Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 22

The Beast Fears Fire - Ugly Birds

Ugly Birds [Want 3]
Impulse - Spread Misery and Despair

These are they. The subjects by which history knows their Queen, beyond simply performing their tasks based on memory and use, these creatures are loyal, true believers. The Queen's heralds, her messengers, her garrison troops. When the queen took territory, they were the first to come and the last to leave.

Ugly birds are the will of their Queen made manifest, and while there are only five flocks active in the Gulf of Catastrophe, they hold the chain of islands on which the Queen's tower is thought to have stood against all comers. The believe that one day she will return, stronger, claim the whole world and bury it in bones. In the meantime, they survive off drowned sailors and fish, mostly.

Ugly birds resemble large, evil-aspected ravens with the wattle and comb of a demented rooster, but there are lots of variations on the theme. Some have bald, vulture-like heads. Some have neck ruffs, some three or more wings, some have glowing eyes. All of them have clever, fully sentient and utterly hate-soaked minds, serviceable, if unpleasant voices and the power of Grief. Their consciousness is thought to be distributed among the members of the flock, and, to a degree, there are only 5 "individuals" left in the world, but each bird in the flock manifests differences in consciousness that simulate individuality. History records the experiments that determined that is the case, and the cost of making those experiments, if you want to look it up. Just understand that a flock of ugly birds is a composite entity of thousands of points of view and they all hate you.

Harm 2/Peril [Grief] There's not a lot of difference between the amount of harm done by beaks and talons or by words and secrets, but most people who have been injured by ugly birds prefer the physical attacks. Ugly birds, of course, would rather talk. A flock is selectively telepathic, able to reach down and get at the worst and mos guarded things in a person's psyche and then give them back to that person in cruel mockery and loud, scratchy voice. Ugly birds love revealing secrets, and their words carry the power of Grief to cause psychic injuries. Ideally, from the bird's perspective, they will be able to subdue a person with their words and psychic assault and then eat at their leisure (the victim being still alive, but unable to defend themselves. Yum.), but, when a victim resists or gets angry, they are willing to resort to beaks and claws.

Ugly birds are mindful of their numbers and will fly off if a fight is dragging on or looks like it might turn against them.

Sticks and Stones
When the Ugly Birds start talking, face Want
On a Hit, give a truthful answer to a question that the Moderator asks, this answer is now in play and can be used against you as a Soft Move. Otherwise, you can face the Ugly birds any way you choose.
On a Hard Hit, you turn it back around on the Ugly Birds, and they retreat.
On a Miss, their words, or their beaks and claws get to you. Give a truthful answer as above and suffer Harm as stated.

Then you became the fear of you
Ugly birds are not really capable of faith or hope, despite their bravado regarding the return of the Queen, they don't believe it. The bitterness this engenders makes them, if anything, more effective tools of her will, but it's probably their best understood weakness. Two of the flocks have been losing numbers to suicide over the years and a third has stopped replacing its numbers. Unfortunately, they continue to exist in numbers that still makes eradication of the creatures impractical to attempt. Ugly birds are also quite susceptible to charms of any kind, though they are happy to hang back and taunt, they cannot cross, body, Grief or telepathy, over boundaries created by the different charms. Water and wind witches have incorporated ugly bird feathers and blood into workings that pry for secrets or level psychic attacks against enemies, but these workings tend to go sour when ugly bird pieces get incorporated into them, sometimes dramatically sour.

The Beast Fears Fire - Hungry Dogs

Hungry Dogs [Violence 3 - 4, Gang]
Impulse - to Hound

Hungry dogs are not dogs any more than ugly birds are birds, lonely shades are spirits, no bears are... oh fuck it, you know where I'm going with this. They resemble dogs, as created by someone who has had dogs described to them by someone who is afraid of dogs and gets them confused with sleek, giant foxes. Of all the Queen's created beings, the hungry dogs are the most straightforward and soliderly. They are soldiers. Commandos who chase, infiltrate, terrorize and kill. Back in the Queen's time, they also kidnapped high value targets and took them back to their mistress, but these days, well, I won't spoil it.

