Zampano
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- Location
- Simping for DSB
Orm manages an index of fan works. It's on the first page, and also has a threadmark under "media".
A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
- Start date
- Original
I think you're massively underestimating the difference in power that an extra 0.82 to 1.59 Rank at high Rank means.
It's not that people think the Forebear is evil, but that his mental state is the result of going through 2 billion progressively more hellish worlds so changing Hunger's mental state to be more like the Forebear's is undesirable.
DkArthas
CAPITAL IS TO BLAME
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- They
I don't think we need to worry about Forebear advancement honestly. They seem to have haelial-sempai's seal of approval since her favour focuses on empowering Hunger that way. That's a very big endorsement.
The mental containmination are not really a problem with Hunger's high willpower which will only get higher. They are also potentially our only source of info on the Hidden Masters.
The mental containmination are not really a problem with Hunger's high willpower which will only get higher. They are also potentially our only source of info on the Hidden Masters.
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I think he is integer type so he does not understand floating point systems like Rank. He is more of a stat guy so he only works with whole numbers.
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
However many OAFs there are, Haeliel's favor puts us one step ahead in the line without the mental contamination from being a step ahead in the process. It Empowers us with a measure of Forebear or Forebear Analogous power while reducing the Forebear's influence on our mind. It makes us not have to chase his formidable power boosts as hard, and reduces his influence on our mind. It could just as easily be interpreted as a backhanded condemnation.
Regardless of which of us is right though, it doesn't matter. Haeliel is a construct of the GM. She represents the in Universe concept of Heroism according to a worldview decided on by Rihaku. She is only as philosophically cultivated as Rihaku can make her, she is not some infalliable avatar of morality(Edit: Out of Universe, to clarify).
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- Location
- Ostren
[X] Plowshares to Swords
How does this guy compare to someone with Expressive for a decade or two?
How much does your behavior in the month you have before expressive wakes up influence the power compared to who you are as a person?
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
This is so frustrating. I thought I was going to get a comfy quest about rebuilding the majesty of Atlantis, but actually it's about frantically seeking allies and power to stave off an ancestral enemy that may have already defeated my forerunners once. It sounds like he is at least as scary as Doctor Apocalypse, in terms of looming threats. I don't think my preferred civilization-crafting build scales quickly enough to survive or escape the General, even if I were to start with territory already under control.
So, I guess I'm signing on with The Hand. The Adherents are likely to support the expansion of "my" metaphysical territory while benefitting enormously from Water's paradigm - a river dammed, and damned, in service of another's purpose. But even a damaging flood leaves behind fertile soil, and may allow new growth in time.
I'm taking a (moral) risk by swearing obedience to the Hand - its unknown purposes could be intrinsically monstrous, like 'replace all joy with suffering'. It could be futile in a multiverse complex that includes the Accursed: 'bring low all authority save that of The Hand itself.' It could be the outgrowth an alien utility function, like 'eliminate the qualia of song from the multiverse' or 'maximize paperclips'.
But there's an equal chance that the "unthinkable atrocities" warned of by the blurb are side effects of The Hand's actual designs. An ineffable chess match between The Hand and a peer opponent might raze entire civilizations as a mere distraction from other plots. For now, The Hand lacks the incontestable power of the Forebear or The Accursed and so his methods may be more crude. In exchange for the resurgence of my entire people, I'm willing to be a pawn, or a Knight, or an Adherent.
Here's the build:
[Z] A Ruined Garden
[Z] Originator Resurgent (3 orbs)
[Z] Final Scion of Water (2 orbs)
[Z] A Taste of the Fruit - Slice of the Sun (1 orb)
[Z] Exemplar (1 orb)
[Z] Oathbound (+2 orbs)
[Z] Dreams of Distant Fire (+2 orbs)
The default plan would be to sign up and terraform The Hand's current base of operations into a proper garden world. The mysterious mention of "the titanic shadow of the Walls" suggests that The Hand has a fortress set up, which means that there's potential for a siege. I'd be able to contribute a lot towards fortifying the stronghold against attack. This strat has the most lead time to generate contingencies & Shock Troops against The General's inevitable assault.
Depending on how effective 3x Slice of the Sun is, I also briefly considered swapping my starting location:
[Z] A Unified Earth
[Z] Prometheus Engine (1 orb)
[Z] Dissident (+1 orb)
The Watsonian question is basically 'where can I be most useful to The Hand' - does the benefit of Prometheus Engine outweigh the danger of operating far from a secure base? Would it be possible to bait the General into attacking the Tyrant?
Ultimately I decided that no amount of hyper tech is worth doubling my number of fated enemies. Taking on either the Tyrant or the General would be a challenging task on its own. Even dropping Final Scion for this option seems to ignore the massive scaling opportunities from Originator.
(The Doylist question is whether one could write an interesting story as a mad scientist working under Aizen from inside Las Noches. That question has already been answered piecemeal by Rihaku himself.)
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- Location
- Earth
[X] Plowshares to Swords
[X] Sate the Hunger
[X] Aeira
[X] Nightmare Flight
Adding Nightmare Flight to my vote, otherwise no changes, carry on!
[X] Sate the Hunger
[X] Aeira
[X] Nightmare Flight
Adding Nightmare Flight to my vote, otherwise no changes, carry on!
Sweet Christ that's a lot of alerts, on and off of Discord. Let me just... try and catch up. Also, guys, remember not to vote for the CYOA(s) with an X inside the brackets, it'll overwrite your actual vote.
So that doesn't fit, you'd arrive as an Ancient with a backstory appropriate to your parameters who's just begun undergoing the process. Notably, the only world that lets you Naturalize your way into a preexisting Expression (A Unified Earth) also alters the results; Expressive is priced around not providing any immediate power, if you can get safety out of it/circumvent the ramp-up it's too strong.
Labyrinthian might be better for providing unique capabilities, since the Hand has Practitioner Fingers but no access to the former magic, but Practitioner (Survivalist) provides a measure of safety in the doubly post-apocalyptic wasteland. Spending 8 orbs on pure potential with Nemesis is just asking for an early death. Ruined Garden Oathbound builds can link up with their new partner quickly given the low-level presence he maintains there, but it's not instantaneous security. Still, once he shows up the ideological bootcamp can commence, optimizing your Expression for the purpose of fulfilling the Oath! Such a shame the cap's eight orbs, otherwise you could get Water too.
I might recommend Water instead of Litanist since you're taking Dreams anyway, an appropriate Ethos would both accelerate the growth and gradually reduce the power of Fire Ascendant. But given the proposed Expression you'd have to either limit who you made a Waterbearer, or accept a near-certainty of Paradigmatic usurpation in the long run; Water is fairly loyal to its Final Scion, but not to the point that it could withstand that much competition. Relying on regen/stealth also makes Somber risky, and Litanist gets more out of Exemplar anyway.
The adjusted Wellspring has good odds (~85%) of successfully scaling beyond Dreams, assuming you can exert control to prevent the Pit from benefiting (as civs slain by the sword are damned/exploited). The biggest risks are probably a Nemesis proc triggering an early General advent and/or dovetailing with Somber. But as long as you personally escape wonder will live on, and the Wellspring excels at creating ablative armor. Eventually, a convocation of civilizations endowed with such glory may rederive the principles used to construct the Ladder, at which point things will get Apocryphally Interesting.
The rest of the build's fine! Exemplar + Practitioner in particular is strong, especially with a Labyrinthian surgical theater to enhance your already-absurd abilities. Bit of a rough start, but with your preexisting social skills enhanced by the aforementioned choices you can grit your teeth and bear it until the first demiplane's livable. The telepathic sweeps are a tad tricky, but it's too rare an Expression for them to be ubiquitous.
It seemed like a good idea at the time? Can't have a proper narrative if your antagonists are incompetent or lacking in teeth! I'd read Unsong & Bakker's Second Apocalypse series, and wanted a setting that fully captured the horror of Hell. Thus the Holy Triumvirate, who've followed their incentives straight over the cliff and into atrocity.
Good question! The life cycle of a cultivator's classed as a physical malady in a way that would let an Immortal avoid that fate if they wish, with some work. It's actually a way to get multiple Fruits of Origination, though: accelerate the sessile state somehow, manifest a Fruit to pass on your powers, and have a minion pluck it (at which point you'd usually die).
Each option can only be picked once. An Ancient has lower aptitude than the Litanist but has fully realized their potential. It's suboptimal to take it alongside Litanist, but the talent upgrade would expand their horizons; those two should probably be mutually exclusive, honestly.
The way Naturalization works is that it'll seamlessly incorporate setting-appropriate powers into your backstory. You can't write yourself in as a provincial governor with Naturalization alone, but if you're an Ancient Loyalist it makes sense that you'd command such resources. If you'd had an Unprincipled Expression for long periods of time, however, the history of the Dominion and perhaps creation as a whole would be drastically different.
So that doesn't fit, you'd arrive as an Ancient with a backstory appropriate to your parameters who's just begun undergoing the process. Notably, the only world that lets you Naturalize your way into a preexisting Expression (A Unified Earth) also alters the results; Expressive is priced around not providing any immediate power, if you can get safety out of it/circumvent the ramp-up it's too strong.
Correct, one of Litanist/Ancient/Naturalization in the Dominion is required to cast the Litanies. Exemplar by itself just improves your aptitude, but unless you're both a classically trained vocalist and 99th+ percentile in a selection of attributes correlated roughly-but-imperfectly with intellect, Litanist alone is better than Naturalization + Exemplar. Absolute maximization of Litanal talent in order of priority is as follows: Litanist, Exemplar, Naturalization with Loyalist (Main-branch Argyris), Practitioner (Singer). Some diminishing returns/difficulty improving the ideation component of casting as a Practitioner, though.
The Authority of Imposing Justice may be shattered, but justice as an ideal is not dead so long as it lives in the hearts of men... and boy, does the Hand have a lot of those. Well-done on avoiding the crippling regret inherent in taking Oathbound without one of Jacob's Ladder or Lethe! As I think I've mentioned, this is a solid build if you accept sacrificing your agency as necessary. Ruined Garden's the best starting point for Oathbound + Nemesis, since if it can't proc on him it either won't trigger early or he can assassinate the Nemesis.
Labyrinthian might be better for providing unique capabilities, since the Hand has Practitioner Fingers but no access to the former magic, but Practitioner (Survivalist) provides a measure of safety in the doubly post-apocalyptic wasteland. Spending 8 orbs on pure potential with Nemesis is just asking for an early death. Ruined Garden Oathbound builds can link up with their new partner quickly given the low-level presence he maintains there, but it's not instantaneous security. Still, once he shows up the ideological bootcamp can commence, optimizing your Expression for the purpose of fulfilling the Oath! Such a shame the cap's eight orbs, otherwise you could get Water too.
I hope you like leaving your teachers dumbstruck, speechless with sheer awe. It's difficult to deprive a Litanist of words, but talent of this tier nevertheless manages. Your Nemesis likely thinks that you should be killed for the common good while it's still possible. They may even have a point.
All it took was an Arete incentive for me to sell out completely! That said, it's the players who breathe life into things. It's thanks to you, DB, Vel, and so on that the setting's more than a miserable pile of puns; your participation's always appreciated.Truly Orm, your need to torture readers with nice shinies at terrible costs knows no bounds
In the spirit of sharing, I'll comment on the new stuff and then write down a few builds born fromthe pain and tears of hindsightcosmic insight. As spoiler-free as possible of course.
Whoever named Telos must've thought they were reeeal clever, both in and out of character.Also, 'the culmination of its telos'. Smart joke
Naturalization builds can retroactively slot in world-appropriate powers, but Envy corresponds to none of the listed worlds, so it just appears on the finger (lowercase f, fortunately) of the player once their decisions are finalized. An Ancient who'd successfully avoided Ring-jacking for thousands of years would be Envy's master, and quite possibly the Lord Reaper as well. Which is to say, yes, it's got absurd synergies with both Reaping and Dissident. Better even than the infamous Autocannibal build (Immortal Ancient Reaper)!
Yeah, you can rack up extremely degenerate levels of environmental control with thematic saturation from Reassurance compounding multiple other magics. Could I perhaps interest you in the grudge match combo platter: Final Scion, Labyrinthian, and Originator? Room for one of either Litanist (Reassurance/Reinforcement) or Exemplar + Practitioner (Gardener) to accelerate cultivation in your greenhouse-dimensions.
A Waterless Wellspring, eh? Isn't that an oxymoron? Still a very viable build, the epitome of a rising tide lifting all ships. Reciprocity might be better than Repulsion in the medium term if your influence relies on managing/manipulating those uplifted by your Expression. A Litanist specialized according to your parameters is competent enough to survive the Street with minimal risk, though; get power armor as one of your artifacts, tweak the anti-cognitohazard wards to filter out Somber Speech, scry anything that looks dangerous. Banishment-based offense is broad enough to cover all bases, though the efficacy varies depending what worlds your path's adjacent to until you Express.
I might recommend Water instead of Litanist since you're taking Dreams anyway, an appropriate Ethos would both accelerate the growth and gradually reduce the power of Fire Ascendant. But given the proposed Expression you'd have to either limit who you made a Waterbearer, or accept a near-certainty of Paradigmatic usurpation in the long run; Water is fairly loyal to its Final Scion, but not to the point that it could withstand that much competition. Relying on regen/stealth also makes Somber risky, and Litanist gets more out of Exemplar anyway.
Exemplar's perks of improved physique/intellect/charisma are relevant to all builds except perhaps the Envious, but Expression typically benefits the least. The raw effulgence of the soul unbound to tyrannize the realm of mere phenomena cares about who you are and what you want rather than one's talent. In this case the Expression's ethos is so congruent with Exemplar I'm inclined to say it's fine, though the growth rate remains too fast regardless.
The adjusted Wellspring has good odds (~85%) of successfully scaling beyond Dreams, assuming you can exert control to prevent the Pit from benefiting (as civs slain by the sword are damned/exploited). The biggest risks are probably a Nemesis proc triggering an early General advent and/or dovetailing with Somber. But as long as you personally escape wonder will live on, and the Wellspring excels at creating ablative armor. Eventually, a convocation of civilizations endowed with such glory may rederive the principles used to construct the Ladder, at which point things will get Apocryphally Interesting.
Comfy Life is too much safety. Since you're not Naturalized and would be undergoing Expression while affected by Dissident, it's unlikely the resulting power would be so suited to living well within the Unified World (or a realm abutting it). You might consider a more general fleshcrafting Expression? Become Panacea; your private Practice would benefit tremendously! Alternatively you can choose Envy and harness the externally-imposed emotions to master it, though that's not terribly comfy.
The rest of the build's fine! Exemplar + Practitioner in particular is strong, especially with a Labyrinthian surgical theater to enhance your already-absurd abilities. Bit of a rough start, but with your preexisting social skills enhanced by the aforementioned choices you can grit your teeth and bear it until the first demiplane's livable. The telepathic sweeps are a tad tricky, but it's too rare an Expression for them to be ubiquitous.
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
Oh. Oh no. I forgot to grab a mindwipe for myself! I could even get Prometheus Engine without picking a fight with the Tyrant. The only question is whether The Hand has any operatives on the Unified Earth. Prometheus Engine is probably enough to tinker up some dimensional portal if there is nobody nearby.
[Z] A Unified Earth
[Z] Originator Resurgent (3 orbs)
[Z] Final Scion of Water (2 orbs)
[Z] A Taste of the Fruit - Slice of the Sun (1 orb)
[Z] Exemplar (1 orb)
[Z] Prometheus Engine (1 orb)
[Z] Oathbound (+2 orbs)
[Z] Dreams of Distant Fire (+2 orbs)
[Z] Lethe (+1 orb)
I'm pretty sure that I would still remember that I have powers, so Lethe doesn't remove anything important except the degree of fear/urgency that I should feel from my nightmares. Unified Earth seems like a decent place to live, too.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Hm. I want to play with this. I'm going to make a minor adjustment and give myself an extra platinum, since I think the half-beast builds are the most interesting from a narrative standpoint - Elysium is impressively powerful but boring as a result, and Resilient is more interesting but not to my taste - but the cost seems a bit high with the weaknesses inherit. Of the three it's the only one that comes with a giant red flag. Naturally Rihaku has already accounted for that, but I'm cheating so
.Thus:
The Shadow
+ 8 Copper
+ 4 Platinum
+ 1 Jade.
[ ] Half-Beast (Fox) -2 Platinum
[ ] Violet -2 Copper
[ ] Sword -5 Copper -1 Platinum
[ ] Three -3 Copper
[ ] Step Up -1 Platinum
[ ] Perfect Storm -1 Jade
[ ] Stain: The Captain +2 Copper
The general idea here is speed, shadow, and to pick your fights. There is nothing pressing. No great enemies waiting for you. No pressing need to push forward. Everything is at the pace you set for yourself, and without Red you are not forced into ambition that may, perhaps, prove dangerous. The one caveat, such as it is, is the 7k year time limit to get strong enough to beat back the ravages of time. Long enough, I think.
The Sword isn't necessary for this build and without it I could grab a Stitch in Time, to make myself basically impossible to pin down short of overkill by a massive margin. The comfort provided by the Sword was chosen because it's what I would prefer, in this situation. Power can come with time.
Optimally you would want to choose Ten Thousand rather than Perfect Storm, but Ten Thousand has the unfortunate effect of causing you to effectively transcend immediately and is impossible to really wrap my mind around. So I'm avoiding it to come up with a build that can remain the player and be understood by common humanity.
This build is meant to primarily be a loner - there is space to take the Wretch. If so you would probably want to take Ten Thousand and Red, though this is exactly the choices I was wishing to avoid simply by preference.
A fox is cunning and swift. And so that is the game.
Can you tell us more about the Ring of Envy, Orm? I think it came as a surprise to most people who'd seen the Ormulum before.
