Ascensions and Transgressions: the Tales of Keris Dulmeadokht (Exalted game)
- Thread starter Aleph
- Start date
I'm now picturing a very unfortunate photographer trying to wrangle Keris and her family into getting a family portrait done.
Also the Dulmea Keris conversations are going to be interesting
Also the Dulmea Keris conversations are going to be interesting
- Location
- Virginia
Did you really have to put a Skyrim joke in there? 
And that one in particular?
And that one in particular? Did you really have to put a Skyrim joke in there?
What one? What are you talking about?
Right, let me rephrase. I don't know much of anything about Skyrim, so I don't know the reference and would like to be enlightened.
Dynamesmouse
Bzzzzzz
I used to be an adventurer, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Very common Skyrim guard dialogue.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It is, incidentally, an old euphemism for getting married and retiring from being an active warrior who goes out for battle.
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
I think it's going to require Dulmea to acknowledge that she herself is in the process of becoming a 3CD, if she hasn't already. Deny it all she likes; once her 2CDs start showing up, the evidence will be unquestionable.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
Man, Xasan's story sounds like, had his side of things happened just few years later, he probably would have become an Infernal himself.
And something from part 91 that would have been doubleposting. Spoiler tagged, since I'm not sure whether or not Aleph caught it. (on the one hand it doesn't show up in the log OOC commentary or the extras, on the other hand, the extras are suspiciously short.)
And something from part 91 that would have been doubleposting. Spoiler tagged, since I'm not sure whether or not Aleph caught it. (on the one hand it doesn't show up in the log OOC commentary or the extras, on the other hand, the extras are suspiciously short.)
A lovely bit of environmental storytelling too.
The temple of Sham-Sun, She who gives off light (like, say, brown fire does) built above a mountain that, as it used to be a face and now has an eyesocket, probably means that's an opened cave?
Let me guess: Centuries ago, back when that cave collapsed, it loosed Asarin and she took control of/founded that temple in the manse in an attempt to forge a road to sunhood in part by trying to pose as a sun god. The fact that Shamsun is not allowed to have iconography associated with her strikes me as a way to ensure someone who would know of her has a harder time recognizing Asarin.
The whole thing does leave me wondering whether the mountain largely collapsing and the manse depowering came before Asarin, or after.
The mentions in part 92 of other sun gods and that Liger's color was green, phrased as though all the sun gods have specific colors only makes it seems like a more advanced version of what Keris was doing with making the Shashalme into the sower of wealth. (After all, to the casual observer, who would expect one demon lord to found a cult of five gods especially when she's only going to get a fraction of the worship, and apparently most of it on Calibration at that? Well, unless Asarin managed to pose all five of them to be herself.)
The temple of Sham-Sun, She who gives off light (like, say, brown fire does) built above a mountain that, as it used to be a face and now has an eyesocket, probably means that's an opened cave?
Let me guess: Centuries ago, back when that cave collapsed, it loosed Asarin and she took control of/founded that temple in the manse in an attempt to forge a road to sunhood in part by trying to pose as a sun god. The fact that Shamsun is not allowed to have iconography associated with her strikes me as a way to ensure someone who would know of her has a harder time recognizing Asarin.
The whole thing does leave me wondering whether the mountain largely collapsing and the manse depowering came before Asarin, or after.
The mentions in part 92 of other sun gods and that Liger's color was green, phrased as though all the sun gods have specific colors only makes it seems like a more advanced version of what Keris was doing with making the Shashalme into the sower of wealth. (After all, to the casual observer, who would expect one demon lord to found a cult of five gods especially when she's only going to get a fraction of the worship, and apparently most of it on Calibration at that? Well, unless Asarin managed to pose all five of them to be herself.)
Sadly, I've heard a lot of dispute on that one. It seems nobody I've read can find the source of the phrase.
- Location
- oregon, usa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It happens to be the kind of injury that is likely to put an end to any career that involves traipsing back and forth across the countryside and yet is also fairly survivable as things go.
Edit: So, cliché or not, an arrow to the leg makes a bit of sense as a narrative excuse to cut short someone's career adventuring or soldiering.
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Lesser Dead - Waiting Ones
Waiting Ones
Lesser Dead
Dead by Many Causes
There is an old house up on the hill. They say that there were once three children who lived up there, along with their mother. One day she went out to get food and she fell and broke her neck. The children never left the house, but they're still waiting for her. And perhaps if a woman approaches carrying a basket of bread, she sees the little emaciated ghost children and they weep with happiness when they see her. That lasts until they realise she's not their mother. Then they get spiteful. No wonder the locals don't go up there.
Someone is left behind. Perhaps it is a maiden, waiting for her lover to return from the wars. Maybe it is a child whose parent promised they'd be back with food and never made it back home. Maybe it's a person who dies before the doctor arrives. What matters is that there was a promise, and it was broken. The ghost lingers, awaiting someone's arrival and the fulfilment of the old promise. Such ghosts usually resemble their living self closely, although there is always some mark of the promise on their form; a mask, a kiss-shaped scar on the hand, or the words of the promise carved into their chest.
