Once you found a captain that was making the trip and willing to accept a passenger, the voyage across the Great Ocean was uneventful. You spend your time telling old sailors tales you'd picked up over the years, none of which were remarkable when you heard them but most of which had since been forgotten, and in doing so you garnered enough affection among the crew that several times one mate or another took you aside and tried to dissuade you from your intention to go ashore in Awakening. You graciously accept these compliments to your ability to pass as mortal and wave them off.
Awakening itself reminds you a lot of Sudenberg, both in architecture and humidity, and you mentally revise your moisturizing regimen as you disembark from the ship and begin striding your way inland. The streets are crowded with both living and dead, though with the exception of a few places where they're being used for menial labour, most of the dead seem largely independent and aware, at least as much so as an average Nehekharan merchant or tradesmen. Those with flesh are surprisingly well-preserved, having seemingly undergone a rudimentary form of mummification from long exposure to salt and sun, while those of bone are at least as well-maintained as a lesser Prince's Tomb Guard. The spirits are more of a mystery, as among the simple souls of not-quite-departed pirates, there are beings very much like a Wraith but seemingly universally female, and others clad entirely in metal armour of a kind you'd previously only seen in Antoch.
Looming over the town is a castle of black stone, bearing the silhouette of northern architecture but built from enormous blocks of basalt in a way more characteristic of your homeland, and sprouted with more towers than can be easily counted. A sizable stretch of swamp lies between the city's outer walls and the castle gates, bridged by barely-floating pontoons over unknowable depths. A cloud of insects arises at your approach, and you give a nostalgic smile as they attempt to swarm you and then fall back into the water with a pitter-patter as a wave of your hand dislocates their souls. You hop lightly across to the castle, and then introduce yourself to the gatekeeper, who seems to have originally been human but bears the characteristic stoop, claws, and teeth of one adapted to
Dhar exposure.
The gatekeeper tasks an attendant to watch you, and another to take word of your presence to his master, and the one attached to you leads you into a small, dimly-lit waiting room to await judgement. You sit there, and with a ceasing of conscious effort, you stop all the little movements that simulate a living person. You stop moving, you stop breathing, you stop blinking, you deactivate your body and turn your attention inwards, to continue digesting the most recent scrolls you were able to read before you left Araby. You're aware of the attendant shifting uncomfortably, and then stepping forward with something like concern on their face, and then they scramble backwards as you flick your eyes over to look back at them, and then to watch them flee. If your facial muscles still responded to your emotions instead of your will, you'd smile.
Eventually another attendant, this one significantly better-dressed, comes into the room to tell you that the ruler of this place is ready to see you, and they lead you into a throne room, its centerpiece a throne made entirely of bone, some familiar and some too large to have come from even an altered human. The Vampire sitting atop it wears blackened steel armour with steel talons emerging from its shoulders and back to frame the head, and under that a luxurious red robe trimmed with tattered gold. The hair is whiter than you remember and the eyepatch is new, but the face is one you remember.
[Luthor Harkon roll: 9.]
"Lutr, it is you!" you say in High Nehekharan, striding forward to properly greet the lad, but halting as his gaze bores to you. It's not quite hostile, but it is intense, and there definitely isn't any recognition in it.
He leans forward, his eyes narrowing. "You knew me," he says thoughtfully, in the High Nehekharan of someone who learned it from a book, and you can feel the full attention of his magical senses upon you. "A genuine Liche Priest. Mid-dynasties. Eastern accent. Expecting a warm welcome, but unadapted in the way that Arkhan's disciples are. Well, that only leaves one possibility." He says a name, one you haven't heard properly pronounced in many years.
He knows your name. What is it?
[ ] [NAME] Name (write in)
He continues on. "What brings you to the anchorage of the Undead Admiralty?"
"What happened to you, dear boy?" you can't stop yourself from asking.
The Vampire looks annoyed. "Ren-tbb curse on a Lizard Pyramid. It will be temporary. Answer the question."
Identity-shatter. So the rest of him is still there, it's just not... out right now. Okay. That can be worked with. "Apart from visiting an old friend, I was looking for a place I could find and teach students in in relative peace. I've been living in the former Elven lands, but some of my students ended up with unfortunate reputations being attached to them by the unkind. I was hoping somewhere shaped by yourself would be more understanding towards that sort of thing."
He looks slightly interested for a moment, then something seems to occur to him and he seems very interested. "Funny you should say that," he says. "There is a project underway intended to further that shaping, and it could benefit from your perspective and predilection."
