Little River sits back in her spectator's box, along with her guests. Golden Child is on her right, and she isn't paying much attention to the man on stage. She's glancing up at the veiled box, where Tenné Cinnamon is seated.
Aleph: Now we play the fun, fun game of "which one is the real one?"
Aleph: (You get extra points if you immediately discard the notion that it necessarily has to be either of them.)
EarthScorpion: Well, it's not Keris on stage. That's Seresa.
Aleph: Indeed. But anyone who knows Keris well ends up with a sensitivity to when they're being fed a shell game that implicitly wants them to assume the pea is under any of the shells at all.
Aleph: (She's probably Little River at the moment, though.)
...
EarthScorpion: So, here's a chance for you to define one of your cult rituals. You have yourself, a cult room you can design (with an idol), you have Seresa and whatever demons you want who live down here (probably a few well-paid penury courtesans, angyalkae, and maybe Saji too).
EarthScorpion: And as a ritual, we can give it a small thaum effect lasting a week or so. Probably 1-2 dots of "mutations".
Aleph: Hmm. Okay, I think... yes, heh. This one will have a general theme of "secrets". And also, sigh, warped confessional. There's a statue there; an effigy of Lilunu, and they whisper the dark and sordid and forbidden things they've done since they last "confessed" in her ear, or the desires and fantasies that are twisted and wrong and against the mores of society - anything that would count, heh, as an act of depravity. And then they give her a token of their regard - a flower, or a small and valuable thing, or just pledge of renewed service.
Aleph: And by giving their secrets to
her, they safeguard them from others.
Aleph: (Also there's then, under her aegis, an allowance to indulge themselves with forbidden love, etc~)
EarthScorpion: And of course, Keris is there to hear all their confessions.
EarthScorpion: Dammit Keris.
Aleph: look, she's good at this
Aleph: (Also it's worshipping Lilunu in her TED-aspect sneakily.)
EarthScorpion: And of course, as a cult that's influenced by Seresa, she's probably telling them that there are unjust laws of the gods that get in the way of pleasure.
EarthScorpion: Oh god. Keris. They also drink from something that's probably some mild hallucinogens mixed with Keris's social attack foodstuff. So they're seeing things and her social attack is shaping what they see.
EarthScorpion: (And this is her training them to accept changes of mental state in her service.)
EarthScorpion: So, what social attack is Keris making?
Aleph: Hmm. Loyalty to the group. The importance of secrecy; of safety from the Immaculates. Determination to keep each other hidden; to give nothing away. Both to build group loyalty and as a primer for "this is how you can..." re Split Personality.
EarthScorpion: OK, so she's seeking to build Loyalty To The Ladies in all of them
Aleph: Yes.
EarthScorpion: So roll me Cog + Occult for how she brewed up this alchemical draft. This sets the "successes" of the Social attack.
Aleph: ... sigh. Semi-toxic plants with hallucinogenic effects, huh? Gee, Keris, I wonder where you got
them from.
Aleph: 4+5+3 Frozen Florist Style+2 stunt+4 Metagaos ExSux {ensnaring, insidious influence, improve sustenance}=14. 7+4=11 sux.
Aleph: Heh. There's nothing that tastes quite like Cinnamon's brews in all of Saata. A slight edge of bitterness that somehow makes the lighter flavours even better.
EarthScorpion: So, uh, that's a surprise "written" attack from Per 4 (acting as Lore 4). Which means for all of them, that's hitting with 11-12 successes.
EarthScorpion: And then she follows it up with a "this is a taboo we're all doing together" orgy-ritual.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, each little ritual is like 2-scenes of group bonding.
Aleph: o keris
Aleph: no wonder this one is a favourite
EarthScorpion: They're all at least 2 dots of Loyalty to the Ladies now, and in some cases it's got to 3 - 4 in the case of anyone who's particularly weak-willed.
Aleph: And it also has a cathartic edge of getting to talk about and voice the secrets they're keeping.
EarthScorpion: Will Keris stay for the conclusion of the ritual, or leave now that things are underway?
Aleph: No, Keris will leave - with the ritual-logic that as their "eldest sister" and priestess, she's ritually standing guard without so that their safe space remains secret and protected for them to do as they will, hidden from the judging eyes of the gods.
...
EarthScorpion: So, funny thing. The Papua New Guinea highlands have a climate code which isn't equatorial.
EarthScorpion: It's
this.
EarthScorpion: Which is amusingly a super-rare broad classification in the world
except in Western Europe.