Just note down that Litanist and Ancient gets some obvious inefficiencies/suboptimal-ness there. How else would I get my shockingly-talented-super-Litanal-potential "Ancient Litanist Samurai Jack", who got yeeted out of the Dominion by a mixture of time magic and dimensional yeeting (maybe it was during the salvation of Dynessos... maybe the Ruin of Tomorrow... who knows. Though if the latter, I prefer playing with the "The one sane rival of Father Time, our good friend Cato the Elderest" instead. Samurai Jack is better for end-of-Warring-Lords-Era stuff, heh), seeking to return to the Dominion to help his allies win the war and bring an end to the Warring Lords Era? While seeking to fend off the General Who Arises In Fire And Does Not Die, who he knows is coming for him eventually, and he hopes to outpace him via using the Street.
People who want to go all in on the Litanies and see how horrifiedly fascinated they can make their teachers and peers be, should have the freedom to do so.
Same for people who want to play an Ancient that's really scarily good at the Litanies.
(Really, in order to afford all the Litanal choices, you're probably going to have to either take some Nemesis/Dissident drawbacks in the Dominion, or go out of the Dominion, in which case you're the Ancient who left the Dominion some time ago, and thus didn't change unrecognizably the whole backstory of the Dominion.)
But another possibility for somebody picking Naturalization and Litany powers while on the Street, would be that they were the child of a Litanist who was on that street. Rather than somebody who came from the Dominion and went there.
But the thing is, what if you're picking Ancient instead of Litanist?
Ancient + Naturalization can wreck a lot of history, so... One of the best ways to make it fit is to go "You're a recently arrived Ancient."
In the Transcendent Pit, you're an unlucky or dumbass Ancient who somehow recently got tossed there. (Or maybe you got killed by the General recently.) Or stepped off from the Street. In the Thousand Estates, you're a new arrival, and are probably going to trivially conquer the world because what're they going to do? In the Street... actually technically I suppose that Insertion point could have remained the same for all that time? I don't know much about the Street so I'm guessing. But like. It's like a semi-natural supernatural phenomena that shows up everywhere. So perhaps an Ancient has lived there all along, and has not changed the setting of the Street very much. ... Perhaps he's a Repulsor who's a totally grouchy old man who lives in a secluded tower and doesn't bother anybody, heh.
Oh man, now I want to see a Litanist build that takes Originator, Immortality, and maybe Envy. I want a dual-Reinforcer-Reaper wombo-combo, from Originator and Immortality!
Immortality lets you Reap yourself eternally.
Immortality plus Originator lets you make multiples of the Original Fruit. Though, could Reinforcement (and Revelation I guess, for the planning) have managed that, if you took Originator?
Either way, you are the ultimate surprise Reinforcer, with access to Fruits. The ultimate Reaper, with the ability to Reap yourself eternally. (Whatsisname, eat your heart out! ... Or don't, actually. That's still kind of worrisome and sad that you do that, man.)
... I guess Labyrinthian is an equally amusing combo with Reassurance or Repulsion, huh?
Man, these one-two punch Litanist ideas are entertaining as heck.
The Labyrinthian Reassurer (and/or Repulsor).
The Immortal Reaper.
The Envious Reaper.
The Fruity Reinforcer.
Only questions left are, what Litany combos nicely with Expressive? And Water? Reassurance again perhaps? So that you can share your heart's fantasy with everybody? Or Reciprocity, perhaps. So you can spread your heart's desire. Hm. It's hard to say.
As for Water... It depends on what ethos you develop for it, I guess. It could go well with any Litany. Or poorly with any Litany. For example, pick Water and Reciprocity, and become the Six-fold Mariner come again!
EDIT:
...
...
... Oh hey, I just realized a thing that Envy could do. It can steal even abstract things. It functions based off of what you really really want. Or what you really really envy. So...
@Orm Embar, I have a riddle for you.
*Ancient +3
*Naturalization +1
*Dominion Loyalist +1
*Envy +2
*(Possible boon: Exemplar)
Drawbacks: Lethe, Nemesis, Dreams of Distant +2
Possible Drawback: Somber, (for Exemplar)
Insertion point: Streetwalker, probably has to be
I am a pretty old Litanist, though not the most absurdly oldest.
I do not have mere family issues. I have entire magazine subscriptions.
My Lineage is the grandest of them all. Only my few siblings could boast to have an equal.
I am probably overshadowed by my two more-famous siblings -- unless I picked the Exemplar version of this buid (not having Exemplar in one version of this build, SMH, parents must have been sooo disappointed but I'm sure they loved me anyway) -- but frankly that's okay, I don't necessarily mind that. I'm a family guy.
And finally...
I really really really want to be able to have children.
(And for my FamilyIssues Subscriptions to just not be awful problems and messes anymore and for them to just try to come to the table and talk. I need the world's biggest marriage counselor.)
And now, I return to the Dominion, with the Ring of Envy on my finger, desperately desiring to cure my infertility and Lineage issue.
Who am I, Orm? Who are my parents, Orm?
And what is going to happen, with my returning to the Dominion, with the Ring of Envy on my finger, and an extreme desire to be able to have a good, functional, family and be able to have children? What are the consequences of me finding a way to achieve my heart's desire, arguably my family's (my siblings', at least) heart's desire too. And what will the effects of that be on the Dominion? (That "Nemesis" pick was for the ripple effects of this, presumably. Because hoo boy are some people in the Dominion going to be upset with this miracle child.)
No no please don't, we won't have the hilarious build of "I wanna take all the Litanist options!" xD
Just note down that Litanist and Ancient gets some obvious inefficiencies/suboptimal-ness there. How else would I get my shockingly-talented-super-Litanal-potential "Ancient Litanist Samurai Jack", who got yeeted out of the Dominion by a mixture of time magic and dimensional yeeting (maybe it was during the salvation of Dynessos... maybe the Ruin of Tomorrow... who knows. Though if the latter, I prefer playing with the "The one sane rival of Father Time, our good friend Cato the Elderest" instead. Samurai Jack is better for end-of-Warring-Lords-Era stuff, heh), seeking to return to the Dominion to help his allies win the war and bring an end to the Warring Lords Era? While seeking to fend off the General Who Arises In Fire And Does Not Die, who he knows is coming for him eventually, and he hopes to outpace him via using the Street.People who want to go all in on the Litanies and see how horrifiedly fascinated they can make their teachers and peers be, should have the freedom to do so.
Same for people who want to play an Ancient that's really scarily good at the Litanies.
(Really, in order to afford all the Litanal choices, you're probably going to have to either take some Nemesis/Dissident drawbacks in the Dominion, or go out of the Dominion, in which case you're the Ancient who left the Dominion some time ago, and thus didn't change unrecognizably the whole backstory of the Dominion.)
Hmm, but that's because Litanist also grants you several decades of study and competence with 3 Litanies off the bat. Naturalization and Exemplar... don't do that necessarily
Huh. How does Naturalization work with picking out-of-Insertion powers then? Like, let's say I pick "Ancient" and "on the Street" with "Naturalization." I mean, there are ways to make that make sense of course, which I bandied around for some of my build ideas. My two favorite methods were, obviously, "You're an Ancient who has recently wandered onto the Street" of course.
But another possibility for somebody picking Naturalization and Litany powers while on the Street, would be that they were the child of a Litanist who was on that street. Rather than somebody who came from the Dominion and went there.
But the thing is, what if you're picking Ancient instead of Litanist?
Ancient + Naturalization can wreck a lot of history, so... One of the best ways to make it fit is to go "You're a recently arrived Ancient."
In the Transcendent Pit, you're an unlucky or dumbass Ancient who somehow recently got tossed there. (Or maybe you got killed by the General recently.) Or stepped off from the Street. In the Thousand Estates, you're a new arrival, and are probably going to trivially conquer the world because what're they going to do? In the Street... actually technically I suppose that Insertion point could have remained the same for all that time? I don't know much about the Street so I'm guessing. But like. It's like a semi-natural supernatural phenomena that shows up everywhere. So perhaps an Ancient has lived there all along, and has not changed the setting of the Street very much. ... Perhaps he's a Repulsor who's a totally grouchy old man who lives in a secluded tower and doesn't bother anybody, heh.
Oh huh. You can get multiple Fruits of Origination that way? Huh.
... Hah! And that's trollish too!
Oh man, now I want to see a Litanist build that takes Originator, Immortality, and maybe Envy. I want a dual-Reinforcer-Reaper wombo-combo, from Originator and Immortality!
Immortality lets you Reap yourself eternally.
Immortality plus Originator lets you make multiples of the Original Fruit. Though, could Reinforcement (and Revelation I guess, for the planning) have managed that, if you took Originator?
Either way, you are the ultimate surprise Reinforcer, with access to Fruits. The ultimate Reaper, with the ability to Reap yourself eternally. (Whatsisname, eat your heart out! ... Or don't, actually. That's still kind of worrisome and sad that you do that, man.)
... I guess Labyrinthian is an equally amusing combo with Reassurance or Repulsion, huh?
Man, these one-two punch Litanist ideas are entertaining as heck.
The Labyrinthian Reassurer (and/or Repulsor).
The Immortal Reaper.
The Envious Reaper.
The Fruity Reinforcer.
Only questions left are, what Litany combos nicely with Expressive? And Water? Reassurance again perhaps? So that you can share your heart's fantasy with everybody? Or Reciprocity, perhaps. So you can spread your heart's desire. Hm. It's hard to say.
As for Water... It depends on what ethos you develop for it, I guess. It could go well with any Litany. Or poorly with any Litany. For example, pick Water and Reciprocity, and become the Six-fold Mariner come again!
EDIT:
...
...
... Oh hey, I just realized a thing that Envy could do. It can steal even abstract things. It functions based off of what you really really want. Or what you really really envy. So...
@Orm Embar, I have a riddle for you.
*Ancient +3
*Naturalization +1
*Dominion Loyalist +1
*Envy +2
*(Possible boon: Exemplar)
Drawbacks: Lethe, Nemesis, Dreams of Distant +2
Possible Drawback: Somber, (for Exemplar)
Insertion point: Streetwalker, probably has to be
I am a pretty old Litanist, though not the most absurdly oldest.
I do not have mere family issues. I have entire magazine subscriptions.
My Lineage is the grandest of them all. Only my few siblings could boast to have an equal.
I am probably overshadowed by my two more-famous siblings -- unless I picked the Exemplar version of this buid (not having Exemplar in one version of this build, SMH, parents must have been sooo disappointed but I'm sure they loved me anyway
) -- but frankly that's okay, I don't necessarily mind that. I'm a family guy.And finally...
I really really really want to be able to have children.
(And for my Family
And now, I return to the Dominion, with the Ring of Envy on my finger, desperately desiring to cure my infertility and Lineage issue.
Who am I, Orm? Who are my parents, Orm?
And what is going to happen, with my returning to the Dominion, with the Ring of Envy on my finger, and an extreme desire to be able to have a good, functional, family and be able to have children? What are the consequences of me finding a way to achieve my heart's desire, arguably my family's (my siblings', at least) heart's desire too. And what will the effects of that be on the Dominion? (That "Nemesis" pick was for the ripple effects of this, presumably. Because hoo boy are some people in the Dominion going to be upset with this miracle child.)
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Enohthree
Hypersane
Wait, a new Choose Your Own Adventure!? I haven't finished my builds from the last one yet!
Regal and Twitchy Builds - 1117 Words
There were two men on two different walks of life. The first was Regal, every action of his seemingly planned with good fortune falling in his lap as he waxed lyrically and brought to life the fictions that were once a bubbling of daydreams. The second was, in a word, Twitchy. He flinched more often than not, he didn't trust as easily, he often kept silent even if he had more to say due to no fault of his own.
They were the same man, once. But in the face of a simple bargain, the first in his particular universe choose to embrace the majesty and wonder of what was presented to him. And the second in his particular universe choose to dwell on the implications of Jade as a currency and grew, perhaps rightfully, fearful of what was yet to come.
"Regal"
[ ] Resilient [2 Copper]
[ ] One [1 Copper]
[ ] Ten Thousand [1 Jade]
[ ] Stitch in Time [1 Platinum]
[ ] Step Up [1 Platinum]
[ ] Gold [1 Platinum]
[ ] Sigil [5 Copper] (Empower Gold)
[ ] Stain - The Poet [+2 Copper]
[ ] Last Laugh [2 Copper]
A man with a plan. He isn't quite the runaway train of advancement as someone more greedy, but he has chosen to invest in his own future. There are no looming deaths or dooms hanging over his head, the Swords of Damocles turned away by simply never accepting them in the first place. Instead there remains a man buoyed by good fortune, a lyrical tongue, several thousand other methods of keeping himself alive every week. His movements are smooth, practiced, and without flaw no matter how the circumstances around him unfold, almost as if he knew ahead of time what was coming. He intends to live a very long time, and he also intends to become someone worthy of such a feat.
A body that never tires paired with a mind that never tires of exploiting that fact, along with a daily top up to round it out. The power to try again, gorged on mental stamina until a nine rewind per day limitation becomes hilariously inflated with a limit measured in the quadruple digits.
An intelligence and movement option bundled together, one that has no upper limit and can be ceaselessly trained day and night for a fountain of compounding results and options.
Gold and good fortune, empowered by the Sigil.
The issue with Ten Thousand is throughput. No matter how many minds were willing, you only had so many fingers and so many toes to write your novels. Construct generation frees the Ten Thousand from those physical shackles, allowing the raging torrent of focus and drive to be unleashed as long as you have constructs to command.
The Sigil is the icing on the cake, allowing manual training on top of the normal advancement by wealth acquisition by a pack of minds eager to be let free, bolstered by Step's intelligence boost, and have no reason to ever stop experimenting with novel shapes and applications. No reason to stop and every reason to do it ceaselessly, for good fortune and comfort follows in the wake of a strengthened Color Gold.
The Stain of the Poet paying for the Last Laugh. Because the 10,000 is really the ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine warrior scribe mages plus one guy whose job is to keep coming up with rhymes and occasionally bail the entire collective out when needed.
He intends to live long enough to invoke such a feat more than once.
---
"Twitchy"
[ ] Resilient [2 Copper]
[ ] Last Laugh [2 Copper]
[ ] Red [1 Jade]
[ ] Ten [2 Platinum]
[ ] Stitch in Time [1 Platinum]
[ ] Bolt From the Blue [4 Copper]
[ ] Stain - The Poet [+2 Copper]
A man who is hard to surprise, harder to kill. Though not nearly at the apex of his potential nadir he had no doom weighing over his head be it endless enemies or the entropy unrelenting. He has two goals, the first being to not die and the second being to exploit the fact that he has ramp up time to manifest Red in all of its majesty.
He gives up a lot from his other hypothetical shopping cart. He is bereft of the natural good fortune of gold, the daily top up, the ten thousand fellow planners and the accompanying expansion of capabilities that a thousand rewinds each day would bring. He even allows himself to be tongue tied, the lack of offshoot personas to task with rhyming leaving him embarrassingly silent distressingly often.
He does so because he's twitchy and paranoid, a demeanor that carries over to his bearing as he lacks thousands of fellow minds to regulate the superspeed of 10 and the staccato flow of time Stitch has him experience as he probes, seeing what he can slay with Bolt from the Blue and abandoning things the moment it seems like they noticed. Never truly committing unless he feels like he got away with it. His only regret is not getting the Plate, relying on the maxim that simply deciding which fights to have are vastly preferable to being better at them. Thus he leans on the natural scaling inherit in 10 and Stich, allowing him to test his luck against an enemy where nine seconds would be an eternity, and then opt out if he didn't have a winning hand.
He's twitchy because he does not trust out of combat luck, something that could surely be overcome by the right combination of power or set up, even if the Sigil would allow him to train it manually. And because he does not trust that surety, he can not condone the knock on safety of the Ten Thousand. Picking Red's advancement over Ten Thousand's safety is greedy, but he's greedy because he wants to be safe. In the long run.
Jade is currency. Nearly priceless to him, but not so to others. There were multiple ways to spend Jade, and much more worryingly there were ways to obtain Jade. No, even if he did trust the safety of his own expanse of options he did not trust that some other fool would not make a trade for a Jade, with the cost attendant to doing so. Costs that he did not imagine surviving if he happened to be caught in the blast radius through no fault of his own.
He thinks he has two goals, but in actuality he has one goal and one observation.
Knowing that the Red Tide would wash away all other powers in time, he plans to live long enough to see that.
Regal and Twitchy Builds - 1117 Words
There were two men on two different walks of life. The first was Regal, every action of his seemingly planned with good fortune falling in his lap as he waxed lyrically and brought to life the fictions that were once a bubbling of daydreams. The second was, in a word, Twitchy. He flinched more often than not, he didn't trust as easily, he often kept silent even if he had more to say due to no fault of his own.
They were the same man, once. But in the face of a simple bargain, the first in his particular universe choose to embrace the majesty and wonder of what was presented to him. And the second in his particular universe choose to dwell on the implications of Jade as a currency and grew, perhaps rightfully, fearful of what was yet to come.
"Regal"
[ ] Resilient [2 Copper]
[ ] One [1 Copper]
[ ] Ten Thousand [1 Jade]
[ ] Stitch in Time [1 Platinum]
[ ] Step Up [1 Platinum]
[ ] Gold [1 Platinum]
[ ] Sigil [5 Copper] (Empower Gold)
[ ] Stain - The Poet [+2 Copper]
[ ] Last Laugh [2 Copper]
A man with a plan. He isn't quite the runaway train of advancement as someone more greedy, but he has chosen to invest in his own future. There are no looming deaths or dooms hanging over his head, the Swords of Damocles turned away by simply never accepting them in the first place. Instead there remains a man buoyed by good fortune, a lyrical tongue, several thousand other methods of keeping himself alive every week. His movements are smooth, practiced, and without flaw no matter how the circumstances around him unfold, almost as if he knew ahead of time what was coming. He intends to live a very long time, and he also intends to become someone worthy of such a feat.
