So yes. Um. Let's break this down, shall we? I'm folding most of what would normally go into the extras into this, so no quote box full of conversation this time:
Keris's babies
They're so cute and huggable! They're also at the developmental level of six-month-olds, which is a perk that Exalts get in return for carrying them six months longer than a mortal mother. This means that they're slightly less
completely and utterly helpless, and a bit creepy already to those accustomed to newborns being screaming pink wrinkled things that can't do much of anything.
Kali is a little shapeshifter-emberi with three forms; human, tiger and hawk. Her eyes are a vivid gold, her hair (or fur, or down) is red (striped or speckled with the goldish-brown of her skin where it matters), and in her tiger and hawk forms her natural weapons already do lethal damage - which means that as a kitten or a chick, her claws, teeth, beak and talons are in theory capable of piercing Keris's skin. In all three forms she has six limbs - as a human she has legs, arms and two hair-tendrils,
as a tiger she has six legs (and two tails, but they're not prehensile and just lash around a lot), and as a hawk she has four wings and two talons. In practice, at the moment, she can either be a little ball of fluff and down feathers with a beak, a little ball of fluff and fur with paws, or a little ball of non-fluff that's cocooned in fluff that her mother has swaddled her in. She does not have much control over her shapeshifting yet, and while she can force a transformation (with great effort that leaves her dazed and prone to headaches and which she can only do about once a day), she can't pick which of her other two forms she flips into. Also she sometimes shifts at random without meaning to.
She is very adorable.
Her brother
Ogin is a rather weirder emberi who when he's fully grown will probably look a bit like
Gwyndolin. Except his tails are fluffy. In fact he is, at present, even more of a fluffball than Kali; being almost entirely covered with soft white fur. Honestly, you could call him Gwyndolin and
Priscilla's lovechild and you wouldn't be far wrong. His eyes compliment his sister's; being vivid silver, and his hair is prehensile as well. He'll probably gain more tails as he gets older, but for now he's just got seven, which come together into the trunk of his waist similar to a human's legs - at a skeletal level they probably look more like how fingers diverge from a hand than anything, just with the hips being the "wrists" they're attached to. Sometimes one of his tails will phase out and go immaterial briefly, swiping through the blankets or the ground. He can't control that at the moment, but he'll learn - and may learn to turn more of himself intangible at will. Happily, when he's all swaddled up in blankets and his tails are bundled up together, he looks less unsettling for people like Xasan who consider "squidboi with tails for legs" to be more unnatural than "baby shapeshifter". Kali doesn't seem to care about that, and pouncing on/playing with his tails is one of her favourite activities.
He is also adorable.
Moving on!
The Corpse-Eater
As soon as I heard the scream, I guessed what it was, or might be. Pattern recognition, yo. Nothing else has that kind of narrative weight around here. Seeing its Harborite-influenced corpus only confirmed my guess, but of course Keris held out hope to the very end, until Calesco's
fantastic line:
"Calesco; where did it lead?"
Calesco swallows. "To the truth," she says, sadly, wringing her hands together. "To my kind of truth."
And "to the very end" involved Maryam's yidak not only
escaping Keris but
landing a solid blow on her. The Sapphire-tier drug-prince fae that became the Shashalme's Pet didn't manage that, nor did Leechhead; the Greater Dead thing that was digging up the Royal Yacht of An Teng. The E7 King of the Hungry Mountain didn't successfully hit Keris in their battle, and she came out of her fight with the E9 Lunar yidak of Rosseah exhausted but uninjured.
Four coordinated Dragonblood locking her in a small underground room under a Realm fortification and trying to jump her in unison failed to tag her with weapon or elemental bolt attack. Freaking
Adorjan-possessed Lilunu couldn't wound her until Keris stopped and let it happen.
And yet Maryam's yidak did it on the first try. Truly, Keris takes after her mother in all the very best and very
worst of ways.
Of course, it's notable that Maryam died because her leg wound hobbled her, so it's not surprising that her yidak has explicit Charmtech to prevent anyone from laming it. It might look like
@EarthScorpion played that encounter to let the yidak get away, but I genuinely suspect he wrote it up in advance and I just happened to play right into his hands by trying to go for its legs like that. I'm tempted to wonder how many people failed to see through that illusion and died for it. Fewer since it learned to bring the cold, no doubt, but I bet there were a lot of thaumaturge-exorcists back when it was a baby Hollow rather than a powerful adjuchas who thought they'd crippled the monster and got ripped apart for their arrogance.
(ES notes that it's super amusing how he came up with the Dead ranking stuff before watching Bleach, but it maps quite well to hollow, adjuchas, vasto lorde. No gillians, but gillians are boring and under-represented in Bleach anyway.)