The materialisation conditions of such spectres are almost always directly linked to people who resemble the one they're awaiting. The children waiting for their mother to bring back a meal can be seen by motherly women carrying food; the woman waiting for her lover is physical for curvy redheads. Alas, death blurs the memories and such ghosts often lack the capacity to recognise their loved one. Sometimes tales with these ghosts have a happy ending when the promised is fulfilled and they pass on peacefully, but others feature an age-maddened ghost trapping someone who resembles someone long dead, or cruelly slaying them for the crime of not being who they thought they were.
Necromancers find that such ghosts can easily be manipulated by their single-minded focus on the promise that traps them to the earth. The waiting ones are bound to a single place, and often display poltergeist-like abilities to hurl things at anyone who threatens their home - if magic is used to grant them a new anchor, they make excellent guardians. Exorcists, by contrast, usually concern themselves with resolving the ancient promise - which can be difficult indeed when the person they're waiting for has been dead for centuries. It is hard, but it can be possible to persuade a waiting one that the person they await will never come back. Such a path is risky though, because if they do not pass to Lethe immediately they are often consumed by spite and take it out on the bearer of that unwelcome truth.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Many Causes
There is an old house up on the hill. They say that there were once three children who lived up there, along with their mother. One day she went out to get food and she fell and broke her neck. The children never left the house, but they're still waiting for her. And perhaps if a woman approaches carrying a basket of bread, she sees the little emaciated ghost children and they weep with happiness when they see her. That lasts until they realise she's not their mother. Then they get spiteful. No wonder the locals don't go up there.
Someone is left behind. Perhaps it is a maiden, waiting for her lover to return from the wars. Maybe it is a child whose parent promised they'd be back with food and never made it back home. Maybe it's a person who dies before the doctor arrives. What matters is that there was a promise, and it was broken. The ghost lingers, awaiting someone's arrival and the fulfilment of the old promise. Such ghosts usually resemble their living self closely, although there is always some mark of the promise on their form; a mask, a kiss-shaped scar on the hand, or the words of the promise carved into their chest.
The materialisation conditions of such spectres are almost always directly linked to people who resemble the one they're awaiting. The children waiting for their mother to bring back a meal can be seen by motherly women carrying food; the woman waiting for her lover is physical for curvy redheads. Alas, death blurs the memories and such ghosts often lack the capacity to recognise their loved one. Sometimes tales with these ghosts have a happy ending when the promised is fulfilled and they pass on peacefully, but others feature an age-maddened ghost trapping someone who resembles someone long dead, or cruelly slaying them for the crime of not being who they thought they were.
Necromancers find that such ghosts can easily be manipulated by their single-minded focus on the promise that traps them to the earth. The waiting ones are bound to a single place, and often display poltergeist-like abilities to hurl things at anyone who threatens their home - if magic is used to grant them a new anchor, they make excellent guardians. Exorcists, by contrast, usually concern themselves with resolving the ancient promise - which can be difficult indeed when the person they're waiting for has been dead for centuries. It is hard, but it can be possible to persuade a waiting one that the person they await will never come back. Such a path is risky though, because if they do not pass to Lethe immediately they are often consumed by spite and take it out on the bearer of that unwelcome truth.
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Oh Kerisa, sweetie...
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
... And then there are those who decide to adopt the ghost, and immediately start looking for ways to make them a non-ghost. I'll never complain about death not getting its victory, but this seems problematic.
What happened to Kerisa, anyway? I don't recall reading any mention of where she went once Keris left that city.
EDIT: And at risk of being slightly off-topic, apparently the Shogunate had cinemas and trains. Not to mention museums, hilariously expensive art pieces, modern art, tower blocks, high-tech secret projects, hologram projectors, power armor and... repeating crossbows?
It sounds like a slightly more advanced version of our world, is the point. Perhaps not in weapons technology, though that's hard to compare; the main reason we don't have power armor is a lack of any serious need combined with a lack of a sufficiently compact power source, and they're not operating under quite the same laws of physics, which particularly affects the latter one.
Meanwhile, I always figured our world sat somewhere in-between the Shogunate and the high first age. Apparently not, though. This is relevant to my own story, so I have to ask... how canon is this?
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Canon really doesn't talk about the Shogunate. There are no examples of Shogunate anything, beyond First Age stuff that says that the DBs lost the ability to make it later in the Shogunate than the Usurpation.
Aleph and ES, of course, have taken this as a challenge and invented a bunch of stuff for the Shogunate that they think should have been there, including giving it most of the WotLA artifacts. They also cut down on mysterious First Age ruins that have survived for 1.5k+ years untouched and replaced them with more recent Shogunate and Age of Sorrows ruins.
I personally like their stuff, but it is not canon. Not that canon means much to most of the SV Exalted community, but you know.
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We have almost no concrete information on the Shogunate - what little we do have are things like we know they had a stock market and war bonds (from the old 1e Aspectbooks).
