Ascensions and Transgressions: the Tales of Keris Dulmeadokht (Exalted game)
- Thread starter Aleph
- Start date
Some quick thoughts on this latest arc.
There is a lot of word bloat, but the story doesn't drag or being to blur into itself like the others- the distinct trips to distant locales breaking up the Coup arc help this, as does the development of Keris's powers. A part of the bloat is the vast increase in the number of important characters, but I expect RP's like this to be somewhat more scattered than ordinary stories, and the writing is more than good enough to compensate and make it enjoyable.
Right now, I'm just waiting for the next "episode" so we can get learn where the immediate plot will go next. You've got some plot lines dangling, but Keris has actually completed her takeover of Saata, so a new plotline is due to start.
There is a lot of word bloat, but the story doesn't drag or being to blur into itself like the others- the distinct trips to distant locales breaking up the Coup arc help this, as does the development of Keris's powers. A part of the bloat is the vast increase in the number of important characters, but I expect RP's like this to be somewhat more scattered than ordinary stories, and the writing is more than good enough to compensate and make it enjoyable.
Right now, I'm just waiting for the next "episode" so we can get learn where the immediate plot will go next. You've got some plot lines dangling, but Keris has actually completed her takeover of Saata, so a new plotline is due to start.
Based on discussion on the discord, what's next is the first major timeskip, of the kind the two authors always felt should be standard in Exalted, but only recently formalized the system for.
Secrets Revealed - Chapter 1
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And we start off a new arc in the wake of the old; Secrets Revealed, Chapter One! Which Keris... god, I'm going to get smote from on high for this... which Keris starts off with a bang!
*lightning strikes @Aleph through her living room window for her punnery*
Ahem. Yes. Anyway, despite being rather action-packed (and also action-packed), this chapter doesn't have too much happen in it, so I'll save my commentary until after we see the, ah... fallout. As it were.
Enjoy!
*lightning strikes @Aleph through her living room window for her punnery*
Ahem. Yes. Anyway, despite being rather action-packed (and also action-packed), this chapter doesn't have too much happen in it, so I'll save my commentary until after we see the, ah... fallout. As it were.
Enjoy!
Aleph: Oh Keris. Something she shares with Haneyl is that they both make for very undramatic thwarting. A hero basically just has to make themselves enough of an aggravation that she throws her hands up and stomps off in a sulk, probably muttering dire threats of retribution that she'll probably forget about if you let her calm down for a season or two. It's less "Sauron is defeated, Middle Earth is saved" and more "we were just approaching the climax and then she called it all off in a huff and flounced out to sulkily eat ice cream in her room".
EarthScorpion: Haneyl: "Okay, okay, I know you keep on going on and on about how you'll stop me turning the island into a jungle, but have you considered that if you just stop being such a little bitch about it, I'll pay you lot to go away."
Aleph: ... though, heh. Also common to both Keris and Haneyl is that neither of them sulks for long.
Aleph: They can generally sustain a good sullen shut-in-their-room sulk for about a week, tops, before they get another idea to do something else for some other goal or desire. At least barring Haneyl's out-of-fuel or starved states interfering, but that's not really sulking. That's apathetic depression, not pacing around her room muttering to herself and punching pillows and aggressively eating snacks and occasionally breaking into loud shouty rants mid-sulky-mutter-flow about how they were completely fucking out of line and HOW DARE THEY.
Aleph: Sasi: "How much longer is she going to be doing this?"
Calesco: "It's day three. She'll be done by Marsday."EarthScorpion: Heh. It's the advantage of low Conviction.
Aleph: They can't sustain proper outrage or grumpiness for long. Grudges, yes, sometimes - mostly Keris - if she feels like someone owes her instead of just having made it too annoying to bother, she may hold a grudge.
Aleph: It's hard to say whether she will or won't - her low Conviction and her envy interact unpredictably. Even for the same general kind of thwarting, sometimes she'll vow ETERNAL REVENGE and wind up forgetting about it completely within a month, while other times she'll run into the person a decade later and go "and now for payback, you bitch".
…
EarthScorpion: So for the Calibration stuff, I'm thinking we basically skip to the after party of the yearly report after a roll to see how well it went.
EarthScorpion: Oh god. You know what horrors Keris now has to face as she's a team leader?
EarthScorpion: She now has team leader meetings of senior Infernals. And strategy meetings. And possibly workshops.
EarthScorpion: And she can't just send Haneyl in her place because she has to keep her souls secret.
Aleph: ... :c!
EarthScorpion: Hmm. There's probably 10-15 Infernals in the division manager category.
…
EarthScorpion: So, actions. The one that really matters is what takes Keris - with her souls as assistants - basically all of Fire, and that's securing her hold on the Hui Cha while the men declare war on the Hinya. So, how is she securing control? What means is she using?
Aleph: Hmm. In what sense?
EarthScorpion: Like, what is her general approach to ensuring that everyone influential in the Hui Cha in the women and below the BSM level (plus Jade Fox) accepts that she's now basically the queen who handles the men's disputes and so on?
Aleph: Hmm. I guess a Major action devoted to basically hammering everyone into line and keeping the Hui Cha a single united block operating seamlessly, and a Minor one of taking to the front in some engagements and showing off that she is a deadly murderous bitch who is not to be fucked with?
EarthScorpion: Nah, we're just folding it into one season-long action, and the approach determines the governing Att + Ability (and future spin off stuff from the way she's viewed).
Aleph: Ah. Hmm. Then yeah, going by the "new deadly generation of Hui Cha women", she'll probably take an active role in the fighting and try for something like Physique+Presence, hammering it through with battle prowess and sheer force of personality. A symbol, who doesn't need to micromanage but acts as a very clear leadership figure and rallying point.
Aleph: I'm not saying "Prince of Hell Style", but she's probably going to be using Prince of Hell Style.
EarthScorpion: OK, yeah, then she's taking a front-line position and making it very clear she's bigger (metaphorically) and stronger than others around. Any non-Excellency charms enhancing this - physical or social?
Aleph: She'll make sparing use of Attention-Holding Grace in combat for things she wants to make sure everyone sees, and, hmm. Yeah, I remember the DBs from the ship standing on water, so she'll also display Foam-Dancing Haste if necessary for "lol I just run across the riptide waters to jump on their boat and murder them all", and Opened Eye of the Hurricane for "haha, you think ganging up on me is an effective means of wearing me down, that's adorable".
EarthScorpion: I was actually asking if you were using any of the Rathan things to placate the Tengese
Aleph: Oh right, I thought you meant for the front-line position murderin'. Yeah, Carmine Mantled Emissary will be getting a workout to stop people's annoying attitudes about how women shouldn't be doing this kind of thing from interfering, and she'll drop Beauty-Over-Truth to get her way in planning.
Aleph: She'll, sigh. Also be using Wan Washed-Out Faces to keep track of the steadily-rising number of people who envy her.
Aleph: o keris
EarthScorpion: OK, Phys + Presence.
Aleph: 5+5+3 Prince of Hell+2 stunt+3 Lead My People Well=18. 9 successes.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, so Keris very much secures her position as the Tengese build their forces and start making examples of the Hinya. Then comes Calibration. What is Keris's approach for her yearly bragging, what Charms, etc?
Aleph: Keris will make a much brag, very smug report about how she's subverted one of the major groups of the Southwest right under the noses of House Sinasana and gained subtle influence over the politics and economics of Saata through spies and corruption and various other devious means. She'll have Flowering the Fairer Face up (and, uh, as a side-note will also have Wan Washed-Out Faces active during her Calibration boast for the first time, which may surprise her as to the results it returns), but I don't think there are any other useful charms she can enhance with, bar Attention-Holding Grace to make sure everyone is paying attention and not yawning and fiddling with their L-phone under the table.
EarthScorpion: Per + Expression, then.
Aleph: ... oh keris
Aleph: She's not actually used to being a division head, but she's seen how Sasi does it in past calibrations. So she can probably legit apply Wolf-as-Lamb Style to pretend to be all confident and on top of things in her new posting.
EarthScorpion: Sigh, yes.
Aleph: 4+5+3 Wolf-as-Lamb+2 stunt=14. 7 sux. Very average rolls today.
EarthScorpion: Of course, since many of the Infernals are not social specced like Keris, she comes across as better.
EarthScorpion: There's a reason that high social skill Infernals often rise to the top even if they're not the best for the job.
Aleph: Mwaa haa~ : 3
Keris: "I'm totally on top of my posting, honest!" *sweats discreetly*
Althing: "Wow, she's really got it together. Excellent choice."
Keris: *fistpumps smugly*
…
<ZE FIGHTO>
EarthScorpion: Oh god. Um.
Aleph: Hmm?
EarthScorpion: That clothing (or lack thereof) combined with the 1-dot mutation means it only takes one scene for it to apply. There is an audience. A very large one.
Aleph: … so what you're saying is that Keris looks very sexy when she's beating people into the ground while almost totally naked, and the stands may in fact have a spontaneous orgy afterwards?
EarthScorpion: What I'm saying is that a lot of the crowds who attend are going to be driven mad with lust when in her presence hereafter.
Aleph: Oh Keris. This is going to be really embarrassing for her later.
EarthScorpion: OK, contested Phys + combat ability, Keris has advantage here because of both initiating combat and also... uh, being an actual example of "I'm not wearing armour so my enemy is turned on" because she's not taking it seriously. Describe the kinds of charms you're using, and whether you're anima flaring or anything like that - Excellencies are allowed.
EarthScorpion: Also you don't have to just fight with weapons - weapons are kind of just aesthetics here, as long as you're in Style.
Aleph: Okay. So, since this is one of the few fights where Keris can go all out without fear of giving away what she is.
EarthScorpion: Oh god you're looking at your shintais and deciding when to go Res for drama, aren't you?
EarthScorpion: Or are you going "lol I don't need to go Res, I hope she does"?
EarthScorpion: "Bitch I'm Grimmjow who doesn't even draw his sword to beat down Ichigo first time"
Aleph: So, Keris is going to start stage 1 with a disarm attempt on that sword using Theft as Release, and throw it into a hazard, then pop Racing Vitaris to blind her and throw her off her feet as she gets distance.
Aleph: Then stage 2 she'll basically just stay at range throwing knives and poisoned needles and slingstones and running through and over hazards and mechanisms with Foam Dancing Haste/Gravity Rebuking Grace, popping Hungry Devil-Weed Growth to bind Kasteen whenever she starts making progress or it seems funny.
Aleph: And once that's worn her down, she'll move in and stage 3 coup-de-grace her with Thousandfold Typhoon Hand / Self as Cyclone Stance flurries.
EarthScorpion: Oooh, that's a novel and dangerous start. OK, so Theft as Release is your first action, so roll to use that, while she'll roll to try to gut you with it.
Aleph: yeah, but
Aleph: if it works
Aleph: it's going to be hilarious
Aleph: (and also cruel)
Aleph: Do I get a bonus for JIVAing?
EarthScorpion: She has increased difficulty.
Aleph: mwaa haa~
Aleph: So I'm rolling Phys+Melee, and she's at -4 DV from Theft as Release, on top of her JIVA Diff, yeah? 5+5+3 Friagem Serpent+2 stunt+5 Adorjani ExSux=15. 6+5=11 sux.
EarthScorpion: And she got 10 successes vs Diff 6 because of Keris being a dick. So 4 successes.
Aleph: *snrrk*
Aleph: Yeah, she's not getting that sword back for the rest of the fight.
Aleph: God, where did Keris throw it? Into a pit of spinning murderblades or a pool of acid or something?
EarthScorpion: That's up to you.
EarthScorpion: So, the knockback bounces back.
Aleph: Hah. Neat.
EarthScorpion: So, yeah, she succeeded that - roll the Racing Vitaris thing to stay on your feet. Possibly surfing your own explosion away.
Aleph: Don't need to - Uninterrupted Perfection of Exertion/Foam-Dancing Haste, lol. You can't interrupt the wind in motion~
EarthScorpion: OK, then another Phys + Melee for the fight stuff you're doing? Also, she's igniting up to Anima 3, so take account of that.
Aleph: Uh, Keris's plan in this stage is to get range and pummel her from the walls, as well as hitting her with Metagaoiyn hazard-weeds from underfoot whenever it seems funny. So that should probably be Ranged.
EarthScorpion: OK, then. So lower pool, but raising her difficulties due to the speed difference.
Aleph: 5+2+3 FFF Style+2 stunt+5 Szoreny ExSux {weakening his foes, flashy and melodramatic}=12. 6+5=11 sux again. Mwaa haa~
EarthScorpion: She got 9 successes. She's going to tear up one of the great circular spinning blades from the arena floor and threw it at Keris, but she clearly missed.
Aleph: The devil-weeds, incidentally:
EarthScorpion: So, what's the plan now? Beat her senseless with your bare hands? Get behind her and throttle her with your hair? Pull out your spear for the first time and take her arm as a trophy? Impale her with your spear then pull her back with a cry of "Get over here!"? So many choices.
Aleph: Hee. Keris is gonna flare totemic - she's, sigh, deliberately staying a stage behind Kasteen to show she doesn't need to fight on even footing to win - and then show off that Keris always has six sets of extra limbs as she thoroughly pummels her, initiates a clinch and chokes her out.
EarthScorpion: OK, well, if you win the roll.
EarthScorpion: She's suffering because she's put a lot into fighting with her huge sword
EarthScorpion: Oh. Oh dear. She's kind of fucked.
Aleph: Huh? Who?
EarthScorpion: The dice decided to hate her when before she's just been rolling about a success or less than Keris and narrowly losing.
EarthScorpion: [10 8 7 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 4 4 4 3 2 2 2 1 1 1]
Aleph: *snrrk*
EarthScorpion: OK, well, we'll wrap up this fight and then Keris can be very enthusiastically hugged by Sasi for being a showy bitch another time
Aleph: lawl
EarthScorpion: But yeah, as I'm rendering it, basically Keris was being showy and "winning", but not actually by much so she wasn't doing much damage.
Aleph: Yeah, I know. This was the Style victory. Phys+Melee, then?
EarthScorpion: Yes.
EarthScorpion: Also, sigh, she was doing this all entirely topless as the first blow broke her necklace.
EarthScorpion: ... oh man. Zanara is going to be both so pissed they missed this and so impressed.
Aleph: 5+5+3 Wild Alleycat+2 stunt+5 Malfeas ExSux {arrogant, cruel, excessive}=15.