A body that never tires paired with a mind that never tires of exploiting that fact, along with a daily top up to round it out. The power to try again, gorged on mental stamina until a nine rewind per day limitation becomes hilariously inflated with a limit measured in the quadruple digits.
An intelligence and movement option bundled together, one that has no upper limit and can be ceaselessly trained day and night for a fountain of compounding results and options.
Gold and good fortune, empowered by the Sigil.
The issue with Ten Thousand is throughput. No matter how many minds were willing, you only had so many fingers and so many toes to write your novels. Construct generation frees the Ten Thousand from those physical shackles, allowing the raging torrent of focus and drive to be unleashed as long as you have constructs to command.
The Sigil is the icing on the cake, allowing manual training on top of the normal advancement by wealth acquisition by a pack of minds eager to be let free, bolstered by Step's intelligence boost, and have no reason to ever stop experimenting with novel shapes and applications. No reason to stop and every reason to do it ceaselessly, for good fortune and comfort follows in the wake of a strengthened Color Gold.
The Stain of the Poet paying for the Last Laugh. Because the 10,000 is really the ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine warrior scribe mages plus one guy whose job is to keep coming up with rhymes and occasionally bail the entire collective out when needed.
He intends to live long enough to invoke such a feat more than once.
---
"Twitchy"
[ ] Resilient [2 Copper]
[ ] Last Laugh [2 Copper]
[ ] Red [1 Jade]
[ ] Ten [2 Platinum]
[ ] Stitch in Time [1 Platinum]
[ ] Bolt From the Blue [4 Copper]
[ ] Stain - The Poet [+2 Copper]
A man who is hard to surprise, harder to kill. Though not nearly at the apex of his potential nadir he had no doom weighing over his head be it endless enemies or the entropy unrelenting. He has two goals, the first being to not die and the second being to exploit the fact that he has ramp up time to manifest Red in all of its majesty.
He gives up a lot from his other hypothetical shopping cart. He is bereft of the natural good fortune of gold, the daily top up, the ten thousand fellow planners and the accompanying expansion of capabilities that a thousand rewinds each day would bring. He even allows himself to be tongue tied, the lack of offshoot personas to task with rhyming leaving him embarrassingly silent distressingly often.
He does so because he's twitchy and paranoid, a demeanor that carries over to his bearing as he lacks thousands of fellow minds to regulate the superspeed of 10 and the staccato flow of time Stitch has him experience as he probes, seeing what he can slay with Bolt from the Blue and abandoning things the moment it seems like they noticed. Never truly committing unless he feels like he got away with it. His only regret is not getting the Plate, relying on the maxim that simply deciding which fights to have are vastly preferable to being better at them. Thus he leans on the natural scaling inherit in 10 and Stich, allowing him to test his luck against an enemy where nine seconds would be an eternity, and then opt out if he didn't have a winning hand.
He's twitchy because he does not trust out of combat luck, something that could surely be overcome by the right combination of power or set up, even if the Sigil would allow him to train it manually. And because he does not trust that surety, he can not condone the knock on safety of the Ten Thousand. Picking Red's advancement over Ten Thousand's safety is greedy, but he's greedy because he wants to be safe. In the long run.
Jade is currency. Nearly priceless to him, but not so to others. There were multiple ways to spend Jade, and much more worryingly there were ways to obtain Jade. No, even if he did trust the safety of his own expanse of options he did not trust that some other fool would not make a trade for a Jade, with the cost attendant to doing so. Costs that he did not imagine surviving if he happened to be caught in the blast radius through no fault of his own.
He thinks he has two goals, but in actuality he has one goal and one observation.
Knowing that the Red Tide would wash away all other powers in time, he plans to live long enough to see that.
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It was intended as one, I've previously only alluded to it very obliquely. But anything I post publicly will get back to Vel, who honestly already Knows Too Much. And though I did ask permission before posting the CYOA here, monopolizing the thread to exposit endlessly would be in poor taste.
Naturalization with the Street has some leeway in that you can build a coherent backstory along the lines you're thinking of, a Streetnapped Ancient who eventually embraced the Sulevast life until the arc of his odyssey came to a close, delivering him to a home he may recognize only with the help of Revelation.
Man, a second missing son? For those two? That's hard both on their relationship and the associated civilization. But now for the most important question of all: does your name start with an A? It's a decent heuristic for which parent you favor, Ana could really stand to expand her repertoire. Envy may not be the best instrument for resolving interpersonal disputes, but if you could bridge the rift between Seats it'd do wonders to stabilize the Dominion; if the Lord Revelator were the sort of entity that gave hugs, this would earn you one. Successfully solving the fertility issue would catalyze the creation of a sixth Great House with all the knock-on effects that implies; scions not of silver or gold alone, but some more glorious alloy of the two.
It varies, but at least world hunger was done away with and Earth's unquestionably become a more interesting place! Taste (Slice) & Prometheus has some synergy few people touch on; a photokinetic mid-tier Principled Expression that, if harnessed, could enhance the former powerset. Unfortunately both are somewhat superfluous with Oathbound, since the Hand has similar cultivars (though not of Royal Guard tier, so it'd still be useful especially when farmed by Originator) and the tech base necessary to manufacture Engines. The soul within is relevant, but not worth the orb for you; where Prometheus Engine really shines is with sub rosa Reciprocity/Revelation builds in the Unification-verse.
Water + Originator remains a ridiculous combination, though. Delegate the task of conquest, dodge the risk of usurpation entirely, get Practitioner Fingers to work the fields and Waterbearers to irrigate your crops, etc. I do feel your pain about how Dreams warps Water builds to necessarily be scale-or-die; comfiness almost requires ignorance of the stakes. But you are Oathbound, and your partner will defend you to the death however many billions of times is necessary to repel an incursion. How fortunate, that the Array which maintains his network means slain Fingers aren't subject to the usual fate...
"Sigh. He's the most dedicated firefighter, border guard, sailor (and waterpark manager!) I've ever met. A Duke with a dayjob. Multiple dayjobs, even."
"... So why does he have to act like such a terrible human being?"
[ ] Practitioner
[ ] The Authority of Celestial Voyages
[ ] Final Scion of Water
Practitioner: Firefighter
Practitioner: Border security. Borderguard, Coastguard, ticket inspector, gate guard, customs inspector, etc
Practitioner: Sailor, explorer, etc (He was also a waterpark manager too! He owned some territory, too. He was a Duke with a dayjob -- several dayjobs, in fact.)
I'm telling a story, with these three purchases. I know that an Authority is enough to get practice, but I want to be known as a Firefighter and Border guard and Coastguard and ticket inspector and customs agent and so on.
[ ] Exemplar
[ ] Naturalization
I was the best they could have asked for. The most devoted of all firefighters. The most dedicated of all border guards ever. I once denied entry to the Authority of Primal Fury because it didn't have its passport. Not the person-posessed-by-it, but the Authority itself from being able to manifest, because it had been banned from the country's borders.
(I was also a manager of a waterpark, and loved traveling and sailing everywhere!)
When the nutty king passed a law that no tidal waves were allowed to cross into our territorial waters, who was it that stopped them? Who prevented the kraken from being unleashed? Who held up the ten thousand ships from leaving port, because they hadn't been inspected and cleared for exit?
Who stopped an army in its tracks, because they their government never officially declared war, and so they had no right to enter our territory?
Who turned away the Sorcerer, when he came to pillage the Great Library, because he did not have a library card? Who punched out a scion of the Ancient Blood themselves and threw them off the train, saying only "No ticket."
Who punched so many people in the face, and was widely acknowledged as the most devoted and celebrated firefighter and borderguard but "kind of a total jerk of a human being"?
Who made it onto Santa's Naughty List 87 years in a row, without fail?
And when I was giving my deathbed confession, and revealing my plan for my afterlife, and the reason I had lived my life the way I did, how big was the betting pool for that? Sadly the payout wasn't very big, as very few people were surprised, but... Well.
[ ] Oathbound
[ ] Into the Fire
No one in the Thousand Estates.
Literally no one.
Not a single person.
Me:
"I am literally going to rain on your parade."
"Also, I checked your visa. (Trick question, you don't have one!) So, Authority of Celestial Voyages (and Practitioner: Border guard) says 'lol get fucked.' No passport, no passing."
The General is the only one who can leave Hell, right? And there's a cost to doing so, right? It's probably a bit tricky to do so, right? And even once he leaves, it's probably quite a voyage to be able to make it from the Transcendent Pit to the next place he wants to destroy, right?
It would be a shame if somebody with an Authority over Celestial Voyages were to revoke his traveling ability.
An absolute tragedy.
... And to then follow it up by literally running circles around them in Hell, with Yakkety Sax playing, while literally raining on their parade.
EDIT: The comic page is the core of it, the main guiding star. But among my other inspirations were the episode of If the Emperor had a Text-to-speech Device, where Cegorach stops Ahriman and asks for his library card; and of course, the old "*Indiana Jones throws a person out of the train* No ticket." scene.
"... So why does he have to act like such a terrible human being?"
Insertion Point: The Thousand Estates
[ ] Practitioner
[ ] The Authority of Celestial Voyages
[ ] Final Scion of Water
Practitioner: Firefighter
Practitioner: Border security. Borderguard, Coastguard, ticket inspector, gate guard, customs inspector, etc
Practitioner: Sailor, explorer, etc (He was also a waterpark manager too! He owned some territory, too. He was a Duke with a dayjob -- several dayjobs, in fact.)
I'm telling a story, with these three purchases. I know that an Authority is enough to get practice, but I want to be known as a Firefighter and Border guard and Coastguard and ticket inspector and customs agent and so on.
[ ] Exemplar
[ ] Naturalization
I was the best they could have asked for. The most devoted of all firefighters. The most dedicated of all border guards ever. I once denied entry to the Authority of Primal Fury because it didn't have its passport. Not the person-posessed-by-it, but the Authority itself from being able to manifest, because it had been banned from the country's borders.
(I was also a manager of a waterpark, and loved traveling and sailing everywhere!)
When the nutty king passed a law that no tidal waves were allowed to cross into our territorial waters, who was it that stopped them? Who prevented the kraken from being unleashed? Who held up the ten thousand ships from leaving port, because they hadn't been inspected and cleared for exit?
Who stopped an army in its tracks, because they their government never officially declared war, and so they had no right to enter our territory?
Who turned away the Sorcerer, when he came to pillage the Great Library, because he did not have a library card? Who punched out a scion of the Ancient Blood themselves and threw them off the train, saying only "No ticket."
Who punched so many people in the face, and was widely acknowledged as the most devoted and celebrated firefighter and borderguard but "kind of a total jerk of a human being"?
Who made it onto Santa's Naughty List 87 years in a row, without fail?
And when I was giving my deathbed confession, and revealing my plan for my afterlife, and the reason I had lived my life the way I did, how big was the betting pool for that? Sadly the payout wasn't very big, as very few people were surprised, but... Well.
[ ] Oathbound
[ ] Into the Fire
No one in the Thousand Estates.
Literally no one.
Not a single person.
Me:
"I am literally going to rain on your parade."
"Also, I checked your visa. (Trick question, you don't have one!) So, Authority of Celestial Voyages (and Practitioner: Border guard) says 'lol get fucked.' No passport, no passing."
The General is the only one who can leave Hell, right? And there's a cost to doing so, right? It's probably a bit tricky to do so, right? And even once he leaves, it's probably quite a voyage to be able to make it from the Transcendent Pit to the next place he wants to destroy, right?
It would be a shame if somebody with an Authority over Celestial Voyages were to revoke his traveling ability.
An absolute tragedy.
... And to then follow it up by literally running circles around them in Hell, with Yakkety Sax playing, while literally raining on their parade.
EDIT: The comic page is the core of it, the main guiding star. But among my other inspirations were the episode of If the Emperor had a Text-to-speech Device, where Cegorach stops Ahriman and asks for his library card; and of course, the old "*Indiana Jones throws a person out of the train* No ticket." scene.
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- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
A Richer Reality: Part 4: Rising Color And A Melancholy Vampire
"This ramp is... concerning." I muttered. After the initial platform the Tier Threes had been waiting on, a steep slope a human wouldn't have been able to scale dropped us another 10 meters. Immune to damage from such a slight height myself, and Luna more than capable of catching herself halfway down before dropping again, we found ourselves in a... tower, of sorts. Though the walls were formed of rock, it was clearly formed in the shape of one.
At regular intervals, there were holes far to uniform to be natural. This continued on until my eyes, enhanced as they were, couldn't make out any more.
"It's at least a kilometer down." Luna commented, her eyes intended to pierce such glooms as a vampire's natural haunts would have little in the way of natural light, whereas mine were enhanced versions of an idealized human's. Enhanced by Color Red, to be sure, but a generalist like myself couldn't match a peer in their specialty. "I can't see any illusions, though that doesn't mean there aren't any spatial distortion effects. I can see at least 20 levels as well." she reported.
"We can assume they get stronger as we go. That's what happened last time I cleared out one of these sort of places." How long had they been digging this out? Was it natural caves they'd expanded, or purely unnatural ones? The latter implied a much longer timeframe, which would mean a lot of high-end Risen. Actually, how long had the Rising been happening, anyway? Nrom's comments had implied that things were worse off than a century ago, but had the Risings started then, or were they more like a thousand years? Longer? Hm, something to ask around about, assuming Luna didn't know anything. She'd been pretty loose-lipped about vampiric quirks and the creatures we were liable to encounter, but I had yet to prod her on the past, since I didn't know what might set her off. I'd gathered pretty quickly that vampires being drained for bloodlines and her family were touchy subjects, and could at least infer the two were related, but I didn't know enough to extrapolate what was and wasn't alright to ask about where she was concerned.
Alienating my only ally with any real combat power before she was fully bound to me would be stupid, especially since she only really considered me an infinite food supply, and lacked even the small amount of moral fiber I possessed. I was self-aware enough to realize that I was fairly neutral on a lot of subjects besides my personal safety, and to wonder if that self-awareness was itself a product of having been more moral in the life I'd had before, but I'd stopped short of slaughtering innocents for power. Luna? I was nearly certain it was a concession predicated on how the Emperor Red would grant her far more power and theoretical immortality as long as I was still alive, as I'd seen nothing to indicate a bluff to make it feel like I was asking more or anything complicated like that. Though I supposed being able to change her priorities that fast would require a level of charisma or manipulation more akin to brainwashing. On the other hand, if it weren't for her ambition, I'd be concerned she'd try to bundle me up and hide me away somewhere so she wouldn't be at risk of my death and severance of the benefits. I'd mention Hunted at some point if she made me suspect that sort of thing was rolling around in her head, but that wasn't foolproof, if she thought the boost from Color Red would let her outpace it. Sure, it hadn't done more than make the threats I was facing much worse than they seemed outwardly, though it was debatable if it had much to do with the Mausoleum or this mess, but that was because I'd gone out of my way to kill everything that wasn't a normal human or livestock. I had no idea how much time I'd bought myself before it dropped monsters on my head instead of letting me come to them.
"Hm, well, there's nothing stopping them from just rushing us if we dally, and I don't fancy our chances if they decide to come at us as a group, so we should probably clear out the higher levels systematically." I stated, showing none of my internal musings. The helm of my Plate also served as a means of hiding my expression, but my voice was another matter.
"Gambling that the Essence you harvest will be enough to grant you the strength to continue, as strange as it is to say, might be the safest option. I'm sure they know we're here, and I'm sure they'll come after us if we just run off." Luna nodded.
"Not to mention the more of them we kill now the less of a massive horde can show up later and try for swarming us under. That being said, let's pace ourselves. One of us starts flagging, we take a break. We don't have literally unlimited stamina, and you don't have unlimited healing until I can crack the Essence manipulation for that." I added, as we headed for the nearest 'floor' to start the process.
It was maybe 300 meters long, and basically a single room that averaged 10 meters across once you left the entrance bottleneck. On the down side, this left them with just enough space that, about halfway through killing our way through the hundred or so Tier Threes here, along with the couple hundred Tier Twos my Gold soldiers generally took care of, a pair of Tier Fours could ambush us without worry of striking each other unless we fought back to back, and we currently lacked the ability to fight in-synch enough to make that efficient. Still, each of us was well past the level of a Tier Four, and they only had enough teamwork to avoid interfering with each other. With my Gold soldiers more than sufficient to kill the Tier Twos and hold back the Tier Threes, they were something of a non-factor in this fight. It was only a few minutes before one of them made a mistake, and they died. We might have finished more quickly if Luna had fought less conservatively, but since I'd been avoiding using my Sword on the Tier Fours so I could claim all of their Essence for myself, I didn't really have a right to complain.
"Those two got me just over 21 meters." I reported once they'd fallen, the Tier Threes even less of a threat now, especially since Color Red boosted Color Gold, to the point my Gold soldiers could keep the dwindling number back long enough for a quick breather for the actually sentient members of the group.
Roughly a sixth more Essence and I only got a meter out of it. I'd known it took exponentially more, but that really drove it home. I supposed it was at least partially a volume issue, since I'd gained a bit more than 16% there, just like my Essence. Still, my calculations indicated that I'd need just under 13.5 times as much Essence to achieve a radius of 50 meters, which was where I hoped my Sword and personal Essence would merge, strengthening both. That was 18.9 Tier Fives or 189 Tier Fours off though, to the point it might be easier to simply wait for my cultivation to push me along, but I doubted Hunted would give me that sort of time. Perhaps if I stumbled across a synergistic magic system that couldn't simply be fed deaths like Color Green, I'd multitask by advancing it and wait while my might grew naturally from Color Red, but outside of those circumstances I'd keep pushing onward. Teaching Luna any Numeracies or Verses I might agree to was something we could do on the move, so none of my existing magic systems would prompt such a pause.