Hence, since we know so little, I just decided that having a concrete vision that I could build off of was more important than canon since it's so sparse. So I went for a very solid aesthetic vision of "Anime 1930s". That means big armoured trains with dragon heads on the front, delta-wing planes and airships, cinemas showing the Exalted version of Steamboat Mickey (hand-animated by artisans), Dragonblooded femme fatales singing in shady nightclubs for the triads, and soldiers in war-torn regions looking like they come straight out of Jin-Rui or Wolfenstein: the New Order. That's Late Shogunate, though - so there are spikes of "high tech" in stuff left over from better days, which serves the narrative role of "superweapons" and "super prototypes".
In more intact areas, there are still clunking farmstriders (which take the place of combine harvesters and the like), but in poorer areas the farmstriders have been militarised to be warstriders and people work the land with the help of animals. The "anime 1930s" feel means that there's no real "computing tech", which means computers are rooms of men and women trained to quickly carry out maths as part of grand operations to calculate things for Dragonblooded sorcerer-scientists (these rooms are also appropriate places for kung-fu duels, over the heads of the computers). Shogunate power armour is heavy, clunking stuff that feels "real" in that it's weighty, has all kinds of flaws, and can't be used to stand on weak floors [1].
And so on. Basically, as I depict it the Shogunate is the 1930s in the same way as pre-War Fallout is the 1950s - it takes the aesthetics and has spikes of supertech.
[1] By contrast, High First Age stuff is as Orokin as all hell, and so tends towards the lithe and techno-organic.
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By RAW?
The only thing I can think of on that list that is beyond them are the trains, and that's because too many resources were split between too many hands. Even power armor is well within the current manufacturing capability of the Realm in 2E, though they'd have to settle for 3-dot gunzosha instead of 4-dot Dragon armor if they want to build at anything like a reasonable pace.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
[post=PostId]Title[/post]
High-tech artifacts become exceedingly rare and difficult to maintain even if it's technically possible, which is actually a feature you can find in today's world as well, in some places.
That Kerisa could speak casually of going to the cinema, when she was an as far as we know random five-year-old, means the Shogunate had a much more solid basis. That's backed up by basically everything we've seen of it, especially the trains--railways are simple enough that they could have been built centuries before we did, but they require vast quantities of steel and an existing, highly connected economy to pay off the investment.
Such places are generally good places to live, because part of the requirement for an interconnected economy is stability.
It... was a bit of a gutshot, to be honest. I knew all of this logically, but they've lost so much.
SWLIHN burned entire concepts out of reality, and that may have been as much of a loss as this. We don't know; we can't know, except by inference. Kerisa's loss is different, because she's been talking, and we at least understand the concepts... but Keris doesn't. She could learn, except she has no reason to. And she doesn't know what the world has lost, only that it's a lot.
Economic density is pretty important here, though. If you can build warstriders, but you have the GDP-per-capita of a third-world nation or worse, then common life will be the same as in that nation--if not worse. Basically what I've seen in this game, I suppose.
High-tech artifacts become exceedingly rare and difficult to maintain even if it's technically possible, which is actually a feature you can find in today's world as well, in some places.
That Kerisa could speak casually of going to the cinema, when she was an as far as we know random five-year-old, means the Shogunate had a much more solid basis. That's backed up by basically everything we've seen of it, especially the trains--railways are simple enough that they could have been built centuries before we did, but they require vast quantities of steel and an existing, highly connected economy to pay off the investment.
Such places are generally good places to live, because part of the requirement for an interconnected economy is stability.
It... was a bit of a gutshot, to be honest. I knew all of this logically, but they've lost so much.
SWLIHN burned entire concepts out of reality, and that may have been as much of a loss as this. We don't know; we can't know, except by inference. Kerisa's loss is different, because she's been talking, and we at least understand the concepts... but Keris doesn't. She could learn, except she has no reason to. And she doesn't know what the world has lost, only that it's a lot.
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Yeah.
Creation is a post-apocalyptic setting not once, not twice, but three times.
Even after the death of the Solars, they left behind a strong enough economy and infrastructure that baseline normals could live safe prosperous lives.
The double whammy of the Great Contagion and the Balorian Invasion ended all that.
90% of Creation went poof: population, land and gods.
The fact that parts of Creation retain the levels of infrastructure they still do is nothing short of miraculous, especially given how the Incarna and most of Yu-Shan have ignored their responsibilities.
For reference, the Black Death killed ~30-60% of Europe in the 14th century; the world population did not recover to pre-plague levels for 3 centuries.
It's only been 700 years since the Fae did their thing.
And RL Earth did not have to worry about warlords with superweapons and their own geopolitical agendas fucking shit up.
Family Matters - Chapter 3
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
THESE PBP SESSIONS BE CRAZY, YO. Almost twenty thousand words for chapter 3; the second edition of Kerisgame: the PBPering that we did over the course of a week in a Googledoc. First time we did this was back in the third chapter of From One, Many, when I was in America for the holidays and therefore couldn't guarantee a decent Skype connection for the length of a whole session (or face up to that much typing density on my iPad keyboard).