Aleph: ... huh. Uh, 2+5=7 sux. Lol. Dice decided to hate Keris too. Still, that's nonetheless a win.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, uh, that was actually a draw. You were at +3 Diff from the Shintai.
Aleph: Ooo, interesting. So... Keris is pinning her, but can't choke her out?
EarthScorpion: I think they're probably trading blows - you don't start on the pin yet, and Keris is probably a bit messed up and dirtied and hasn't managed to do this all while looking good.
Aleph: alas
EarthScorpion: Keris observes that Kasteen really hates the way they're cheering Keris - and over the course of the scene, she's felt the Envy grow.
Aleph: Lol. Okay, playtime over. Pulling out THE LANCE and switching over to lethal attacks and Kimmy venoms.
EarthScorpion: Well, that's her size bonus negated by stabbity.
EarthScorpion: Roll Phys + Melee, 3-dot stunt for DOING THAT THING.
Aleph: Actually, hang on. Just occurred to me, but wouldn't "I choke out the 4-metre high devil-tyrant without using any weapons or shintai of my own by climbing up her own body and strangling her" be a 3-dot stunt?
Aleph: Because if Keris got even a single success on that extra die...
EarthScorpion: Ah, too late.
Aleph: Aww. But it's not too far to quickly backtrack :c
Aleph: and that would be such a cool win~
EarthScorpion: (plus, it means she's not casually dismissed)
Aleph: mou :c
Aleph: (gonna roll it anyway just to see)
Aleph: Bah, fail. Nvm then. So yes, STABBY STABBY MURDER TIME NOW. Hmm. Does my Lance's +4 Accuracy apply, or is that butterflied away/count as the negation of the penalty? And if the latter, is it a +1 bonus, or what?
EarthScorpion: It's butterflied into a +2 diff for her, since Keris now has something that negates her reach and then some. She's tall, but Keris has more reach.
Aleph: Cool cool. Mwaa haa. 5+5+3 Friagem Serpent+2 stunt+5 Adorjani ExSux=15. 5+5=10 sux. Keris will be enhancing with Thousandfold Typhoon Hand murderblows and Self-as-Cyclone Stance flurries.
EarthScorpion: Roll an extra dice for the 3-dice for the spear drawing showmanship.
Aleph: Yay, +1 sux!
EarthScorpion: Also, you could probably, sigh, channel "Love of Art" if you wanted to.
Aleph: ...
EarthScorpion: u melodramatic bitch
Aleph: I TOTALLY WILL
Aleph: Haharrr, another 2 sux, and damn I wish I'd thought to use that back at the strangulation.
Aleph: But I would have needed to loudly boast something to do it. Ah well.
Aleph: God, Zanara is going to be so pissed that they missed this.
EarthScorpion: Meanwhile, she got 7 reduced to 5 by Keris's reach. So Keris wins by 8.
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: And oh Keris, that loincloth was made for elegant draping, not how fast your legs move when you're running.
EarthScorpion: Heh. You can demand she kisses your feet at this point. It's Cecelyne traditional.
Aleph: I shall.
Aleph: o keris u such a bitch
EarthScorpion: Now, let me just roll her Valour against her Survival...
EarthScorpion: and... uh, she gets 2 successes on Valour and botches on "Survive". She tries to bite the foot and blast Keris with a GSNF-enhanced Sandstrike Blast, which she can't get away with surprising Keris about.
Aleph: sigh
Aleph: okay, hmm
Aleph: Stunt that real quick, and Keris will, uh, roll Payback to see whether she maims her or just steps on her head and grinds it into the dust while ordering the Priest to call it.
Aleph: ... Payback 3 sux, Compassion 0. Welp, looks like she's losing all her teeth.
EarthScorpion: So, check the stunt. She is. Um. Well, she botched Survive.
Aleph: oh wow
EarthScorpion: Wow, her entire character arc has gone off path in just two scenes. She was meant to be Keris's kind of sister in arms for fun pirate times, and the bureaucrat was meant to be an enemy.
EarthScorpion: Then Keris slutted it up to piss off Deveh and proved to be a perfectly competent saboteur and understander of naval things, which flipped their planned relationships.
Aleph: whups
Aleph: Well, on the plus side, SPIES IN THE REALM NAVY are probably more valuable than a pirate-fleet sister.
Aleph: heh
Aleph: And that's an enemy made. Dammit Keris.
…
EarthScorpion: So, uh.
EarthScorpion: The thought occurs
EarthScorpion: that um
EarthScorpion: this is a totally valid moment to stunt learn one of Silver Eyed Monster or Adoring Fans Biomagnification.
Aleph: ...
EarthScorpion: ... god this is such an Adoring Fans Biomagnification moment as much as Silver Eyed Monster. It's Keris literally making herself into art and getting everyone adoring her.
EarthScorpion: Zanara, in five days time, will feel incredibly proud of Keris.
Aleph: Asarin will be very pleased, too.
Aleph: And yeah, it'll be AFB, I think.
EarthScorpion: Goddamnit Keris. Her cult powers are growing terrifyingly fast.
Aleph: She is a scary woman.
EarthScorpion: When she comes back as Cinnamon and is ready to really focus on her, she can get giant murals of Cinnamon painted places.
EarthScorpion: The keruby have invented advertising from first principles, so they'll advise her to do it (and get annoyed that someone else already came up with the idea).
EarthScorpion: With the Saatan ladies like Golden Child, too, she can have a statue of herself as a cult icon along with Lilunu, and get the cultists falling in love with her.
EarthScorpion: Sigh. You know, Kasteen is probably going to be pulled into Szoreny or TED or Kimmy by sheer, unrelenting spiteful hate at Keris.
EarthScorpion: It's actually a notable trait of Keris - because she tries to avoid people hating her, when they do hate her she assumes they're always going to hate her and escalates.
Aleph: Yup. That's why she tries to avoid people hating her. She assumes it's a one-way road to one or the other dying over it.
…
Aleph: ... I do actually feel vaguely guilty over how I handled that; even if it was fully in character and good for the narrative.
EarthScorpion: Do you want to tweak anything?
Aleph: No, like I said, it's good. I just get irrationally guilty about things like maiming and humiliating a fictional character, even though I know Keris is meant to be a nastier person than I am in real life.
EarthScorpion: Sigh. I think Dulmea is going to be the only soul who's annoyed at what Keris did.
EarthScorpion: The rest are somewhere between "that was cool" to Zanara, who's probably aged a year or two from sheer delight.
Aleph: I mean, Knowing Your Place and Disdain of Brute Force.
EarthScorpion: Yes, but Dulmea is probably not entirely pleased with how she made an enemy like that. It's the final blow that was, sigh, the street rat in Keris poking out her head.
Aleph: Yes.
EarthScorpion: Also, sigh, oh Keris. I think it's almost that she applies different nudity standards in hell to everywhere else.
Aleph: Heh
Aleph: It helps that it's normal there.
…
Aleph: Oh Sasi. She knows how good a fighter Keris is, but even so, her heart was probably in her throat a few times - at the start when Keris let the cleaver close enough to scrape a layer of oil away from her skin, and again when she took on a Devil-Tyrant Avatar with nothing more than fists and hair.
Aleph: And Lilunu, who doesn't know how good a fighter Keris is except in an intellectual way, was probably even more worried.
EarthScorpion: Sasi is going to be mad at Keris for making her so worried.
Aleph: o noes
EarthScorpion: She's getting angry-fucked for that.
EarthScorpion: (Because let's be honest, seeing Keris like that showing off her fitness means Sasi is also super turned on. She is both angry and horny. Horngry.)
Aleph: Poor Keris.
Aleph: She just had an amazing victory and now she's going to be scolded in tandem by her girlfriend and older cousin/parent.
EarthScorpion: Well, no. She's going to be grabbed by Sasi, violently kissed, and may well be presented with the choice whether she wants to accept more scolding if it means she can put off Sasi pinning her down and doing her on public.
EarthScorpion: Sigh. You said that Sasi encouraged Keris to go to the all thing dressed (undressed) like that. That means that she's probably - while of course not copying Keris's style - pretty explicitly undressed too.
Aleph: Yes.
Aleph: Sigh. Lilunu will approve of the tattoos. And recognise that Keris used the style Lilunu taught her to make them. Such a quaint little magic in them, too!
EarthScorpion: And the piercings too, yes. She might chide Keris a bit for her little prank of making those who stare at her too long turned on in her presence hereafter.
EarthScorpion: Sigh. If she does make out with Sasi in public, the two of them are a My Dark Lady wet dream for onlookers.
Aleph: Keris: "But Lilunu, how am I meant to tell the difference between people who are turned on whenever I'm nearby after they get a look at me naked because of my tattoos, and people who are turned on after seeing me nude because I'm just that hot? Are you even sure it's the tattoos doing it at all?"
EarthScorpion: Sigh. Keris is exactly the kind of person who'd consider using Space Warping Needles (from Infernals) as piercings just so she always has a fallback weapon that no one will ever see coming and that she can take into any meeting.
Aleph: Yes. They're her kind of weapon.
EarthScorpion: Also, lol. Keris is probably super glad that she did put the time into making sure she looked perfect naked for Sasi, rather than go in something more conservative and win without getting to flaunt herself.
EarthScorpion: Because man, that was a rush for her Zanaran side. And also her Rathan side, where she beat down a bitch who was unfairly getting in her face and everyone loved her for it.
Aleph: : 3
…
EarthScorpion: Hmm. This is probably the year that Keris needs to start talking to the little kids about infosec. Repeatedly. Especially to Kali.
EarthScorpion: But Ogin needs to understand that it's not something everyone does so he doesn't blab about green suns or ask them if they're going to hell for Calibration too.
EarthScorpion: ... Kali no
EarthScorpion: Calibration is not Kalibration
Aleph: Heh. Yes. Sigh. She can train up their Subterfuge (and then regret it later).
EarthScorpion: The thought also occurs that Calibration might not be as such a big deal as it was when the kids were really young. Uh, the year before last.
EarthScorpion: Because mama is always so busy in Calibration these days, and they're not all in the same place anymore, and Eko doesn't need "human days" so much.
Aleph: Indeed.
...
EarthScorpion: ... poor Aiko. She's probably scared of water because she can't swim - she's too heavy.
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: It's why she's always such a good girl in the bath with Keris, unlike the twins.
Aleph: Hopefully she's at least started acting out a bit after a year spent with Keris as her other mama. Or possibly four seasons, if Testolagh finished getting settled in time to take her for Fire.
Aleph: ... it is possible/probable that one of her first "testing the limits" will be going along with the twins on one of their "steal the honey pot" kitchen raids, on the basis that Keris never really gets mad at them for doing it, just reclaims the honey pot and sometimes bans them from having any at the next few meals.
Aleph: (Keris catches them halfway through, rolls her eyes and lets them get away with it)
EarthScorpion: Mmm. She does act up a little but she's still very well behaved and a bit neurotic about it. She is her mother's daughter, after all.
Aleph: o aiko
Aleph: I look forward to eventually seeing her as a teenager and then a young adult.
EarthScorpion: Well, once her father gets into her life more, things will change a bit. But she's still going to be competing with Atiya for "most princess-y"
Aleph: Yes
Aleph: Hee. This is how Kali walks. Like her mama. Like a predator. Even when she's in human form, there's a deliberate, lazy grace about how she moves.
EarthScorpion: Kali: "Mama, why doesn't that tiger have enough legs?"
Aleph: Ha ha.
Aleph: You get what I mean, though.
Aleph: Keris and Kali don't move like dancers, because dancers train their bodies to do some very specific movements, and unless they're like Piu their daily lives aren't geared around those movements, so they can be surprisingly awkward when they're just walking around. Keris and Kali move like predators. Apex predators.
EarthScorpion: Ogin moves like... um. An apex predator stuck on land when it's a sea dweller
Aleph: Ogin moves like liquid, in a disconcerting way that passes for "incredibly graceful" to most people, but which someone with a trained eye can tell is physically impossible with a human bodyplan.
Aleph: Most people have a gait; Ogin doesn't. He glides.
…
EarthScorpion: Keris is in many ways a pre state woman. She always assumes you'll have more loyalty to your kin over some abstract grouping.
Aleph: Ooo, yes. Keris operates at the monkeysphere level; political affliations and ties to the state and megascale groups are just words to her. And because she doesn't understand states, she doesn't trust them. The American government isn't a person, it doesn't act like a person or a clan-group of people, and she can't model or predict how it will behave. Therefore she treats it, basically, as a frighteningly powerful entity that is functionally insane and cannot be trusted to keep any promises or hold to any courses of action or even be predicted with any degree of assurance.
Aleph: Or she relies on people like Sasi who can tell her what it will do.
Aleph: But at an instinctive level, when dealing with bigger-than-monkeysphere groupings, Keris is always going to instinctively assume that they're... not necessarily dealing in bad faith, but at minimum incapable of dealing in good faith. So even a transactional relationship has problems.
Aleph: Heh, that's why she likes corruption. She understands that. She can divorce the Secretary of State from the US government as a whole and be confident he'll act like a real person who makes sense. Like you said; a stateless society mindset.
EarthScorpion: Hmm. We might want to tweak Vali, especially given how he's willingly taken so much big brother stuff on himself. To something like, hmm. "Clan above all".
Aleph: Hmm. Yes. Well, mm.
EarthScorpion: Or something else that's how the only bonds that tie her are ones of family.
Aleph: Hmm. The ones she puts on herself, yes.
Aleph: Heh. "No Chains But Those I Make", or something.
EarthScorpion: And that's not a retcon - that's a sign of Keris growing up as she leaves the street rat behind and becomes a matriarch. When she was younger she hated following anyone else's rules. And hmm. No. I don't think it's "I only follow self imposed rules". It's that the clan - bloodline and adopted - always comes first.
EarthScorpion: (She counts Lilunu as part of her clan. Not Ligier, though.)
EarthScorpion: But this does have a counter compel where she can be pulled into things by family demands even when she had other ideas.
Aleph: Hmm. Yes, true.
Aleph: Hang on... yeah, most of her self-imposed rules and promises have basically been clan-related. Being there for Aiko, etc.
EarthScorpion: And the things that she wouldn't betray for money or advantage are basically all in her family.
EarthScorpion: Hee. The thought occurs that this means that Keris has several anchors of loyalty to the Reclamation, but most of them are... not exactly what they'd want.