"30 should be enough to be activate the effect that would feed me." Luna noted. Well. It was about time she told me the specifics of that. As soon as I'd reached the point that was possible, I was going to ask how she knew so much. Not yet though. I had no real leverage beyond that.
"I'm my math is right, I'd need another 28 Tier Fours for that, though 3 Tier Fives would also work." I commented. My continued investigation of Step Up, even if I wasn't using it's teleportation properties in front of Luna, was still improving my mental faculties, and Color Red's bonuses in that area still applied, so I was confident in my calculations.
Luna hummed in acknowledgement, the noise too refined to really call a grunt. "Emperor Red wielders gain 1% of their old strength, at about the point your range reaches 50 meters, every day they cultivate, and starts unlocking more esoteric abilities. So it should be roughly 27% more strength every 24 days once you get that far." I reassessed her knowledge from 'intriguing' to 'suspicious' because it was very strange that someone without Emperor Red knew so much about it's workings that they could give me a specific distance for my Essence-sense where I'd jump from geometric to exponential. On the bright side, if she was right, then the 'esoteric effects' she mentioned would probably include merging my Essence with my Sword's perhaps even my Gonne and Plate. "A Wendigo, Dullahan, or Lich should be more than enough to push you that far if we can catch it alone, though I'd prefer if we were each at least a Rank stronger before attempting that." she explained, to my befuddlement.
"I don't know what those are. Tier Sevens?" I asked. At some point, she'd need to actually give me an in-depth explanation. We moved to the next 'floor', which was twice the size of the old one. The Risen were also twice as numerous.
She opened her mouth, paused, then spoke. "It depends. Once a Risen's consumed the Essence of a hundred thousand, it can start to branch off. Wendigos are what happens when a Risen begins cannibalizing it's own kind to harvest Essence more quickly, usually in Rank 6. They gain a lot of power quickly, but once the initial power boost has been consumed, they require much more than their fellows to advance unless taken from other Risen, and get less out of that advancement because the curse that animates them in the first place punishes them for killing their fellow Risen, though unlike most they gain a healing ability akin to a lesser vampire. The other special types can guard against becoming one of these to some degree, but truly excessive amounts of cannibalism can override it.
Dullahans are created when a Risen loses their head at Rank 5 or above, without losing their hearts, and haven't yet branched out as one of the other types, though I did hear about a Lich Dullahan once." she shuddered. "A region 50 kilometers around was destroyed in the fight that killed it, and even centuries later, nothing grows there. Apparently it had arranged to become a Dullahan if it's Phylactery were destroyed. Anyway, Dullahans tend to gain zombified horses with a special magic they gain access to in their transformation, which are treated as part of them where Essence is concerned, meaning they'll be strong and fast enough to fight evenly with their master even if they don't personally harvest any Essence from the living.
Finally, the Lich is a Rank 7 or higher that specializes in magic. It gains a third vital point, the phylactery, which can be used to revive the Lich as long as it remains intact, even if it's body gets atomized. They tend to lose all of their flesh besides their heart and brain, no matter how much they eat, but their intellect and magic is far in excess of a Rank above them that hasn't specialized. With a few exceptions, they tend to command any other Risen, even if they're of higher Ranks.
Regardless, special types cannot exist below the level of Rank 5."
"Know about any others?" I asked as we moved on to the next 'floor' of the 'tower' to continue our efforts.
She was silent for a solid 15 minutes, long enough that we began to kill the Tier Threes massed inside the next cavern, twice the size of the previous, and then the 8 Fourth Tiers. I was concerned I'd dredged up some bad memories. Unlikely to be offense, since she'd rebuke me instead if my read of her personality was correct. She only clammed up when her past came into the equation. Luckily, it didn't interfere in our teamwork, because that could have gotten us killed.
The Tier Fours fought smart this time. They had two of them hang back and cast magic while the remainder fought us directly, keeping the Tier Threes just far enough back to avoid interfering, but not so far back they couldn't use them as shields. Unfortunately for them, the Tier Threes had initiative of their own. Once, when my left fist would otherwise have been blocked by the body of a Tier Three, it abruptly janked to my left, getting the Tier Four in question a hole in it's chest, which I took advantage of to toss my Sword upwards, lodging it in the ceiling out of easy reach for any of the Risen, and smash my other fist in the brain of the wounded Tier Four, which granted me the leverage to rip my first fist across the torso of the Tier Four, destroying it's heart and allowing me to harvest it's Essence in a split second, and jump up to the ceiling, briefly standing on it to grab my Sword.
With one of their comrades dead, the Tier Fours switched things up, retreating into the midst of their horde of Tier Threes and slinging spells at us. Though my Gold soldiers could discorporate and reform in their midst, Tier Fours were currently beyond their ability to do more than distract. I took the lead here, providing a magic-resistant island Luna could retreat to. Which was good, because they'd switched to a spell that traded twice the casting time for a tracking function. Luna, in turn, pulled her weight by slaughtering a Tier Four who'd gotten too close from a slash of my Sword that managed to cut down an entire row of lower Risen who'd been blocking the way. With another of their number dead, and their remaining lessers dwindling fast, they resorted to rushing us as a group. This actually got Luna and I a number of cuts and bruises, though it made them die even faster, since my Gold soldiers crashed into them from behind as the Tier Threes and Twos dropped into the dozens and could be kept back by a quartet of my soldiers.
With the boost from another 8 Tier Fours, and a personal Essence harvest equal to 200 Tier Threes, my range expanded again, to 30 meters, which I reported. As we cleared out the stragglers, I began to experiment with enhancing Luna's Essence. A deal was a deal, and I doubted I could have handled that fight alone. Besides, she hadn't done anything to me personally, nor broken the terms of our agreement since we'd made it. It took a few adjustments to figure out the best method, as her Essence circulated differently from mine, both because she didn't possess Color Red, and because she wasn't human. She gasped slightly as she my influence, but didn't resist, though I felt a slight tensing of her Essence from her suppression of the reflex. She was putting an awful lot of trust in me to let me do this. Maybe I should teach her some of my magic, though I'm not sure how the Curse Broker would react. On the one hand, he'd said the Verses would take quite some time to learn which likely extended to teaching them if you weren't a strange eldritch creature who could stop time with a thought, and these were his wares so he might not appreciate it from that angle. On the other hand, the Numeracies were much simpler, and you'd think he would have mentioned it if he cared, given that I'd be interacting with people. Of course, there was the possibility that he didn't care too much since what he was selling was a degraded version of someone else's work, or impossible to teach like the Transmogrification and Colors.
"So, I've got to that first threshold. Do you suppose I'll hit the changeover to exponential growth by the time we hit the bottom?" I asked as my soldiers skewered the last of the Risen in this second level. She was the one with an actual idea how far down it was. 18 more holes that she'd confirmed, though that didn't preclude hidden ones.
"The Skeleton King." Luna said, apparently finally having decided to continue our previous conversation, though apparently ignoring the current one. Any further sarcasm was curtailed at the strange mixture of determination and despondence on her face. "The strongest Risen... the first, in fact. He was a noble ruler once, some ten thousand years ago. He lost his wife to illness, and his children to war, either with neighboring lands jealous of the prosperity of his own, or from the internal war that wracked the kingdom when the stress caused his health to fail.
His second eldest son had grown ambitious, and wished to be the next king in place of his brother. They were a classic division between the scholarly mage and ruler, and the warlord and general, though it had grown much worse from the war's ravages. The eldest was popular among the farmers, merchants, artisans, and of course mages, but the military had grown found of the second due to his performance in the war. The king collapsing and coming to the brink of death had merely been a spark to light waiting tinder. Though their enemies were in no condition to take advantage, the affection between brothers stretching just far enough to wait a month to ensure that, the war killed nearly half the kingdom, and in time it was more about hurting the other side than who would be a better king. The king finally recovered a full year later, only to find his only surviving children of the eight, his youngest daughter, and two oldest sons, had all killed each other not 100 meters from his bedchamber. As he wandered the ruined capital, his disbelief and grief turned to rage and bitterness.
Finding many of the mages and military were like-minded, he secretly came to the remnants of both camps, and convinced them to take part in a ritual to make them a hundred times stronger, enough that they could conquer their neighbors, and become lords of those kingdoms. Perhaps conquer the Furthermost Reaches entirely, and more importantly, finally kill their hated rivals. The king had been much like his eldest son, and managed to assuage any suspicion amongst his embittered subjects as to his support for their coup on the militants' side, claiming he saw his second eldest's point that they needed to amass greater power.
However, he had modified the ritual, claiming the singular billion lives remaining in the kingdom for himself. With that much Essence in a necromantic ritual, he became an the Skeleton King, to the Risen what an Elder vampire is to my kind. Now effectively immortal, and in possession of all the special abilities of the High Risen, he enacted another ritual, to imbue the dead with a mystical unlife. To imbue them with his hatred for life, for what he viewed as a pointless, tragic mistake."
I opened my mouth, but she continued, and I got the sense that if she didn't say this now, she might not be able to, so I kept quiet. "My kind, the Ethereals, benefitted from his manipulation of the moon to lengthen the nights and shorten the days. Indeed, for a time we were allies of convenience. My father rose to power in that time, having gained access to the Emperor Red, which was incredibly powerful in a vampire's hands. My mother married him as part of a merger of our clans. The Bane Diminishment Bloodline she possessed was valuable, as even the immense weaknesses to jade and platinum were weakened. It was hoped that I'd inherit his Color, though the Weakness Inversion Bloodline I gained was considered a decent consolation prize. Between keeping his clan and himself from weakening over the years as we absorbed other clans and grew in number naturally, he had little left to cultivate his own growth.
We had assumed the Skeleton King's quest was focused on the living, but in truth, they were merely a means to an end, and he would have them collapse like puppets with their strings cut once they'd served their purpose. As the ritual's focus and caster, he can end any Risen he wishes at any time, unless they somehow gained at least 2 Ranks on him." A bitter laugh escaped her. "Besides, Ethereals merely mimic creatures of mythology. So technically, we aren't undead, we just have characteristics of the undead, as he explained while he killed my family." she took a deep breath and continued.
"I was able to escape, bereft of any treasures, forced to simply flee for years, terrified he'd catch me to make sure he'd finished the job, but eventually, in my hundred fourtieth year, I decided enough was enough, and simply hid myself away in that mine you found me in. I sired a few of the locals to attend to me and feed me enough to avoid being diminished any more than I had been, a shadow of a shadow as I am, and decided to wait. If he found me, I would die standing. If not, then I'd wait for whoever eventually came to hunt me. If they were strong enough to not-die, then I might offer my services in exchange for their strength, and we could grow stronger together, in hopes of killing that creature. Surely, if they were out hunting vampires for backwater towns, then they'd be interested in cutting this nightmare off at the source, right?" The expression on her face was technically a smile, in that the corners of her mouth were turned up. Otherwise, it was not.
"I would never have dared hope I'd stumble across another Emperor Red user, and an anomaly with a second Color and multiple pieces of magical equipment. I'm sure you were wondering why I didn't just demand you stay in my little hidey-hole and cultivate your Color until you could feed me, or at least wait until then before we went out and started killing things I can't even drain of Essence myself. Well, I want to get stronger as fast as possible too, even if I don't know your reason, and the fastest way is for you to get strong enough to hit that exponential power boost so you can boost me too. I know it's selfish to sap your growth by demanding resources from it, especially when that's what got my father killed in the first place, but I want that bastard dead, no matter what it takes! Even if you leave me behind, as long as the Skeleton King dies, I'll be satisfied!" she was all but snarling that title as this point, but I could tell she was earnest. There was no regal mask here, just a scared girl about my age in maturity.
With no experience in comforting people, I placed a hand on either shoulder to comfort her. I didn't go for a hug. Frankly, we didn't know each other well enough for it to be comfortable for either of us, I didn't think. "I can't remember anything from before I found myself looking at the Furthermost Reaches, not far from Gilvale. I have no idea who my family is, or was, or where the money I traded my magic and equipment for came from. My goal is to find out. I took on three Curses to gain even more power, The Captain, which makes me less inclined to hierarchies of others or being a team-player, The Wretch, which poisons all of my first impressions into toxic muck, and The Hunted, which causes all the creatures of the Reaches to try and kill me in ever-escalating numbers, though this one I can cure by killing them all."
Luna blinked, then grinned a vicious grin. "'Hunted' huh? ...It sounds like the Skeleton King will be coming to you sooner or later. Even better than I thought." she paused. "That 'power merchant'... is there any way you can get more powers from him?" she asked. It was a tad disturbing that her desire for vengeance caused her to react to the knowledge that literally every monster in the Reaches was liable to come gunning for me sooner or later with glee, but knowing why she was so set on revenge...
I sighed, removing myself from her. "It costs Mythic Copper at the cheapest, and Mythic Platinum and Jade at the most expensive, such as Emperor Red."
Where learning of my Curses had caused glee when it led to the thought that she would have a chance for revenge, this caused her to blanch so pale it almost looked like she was shining. "Costs-! Mythic coins are worth precisely a million times their common counterparts! It takes Lustrous Gold Users who've been at their practice for decades years to make even the copper ones, and attempting Platinum or Jade usually kills whoever tries to make it! It would take a kingdom in the realm of a hundred thousand square kilometers to make money a single Mythic Copper in a year!" she was clearly flabbergasted. "A Mythic Jade is four tiers of currency higher, so you'd need a territory more in line with a billion, and that's if it was well-managed and prosperous enough that you'd draw the Skeleton King's attention within a year! It took a thousand years for my people to amass a single Mystic Silver in our treasury!"
Huh, so if I accumulated enough wealth and gained enough advancement in Color Red to bolster my other Colors as the Broker had mentioned, I might be able to use Color Gold to create enough Mystic Copper to buy the other Colors and accelerate my growth, perhaps even creating a virtuous cycle of using Green to rule better to get more money out of the kingdom and get more coins? That was good to know. Though if they were that rare, she probably didn't have any idea where I might be able to just find some Mythic Coins laying around, if any such locations existed. I decided not to comment on how the vampire kingdom was probably vastly underpopulated for it's power and there were some things you could only do with numbers, since she was emotionally off-balance right now. "Besides, my only means to contact him only works every ten thousand years, and I'd prefer to save it for the Skeleton King, if at all possible." Or any other such monstrosities. Seriously, sacrificing the remains of his own kingdom for the sake of power? I couldn't understand that. I only killed monsters, things incapable of thought, or people who attacked me personally first. Though, I did wonder, if I claimed his Essence, would I also claim the Essence of every Risen simultaneously? After all, if he could kill any Risen, anywhere, any time, then they must all be connected to him, and Color Red and my Sword might be able to take advantage of that. If there Reaches were so extensive that you could stretch entire planets across it and not make a dent, as implied by a billion people remaining after multiple wars including one that was between different members of the same kingdom, and the Skeleton King's influence extended across them, how many Risen would that be? How much Essence?
Luna, having recovered a bit, nodded. "A trump card on the level of someone able to casually hand out powers like Color Magic would be best saved for someone like him." she agreed.
Given that she'd basically spilled her backstory to me, and me to her, I felt I could extend her a little bit of trust. "When we finish up here, I could teach you a bit of some of the magics. The Broker mentioned that the Verses take years of study, but the Numeracies seem pretty simple by comparison. I don't think we have the time for it right now, but I'll give teaching them to you a shot." I said, nodding for emphasis.
"What effects do they have?" she asked as we finally headed for the entrance to the cave to continue down the ramp.
"Numeracy Ten, for example, multiplies your speed, strength, and durability by 10, and keeps that from throwing you off." I replied. Best save explaining the madness of Ten Thousand for somewhere less dangerous.
Luna pinched her nose. "That would make me actually relevant against a Rank Ten by giving me speed roughly a quarter greater than their baseline, strength more than half of theirs, and durability greater than a Rank Six. You are a walking bundle of nonsense." she huffed, before her eyes snapped downward as we exited the second 'level'. The shuffling noises of Tier Threes, broken speech of Tier Fours, and complete speech of a quartet of Tier Fives echoed up to us. I could hear it just fine with Elysian and the acoustics of this place, but those same acoustics made targeting off of the sound unreliable at best and my eyes were of no use. "It looks like my explanation took too long and the level third level below us is headed up to deal with us. There are at least 1200 Rank Threes coming up the ramp, with 70 Rank Fours, and 4 Rank Fives." she reported.
I considered, then, on instinct, I swished my Sword. It hummed, and I felt a much stronger breeze than usual. While it would be a shame to have my Sword absorb all of this Essence and slow my own progress down when that progress would likely lead to both getting stronger instead of one or the other, survival took priority. Assuming that my idea worked and harvested the Essence for my Sword. "I have an idea. I'll need you to be my eyes. Point me to where the foremost of the group is." I sheathed my Sword, keeping one hand on it. "I'll cut that group down to size."
"From here?" Luna asked, nonetheless pointing the spot out to me.
My first unsheathing slash was sloppy. Were I able to see it, I would have only seen a singular thin cut, more akin to a papercut than a sword slash, on one of the leading Tier Fours, who paused and looked upwards in bafflement. Luna, however, saw it quite clearly, and her eyes widened, continuing to guide me on automatic for a moment. My second slash actually pierced the skin of another Tier Four. Luna recovered herself and kept up her role as a scope, growing more confident as I did. Finally, on my third slash, a Tier Four was cut in half vertically.
"How are you doing that?" she asked, awed.
