carissa meets a tyrant
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"Uh, I'm Arber, an apprentice of Mavelar Merseigor, and probably reporting to him unless, you know, you pay me to do something else." Mav is, of course, scrying, and also doesn't mind being betrayed; half his apprentices are reporting on him to various rivals and he says it's great because he doesn't have to pay them as much himself. 

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"And what excuse do you give for your presence here, on the very threshold of my master's domain?

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"Actually, when I showed up here it was just empty air. You're the ones who showed up. ...if you don't want your castle approached you probably want to go park it halfway to Arcadia or something. Or I guess you could just kill everyone who shows up and figure they'll mostly get the message, only I'd rather you threw my body overboard, if you do that."

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The panther's eyes narrow, but the devil laughs. "Boldness may charm our master, but rashness will mean your end. If you speak only for one man, than begone!" His mouth curves into a harsh smile. "You may tell your master that the Duke is here on a shopping trip, if you so dare."

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Arber will absolutely take the opportunity to escape with his life!

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"Told you," Mav says to Perry. "Not here to conquer everything. Too bad. I kind of want to beat 'em up now."

     "Could still go badly," says Perry. "Shopping trips often do."

"That was once. Okay, let's sell everyone the news that castle guy says he's here for a shopping trip but won't entertain anyone who 'speaks for only one man'. For, like, a hundred gold a pop, except charge Krimina eight hundred seventy two."

       "Eight hundred seventy two?"

"She knows what she did. Then, once you've done that, stop by South Square and pick up a random beggar so we can send someone back speaking for two men, see if that goes any better."

        "At some point, you're gonna piss castle guy off, boss."

"And what's he going to do about it?" 

        "Well, if we knew that, boss, we could sell it for more than a hundred gold."

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And, once the castle has progressed enough, it will rumble to a stop, just outside of Absalom's walls! Then a flood of mosquito-drones descends on Absalom! (For certain limited values of flood, that means 'a couple dozen'; in the event that Sikandros wants more than came in the initial box he purchased them in, he's going to need his lieutenant back home - a woman from the seventeenth century whose descendants include most of the population of the United States - to go back to the store and get more.)

What's the city look like?

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Absalom has around a million inhabitants, which isn't very impressive for a modern Earth city but is very impressive for a Golarion city. Its streets are laid out eccentrically, clearly the result of a city outgrowing its walls again and then again and then again, mostly sprawling along the coast and the rivers rather than inland because inland looks...dead. Very dead, actually, sheer spiky obsidian with nothing growing on it, as far as the eye can see, periodically interrupted by wizard-towers and wizard-castles and wizard-dungeons and of course Nex's long-abandoned mile-high siege tower, looming over everything. 

On an island -- the river parts to go around it -- in the center of the city there is an ominous castle shrouded in mist. There's a moat around it of void, extending down as far as the eye can see, and no apparent ways in except flight.

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How about radio? The camera's got automatic instructions to turn around and go back if it loses touch with the signal.

(Also, possibly more important: Does this look like a plague-ridden third-world country where everyone is malnutritioned and half the people are starving?)

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The shrouded castle kills radio. The camera does not return. 

 

Absalom looks like London in 1800! (with some added wizards). London in 1800 was the capital of the world!!! Yes, it did also have some plagues and some starvation, but there's nowhere richer and more alive and exciting!!

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... This city offends Sikandros's dignity by not being richer.

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Well, on with the plan. Camera operators, your job is to pilot cameras up to every temple in the city to spy on them to see if they're nefarious. Also, investigate charities to see if they're temple-run, and if they are, if they're doing anything nefarious. Guards, your job is to guard. Remember to fill every corridor you aren't using with golden chains, they're aesthetic we don't want to be spied on.

And we can work on preparations for the personal investigation. Also for distributing lots of valuable resources in exchange for all their magic items.

Sikandros wishes he had a demon he could trust. That would make all of this so much easier.

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Meanwhile, in a demiplane far far away, a serious man in nondescript cotton clothes -- which identify him, somewhat unavoidably, as from before the invention of the modern textile industry, but not as from any country or region beyond that --meticulously copies the messy Planar Binding circle that Carissa Sevar completed at the bottom of a pit.

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An angel appears! He has fluffy white wings with lots of feathers and perfect hair and is generally very good-looking, albeit in a way that resembles no ethnicity on Earth or Cheliax, and a genuinely charming smile. He's wearing slacks and a T-shirt with holes in the back for his wings.

"Hey!" he says, in the native language and accent of whoever's talking to him. "Are you with Davidson's?"

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...the man speaks six languages fluently, and was planning to not address the angel in Chelish Taldane. But -

 

"No, sorry," he says in a matchingly cheerful tone. 

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"Huh."

... He'll look at the summoning circle. Not having Chelish dignity, he is VISIBLY SURPRISED by it.

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Detect Thoughts.

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He's thinking that this does not look like a normal circle! They're usually not drawn in powdered silver, and they usually have bindings, and they're usually not that, you know... weird.

Look on the upside, he just got six languages! Score! Take THAT, linguistics club, he's never even HEARD these ones before!

"Man, what's with the circle?"

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"It's how my friend told me to do it, though even odds she was trying to get me killed. Was she?"

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"Holy shit, you have terrible friends!" He is totally sincere about this! People just don't do that! "That's a really nasty prank to pull on someone." Angels are mostly good people, but there are assholes out there who'd love to go around doing whatever. "Man, you can look up how to do a better circle on the internet and get better advice than that." And that's saying something.

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"Well, I'm lucky I got you, I guess. What am I doing wrong?"

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"Uh -" He'll pull something that looks like a small metamagic rod out of his pocket, point it at a wall, and a screen will appear in midair, visible to both of them. A bewildering cascade of images will appear on it, before settling on a blank off-white page with text in a foreign language. (His thoughts are all of incomprehensible things related to that.) "No internet?" This is super weird, he should be able to get a connection anywhere. What's with this place?

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"Yeah, uh, there's no internet here, it's really inconvenient. It's why I had to go off what my friend said."

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"That's bizarre. Where's 'here?'" It's got to be something really weird to have so many different languages, maybe some weirdo space colony, but, like, most of the planets have internet! Maybe it's some kind of cult? Or, like, Pluto?

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"Oh, well, we're trying to start our own colony. To live independently, you know, out in space, where no one can tell us what to do."

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