Aleph: oh my god, keris
Aleph: sigh
Aleph: it's perfect for her
EarthScorpion: "In the tropics, a subtropical highland climate tends to feature spring-like weather year-round. Temperatures there remain relatively constant throughout the year and snowfall is seldom seen. "
Aleph: Hee!
EarthScorpion: "Areas with this climate feature monthly averages below 22 °C (72 °F) but above −3 °C (27 °F) (or 0 °C (32 °F) using American standards). At least one month's average temperature is below 18 °C (64 °F). Without their elevation, many of these regions would likely feature either tropical or humid subtropical climates."
EarthScorpion: This, incidentally, is vaguely what this place would have looked like in Shogunate times, scale-wise.
Aleph: Oooooo
Aleph: pretty
EarthScorpion: Around 45k inhabitants, so certainly no Saata or Eshtock.
Aleph: but pretty nonetheless
...
EarthScorpion: So how was that?
Aleph: I want this train
Aleph: I want this
entire train
Aleph: I want this entire train
and everything on it. <3 <3 <3
EarthScorpion: Keris is really showing that Greed 4. No wonder Haneyl is going to probably come to blows with Asarin.
Aleph: yeah
EarthScorpion: Hee. Of course, the thing about this find is that it's very little directly military stuff. It's military adjacent/militarisable rather than military.
Aleph: Which Keris likes better.
EarthScorpion: Keris: "SASI LOOK WHAT I FOUND."
EarthScorpion: Keris: "SASI LET'S MAKE OUT IN THE COCKPIT OF THE BULLDOZER!"
Aleph: *snrrk*
...
EarthScorpion: Honestly I was super happy with the opening. Like, really happy. Keris as cult leader is super in place now, and the seeds of the Ladies are taking root.
Aleph: Aleph: Hee. Yes. ^_^
Aleph: God, and her talent for cult-making is really coming through. That ritual is a vicious little thing. It accomplishes
five different goals at once. Thaum-blessing, intel-gathering, loyalty-building, hallucination-training and sneaky secret Lilunu-strengthening! Man, I am
really good at this.
EarthScorpion: Heh. Keris doesn't do popular religion in her cults. She's not Cecelynite.
Aleph: Keris: "Of course not. That's far too mainstream."
EarthScorpion: Sasi could be a high priestess of a nation if she wanted to, like Mashy is to the Illuminationists. Keris's religion is always exclusive; either a cult or a clan.
EarthScorpion: It defines itself against outsiders.
Aleph: Yup. Oh, Keris.
EarthScorpion: The Ladies are honestly defined by "We're a bunch of horny wlw who can't do this in normal Tengese society".
EarthScorpion: The Daiwye get the truth about Keris and her souls, at least in part, and have demon lords as "ancestor spirits". Etcetera.
…
EarthScorpion: Sigh. With the Cult of Nululi, Keris might want to start art-nerd classes. She can get ladies trained up to Expression 4, and with an Enlightenment Excellency.
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: Which is, like, she can probably art nerd with people with dice pools in the 14-16 range if she really works at finding the best ones.
Aleph: Keris: "Eeeee!"
EarthScorpion: Also, it helps hide the cult aspects more if it's a ladies' art club. "It's an art club" -> "It's a lesbian hookup art club" -> "it's a lesbian hookup art club Yozi cult" is a lot harder to see through.
Aleph: Lol. Fair. Most investigators would stop looking at stage 2 and just assume they'd found a mildly decadent pile of repressed ladies' dirty laundry.
EarthScorpion: Admittedly representative art isn't Immaculate-OK, but let's be honest here. This is Saata.
EarthScorpion: People who actually follow the Immaculate rules are probably suspicious in and of themselves.
...
EarthScorpion: Kali and Ogin given a glass bowl.
EarthScorpion: Keris can basically find the twins by leaving a box unguarded.
Aleph:
Aleph: Keris: *peers at an apparently-liquid Ogin in a glass bowl*
Aleph: Keris: "Don't you have
bones?"
EarthScorpion: Kali: "Mama mama mama I'm in the bowl too!"
Aleph: Keris: "I can see that, sweetie. And I'm pretty sure you're going to have to turn back into a bird to get out, because your head is too big for the top as a kitty."
...
Too-hot air huffed against the back of her neck as Haneyl snorted. "So Rathan can let me down? No thank you, mama. He'll just vanish off when something else catches his fancy."
Keris flinched at that. The words were… just at the edge of memory. But lost. It sounded like something she'd say, but not something she remembered saying. The chit-chat she made with Haneyl while she finished her massage was much more idle. It grew increasingly intermittent as Keris tried to meditate to put such thoughts out of mind.
