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.