"I'm not physically strong enough for it to work at this distance, but my Sword absorbs Essence from the fallen. I can use Color Red's manipulation to shape the Astral power behind my sword slashes, and until it leaves my range, concentrate the force. Essentially, I'm making a bubble of Essence around the air pressure behind my sword slashes, which pops when it hits something solid, like a Risen." I continued to slash, killing another two Tier Fours as I explained. "One of the benefits, as I'd hoped, is that I can drain the Essence for myself instead of my Sword, using the tether of the manipulated Essence and the fact that my Gonne can't drain Essence for itself despite both being able to pierce Shadow Beast hide, even though the latter uses mundane ammunition. I'm fairly certain 300 meters is the absolute limit, and the attacks are only going to get stronger until they enter my Essence range, which is like being inside the barrel of my Gonne when it goes off. No chance to dodge, but it can't accelerate to it's limit under those circumstances, so the attack doesn't do full damage. By the time they're in range for my normal sword, I don't have the mastery to coat my sword in cutting winds permanently, so I might as well slash normally." I'd killed fully half the Tier Fours by now, based on the Essence I was receiving. The benefits of being more than 50 times faster than a normal human. Though, if not for Numeracy Ten, I'd need much more than equivalent Essence to match a given Risen. Something to do with the Skeleton King?
"Impressive." Luna's smile rapidly morphed to a frown. "The Rank Fives have abandoned their followers, and are charging at us headlong. I'd estimate another minute before they get here." she reported. The problem with a ramp is that unless it's extremely steep, to the point carrying anything up or down would be difficult, especially for the dumber Risen, would require a lot of time to traverse, even if you were 32 times as fast as a normal human. Meaning even the Tier Fives would need a bit to get up here.
"Keep on the minions. I'll wear them down some more so they don't interrupt us mid-fight. Tier Fives are much worse than Tier Fours, so even the minor distraction a Tier Three could manage at the wrong time could get us killed. I'll be able to see them when they get close enough to fight directly." Also, jumping from 4.2 times the Essence of a Tier 5 to 7.7 had made me notably faster, and my slashes notably stronger, and not just because my range had expanded to 37 meters with commensurate swelling of how long I could harness the slashes for, but the growth was exponential. My speed and strength increased, increasing the power of the attack, and my ability to manipulate Essence improved as Color Red advanced whether I practiced or not. Something similar was true of Gold too, but skill and material wealth determined how powerful Gold was, where Red cared a lot more about Essence than how much I'd practiced. Which wasn't to say practice was useless, but harvesting Essence was the fastest means of gathering Color Red-related might until you ran out of good targets for it.
By the time I stopped slashing and turned to meet the Tier Fives, every Tier Four that had tried to come up here to meet us head-on was dead, taking me from 7.7, to 11.2, and my range to 42 meters, which I had just enough time to tell Luna, too quietly for the Risen to hear but more than loud enough for entities with enhanced hearing like us. If they'd simply come at me themselves, they might actually have killed me(though Luna's speed advantage would almost certainly have let escape), but since they'd decided to throw their subordinates' lives away, now I was only someone they could take on if I got sloppy. Another upside, was that as my Color grew more potent, the enhancement it granted allies also improved, so Luna was slightly but noticeably faster than she had been a few minutes ago by simple virtue of the fact that my Essence had more than doubled so she'd get a lot more out of the enhancement until she caught up to me Essence-wise, though there was still a hard cap of 1% of my current power as growth, meaning someone who joined on late would never exceed me or even catch up unless they learned and practiced on their own. I suspected her father's stunted growth was more a product of limited mental attention than any inherent limit to Essence manipulation on Emperor Red's behalf.
Regardless, the Tier Fives had effectively tripled the threat they were dealing with. Despite the fact that two of them used magic similar to the first Tier Five I'd fought, the only reason I took any hits was that they'd immediately ganged up on me, to the detriment of one that Luna targeted. Since my range was so much larger, she could also go further away without running the risk of robbing me of Essence, and she didn't even make a pretense of fighting conservatively beyond basic self-preservation. Myself, I was strong enough that a Tier Six was theoretically doable as a one-on-one now. Maybe even a Tier Seven with Luna's help if we could double team it, and the Tier Fives would merely fuel my growth, as they'd dropped themselves below the point of being a threat individually. My Essence drain was only exacerbating the issue.
Sure enough, while Luna struggle a bit, not having had time for my Essence cultivation on her behalf to empower her as much as I had been, the Tier Fives felt like fighting the Tier Fours from the second level. I was hovering around the level of a Tier 6 physically even if I was fighting with the handicap that I could only use my Sword for a distance attack that rapidly weakened as they neared melee range, or else personally gain nothing from their Essence, which meant that force concentration worked in my favor, such that you needed four Tier Fives to match me now, and with Luna occupying one, and my Gold soldiers harrying the rest, it was less than a minute before we'd killed the first, which triggered the death spiral that was frequently becoming a pattern. Having risen to 15.2 times the Essence of a Tier 5, I was getting close to the Essence needed to hit that exponential threshold, and as I was now, Tier Fives would have to come at me in double-digit numbers to seriously threaten me, especially with Luna on hand.
"Say, Luna." I began, drawing her attention as we waited for her reserves to be restored. "I'm seriously considering taking a break to try to teach you Numeracy Ten, since it would make you capable of fighting just about everything down here in groups of four as long as it's not a Tier Eight or more, and significantly stronger than me. On the other hand, I don't like giving them the idea to prep. Then again, I've already harvested enough Essence that I'm more than twice as powerful a combatant as I was when we came down here, which is only going to grow. I'm conflicted enough that I'll probably go along with whichever your preference is."
Luna pondered, glanced down at the remains of the attack force, then further down, to the depths where Risen even stronger than the inhabitants of the cavern a quarter of the way down. "Let's clear out the Risen headed up here, and then fall back to the highest point on the ramp, and see about teaching me Numeracy. If they mass up again, we'll be able to see it, but we'll be as far away as possible." she decided.
AN: Is the Emperor Red's Ambition coming across clearly here? I feel like Flower is still fairly dispassionate due to her amnesia and killing things for a living instead of socializing, but I wanted to get across the influence of Red shining through in reacting to a huge underground complex of Risen with 'What am I going to do... with all of this Essence.' and to the revelation that Gold can create Mythic Coins with 'Huh. I wonder if I could grab more Colors by using Gold to farm Coins?' though the Red Color also gives willpower buffs that keep her from doing anything truly stupid. When this chapter started Flower didn't really trust Luna as of yet. It's been less than a day, after all. By the same token, Luna still mostly sees Flower as a walking bloodbank, or Essence bank, as it were, to leverage into vengeance. However, the characters decided to start talking about things early, because Luna had been offered a scrap of actual hope for the first time in decades, and Flower is social-activity-starved. Be honest with me. Are these starting to feel like lore posts with fights to break them up? I would have gotten this out sooner, but I actually lost the first draft.
The Risen don't care about their comrades beyond how it can help them, but that goes both ways. When your boss tries to use you as a shield, you might just stand aside even if it ultimately screws you over too, because that guy was about to get you destroyed, so you might as well drag him down too. This is the reason why the Risen in the other caves aren't simply uprooting themselves and just coming at the pair as an endless reverse-avalanche. They take a perverse glee in the downfall of their rivals, just less so than the living. Sort of like the Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy, or the Orcs in Tolkien's works. Well, that and they don't actually know how Flower gets stronger with each fallen Risen's Essence. If they knew about that, they would take her much more seriously. The Tier Fives would be the footsoldiers then, with the lower level ones hanging back because being too weak would just make you an Essence piñata.
Though the lives of a billion are an immense amount of Essence in the Furthermost Reaches, one must keep in mind that though he's Rank 10 by the reckoning of the locals, that's Risen-specific, not Astral Rank 10. 7.5 perhaps, with massively more to his combat power than Rank would indicate. He's no match for Hunger, but he could definitely kill almost anyone else in the party, though his lower Rank would mitigate the likelihood of Hunger losing companions. Before anyone asks, yes, he looks like the Skeleton King from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go. He is also similarly nihilistic, and he frequents a boney fortress he designed to be able to take some of the strain for The Rising off of him and even take it off his shoulders entirely for brief spans so he can go for a nation-destroying jaunt, but unlike his inspiration, he wasn't corrupted by an outside force. His choices are all his own. He didn't dig into any extradimensional weirdness and let eldritch abominations in, he was just a previously wise and noble king who inverted a ritual meant to raise the kingdom's dead in defense of the living by the sacrifice of the ruler to sacrifice the living and turn the ruler into an immensely powerful undead monstrosity. In turn, he further modified the ritual with his new power and Astral might to get The Rising, though this took a lot of work in both instances. Luna's information is a mix of decades of an ear to the ground for it, and a base of what she found out as heiress to vampire royalty.
Side note, if Super Juggernaut Undead Chimera can give us the benefits of being undead without actually being undead, surely it's possible to have a magical creature that acts like it's undead without actually being undead. Though it would be something of a question of semantics honestly. If it does everything an undead thing does, does it really matter if it's technically not undead.
Anyway, I tend to think of vampires as largely aging about a tenth of the rate of humans, in terms of maturity. When your aging is determined as much by your diet or lack thereof as anything else, then you can afford to have a really long childhood. It's like the elves or dwarves in Warhammer Fantasy. If you have a lifespan measured in centuries instead of decades like anybody else, you childhood are also lengthened. Without as many gribblies to worry about or ongoing war with invading hostile non-physics, the vampires had even longer childhoods for their natural offspring. As Ethereals, they can reproduce like mythological vampires, via bite/blood transfusion(the former is intent-based, the latter defaults to vampirization, though there are magics and bloodlines capable of avoiding it) or by natural means. Thus, Luna is technically the equivalent of an 18-year-old by vampire standards. Flower is somewhere between 16 and 19, her memory loss and the differences of Elysian and her old body make it a little hard to tell. After all, a peak human body will resist the effects of aging much better than a normal one, and that inn was poorly lit. Regardless, by the standards of their respective races, they're both about the same age.
Note that the scale of the Mythic Coppers has a hundred million where the Furthermost Reaches are generally lower-tech and magic than the Temple of the False Moon at best. With Numeracy Ten Thousand and the bolstering of mental stats from all of her... everything, Flower is well-positioned to rule far better even if she basically checks in once a day and leaves the rest to her advisors(who will get the occasional reminder that she can kill quite literally all of them with her hands tied behind her back if they do anything to mess with her kingdom's prosperity in a significant manner, as that directly translates into harming the funds she would be harvesting), as well as use Gonne's war-making expertise in civilian pursuits. Better communication is one of the most important things, since modern radios with a bit of mystical enchantment to deal with the pall the Rising Curse has laid across the land could drastically increase the amount of territory she could govern. That being said, by current standards, she'd need just over 60% of California's landmass for the Mythic Copper tier, more than the US' 9.1 million (counting full states and DC) kilometers of landmass for a Mythic Silver a year. The Earth's total landmass is 148 million kilometers, and total surface area is more akin to 510 million. So, she'd need about 7% of Earth's landmass for a Mythic Gold, about 68% for Mythic Platinum, and a little under 2 Earths of surface area to be able to gain a Mythic Jade in a year, if she's willing to immediately bankrupt the kingdom she's forged. I'd expect at least ten times that much if she wants to extract that sort of wealth without immediately crippling her economy, for each tier. Still, the Furthermost Reaches are the edge of a universe-scale Realm, with practically unlimited resources since it's basically a Discworld the size of a universe. Well, on occasion you get weird geomety like Menger Sponges, though that's usually the product of warfare or defenses.
Still, if she can leverage the Gonne's war-making technologies into civilian life, the average person is going to see a pretty major increase both in personal happiness and personal wealth, which will translate into more money. This is why I mentioned Green being something she might have gone for if she planned to rule. Curse Broker harvests deals like this in return for more powers(which is one of the reasons Ten Thousand can be bought for 10000 Mythic Copper), and even gives out Color Gold, in hopes of gaining more Mythic Coins, which he, in turn, mostly sends up the chain in return for more mitigation of his Curses. In turn, his benefactor uses a million or so Mythic Coins to slightly mitigate their Curses, though each is suited to different Curses, meaning the Broker can't focus too much on any one, for risk of 'oversaturating' the market, even if Jade is easily the most valuable to said benefactor by simple virtue of being more than ten times rarer. The Broker has high hopes for Flower, given she managed to get him 2 pieces of Jade within 20 years of birth. It's entirely possible to buy powers for companions as well, and Elysian customers have been known to spend centuries working to prolong the lives of those around them long enough to buy Elysian for them, for example. It's not exactly a pyramid scheme, since people have been known to just die before even making it to the level Flower is at right now and the Curse Broker makes it very clear that the Curses are dangerous and never so much as implies that he'll show up again any time soon. Still, Flower knows for a fact that Jade interests him, and in a few centuries she might be able to reliably create it for him.
@Rihaku, I'd appreciate a more direct scale for how Hunted escalates, to gain a timetable of sorts for when the Skeleton King would show up to kill her. I'm currently operating on 'ten years if she does nothing else to draw attention to herself' though with the notoriety she'll get from killing all the stuff Hunted throws at her, I'm expecting more like five. Given that is not on the level of Madman and not on the level of bad enough to both be worth a Jade, I based my timescale off of how ten years is when Apocalypse finds out you exist, but the bad-ness of the Blight relative to Hunted is how Apocalypse can scale, while unlike Apocryphal Hunted merely tosses monsters at you instead of making them stronger. Once they hit the exponential threshold, the remaining 9 years and 355 days or so would be enough to gain about 81.226 trillion times as much Red-related power, ignoring the bonus to her base from being able to join her equipment to her Essence pool.
Given that peak human strength caps out at 500 kilograms lifted over your head, and I assume Elysian is enough for that, Numeracy Ten boosting that to 5000, my personal reckoning that she'll be another ten times stronger than that baseline by the time she hits 50 meters in Essence range, she'll be working off a base of being able to lift 50 metric tons over her head at that point. Nothing compared to Hunger's continent-shattering strikes, but after the remainder of the ten years the Essence multiplier I had Luna describe(which was crippled because her father was nation-building with it instead) would total roughly 4.724 quadrillion, which means she'd be strong enough to life 236.226 quadrillion tons over her head. That's less than the weight of Asia(estimated 4.51*10^24) by more than 7 orders of magnitude, but you don't need to lift a continent to hit it hard enough to break it, especially with an unbreakable sword, just like your average brick wall is to heavy to lift but much easier to break, and that assumes she just sits around waiting that whole time. By the same token, her range will have extended to about 3500 kilometers, with 1% of that as her 'reality warper' zone. My question is how much supernatural power helps with being able to make pressure waves/air slashes to give her a distance attack besides her Gonne, since I'm thinking she'll be able to do that as soon as she figures out how to manipulate the Essence to the point she can permanently feed Luna, allowing her to shape her sword's strikes due to it's strong link to Essence, even if she couldn't do that sort of thing with her Plate or Gonne until she hit the point of being able to directly link them as part of herself by piggybacking off of her Astral Rank and how she's been doing things using them so they're connected to her Astral Rank even if she doesn't have Accretion per se.
The 'Essence Bottle' technique is strong, but it doesn't work well on highly mobile enemies, or ones that can easily move in three dimensions. It's also not very useful if you can't aim properly, which is why Luna's ability to see in darkness Flower can't is absolutely crucial to this actually working. The 300 meter limit being ten times her Essence-sense range is intentional. Further, getting within 27 meters is akin to being 270 meters away where the force is concerned. Being 3 meters away, by the same token, is where the technique stops being useful. There's also the issue that since it's not a significant fraction of lightspeed, it's going to be noticed a long time before it hits, which means it's easier to dodge if you're further away. The various mental ups she possesses are also greasing the wheels here.
Anyone who might be worried that a Tier 10 with some potent magic is going to die like chump if Flower keep growing at this rate shouldn't be. While I'm sure Rihaku designed the build vote with that in mind because if there's anything the QM excels at it's good build votes, hence my character growing so ridiculously fast with doubled money. and thus more powers, I have a plan for that. I'm sure you can guess what it is. If not, here's a hint. 8 people die per second IRL. For anyone curious, she's at 46.5 meters in Essence sense range with that last batch. Another 4 Tier Fives will be enough to push her over the threshold, which will mark a huge jump in power, both because she can use her sword freely and still get all the Essence out of it, but also because she can enhance her equipment better, as the Sword's Essence pool isn't the only one that gets merged with hers.
9077 Words, discounting this line.
"This ramp is... concerning." I muttered. After the initial platform the Tier Threes had been waiting on, a steep slope a human wouldn't have been able to scale dropped us another 10 meters. Immune to damage from such a slight height myself, and Luna more than capable of catching herself halfway down before dropping again, we found ourselves in a... tower, of sorts. Though the walls were formed of rock, it was clearly formed in the shape of one.
At regular intervals, there were holes far to uniform to be natural. This continued on until my eyes, enhanced as they were, couldn't make out any more.
"It's at least a kilometer down." Luna commented, her eyes intended to pierce such glooms as a vampire's natural haunts would have little in the way of natural light, whereas mine were enhanced versions of an idealized human's. Enhanced by Color Red, to be sure, but a generalist like myself couldn't match a peer in their specialty. "I can't see any illusions, though that doesn't mean there aren't any spatial distortion effects. I can see at least 20 levels as well." she reported.
"We can assume they get stronger as we go. That's what happened last time I cleared out one of these sort of places." How long had they been digging this out? Was it natural caves they'd expanded, or purely unnatural ones? The latter implied a much longer timeframe, which would mean a lot of high-end Risen. Actually, how long had the Rising been happening, anyway? Nrom's comments had implied that things were worse off than a century ago, but had the Risings started then, or were they more like a thousand years? Longer? Hm, something to ask around about, assuming Luna didn't know anything. She'd been pretty loose-lipped about vampiric quirks and the creatures we were liable to encounter, but I had yet to prod her on the past, since I didn't know what might set her off. I'd gathered pretty quickly that vampires being drained for bloodlines and her family were touchy subjects, and could at least infer the two were related, but I didn't know enough to extrapolate what was and wasn't alright to ask about where she was concerned.