Hungry dogs are about the size of larger dogs, running about up to 40 kg in mass. They are sleek, with short coats and long snouts, possibly similar in body shape to a mix of Doberman and greyhound. Hungry dogs are universally silver-white with red ears. They are hungry. Hunger rolls off them in waves, along with the resonance of psychic Fear, both apparent to even intensely insensitive people. Hungry dogs have weird voices, unable to bark so much as yip and moan in a way distinct from any known breed of dog. When you hear hungry dogs, you know exactly what they are before you see them, even if you were wholly ignorant of them before. Hungry dogs can gang up, but they prefer not to, and their tactics are better suited to individual action than a coordinated unit. They benefit from ganging up, but not a lot, and their temperaments don't support it. Each one is a master of psychological warfare, and possesses a share of their mistress' Fear resonance, which is a far more impressive weapon than their admittedly strong jaws and pointy teeth.

Harm 2 [3, Gang]/Peril [Fear] Nothing unexpected here. Hungry dogs weaken you with Fear and then make with the biting. What is unexpected is that hungry dogs cannot be prevented from entering a place by physical impediments, however impressive. You can bar their passage with salt, white ash or the light of a fire lit by a blue match, but doors, locks, windows do not keep them out, even if chocked or nailed with iron nails or lined with silver needles. Hungry dogs can flatten themselves and flow through just about anything, including places that appear to be air tight and capable of entrapping lonely shades. They love doing this; they are capable to compacting themselves to fit into spaces much smaller than they should be able to fit in. One popular story is of the hungry dog that jumped out of a bottle of wine to kill guests at a party. Seriously. They can do that.

Hungry dogs do suffer from a weakness that is related to their primary weapon. Those who respond to fear with aggression are capable (if unconsciously and be accident) of turning the resonance back on the dogs. This appears to be specific to hungry dogs, not possessors of the Fear resonance. No bears, for instance, appear to be unaffected by this behavior.

Hackles
When the hungry dogs come prowling and you want to keep them away, face Violence.
On a Hit, they keep their distance, unable to get in to where you are, and may even leave. They may come back, also, as a Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, they suffer their own Harm as stated from psychic backlash.
On a Miss, they come in anyway and bite you. Suffer Harm as stated, but you may face them any way you choose.

Growing old, and I don't want to know.
Hungry dogs can reproduce. Fortunately, they do this only very rarely. They are capable of swallowing an incapacitated person whole, something they used to do to bring people the Queen wanted to see back to her. In order to reproduce, a hungry dog has to swallow a person and keep them down for 72 hours. With such a large meal, the dog appears to be full, but that's about it, in terms of outward sign. Before 72 hours have elapsed, it is possible to save the person through the means you might expect, inducing the dog to vomit or cutting open its belly or something more creative and messy. Once the time is elapsed, the dog vomits forth another hungry dog. The person this dog once was is impossible to contact by any means and one can only assume that everything that made them who they were was destroyed in the process.

People have found that the leathery pouches that go for stomachs in a hungry dog are significantly larger on the inside (technically large enough for two adult humans to inhabit, if they are friendly. Or incapacitated by psychic Fear.), and that property persists after death, making them excellent to turn into means of carrying a large amount of stuff - the pouches never weigh more than a kilogram, regardless of what you put in them.

People have also found a way to maintain some of the Fear resonance in hungry dog blood, such that it will discharge on the a target touched with it, which allows it to function as a weapon.

The Beast Fears Fire - Ghost Islands

Ghost Islands [Malevolence 3]
Impulse - Entrap, Bring back the Past

The Gulf of Catastrophe is full of tiny islands, too numerous and small to appear on even detailed maps. Experienced sailors know all the islands visible on their routes, which is a damned good thing, considering. The Gulf of Catastrophe is challenging to the point of a feature of national defense to navigate for a host of entirely mundane reasons - shoals, currents, sudden shifts in weather (two microclimates abut one another over the center of most of the Gulf), territorial pods of hippothalassoi (Sea Creatures [Violence 4], stay tuned, true believers). Then there are the ghost islands.

The ghost islands predate the coming of the Queen - they prowled the Long Drink River and its tributaries in the Ketteleye for as long as anyone has lived in the region. Their association with the Queen is a modern one; it's uncertain how long they have operated as they currently do, and no one knows why.