This was mostly a slice-of-life session spent (partly) repairing what Keris broke. She's back up to Coadjutor 4 now, and as a conceptual thing, now that the Old City of Keris belongs to everyone, the New City is now an expression of Dulmea, rather than Keris. There's full license for things like a place in the Swamp where a single building from the Old City crashed down in the sticks and there's a group of wild sziromkeruby using it as a library, or part of a street that landed on the side of a Spire and now wraps around it as a crazily-angled ledge. We also get to see a bunch of new locations and environs of Krisity, some of which were really cool and a lot of fun to walk through. Her Hoard has probably also expanded, assuming the Treasury she specifically had in the middle of the Old City so that the bitchy snake couldn't easily get at it was one of the chunks that went sailing overhead and landed out in the Cloud Wall.
*mutter mutter friggin' es being an asshole again grumble grumble sulk glare fume*
Lots of extras, because we were chatting about what was happening all week over Skype in parallel to the GDoc session!
This was mostly a slice-of-life session spent (partly) repairing what Keris broke. She's back up to Coadjutor 4 now, and as a conceptual thing, now that the Old City of Keris belongs to everyone, the New City is now an expression of Dulmea, rather than Keris. There's full license for things like a place in the Swamp where a single building from the Old City crashed down in the sticks and there's a group of wild sziromkeruby using it as a library, or part of a street that landed on the side of a Spire and now wraps around it as a crazily-angled ledge. We also get to see a bunch of new locations and environs of Krisity, some of which were really cool and a lot of fun to walk through. Her Hoard has probably also expanded, assuming the Treasury she specifically had in the middle of the Old City so that the bitchy snake couldn't easily get at it was one of the chunks that went sailing overhead and landed out in the Cloud Wall.
*mutter mutter friggin' es being an asshole again grumble grumble sulk glare fume*
Lots of extras, because we were chatting about what was happening all week over Skype in parallel to the GDoc session!
EarthScorpion: Oh yeah, so do you want to run a pbp session this week so you can be writing small amounts and also because bluntly we're probably not going to have meaningful combat? Since as I see it, we can use anything we get done in the pbp to push ahead so next friday we're not just doing small things.
Aleph: heh, fair enough
EarthScorpion: Hee. Last time we did this, it was for the "you're having a sixth soul-baby" revelation from Haneyl.
Aleph: : D
Keris: "... I'm having a what?"EarthScorpion: And Eko getting irked that Haneyl had ruined the SURPRISE!
...
<while healing Xasan>
EarthScorpion: Heh.
EarthScorpion: You know, every time this comes up I always think you'll go and rebuy the Metagaos Charm so you can speed-boost your surgery by up to (Essence x Medicine) times. Which, hmm, at the moment is a speed boost of 20x, which would let Keris cure Amputations in less than an hour if she spent 5m on it.
Aleph: hmm
EarthScorpion: Oh yes, that does mean Keris needs to self-seed her uncle to cure it.
Aleph: Amusingly, she can probably do so, and then do Diff 4 internal surgery to remove it.
EarthScorpion: Yes. Or if that feels like too much effort, she can use countermagic.
Aleph: That does require explaining to him why she's hitting him with countermagic, though.
EarthScorpion: Eko points out that the surgery would take 12 hours, mama.
Aleph: Not if she got the speed-enhancer.
EarthScorpion: Hmm. Reading how the Charm works, actually, it looks like the order of operations is that you need to first regrow it, then carry out an extra bit of surgery to make it look non-Metagaos as a disguise thing.
Aleph: Yes.
EarthScorpion: So, hmm, disguising "demonic flesh" as "mortal flesh" is... uh, technically a different race, I guess, so that's Diff 2 as a disguise, so it's Diff 4 to hide the Metagoyin stuff.
Aleph: ... right. So.
Aleph: I'm getting the speed enhancer.
EarthScorpion: Of course, another option is to go cut off someone's hand and graft it onto the stump. That's just Diff 5 normal surgery.
Aleph: ... tempting. But no.
Aleph: Besides, regrowing it from the stump is more impressive
EarthScorpion: Zanara: "Mother, why don't you give him your hand? Hands grow back, after all."
Aleph: Keris: *looks at the width of her wrist*
Keris: *looks at the width of Xasan's*Aleph: Can I fast-buy the repurchase of FWT?
Keris: "... well to start off with, it wouldn't fit."
Keris: "Also I'm genuinely unsure I would actually be capable of cutting my hand off, and I mean that physically. It's hard enough breaking skin."
Keris: "And of course it's my hand. I'm very attached to it."
EarthScorpion: I'm actually going to say no here. You're in no real rush in character, and the time spent using it can count towards training time. A few days of practice can be done as part of a training stunt as Keris gets to spend time around her family, though.
Aleph: Fair enough.
EarthScorpion: Heh. Meanwhile in An Teng, Haneyl starts feeling weird.
Aleph: : P
Aleph: Hee. I'm trying to picture what Xasan's PoV of her is; this strange, brash, foreign, arrogant-as-her-mother, occult-as-her-father girl who speaks casually of spirits and demons and demon lords as if they're horses or hunting dogs or merchants, who can regrow limbs and yet chases little stories about her parents, who travels with a "bodyguard" the size of a child yet seems calmly and completely convinced of her ability to wipe out an entire mercenary company.
