Hell is Other People (Exalted/World of Darkness)

The sun is dying, dying like you. Slowly ascending, it looks more like it's descending to you, its reddish glow dripping down the sky like the yolk of an egg that has been smashed against some cosmic table. The low-hanging morning-star bathes the grey and leaden clouds in a scarlet light. Fitting to your current situation.

And you? You're bleeding out in a Roman alley like a bitch.

You always wanted to be something. You always expected to be something. Through your entire life, success has graced you. No, you have taken success and made it what it is; rightfully yours. But tonight, you tried too much, and this time you bit more than you could bear and in response your failure perforated your lungs, broke both your arms and a shoulder, fucked up your throat, tore off a leg and left you with the garbage to cry out your sorrows like the failure you are. You're not actually sure whether or not you are crying right now though. There is definitely something liquid dripping down your cheeks, but you're not sure if that's tears or blood from the gashes in your face. You're not sure you want to know either, but then, you didn't want to be thrown aside like a discarded toy in a shady alley you should never have entered anyways.

What's that? A cough? Don't cough too hard, you might break something. If you haven't already, that is.

The dirt of the alley is really getting to you at this point. You don't know if it's hallucination or the last few metres of a dying mind trying to run its way to the goal marker, but everything seems so clear to you right now. It's none of that shit about life flashing before you, nah, you're seeing the centipedes and spiders in the corners, the true inhabitants of the hellish steel-and-concrete superstructures surrounding you. It was built by people, yeah, that's true, but the people built for the ants and the centipedes, the spiders and the flies. A mound of blood and shit the maggots cavort in as the people wear suits and crowns, calling themselves consuls and kings. Someone once wrote a poem about this; all man makes is deserts and war, and someday there won't be more wars and only desert. You can feel something inside you collapse, you think that might be your other lung, do you care anymore, child of dust?

Your old man always had it figured out, it was all a big cosmic battle to him; truth and lies. You can speak the truth, he would say, or you can be a liar, and there's really no middle ground between those. As you lie here, it's hard not to to consider yourself an an idiot in comparison to him. Success is what you've strived for your entire life and what you've justly received, but here you are, lying and dying on the pavement. Meanwhile, him and his moved all the way from Iran to reach the Eternal City and you spent your time:

Article:

Choose one:

[ ] Fighting Pointless Battles: You are a violent girl, you've always been so. You spent your time humiliating the chaff of McDojos and catching glimpses of violent enlightenment in the clarity of fist bones breaking and things giving way to the strength of your body. Your mother once told you to get a boyfriend and you laughed, you were sure that no boy in high school would date you and university sure didn't help either. People didn't fight you, you broke people. Well, until tonight. Haha.

[ ] Repeating Tired Arguments: You are an argumentative girl, you've always been so. You spent your time playing devil's advocate and toying with arguments. When you speak with enough force and power, everyone listens in the end. Reason surrenders where emotion wins, and when you speak? Emotion always wins. You were going to become a politician, you had already planned it all out. Power was your desire, and you were very good at grasping for it. Well, until you reached too far.

[ ] Reading Useless Texts: You are an inquisitive girl, you've always been so. You spent your time researching everything you could about everything. Your mind would make leaps of logic and shifts of association and you would forget to sleep in the mad fervor of your interests. You would never truly master your interests, but it is not most girls who learn to speak conversational Turkish in a few weeks of feverish obsession. Your parents were sure that university would ensure your eventual success. So were you.

[ ] Mistrusting Close Friends: You are not a trusting girl, you never were. You spent your days lying and cheating, never exactly on the side of the law. In high school, people knew came to you to get access to things they shouldn't get their hands on. Now? Well now everyone comes to you to get access to things they shouldn't have their hands on. You're not some back-alley dealer, you know people, many people, and you know how to get everything. It's just a matter of whom to ask.

[ ] Playing Mindless Games: You are a popular girl, you've always been so. Your life has been one long search for excellence. You were head cheerleader, most popular girl and queen bitch par excellence in high school, and when you reached the law school that you knew lay in your destiny, little changed. Little miss perfect's royal entourage of fawning admirers never shrank, nor did the hilarity you found in playing them off against each other. Oh, what joy.

It's honestly kind of embarrassing in hindsight. Despite your life-long struggle for success, most of it is hard to think of as anything but a failure. Maybe there really is some truth in what they say about the next generation always being weaker than the one that spawned it. Born into the niceties which your parents spent their lives to create, you never knew the real labour of their craft, entitled to all the paradisiacal fruits it bore for you. You thought you struggled and fought, but did you really? And honestly, did you really care? You remember countless evenings of your mother or your father trying to instill the proper filial duty in you, telling you of their own hardships or what they had worked for. You mostly thought they were entitled shits and that you didn't owe them anything. This, you stand by; you don't owe anything to anyone. Your soul is yours alone. Little good it did you in the end.