---
Flanked by an escort of heavily armed and armoured Vampires only somewhat reminiscent of Abhorash's Palace Guard, Luthor Harkon leads you through the streets. "There is a challenger," he says dismissively, "some distant descendent of Vashanesh, who stumbled across a gimmick relating to the oceanic maelstrom and believes it sufficient to challenge the Undead Admiralty. Naturally he will be defeated upon the waves, but there are have been desertions among the shortsighted - the Shadewraith and the Bloody Reaver have gone entirely over to him, and the Vorgo, the Lamprey, and the Terror of Bogenhafen have been distant of late. Every ship tempted into desertion is a ship that will need to be destroyed, and then laboriously reraised and recrewed. Wasteful. There needs to be a fothering, something to prop up belief in the Vampire Coast within the wavering souls of the foolish. And a great many of the appropriate trophies and monuments would double as exhibits in a center of learning on the topics of Necromancy and Vampirism - topics you would seem uniquely qualified to curate."
As he proposes that you do what you were going to do anyway, but in a place specifically designed for it, with a staff to assist you, and with interesting artefacts delivered straight to you, he takes you around to various locations that could host this endeavour. Some options are quite mundane, others considerably less so.
[ ] [PLACE] Ziggurat
At the center of Awakening, the source of its name, its leader's obsession, and most of the stone that its buildings are constructed from, lies the remaining portions of the Temple-City of Huatl. Everything above ground has been mined for its stone, but underground the vast catacombs and former treasure vaults still exist, looted of everything of value except the empty space. A museum located in this space would be aesthetically foreboding and definitely reminiscent of the Lizardfolk further inland, and it's up to the future curator to decide whether those are good things or bad things for their museum to be.
[ ] [PLACE] Bespoke
Awakening doesn't have an abundance of much, but among what it does have is labour and stone. You could have a museum built to any design you can imagine - a library, a temple, a Pyramid, a plaza, a bazaar, or something more exotic. It would take some time for there to be much space available, but once the initial area is built, you could continue expanding for as long as you have reason to.
[ ] [PLACE] Island
East of the Vampire Coast lies a chain of volcanic islands. The largest two are occupied by Lizardmen and High Elves and the northernmost by a particularly powerful Wraith, but the one nearest Awakening is home to the small keep and harbour that a previous facet of Luthor Harkon originally landed on and this one abandoned when it came time to conquer Huatl and establish a foothold on the mainland. There's plenty of room to expand deeper into the dormant volcano, and while this location would be less conveniently accessible to the inhabitants of Awakening, it could receive visitors from the rest of the world without them having to cross into seas and onto land directly controlled by the Pirate King.
[ ] [PLACE] Hulk
The ships that the Vampire Coast adds to its flotilla tend to be those built for speed, whether that be the sleek shapes of longboats and cutters or larger ships with even larger mountains of sails atop. That leaves a great many ships floating out there in the sargassum; cargo ships, passenger ships, slower warships stripped of their guns, all of them slowly ageing and serving no useful purpose. Any one of a number of large ships could be recovered, patched up, and its cargo hold transformed into a museum, and if properly crewed it could be adapted into just about any form, expanded as needed, and even sailed to other ports to bring new eyes to the monument to the greatness of the Pirate King.
[ ] [PLACE] Leviathan
Deep beneath the waves, amongst innumerable other kinds of oversized life, lives several variety of enormous crustacean. Apart from the occasional rampage that claims a ship or a seaside village - often cited as Manann's punishment for something or other - the only solid evidence of their existence are the immense bodies that sometimes wash ashore. Those caught in the insidious currents of the Vampire Coast are raised to join the Pirate King's forces, the 'smaller' ones as steeds for rifle-bearing Pirate Dragoons to ride atop, the larger for entire masts to be mounted atop to provide elevated and mobile firing positions for teams of snipers up in the tops, crosstrees, and crows nests. But the largest, like the one recently washed up that's fifty feet across at the jowls, are kept for something special - like you. Carve out the organs and unnecessary meat and you'll have an extremely impressive and mobile house of wonders. Space will be limited, expanding that space will take a great deal of creativity, entering the museum (through the mouth) will require some boldness on the part of your visitors, and at least for now you'll need assistance to handle the animation of the corpse, but the freedom of movement that an amphibious, submersible museum would enjoy would be completely unparalleled.
- There will be a twenty-four hour moratorium for the thread to hash out name ideas and possibly for me to accept other ideas for museum locations.
- This fellow was born and inducted as a Liche Priest during the 3rd Dynasty, but he was related to the family that would give rise to the High Kings of the 4th Dynasty. The known names of their Kings were Lamasheptra, Lahmizzar, Lahmizzash, Lakhashar, and Lahkashaz, so there was something of a theme going on - but this can be disregarded for the purposes of this vote if you wish, as the pattern could have been for regnal names only instead of birth names and so may not have effected the protagonist.