Aleph: oh keris
Aleph: Her and Rat.
EarthScorpion: Haneyl is made of seeds planted in her when Rat was gone.
Aleph: God, you really can
feel his absence in the narrative sometimes, can't you? All his clever little schemes and plans and ideas, the way he held her back, his role as the face and the brains of them...
Aleph: Sometimes it's like she's missing a
limb. One that she doesn't even realise isn't there.
Aleph: Can't realise.
EarthScorpion: Haneyl is the daughter raised by a mother who's bitter that her lover walked out on her and never mentions his name, but passes down the attitude.
EarthScorpion: Her personality is shaped by the absence of Rat, because in many ways Haneyl is Keris's self-contorting to try to fill his role.
Aleph:
EarthScorpion: While Rathan is the good memories of Rat that remain; the cleverness, the foresight, the way he was much more easy-going than her.
EarthScorpion: And of course, the fact that Rathan and Oula are Rat and Keris actually getting together.
Aleph: oh,
keris
...
Aleph: Did… did you just…
EarthScorpion:
Aleph: Rathan. A sorcerer.
Aleph: Oh my god.
EarthScorpion: (Haneyl is going to be very nettled.)
EarthScorpion: (And even more nettled that her brother managed it by reading a book and going "Huh, I don't know everything".)
Aleph: She is going to be nettled, brambled and quite possibly hedged.
EarthScorpion: It's kind of impressive, really. Rathan's character development led him to sacrifice his lazy, self-satisfied assumption he knows everything. He's literally just become a better person
Aleph: Hee!
EarthScorpion: And I think that's what you were looking for. That his sacrifice will lead to curiosity and him being the "blue skies researcher".
Aleph: Yes, hee. Or, well. Black skies.
Aleph: ^_^
EarthScorpion: It also means you can task Rathan as doing Emerald sorcery research for you.
Aleph: Yesssss~
EarthScorpion: He'll probably waste a lot of his XP in future making minor spell variants to play with them and see if they're useful
EarthScorpion: And learning spells that are totally redundant or do things he can do already.
Aleph: Goddammit Rathan. ¬_¬
EarthScorpion: This is one reason pure sorcerers tend to hit an effectiveness cap. If you're that kind of sorcery purist, you're a nerd who's just wasting so much XP playing around learning variants and things you can already do.
EarthScorpion: Oula is probably a more
effective sorcerer than him, because she's more driven to power and wants to be useful to Keris and him, while Rathan wastes his time seeing of he can make Death of Silver Nightingales.
Rathan: "Okay, okay. Hear me out. What if I modified Death of Obsidian Butterflies to bring life and healing to anyone it hits?"
*nine months later*
Rathan: "Hmm. Their chakra systems are exploding from too much life. Well, interesting effect. It seems to not care how armoured they are. Not as lethal as glass, though. I'll call it Life of the Sun-Staring Moth."
Aleph: Sigh.
EarthScorpion: Heh. Poor Haneyl. She's really going to struggle with sorcery initiation because sacrificing things is very hard for her. Rathan meanwhile just stumbled into it while reading a trashy Shogunate novel.
EarthScorpion: Haneyl and Calesco agree - one of Rathan's most annoying traits is how he makes things he does look easy.
...
EarthScorpion: Heh. If Rathan is academia and Zanara is the cultural sphere, Haneyl is big business.
EarthScorpion: I guess that makes Calesco the voluntary sector.
Aleph: Hee. Eko and Vali?
EarthScorpion: Not sure. Vali might be organised labour.
Aleph: Eko is anarchy.
Aleph: I'd say "the military" but Eko and discipline have never met and never will.
...
EarthScorpion: Heh. Oh Haneyl. She's sloppy, arrogant and proud at the moment because of too much success. And getting on Asarin's nerves as much as Asarin gets on hers.
EarthScorpion: And now she's just about to find out her slacker brother is a sorcerer.
Aleph: There's going to be an explosion.
EarthScorpion: Now now. It might hold off until something seemingly inconsequential sets her off.
Aleph: I pity the next poor mua to try and attack her while not tasting very nice.
Aleph: I mean, it'll be dead by the time she blows up because the stupid toothbirds attacking her don't even taste good.
Aleph: But what's left of it will get vaporised.
Aleph: Sigh. We may actually see the flame princess again.
Aleph: ... while at the moment, we... are we kind of are seeing her human/hunger form?
Aleph: Hmm, no. She's still too proud and arrogant to have lost her fire side under hunger and humanity.