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: Like her "Lilunu is part of my clan" means she's like she's family, but that means Keris will do things directly because Lilunu asked her or to advantage her, rather than out of loyalty.
Aleph: Hee.
Aleph: Sigh.
Aleph: It really does make perfect sense that Keris thinks like someone from a pre-state society. I mean, she grew up in Nexus. It's the closest thing to a stateless state you can get.
…
<post-fight scene>
EarthScorpion: Heh. She probably is feeling the exhaustion now. It's like she's been through 10 hours of vigorous exercise.
Aleph: well yeah
Aleph: but like she's going to admit that
EarthScorpion: Per + Pres to mollify Sasi, declare charms used.
Aleph: Heh. No active charm use, since Keris is feeling all apologetic and guilty. TLA reduces her MDV by 4, though.
4+5+3 Cerulean Paramour+1 bonus+2 stunt+8 Kimmy ExD {beauty, poise, drowns all opposition}=23. 9 sux.
EarthScorpion: oh keris
EarthScorpion: It says a lot that what she uses here is Cerulean Paramour.
Aleph: Oh shit, actually, haha. Doesn't this trip the exact role Sasi has her in with her own Elloge charms?
EarthScorpion: Yes. It does.
Aleph: lol
EarthScorpion: 9 x 2 = 18 successes to build a 1-dot Principle of Exhibitionism in Keris, playing off her Love of Art.
Aleph: oh sasi
EarthScorpion: She is a very bad woman sometimes. And now that Kalaska has been placated, Seresa is here in full force
Aleph: Sooo. Just, uh. Roll 1 die to see whether their... activities... should happen to accidentally turn on the projectors, would you?
EarthScorpion: 1 success - a 9
Aleph: lol
Aleph: welp, I guess the next hour or two is getting broadcast
Aleph: keris u shud choose ur makeout spots better
Aleph: ... also that orgy outside is, um
Aleph: yeah
Aleph: going to get kind of brain-fried
Aleph: keris is going to be muchu embarrass, very blush, wow
Aleph: in the interests of, uh, not writing literal porn, we should probably fade to black before it gets heated
EarthScorpion: Well, uh, Physique + Expression for the performance, enhance (subconsciously if needed) with what the onlookers get hit with. Enough successes might boost Infamy in the short term or win her other favours.
Aleph: oh keris
Aleph: hmm
Aleph: "This Charm is used in the process of the creation of an image of the Infernal, which the Infernal must handle during its manufacture, and imbues it with unnatural attraction."
EarthScorpion: Actually, huh. This is... uh. The creation of an image of the Infernal.
Aleph: Yeah... does... does the projection count?
Aleph:
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: (It's also art in Kimbery's themes.)
Aleph: KERISSSS
Aleph: So yeah, throwing down Pelagic Muse Artistry and Adoring Fans Biomagnification, and in five days time Zanara is going to squee at a pitch to shatter glass and love Keris probably more intensely than they have ever done since they were born.
EarthScorpion: It's also enhanced with My Dark Lady. The Infernal reduces the number of scenes by one, to a minimum of one, required to build desire-Principles towards him or towards vices he offers.
Aleph: Goddammit Keris and Sasi.
Aleph: ... does this qualify for a 3-die? This probably qualifies for a 3-die.
EarthScorpion: Well, it's in line with Love of Art
Aleph: Sigh.
EarthScorpion: If she wanted another child, honestly this is the kind of time when Mother of Monsters would activate - but she doesn't.
EarthScorpion: ... sigh.
EarthScorpion: Attention Holding Grace, too, to keep Sasi's eyes on her.
Aleph: Yes.
Aleph: (And, by extension, everyone else's.)
Aleph: 5+5+3 Cerulean Paramour+3 stunt+3 Love of Art+10 Szoreny ExD {attention of others, flashy, adoring fans}+4 PLA sux=29, good god Keris. Yeah, 13+4=17 successes.
Aleph: sigh
Aleph: The victorious champion puts on a show to arouse even the gods of the demon realm.
EarthScorpion: And Sasi for her part, throws in 15 successes of UMI that encourages vice and attacks Temperance
Aleph: christ
Aleph: the arena is going to look like Erembour just held a performance there
Aleph: oh keris
EarthScorpion: God. Also, even the 1CDs who get to attend the All-Thing aren't just generic serfs. And it's not just 1CDs there.
EarthScorpion: Lol. Also, Pelagic Muse Artistry makes it unsettling, demonic sex. That, uh, reduces natives of Malfeas's MDVs by their Enlightenment against it.
Aleph: oh my god
Aleph: Well. This... was definitely a thing! We shall see how Keris reacts to it later.
- Location
- Queensland, Australia
And Keris both demonstrates why researching your enemies before fighting them is a very good idea... And also that before you decide to 'entertain' your girlfriend, it would be a really good idea to remember what you were just told by your mentor, gosh-darnit...
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
So, thought I just had.
Given what Balanodo is, what are the chances he chose not to resist the effect of Keris's tattoos?
Also I feel like Eko is going to melt through to the next layer of Malfeas from the embarrassment once she hears about the "after-party".
Given what Balanodo is, what are the chances he chose not to resist the effect of Keris's tattoos?
Also I feel like Eko is going to melt through to the next layer of Malfeas from the embarrassment once she hears about the "after-party".
DarkLight140
Credit to Team
- Location
- Lost in my thoughts
It's very nice to meet more infernal characters. One of the more interesting and fun points of infernals to me has always been the fact that they have numerous peers; while they share this trait with sidereals and dragonbloods, they're the only solaroids who, immediately upon exalting, are promptly confronted with the fact that sure, they're on top of the world, but they're still just one of a crowd. Being part of that crowd means that they never really have a shortage of friends, enemies, rivals, love interests, students, or what have you that are on their own level and in their same situation- people that they can respect, if not necessarily like. The fact that everyone is (supposedly) on the same side means that these characters tend to stick around, too, as everyone has solid reasons to not kill one another. Infernals are the way that Hell influences Creation in both the backstory and in the realities of play, too; the fact that they generally keep track of one another and have powerful demonic backers mean that troubles and disagreements sourced in Hell can follow PCs back to Creation and make actions taken in Malfeas a lot more relevant.
Kerisgame has largely glossed over all of this so far, with the number of infernals present kept sharply limited and their relevance as a group equally so. Every Calibration's boasting contains little except for what Keris or Sasi says, and the rest of the infernals are a faceless implied crowd with a number of exceptions that can be counted on one hand's fingers. The choice to do that is understandable, as screentime is limited and everyone there has their own stuff going on so only the things that are going to immediately impact Keris and her plots are treated as relevant or worthy of attention. It feels like a shame every time, though, because it's sitting down with forty or so characters with colorful backgrounds and cool powers talking about incredible nonsense they've recently pulled off and a good chunk of them are legendarily effective speakers. It should be nearly impossible to sit through that and not find at least one person who seems so interesting, attractive, or useful that they're worth going over and getting to know (if only because so many of them throw UMI that almost no one has the ability to reliably resist it all).
So coming from this perspective, more infernals being pushed into the story's foreground- Keris now has to work with at least these three, plus she's got one subordinate and one lover- feels to me like embracing more of what the splat is built around. The presence of more infernals not only means more peer characters, but also more of Hell's influence being directly felt Creation-side; for the most part the Unquestionable as quest-givers thus far has resulted in clean wins or avoided conflicts (ex., Keris is largely gone from An Teng rather than having her own/backers' visions conflicting with Deveh's there) but more infernals running around means more missions being completed and inevitable tripping over one another and conflicts eventually, as well as the joys of office politics- which is to say, social scenes where the question of which Unquestionables should be backed and why, what the relationship between Hell, Creation, and the infernals as their agents there really should be, balancing the mundane needs of favor-trading with the need to support people with matching ideologies, and so forth take the fore. Keris is pretty cagey around those topics even as her opinions shift, but not everyone will be (and she's got souls much less subtle than she is likely to go behind her back and talk to coworkers given the chance).
This stuff has all come up before but it's been quiet, not treated as a primary focus of the plot. Overall this seems like the opening chapter of this arc is taking things toward pushing it toward more prominence, which is a direction I like and hope to see more of.
Kerisgame has largely glossed over all of this so far, with the number of infernals present kept sharply limited and their relevance as a group equally so. Every Calibration's boasting contains little except for what Keris or Sasi says, and the rest of the infernals are a faceless implied crowd with a number of exceptions that can be counted on one hand's fingers. The choice to do that is understandable, as screentime is limited and everyone there has their own stuff going on so only the things that are going to immediately impact Keris and her plots are treated as relevant or worthy of attention. It feels like a shame every time, though, because it's sitting down with forty or so characters with colorful backgrounds and cool powers talking about incredible nonsense they've recently pulled off and a good chunk of them are legendarily effective speakers. It should be nearly impossible to sit through that and not find at least one person who seems so interesting, attractive, or useful that they're worth going over and getting to know (if only because so many of them throw UMI that almost no one has the ability to reliably resist it all).
So coming from this perspective, more infernals being pushed into the story's foreground- Keris now has to work with at least these three, plus she's got one subordinate and one lover- feels to me like embracing more of what the splat is built around. The presence of more infernals not only means more peer characters, but also more of Hell's influence being directly felt Creation-side; for the most part the Unquestionable as quest-givers thus far has resulted in clean wins or avoided conflicts (ex., Keris is largely gone from An Teng rather than having her own/backers' visions conflicting with Deveh's there) but more infernals running around means more missions being completed and inevitable tripping over one another and conflicts eventually, as well as the joys of office politics- which is to say, social scenes where the question of which Unquestionables should be backed and why, what the relationship between Hell, Creation, and the infernals as their agents there really should be, balancing the mundane needs of favor-trading with the need to support people with matching ideologies, and so forth take the fore. Keris is pretty cagey around those topics even as her opinions shift, but not everyone will be (and she's got souls much less subtle than she is likely to go behind her back and talk to coworkers given the chance).
This stuff has all come up before but it's been quiet, not treated as a primary focus of the plot. Overall this seems like the opening chapter of this arc is taking things toward pushing it toward more prominence, which is a direction I like and hope to see more of.
Potential suitor* incoming?
* Or at least, potential 'seduce her so she'll fawn over me, then dump her in with the rest of the women who do that who I neglect'-person. I foresee lots of stabbing in the future if so.
"Sinfernals" - the flawed peers of the Althing Infernal
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, I'm pleased to say that our core group of "Sinfernals" is now fully rounded out and complete! We have seven major names in the Reclamation that Keris has built relationships with; each themed around one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In each case, these Sins represent the failings and flaws that characterised their Exaltations and prevented them from becoming Solars, and which in many ways they're still carrying forward. They're the reasons that these characters are villains now; and there's a strong theme that all seven of them are still the same flawed, fucked-up people blindly repeating the same mistakes and vices that got them into this mess without realising how destructive they are. I kind of think this is a core part of being an Infernal, honestly, and while I'm not going to try and work out mechanics, I feel like it should be a pretty core part of the fluff. Not necessarily one of the seven traditional ones - Keris is as much Fear as Envy - but if you're not playing someone who's fundamentally a failure who continues the failings that got them the Exaltation; why are you playing an Infernal at all?
If you've seen Bleach, or read @Omicron's Number None, the septet in Kerisgame are very like the Espada, whose "Death by X" titles refer both to how they bring death to others and also destroy or doom themselves. Look at how Barragan sentences those who stand before him to the ravages of time and entropy, but is ultimately himself a decaying king on a crumbling throne. Witness how Nnoitra brings despair to those who stand before his dreadful might, but is ultimately eaten from within by it and left purposeless and despairing of any cause or goal save a glorious death. There's one particular scene in Number None - spoilers apply, obviously - that encapsulates his title perfectly; how he turns it on others but also suffers it himself.
It's a really good element of Number None that I adore, and we realised all the way back in Death by Fear that it's a great way to view Keris. But we also realised back then that Sasi and Testolagh fit it as well - and came to realise that so did the others.
In rough order of importance, then...
Keris Maryam Dulmeadokht; Fallen in Envy, Fallen in Fear
That's right; our cute little protagonist gets two titles, because she's just that much of a disaster area. However, I've already spoken on her terror side in my Death by Fear post; we're here to look at her Deadly Sin. Envy. This should surprise nobody, given how much of a natural fit for Szoreny she is. For as long as she's been defined by cowardice, Keris has been equally defined by envy and spite. She was a jealous, hateful, tiny thing as a slave who looked at her rich owner and loathed her for the things she had. She was a bitter, vicious little monster on the streets who cut the purses of the rich and held Bags and the faithful in contempt. She's a thief and a saboteur, a poisoner and infiltrator who lies and lies and lies to claim things not her own. From market stall apples to the naib of Malra's wealth, from children with loving parents to the lords of the Hui Cha triads, from fingers nimble enough to pick locks to the heights of Sapphire Sorcery; Keris is fundamentally a person who looks at what other people have and wants it for herself. Sometimes she gets that by earning it. Sometimes she gets it by taking it. And sometimes it's enough just to deny it to them, so that if she can't have it, no-one can. But always, she looks at what's beyond her grasp and feels a vicious stirring within her heart to stretch out her hand and snatch it.
And as is traditional, she doesn't just suffer it herself. No, she inflicts it on others in spades. Not even her cowardice can keep in check the way Keris flaunts her power in front of those who can't keep up with her; enjoys outdoing people and proving herself the best. Her social suite is overwhelmingly about tearing you down, making you want her or the things she has, or making you something she owns. Her Envy is directly tied to her sense of self-improvement and the part of her that likes to measure herself against other people as a way of keeping score. She likes being wanted. Sometimes the envy she inspires is positive - the adoring crowds of demons lauding her in the arena. Other times it's negative - Kasteen's new and bitter hatred, or her brother's quiet inferiority. Good or bad, though, she can't help but inspire it - and she can't deny that she gets a bit of a kick out of it, so long as she feels safe. She leaves Wan Washed-Out Faces on more or less permanently, just for that sweet sweet patter of "Envy: Yes" readouts, and it's not warping to her psyche because that's just... how she already thinks.
Honestly, this above any other is the reason why Keris is dangerous to the Reclamation. Her Fear is her shield, and her Envy her spear - and together, they mean that she will, inevitably, turn on her masters and bite the hands that feed her. Already she looks at the Unquestionable and resents their place above her; already she acts against them and shields herself with cowardice and cunning. Envy, alone of the sins, is the only one that tries to improve itself - not just laud itself for what it is or gather what it thinks valuable, but climb the ladder and surmount everything else around it.