Ghost islands appear to be tiny, mobile islands. They are rarely larger than the bare minimum needed to justify a stand of trees or a tiny structure (such structures are common on ghost islands, little cottages or boat houses to draw people to set foot on them. These structures are part of the island and grow from it). Ghost islands are capable of manifesting or generating local fog banks of varying size and density. Despite not appearing to bob with the waves, even during the strongest seas, ghost islands float, and have an underside that observers describe as sporting a tangle of appendages, some like flippers and some not. On the rare occasion that one has been successfully destroyed and studied, the most of the living entity that is the island is a sort of biological web that moves through the soil and rock that make up most of its bulk. Ghost islands don't appear to have sensory or cognitive abilities more developed than the simplest organisms that Cricks designate as such, but they do possess a powerful and unconscious psychic resonance of Grief, one of the two resonances that the Queen gifted some of her servitors.

The Grief is one of the things that links the islands to the Queen, despite them not being significant to her in the historical record or, more tellingly, not being something she created upon arrival in the Ketteleye. The other major link is that the ghost islands seem to exist in two points in time. The first is the present, as it continuously moves forward, and the second is a fixed point, the same for all known ghost islands, approximately 300 years in the past, during the reign of the Queen, thought to be a year or so before the destruction of the Ketteleye and the formation of the Gulf.

Harm - Moderator Hard Move [Transported to the Past]/Peril [Grief] Ghost Islands want, to the extent that they are capable of wanting, to bring living things from the present back to their homing point in the past. Anything currently touching the island when it returns to its homing point are transported with it. The island can remain current with time going forward from its homing point for up to 144 hours, at which point everything that went back with it comes forward to the point in the present from which it departed, regardless of whether those things are still on the island.

Also regardless of where the island was in space when it departed from the present, it arrives in the same point in space (somewhere on the Long Drink River) it was located when it arrived at the homing point in the natural flow of time. Regardless of where the passengers of the island were in space when the island returns to the present, the return to the present on the island at the time and point in space from which it departed. Those who have arrived in the past on the island report that the only ones to arrive at the homing point on the island were the ones to depart from the present on the island, which shouldn't happen, since all future instances of time travel to the homing point should arrive in exactly the same place and time. No one is sure why previous passengers are not there on the island at the homing point, whether or not their actions have changed the course of history or what damage to spacetime all this looping has done. Time travel is hard.

People who explore the island do not run afoul of its resonance, and may not even know of its presence unless they open themselves to the psychic impressions of the place (at which point, they activate its Move), ride the island to its homing point or they attempt to, as impractical as this sounds (and it is as impractical as it sounds, but possible) attack the island.

We Have to Go Back - When you open yourself to, transit through time with, or attack the island, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you fight off the Grief, and can choose to leave the island before it transits to its homing point.
On a Hard Hit, you can prevent the island from transiting at all, or force it to and be able to control, up to the 144 hour limit, how long it stays in the timeline going forward from its homing point.
On a Miss, you wake up in the past, having suffered Harm as stated. Good luck.

To a world others might have missed
The study of how and why the ghost islands go to and from their homing point drops almost directly off into speculation. No one knows why there aren't localized time paradoxes, and the occasional adventurous scholar has ridden the same island to the past multiple times without encountering their previous arrivals (this is probably spectacularly irresponsible on the part of said scholars, but the universe hasn't appeared to collapse. Yet. That we know of. Time travel is hard.). The speculation that seems the most plausible (and this should give you an idea about the plausibility of the runners-up) is that the Queen, somehow, foresaw her own decline and fall and started using the islands as a shot in the dark to change the future by bringing folk from the future to mess up the timeline. The thought is that she clears the cache or the islands self-clean the timeline every time it doesn't fall her way. This still creates all sorts of paradox, though, since people in the present (and all the past inhabited trips leading up to the present) remember their trips to the homing point and time travel is really hard.

Attempts to make use of any part of a destroyed ghost island have failed. Attempts to communicate with ghost islands have, so far, also failed. Custodial spirits cannot inhabit any part of a ghost island and will not go near them willingly, to the point where they hold grudges against anyone who is able to compel them. Elves cannot inhabit a person touching the island, and have not successfully traveled to the homing point. You don't see them crying about it. Despite the dangers posed by these beings, historians view them as an excellent window to a fascinating period in the past. 300 years ago was the tail end of the provincial system in the east, the beginnings of the end of imperial collapse in the west, collapse of technologies reliant on totally depleted resources and a great place to scavenge for artifacts that may have multiple copies in the present. Oh dear.