In most cases I'd be as nettled as Keris about this, but there's a beautiful irony in her mother's yidak being the one to
literally keris her. Using the
exact same tactics that make Keris such a pain, right down to unpredictability even when you know what she's going to do. Keris has a history of getting one over on more powerful opponents, and it seems she comes by that trait honestly. Somewhere, Pekhijira is giving an approving huff (followed by
overwhelming rage). And this is, presumably,
exactly what a strong Wyld Hunt with combined combat superiority over Keris feels like when they're hunting her. She's a
really annoying opponent to fight.
Maryam
I am going to strangle
@EarthScorpion. I mean, look at this shit:
Stranglerfolk
Lesser Dead
Dead by Slow Hanging
A traveller ignores the local folktales a farmer tells her, and sleeps under a tree from which an old noose dangles. That night she sees the hanged man, eyes bulging and nails bloody. He speaks to her in a breathy whisper, and tells her how the farmer - his brother - framed him for a terrible crime so that he might steal his inheritance. All she needs to do is cut him down, and he can rest in piece. She does so. Alas, he was not framed. The next morning the farmer is found dead in his bed, strangled with an old rope. The traveller wanders off, bruises on her throat and a cruel mind behind her eyes.
Those ghosts who return as one of the stranglerfolk were hanged and were not granted the mercy of a quick death. They wear their deathmarks clearly, and on their corpus the rope still dangles from around their swollen neck. Stranglerfolk are intensely angry ghosts. As long as the rope that kills them remains intact, they are bound to the tree and this gives them a very long time for their rage to simmer. Their bony hands have a terrible strength in them and when they seize a victim they throttle them slowly.
Occultists broadly categorise stranglerfolk into two broad motives; the ones who wish revenge on their killers and the ones who wish to share their pain with all and sundry. Unfortunately, the two of them are very hard to tell apart while they are still trapped. In either case, these Dead are natural body thieves. Some infamous murderers in folklore were possessed and led to kill and kill again.
Necromancers call on stranglerfolk for their capacity to puppet the living and as assassins. Bodies they snatch slowly sicken as the necrotic essence bleeds into it, wounds not healing and bruises forming on the hands and neck. Such a possession is a crude theft and gives them nothing of the memories, but these ghosts only want hands to touch the world again. Exorcists, by contrast, usually encounter stranglerfolk in a hostile context. Even when they are sympathetic or unjust victims, their slow and painful death leaves them rage-filled and viewing the world through a malevolent lens. Sometimes the only way to help them pass on, though, is to help such a ghost track down its killer - and pray they turn out to have already died in a way which satisfies them.
That's from fucking
November. He's been planning this for
months. And... well, yes. Maryam is dead.
: (
I can't say I didn't kind of expect this, in fairness. I hoped I was wrong, but as soon as I saw the Corpse-Eater I suspected, and as far back as
@EarthScorpion saying he'd throw a Sapphire Choice my way this arc I guessed it would be discovering Maryam dead and having the opportunity to Sacrifice revenge and the grudges of yesteryear. But I like Maryam, and I want her to have some impact on her daughter, so I went with this option instead of sending her on to Lethe for
(near)-Ultimate Power!!!
And on that note; mother of (a demi)god, can you
imagine what this thread would have done if Kerisgame was a quest rather than an RPG? The
war that would have erupted over:
[ ] Set her free. Let her wreck bloody revenge on the Malrans and wipe them out to the last for their crimes. (x0.0, invalid choice)
[ ] Cut her down. Host her within yourself. Seek vengeance against those who wronged her - and hope she will be sated with that.
(Delays Station of Choice, gains Maryam as a Riding spirit.)
[ ] Send her on. Cut her free of her bindings and let her spirit seek out Lethe. Do not continue this cycle of murder and hate. Move on.
(Completes Parenthood arc, gains Sapphire Circle Sorcery.)
It would have been a bloodbath.
Happily, this is not a quest, and ironically, this means that Keris has now
twice allowed a maternal spirit of foreign-and-arguably-hostile-to-Creation nature into her body after it promised her revenge. Dulmea can't really scold her about this, or Keris will just
look at her flatly and go "gee, yeah, what kind of idiot would do that?" all sarcastically until she stops. And amusingly, when you look over the past arc, Keris has basically been entirely involved with E0-3 characters pushing her plot stuff (and the E3 character was Oula). This just continues the pattern.
Oh, and you can have a little look at what happened when I realised that he was going to spring Maryam's hun-ghost on me, after the yidak:
Aleph: NO
Aleph: NOOOO
Aleph: YOU CANNOT
Aleph: NO NO NO NO NO
Aleph: FUCK NO WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME NO
EarthScorpion: aleph
EarthScorpion: why do you think I wrote that ghost in the first place?
Aleph: HATE
EarthScorpion: I settled on it then
Aleph: HATE
EarthScorpion: And we've just kept on putting things off
Aleph: HATE
EarthScorpion: Poor alif
Ain't he a stinker?