If the Unquestionable knew of her envy and put thought into what it meant, they would be worried. And they would be right to be.
Nemone Sasimana; Fallen in Gluttony
That might seem an odd choice, right? Well, first of all, let's look at what gluttony is. It's overindulgence. Not only that, it's impulsive overindulgence in something which would be normal or healthy in moderation. It contrasts with lust in being a similar lack of self-control but in something not inherently wrong, and with greed in being similarly resource-intensive but born from using them rather than hoarding them. It's generally associated with food and drink, but it can apply to anything, really. Ultimately, gluttony is born of having too little sense of self, and thereby failing to properly conserve one's resources - even down to things like health and dignity.
And god, that's heartbreakingly true of Sasi. She never Exalted, and so her sense of self was ground down on the churning axis of the Scarlet Dynasty until she didn't, deep down at the very heart of her, have the self-esteem and self-respect needed to hold herself to her own set of standards. She's bad at moderation. She eats too much, drinks too much, dotes on her children more than a Dynast should. She has too much sex, she falls too far in love, she swings straight from Immaculate devotion to Yozi worship. As her mother so prominently and so often told her when she was a teenager, she's soft and weak.
But just because something is soft and weak doesn't mean that it's not dangerous. Look at what Sasi's charmtech does. She lures people in and erodes their Temperance. She encourages them to indulge - in whatever they want, in whatever she offers them. She tempts them with things that are good for them, and then gives them more and more and more until they're desperately, helplessly hooked. Her charity and generosity are her curse - she feeds you until you're bursting, and become one of her debtors in your intoxicated consumption of her desert-blessed gifts. She reduces you to a simple role on the stage, and leans you further and further into it until it makes up everything you are.
It's an incredibly insidious and subtle form of attack. She never forces anything on you. She never presents herself as a threat, or a form of opposition. She gives you what you want, and she just encourages you to enjoy it. To take some pleasure in this shitty world. To relax and destress by revelling in what brings you happiness, and to put your cares to one side for a while. It's a sweet and sympathetic sin – the most compassionate of all of them, I think, because all she really wants is for people to be happy. And she's made it a corruptive tool that she turned on herself without realising in her breakdown; a tragic figure who was and still is a victim of her own nature.
To fall to gluttony is to fall by inches and never sacrifice a thing; devouring and revelling and enjoying yourself all the while... until you realise that you were giving away your inner strength all along, and now you have none left.
Testolagh Matachim; Fallen in Pride
Here we certainly need no explanation. Aiko's papa would rather be the one man standing alone against the world than compromise his own ego. He's a proud, arrogant, stiff-necked man who takes pride in turning down things he "should" just go with the flow with. Testolagh is the character who most looks like a hero from a distance, because that's what he's built from; heroic parts. He has a tragic destroyed home village in his back story, he holds the Unquestionable in contempt, he has a hard moral code and is honest and straight forwards. We all allow heroes much more leeway with regards to pride, after all. They're better than us.
Only... his tragic destroyed home village is because he assumed he knew best and took all the young men and women and the priests to go hunt down the monster in the caves, and the others got butchered because they were defenceless. His pride means he hates the Unquestionable, but it also means he still serves them because he is not someone who breaks his promises. His moral code isn't a kind one - Compassion is the one virtue he's not pulled by. And his honesty and straight forwardness is equally the pride that means he doesn't respect people enough to soften his words or care about what they think.
Unlike Keris, he's a natural leader of men. And look what he does with them. With the owlriders, he took scattered tribes, turned them into an army, and turned them against everyone else. He crushed their leaders and their champions, and called them unworthy - and then the tribes he'd crushed cheered him on when he crushed others. He has an almost masochistic streak that comes from the arrogant, twisted idea that suffering itself has a value, because suffering when you could not be suffering makes you stronger than others who chose not to suffer. If you can withstand pain when other people fold, he tells his followers, then that makes you stronger. Even when it might be more sensible to give in. Groups he leads are too proud to withdraw, and too arrogant for others to tolerate.
The sin that Testolagh epitomises is at heart a hypocritical and corrupt sense of his own personal value. He holds himself as morally superior, he lifts up his accomplishments and honour code, but he ignores the fact that he's not really much – or any – better than the people he sneers at and thinks little of. His pride makes him unaware of his own flaws; inspires him to hubris and thinking too much of himself. He alienates people by looking down on them, wilfully blind to the ways he violates his own code, and makes of himself a rigid thing that can't bend or flex or compromise; that has no give in it or room for negotiation. He doesn't waver or doubt, he refuses to bow – and so in the end he'll break.
Pride like Testolagh's is a masochistic form of suicide. It lifts its head under the axe and thinks itself strong for taking the route that led there, rather than the thousand that might have avoided the war altogether – because this way, it doesn't have to feel like it admitted it was wrong.
Orange Blossom; Fallen in Greed
Keris's first boss is fundamentally a materialist. She values possessions. She values things. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in what she did to Keris with Eshtock. Sasi would have traded the information for a sworn favour. Keris would have probably given it straight off, and used that to hang it over their head until she felt things were square. But Orange Blossom led with the demand for payment. She only let Keris have the information after she dragged a difficult, dangerous mission out of her. And that shows her vice so well, because she'd rather have the things from Eshtock than make up with Keris. Who is her ex, and who was once in a relationship with her where they had genuine feelings for one another. And this is why that relationship fell apart, too. Because they were together; they were getting pretty serious, and Keris left on her first mission all nervous and tense and uncertain. And when she came rushing back to Hell, screaming about a powerful Abyssal assigned to the city she'd been tasked with destroying by the Mask of Winters, she sent a desperate, panicky message to Orange Blossom for help.
And Orange Blossom didn't come. Because when it came down to a choice between being there for Keris or being there for the wealth and territories she was building in Hell; when she had to decide between helping her lover and preserving the delicate, fragile web of money and holdings that would collapse if she abandoned it… she picked the latter. She always will. Avarice is the antithesis of generosity. It's choosing to be inconsiderate, rejecting compassion in aid of a specific goal or situation: keeping what you have even when it would be better to give it away. It's the inability to put aside miserliness even when it harms you. Where gluttony is a failure of self-control, greed is a failure of foresight - the result of a blind compulsion to have without thought for consequence or even fully using what you own. Sasi has too little sense of self, but Orange Blossom has too much. She succeeds all too well at conserving what she has; hoarding them even at a cost to others.
It would be bad enough if it were just her. But it's not. Orange Blossom turns things into transactions, she makes every interaction into a deal or a bargain. Her influence snares and snarls people into selfishness and thinking of what they can get out of one another, because that's the only paradigm she gives them. Her pet Dragonblood Kazem Motahari told Keris as much – that she goes into deals and meetings with everything already stacked in her favour, so people can only get what they want by coming to her. She makes it all about what they can get out of her and what she can get out of them, and forces things to favour the latter over the former.
Greed is a poison that spreads on touch, and it renders the whole world selfish.
Deveh; Fallen in Lust
Now I imagine more voices rising in confusion over our ascetic Pyrian priest than over anyone else in this post. But when you disconnect it from sex, Deveh is actually pretty lustful. Because it's not inherently carnal - lust is an intense desire or longing for a person or circumstance that reduces them to the object of the fantasy. Deveh wants to be noticed by SWLIHN-senpai; he wants Her attention and regard and to spread Her Perfect Order, and I don't think he really wants it for the sake of the Whispering Pyre. He wants it for selfish reasons - he wants to be noticed by her; rewarded with a place in the world she'll make using him as her tool. Okay, it's a Yozi he's focused on, but if you translate it to a woman or a figure of authority, the point stands - it's the praise and regard and place at her side he wants; the desire is fundamentally centred on himself; with the object of it just... an object to provide what he gets out of it.
That's not to say there's nothing but selfish desire there. Obviously he is compassionate – he's the foil to Keris's compassion. But even there… look at what Deveh's Compassion drives him to do. It leads him to hollow people out and make them part of his symmetrical hierarchy, it ends up with him putting everyone in their place so he can have his flawless system. He doesn't care about the people themselves; their wants or dreams or uniqueness. He only wants them for the part they can play in his vision. Lustful behaviour again – reducing other people to things in pursuit of the intense desire he has for his goal. He captures them in his sin and makes them creatures akin to himself; showing them the same desire he burns with and making them crave it too. When he remakes minds and reshapes souls, he puts one guiding star in there; one overriding urge that drowns out all else. The want for hierarchy. The relentless need to be a part of his order. The main difference between gluttony and lust is that the former is taking things that are healthy or normal in moderation to extremes - but lust is pursuing wants that are in and of themselves harmful or taboo or wrong.
His lust may not be for the sins of the flesh, but it destroys him all the same. He turns the blade of his flaw even on himself – Deveh has literally used Freedom Lets Go to cut away everything he remembers; his entire life prior to cresting a dune and seeing the crystalline spheres of the Whispering Pyre for the first time in the Malfean sky. He's made himself an object in his lust for Her nature as much as he does anyone else. In the end, Deveh's fall to his sin left nothing remaining from what he once was – it took a person with all the potential of the human condition, and reduced him to nothing but a hollow tool.
And the tragedy is; he's so obsessively focused on what he longs for that he thinks it's a good thing.
Naan; Fallen in Sloth
Ah, Naan. Probably the second most unintuitive Sinfernal behind Deveh. He doesn't look slothful, after all. Not really. He's entirely willing to get in vigorous activity, whether blowing up a port or getting into fights with tyrant lizards because he's bored. No, his sloth is more profound; a mental and spiritual malaise. He'll always take the easy way out. He'll never better himself. If Panther is the man who looks at himself and his life and exalted because he realised he could be more, Naan is the man who when put in the exact same position didn't do a damn thing. Self reflection is hard. Taking the righteous path is hard. Why bother?
Naan is a man who fights in arenas for fun, but as soon as an enemy starts to seem challenging, he'll escalate to max strength and crush them. He's a man who'll fall into any easy path you offer him, because it's more work to say no. And if Keris, as Envy, is a critically high risk for betraying the Third circles because she resents being told what to do and wants their power and wealth and vices for herself, Naan is the man who will never betray them unless a large number of other Infernals do, because why go through all the effort of a coup only to lose all the easy life benefits they offer? Sloth is commonly conflated with laziness, and Naan is lazy, it's true. Intellectually, morally, spiritually. He's entirely reactive, never looking forward and proactively dealing with things. But it's more than just laziness. The root of sloth, as a word and a sin, is acedia – which means "without care". And that characterises Naan frighteningly well. He doesn't care. He holds no values, he has no high-level Principles to motivate him. He'll never develop souls, There's simply nothing that anchors him; nothing to stop him being swayed by whatever's most convenient at the time.
And he spreads this condition to others. He suggests easy answers and gets bored easily. He's a blunt weapon who is almost impossible to use him subtly or cleverly. He's the friend who comes to Keris and goes "hey, you came up with a good idea in the arena fight, let's do an exhibition match"; re-using what's already been done instead of coming up with anything new. When he's part of a group, everyone else either has to work harder around him, or just follow along with the way he makes it easier to do the easy things. And when he breaks an honour duel's rules or lays waste to a city, he leaves the systems and values that people depend on, that people live by, in ruins. He creates nothing, builds nothing, preserves nothing – only drags society down into a place where riots and looters prosper. He spreads his blasted wasteland of a soul to anyone who stays too long in contact with him; leaving them apathetic bottom-feeders like him who don't care about what's right or sustainable or even effective – only what's easy.
There's a gear loose in the clockwork of Creation; dirt clogging the pipes and cracks in the frame. Why fix it? It'll survive another few years or decades past your lifespan. The collapse is someone else's problem.
Kasteen Akwilia; Fallen in Wrath
The youngest and newest member of the septet; rounding it out at last – and wow is she leaning into her sin. Only two scenes so far, and already we see her problem. Like envy, anger can be a constructive force, but Kasteen's fury isn't constructive. It's blind. It's thoughtless. It's not focused or channelled or use; her rage is controlling her whenever it gets out of its cage. And it's a pretty flimsy cage. It makes her impatient, it makes her stupid. It makes her take the simplest and most direct option, not out of laziness, but because it's the quickest route to the fight. She assumes that if she hits things hard enough she'll always win – and when she starts losing, she just gets even angrier and tries to out-escalate the target of her rage.
And more than that, Kasteen's anger is flawed because it's not justified by anything. It's entitlement, in its purest form. She doesn't get angry for good reasons – she gets angry when she doesn't get something she wants, or whenever things don't go her way. As soon as things become difficult or the world doesn't respond the way she wants it to – be it a meeting dragging on too long or someone not giving her what she feels is her due respect or her ships suffering damage in a battle – her reaction isn't to look for the cause of the problem and fix it; it's to find a target to blame and take out her frustration on them.
Which makes her a pretty obnoxious person. People get angry at her. Her stubborn refusal to see reason, her brutal stupidity and use of blunt force in every situation no matter how bad an idea it is, the way she makes enemies she doesn't need to make by striking first and offending or assaulting people for meaningless, pointless reasons… she spreads anger around her wherever she goes. Odds are she Exalted in the first place because her crew got so angry at her and her rages that they marooned her a la Pirates of the Caribbean. And when she does win? When her sheer power is enough to force things to turn out more or less like she wants, or at least to hurt things until she feels satisfied? She teaches anyone watching that anger works. That the way to get what you want is to rage and scream and hurl abuse and throw fits and tantrums and violence at anything that slightly impedes you until nobody dares speak up regardless of how far you go. She shows people that wrath is not only a coin that can buy you anything you want, but also a shield that makes you immune to the consequences of spending it.
Kasteen is a wildfire, and she doesn't just burn and scorch the world she inflicts herself on. She sets it alight in her wake, and the flames of wrath catch in other people and consume them.
So that's our septet. Each with their own sin. Each with their own flaw. Each with their own way they hurt others and hurt themselves and make the world in general a worse place to live in; spreading their personal failings around and being generally villainous. This is, I think, a crucial design element to roleplaying an Infernal in general. Because they're antagonists. They're villains – or if they're heroes, they're tragic heroes or antiheroes. They're flawed, failed people who are to some extent evil and who might not wound the world as badly as Abyssals do by just existing, but who are still fundamentally maluses on Creation. That's the point. That's why you play them.
