Kerisgame! Wherein Sasi summons and swindles a Second Circle demon, she and Keris agree that the First Age was kind of shitty, we get some lovely anima-porn [1] and Keris manages to start a heretical cult inside a heretical cult, which may be a first even in An Teng.
[1] In the sense of being lavishly described, not literal pornographic anima banners [2].
[2] No you are not allowed to use that idea in the Changing Moon Lunar character you just thought up [3].
[3] No, not even if it would be really funny.
Heroic mortals can always surprise you, even as an Exalt. Discounting them entirely is rarely wise, even for an Exalt, especially if they're interacting with you in an area you're not specialised in.
Why, they might do as Darling Yellow did in last night's Kerisgame, and get 4 successes on 2 dice to notice something even through early-stage cataracts, and then hit you with an 8-success "look what a faithful and dedicated priestess I would be for your cult; you should value me and my pseudo-family" social attack.
Oh, and yeah. Remember that Dragonblooded summer house way back in Part Three that I said I was totally going to come back and steal at some point?
Comments and happenings in this session, in no particular order:
Keris ffs if you're going to keep tricking mortals into thinking you're a spirit, at least be consistent about the fake spirit you're pretending to be.
The war of paradigms between her and Sasi is still funny, heheh. Especially given Sasi's Past Life.
Mah planz. Zey advance. Mwaa haa.
I really need to get a Medicine style from a stomach bottle bug or something.
And oh, Sasi. Her need to be safe or her need to be in control (so that she's safe) would both be valid Sacrifices for the Adamant Circle, but they're both driving her desire for it, so neither is even occurring to her (and Keris isn't going to mention it because Sacrificing her fear dramatically increases the chances of her getting killed, and she's already scared enough that Sasi might decide to Sacrifice her). Sasi spent her entire childhood and her teenage years learning that only by controlling everything around her and keeping people more powerful than her happy can she be safe, and now that's being fed by Cece, SWLiHN and TED. She has to be strong or people will victimise her, she has to be in control or she's weak, and no one gets to trap her or confine her. But Ululaya is stronger than her, unpredictable and erratic, and has her in a bind.
She's pretty sure that she could give up loving Keris and Testolagh for power, but a) that scares her and b) she doesn't want to, because she isn't sure what she'd then have left in her life after all the bridges she's burned. And it's that and the idea of leaving people behind - or losing her love for her children - which is making her freak out and go all irrational. She needs leverage over the Blood Red Moon - proper leverage, rather than an appeasement gift - or an Unquestionable ally, but she's too scared to go back to Malfeas and find a Third Circle to negotiate with, because she knows she's relatively safe and can get more time to buy Ululaya off as long as she stays in Creation (hence why she's thinking of trying to learn Adamant Summoning). And she's desperately trying to set things up so she can survive Calibration, because she doesn't know how angry the Blood Red Moon is, but she does know that Ululaya is not happy with her.
And in other Kerisgame-related news, we're introducing a new hack! This one is a fluff hack revolving around akuma - we're repurposing the word to mean metaphysically inhuman things, which are usually but not always the children of Second Circle demons and up. The Four Winds are among the most powerful akuma in Hell. The children of Third and Second Circles are less powerful, but still akuma. That means that as a term, "akuma" means "being native to a Primordial Mythos" or something that's been artificially made such to the point that they no longer have a human soul structure. They are permanently Outside of Fate and Inside (Primordial) Mythos, and a normal being turned into an akuma metaphysically dies for the PoV of things like Exaltations.
That in turn means that means that DB akuma are fucking scary because they're playing in that sort of ballpark - and are also each metaphysically unique. It's not dissimilar, in their case, to oWoD Void Adaptation - they're no longer human, and have been turned into a spirit thing with powers themed around their old abilities (so they can still pretend to be a Dragonblooded or whatever), but which will have potent and dangerous new Panoply abilities as an upgrade.
The reason I mention this is because after a certain point, Infernals start having akuma children. Aiko, the little girl growing inside Sasi? Both her parents are quite powerful Infernals, and her mother has a Mythos Charm and her own soul-world. She's a little devil child; dark-skinned - not dark like a human, but dark like the night - and she can wear many faces. The fires of Malfeas burn in her bright green eyes and drip from her fingers when she wills it. When she dons her dragon form, brassy feathers are revealed, maned over her dark flesh - and in that form she breathes fire.
(Sasi: "Keris. Fair warning. Devil-children are painful to nurse, if they're born with teeth and sometimes turn into dragons like Aiko does.")