A certain number of islands arrive in the present with servitors of the queen aboard, the same servitors, of which there are multiple copies of individuals in the world today. Some people posit that the ghost islands are the sole reason populations of servitors of the Queen survive in the Gulf of Catastrophe today. The islands that bring other servitors forward don't do so when returning other passengers to the present. No one knows why. Time travel is hard.

From the Second Dream - the ytriarch

A boy was stuck, alive in the afterworld with his ghostly ancestors, one of them, the progenitor of his line has identified as male for the sake of onlookers for centuries, but is actually another sex entirely and has, long after death, decided to embrace a gender matching yss sex. In the dream the pronouns were ys (ease) for subject, yn (bean without the b) for object and yss (east without the t) for possessive. The boy's other relatives have been taking pains to hide the boy's status as alive from the ytriarch, but the two bond when the boy is the only one not scandalized by the yss gender identity (there was a sequence where the ghost removes yss clothing and reveals yss naked body to the rest of the family - apparently ys possesses an anatomically distinct sex which is different from intersexuality, female and male, though the dream sort of did not fill in what yss genitals looked like). Apparently, the boy has a friend whose gender is male but sex is female, which he explained to his ancestor after yss reveal and, from inhabiting the boy's head, I know he reacted more to the great apparent age of the ytriarch's body than yss genitals.

One thing that struck me when I woke was how the body or memory of a body was very important to all these ostensible spirits, to the point where the ytriarch points out that everyone has been breathing this whole time, though you would assume they do not need to breathe.

The Beast Doesn't Fear Fire - No Bears

No Bears [Ignorance 3]
Impulse - Not to Stalk and Confound, Certainly. Why are We Even Having this Conversation?

While she controlled the region, the Queen of the Ugly Birds maintained a number of different kinds of servitor beings, thorn labyrinths, lonely shades, hungry dogs, the ugly birds from which she took her name, and no bears. The records are very specific that there were no bears active and serving the Queen during the time of the Autumn war. No bears from that time persist to this day in the islands of the Gulf of Catastrophe, still stalking and killing out of memory, boredom or habit. No bears are consumed by hatred for all that breathes and speaks. No bears have become expert swimmers since their habitat has fallen into the Gulf.

No bears look a lot like moon bears (U. thibetanus) with the aggressive temperament of that species, only sized up to about the height and mass of an U. arctos horribilis. No bears are second only to ugly birds in their intelligence and no bears are capable of learning and engaging in human speech, but no bears rarely have any desire to speak. It's very difficult to perceive or refer to no bears, even in written form. In order to perceive no bear, you need to be looking where no bears are, a task which is even harder than it sounds. No bears are excellent at using their sort of nonexistence to get where no bears can go, to wait where no bears are noticed, and strike, mauling folk who miss that there are no bears about.

Harm 3/Peril [Fear] No bears use fang and mass and claw to wreck a body the way any bear might. This can be quite upsetting to onlookers, as someone is clearly being mauled by no bear. No bears also carry the Fear that the Queen was known to wield and gift to her servitors, though this is hardly necessary, as becoming suddenly aware of no bears where no bears are active is usually terrifying enough.

Like Hunting Bears
When no bears are stalking you, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, you are aware of no bears. Nothing to worry about :D
On a Hard Hit, you become aware of no bears. No bears are intimidated by mindful awareness of their presence and will almost always back down.
On a Miss, you only become aware of no bears when no bears start to maul you. Suffer harm as stated and never know why.

"He's mine/ as soon as he's silly and steps on a line"
The existence of no bears is rather specialized and uncommon knowledge, very hard to teach, and usually regarded as a form of syntactic hazing by people who have never encountered no bears. Occasionally, when killed, no bears will leave no corpses, and no bear skins are perfect makings for powerful artifacts that confer magical benefits to stealth. Shadow and water witches, in particular, love them. No bear claws and fangs have been used to stud clubs, creating weapons that leave wounds difficult to notice and almost impossible to treat. No bear meat is widely regarded as a delicious but ultimately unsatisfying meal, which brings up all sorts of questions about what crazy motherfucker determined no bears were good to eat.