Regardless, here you are, lying in a dirty concrete alley in downtown Rome, bleeding out your lungs and apparently also your life story. Maybe it's true what they say about life flashing past your eyes at the moment of death. Honestly you had never really thought about it. Most people don't consider dying in an alley as a very high possibility on their list of things that they should worry about. Eventually life taught you better, unfortunate that this valuable lesson came with the approaching cessation of your existence. It's hard not to think back to what brought you here, your entire reason for lying broken and bereaved in this shitty alley of greys, browns and bloody red.

Well, it would be a funny story to tell the kids you're never getting.

You're bleeding out in a Roman alley and you're incredibly bored. So bored. There's nothing to do here and all you have to do is wait until the injuries bring an end to you. In the flickering half-light of street lights that haven't seen a repairman for years, a fly bewilders itself into your senses, flying into the shining cone of the lamp. But the fly, like you has made a mistake. Betrayal! The shining glory of the light cone hid a spider's web and the eight-legged arachnid descends, angel-like to your feverish senses, to behold its prey. With practiced weaver's legs, the creature wraps its meal in silken strands as it bites deep into it. Perhaps if you weren't dying, you would appreciate the poetry more.

Oh well, lights out, time to go. As fascinating as the waste and decay around you is, it seems like the light is dimming. It's getting harder to focus, and are the lamplights losing power or is it getting darker here? It's summer, but everything feels so cold. You try to move your arms and you're rewarded with a spike of pain, oh right, you forgot they were broken, guess you can forget to scream too. You tried screaming in the start and no one came, so why try again now? You're feeling tired anyways, so if you just close your eyes…

"Hey you!" A male voice calling out to you. Not far away.

Through your perforated lungs, yet despite a hint of pain, you whisper, almost inaudibly, "Who is there?"

"I came here to tell you to stop dying like a bitch, so maybe if you could stop doing that?." The voice replies, the tone register reminding you of a junkie or some lowlife. Heh, ironic, you're not exactly high class yourself.

Weakly forcing your eyes open to meet the source of your irritation, you're met with more or less exactly what you expected: unkempt and likely also unwashed, he is not exactly a sight for sore eyes. Sitting on the lid of a dumpster, right leg pulled up and the other dangling free, his right arm lazily arranged on his knee and the left balancing him on his precarious position. His dirty black hair frames his dark-skinned face like some lion's mane, although significantly less majestic and his bloodshot eyes meet yours, seemingly without a care in his world. A bored smile plays on his lips, as if he couldn't care less about your current situation. His clothes are hard to really pin down, as if seen from the corner of an eye, even when you're staring directly at them. Only the vaguest features can be made out, but you get the feeling that they don't resemble something people have worn in any time you've learnt about in various history classes. His skin is covered in minor and greater bruises, his uprolled sleeves clearly letting you see his arms and something that could best be described as an intimate love affair with the asphalt he must have scraped along a hundred times. He lazily flicks his fingers with his right hand, making a small rhythm eerily reminiscent of a human heartbeat.

Your eyes are inevitably drawn to his forehead, where an eight-spoked miniature sun in bright viridian green awaits, casting his entire body in its eerie, yet glorious light. Staring at it too long makes your eyes hurt, burning the memory into your eyelids as you blink the fire away. If the rest of his body made you think of a junkie or a lowlife, the sun upon his brow makes you think of emperors or a prophet of the Lord. An angel, perhaps? The disparity between the imperious solar display and the man himself is bizarre.

"What the fuck are you staring at?" The reverie is broken and your thoughts are turned away from suns and glory to the Roman alley currently set to become your grave and the irritation that sits in front of you.

"What the fuck are you staring at?" You retort intelligently. Fuck this guy already.

"I'm staring at a girl who told her old man that she wasn't spoiled 'cause being spoiled was when you had something you hadn't earned yourself. And here she is, bleeding out like a bitch 'cause she bit off more than she could chew. Ain't that a sight?" He replies mockingly.

"Fuck off. So what are you supposed to be, an angel or something? Go back and tell Him I don't care about His ten-step programme." You throw back. Here you were looking forward to dying alone and unloved, and then this fucker shows up to mock you. He sure as hell wasn't here to save you.

"Nah, I ain't no angel. She comes later." He cryptically responds, still with that mocking tone in his voice. "Still, I am here to offer you a choice and one of the possibilities is Hell, so I s'pose I've got that part pinned down."

Heedless of any possible objections of yours, he continues, "You were gonna be everything, y'know? Not gonna bow for any of this shit. You were gonna change the fucking world, and here you're calling yourself a failure 'cause you fucked up one time too many and it's a big nasty world out there that ain't got time for one spoiled little princess' dreams if she ain't got the cajones to back them up."

"So you're lyin' here, crying your heart out as if that's gonna help you for shit in five mins when the last neuron in your brain fires. Boo hoo. Ain't that unfair?"

You genuinely do not know what to respond to this, you are utterly struck speechless by this man, this junkie's utter disrespect for the fact that you are literally dying right now.