Alienating my only ally with any real combat power before she was fully bound to me would be stupid, especially since she only really considered me an infinite food supply, and lacked even the small amount of moral fiber I possessed. I was self-aware enough to realize that I was fairly neutral on a lot of subjects besides my personal safety, and to wonder if that self-awareness was itself a product of having been more moral in the life I'd had before, but I'd stopped short of slaughtering innocents for power. Luna? I was nearly certain it was a concession predicated on how the Emperor Red would grant her far more power and theoretical immortality as long as I was still alive, as I'd seen nothing to indicate a bluff to make it feel like I was asking more or anything complicated like that. Though I supposed being able to change her priorities that fast would require a level of charisma or manipulation more akin to brainwashing. On the other hand, if it weren't for her ambition, I'd be concerned she'd try to bundle me up and hide me away somewhere so she wouldn't be at risk of my death and severance of the benefits. I'd mention Hunted at some point if she made me suspect that sort of thing was rolling around in her head, but that wasn't foolproof, if she thought the boost from Color Red would let her outpace it. Sure, it hadn't done more than make the threats I was facing much worse than they seemed outwardly, though it was debatable if it had much to do with the Mausoleum or this mess, but that was because I'd gone out of my way to kill everything that wasn't a normal human or livestock. I had no idea how much time I'd bought myself before it dropped monsters on my head instead of letting me come to them.
"Hm, well, there's nothing stopping them from just rushing us if we dally, and I don't fancy our chances if they decide to come at us as a group, so we should probably clear out the higher levels systematically." I stated, showing none of my internal musings. The helm of my Plate also served as a means of hiding my expression, but my voice was another matter.
"Gambling that the Essence you harvest will be enough to grant you the strength to continue, as strange as it is to say, might be the safest option. I'm sure they know we're here, and I'm sure they'll come after us if we just run off." Luna nodded.
"Not to mention the more of them we kill now the less of a massive horde can show up later and try for swarming us under. That being said, let's pace ourselves. One of us starts flagging, we take a break. We don't have literally unlimited stamina, and you don't have unlimited healing until I can crack the Essence manipulation for that." I added, as we headed for the nearest 'floor' to start the process.
It was maybe 300 meters long, and basically a single room that averaged 10 meters across once you left the entrance bottleneck. On the down side, this left them with just enough space that, about halfway through killing our way through the hundred or so Tier Threes here, along with the couple hundred Tier Twos my Gold soldiers generally took care of, a pair of Tier Fours could ambush us without worry of striking each other unless we fought back to back, and we currently lacked the ability to fight in-synch enough to make that efficient. Still, each of us was well past the level of a Tier Four, and they only had enough teamwork to avoid interfering with each other. With my Gold soldiers more than sufficient to kill the Tier Twos and hold back the Tier Threes, they were something of a non-factor in this fight. It was only a few minutes before one of them made a mistake, and they died. We might have finished more quickly if Luna had fought less conservatively, but since I'd been avoiding using my Sword on the Tier Fours so I could claim all of their Essence for myself, I didn't really have a right to complain.
"Those two got me just over 21 meters." I reported once they'd fallen, the Tier Threes even less of a threat now, especially since Color Red boosted Color Gold, to the point my Gold soldiers could keep the dwindling number back long enough for a quick breather for the actually sentient members of the group.
Roughly a sixth more Essence and I only got a meter out of it. I'd known it took exponentially more, but that really drove it home. I supposed it was at least partially a volume issue, since I'd gained a bit more than 16% there, just like my Essence. Still, my calculations indicated that I'd need just under 13.5 times as much Essence to achieve a radius of 50 meters, which was where I hoped my Sword and personal Essence would merge, strengthening both. That was 18.9 Tier Fives or 189 Tier Fours off though, to the point it might be easier to simply wait for my cultivation to push me along, but I doubted Hunted would give me that sort of time. Perhaps if I stumbled across a synergistic magic system that couldn't simply be fed deaths like Color Green, I'd multitask by advancing it and wait while my might grew naturally from Color Red, but outside of those circumstances I'd keep pushing onward. Teaching Luna any Numeracies or Verses I might agree to was something we could do on the move, so none of my existing magic systems would prompt such a pause.
"30 should be enough to be activate the effect that would feed me." Luna noted. Well. It was about time she told me the specifics of that. As soon as I'd reached the point that was possible, I was going to ask how she knew so much. Not yet though. I had no real leverage beyond that.
"I'm my math is right, I'd need another 28 Tier Fours for that, though 3 Tier Fives would also work." I commented. My continued investigation of Step Up, even if I wasn't using it's teleportation properties in front of Luna, was still improving my mental faculties, and Color Red's bonuses in that area still applied, so I was confident in my calculations.
Luna hummed in acknowledgement, the noise too refined to really call a grunt. "Emperor Red wielders gain 1% of their old strength, at about the point your range reaches 50 meters, every day they cultivate, and starts unlocking more esoteric abilities. So it should be roughly 27% more strength every 24 days once you get that far." I reassessed her knowledge from 'intriguing' to 'suspicious' because it was very strange that someone without Emperor Red knew so much about it's workings that they could give me a specific distance for my Essence-sense where I'd jump from geometric to exponential. On the bright side, if she was right, then the 'esoteric effects' she mentioned would probably include merging my Essence with my Sword's perhaps even my Gonne and Plate. "A Wendigo, Dullahan, or Lich should be more than enough to push you that far if we can catch it alone, though I'd prefer if we were each at least a Rank stronger before attempting that." she explained, to my befuddlement.
"I don't know what those are. Tier Sevens?" I asked. At some point, she'd need to actually give me an in-depth explanation. We moved to the next 'floor', which was twice the size of the old one. The Risen were also twice as numerous.
She opened her mouth, paused, then spoke. "It depends. Once a Risen's consumed the Essence of a hundred thousand, it can start to branch off. Wendigos are what happens when a Risen begins cannibalizing it's own kind to harvest Essence more quickly, usually in Rank 6. They gain a lot of power quickly, but once the initial power boost has been consumed, they require much more than their fellows to advance unless taken from other Risen, and get less out of that advancement because the curse that animates them in the first place punishes them for killing their fellow Risen, though unlike most they gain a healing ability akin to a lesser vampire. The other special types can guard against becoming one of these to some degree, but truly excessive amounts of cannibalism can override it.
Dullahans are created when a Risen loses their head at Rank 5 or above, without losing their hearts, and haven't yet branched out as one of the other types, though I did hear about a Lich Dullahan once." she shuddered. "A region 50 kilometers around was destroyed in the fight that killed it, and even centuries later, nothing grows there. Apparently it had arranged to become a Dullahan if it's Phylactery were destroyed. Anyway, Dullahans tend to gain zombified horses with a special magic they gain access to in their transformation, which are treated as part of them where Essence is concerned, meaning they'll be strong and fast enough to fight evenly with their master even if they don't personally harvest any Essence from the living.
Finally, the Lich is a Rank 7 or higher that specializes in magic. It gains a third vital point, the phylactery, which can be used to revive the Lich as long as it remains intact, even if it's body gets atomized. They tend to lose all of their flesh besides their heart and brain, no matter how much they eat, but their intellect and magic is far in excess of a Rank above them that hasn't specialized. With a few exceptions, they tend to command any other Risen, even if they're of higher Ranks.
Regardless, special types cannot exist below the level of Rank 5."
"Know about any others?" I asked as we moved on to the next 'floor' of the 'tower' to continue our efforts.
She was silent for a solid 15 minutes, long enough that we began to kill the Tier Threes massed inside the next cavern, twice the size of the previous, and then the 8 Fourth Tiers. I was concerned I'd dredged up some bad memories. Unlikely to be offense, since she'd rebuke me instead if my read of her personality was correct. She only clammed up when her past came into the equation. Luckily, it didn't interfere in our teamwork, because that could have gotten us killed.
The Tier Fours fought smart this time. They had two of them hang back and cast magic while the remainder fought us directly, keeping the Tier Threes just far enough back to avoid interfering, but not so far back they couldn't use them as shields. Unfortunately for them, the Tier Threes had initiative of their own. Once, when my left fist would otherwise have been blocked by the body of a Tier Three, it abruptly janked to my left, getting the Tier Four in question a hole in it's chest, which I took advantage of to toss my Sword upwards, lodging it in the ceiling out of easy reach for any of the Risen, and smash my other fist in the brain of the wounded Tier Four, which granted me the leverage to rip my first fist across the torso of the Tier Four, destroying it's heart and allowing me to harvest it's Essence in a split second, and jump up to the ceiling, briefly standing on it to grab my Sword.
With one of their comrades dead, the Tier Fours switched things up, retreating into the midst of their horde of Tier Threes and slinging spells at us. Though my Gold soldiers could discorporate and reform in their midst, Tier Fours were currently beyond their ability to do more than distract. I took the lead here, providing a magic-resistant island Luna could retreat to. Which was good, because they'd switched to a spell that traded twice the casting time for a tracking function. Luna, in turn, pulled her weight by slaughtering a Tier Four who'd gotten too close from a slash of my Sword that managed to cut down an entire row of lower Risen who'd been blocking the way. With another of their number dead, and their remaining lessers dwindling fast, they resorted to rushing us as a group. This actually got Luna and I a number of cuts and bruises, though it made them die even faster, since my Gold soldiers crashed into them from behind as the Tier Threes and Twos dropped into the dozens and could be kept back by a quartet of my soldiers.
With the boost from another 8 Tier Fours, and a personal Essence harvest equal to 200 Tier Threes, my range expanded again, to 30 meters, which I reported. As we cleared out the stragglers, I began to experiment with enhancing Luna's Essence. A deal was a deal, and I doubted I could have handled that fight alone. Besides, she hadn't done anything to me personally, nor broken the terms of our agreement since we'd made it. It took a few adjustments to figure out the best method, as her Essence circulated differently from mine, both because she didn't possess Color Red, and because she wasn't human. She gasped slightly as she my influence, but didn't resist, though I felt a slight tensing of her Essence from her suppression of the reflex. She was putting an awful lot of trust in me to let me do this. Maybe I should teach her some of my magic, though I'm not sure how the Curse Broker would react. On the one hand, he'd said the Verses would take quite some time to learn which likely extended to teaching them if you weren't a strange eldritch creature who could stop time with a thought, and these were his wares so he might not appreciate it from that angle. On the other hand, the Numeracies were much simpler, and you'd think he would have mentioned it if he cared, given that I'd be interacting with people. Of course, there was the possibility that he didn't care too much since what he was selling was a degraded version of someone else's work, or impossible to teach like the Transmogrification and Colors.
"So, I've got to that first threshold. Do you suppose I'll hit the changeover to exponential growth by the time we hit the bottom?" I asked as my soldiers skewered the last of the Risen in this second level. She was the one with an actual idea how far down it was. 18 more holes that she'd confirmed, though that didn't preclude hidden ones.
"The Skeleton King." Luna said, apparently finally having decided to continue our previous conversation, though apparently ignoring the current one. Any further sarcasm was curtailed at the strange mixture of determination and despondence on her face. "The strongest Risen... the first, in fact. He was a noble ruler once, some ten thousand years ago. He lost his wife to illness, and his children to war, either with neighboring lands jealous of the prosperity of his own, or from the internal war that wracked the kingdom when the stress caused his health to fail.
His second eldest son had grown ambitious, and wished to be the next king in place of his brother. They were a classic division between the scholarly mage and ruler, and the warlord and general, though it had grown much worse from the war's ravages. The eldest was popular among the farmers, merchants, artisans, and of course mages, but the military had grown found of the second due to his performance in the war. The king collapsing and coming to the brink of death had merely been a spark to light waiting tinder. Though their enemies were in no condition to take advantage, the affection between brothers stretching just far enough to wait a month to ensure that, the war killed nearly half the kingdom, and in time it was more about hurting the other side than who would be a better king. The king finally recovered a full year later, only to find his only surviving children of the eight, his youngest daughter, and two oldest sons, had all killed each other not 100 meters from his bedchamber. As he wandered the ruined capital, his disbelief and grief turned to rage and bitterness.
Finding many of the mages and military were like-minded, he secretly came to the remnants of both camps, and convinced them to take part in a ritual to make them a hundred times stronger, enough that they could conquer their neighbors, and become lords of those kingdoms. Perhaps conquer the Furthermost Reaches entirely, and more importantly, finally kill their hated rivals. The king had been much like his eldest son, and managed to assuage any suspicion amongst his embittered subjects as to his support for their coup on the militants' side, claiming he saw his second eldest's point that they needed to amass greater power.
However, he had modified the ritual, claiming the singular billion lives remaining in the kingdom for himself. With that much Essence in a necromantic ritual, he became an the Skeleton King, to the Risen what an Elder vampire is to my kind. Now effectively immortal, and in possession of all the special abilities of the High Risen, he enacted another ritual, to imbue the dead with a mystical unlife. To imbue them with his hatred for life, for what he viewed as a pointless, tragic mistake."
I opened my mouth, but she continued, and I got the sense that if she didn't say this now, she might not be able to, so I kept quiet. "My kind, the Ethereals, benefitted from his manipulation of the moon to lengthen the nights and shorten the days. Indeed, for a time we were allies of convenience. My father rose to power in that time, having gained access to the Emperor Red, which was incredibly powerful in a vampire's hands. My mother married him as part of a merger of our clans. The Bane Diminishment Bloodline she possessed was valuable, as even the immense weaknesses to jade and platinum were weakened. It was hoped that I'd inherit his Color, though the Weakness Inversion Bloodline I gained was considered a decent consolation prize. Between keeping his clan and himself from weakening over the years as we absorbed other clans and grew in number naturally, he had little left to cultivate his own growth.
We had assumed the Skeleton King's quest was focused on the living, but in truth, they were merely a means to an end, and he would have them collapse like puppets with their strings cut once they'd served their purpose. As the ritual's focus and caster, he can end any Risen he wishes at any time, unless they somehow gained at least 2 Ranks on him." A bitter laugh escaped her. "Besides, Ethereals merely mimic creatures of mythology. So technically, we aren't undead, we just have characteristics of the undead, as he explained while he killed my family." she took a deep breath and continued.
"I was able to escape, bereft of any treasures, forced to simply flee for years, terrified he'd catch me to make sure he'd finished the job, but eventually, in my hundred fourtieth year, I decided enough was enough, and simply hid myself away in that mine you found me in. I sired a few of the locals to attend to me and feed me enough to avoid being diminished any more than I had been, a shadow of a shadow as I am, and decided to wait. If he found me, I would die standing. If not, then I'd wait for whoever eventually came to hunt me. If they were strong enough to not-die, then I might offer my services in exchange for their strength, and we could grow stronger together, in hopes of killing that creature. Surely, if they were out hunting vampires for backwater towns, then they'd be interested in cutting this nightmare off at the source, right?" The expression on her face was technically a smile, in that the corners of her mouth were turned up. Otherwise, it was not.
"I would never have dared hope I'd stumble across another Emperor Red user, and an anomaly with a second Color and multiple pieces of magical equipment. I'm sure you were wondering why I didn't just demand you stay in my little hidey-hole and cultivate your Color until you could feed me, or at least wait until then before we went out and started killing things I can't even drain of Essence myself. Well, I want to get stronger as fast as possible too, even if I don't know your reason, and the fastest way is for you to get strong enough to hit that exponential power boost so you can boost me too. I know it's selfish to sap your growth by demanding resources from it, especially when that's what got my father killed in the first place, but I want that bastard dead, no matter what it takes! Even if you leave me behind, as long as the Skeleton King dies, I'll be satisfied!" she was all but snarling that title as this point, but I could tell she was earnest. There was no regal mask here, just a scared girl about my age in maturity.
With no experience in comforting people, I placed a hand on either shoulder to comfort her. I didn't go for a hug. Frankly, we didn't know each other well enough for it to be comfortable for either of us, I didn't think. "I can't remember anything from before I found myself looking at the Furthermost Reaches, not far from Gilvale. I have no idea who my family is, or was, or where the money I traded my magic and equipment for came from. My goal is to find out. I took on three Curses to gain even more power, The Captain, which makes me less inclined to hierarchies of others or being a team-player, The Wretch, which poisons all of my first impressions into toxic muck, and The Hunted, which causes all the creatures of the Reaches to try and kill me in ever-escalating numbers, though this one I can cure by killing them all."
Luna blinked, then grinned a vicious grin. "'Hunted' huh? ...It sounds like the Skeleton King will be coming to you sooner or later. Even better than I thought." she paused. "That 'power merchant'... is there any way you can get more powers from him?" she asked. It was a tad disturbing that her desire for vengeance caused her to react to the knowledge that literally every monster in the Reaches was liable to come gunning for me sooner or later with glee, but knowing why she was so set on revenge...
I sighed, removing myself from her. "It costs Mythic Copper at the cheapest, and Mythic Platinum and Jade at the most expensive, such as Emperor Red."
Where learning of my Curses had caused glee when it led to the thought that she would have a chance for revenge, this caused her to blanch so pale it almost looked like she was shining. "Costs-! Mythic coins are worth precisely a million times their common counterparts! It takes Lustrous Gold Users who've been at their practice for decades years to make even the copper ones, and attempting Platinum or Jade usually kills whoever tries to make it! It would take a kingdom in the realm of a hundred thousand square kilometers to make money a single Mythic Copper in a year!" she was clearly flabbergasted. "A Mythic Jade is four tiers of currency higher, so you'd need a territory more in line with a billion, and that's if it was well-managed and prosperous enough that you'd draw the Skeleton King's attention within a year! It took a thousand years for my people to amass a single Mystic Silver in our treasury!"