...
EarthScorpion: Hmm. I'm actually having an idea here for something I might want to run when you get back to the south west - a test for some of MJ12's ideas about how to run stealth in a less binary way.
EarthScorpion: Suffice to say it'll probably involve Keris breaking into one of the palaces of the three Princes on Sasi's orders.
EarthScorpion: Or maybe a dragonblooded household or fortress.
Aleph: Sounds like fun. : 3
...
Aleph: Hmm. So one of the things that's mostly localised to Calesco, in Keris's soul, are healing demons. The physical ones are balanced against stomach bottle bugs, and she has quite a few of those. But there are also the therapists, and those are almost exclusively the ones linked to her "night-sky" form. Thematically, Calesco finds it very difficult to heal wounds of the mind with lies.
Aleph: (And that means many of her therapists come with the truth that there's really no "undo" button for mind-wounds. You can reverse trauma or brainwashing, but only by effectively brainwashing in the opposite direction with the victim's consent. It's still fucking with someone's head that you're doing, and there's no actual difference between the tools used.)
Aleph: (A scalpel is still fundamentally something you use to cut into someone's body and hurt them. Yes, a doctor might use it only to get to something wrong inside you and set it right, but there's still no actual difference, per say, between a scalpel used to save someone's life and a knife used to slit someone's throat.)
...
Aleph: ekooooo
Aleph: noooo
Aleph: do not make sugarcows
Aleph: ... actually, sigh
Aleph: there is a reasonable chance she may just adapt skullsprinters, which are good for being herded by szelkeruby and anyaglo,
Eko nods. It's good running practice for them, her nod implies. Keeps them fit.
...
EarthScorpion: So did you like the family stuff for Keris?
EarthScorpion: (turns out both her parents were weirdos.
Aleph: yes ^_^
EarthScorpion: Ali is very stoic and reliable compared to them.
Aleph: And it's definitely fitting that she is the daughter of a brash hotheaded "FITE ME!" woman and a slightly weird occult-sensitive cautious man.
Aleph: She has somehow managed to inherit all of their traits simultaneously, which is especially impressive considering that some of them actively contradict.
Aleph: I do like Xasan. I'm hoping he'll wind up coming with and being a, mm...
Aleph: Something like an Iroh, perhaps.
Aleph: Or, hmm, not an Iroh... a Gustus would be the best analogy, but you haven't watched that.
EarthScorpion: Heh. It's also quite notable that with Haneyl absent, Vali is snapping up most of her former screentime.
EarthScorpion: Dammit you two.
...
EarthScorpion: Little ghost girl is judging the future for lacking things she thinks it should have.
Aleph: How dare it.
EarthScorpion: Rounen wants to know about the demons she's talking about.
...
EarthScorpion: Oh Rathan. So much easier to write now that he's just a dark general.
EarthScorpion: Heh. One of the funny things is that Haneyl tries so hard to be an aristocratic princess and never quite gets it perfect. Rathan doesn't even have to try. He just naturally sits around and looks like a spoilt prince.
Aleph: dammit rathan
EarthScorpion: Basically just Jadeite.
Aleph: With one important difference: if Rathan caught wind of three-to-five young magical girls foiling his plans, he would immediately go "shit shit shit drop everything and take them out they're MASSIVE THREATS".
EarthScorpion: Or he'd tell his mother that his sisters were bullying him.
Aleph: Because he is painfully aware of how much damage a 13-25-year-old young woman with magical powers can wreck on an operation. Or castle. Or country.
EarthScorpion: And yes, Rathan's picked up a sziromkerub chef who also does the important task of writing good morning notes that tell him how amazing he is.
Aleph: d'aww
EarthScorpion: Oh, Rathan. He wants women around, but in subordinate positions where they tell him how amazing he is. But that means he winds up giving them power.
EarthScorpion: Keris why is your relationship with sex and gender so complicated?
Aleph: because sex and gender are complicated
Aleph: : P
EarthScorpion: Hmm. I don't think being female matters much to Eko. Would she really act differently if she was male?
Aleph: Eko is mostly like Keris, I think.
Aleph: That is, she acts in ways that would often be considered masculine but is comfortable with being a female physically, and is mostly a female physically because she was born as an echo/afterimage of Keris herself.
Aleph: She doesn't care much, or devote much thought to it.
EarthScorpion: Same as Vali, really. Girl Vali would still run around the place topless breaking things and only wash when Dulmea caught her.
Aleph: look
Aleph: running around topless and smashing things in the rain counts as washing
Aleph: it's basically a giant shower
EarthScorpion: True, it is raining a lot in the Spires.
EarthScorpion: Heh, and of course, telling male Vali or female Vali they can't do something because they're a boy or a girl just means they'll go do it anyway.
...
Aleph: Oh, Keris. Now that she's voiced her reluctance to free the 3CDs, she's quite naturally adapting to her paradigm of "I am a creature of two worlds; Creation and Hell alike, and must think of both of them".