It serves the useful purpose of injecting variance into Infernal powersets – Keris and Naan both share Metagaos and some TED, but Naan's soulscape is a blighted wasteland of dark heavy ruins under gnarled and untamed growth that he looked at and went "this is fine", while Keris's TED and Metagaos souls all like building and creating things. Keris and Orange Blossom share a lot of Kimbery and an increasing amount of Szoreny, but they express and use the exact same Charms in very different ways.
And it interacts in fascinating ways with Past Lives, which Infernals are uniquely prone to having strong associations and parallels with. Look at how Salina wanted to make the world a fair and even-handed place where everyone was free – and see how Sasi's sin of gluttony has dragged down that trait that she and her past life share and corrupted it. Look at how Yamal felt the rule of the elder Solars was unjust and they were inhuman and disconnected, how he clung to the little people rather than just retreating into a bubble of Solar power – and then turn your eyes to how Keris glares up at those above her and hates them; plotting and scheming to bring them down not for the common good but just to see them fall so they're not above her any longer.
Characters without flaws aren't interesting, and it's the broken places where people fail that produce the most interesting splinters to explore. Stories, after all, thrive on conflict – and Infernals based on sins are always locked in a battle of Man vs Self. You need not use the traditional seven for this, of course. Geasa – an Infernal from before the start of the logs who came with Keris to fight the Dead in Matasque – is probably Fallen in Hatred. Anadala is Fallen in Spite. Treachery, Vengeance, Callousness, Grief… there are many you could use. But all of them are character flaws. All of them are sins.
Because, after all. These are the Chosen of Hell.
What else are they going to champion?
If you've seen Bleach, or read @Omicron's Number None, the septet in Kerisgame are very like the Espada, whose "Death by X" titles refer both to how they bring death to others and also destroy or doom themselves. Look at how Barragan sentences those who stand before him to the ravages of time and entropy, but is ultimately himself a decaying king on a crumbling throne. Witness how Nnoitra brings despair to those who stand before his dreadful might, but is ultimately eaten from within by it and left purposeless and despairing of any cause or goal save a glorious death. There's one particular scene in Number None - spoilers apply, obviously - that encapsulates his title perfectly; how he turns it on others but also suffers it himself.
He's the most powerful Adjuchas to ever live. He stalked the deserts as a lone beast, slaying armies and Barragan's nobles without suffering any retribution. He was made a monster with the power of the stone, set above you by right of birth - you broke your mask, but he was reforged. And then he kept growing stronger until he likely surpassed the Forgotten Tercera. Even now his spiritual pressure is crushing you, seeping into your mind, making you feel in your bones just how overwhelmed you are. Blood-stained sands all around you, a shadow across the sky. What did you think you would accomplish?
It's over. You've failed. You haven't managed to meaningfully impair him. You've taken away his reach, his vision, and he is still winning. He can sense how weak you are now, and he will make a point of pride to crush you without using his Resurreccion.
He allows you this moment of despair, swinging his scythe idly, as if practicing for the executioner's blow. A smile creeps back on his mangled face and you don't need to look into his empty eye to see that it is full of contempt.
He doesn't hate you. He isn't angry with you. He's seen something in you and you've seen something in him: an emptiness inside. His disdain so rancid that it ate away at everything else he ever was until there was nothing else remaining. Hollow man in a Hollow's world. And yet even though there is a storm raging inside you, filling you to the point of bursting, even though you have substance and he has nothing, you can't break this empty vessel. With all your might, you can't even make it crack.
Nothing. You've accomplished nothing. And you will die for nothing.
It's over. You've failed. You haven't managed to meaningfully impair him. You've taken away his reach, his vision, and he is still winning. He can sense how weak you are now, and he will make a point of pride to crush you without using his Resurreccion.
He allows you this moment of despair, swinging his scythe idly, as if practicing for the executioner's blow. A smile creeps back on his mangled face and you don't need to look into his empty eye to see that it is full of contempt.
He doesn't hate you. He isn't angry with you. He's seen something in you and you've seen something in him: an emptiness inside. His disdain so rancid that it ate away at everything else he ever was until there was nothing else remaining. Hollow man in a Hollow's world. And yet even though there is a storm raging inside you, filling you to the point of bursting, even though you have substance and he has nothing, you can't break this empty vessel. With all your might, you can't even make it crack.
Nothing. You've accomplished nothing. And you will die for nothing.
It's a really good element of Number None that I adore, and we realised all the way back in Death by Fear that it's a great way to view Keris. But we also realised back then that Sasi and Testolagh fit it as well - and came to realise that so did the others.
In rough order of importance, then...
Keris Maryam Dulmeadokht; Fallen in Envy, Fallen in Fear
That's right; our cute little protagonist gets two titles, because she's just that much of a disaster area. However, I've already spoken on her terror side in my Death by Fear post; we're here to look at her Deadly Sin. Envy. This should surprise nobody, given how much of a natural fit for Szoreny she is. For as long as she's been defined by cowardice, Keris has been equally defined by envy and spite. She was a jealous, hateful, tiny thing as a slave who looked at her rich owner and loathed her for the things she had. She was a bitter, vicious little monster on the streets who cut the purses of the rich and held Bags and the faithful in contempt. She's a thief and a saboteur, a poisoner and infiltrator who lies and lies and lies to claim things not her own. From market stall apples to the naib of Malra's wealth, from children with loving parents to the lords of the Hui Cha triads, from fingers nimble enough to pick locks to the heights of Sapphire Sorcery; Keris is fundamentally a person who looks at what other people have and wants it for herself. Sometimes she gets that by earning it. Sometimes she gets it by taking it. And sometimes it's enough just to deny it to them, so that if she can't have it, no-one can. But always, she looks at what's beyond her grasp and feels a vicious stirring within her heart to stretch out her hand and snatch it.
And as is traditional, she doesn't just suffer it herself. No, she inflicts it on others in spades. Not even her cowardice can keep in check the way Keris flaunts her power in front of those who can't keep up with her; enjoys outdoing people and proving herself the best. Her social suite is overwhelmingly about tearing you down, making you want her or the things she has, or making you something she owns. Her Envy is directly tied to her sense of self-improvement and the part of her that likes to measure herself against other people as a way of keeping score. She likes being wanted. Sometimes the envy she inspires is positive - the adoring crowds of demons lauding her in the arena. Other times it's negative - Kasteen's new and bitter hatred, or her brother's quiet inferiority. Good or bad, though, she can't help but inspire it - and she can't deny that she gets a bit of a kick out of it, so long as she feels safe. She leaves Wan Washed-Out Faces on more or less permanently, just for that sweet sweet patter of "Envy: Yes" readouts, and it's not warping to her psyche because that's just... how she already thinks.
Honestly, this above any other is the reason why Keris is dangerous to the Reclamation. Her Fear is her shield, and her Envy her spear - and together, they mean that she will, inevitably, turn on her masters and bite the hands that feed her. Already she looks at the Unquestionable and resents their place above her; already she acts against them and shields herself with cowardice and cunning. Envy, alone of the sins, is the only one that tries to improve itself - not just laud itself for what it is or gather what it thinks valuable, but climb the ladder and surmount everything else around it.
If the Unquestionable knew of her envy and put thought into what it meant, they would be worried. And they would be right to be.
Nemone Sasimana; Fallen in Gluttony
That might seem an odd choice, right? Well, first of all, let's look at what gluttony is. It's overindulgence. Not only that, it's impulsive overindulgence in something which would be normal or healthy in moderation. It contrasts with lust in being a similar lack of self-control but in something not inherently wrong, and with greed in being similarly resource-intensive but born from using them rather than hoarding them. It's generally associated with food and drink, but it can apply to anything, really. Ultimately, gluttony is born of having too little sense of self, and thereby failing to properly conserve one's resources - even down to things like health and dignity.
And god, that's heartbreakingly true of Sasi. She never Exalted, and so her sense of self was ground down on the churning axis of the Scarlet Dynasty until she didn't, deep down at the very heart of her, have the self-esteem and self-respect needed to hold herself to her own set of standards. She's bad at moderation. She eats too much, drinks too much, dotes on her children more than a Dynast should. She has too much sex, she falls too far in love, she swings straight from Immaculate devotion to Yozi worship. As her mother so prominently and so often told her when she was a teenager, she's soft and weak.
But just because something is soft and weak doesn't mean that it's not dangerous. Look at what Sasi's charmtech does. She lures people in and erodes their Temperance. She encourages them to indulge - in whatever they want, in whatever she offers them. She tempts them with things that are good for them, and then gives them more and more and more until they're desperately, helplessly hooked. Her charity and generosity are her curse - she feeds you until you're bursting, and become one of her debtors in your intoxicated consumption of her desert-blessed gifts. She reduces you to a simple role on the stage, and leans you further and further into it until it makes up everything you are.
It's an incredibly insidious and subtle form of attack. She never forces anything on you. She never presents herself as a threat, or a form of opposition. She gives you what you want, and she just encourages you to enjoy it. To take some pleasure in this shitty world. To relax and destress by revelling in what brings you happiness, and to put your cares to one side for a while. It's a sweet and sympathetic sin – the most compassionate of all of them, I think, because all she really wants is for people to be happy. And she's made it a corruptive tool that she turned on herself without realising in her breakdown; a tragic figure who was and still is a victim of her own nature.
To fall to gluttony is to fall by inches and never sacrifice a thing; devouring and revelling and enjoying yourself all the while... until you realise that you were giving away your inner strength all along, and now you have none left.
Testolagh Matachim; Fallen in Pride
Here we certainly need no explanation. Aiko's papa would rather be the one man standing alone against the world than compromise his own ego. He's a proud, arrogant, stiff-necked man who takes pride in turning down things he "should" just go with the flow with. Testolagh is the character who most looks like a hero from a distance, because that's what he's built from; heroic parts. He has a tragic destroyed home village in his back story, he holds the Unquestionable in contempt, he has a hard moral code and is honest and straight forwards. We all allow heroes much more leeway with regards to pride, after all. They're better than us.
Only... his tragic destroyed home village is because he assumed he knew best and took all the young men and women and the priests to go hunt down the monster in the caves, and the others got butchered because they were defenceless. His pride means he hates the Unquestionable, but it also means he still serves them because he is not someone who breaks his promises. His moral code isn't a kind one - Compassion is the one virtue he's not pulled by. And his honesty and straight forwardness is equally the pride that means he doesn't respect people enough to soften his words or care about what they think.
Unlike Keris, he's a natural leader of men. And look what he does with them. With the owlriders, he took scattered tribes, turned them into an army, and turned them against everyone else. He crushed their leaders and their champions, and called them unworthy - and then the tribes he'd crushed cheered him on when he crushed others. He has an almost masochistic streak that comes from the arrogant, twisted idea that suffering itself has a value, because suffering when you could not be suffering makes you stronger than others who chose not to suffer. If you can withstand pain when other people fold, he tells his followers, then that makes you stronger. Even when it might be more sensible to give in. Groups he leads are too proud to withdraw, and too arrogant for others to tolerate.
The sin that Testolagh epitomises is at heart a hypocritical and corrupt sense of his own personal value. He holds himself as morally superior, he lifts up his accomplishments and honour code, but he ignores the fact that he's not really much – or any – better than the people he sneers at and thinks little of. His pride makes him unaware of his own flaws; inspires him to hubris and thinking too much of himself. He alienates people by looking down on them, wilfully blind to the ways he violates his own code, and makes of himself a rigid thing that can't bend or flex or compromise; that has no give in it or room for negotiation. He doesn't waver or doubt, he refuses to bow – and so in the end he'll break.
Pride like Testolagh's is a masochistic form of suicide. It lifts its head under the axe and thinks itself strong for taking the route that led there, rather than the thousand that might have avoided the war altogether – because this way, it doesn't have to feel like it admitted it was wrong.
Orange Blossom; Fallen in Greed
Keris's first boss is fundamentally a materialist. She values possessions. She values things. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in what she did to Keris with Eshtock. Sasi would have traded the information for a sworn favour. Keris would have probably given it straight off, and used that to hang it over their head until she felt things were square. But Orange Blossom led with the demand for payment. She only let Keris have the information after she dragged a difficult, dangerous mission out of her. And that shows her vice so well, because she'd rather have the things from Eshtock than make up with Keris. Who is her ex, and who was once in a relationship with her where they had genuine feelings for one another. And this is why that relationship fell apart, too. Because they were together; they were getting pretty serious, and Keris left on her first mission all nervous and tense and uncertain. And when she came rushing back to Hell, screaming about a powerful Abyssal assigned to the city she'd been tasked with destroying by the Mask of Winters, she sent a desperate, panicky message to Orange Blossom for help.
And Orange Blossom didn't come. Because when it came down to a choice between being there for Keris or being there for the wealth and territories she was building in Hell; when she had to decide between helping her lover and preserving the delicate, fragile web of money and holdings that would collapse if she abandoned it… she picked the latter. She always will. Avarice is the antithesis of generosity. It's choosing to be inconsiderate, rejecting compassion in aid of a specific goal or situation: keeping what you have even when it would be better to give it away. It's the inability to put aside miserliness even when it harms you. Where gluttony is a failure of self-control, greed is a failure of foresight - the result of a blind compulsion to have without thought for consequence or even fully using what you own. Sasi has too little sense of self, but Orange Blossom has too much. She succeeds all too well at conserving what she has; hoarding them even at a cost to others.
It would be bad enough if it were just her. But it's not. Orange Blossom turns things into transactions, she makes every interaction into a deal or a bargain. Her influence snares and snarls people into selfishness and thinking of what they can get out of one another, because that's the only paradigm she gives them. Her pet Dragonblood Kazem Motahari told Keris as much – that she goes into deals and meetings with everything already stacked in her favour, so people can only get what they want by coming to her. She makes it all about what they can get out of her and what she can get out of them, and forces things to favour the latter over the former.
Greed is a poison that spreads on touch, and it renders the whole world selfish.
Deveh; Fallen in Lust
Now I imagine more voices rising in confusion over our ascetic Pyrian priest than over anyone else in this post. But when you disconnect it from sex, Deveh is actually pretty lustful. Because it's not inherently carnal - lust is an intense desire or longing for a person or circumstance that reduces them to the object of the fantasy. Deveh wants to be noticed by SWLIHN-senpai; he wants Her attention and regard and to spread Her Perfect Order, and I don't think he really wants it for the sake of the Whispering Pyre. He wants it for selfish reasons - he wants to be noticed by her; rewarded with a place in the world she'll make using him as her tool. Okay, it's a Yozi he's focused on, but if you translate it to a woman or a figure of authority, the point stands - it's the praise and regard and place at her side he wants; the desire is fundamentally centred on himself; with the object of it just... an object to provide what he gets out of it.