Huh, so if I accumulated enough wealth and gained enough advancement in Color Red to bolster my other Colors as the Broker had mentioned, I might be able to use Color Gold to create enough Mystic Copper to buy the other Colors and accelerate my growth, perhaps even creating a virtuous cycle of using Green to rule better to get more money out of the kingdom and get more coins? That was good to know. Though if they were that rare, she probably didn't have any idea where I might be able to just find some Mythic Coins laying around, if any such locations existed. I decided not to comment on how the vampire kingdom was probably vastly underpopulated for it's power and there were some things you could only do with numbers, since she was emotionally off-balance right now. "Besides, my only means to contact him only works every ten thousand years, and I'd prefer to save it for the Skeleton King, if at all possible." Or any other such monstrosities. Seriously, sacrificing the remains of his own kingdom for the sake of power? I couldn't understand that. I only killed monsters, things incapable of thought, or people who attacked me personally first. Though, I did wonder, if I claimed his Essence, would I also claim the Essence of every Risen simultaneously? After all, if he could kill any Risen, anywhere, any time, then they must all be connected to him, and Color Red and my Sword might be able to take advantage of that. If there Reaches were so extensive that you could stretch entire planets across it and not make a dent, as implied by a billion people remaining after multiple wars including one that was between different members of the same kingdom, and the Skeleton King's influence extended across them, how many Risen would that be? How much Essence?
Luna, having recovered a bit, nodded. "A trump card on the level of someone able to casually hand out powers like Color Magic would be best saved for someone like him." she agreed.
Given that she'd basically spilled her backstory to me, and me to her, I felt I could extend her a little bit of trust. "When we finish up here, I could teach you a bit of some of the magics. The Broker mentioned that the Verses take years of study, but the Numeracies seem pretty simple by comparison. I don't think we have the time for it right now, but I'll give teaching them to you a shot." I said, nodding for emphasis.
"What effects do they have?" she asked as we finally headed for the entrance to the cave to continue down the ramp.
"Numeracy Ten, for example, multiplies your speed, strength, and durability by 10, and keeps that from throwing you off." I replied. Best save explaining the madness of Ten Thousand for somewhere less dangerous.
Luna pinched her nose. "That would make me actually relevant against a Rank Ten by giving me speed roughly a quarter greater than their baseline, strength more than half of theirs, and durability greater than a Rank Six. You are a walking bundle of nonsense." she huffed, before her eyes snapped downward as we exited the second 'level'. The shuffling noises of Tier Threes, broken speech of Tier Fours, and complete speech of a quartet of Tier Fives echoed up to us. I could hear it just fine with Elysian and the acoustics of this place, but those same acoustics made targeting off of the sound unreliable at best and my eyes were of no use. "It looks like my explanation took too long and the level third level below us is headed up to deal with us. There are at least 1200 Rank Threes coming up the ramp, with 70 Rank Fours, and 4 Rank Fives." she reported.
I considered, then, on instinct, I swished my Sword. It hummed, and I felt a much stronger breeze than usual. While it would be a shame to have my Sword absorb all of this Essence and slow my own progress down when that progress would likely lead to both getting stronger instead of one or the other, survival took priority. Assuming that my idea worked and harvested the Essence for my Sword. "I have an idea. I'll need you to be my eyes. Point me to where the foremost of the group is." I sheathed my Sword, keeping one hand on it. "I'll cut that group down to size."
"From here?" Luna asked, nonetheless pointing the spot out to me.
My first unsheathing slash was sloppy. Were I able to see it, I would have only seen a singular thin cut, more akin to a papercut than a sword slash, on one of the leading Tier Fours, who paused and looked upwards in bafflement. Luna, however, saw it quite clearly, and her eyes widened, continuing to guide me on automatic for a moment. My second slash actually pierced the skin of another Tier Four. Luna recovered herself and kept up her role as a scope, growing more confident as I did. Finally, on my third slash, a Tier Four was cut in half vertically.
"How are you doing that?" she asked, awed.
"I'm not physically strong enough for it to work at this distance, but my Sword absorbs Essence from the fallen. I can use Color Red's manipulation to shape the Astral power behind my sword slashes, and until it leaves my range, concentrate the force. Essentially, I'm making a bubble of Essence around the air pressure behind my sword slashes, which pops when it hits something solid, like a Risen." I continued to slash, killing another two Tier Fours as I explained. "One of the benefits, as I'd hoped, is that I can drain the Essence for myself instead of my Sword, using the tether of the manipulated Essence and the fact that my Gonne can't drain Essence for itself despite both being able to pierce Shadow Beast hide, even though the latter uses mundane ammunition. I'm fairly certain 300 meters is the absolute limit, and the attacks are only going to get stronger until they enter my Essence range, which is like being inside the barrel of my Gonne when it goes off. No chance to dodge, but it can't accelerate to it's limit under those circumstances, so the attack doesn't do full damage. By the time they're in range for my normal sword, I don't have the mastery to coat my sword in cutting winds permanently, so I might as well slash normally." I'd killed fully half the Tier Fours by now, based on the Essence I was receiving. The benefits of being more than 50 times faster than a normal human. Though, if not for Numeracy Ten, I'd need much more than equivalent Essence to match a given Risen. Something to do with the Skeleton King?
"Impressive." Luna's smile rapidly morphed to a frown. "The Rank Fives have abandoned their followers, and are charging at us headlong. I'd estimate another minute before they get here." she reported. The problem with a ramp is that unless it's extremely steep, to the point carrying anything up or down would be difficult, especially for the dumber Risen, would require a lot of time to traverse, even if you were 32 times as fast as a normal human. Meaning even the Tier Fives would need a bit to get up here.
"Keep on the minions. I'll wear them down some more so they don't interrupt us mid-fight. Tier Fives are much worse than Tier Fours, so even the minor distraction a Tier Three could manage at the wrong time could get us killed. I'll be able to see them when they get close enough to fight directly." Also, jumping from 4.2 times the Essence of a Tier 5 to 7.7 had made me notably faster, and my slashes notably stronger, and not just because my range had expanded to 37 meters with commensurate swelling of how long I could harness the slashes for, but the growth was exponential. My speed and strength increased, increasing the power of the attack, and my ability to manipulate Essence improved as Color Red advanced whether I practiced or not. Something similar was true of Gold too, but skill and material wealth determined how powerful Gold was, where Red cared a lot more about Essence than how much I'd practiced. Which wasn't to say practice was useless, but harvesting Essence was the fastest means of gathering Color Red-related might until you ran out of good targets for it.
By the time I stopped slashing and turned to meet the Tier Fives, every Tier Four that had tried to come up here to meet us head-on was dead, taking me from 7.7, to 11.2, and my range to 42 meters, which I had just enough time to tell Luna, too quietly for the Risen to hear but more than loud enough for entities with enhanced hearing like us. If they'd simply come at me themselves, they might actually have killed me(though Luna's speed advantage would almost certainly have let escape), but since they'd decided to throw their subordinates' lives away, now I was only someone they could take on if I got sloppy. Another upside, was that as my Color grew more potent, the enhancement it granted allies also improved, so Luna was slightly but noticeably faster than she had been a few minutes ago by simple virtue of the fact that my Essence had more than doubled so she'd get a lot more out of the enhancement until she caught up to me Essence-wise, though there was still a hard cap of 1% of my current power as growth, meaning someone who joined on late would never exceed me or even catch up unless they learned and practiced on their own. I suspected her father's stunted growth was more a product of limited mental attention than any inherent limit to Essence manipulation on Emperor Red's behalf.
Regardless, the Tier Fives had effectively tripled the threat they were dealing with. Despite the fact that two of them used magic similar to the first Tier Five I'd fought, the only reason I took any hits was that they'd immediately ganged up on me, to the detriment of one that Luna targeted. Since my range was so much larger, she could also go further away without running the risk of robbing me of Essence, and she didn't even make a pretense of fighting conservatively beyond basic self-preservation. Myself, I was strong enough that a Tier Six was theoretically doable as a one-on-one now. Maybe even a Tier Seven with Luna's help if we could double team it, and the Tier Fives would merely fuel my growth, as they'd dropped themselves below the point of being a threat individually. My Essence drain was only exacerbating the issue.
Sure enough, while Luna struggle a bit, not having had time for my Essence cultivation on her behalf to empower her as much as I had been, the Tier Fives felt like fighting the Tier Fours from the second level. I was hovering around the level of a Tier 6 physically even if I was fighting with the handicap that I could only use my Sword for a distance attack that rapidly weakened as they neared melee range, or else personally gain nothing from their Essence, which meant that force concentration worked in my favor, such that you needed four Tier Fives to match me now, and with Luna occupying one, and my Gold soldiers harrying the rest, it was less than a minute before we'd killed the first, which triggered the death spiral that was frequently becoming a pattern. Having risen to 15.2 times the Essence of a Tier 5, I was getting close to the Essence needed to hit that exponential threshold, and as I was now, Tier Fives would have to come at me in double-digit numbers to seriously threaten me, especially with Luna on hand.
"Say, Luna." I began, drawing her attention as we waited for her reserves to be restored. "I'm seriously considering taking a break to try to teach you Numeracy Ten, since it would make you capable of fighting just about everything down here in groups of four as long as it's not a Tier Eight or more, and significantly stronger than me. On the other hand, I don't like giving them the idea to prep. Then again, I've already harvested enough Essence that I'm more than twice as powerful a combatant as I was when we came down here, which is only going to grow. I'm conflicted enough that I'll probably go along with whichever your preference is."
Luna pondered, glanced down at the remains of the attack force, then further down, to the depths where Risen even stronger than the inhabitants of the cavern a quarter of the way down. "Let's clear out the Risen headed up here, and then fall back to the highest point on the ramp, and see about teaching me Numeracy. If they mass up again, we'll be able to see it, but we'll be as far away as possible." she decided.
AN: Is the Emperor Red's Ambition coming across clearly here? I feel like Flower is still fairly dispassionate due to her amnesia and killing things for a living instead of socializing, but I wanted to get across the influence of Red shining through in reacting to a huge underground complex of Risen with 'What am I going to do... with all of this Essence.' and to the revelation that Gold can create Mythic Coins with 'Huh. I wonder if I could grab more Colors by using Gold to farm Coins?' though the Red Color also gives willpower buffs that keep her from doing anything truly stupid. When this chapter started Flower didn't really trust Luna as of yet. It's been less than a day, after all. By the same token, Luna still mostly sees Flower as a walking bloodbank, or Essence bank, as it were, to leverage into vengeance. However, the characters decided to start talking about things early, because Luna had been offered a scrap of actual hope for the first time in decades, and Flower is social-activity-starved. Be honest with me. Are these starting to feel like lore posts with fights to break them up? I would have gotten this out sooner, but I actually lost the first draft.
The Risen don't care about their comrades beyond how it can help them, but that goes both ways. When your boss tries to use you as a shield, you might just stand aside even if it ultimately screws you over too, because that guy was about to get you destroyed, so you might as well drag him down too. This is the reason why the Risen in the other caves aren't simply uprooting themselves and just coming at the pair as an endless reverse-avalanche. They take a perverse glee in the downfall of their rivals, just less so than the living. Sort of like the Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy, or the Orcs in Tolkien's works. Well, that and they don't actually know how Flower gets stronger with each fallen Risen's Essence. If they knew about that, they would take her much more seriously. The Tier Fives would be the footsoldiers then, with the lower level ones hanging back because being too weak would just make you an Essence piñata.
Though the lives of a billion are an immense amount of Essence in the Furthermost Reaches, one must keep in mind that though he's Rank 10 by the reckoning of the locals, that's Risen-specific, not Astral Rank 10. 7.5 perhaps, with massively more to his combat power than Rank would indicate. He's no match for Hunger, but he could definitely kill almost anyone else in the party, though his lower Rank would mitigate the likelihood of Hunger losing companions. Before anyone asks, yes, he looks like the Skeleton King from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go. He is also similarly nihilistic, and he frequents a boney fortress he designed to be able to take some of the strain for The Rising off of him and even take it off his shoulders entirely for brief spans so he can go for a nation-destroying jaunt, but unlike his inspiration, he wasn't corrupted by an outside force. His choices are all his own. He didn't dig into any extradimensional weirdness and let eldritch abominations in, he was just a previously wise and noble king who inverted a ritual meant to raise the kingdom's dead in defense of the living by the sacrifice of the ruler to sacrifice the living and turn the ruler into an immensely powerful undead monstrosity. In turn, he further modified the ritual with his new power and Astral might to get The Rising, though this took a lot of work in both instances. Luna's information is a mix of decades of an ear to the ground for it, and a base of what she found out as heiress to vampire royalty.
Side note, if Super Juggernaut Undead Chimera can give us the benefits of being undead without actually being undead, surely it's possible to have a magical creature that acts like it's undead without actually being undead. Though it would be something of a question of semantics honestly. If it does everything an undead thing does, does it really matter if it's technically not undead.
Anyway, I tend to think of vampires as largely aging about a tenth of the rate of humans, in terms of maturity. When your aging is determined as much by your diet or lack thereof as anything else, then you can afford to have a really long childhood. It's like the elves or dwarves in Warhammer Fantasy. If you have a lifespan measured in centuries instead of decades like anybody else, you childhood are also lengthened. Without as many gribblies to worry about or ongoing war with invading hostile non-physics, the vampires had even longer childhoods for their natural offspring. As Ethereals, they can reproduce like mythological vampires, via bite/blood transfusion(the former is intent-based, the latter defaults to vampirization, though there are magics and bloodlines capable of avoiding it) or by natural means. Thus, Luna is technically the equivalent of an 18-year-old by vampire standards. Flower is somewhere between 16 and 19, her memory loss and the differences of Elysian and her old body make it a little hard to tell. After all, a peak human body will resist the effects of aging much better than a normal one, and that inn was poorly lit. Regardless, by the standards of their respective races, they're both about the same age.
Note that the scale of the Mythic Coppers has a hundred million where the Furthermost Reaches are generally lower-tech and magic than the Temple of the False Moon at best. With Numeracy Ten Thousand and the bolstering of mental stats from all of her... everything, Flower is well-positioned to rule far better even if she basically checks in once a day and leaves the rest to her advisors(who will get the occasional reminder that she can kill quite literally all of them with her hands tied behind her back if they do anything to mess with her kingdom's prosperity in a significant manner, as that directly translates into harming the funds she would be harvesting), as well as use Gonne's war-making expertise in civilian pursuits. Better communication is one of the most important things, since modern radios with a bit of mystical enchantment to deal with the pall the Rising Curse has laid across the land could drastically increase the amount of territory she could govern. That being said, by current standards, she'd need just over 60% of California's landmass for the Mythic Copper tier, more than the US' 9.1 million (counting full states and DC) kilometers of landmass for a Mythic Silver a year. The Earth's total landmass is 148 million kilometers, and total surface area is more akin to 510 million. So, she'd need about 7% of Earth's landmass for a Mythic Gold, about 68% for Mythic Platinum, and a little under 2 Earths of surface area to be able to gain a Mythic Jade in a year, if she's willing to immediately bankrupt the kingdom she's forged. I'd expect at least ten times that much if she wants to extract that sort of wealth without immediately crippling her economy, for each tier. Still, the Furthermost Reaches are the edge of a universe-scale Realm, with practically unlimited resources since it's basically a Discworld the size of a universe. Well, on occasion you get weird geomety like Menger Sponges, though that's usually the product of warfare or defenses.
Still, if she can leverage the Gonne's war-making technologies into civilian life, the average person is going to see a pretty major increase both in personal happiness and personal wealth, which will translate into more money. This is why I mentioned Green being something she might have gone for if she planned to rule. Curse Broker harvests deals like this in return for more powers(which is one of the reasons Ten Thousand can be bought for 10000 Mythic Copper), and even gives out Color Gold, in hopes of gaining more Mythic Coins, which he, in turn, mostly sends up the chain in return for more mitigation of his Curses. In turn, his benefactor uses a million or so Mythic Coins to slightly mitigate their Curses, though each is suited to different Curses, meaning the Broker can't focus too much on any one, for risk of 'oversaturating' the market, even if Jade is easily the most valuable to said benefactor by simple virtue of being more than ten times rarer. The Broker has high hopes for Flower, given she managed to get him 2 pieces of Jade within 20 years of birth. It's entirely possible to buy powers for companions as well, and Elysian customers have been known to spend centuries working to prolong the lives of those around them long enough to buy Elysian for them, for example. It's not exactly a pyramid scheme, since people have been known to just die before even making it to the level Flower is at right now and the Curse Broker makes it very clear that the Curses are dangerous and never so much as implies that he'll show up again any time soon. Still, Flower knows for a fact that Jade interests him, and in a few centuries she might be able to reliably create it for him.
@Rihaku, I'd appreciate a more direct scale for how Hunted escalates, to gain a timetable of sorts for when the Skeleton King would show up to kill her. I'm currently operating on 'ten years if she does nothing else to draw attention to herself' though with the notoriety she'll get from killing all the stuff Hunted throws at her, I'm expecting more like five. Given that is not on the level of Madman and not on the level of bad enough to both be worth a Jade, I based my timescale off of how ten years is when Apocalypse finds out you exist, but the bad-ness of the Blight relative to Hunted is how Apocalypse can scale, while unlike Apocryphal Hunted merely tosses monsters at you instead of making them stronger. Once they hit the exponential threshold, the remaining 9 years and 355 days or so would be enough to gain about 81.226 trillion times as much Red-related power, ignoring the bonus to her base from being able to join her equipment to her Essence pool.
Given that peak human strength caps out at 500 kilograms lifted over your head, and I assume Elysian is enough for that, Numeracy Ten boosting that to 5000, my personal reckoning that she'll be another ten times stronger than that baseline by the time she hits 50 meters in Essence range, she'll be working off a base of being able to lift 50 metric tons over her head at that point. Nothing compared to Hunger's continent-shattering strikes, but after the remainder of the ten years the Essence multiplier I had Luna describe(which was crippled because her father was nation-building with it instead) would total roughly 4.724 quadrillion, which means she'd be strong enough to life 236.226 quadrillion tons over her head. That's less than the weight of Asia(estimated 4.51*10^24) by more than 7 orders of magnitude, but you don't need to lift a continent to hit it hard enough to break it, especially with an unbreakable sword, just like your average brick wall is to heavy to lift but much easier to break, and that assumes she just sits around waiting that whole time. By the same token, her range will have extended to about 3500 kilometers, with 1% of that as her 'reality warper' zone. My question is how much supernatural power helps with being able to make pressure waves/air slashes to give her a distance attack besides her Gonne, since I'm thinking she'll be able to do that as soon as she figures out how to manipulate the Essence to the point she can permanently feed Luna, allowing her to shape her sword's strikes due to it's strong link to Essence, even if she couldn't do that sort of thing with her Plate or Gonne until she hit the point of being able to directly link them as part of herself by piggybacking off of her Astral Rank and how she's been doing things using them so they're connected to her Astral Rank even if she doesn't have Accretion per se.