Aleph: Which, heh
Aleph: Is why she's entirely happy to trade from Creation to Hell, and even happier to trade from the Wyld to Hell, but a lot more reluctant to free things from Hell.
Aleph: Because, bluntly, even without Compassion getting involved, she's pretty sure that if she frees the Unquestionable into Creation; they'll wreck it.
EarthScorpion: She doesn't like the term "free". She prefers "pay"
Aleph: Whereas she can keep supplying them with things from Creation more or less indefinitely.
Keris: "Look, I know I am the last person to be making farming analogies. But if you only have one sheep, you don't butcher it when you could make a living selling wool."EarthScorpion: Lilunu: "Do you really think I'd wreck it, Keris?"
Lilunu: sadfaceAleph: Amusingly, she considers herself to have parent-figures from both worlds, and yes, Lilunu is the other one from Hell.
Aleph: So she's one of the vanishingly few demon princes Keris would actually be pretty happy to set free in Creation, if she could.
Aleph: (Though even then, she'd probably want to keep an eye on her to stop, um, things like the pure-emerald farming cottage and tyrant-lizard chickens.)
EarthScorpion: Haneyl and Eko point out that tyrant lizard chickens should be a perfectly natural part of Creation if it was better designed.
Aleph: ... heh. Another one Keris would probably consider letting loose is Noh, simply because most of Creation expects a freed demon prince to wreck havoc and destruction and cruelty and monstrous suffering on the land, so Keris is pretty sure... not exactly that she won't do that, but at least that she'll dislike the expectation that she would.
Aleph: She wouldn't let Noh out anywhere she liked, but she might nonetheless consider it.
EarthScorpion: Oh, Noh. Calesco isn't sure how to feel about her.
Aleph: : P
EarthScorpion: Noh approves of that, because it means Calesco expects less from her. Also she thinks it's cute how Calesco tries to obscure her nature.
Aleph: : P
Aleph: Sigh. How does Vali feel about her? He certainly likes that she'd rather die than be chained by the will of another, and does whatever she wants no matter who doesn't like it.
EarthScorpion: Vali... is too Yang for her tastes.
Aleph: ... sigh. Honestly, he probably think she's cool as much as Hidrae for that - and indeed, her Pantheon Charm may be in his Cracked Cell Circumvention tree.
Aleph: ... this may mean that his only expectation of her is that she keeps being awesome by not letting anyone tell her what to do.
...
Aleph: hee~
Aleph: loving Rathan's abacus-justice
Aleph: : D
EarthScorpion: Oh, Rathan. He is, as usual, showing too much chest and too much thigh as he sits around wearing basically just a short loosely belted robe.
Aleph: o rathan
EarthScorpion: Keris: "... goddamnit, why is my son so hot?"
Haneyl: "Mama, complain that I'm too pretty too!"Aleph: Keris: "You look like a combination of me and Sasi. Any feeling about your attractiveness gets drowned out by a wave of joy for how you're so obviously our daughter."
EarthScorpion: Heh. Haneyl is probably finding that she tans quickly under Creation's sun.
Aleph: heh
Aleph: and gets sunburnt
EarthScorpion: (which isn't at all caused by Keris seeing what her uncle looks like and getting a better clue of her mother's skin tone, oh no)
Aleph: hee
EarthScorpion: Hmm. That can happened, if you want. With Haneyl becoming more of a darker skinned, grey-haired girl.
Aleph: hmm
Aleph: Eko is at the brown end of "can just about pass for white somewhere like NY", Rathan is very pale and bishie, Haneyl is currently porcelain, Calesco is either snow-white or Keris's-mother-dark in her lie forms, Vali is brassy, Zanara is a coin toss.
Aleph: Yeah, I think bring Haneyl a bit browner - heh, nut-brown - could work.
EarthScorpion: Something more like this, colour-wise?
EarthScorpion: ... sigh, that brings her closer to Vali.
Aleph: yes, heh
...
Aleph: hee
Aleph: In PQ terms, Keris is basically stacking up a shitload of circumstantial social buffs on herself for her confrontation with Dulmea, isn't she? The equivalent of donning armour and choosing high-quality weapons and so on.
EarthScorpion: Yes, hee. But I also wanted for you to have a chance to go off and show locations for all of the Directions that aren't the usual places.
Aleph: ^_^
...
Aleph: poor keris
Aleph: not as much a fan of visiting the spires
EarthScorpion: Calesco: "I like them. So does Vali. So part of you is a fan."
Aleph: Keris: "I would like them a lot! If it weren't for the fact that they're deafening and painful."
Keris: "If I ever get around to making myself artifact earplugs, I suspect my appreciation of the Direction will soar."...
Keris: "Believe me, if you had hearing like mine, you wouldn't like going there either."
Aleph: Hee. I like how Rathan says "by the time you make a loop".
Aleph: Keris looping the Empire and visiting all her children one by one is enough of a thing that they reference it casually. Like the equivalent of household lingo.
EarthScorpion: Well, that's the advantage of a nice small round world you can run around in not very long.
...