The Beast Fears Fire - Lonely Shades

Lonely Shades [Hardship 3]
Impulse - Seek out Life

Lonely shades aren't spirits. We're not exactly sure what they are, though there are a handful of hypotheses on the subject, but we are quite certain they aren't spirits. They have some superficial similarities, but they are fully... well, mostly physical. Things that work on spirits don't seem to work the same way on them - you need to bring spiritual power to work magic against them, for instance. At the same time, in accounts of the coming of the Queen, there's a consistency in the reports that these shades rose from the bodies of the dead on the battlefield, and, in the early days, they ranged out to the family and friends of the war dead to spread their chilling, awful touch.

Lonely shades are dark, sometimes translucent in bright light, though they tend to shy away from it (light does not seem to injure or deter them, so beware in thinking that light will save you, you aren't the first to do that). They are flat, nearly two-dimensional sheets of stretchy, semi-amorphous cold and color - dishwater black, swamp-soaked leaf brown, purple, all roiling in cloudy patterns. Their edges are sharp, they move like inchworms, occasionally somersaulting, and always stretching and bending. There are little claws at each or any of their corners, and opaque, white eye-symbols open on their forms in lines and patterns. They are utterly silent. Cold, loneliness and need roll off them, perceptible to even the most hardened and closed-off person.

Harm - 3/Peril [Cold] Lonely shades are cold and want to get warm. The only thing that registers as warm to them is the living, particularly living creatures that speak. You can see where this is going. The touch of a lonely shade steals warmth from the body and affects the mind as well, infecting it with loneliness and the sensation of infinite cold (hypothermia from physical contact with the creature notwithstanding.) Simply being brushed by the shades is enough to cause injury, but a lonely shade prefers to wrap itself around its victim, clutching with its claws, until there is no warmth left.

Cold Finger
When a lonely shade touches you (and it will), face Hardship
On a Hit, it's cold, it hurts, Suffer 1 Harm,but it's not latched on and you can respond to it as you see fit.
On a Hard Hit, your warmth actually burns the shade (it happens sometimes). The shade Suffers Harm, you do not, and the shade may attempt to flee.
On a Miss, the shade wraps itself around you, latching on, Suffer Harm as stated.

I can see your purple body swell and fall, swell and fall
It's likely that there were only a finite number of Lonely shades created by the Queen, which is less comfort than it probably could be, considering their spread and their persistence. When the Queen was active, they were impossible to kill, and so those who were dealt with were usually imprisoned in jars, cellars, or pinned in place with iron nails. All the customary charms of the region work quite well on lonely shades, particularly the nails, which paralyze them as well as pin them in place. Lonely shades are now vulnerable, though they can be deceptively tough to hurt with steel. When destroyed, they leave behind an intensely cold, translucent black-brown-purple jelly which degrades quickly in sunlight, but can be stored in an opaque container and broken on someone for the same sort of Harm a living... well, active shade would cause. Don't expect to win a lot of friends if you decide to use shade leavings as a weapon, but if your are considering it, then the friends ship has probably already sailed.

The Beast Fears Fire - Thorn Labyrinths

Thorn Labyrinth [Disaster 3]
Impulse - To Deny Entry, Stymie Passage

It's not that hard to pin the formation of the Gulf of Catastrophe and the destruction of the Ketteleye on the Queen and he minions. There is very little evidence either way, but it makes a great deal of intuitive sense, and offers a pretty satisfying explanation. And there are the thorn labyrinths, which provide a hefty portion of the evidence to pin the destruction on the queen.

Thorn labyrinths, whatever else their properties are ecological disasters on multiple levels. They move and spread fast enough to be visible (and seem to do so even faster when not observed), choking out all plantlife they contact and attempting to entrap and impale all animals. Their presence drives custodial spirits of earth and wood out of their usual habitats, or, worse, entraps and drains them in order to fuel their growth. They generate a constant psychic background that is inimical to natural sapient creatures. They burn slowly and generate awful, greenish, acrid smoke.