The 'Essence Bottle' technique is strong, but it doesn't work well on highly mobile enemies, or ones that can easily move in three dimensions. It's also not very useful if you can't aim properly, which is why Luna's ability to see in darkness Flower can't is absolutely crucial to this actually working. The 300 meter limit being ten times her Essence-sense range is intentional. Further, getting within 27 meters is akin to being 270 meters away where the force is concerned. Being 3 meters away, by the same token, is where the technique stops being useful. There's also the issue that since it's not a significant fraction of lightspeed, it's going to be noticed a long time before it hits, which means it's easier to dodge if you're further away. The various mental ups she possesses are also greasing the wheels here.
Anyone who might be worried that a Tier 10 with some potent magic is going to die like chump if Flower keep growing at this rate shouldn't be. While I'm sure Rihaku designed the build vote with that in mind because if there's anything the QM excels at it's good build votes, hence my character growing so ridiculously fast with doubled money. and thus more powers, I have a plan for that. I'm sure you can guess what it is. If not, here's a hint. 8 people die per second IRL. For anyone curious, she's at 46.5 meters in Essence sense range with that last batch. Another 4 Tier Fives will be enough to push her over the threshold, which will mark a huge jump in power, both because she can use her sword freely and still get all the Essence out of it, but also because she can enhance her equipment better, as the Sword's Essence pool isn't the only one that gets merged with hers.
9077 Words, discounting this line.
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Not exactly what-if but I want pure lulz when we are in the Human Sphere and confusing everyone
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Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
The Seeker. Note, this CYOA isn't for me personally, but for a fiat character called the Seeker, who glimpsed the Cosmos Edge and is now dedicated to the cause of mastering the sword. Consequently, their Expression is doubtless and sure.
[⚔] Streetwalker
[⚔] Practitioner (1 orb) [Swordsman]
[⚔] Litanist (2 orbs) [Reassurance, Reinforcement, Revelation]
[⚔] Expressive (4 orbs) [Cosmos Edge]
[⚔] Exemplar (1 orb)
[⚔] Lethe (+1 orb)
[⚔] Nemesis (+1 orb)
[⚔] Somber (+1 orb)
[⚔] Dreams of Distant Fire (+2 orbs)
-e
Replaced Expressive (Sword Master) with Expressive (Cosmos Edge), because the Seeker doesn't just want to be the Sword Master while wielding any old perfect sword. He wants to be worthy of wielding the Cosmos Edge, and the Cosmos Edge in turn demands that he be the Sword Master.
[⚔] Streetwalker
[⚔] Practitioner (1 orb) [Swordsman]
[⚔] Litanist (2 orbs) [Reassurance, Reinforcement, Revelation]
[⚔] Expressive (4 orbs) [Cosmos Edge]
[⚔] Exemplar (1 orb)
[⚔] Lethe (+1 orb)
[⚔] Nemesis (+1 orb)
[⚔] Somber (+1 orb)
[⚔] Dreams of Distant Fire (+2 orbs)
-e
Replaced Expressive (Sword Master) with Expressive (Cosmos Edge), because the Seeker doesn't just want to be the Sword Master while wielding any old perfect sword. He wants to be worthy of wielding the Cosmos Edge, and the Cosmos Edge in turn demands that he be the Sword Master.
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HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Royal We
In a dream I slipped away, o best beloved. A name, a path, a sparkled riptide, heard I, saw I, and carried I away...
There was a box, beloved. Inlaid a hundred times and one, there was a box. Last will and testament, cast upon the sea of Fate to mold it, shape it, wright from it a pleasing form, and bring it safely home. It said, and here I quote:
And I knew, o best beloved, that I had been chosen for how much I knew - of the Curses, of the Thing-That-Voyages, and of the Doctor Apocalypse. I knew it from the moment I saw the Broker's wares, some faceless journey after. It knew me not; I think it could not know me. But I knew it, or of it, for I was not the only dreamer from the world of my home.
At this point my recounting becomes distorted shadow-of-shadow, dream-of-dream, for in that moonlit realm I purchased a myriad-sight, and what I dreamed in that one night I could not tell you surely in ten thousand days awake. Beloved, this much I do know: I had three hundred and thirty-six hours to prepare, and then I would face the Rising. I arrived with first dark on that second-longest night of the Realm's year, and the Rising would begin at next twilight.
The trees were already burning, beloved. The people had chosen to set the dark forest aflame, to drive out the wolves that haunted there. A desperate measure, for the wolves' wrath was great and terrible - but their hunger was no kinder, nor the boldness they had learned. Given a choice of deaths, the people had taken fire over ice.
Scarcely more than a hundredth of my attention was on them, beloved, for I was tightly hounded - that dread, well-meaning Doctor would be compelled to seek my death, and I had scant time in which to check him. Truthfully, most of my interest in the battle was in how I could grow from it.
But still, I helped. Weak as I was then, I could still move twenty meters in an instant, with a golden sigil and a cleat-step, tireless muscle still far slower than I could plan. A gauntlet of golden thorns - I thought it would be cool, beloved, and that that might be worth something in this place - slew one wolf, as soon as I knew them enough to deem it safe. (I was quite correct, beloved. I'd nearly forgotten about Astral Accretion, but seeing the process helped enormously. By the end of that battle, the Midas Claw had become my first Technique.)
Others, I had slain with large blades and boar-spear tendrils, saws and barbs and tiny grains like scattered stars, testing the limits of my golden resplendence. Learning to shoot veins of Vermilion Imperial through the constructs, to drink essence like blood, and discern as much of its' identity as I could, so as to avoid destroying not-sufficiently-immortal souls.
(I sought to drain the trees and fire too, and the ground and air and all in sight, but none were Red enough for easy absorption, and infusing them first was scarcely twice as fast as compounding the Red directly. And indeed, none of a hundred mind-threads could discover a solution that did not require practice or magics I did not possess - but at least the practice would go quickly, and without interruption.)
Beloved, I shall not - can not - recount all the ways I thought to train, but those wolves, even those wolves the size of houses, were no true threat to me. Not in my armor, bound to me by gold and red. Instead, I shall recount to you the nature of that first Technique - the Golden Barb, the Miser's Grip, my curse-prayer grasp of fool's desiring.
It began, as I said, as a gauntlet of golden thorns. I tried veiny vines of Red for it to grow from, but seeing it in the Astral, I did not like what I saw - it would have been a heart-choking blood-fed briar, never loyal, and its' powers largely redundant. Instead, I made it gold alone, of amber and pyrite, of honeyed venom and shining predator eye. It grew with me, in that first flame-lit shining, as I made myself a rising sun against the fall of night. It's first astral power was entanglement, figurative and literal; while I wore it, no treasure could slip from my hand - or my mind - if I considered it within my grasp. And that meant I could fight freely, without having to stop to drain my loot.
In time, it would grow to include maintaining a thing's material value even as I absorbed the Essence of it, and then finally, converting things directly to my Gold. That came late, beloved, toward the end of my dream - the final act, wherein I and the Doctor were racing to convert our respective universes to power for our final clash. But I tell the story out of order. Forgive me, beloved.
Firstly, in my conquest of the Moonlit Realm, know that I had not much time to spend. I spoke with the humans during that first battle, seeking directions to the nearest places to gain strength - I found a quiet tomb, beloved, and a den of ravenous lizards, and a dozen other places before I fled - but the dream of them is fading, I cannot hold it.
I do recall that by a stroke of ...only moderately good fortune, given how many threads I had dedicated to the task, I did manage to discover a Verse of the Higher Tongue. It was the Red Right Hand, which granted prowess with the sword, the dagger, and the handgun, a dozen minor maledictions - all fairly gruesome, I'm afraid; each one a gesture for throttling or flaying or burning alive - and an esoteric affinity with the Emperor Red. When summoned, it would replace the right hand and forearm, or nearest equivalent, of the caster or of a willing subordinate. And in the latter case, it would enhance that subordinate in every way necessary to make them the caster's single best agent for violence.
And that was why I recruited Junberg. (Pronounced Yoon-burg, like German.)
The Junberg System was a Conjurer who would probably have been male and female in sequence, under a more typical lunar precession. Here they were neuter, but awake simultaneously. I didn't have the time to learn Lunar Conjuration, they didn't have any strong spirits to power their spells; it was mutually beneficial.
Ah, Junberg... I could likely write a story about them, but I really don't remember much more - I was exploring too quickly, discovering too much for my waking self to keep. I didn't sleep, beloved. Not any time but once, seeking dream magics, and I fled back to consciousness remembering little of why, but knowing I must not. This, I think, is where my waking self diverged - became aware that I was dreaming - could slip back only a moment, with effort, to catch the conclusion.
I saw five paths, beloved. One in which I ate the world, turned that Foremost Realm to Gold, and almost-inadvertently fulfilled the meta-fate of stopping Aobaru Vigorflame. I did not see the conclusion, but I think it was a standoff; two Titans unable to slay the other without losing all they protected, nor come to treaty long enough to build the utopias they'd once desired.
One in which I sold a thousand years of service to the Republic in exchange for its' full support in a preemptive strike; it worked, but the polity fell, and it was the work of slow milennia to restore it.
One, in which the world ended in blood and fire, and it was all I could do to sign the Last Laugh to escape it. In that branch I fled and was chased, the Coming Apocalypse a curse as lasting as any of the others I was once offered.
One, in which I sought the wider multiverse as early as possible, and sought shelter among titans. Finding none I knew, I settled for the most peaceful - and though they did protect me, even from the recollection of my enemy, that serene garden was one I could not leave. A peaceful dream, but one I'd choose to wake from.
One, in which I won completely. Arrived at exactly the hour to comprehend the process by which he was turned against me, and with power enough to defeat him solidly, showed him the truth, and undid it. I think we were friends, then, but by then the dream was faded.
That was my dream, tonight. Tomorrow, I'll dream another.
(1601 words, unedited. Several days labor. Goodnight!)
[+] Resilient [2 Copper]
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[+] Red [1 Jade]
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[-] Tarnish: Hunted [+2 Platinum]
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[+] Gold [1 Platinum]
[+] Red [1 Jade]
[+] Last Laugh [2 Copper]
[+] Step Up [1 Platinum]
[+] One [1 Copper]
[+] Three [3 Copper]
[+] Ten Thousand [1 Jade]
[+] Sigil: Ten Thousand [1 Platinum]
[+] Plate [2 Platinum]
[-] Tarnish: Hunted [+2 Platinum]
[-] Blight: The Madman [+1 Jade]
There was a box, beloved. Inlaid a hundred times and one, there was a box. Last will and testament, cast upon the sea of Fate to mold it, shape it, wright from it a pleasing form, and bring it safely home. It said, and here I quote:
To the Broker of Curses, I owe a debt of gratitude. As my Executor, I charge you with taking these last and least of my possessions, to buy from that creature all that you can. In addition, please relieve from it the greatest curses you feel able, for it always did take too much upon itself. Keep your purchases in payment; you'll need them. Many thanks.
-Rose Everblooming
And I knew, o best beloved, that I had been chosen for how much I knew - of the Curses, of the Thing-That-Voyages, and of the Doctor Apocalypse. I knew it from the moment I saw the Broker's wares, some faceless journey after. It knew me not; I think it could not know me. But I knew it, or of it, for I was not the only dreamer from the world of my home.
At this point my recounting becomes distorted shadow-of-shadow, dream-of-dream, for in that moonlit realm I purchased a myriad-sight, and what I dreamed in that one night I could not tell you surely in ten thousand days awake. Beloved, this much I do know: I had three hundred and thirty-six hours to prepare, and then I would face the Rising. I arrived with first dark on that second-longest night of the Realm's year, and the Rising would begin at next twilight.
The trees were already burning, beloved. The people had chosen to set the dark forest aflame, to drive out the wolves that haunted there. A desperate measure, for the wolves' wrath was great and terrible - but their hunger was no kinder, nor the boldness they had learned. Given a choice of deaths, the people had taken fire over ice.
Scarcely more than a hundredth of my attention was on them, beloved, for I was tightly hounded - that dread, well-meaning Doctor would be compelled to seek my death, and I had scant time in which to check him. Truthfully, most of my interest in the battle was in how I could grow from it.
But still, I helped. Weak as I was then, I could still move twenty meters in an instant, with a golden sigil and a cleat-step, tireless muscle still far slower than I could plan. A gauntlet of golden thorns - I thought it would be cool, beloved, and that that might be worth something in this place - slew one wolf, as soon as I knew them enough to deem it safe. (I was quite correct, beloved. I'd nearly forgotten about Astral Accretion, but seeing the process helped enormously. By the end of that battle, the Midas Claw had become my first Technique.)
Others, I had slain with large blades and boar-spear tendrils, saws and barbs and tiny grains like scattered stars, testing the limits of my golden resplendence. Learning to shoot veins of Vermilion Imperial through the constructs, to drink essence like blood, and discern as much of its' identity as I could, so as to avoid destroying not-sufficiently-immortal souls.
(I sought to drain the trees and fire too, and the ground and air and all in sight, but none were Red enough for easy absorption, and infusing them first was scarcely twice as fast as compounding the Red directly. And indeed, none of a hundred mind-threads could discover a solution that did not require practice or magics I did not possess - but at least the practice would go quickly, and without interruption.)
Beloved, I shall not - can not - recount all the ways I thought to train, but those wolves, even those wolves the size of houses, were no true threat to me. Not in my armor, bound to me by gold and red. Instead, I shall recount to you the nature of that first Technique - the Golden Barb, the Miser's Grip, my curse-prayer grasp of fool's desiring.
It began, as I said, as a gauntlet of golden thorns. I tried veiny vines of Red for it to grow from, but seeing it in the Astral, I did not like what I saw - it would have been a heart-choking blood-fed briar, never loyal, and its' powers largely redundant. Instead, I made it gold alone, of amber and pyrite, of honeyed venom and shining predator eye. It grew with me, in that first flame-lit shining, as I made myself a rising sun against the fall of night. It's first astral power was entanglement, figurative and literal; while I wore it, no treasure could slip from my hand - or my mind - if I considered it within my grasp. And that meant I could fight freely, without having to stop to drain my loot.
In time, it would grow to include maintaining a thing's material value even as I absorbed the Essence of it, and then finally, converting things directly to my Gold. That came late, beloved, toward the end of my dream - the final act, wherein I and the Doctor were racing to convert our respective universes to power for our final clash. But I tell the story out of order. Forgive me, beloved.
Firstly, in my conquest of the Moonlit Realm, know that I had not much time to spend. I spoke with the humans during that first battle, seeking directions to the nearest places to gain strength - I found a quiet tomb, beloved, and a den of ravenous lizards, and a dozen other places before I fled - but the dream of them is fading, I cannot hold it.
I do recall that by a stroke of ...only moderately good fortune, given how many threads I had dedicated to the task, I did manage to discover a Verse of the Higher Tongue. It was the Red Right Hand, which granted prowess with the sword, the dagger, and the handgun, a dozen minor maledictions - all fairly gruesome, I'm afraid; each one a gesture for throttling or flaying or burning alive - and an esoteric affinity with the Emperor Red. When summoned, it would replace the right hand and forearm, or nearest equivalent, of the caster or of a willing subordinate. And in the latter case, it would enhance that subordinate in every way necessary to make them the caster's single best agent for violence.
And that was why I recruited Junberg. (Pronounced Yoon-burg, like German.)
The Junberg System was a Conjurer who would probably have been male and female in sequence, under a more typical lunar precession. Here they were neuter, but awake simultaneously. I didn't have the time to learn Lunar Conjuration, they didn't have any strong spirits to power their spells; it was mutually beneficial.
Ah, Junberg... I could likely write a story about them, but I really don't remember much more - I was exploring too quickly, discovering too much for my waking self to keep. I didn't sleep, beloved. Not any time but once, seeking dream magics, and I fled back to consciousness remembering little of why, but knowing I must not. This, I think, is where my waking self diverged - became aware that I was dreaming - could slip back only a moment, with effort, to catch the conclusion.
I saw five paths, beloved. One in which I ate the world, turned that Foremost Realm to Gold, and almost-inadvertently fulfilled the meta-fate of stopping Aobaru Vigorflame. I did not see the conclusion, but I think it was a standoff; two Titans unable to slay the other without losing all they protected, nor come to treaty long enough to build the utopias they'd once desired.
One in which I sold a thousand years of service to the Republic in exchange for its' full support in a preemptive strike; it worked, but the polity fell, and it was the work of slow milennia to restore it.
One, in which the world ended in blood and fire, and it was all I could do to sign the Last Laugh to escape it. In that branch I fled and was chased, the Coming Apocalypse a curse as lasting as any of the others I was once offered.
One, in which I sought the wider multiverse as early as possible, and sought shelter among titans. Finding none I knew, I settled for the most peaceful - and though they did protect me, even from the recollection of my enemy, that serene garden was one I could not leave. A peaceful dream, but one I'd choose to wake from.
One, in which I won completely. Arrived at exactly the hour to comprehend the process by which he was turned against me, and with power enough to defeat him solidly, showed him the truth, and undid it. I think we were friends, then, but by then the dream was faded.
That was my dream, tonight. Tomorrow, I'll dream another.
(1601 words, unedited. Several days labor. Goodnight!)
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