That's not to say there's nothing but selfish desire there. Obviously he is compassionate – he's the foil to Keris's compassion. But even there… look at what Deveh's Compassion drives him to do. It leads him to hollow people out and make them part of his symmetrical hierarchy, it ends up with him putting everyone in their place so he can have his flawless system. He doesn't care about the people themselves; their wants or dreams or uniqueness. He only wants them for the part they can play in his vision. Lustful behaviour again – reducing other people to things in pursuit of the intense desire he has for his goal. He captures them in his sin and makes them creatures akin to himself; showing them the same desire he burns with and making them crave it too. When he remakes minds and reshapes souls, he puts one guiding star in there; one overriding urge that drowns out all else. The want for hierarchy. The relentless need to be a part of his order. The main difference between gluttony and lust is that the former is taking things that are healthy or normal in moderation to extremes - but lust is pursuing wants that are in and of themselves harmful or taboo or wrong.
His lust may not be for the sins of the flesh, but it destroys him all the same. He turns the blade of his flaw even on himself – Deveh has literally used Freedom Lets Go to cut away everything he remembers; his entire life prior to cresting a dune and seeing the crystalline spheres of the Whispering Pyre for the first time in the Malfean sky. He's made himself an object in his lust for Her nature as much as he does anyone else. In the end, Deveh's fall to his sin left nothing remaining from what he once was – it took a person with all the potential of the human condition, and reduced him to nothing but a hollow tool.
And the tragedy is; he's so obsessively focused on what he longs for that he thinks it's a good thing.
Naan; Fallen in Sloth
Ah, Naan. Probably the second most unintuitive Sinfernal behind Deveh. He doesn't look slothful, after all. Not really. He's entirely willing to get in vigorous activity, whether blowing up a port or getting into fights with tyrant lizards because he's bored. No, his sloth is more profound; a mental and spiritual malaise. He'll always take the easy way out. He'll never better himself. If Panther is the man who looks at himself and his life and exalted because he realised he could be more, Naan is the man who when put in the exact same position didn't do a damn thing. Self reflection is hard. Taking the righteous path is hard. Why bother?
Naan is a man who fights in arenas for fun, but as soon as an enemy starts to seem challenging, he'll escalate to max strength and crush them. He's a man who'll fall into any easy path you offer him, because it's more work to say no. And if Keris, as Envy, is a critically high risk for betraying the Third circles because she resents being told what to do and wants their power and wealth and vices for herself, Naan is the man who will never betray them unless a large number of other Infernals do, because why go through all the effort of a coup only to lose all the easy life benefits they offer? Sloth is commonly conflated with laziness, and Naan is lazy, it's true. Intellectually, morally, spiritually. He's entirely reactive, never looking forward and proactively dealing with things. But it's more than just laziness. The root of sloth, as a word and a sin, is acedia – which means "without care". And that characterises Naan frighteningly well. He doesn't care. He holds no values, he has no high-level Principles to motivate him. He'll never develop souls, There's simply nothing that anchors him; nothing to stop him being swayed by whatever's most convenient at the time.
And he spreads this condition to others. He suggests easy answers and gets bored easily. He's a blunt weapon who is almost impossible to use him subtly or cleverly. He's the friend who comes to Keris and goes "hey, you came up with a good idea in the arena fight, let's do an exhibition match"; re-using what's already been done instead of coming up with anything new. When he's part of a group, everyone else either has to work harder around him, or just follow along with the way he makes it easier to do the easy things. And when he breaks an honour duel's rules or lays waste to a city, he leaves the systems and values that people depend on, that people live by, in ruins. He creates nothing, builds nothing, preserves nothing – only drags society down into a place where riots and looters prosper. He spreads his blasted wasteland of a soul to anyone who stays too long in contact with him; leaving them apathetic bottom-feeders like him who don't care about what's right or sustainable or even effective – only what's easy.
There's a gear loose in the clockwork of Creation; dirt clogging the pipes and cracks in the frame. Why fix it? It'll survive another few years or decades past your lifespan. The collapse is someone else's problem.
Kasteen Akwilia; Fallen in Wrath
The youngest and newest member of the septet; rounding it out at last – and wow is she leaning into her sin. Only two scenes so far, and already we see her problem. Like envy, anger can be a constructive force, but Kasteen's fury isn't constructive. It's blind. It's thoughtless. It's not focused or channelled or use; her rage is controlling her whenever it gets out of its cage. And it's a pretty flimsy cage. It makes her impatient, it makes her stupid. It makes her take the simplest and most direct option, not out of laziness, but because it's the quickest route to the fight. She assumes that if she hits things hard enough she'll always win – and when she starts losing, she just gets even angrier and tries to out-escalate the target of her rage.
And more than that, Kasteen's anger is flawed because it's not justified by anything. It's entitlement, in its purest form. She doesn't get angry for good reasons – she gets angry when she doesn't get something she wants, or whenever things don't go her way. As soon as things become difficult or the world doesn't respond the way she wants it to – be it a meeting dragging on too long or someone not giving her what she feels is her due respect or her ships suffering damage in a battle – her reaction isn't to look for the cause of the problem and fix it; it's to find a target to blame and take out her frustration on them.
Which makes her a pretty obnoxious person. People get angry at her. Her stubborn refusal to see reason, her brutal stupidity and use of blunt force in every situation no matter how bad an idea it is, the way she makes enemies she doesn't need to make by striking first and offending or assaulting people for meaningless, pointless reasons… she spreads anger around her wherever she goes. Odds are she Exalted in the first place because her crew got so angry at her and her rages that they marooned her a la Pirates of the Caribbean. And when she does win? When her sheer power is enough to force things to turn out more or less like she wants, or at least to hurt things until she feels satisfied? She teaches anyone watching that anger works. That the way to get what you want is to rage and scream and hurl abuse and throw fits and tantrums and violence at anything that slightly impedes you until nobody dares speak up regardless of how far you go. She shows people that wrath is not only a coin that can buy you anything you want, but also a shield that makes you immune to the consequences of spending it.
Kasteen is a wildfire, and she doesn't just burn and scorch the world she inflicts herself on. She sets it alight in her wake, and the flames of wrath catch in other people and consume them.
So that's our septet. Each with their own sin. Each with their own flaw. Each with their own way they hurt others and hurt themselves and make the world in general a worse place to live in; spreading their personal failings around and being generally villainous. This is, I think, a crucial design element to roleplaying an Infernal in general. Because they're antagonists. They're villains – or if they're heroes, they're tragic heroes or antiheroes. They're flawed, failed people who are to some extent evil and who might not wound the world as badly as Abyssals do by just existing, but who are still fundamentally maluses on Creation. That's the point. That's why you play them.
It serves the useful purpose of injecting variance into Infernal powersets – Keris and Naan both share Metagaos and some TED, but Naan's soulscape is a blighted wasteland of dark heavy ruins under gnarled and untamed growth that he looked at and went "this is fine", while Keris's TED and Metagaos souls all like building and creating things. Keris and Orange Blossom share a lot of Kimbery and an increasing amount of Szoreny, but they express and use the exact same Charms in very different ways.
And it interacts in fascinating ways with Past Lives, which Infernals are uniquely prone to having strong associations and parallels with. Look at how Salina wanted to make the world a fair and even-handed place where everyone was free – and see how Sasi's sin of gluttony has dragged down that trait that she and her past life share and corrupted it. Look at how Yamal felt the rule of the elder Solars was unjust and they were inhuman and disconnected, how he clung to the little people rather than just retreating into a bubble of Solar power – and then turn your eyes to how Keris glares up at those above her and hates them; plotting and scheming to bring them down not for the common good but just to see them fall so they're not above her any longer.
Characters without flaws aren't interesting, and it's the broken places where people fail that produce the most interesting splinters to explore. Stories, after all, thrive on conflict – and Infernals based on sins are always locked in a battle of Man vs Self. You need not use the traditional seven for this, of course. Geasa – an Infernal from before the start of the logs who came with Keris to fight the Dead in Matasque – is probably Fallen in Hatred. Anadala is Fallen in Spite. Treachery, Vengeance, Callousness, Grief… there are many you could use. But all of them are character flaws. All of them are sins.
Because, after all. These are the Chosen of Hell.
What else are they going to champion?
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mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
wrath exalted REPRESENT
Interesting. I guess even the Yozi's themselves have an element of this sinfulness and self-destruction. It's easy to see how Malfeas's own rages, and SWLIN's obsessive need for control are self-sabotaging sins. The Ebon Dragon is so unrelentingly contrary that he can't live in peace with anybody; he does nothing but what people don't want him to do (including things like "don't stab me"), and so drives people to kill him and chain him just to be rid of him. Cecelyne is a bit trickier, but her caprice, her inability to genuinely hold to the laws she proclaims, and her Machiavellian cynicism undermine the very law she relies upon until it collapses beneath her.
I can't think of anything for Adorjan that isn't a stretch.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
One thing that I thinks is worth noting- that came up in the discord chat but may not be clear here, is that Aleph is writing more from an analysis and narrative tool/structure direction. She's not trying to say that the classic 'seven deadly sins' are at all inherent to Creation or even Malfeas- (we've already had enough trouble trying to get people to not overdo the connotation of the word 'Demon' with torches and pitchforks and damnation). Instead, the above post is more about how these personalities fall into narrative and thematic archetypes.
Like- envy as a concept exists in Creation (It's probably under Venus, for example), but it's not really seen as a sin in the religious sense of the word. Oh a given culture might say so, but there's no cosmic force that says 'This is a sin, it is inherently corruptible, consumptive, destructive' to be this thing. No external moral or ethical arbiter. Not even the Unconquered Sun really defines what is moral and good and just- even if most positive interpretations of the 4 Virtues suggest that they are Usually Good.
(Thinking about it, it's better to say that UCS embodies the ideal of 'driven by Virtue', not 'interpretation of virtue'. It's equally compassionate to offer mercy, be charitable, to prevent or reduce suffering, etc. But the important factor is that your Compassion drives you to act, not that Compassion means a specific kind of Goodness. Compassion can drive you to murder, after all, if that is the most compassionate act you can conceive of.)
Anyway- the point is, and it bears really stating out loud, that there is no central master authority or arbiter of 'what is good/bad' or 'sinful' or anything really. That's all defined on the ideological level by polities and actors. Creation is at it's core a setting about the bigger being enforcing their will upon the smaller- even if what they're enforcing is nominally good. So calling these seven Infernals 'sinful' is not saying that 'Judeo-christian conception of Sin' is canonical in Creation- it's saying that these characters map to these flaws and personality types.
Like- envy as a concept exists in Creation (It's probably under Venus, for example), but it's not really seen as a sin in the religious sense of the word. Oh a given culture might say so, but there's no cosmic force that says 'This is a sin, it is inherently corruptible, consumptive, destructive' to be this thing. No external moral or ethical arbiter. Not even the Unconquered Sun really defines what is moral and good and just- even if most positive interpretations of the 4 Virtues suggest that they are Usually Good.
(Thinking about it, it's better to say that UCS embodies the ideal of 'driven by Virtue', not 'interpretation of virtue'. It's equally compassionate to offer mercy, be charitable, to prevent or reduce suffering, etc. But the important factor is that your Compassion drives you to act, not that Compassion means a specific kind of Goodness. Compassion can drive you to murder, after all, if that is the most compassionate act you can conceive of.)
Anyway- the point is, and it bears really stating out loud, that there is no central master authority or arbiter of 'what is good/bad' or 'sinful' or anything really. That's all defined on the ideological level by polities and actors. Creation is at it's core a setting about the bigger being enforcing their will upon the smaller- even if what they're enforcing is nominally good. So calling these seven Infernals 'sinful' is not saying that 'Judeo-christian conception of Sin' is canonical in Creation- it's saying that these characters map to these flaws and personality types.
Secrets Revealed - Chapter 2
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Aaaand here's Chapter 2! In which we see the aftermath of Keris and Sasi's "performance" (poor, poor Keris), get some adorable kiddy time (yay Aiko!), Lilunu scolds her adorable little student for being naughty (not like that, get your minds out of the gutter), and Keris does something unutterably stupid. Again.
Oh, and there's also a super-special secret spoilery surprise at the end. But any more on that would be telling. : 3
To the extras!
Oh, and there's also a super-special secret spoilery surprise at the end. But any more on that would be telling. : 3
To the extras!
EarthScorpion: As a reward from the vox populi of Hell, Keris has a temporary 1 dot increase of Infamy for putting on such a fantastic entertainment for so many powerful demons.
Aleph: lol
EarthScorpion: So, she'll definitely find it easy to find demons for her crew to replace the ones she lost. They adore her.
EarthScorpion: And ah, the flip-side of Haneyl's aromantic view of things. She doesn't think it's a big deal, so she's just warmly congratulating Keris for making Sasi happy, because she likes both her mothers to be happy and getting along.
Aleph:
…
EarthScorpion: Roll me your Mentor Lilunu.
Aleph: 2 sux
EarthScorpion: OK, so she'll be able to make time for you next scream, though only an hour or so.
EarthScorpion: You could go visit Sasi, interact with other Hellish characters, or follow up on any other threads you want to in the meantime.
Aleph: Cool. Hmm. Keris is probably feeling a little too awkward for Sasi time right now, so she will... hmm. See if she can find Yuula and get a medicine lesson.
EarthScorpion: On the other hand, Sasi would allow the twins to be kept happy when they didn't get Lili because they can see Aiko, while you'll have to take them back home because... uh, you don't want babies who like putting things in their mouths so much anywhere near Yuula.
Aleph: ... an excellent point!
EarthScorpion: also, lol, Eko is the only one who won't give Keris shit about this because she'll repress it as hard as she has to.
Aleph: Heheh.
Aleph: Yeah, so Keris is just going to spend this scream coaxing Sasi into having cute family time with Aiko and the twins, then go see Lilunu.
EarthScorpion: Sasi asks, "Why are Americans more OK with violence than sex in movies?"
Aleph: o u
…
EarthScorpion: Oh, Keris. This whole thing has turned into strong thematic reinforcement of her issues. And the mortification has probably removed that 1-dot of Exhibitionism, eroding it back away
Aleph: Yup.