Aleph: ... you know, I'm vaguely tempted to, like
Aleph: livestream a writing session like this at some point
Aleph: just as a way to show off how hilariously bullshit we are at this
...
Aleph: ... heh. I do suspect that insofar as szelkeruby gang culture has stories about the all-queen, it's generally held that if you're cheeky and mischevious and make sure not to admit guilt for things, it'll usually amuse her and she won't call you on it.
EarthScorpion: They are the worst girl scout cookie sellers.
Aleph: lies
Aleph: they are the bestest best evar
...
EarthScorpion: Heh. Keris is probably going to find later that, no, the keruby can't resolve the contradictions of Haneyl's nature. Haneyl can sit in the middle and hold everything together and be all three at once, but her lands tend to fall apart like the Realm deprived of the Empress whenever she's not there.
EarthScorpion: (Rathan's lands just keep working with almost no change when he's not there)
Aleph: lawl
...
EarthScorpion: Oh, Zanara. You really are acting up right now, partly because you're missing your big sister and partly because you just got your girl body back for the first time in a while and Dulmea accidentally pushed more divergence of your selves by making you be a boy for longer than ever before.
Aleph: poor zany
Aleph: She may be a hard sell.
EarthScorpion: She is a hard sell.
EarthScorpion: Oh Keris. Your greed and your love of art are your most loyalist souls.
Aleph: Heh. I bet Zanara thinks Pyrian aesthetics are creepy. It's one of the few types of beauty she doesn't like. That phobia runs pretty deep.
EarthScorpion: Well, of course. Zanara loves unique things and one off things.
Aleph: (Or to hear her say it; they're boring and colourless and suck all the individuality- yes, quite.)
Aleph: Oh, Keris. Basically your entire soul hierarchy doesn't like SWLiHN very much. Even Dulmea, who's all about order and the Proper way of doing things, wants there to be a healthy band of chaos around her calm and is a little scared of the Pyre in Which Thoughts Are Burned. Despite being similar in how her music catches people.
EarthScorpion: Amusingly, Calesco might have the softest space. After all, SWLIHN is a white fire that hides itself from the world
Aleph: Heh. Yes. But she also kills individuality and enforces unfair systems.
...
Aleph: heh
Aleph: I've been considering how to explain the Domain to Ali, and it's actually easier to explain that than her souls.
Keris: "I have a godmark on my brow where the gods' power - or demon's power - entered me. It did so in the body of a demon, who became part of me. So she has a sort of sanctum, as a god does, that's nestled within my soul. And I can put things in there and take them out."Aleph: Hmm. For her souls... possibly that just as a smithy will have a least god for the forge, the anvil, the tools, the metal and so on; she's developed familiar-like god-spirits for each area of her powers - and since her powers kind of stem from ways she's like her patrons, they're god-spirits for areas of her self, too.
Keris: "Her name's Dulmea. She was not happy about me telling you everything. I just spent half the night working things out with her."
Keris: "And since I wanted a family, they took form as my children. Who are all brats, even if I adore them."
...
<while arguing with Dulmea>
EarthScorpion: ((Remember, you're up against her Conviction 5, Temperance 4. Angyalka are ludicrously virtuous there.))
Aleph: ikr
Aleph: argh
Aleph: Hmm. Well, I'm playing to her having a Place, to still being needed to Guide and Aid Keris, and to more basic "everybody" drives like being accepted and protected and not treated badly. And, heh. Reassuring her that things aren't necessarily going to change in what Keris is doing, because she still has other reasons to work for Hell, it's "merely" a priority shift in why she's doing it.
Aleph: also lol keris
Aleph: "you know, the exalted were the ones who imprisoned the demon princes in hell in the first place, and they made of their jail a harsh and cruel place where the life of a serf was often short and brutal, and then they parcelled up the power that sealed them there and gave it to a human fused to a first circle demon, and at no point in this process did they stop to wonder whether it was a good idea"
Aleph: lbr, it was only a matter of time before Keris made that connection
...
Aleph: Hmm, yeah. I think the best way to slide this concept in for the moment is to shift Keris outside that chain of Hierarchy in Dulmea's worldview.
Aleph: Dismantling the whole thing would be hard, but conceiving of the Exalted as an exception... that might be doable.
Aleph: Oh, and she's at -3 MDV for that. God, TLA is awesome.
Aleph: dammit keris, stop clinging so tightly to your loves that you've used up most of your slots for it and refuse to let them go
EarthScorpion: Okay, so that's running into her Charisma 5, Presence 5, channelled Conviction 5, and her spirit excellency as a social 2CD-alike. That resolves as parry MDV 14, or to put it another way, if it wasn't for TLA swaying things, you'd have lost.
Aleph: ... yikes
...
Aleph: sigh
Aleph: keris has branched out into technically-not-unsupported-but-still-wrong heresy again, and gone "okay, so the powers of the anathema were originally demonic and then the sun took them and made them sun-coloured and then the demons took them back and put them back to how they were - but where'd they come from originally? they're weird empowerment shards that lift up weak humans and make them demigods - hardly the sort of thing demon princes would make"
Aleph: "maybe the unquestionable just found them before Creation even existed, and they don't have a source?"