In a state of shock, you simply reply, "Y-yeah! I do think that's unfair, and what are you gonna do about it?" In the utter strangeness of the situation, or simply because you're literally talking to a hallucination, you don't really mind that the guy's body has caught fire, which is currently eating him up. You don't mind that it's eating the dumpster too, or the alley or you. That seems natural.

"Not a damn fucking thing." He flicks his fingers and laughs, the lazy smile on his face turning into a grin. "But she will." He says, the flames all but consuming him.

"I've been called Ravana before. Be seeing you girl." Even as the flames lick around his face and caress his body, consuming him bit by bit, he gets an ironic last word off. Fuck this guy, you hope your brain stops soon so you won't have to see him again.

And that is when SHE comes.


It begins slowly, springing out of the nowhere-aether of the nightly air. A vision out of nothing, a Fata Morgana produced by the final guttering sparks of neurons firing in a dying braincase. A greenish, viridian glow beginning in the very heart of the flames, where Ravana's green sun shone, licking the walls and dirt. It's too pure for this world, too clean. The impurity of the Eternal City cannot help but catch aflame and crumble like burning paper in comparison with its radiant glory.


A wildfire of emeralds, dancing like the evening fire of Saint John, engulfing the alley, terrible and majestic! Consuming all within your vision and forcing your eyes to open wide, the roaring thunder from within the flame drowning all lesser sounds, drowning you. You are swimming and greatness is your ocean, the ocean is made of emerald and fire, the fire of truth. Truth and lies. The deceptions of the world before you must retreat as you gaze upon the silhouette of the dancing figure in the nimbus-gyre of swirling flames before you. At the core of the flames SHE stands.


SHE is like a dancer, the ballerina that dances at the centre of the flames, a wild and unrestrained performer, innocent in HER resplendency. There is nothing but the dance to HER, the slender limbs, the glowing visage, the flowing hair, caught in the eternity of the dance. Yet SHE stares at you, eyes of fire and a face like the shining full moon. Through the roar of the flames you can hear HER voice, elegant yet overpowering; restrained, yet so like an angel of the Lord.


You understand, it is an offer, a proposal, the choice Ravana offered. It needs not end here, the fires could consume you, purify you, free you. SHE would set a crown upon you and name you Prince of the Earth, demiurge and demigoddess, divinity and diva. You would never need to bow to another being, the strings of the cosmos you would play with your left hand, the sun you would hold in your right hand. All grievances and slights against you, you would set right. All you would need to do is accept HER bargain.

Die as the fires consume your pathetic, broken body or be a good girl and make the right decision:

Choose fighting for the God's empty throne. Choose the Ten Thousand Hells. Choose the Yama Kings. Choose the Throne of Want. Choose desire and raw passion. Choose ascension. Choose an eternity of ambition. Choose hellish enlightenment. Choose the Wheel of Ages. Choose the quailing earth. Choose the trembling heavens. Choose the keys to the kingdom. Choose the Sixth Age.

Choose Royalty.

Choose Exaltation.

You've already made your choice, you realize, and the flames consume you. Oh, it is a good pain, but it is not the end.

You smile, you can definitely think of something you will do. Oh, yes you can.

Rules

Yo yo yo, this quest will feature dice rolls and we'll be using rolz.org for those. Follow this link if you want to roll dice but please only roll them when I ask you to. And don't ever roll preemptively. The command is #roll[dice].

A lot of options will have weight to them, that means they'll count more because you care about them more. Over time, what you care about can shift dependent on your decisions and how you act, but right now, you should assume that they're as they are. Weighting will never go so high or low as to make something utterly impossible. Things that can influence weighting include Nature, Demeanour, Intimacies and certain Charms which alter your personality or body on permanent or indefinite basis.

The system we're running on is a heavily modified Classic World of Darkness.

Stunting and Channeling

You should feel encouraged to do write-ups of your actions, do describe how you're doing your votes. This is called "Stunting" and might lower the difficulty of the action or cancel penalties that would have made it harder. You should be aware that if I think something is too silly or doesn't fit, I maintain a veto power which I can and will use.

You can also Channel which is when you do a stunt that defends an Intimacy (which is something you care about). This lets you regenerate a point of Willpower, although if you try to do this too much, I will grow more stringent with what I count as a valid channeling of that Intimacy.

In addition, I will also incorporate cool Stunts in my updates, although I'll probably clean them up and edit them a bit to make them fit.

Charms and Spells

Charms are your cool magical demon powers, they do cool magical demon stuff. Normally, Charms will just be included in a vote, but if you want to make a bigger deal out of it, you can do subvotes that include additional Charms. Spells are more structured, sorcerous magic. You don't have any per default. I will never include spells in write-ups and you will have to cast those with a special [ ] Cast a Spell write-in vote that will be provided, and then a subvote clarifying which spell you want to cast.

Character Sheets



Arcs and Updates