EarthScorpion: Such a shame. Sasi wanted to reinforce it up to 2-dots. Poor Sasi, not getting the vices she wants.
EarthScorpion: Oh, Keris and her relationship with her body and sex and... well. It's inconsistent, but it's inconsistent in a very human way. Her hypocrisy is kind of rounded there.
Aleph: Yes, heh.
EarthScorpion: She literally became a stripper so she could seduce Golden Child and buy her soul when Golden Child thought she was buying her body, but Keris is just like "that didn't count; I only slept with her because I wanted to and I could have gotten her another way if I hadn't thought she was cute".
EarthScorpion: Hmm. What will Testolagh say, actually? Because on one hand, he's kind of accepted that Sasi and Keris have a thing going on - and it's a long-lasting, sustained thing where their family groups have kind of merged and Aiko is really happy to have a little brother and sister. It's not just them messing around. But on the other...
Aleph: It's not them being together that he'll be upset at. It's the broadcasting a 32-success UMI porno to thousands of demons and sparking a scream-long orgy.
Aleph: ... on the other hand, Keris will probably make a spirited attempt at literally dying of mortification as soon as it comes up, which might appease him slightly.
Aleph: It's hard to be angry at someone who is very clearly punishing themselves worse than you could manage with an hour of screaming and possibly a lead pipe.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, but, mmm. Them doing that, if he accepts that they're in a relationship, doesn't go against his Valour, Conviction or Temperance.
EarthScorpion: Sigh. Honestly, if he's seen it, he's probably feeling inadequate.
Aleph: lol
Aleph: He is physically attracted to Keris, honestly. He'd probably have enjoyed it more than he's entirely willing to admit.
Aleph: ... yeah, sigh. Given his pride, I think the most likely result is him just not talking about it.
Aleph: (Keris is unutterably grateful)
…
EarthScorpion: Sigh. I think I know how Yuula acts as a Mentor. She gets into bets with Keris to see if she can work out how to reverse-engineer certain medicines and she'll teach her if she can work out what they're made of
Aleph: Heh.
EarthScorpion: (Of course, in doing that, Keris learns. And so even if she wins, Yuula is like "Well, I held up my end of the deal and don't have to do anything".)
Aleph: worst best mentor
Aleph: So, hmm, Keris will pick up Immortal Emperor Benediction, and I think I'll also try to pick up a medical Style as well. Not sure what kind. Probably trauma. Actually, lemme check that surgery one from the doc.
EarthScorpion: Hmm. Well, there's always Needles-and-Spires Style from Lilunu. That's an acupuncture style and also a geomantic one
Aleph: Ooo, true. Hee.
EarthScorpion: She can probably get started with it with Lilunu, and then learn some more either in the days after Calibration or, sigh, the Elloge in Lilunu means she's been experimenting with writing beautifully illustrated books
EarthScorpion: that uh
EarthScorpion: would be burned on sight by the Immaculate Order as they are in fact convincing demonic tracts that push her ideals of beauty in the reader.
Keris: *isn't affected*Aleph: Keris: "I don't see what that has to do with anything."
Nun: "You're not affected because you already agree with them fully!"
EarthScorpion: God, Lilunu's book is actually almost certainly a potent sorcerous research materials tome. Even though she's not a sorceress. And is also a very informative thing on manse-building once you wrap your head around her paradigm.
Aleph: Hmm. On that note… Resources Keris can throw at her painting-making spell:
- Study of her own painting.EarthScorpion: If she can find that tree face spell, that'd be an excellent starting point.
- An action from Lilunu writing out a detailed book about how she did it and the occult theories behind art-as-self and self-as-art.
- Oula or Yuu, once they learn Sorcery - especially the latter.
Aleph: Ooo, yes, true. Libraries of Orabilis, yo.
Aleph: Hmm. The base spell is Emerald, and makes an arcane-link painting that can be used to scry on the subject. I think...
Aleph: ... heh, yes.
Aleph: I think that if Keris makes the painting itself an artifact and then uses Key to a Kingdom on it, she might... hmm. Normally anchoring a spell in an artifact means you can't use the base power of the artifact, but in this case the arcane link is a Sorcerous effect attached to the painting, and it doesn't necessarily need to be an artifact in its own right. So... heh, yeah. Making it an artifact painting and using Key to a Kingdom on it is probably how Keris would get an equivalent of her own painting. A combination of two spells.
Aleph: (Which means that inner-world paintings are going to be rare, because making an artifact painting is non-trivial so she only does it when she has a really good reason like letting Aiko get hugs from her painting-mama.)
EarthScorpion: o aunty keris
Aleph: Honestly, she'd probably have given Aiko her portrait if she weren't, um, naked in it.
Keris: "... wait. Iris, sweetie? Can you give painting-me some clothes?"EarthScorpion: Aiko: "I don't understand. Aunty Keris, you wash me in the bath and we're both naked then."
Aiko: "You make me feel really safe in the bath. Baths are scary."Aleph: d'aww
Aleph: ... shit, Iris actually might be able to. We know she can manipulate tattoos on Keris's skin, and her painting literally is art done on part of her skin that happens to not be attached to her body.
Aleph: Hmm. If she can find a Spoke the Wooden Face variant in Orabilis's libraries - which she probably can, because he is, sigh, perfectly fine with Keris going hunting for spell research/development materials…
EarthScorpion: Or something similar, at least. Sigh. At the very least, there's probably one that lets you speak through an evil stone face.
Aleph: But that would be a, hmm...
Aleph: Major?
Aleph: Or extreme?
EarthScorpion: Major, I think. Speaking through a painting is sort of speaking through an image like something carved into a tree. But you're not just changing the material the thing is carved into, which would be Minor.
Aleph: Yeah, cool. So with study of her painting and a research book from Lilunu, Keris can just spend a seasonal action on tying it all together.
Aleph: Oh Lilunu. She quite likes helping Keris invent new spells. It's exciting~
EarthScorpion: she may also want to ask keris where hermione has gone~
Aleph: well yes that too :c
…
EarthScorpion: Oh, Sasi. There is a bit of her that's a 60 year old woman who likes having a pair of younger, beautiful people in love with her.
Aleph: ... heh. So has Vali's Principle shifted to "Clan and Kin"?
Aleph: Or, hmm…
Aleph: "Free From All Save Clan and Kin"
Aleph: Hmm. Yeah, I think that strikes a nice balance between what it was, and it now also including "but family can chain me".
Aleph: sigh
Aleph: and it's so clearly a reaction to the Tairan arc
Aleph: poor keris
…
<Lilunu scene>
EarthScorpion: Keris is now being hugged tight (a bit too tight) by a basically-naked Lilunu, and the "shit, Lilinu looks just like Sasi when her hair is grey" thing is now in play
Aleph: oh noes
Aleph: Heh. Oh, Keris. She's chosen her loyalties.
Aleph: It may be a while before it comes down to explicitly going against the other Unquestionable to their faces, but this right here; this is her declaring which side she's on when that day comes.
Aleph: Hehehehe~
Aleph: Keris is - ostensibly - talking about herself before her Exaltation with this little story.
Aleph: If Lilunu draws any parallels from a story about how to survive when you're powerless and trapped and can't afford to stand up to people to their faces... well, nobody can prove anything.
EarthScorpion: Lela is chained, though. And she's Lilunu's Defying Soul.
Aleph: yes
Aleph: Hmm.
Aleph: But... Hermione is able to hide her spiteful feelings.
EarthScorpion: Well, also Hermione is the Envious soul, not the Defying one. They don't necessarily want to hurt her capacity to envy, but she's certainly one of the suspect ones. Unlike, say, Bruleuse, who they are A-OK with.
EarthScorpion: (this could be considered commentary on the permitted emotions to women
Aleph: Yeah. But still. Keris is innocently offering purely academic lessons that might, hmm.
Aleph: I dunno how the as-above-so-below stuff works here.
Aleph: But it's worth a shot to see if walking Lilunu through some entirely hypothetical lessons on how Keris does her job in Creation might help her out a little - and perhaps give Lela some strength in her secret prison, even as she remains chained.
Aleph: ... sigh. And Keris's style of lying is to not actually lie, after all
Aleph: to never outright defy
Aleph: just... avoid getting into trouble.
EarthScorpion: Yes, hee.
Aleph: ... goddammit she's going to teach Lilunu Mendaciloquent Maverick Style.
Keris: "You don't have to tell any falsehoods. Just... tell them the truth in a certain way, and if they happen to assume things from it that aren't exactly right, that's not your fault at all."EarthScorpion: Yes.
EarthScorpion: Hee. Her book is clearly like that Quran.
Aleph: unf
EarthScorpion: Oh Keris. She's doing more illegal things than ever, and yet her Infamy has never been higher.
Aleph: God, she's riding at Infamy 4 right now. And is a division head with a perfect mission record.
Aleph: Truly, she is almost as good as First Dolphin at covering up her dirty laundry.
EarthScorpion: And she's a suck-up to both the CEO and the CEO's wife.
Aleph: rather more so the latter~
Aleph: (one of these days she's going to help with a hostile takeover
…
<Yuula scene>
Aleph: You know, it's a pity that Infernal Artist's Touch is only E8, and that the adamant manacles are probably already Szoreny-corrupted from sheer exposure. Because shifting them to get them off her would be hilarious if it were possible. The look on her face~
EarthScorpion: Heh.
Aleph: ... actually, that'd be interesting. I wonder what readout Keris would get if she touched them?
Aleph: I might try that at some point.
Aleph: … goddammit yuula-sensei is like tsunade-sensei
Aleph: she r mean
EarthScorpion: mean and torn up by her past
EarthScorpion: and likes people standing up to her, but tries to crush people who stand up to her
Aleph:
Aleph: Heh. Keris isn't her Naruto. Keris is her Sakura.
EarthScorpion: Yeeeeeeeeep.
Aleph: (the student who will surpass her, and do what she never could)
[Keris not only takes her bet, but escalates it]
Aleph: oh yuula
Aleph: no wonder you like her
Aleph: (the only way to deal with Yuula is not just to meet her expectations, but to outdo them
EarthScorpion: Then she can go straight to Oula - so at the very least she can get things copied out if she loses.
Aleph: oh goddammit that drinking offer is unfair, now I can't turn her down or I lose
EarthScorpion:
EarthScorpion: Sigh. Yuula always pushes.
Aleph: Hee
Aleph: I did like that, though.
"You have a week."EarthScorpion: dammit keris
"I'll do it in five days!"
Aleph: god, I really like Yuula
Aleph: she's - hah
Aleph: she's the Sea Eagle of mentors
EarthScorpion: Hee, there really are certain NPCs you like. Usually ones who are kind of antagonist-y, but not quite.
EarthScorpion: Ney, Sea Eagle, Yuula, Calesco...
Aleph: : 3
Aleph: Heh. I had to come up with a reason why Keris wouldn't just refuse the bet on account of valuing the book more
Aleph: And then I was like "wait, this is Yuula"
Aleph: "she's a bitch"
Aleph: "she's going to make it so that if Keris backs down, she'll take the book anyway"
Aleph: and then everything just clicked.
EarthScorpion: She's a mean, bitter old lady who hasn't gotten over her heartbreak, and has PTSD from what the Exalted did to her.
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: Heh. The entire, uh, orgy bit was totally unplanned, and the "you could broadcast it" bit from Yuula was meant to just be her being crude. And then you got me to roll a dice and it came up a success.
EarthScorpion: So really it was all Sasi's fat ass.
EarthScorpion: Well, that and you totally flipping the planned relationships with the other Infernals.
EarthScorpion: (you can tell I didn't plan it, because you went and did something totally unexpected)
Aleph: I do have a talent for doing that ^_^
EarthScorpion: Thiiiiiiiiis story is going to be M-tagged.
Aleph: Oh very much so yes.
…
EarthScorpion: Oh, Keris. It is funny that she's got such a remarkably stable, long-term relationship going. But there is a question about Testolagh, especially if they get to talking in the aftermath when heading home.
EarthScorpion: Is she ever going to say anything about Salina to him~
Aleph: Hmm.
Aleph: I mean
Aleph: certainly not in Hell
EarthScorpion: Well, no, back in Saata or on the boat back.
EarthScorpion: Also, goddamnit Keris. She's definitely going to insist on putting a nice prominent statue of herself with her new charmtech in her submarine.
EarthScorpion: It's even one of her bits of UMI she can use fairly safely around relatives and stuff.
Keris: "I mean, it's made to make me look like someone they should love. And my family loves me."Aleph: : 3
EarthScorpion: Hmm. Just a check - is Keris on any active birth control at the moment? Hmm. The twins and Atiya are probably on a mixed diet with some milk, but probably not fully milk-based, especially since Kali and Ogin now both have baby teeth and like feeding themselves. So for the first time in two years, sigh, her periods are back up.
Aleph: Hmm. I mean, since Haneyl's little bomb, she keeps track of her cycle internally and has Flesh Weaving Tendrils and Teeth Without Number to make sure that any little accidents don't happen.
Aleph: She can just eat the egg before it reaches the uterus.
Aleph: ... actually she can probably eat the uterine lining as well, which helpfully avoids the period.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, makes sense. Heh. Flesh-weaving massaging it away.
Aleph: keris stop using autocannibalism to keep your monthlies under control
EarthScorpion: What, you mean "replace my cervix with a tiny mouth that just eats anything that gets in?"
Aleph: *snrrk*
EarthScorpion: Sasi: "Oh, yes, that's the solution I use. I used to use mind-hands, but this is just easier."
Sasi: "I love having babies around, and Aiko deserves a little sibling, but I can't have one now with everything that's going on."Aleph: Keris: *grins*
Sasi: "Once this is over, though, Keris? You're getting me pregnant. I want to give Haneyl a younger sibling."
Keris: "Another one, you mean."EarthScorpion: Sasi: "And Vali too, of course, yes. But a baby of ours who can grow up with us together. Not suddenly appear as me as a grown girl."
Aleph: Keris: "I think we can manage that~"
EarthScorpion: Sigh, and if it takes about as long as Sasi thinks for the job to finish, it'll come up just as Keris is starting to feel like she wants babies around the place given the twins will probably be around 5-6.
Aleph: Yup!
EarthScorpion: ... heh. Honestly, among the things in Lilunu's book probably is sex-change acupuncture, where with the right needles you change the flows from male to female or vice versa, and over an extended period if you keep it up, it's basically like HRT.
