all going to be ON FIRE and the fire is weird pitch black shadowflame for good measure.

 

Mechanics

The devil prepares to produce a shadow fireball, as per shadowflame theory, uses a free action to stop being in shadowform, and then uses that prepared action to cast the fireball. Everyone in the corridor or near the chamber’s entrance takes eight damage, before resilience modifiers, and a -16 penalty to perception while within the flame.

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- Zeke bolts forward in a blink, wheels towards the devil, and violently smashes its face in until it goes poof moments later. The shadowy fireball dissipates.

 

Mechanics

Zeke rolls 63 for initiative, and goes first; he uses one action to move out of the darkness and into melee range with the devil. He then makes three melee attacks. From his dexterity attribute, blunt weapons talent, and unarmed combat theory, he has a +33 bonus to attack; this is inconsistent with the earlier fight because this entire sprawling game system is still in the process of being written, okay, give me a break. His three attack rolls total 58, 54, and 48; the devil is incapable of dodging any of them and is struck by all three. He rolls 3d100 for each damage roll, and rolls 95, 74, and 195, for 364 damage total; the devil dies in an instant.

 

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Jace looks around to see if any exits, for example, have made themselves apparent.

Mechanics Jace rolls a natural six, plus 19, for a total of 25, on her perception check.
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There’s a door over thataways! The handle is inset into the frame of it, and also painted vantablack, and the whole thing is accordingly tricky to see even covered in frost, but it’s just barely discernible.

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"Door's over there," whsssh frost gesture "once Mr. Catboy's had a chance to look at us all for two seconds."

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He glances at all of them in succession and they are healed from their extremely trivial scorch marks! 

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And Zeke opens the door; it fails to spout fire or gong ominously or anything, and leads to an ordinary looking corridor.

Onward! Again!

Permalink Mark Unread

 

A serpentine skeleton rattles through a hole in the wall and lunges at Morgan, after a minute or so of walking.

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She yoinks it and stomps it and, after a small nip at her hair from the crow-shaped party member, sighfully does not treat herself.

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The skeletal snake becomes a collection of bone shards.

They eventually reach another door; Zeke opens it, and it reveals a very, very large cavern and a greater green dragon sized to suit.

Being a dragon, it is also a priest, plucked from the afterlife to serve in the celestial bureaucracy. Being a green dragon, it is serpentine; dragons of the kind are sometimes also called basilisks or coatls, accordingly, the former more often for the wicked and the later more often for the good. Being a greater dragon, it is absolutely immense; thrice the mass of an elephant, spread out into a hundred feet of thick coils, and into two large, feathered wings perched near a great horned head.

Green scales glimmer in the light.

”Charmed,” it says, peering at them curiously.

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"Likewise; nice to meet you."

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“Is it?” the dragon inquires. “My delights are so rarely shared.”

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"It seems premature to make any sort of judgement, honestly.  And erring on the side of friendliness is a good way to make friends."

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“I find friends with ease and keep them rarely. So often, it seems, they desire not my company but my benevolence, and so often then does my benevolence expire.”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds rough."

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“I have served the stars for ages long and short and such trifles do not bother me. Although I do still bother with trifles, on occasion, for my collections and my encyclopedia, hence my presence here.”

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“Your encyclopedia?”

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“For the past several decades I have been compiling information on the nature of spontaneous magical activity, having found other texts on the subject lacking. I had already planned on inspecting these catacombs, in time, for that purpose, and a patron offered me a small trinket in return for hastening my visit and preventing access to their chambers.”

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"That sounds really interesting!  - Wait, are you Lady Kyriakos and Lord Despoina?  I think I read your 'An Unfinished and Inadequate Review of Spontaneous Magical Phenomena'."

Mechanics Jace rolls a natural 17 (as a 1 and a 16), and adds 22 for her intelligence score and 6 for her memory talent.  She subtracts 5 from rolling one crit fail but with a total of 40 still meets the DC to recognize the dragon's work.
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“It was unfinished and inadequate, as per the title, and I would not have released it if not for pestering,” says Lady Kyriakos and/or Lord Despoina. “I apologize for subjecting you to it.”

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"I subjected myself to it.  It's a promising start."

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Is this is an opportune moment to infodump for several minutes about all of the revisions they’re presently making? The dragon sure thinks so!

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Jace listens actively and provides occasional specific questions along with her 'mmhm's and 'uh-huh's and 'oh really; why is that?'s.

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Zeke eventually interrupts.

”- uh, that’s super cool and stuff, your scaliness, but we kinda still need to use the door that you’re supposed to keep us out of.”

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“I am aware,” says Lady Kyriakos and/or Lord Despoina, after a pause. “I am obliged to guard it, as you know, and I do not shirk my obligations. I do not, however, wish to interrupt my studies with a return to the draconic isle, and the rhythm of the stars would imply your capacity to slay me. I am obliged to give battle, but I have not specified the kind. One of you could, for instance, wrestle my tail to the ground, and in doing so defeat me?”

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“Can do,” says Zeke.

The dragon uncoils, and presents the very tip of its tail, steadying it with the rest of its mass; Zeke leaps over to it, grabs onto it, and waits for a “- one, two, three -“ to slam it to the ground.