EarthScorpion: Heh. Keris is perhaps a little inured to Kali's tantrums because Kali can't match her big sister for meltdowns.
Aleph: Yes, heh.
EarthScorpion: I think, hmm. She's actually dropping down towards the dragon, losing her humanity which is what cares for what other people think.
EarthScorpion: Haneyl gets sluttier the closer she gets to the dragon.
Aleph: ...
Aleph: That is honestly kind of disturbing.
Aleph: I mean
Aleph: It makes sense
Aleph: But taken to the logical extreme, it's very weird.
EarthScorpion: Well, yes. But dragons don't wear clothing.
Aleph: And in that form she's all bestial appetites with very little reason.
Aleph: Oh Haneyl. It's her po-state, like Pekhijira. But she reacts to it like Sasi does to hers.
EarthScorpion: ... huh. Are the dragon forms the children of the snek?
Aleph: :3
EarthScorpion: Sigh. I guess it makes sense. After all, that's a logical consequence of being Keris's soul child. You have a human form from her hun and a snake like monster form from her po.
Aleph: ... goddammit. Calesco's Arael form is Adorjan's.
EarthScorpion: Rathan: "I could turn into a big sea snake, but that feels like effort."
Aleph: Nah, I think Rathan's mercury-orca - which is, after all, somewhat fluid-form - is his. It's a longer, more slender orca than normal ones.
Aleph: Eko probably has a Bloodborne snake hiding somewhere now that she's taken in Elloge, Rathan is a mercury orca-eel, Haneyl is the Orchid Dragon, Vali is the Thunder Dragon and Zanara is a hydra.
Aleph: The only one without is Calesco, because she got
her monstrous warform from the mother who carried her. Which
wasn't Keris. And thus she wound up as an Old Testament angel; all wings and eyes and cold painful vacuum-light.
EarthScorpion: Heh. And Zanara's is splitting apart into multiple heads because they're only half Keris's child.
Aleph: And because it's just dragony enough to fit in with the way each of the Marred Dragons is a different type of dragon. :3
EarthScorpion: Yes.
EarthScorpion: Heh. Adorjan might not be too pleased when she finds out what Eko did to herself. Keris is a bad mama who can't keep their daughter safe.
Aleph: :c
Aleph: Eko stomps sulkily and insists that it's her body and she can do what she wants with it,
mom. Then locks herself in her room and plays loud music for hours while sneaking out to visit her bad-influence BFF who led her into this.
EarthScorpion: Poor mama Adorjan tries to explain to her that mutilating yourself with spiritual attachments might seem cool when you're a baby, but it's going to still be there when you're a thousand and trying to cast off the burdens of a painful world.
Aleph: Lol.
...
EarthScorpion: Hmm. To the women who join the Ladies, what does the cult actually offer them? What, beyond Keris's frankly terrifying powers of manipulation and corruption, keeps them there?
Aleph: So at first you join because you've learned there are these powerful influential women on the island and their businesses have luck and fortune and they give each other preferred rates, and it's theoretically possible to stay there in the first circle indefinitely doing little rituals to a lesser-known goddess and be in it for the economic benefits and never actually find out about the demon stuff.
Aleph: In practice, they eventually decide you're ready to learn more and you get sucked into the deeper circles where you learn about their plans to take over the Anarchy and they offer you power and magic that
you can use and you're special and you can send demons or curses after people who fuck with you and your sisters and no wonder their businesses are always lucky, etc.
Aleph: It offers economic fortune, it offers companionship and trust and - oh Keris - love and family, it offers magic and blessings and power.
EarthScorpion: Yeah, that was actually my thought. It's set up by Keris (honestly kind of accidentally) so the members can trust each other in a way they can't really in normal female triad society. It's, heh, alliance forming through shared secrets and sexual bonding. Normally, these women have to spend their lives in competition with other women managing their husband's interests.
EarthScorpion: The
real hook in many ways is the way it lulls them into trusting one another (and pumps them full of oxytocin while in an altered state of consciousness, and then will likely reinforce those bonds with demonic magic).
Aleph: Oh Keris.
Aleph: She's kind of a mess, but she's a mess who's actually very aware of how enticing trust and intimacy and a feeling of safety in vulnerability are to human beings.
EarthScorpion: Keris: "... Sasi, can I keep Seresa a bit longer? She's really useful for my lesbian sex cult made up of some of the most powerful women in Hui Cha society."
Sasi: "Oh, Keris, I'm so proud of you. You've grown up so much!"