Aleph: goddammit i'm so jealous
EarthScorpion: Prefer to be jabbed with needles than take drugs?
Aleph: ...
Aleph: shut up
Aleph: Keris: "Hee~"
Oula: "What is it?"Aleph: urgh, she can trace chakra flows with her bare fingers
Keris: "A lot of this stuff is dependent on the needle material, since different substances affect chakra flow in different ways."
Oula: "... yeah. And?"
Keris: *wiggles her left hand*
Keris: "Half the examples are things I can transmute on the fly."
Aleph: she's disgustingly good at this
EarthScorpion: Amazing, isn't it; Lilunu's charms aid with her preferred methods.
Aleph: so unfair~
EarthScorpion: Yes. And she can extend the principles to use Kerisian materials, and introduce Kerisian essence into people's chakra systems. She can, heh, certainly use this as the basis for working on enlightening mortals like Pale Branch to have their own essence pools.
Aleph: Keris: "Okay, we're gonna be raising this sociopath's crippled sense of Compassion with acupuncture."
Keris: *produces an amber needle, which glints worryingly in the light*EarthScorpion: Heh.
Keris: "Fair warning. This is going to hurt. Both physically and emotionally."
EarthScorpion: Manses designed with these principles won't be very habitable. They tend to be much more obelisks, and other narrow tall things with deep foundations.
Aleph: So just fine for seabed manses~
EarthScorpion: Keris: "Right! Let's find Shogunate mining platforms and take their jadesteel and supercrete supports for this."
Aleph:
…
Aleph: Heh.
Aleph: Close up the chapter, and give me 0xp.
Aleph: Because I spent it all on Oula's Sorcery
EarthScorpion: Done
EarthScorpion: Oh Oula
EarthScorpion: Such a dangerous realisation
EarthScorpion: Mercurial artisans are, I suspect, one of the better breeds at getting sorcery. Their nature imposes certain limits on them so they often have an easy sacrifice - and they're naturally one of the more intelligent breeds with an affinity for the occult.
EarthScorpion: Szilfa are smarter, but don't have the same innate occult scholarship. Vali's ones are good at finding sacrifices, but just can't easily maintain enlightenment 4.
EarthScorpion: (Then watch when the next demon to work out how to do it is Saji, to everyone's disgust.)
Aleph: Lol.
...
EarthScorpion: Oh yeah, roll me 7d10
Aleph: Um
Aleph: ... 3 successes.
Aleph: I-is that a good thing?
EarthScorpion: So, Rounen over Fire had some moderate success, and managed to cultivate a couple of new dragon aides
Aleph: Woo!
EarthScorpion: Soon Keris will find that one dragon aide is an efficient and superior underling, but several becomes a warren of backstabbing and jockeying for status.
Aleph: Hahaha.
Keris: "I have decided to split them up and put them in charge of different things where they don't interact much."EarthScorpion: She will also find that one hungry one is an effective underling, and several is an effective murder-pack with only occasional beatings to resolve the dominance hierarchy.
Keris: "Largely to ensure that I have as many by the end of the year as I started it with."
Keris: "Oh, and also to maximise use of their talents. But mostly the first one."
EarthScorpion: Elly, who is tall, kind of lawful butch, and older than them, dommes everyone who isn't Haneyl.
Aleph: Keris: *clears throat*
EarthScorpion: Elly: "Of course. You are just as beautiful as your daughter. My heart beats to think what you might do with my willing body."
Aleph: That was more directed at "dommes everyone who isn't Haneyl".
EarthScorpion: Heh, yes. And Elly is the one who has... honestly, been most warped by proximity to Haneyl. Saji is younger and asexual, and Rounen has spent more time around Keris, but Elly has been blasted with Haneyl's full maturing spiritual hormones. She longs to be as submissive to Keris as she is to Haneyl. In all the same ways. But of course, would never act on it without Keris acting first because that would ruin the point. But she's delighted when Keris tells her to clean the floor or casually orders her around, or flesh-weaves her human form into a disguised self.
Aleph: hee
Aleph: sigh
Aleph: She likes seeing Keris fight, too. Like, a lot. If she gets a record of that fight against Kasteen, it'll probably do more for her than the home porno that came after it.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, that exceeds even what she gets from sparring with Keris which Keris does to stay in shape when in Saata.
EarthScorpion: poor keris
EarthScorpion: about a third of the adult keruby want to be her
EarthScorpion: and another third just want her
EarthScorpion: she has been a defining figure for a lot of metaphysical teenage libidos
EarthScorpion: Especially when Rathan, Haneyl and Calesco have been absent and so they're not there to crush on instead.
EarthScorpion: (also crushing on Rathan is dangerous when Oula is there)
EarthScorpion: (Crushing on Haneyl is dangerous for your pelvis, and then your heart when she gets bored.)
EarthScorpion: Which, uh
EarthScorpion: Actually makes Calesco the safest crush. Somehow.
- Location
- Wingmaiden's Reach, the Near Roofs, Town
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Every time he shows up, I am struck with a moment of admiration for the calm and professional demeanor in which Mehuni deals with the eleven-ring circus that is Keris' life, Especially because, unlike Rounen, he's not really around Keris enough to be immunized through exposure - he's just that organized and unflappable.
Mehuni is a hero.
Mehuni is a hero.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
It's nice to see Keris confirm to Lilunu just how far she'll go for her.
It's going to be so much fun once she finally escalates to things like breaking Lela out.
(I only hope it does not end in tears.)
It's going to be so much fun once she finally escalates to things like breaking Lela out.
(I only hope it does not end in tears.)
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
We can also infer from the way he didn't blink an eye at her tattoos that he is butlering-sexual, and thus an inapplicable target for their influence.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
When will we see pipera mehuni crossover commentary?
Clearly Rounen needs a training arc under him.
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Don't tell that to Haneyl, she might misinterpret it.
meianmaru
The Devourer of Fiction
Haven't made many in-thread comments lately because of the Discord-server-option, but this is a little too long and rambling topic to put there.
*****
The post about "Sinfernals" and the latest chapter got me thinking about what kind sin/flaw Lilunu would map into. In this latest chapter, we once again see her struggle with the idea of opposing her creators and superiors, which not-so-surprisingly points out her flaw to be same as the one Keris has: Fear, which that whole discussion about being powerless was all about. No wonder this student-teacher pair gets along so well, besides the similarities and interests they have.
Or maybe it could be better categorized as excessive meekness towards the Yozis and their souls, combined with a heavy dose of escapism. She has her dreams, she has her goals, but doesn't dare to pursue them truly in the fullness of her vision, because she knows that the opposition she would face could instantly snuff out anything she tried to do that they didn't approve of, combined with herself truly loving Ligier, and not wanting to anger or even disappoint him. The fact that she has been pre-emptively crippled in at least couple of ways to explicitly prevent any thoughts about rebellion, which her "love" approved? And the fact that number might rise soon with Antifasi and Hermione if deemed so by certain Unquestionables, and if Keris doesn't manage to protect them if this comes to pass? Well, Ligier almost certainly does love Lilunu and wishes to protect her, but only as long as she is beneath her. And yes, also in that way you pervs, but also in the more serious way where he could easily turn into an abusive husband who is smashing her "silly dreams" to "protect her" with complete sincerity and seriousness.
So Lilunu instead turns to things that bring her pleasure but do not anger the Yozis or their souls, which is mostly about making and appreaciating art (in a much smaller scale than she is capable of) of course, with the side activity of trying to get her dear Infernals to at least tolerate each other.
But while I think that most of this has been already pointed out by Aleph and ES before many many times and can be easily noticed by, you know, reading the story, what I am actually quite interested in is what Lilunu could be with her chains of subservience and meekness broken apart, and what her "flaw" would be then. We see couple of hints every now and then about her conflicting natures rising to the front briefly, especially when she has been feeling well after Keris has helped with her chakra-knots. The only reason we don't see this more often is because of how damaging this seems to be for Lilunu, which means she is not only inhibited by external factors in expressing her true feelings, but has to work extra-hard to not display those herself, lest she suffer a bad case of omen-weather once again.
But from what we have seen thus far from those brief climpses: Oh boy. I think she would have a whole kaleidoscopically shifting rainbow of "sins" as her nature cycles between different Yozi-phases. I mean, every single one of her souls is flawed in some way that is themed to their corresponding Yozi, with some leaning more than other to the western Deadly Sins than the others. And while they could all probably promote constructive ways to express them if they were healthy souls, even then I can see Lilunu exhibiting both the good and the bad sides of them depending on what "phase" she would be currently in. And with maybe mixtures of those phases providing some sort of flavours of balance, like her dear Infernals at least sometimes show with their "healthier" mixes of Charm-sets that don't dive too deep into the, well, deep end of the Ultimate Cosmic Power (TM).
If she ever manages to free, that is. Which suddenly actually seems somewhat more likely with Keris starting to corrupt her mentor in her wicked, wicked not-lying-but-misleading ways. Which will probably make the promised hiatus in the near-future even more agonizing, as I wait to see Lilunu unshackled. Curses.
*****
So those were my (very rambling and incoherent) thoughts about Lilunu, and her inner demons she would be wrestling with to be more constructive and healthy if they weren't, you know, basically crippled or douple-crippled fragile husks because the current states of her position.
*Bows in supplication*
Please accept this meager offering story-weavers, and in return, please grant us more of your delicious story-words when you see fit.
*****
The post about "Sinfernals" and the latest chapter got me thinking about what kind sin/flaw Lilunu would map into. In this latest chapter, we once again see her struggle with the idea of opposing her creators and superiors, which not-so-surprisingly points out her flaw to be same as the one Keris has: Fear, which that whole discussion about being powerless was all about. No wonder this student-teacher pair gets along so well, besides the similarities and interests they have.
Or maybe it could be better categorized as excessive meekness towards the Yozis and their souls, combined with a heavy dose of escapism. She has her dreams, she has her goals, but doesn't dare to pursue them truly in the fullness of her vision, because she knows that the opposition she would face could instantly snuff out anything she tried to do that they didn't approve of, combined with herself truly loving Ligier, and not wanting to anger or even disappoint him. The fact that she has been pre-emptively crippled in at least couple of ways to explicitly prevent any thoughts about rebellion, which her "love" approved? And the fact that number might rise soon with Antifasi and Hermione if deemed so by certain Unquestionables, and if Keris doesn't manage to protect them if this comes to pass? Well, Ligier almost certainly does love Lilunu and wishes to protect her, but only as long as she is beneath her. And yes, also in that way you pervs, but also in the more serious way where he could easily turn into an abusive husband who is smashing her "silly dreams" to "protect her" with complete sincerity and seriousness.
So Lilunu instead turns to things that bring her pleasure but do not anger the Yozis or their souls, which is mostly about making and appreaciating art (in a much smaller scale than she is capable of) of course, with the side activity of trying to get her dear Infernals to at least tolerate each other.
But while I think that most of this has been already pointed out by Aleph and ES before many many times and can be easily noticed by, you know, reading the story, what I am actually quite interested in is what Lilunu could be with her chains of subservience and meekness broken apart, and what her "flaw" would be then. We see couple of hints every now and then about her conflicting natures rising to the front briefly, especially when she has been feeling well after Keris has helped with her chakra-knots. The only reason we don't see this more often is because of how damaging this seems to be for Lilunu, which means she is not only inhibited by external factors in expressing her true feelings, but has to work extra-hard to not display those herself, lest she suffer a bad case of omen-weather once again.
But from what we have seen thus far from those brief climpses: Oh boy. I think she would have a whole kaleidoscopically shifting rainbow of "sins" as her nature cycles between different Yozi-phases. I mean, every single one of her souls is flawed in some way that is themed to their corresponding Yozi, with some leaning more than other to the western Deadly Sins than the others. And while they could all probably promote constructive ways to express them if they were healthy souls, even then I can see Lilunu exhibiting both the good and the bad sides of them depending on what "phase" she would be currently in. And with maybe mixtures of those phases providing some sort of flavours of balance, like her dear Infernals at least sometimes show with their "healthier" mixes of Charm-sets that don't dive too deep into the, well, deep end of the Ultimate Cosmic Power (TM).
If she ever manages to free, that is. Which suddenly actually seems somewhat more likely with Keris starting to corrupt her mentor in her wicked, wicked not-lying-but-misleading ways. Which will probably make the promised hiatus in the near-future even more agonizing, as I wait to see Lilunu unshackled. Curses.
*****
So those were my (very rambling and incoherent) thoughts about Lilunu, and her inner demons she would be wrestling with to be more constructive and healthy if they weren't, you know, basically crippled or douple-crippled fragile husks because the current states of her position.
*Bows in supplication*
Please accept this meager offering story-weavers, and in return, please grant us more of your delicious story-words when you see fit.
Thinking on the Sinfernals one thing that comes to mind is that the majority of the sins are driving their heroic feats (in the tragic sense). Plus they make easier to get into the frame work of the narritive weight put onto Infernals Man vs Self conflict
That is to say the Principals that drive these characters to do great and terrible acts almost all can line up neatly with their primary Sins.
Envy, Pride, Greed, Lust and Wrath are powerful and obvious motivators to action, and even Gluttonys hunger is a never ending source of drive for more.
I'm struggling to figure out how Naan though remains internally motivated with Sloth as his Sin. As noted he doesnt have strong principals, nor anything to care about, which makes to tough for me to go "Why was Naan even worth considering for an Exaltation to in the first place."
That is to say the Principals that drive these characters to do great and terrible acts almost all can line up neatly with their primary Sins.
Envy, Pride, Greed, Lust and Wrath are powerful and obvious motivators to action, and even Gluttonys hunger is a never ending source of drive for more.
I'm struggling to figure out how Naan though remains internally motivated with Sloth as his Sin. As noted he doesnt have strong principals, nor anything to care about, which makes to tough for me to go "Why was Naan even worth considering for an Exaltation to in the first place."
Because in his apathy to other people, he does great and terrible things. Things like demolish a Realm naval base by walking into their firedust stocks and not caring about the damage he does or the retaliation the Realm will bring on the area. He's told to do something by a commander, and he does it against all odds - even if it's awful.
And he could be better than he is. So much better than he is. But every time he's had a chance to be better, he hasn't taken it.
Would it be accurate to say he does what he just to get accolades and maintain his life of pleasure, but not much more?