Naturally, when Keris starts having her own non-Pantheon-soul children (which she will, and 10 points to anyone not already in the know who can guess who the father(s) will be), they will definitely be akuma. And, well. One of the later ones, after she's found out about hellstriders and decided to have sapient independent hellstrider babies as the bestest best thing ever, has been drawn up for me by @Shyft.
Just got caught up on this series and I'm loving it. I'm a little confused about what Sasi did to get Ululaya pissed at her, or if its just the Moon's random whims.
You recall the two-week absence she took, where Keris went off to investigate the Lintha? That was on Ululaya's orders, to attend some big conference or another. Unfortunately, it got mobbed by waterlogged zombies, which was why Sasi arrived back hyperventilating and terrified.
Most rational, reasonable bosses would accept that "I got attacked by an army of waterlogged zombies" is a fair and understandable excuse for not accomplishing your mission.
Ululaya is neither a rational nor a reasonable boss. Hence, she is not happy and Sasi is panicking.
In other news, more Kerisgame! I've stripped out basically all of the mechanics of the fight, since the Tick system and 10-step combat resolution takes forever, leaving only two or three completely bullshit rolls in. TL,DR: My brilliant plan to attack the Realm shipping interests went wrong. Then it went further wrong. And then it went further wrong still.
I only realised after the session had ended that I could have technically shut down that last bit of Sorcery with Emerald Countermagic. Sadly, Keris is not much of a sorcerer and thus it didn't occur to her to use magic to stop him instead of poisoned slingshots. Grr.
Observe the second of Keris's akuma-children! Well, actually the first and eldest, technically, but Spearhornet was a more easily-explained design, so I asked @Shyft to draw her first.
Thousandhanded Susurrus; Spearhornet's older sister! (I decided genders, insofar as that applies to biological jigibachi attack helicopters and ocean-adapted VTOL carriers, by coin-flipping).
Thousandhanded Susurrus
(Leviluva heart, eristrufa, sortekno, amphelisia, tomescu)
A giant flying poisonous whale-turtle with a squid/octopus underbelly full of tentacles and crab-limbs around a secondary starfish mouth. She can brew up all sorts of poisons within herself which spill from the wells in her shell and vaporise into fog - which she likes to hide in. She can hover, reaching a flight ceiling of about twenty feet (enough to fly over a ship, eat everyone on deck, rip its decks up and then everyone below deck), but much prefers to stay in the water where she can move faster than a human's brisk jog. She's both shy and moe and a predatory killer, who doesn't like being seen because it makes her nervous and gets stressed out by being around people she doesn't know - but if she eats a ship, she doesn't have to talk to them at all! Like Spearhornet, she has an upper-torso avatar, but she hides its default location even from her pilots and only pokes it out through the cockpit in her head when she has to use it to talk (mostly only to Keris and her siblings).
She's also rather bigger than petite little tsuntsun Spearhornet, and tends to unintentionally loom over people.
Hey ho, hey ho, it's off to Kerisgame we go. In which Keris fits some very large objects inside herself ( ) and then finds something best left buried and comes down with another bout of Yozi Sickness.
At least this one hasn't left her feverish, hallucinating and delusional for a week solid, and should wear off within a day or two.
Ravenous Sunderer
(Egzengesnyal heart, gallmau, scaureum, tomescu, inyenki)
An enormous centipede with huge scorpion claws and a host of lesser bladed limbs that hold it up. His blazing blue-white tongue is half as long as he is, as much lightning as flesh, and strikes with a thunderclap to pull people screaming into his hungry maw. Fang-lined mouths line his serpentine body, each with its own prehensile tongue, and his avatar-torso lies under the armour-plate behind his head. He's a burrower; the land unit to his sisters' air and sea, and serves a similar formation-breaker function to a spine chain in some respects - though Sunderer is far more powerful than most spine chains, which can be created in a week or two, and tends to rip them apart and eat them. Where his sisters mostly grew out of the voracious appetites of their early-growth stages, Sunderer... did not. He's always hungry for food, and not terribly discerning about where it comes from.
And with some careful scaling via the human figures, we can see that Spearhornet really is the petite little baby of the family:
Keris, the ADHDing! In which Keris learns silversmithing, sabotages a mine, doesn't get much else done, and realises that she desperately needs to buy up her Investigation. Yeah, this session sort of stumbled a bit for lack of plot leads. Happily, there's still the matter of where all those waterlogged zombies came from to investigate, as well as a Super Special Bonus Prize that ES has assured me is hidden somewhere in An Teng for Keris to loot earn.
(Yes, Keris can learn a crafting or artwork Style in under a month to a level that stuns acknowledged masters in the profession. By the time she hits her 30s she's going to have dozens of them, probably. Exalted. So annoying.)
) and then finds something best left buried and comes down with another bout of Yozi Sickness.