It leaves several fractures in the stone.

Mechanics

The dragon rolls 2d20+27+27, and gets a total of 67; Zeke rolls 2d20+37+10+20, from his strength bonus, grappling bonus, and mastered grappling theory, and gets a total of 79. Zeke wins.

 

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“Oh no,” says the dragon, allowing all hundred feet of its serpentine self to fall dramatically to the ground. “You have defeated me. How troublesome. I am unable to stop you from using the door, then - interesting person, over there, would you allow me to very briefly read your mind so that we might remain in touch over telepathy?”

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"Sure."

Jace is now thinking very intently about the contents of the infodump.

Permalink Mark Unread

The dragon telepathically touches her brain, gets a snippet of its own infodump, cuts the receptive feed, and continues to have a communicative feed; it sends her a nonverbal ‘thank you’.

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Zeke opens the door; it leads to... yet another corridor?

Down the corridor they go.

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An undead bunny tries to assault Morgan from the rear after hopping down from the ceiling; this particular undead animal declines to shatter harmlessly into bone fragments, when it would otherwise, and instead explodes violently with a bright cascade of extremely hot fire!

 

Mechanics

The undead bunny explosion deals 3d100 damage to all party members.

 

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- Zeke, at the front of the line, gets mildly singed - 

Mechanics

He rolls for 159 damage, subtracts 35, and then divides by four, for a total of 31 damage.

 

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- Kamin dies instantly in a flash of pain and then auto-ressurects, a moment later, in a burst of glitter - 

 

Mechanics

Kamin takes 157 damage, and subtracts four; he dies. Using recovery theory, he auto-ressurects; being a journeyman of recovery theory, he cannot auto-ressurect again for another ten minutes.

 

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- Jace is badly burnt and very unhappy, but conscious -

Mechanics Jace takes 121 damage and subtracts 9, leaving her with 20 yellow HP.
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- Morgan, closest to the explosion but fairly hardy, is not in great shape but could in theory still fight -

Mechanics Morgan rolls 117 and subtracts 18; she ends up with 57 yellow HP left.
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- and where there was formerly a bird on Morgan's shoulder there is now a young teenage cambion lying on the floor, her skin - or what's left of it - literally rather than purple-prosily as white as snow.  And dead.

Mechanics Emily gets hit for 248 and subtracts 6, which is not anywhere near enough to prevent the sweeping wipeout of her entire HP pool.
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The cambion is immediately scooped up in Morgan's arms and presented to Kamin.  "Fix her.  Now."

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“I, um - um? -”

He pokes the cambion’s forehead and she resumes being alive.

Permalink Mark Unread

She gasps and for just a moment curls tighter into Morgan, before stiffening and hopping down onto her hooves with two little toks.

Permalink Mark Unread

 


Kamin opts to start healing her, first, to get her the rest of the way to health; she glimmers.

“It’s, um, nice to meet you?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"You already did before."

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“- in, um, a more introductory context, I mean.”

Permalink Mark Unread

“Your animal companion is a person?”

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"Uhhhhhh, no??"

Permalink Mark Unread

 


“Jade would like to register his confusion at what, precisely, is going on, could you explain in further detail?”

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"She's not an animal companion."

Permalink Mark Unread

 


“Jade would like to ask whether, when you previously said that you were ‘a druid and a bird’, you meant that you were a bird and that your companion was a druid?”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uhhhh.  Yeah."

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“Super valid, I guess.”

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" - Hoooooooly shit.  Hahahahaha - I'm sorry and also not sorry at all for calling you a birdbrain - hahahaha gods above - "

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"Uh.  'Kay."

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“Do you, like, say things,” Zeke says, to the cambion.

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(Kamin finishes healing said cambion and starts healing his BOYFRIEND who should not ever be injured.)

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Headshake.

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“Still super valid,” says Zeke, who stops being mildly singed in short order.

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(Kamin redirects his health promoting attention to Jace.)

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"Glad we've got our priorities straight here, blondie - aw man, I should've said holy crow instead of shit - "

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“I like you and value your lack of injury, and that statement is even more true when it refers to my boyfriend, who I love.”

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“Love you too!”

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“You’re very lovable and I really appreciate the fact that you exist!”

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“No, see, like, I appreciate the fact that you exist - anyways.”

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"Not like I mind as long as I'm not dead, and we probably aren't going to hit something that would make me so in the next few seconds.  Does wreck my verbal filter though, so I'm glad you're so magnanimous as to be willing to put up with that for a bit longer."

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“You’re welcome!”

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"Ah-huh."

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Kamin finishes healing everyone and they can then continue.

The next door they find only somewhat muffles the sound of someone sobbing right behind it.

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(Morgan's companion druid reverts to her more conveniently enshoulderable form as they walk.)

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"Grand," says Jace, quietly, pinching the bridge of her nose.  "Maybe just knock this time, Mr. Tough 'n' Buff?"

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He does.

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“Do come in,” says a deep, pleasant voice. The less-deep and less-pleasant sobbing of someone else in the room intensifies.

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Jace - motions to Zeke to open the door??