Thorn labyrinths are massive, continuous tangles of woody vines with sparse and tiny black and white speckled leaves. Their vines appear to be segmented, and their bark slightly shiny, giving the appearance of many-jointed insectile legs. The resemblance is more than merely visual, as individual vines are jointed and possess a wide range of motion. Thorn labyrinths seem able to know when they are being visually observed, and while portions of them under observation do appear to to be in constant, slow motion, the portions of the plant or colony's bulk not observed can move very quickly. A thorn labyrinth is covered in clusters of black thorns, up to 10 cm in length and extremely sharp.

Harm - 2/Peril [Grief] Thorn labyrinths don't set out to harm their inhabitants directly, at least, not at first. Though they are capable of moving their vines with reasonable force when attacked, their major form of attack is simply their existence, position and the psychic resonance they create.

Path of Needles/Path of Pins
When you wish to bypass or escape a thorn labyrinth, face Disaster
On a Hit, you are able to navigate around or through, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move, anyway.
On a Hard Hit, you are able to find the labyrinth's power source (or one of them), which you may destroy, and cause the death of at least this section of the labyrinth.
On a Miss, you blunder into thorns, Suffer Harm as Stated.

Your regret is my reward
Thorn labyrinths grow over the bodies of the people they are able to trap and kill or subdue with their psychic resonance, using the spirit of the dead as a battery to fuel their movement and add to their psychic powers. They can do this to custodial spirits they entrap. In either case, they grow around their prey in dense balls of thorny vine. If you can cut one of these batteries free, destroy or magically isolate one from the rest of the mass, it will kill the thorns in the area (potentially the whole mass). Custodial spirits still strong enough to be viable are likely to be grateful to their rescuers, however it is possible to keep the spirit in the thorns and use it as a power source for other things (particularly psychic weapons). This will make you very unpopular among spirits and witches, for reasons which should be pretty obvious.

Spirits cannot pass through thorn labyrinth vines, which makes wreathes and garlands of the stuff potentially useful for securing a place or item from spirits. The downside is that vines will sometimes take root and begin to spread if not properly watched.

There are still islands in the Gulf that are totally dominated by Thorn labyrinths, as well as rumors of the stuff dominating a vast part of the Murrenic taiga.

The Beast Fears Fire - Remnants of the War

A very long time ago, the kingdoms in the west were united, more or less, under an empire, and the countries of the east were divided into colonial provinces under control of the empire.  It was a very long time ago, and records didn't survive in great numbers, at least not the ones that weren't recopied and edited to include the prejudices and agendas of their copiers.  Fact is, what people know about the empire is incomplete and suspect on its best day.

After the empire, or possibly just at its end, the Murrenic people and the Pineys of the east went to war, though, in this, the histories tend to agree that "war" was far to grand a word for what they actually got: a season of errors and hubris that led to mutual, back-and-forth slaughters and routs.  If it was the blood itself spilled or the pointlessness of the blood spilled, and if it brought the entity forth from nothing or from some other place, no one knows.  What they do know is that, deep in the center of the Ketteleye, where the Gulf of Catastrophe is now, a tower rose.

The tower was made of all the houses emptied of inhabitants by the war, and it bred awful scavengers that dominated the landscape for years before the entity, the Queen, finally faded, and the land beneath the tower fell into the water. 

The remnants dwindle in number without their queen, and, from having once dominated the east, only trouble the islands in the gulf and, occasionally, the shore.  That said, there are places in the Gulf of catastrophe where the war has never ended.

Home Again Home Again

*splat*

Arisia is done.  It went well.  I am ready to do things with it. 
But not tonight.

I Went to Hell, and there Was a Space Ship

This was a dream, or sort of a dream - the kind of thing you get on the very knife-edge of sleep.  I was in hell.  It was bad, but not that bad.  I don't remember why I went to hell, I just remember falling and being blown around, every which way, and melting, a little, deforming, oozing out of shape.  That's the real secret for hell, I guess, that it extrudes you like molten glass.  There were others, first a few and then a lot - packed all together and then blown apart.  Uncomfortable, but not terrible.  The noise was quite bad, though.  And then, I fell through nothing for a while.  That was quite nice, like being in space without the stars.  Cool, slightly blue-tinted black, and then I fell back into an active layer of hell.  There was a space ship.  It was big and sleek and powerful, in a dry dock of bone and glass and copper wire.  A warship.  Except that this part of hell had a ceiling, and the ship would never be able to leave