Aleph: which, I mean
Aleph: you'd have quite a hard job proving her wrong
Aleph: and it does explain why the friggin' things seem to be adaptable to basically any group and simultaneously not loyal to any group.
Keris: "My hypothesis is that they come from a pre-exisistential incarnation of 'fucking up the status quo'."
...
<after the armour-piercing question of "who made Krisity, then?">
EarthScorpion: Okay, hmm
EarthScorpion: Is now when Keris should roll her stealin'-the-Dulmea roll, or should that be at the end?
Aleph: "This Charm may enhance any action to make a target character lose an object or structure he owns."
Aleph: so, hmm, yeah, probably now
Aleph: also lawl
Aleph: "Any action opposing the enhanced action suffers an external penalty of the warlock's Compassion rating, including DV-based defenses."
Aleph: : V
EarthScorpion: roll dat shit, then
Aleph: wat roll r eet?
Aleph: TaR just enhances whatever roll it is
Aleph: "Examples include Larceny actions to pickpocket an item, a disarming attack to remove a weapon, social attacks to convince the target to sell or surrender the property or attacks against the item in an effort to take it away from everyone."
EarthScorpion: It's a Per + Pres roll.
Aleph: kewl
Aleph: 3+5+2 stunt+8 Adorjani ExD {shreds the best-laid plans, exposes the flaws, freed mind}+4 Compassion autosux=18. Mwaahaha, 7+4=11 sux, Dulmea's MDV against "stealin' her from teh yozis" is reduced by 3 TLA and also, I think, by 4 from TaR.
EarthScorpion: ... yeah. Yeah, it is.
Aleph: : V
...
Aleph: ... sigh
Aleph: the new City
Aleph: its theme is instrument-buildings, isn't it?
Aleph: because it's grown out from the Tower
Aleph: There'll be things like a set of terraced houses that look like a long, supersized flute lying along the street, with the fingerholes as the doors.
EarthScorpion: Hmm. Maybe not so mono-focussed. It's still the centre of Keris...
Aleph: Totes going to be a present theme, though
EarthScorpion: ... then again, sigh, how much of the Old City wound up in the Edgelands?
Aleph: ...
Aleph: alarming amounts, I suspect
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Atoshi
The human equivalent of a potato
Whoop whoop, all aboard the hype train, it's play-by-play time!
I loved the whole scene with Dulmea. It's totally the dramatic climax scene with the hopeful music where the characters sort out their issues with the Power of Friendship right before they go punch the villain. And Keris manages to perfectly sum up everything I feel is important about Exaltation. Not ULTIMATE POWAR, not gods reaching in to sponsor people then letting them run off and do their own thing, but the age-old principle of 'Fuck the System'.
However, my favourite moment of the session was this:
"Ah, alas, my queen, this is a most tragic tale," the horse says. "But I, Lady Imanagi, shall recount this tale of treachery and bloodshed to thee! It all began when Countess Saji called Countess Ellyssivera fat..."
I love Krisity politics.
Atoshi
The human equivalent of a potato
Yeeeep <_<
And I should really work out how to do the spoiler thing in my posts.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
So Ellyssivera is becoming the first of the Hungry Ones while Saji is maturing into a Maglyaszentka?
Hunh, that is not how I expected the two of them to turn out.
Also, the maturing mezkeruby are giving me Hollow Knight vibes.
...Significantly more so when I realize they draw from a being of shadow containing harmful light.
Hunh, that is not how I expected the two of them to turn out.
Also, the maturing mezkeruby are giving me Hollow Knight vibes.
...Significantly more so when I realize they draw from a being of shadow containing harmful light.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Cute little amorphous black creatures with insectoid masks of stark white bone?
I can't imagine why you might link those to Calesco.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
It occurs to me, Keris does not in general know when she's about to have another 3CD. She may be "complete" for now, but that just means the growth has moved to her children, who have no idea it's even a possibility. Hopefully they'll at least reach their late teens first, though. But...
The last transcript made mention of some Sailor Moon parallels. Sorta.
So now I'm imagining a gang of 2CDs, rising up in rebellion against the Dark Queen -- aka. Keris -- while their "parents" don't even realize they exist yet. They can have adventures, fighting a (flummoxed) set of "demon generals", while freeing the keruby from the tyranny of their parents...
All slightly tongue in cheek, as they know who they are, just -- as Echo's mentions -- they only have one shot at completely confusing them.
Rathan's nurturing soul gets to be the leader, of course.
The last transcript made mention of some Sailor Moon parallels. Sorta.
So now I'm imagining a gang of 2CDs, rising up in rebellion against the Dark Queen -- aka. Keris -- while their "parents" don't even realize they exist yet. They can have adventures, fighting a (flummoxed) set of "demon generals", while freeing the keruby from the tyranny of their parents...
All slightly tongue in cheek, as they know who they are, just -- as Echo's mentions -- they only have one shot at completely confusing them.
Rathan's nurturing soul gets to be the leader, of course.
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