See this is the first mistake. They need a shirt that asks "Is the person next to you an imposter? Have they been trying to lull you you into a false sense of security? Making excuses like they don't have the time to discuss things? Telling you your imagining things? That's some very untrustworthy behavior." Would someone with anything to hide wear a shirt like this?
Of course, if your worried that's too long and they won't read the whole thing, there is the simpler "Someone is always out to get you. It's me. You know what you did."
Winning vote:
- "We're not going to get far if you two keep glaring at each other instead of our foes."
A sort of weird thrill runs through you as you say it. It's the sort of thing that a prince might get to say and get away with, and you never have had the chance before. Up until now, if you wanted to get something hot to eat outside of regular mealtimes, the best way to get the palace cooks to get over their grumblings and actually produce it was to invoke the real Prince Jinaya's name.
Now, two superhuman Exalts listen when you speak with your own voice. The short woman gives you an inscrutable look from behind bright green eyes. The tall man barks a laugh. "I'm not the untrustworthy one, here!" He gives a grand gesture to the Dragon-Blood. "She's the one with a religious imperative to kill me off."
The Dragon-Blood's eyes set, and you see her working on a response, but you cut her off by drawing yourself up to your full height, still well short of his, and slash a finger through the air in front of his face. "Not today!" He doesn't flinch back, but does give you a rather startled smile as you continue. "Maybe tomorrow, but today all of us are getting off this ship together, and that means that you're trusting her to watch your back. And we're going to trust you to do your part, because you brought this alliance up!"
The smile grows, which is rapidly getting on your nerves. "Very well." He sweeps into a low bow, both hands swept to his left. "Upon my honor and in the sight of the goddess who Chose me, I will give none of you any cause to doubt or regret my faithful support, save only if I am betrayed first."
You look at the Dragon-Blood, who gives an enigmatic smile and a dip of her head in return. "On the name of my divine mother, for today we stand united."
The rest of you, you and the other now-free hostages, make your own similar statements, but they're an afterthought.
What's important is that the Lunar turns his back to you all, facing outward and not fearing someone will put a dagger into it. "I'll slip out first, attack the fore stays. That should distract Peerless Pearl, and if I'm lucky it will distract the King, too."
"I can help there," the Prasadi interjects. "Just before we come on deck, I'll punch a hole in the hull down here. The King should feel that, and it knows how to sink ships with holes in them."
The Lunar laughs once and cracks his knuckles. "Excellent! While they're both distracted by the damage to the bow and below the waterline, you head aft and get a launch in the water. I'll slip away and join you, pulling the launch, and you lot keep me safe while I do. Agreed?"
There's a murmur of assent.
Peerless Pearl can't stop his body from shaking, or slow the frantic panting of his breath. He, and much of the deck, is stained with the silver-white blood of the King of Dark Fathoms. One of its lesser tentacles with the two least tentacles that fork from its end still squirms on the deck, even though it's been severed from the main body. It's a hazard that has cost him his last elemental and most of the human part of the Impossible Perfection's crew. He's wrung out every drop of power in his body to get this far, and the cutlass he used to supplement his magic slips, almost unconcerned, from hands that can barely close their fingers. The vast coils of the King of Dark Fathoms still writhe and twist below the surface of the water, but the behemoth-thing is clearly wary, now. It has to know that it's crushed a lot of the resistance aboard ship, but wood is not its food. It's still thinking if there's enough meat left to justify attacking further. It has time, after all.
All of that would be enough to make this the worst day of Peerless Pearl's life already. The sorcerer-prince he apprentices under will consider the damage to the treasure ship to be his fault, and thus his own ascension from sorcerer-captain to sorcerer-prince is in jeopardy. Not to mention his life. He doesn't think he will survive the day any longer, but that is almost secondary to a life's ambition suddenly cut short.
With every bit of fire left in his soul, Pearl spits curses. Curses upon Cynerean, the sorcerer-prince master who refused to accept Pearl as a sorcerer-prince peer. Curses upon the King of Dark Fathoms. Curses upon the lands he's traveled in this journey: any of them could have acquiesced sooner, or feted him longer, and prevented this interception today.
Most of all, he curses Sophoebus. The god had been such a prize, the overseer of a library of sorcerous knowledge, and possessor of a spark of Exaltation. Somehow, through what means Pearl knew not, he had been granted the Exigency, which would let him choose a human as his Exalted champion. Day after day, Pearl had communed with the yasal crystal that confined Sophoebus. He had bargained, begged, threatened, promised to accept any terms at all, if only Sophoebus would Exalt him. Surely, if Pearl merely had the strength of an Exalt, he could have dealt with the King of Dark Fathoms. Surely, all Ysyr would agree that an Exalt qualified as a sorcerer-prince. And yet, the only thing he had received in return was a flat refusal, as Sophoebus told him he did not understand the danger and was not worthy.
And now someone, presumably one of the hostages, has been Exalted instead of Pearl, if the anima display he saw before is any indication. The only thing that stopped him from rushing below decks and trying to save the Exaltation that should have been his was that he had been physically blocked by the King's vile tentacles.
On sheer determination, Pearl forces his exhausted body back on its feet. His limbs feel as if they have been shackled with heavy weights and he feels weaker than a newborn kitten, but that doesn't matter right now. Even if his heart gives out this instant, he will still die a few feet closer to the hope that had been stolen from him.
There is a long, shuddering crash behind him, and Pearl almost doesn't turn, but the only surviving crewman shouts, points, and tries to get Pearl to see. Groaning, he turns just slightly, enough to see what has happened. A massive chunk of the Impossible Perfection's rigging is in the process of a long, convoluted collapse, ripping down a damaged mast and taking a chunk of railing overboard into the sea with it.
For just an instant, Pearl imagines he can see a snake amidst the tangle, but, no, surely it was just a coil of rope. Stopped from his plodding forward, he has to take a moment to... think. It's hard. So hard. But, finally, he decides nothing can be done there. He turns back to the hatch.
For certain actions, Essence allows opposed rolls. Two characters can each roll a relevant pool of dice, and whoever gets more successes wins, with a hierarchy for breaking ties.
In this case, I figure that the most appropriate pool to roll here is the Lunar's sabotage attempt against Pearl's ability to pierce the deception and catch the Lunar.
The Dragon-Blood puts a new hole in the ship through the simple expedient of feeling around for a moment, then driving her heel in with an incredibly powerful kick. The wood gives way, and water immediately gushes up. The ship is on a timer, now: it isn't impossible to patch, if a crew works effectively, but that would require the crew to rush down here and patch it, and for the King of Dark Fathoms not to attack it.
As the group of you hurry up the ladder to deck, you hear a groaning and then snapping behind you. A new muscular tentacle has already found the new opening, and is working on widening it and working its way in.
Like above, I modeled this as an opposed roll: can the sabotage attempt work like intended, or... does something go wrong?
Dragon-Blood uses Physique Excellency:
16 dice: 6 successes
King of Dark Fathoms:
11 dice (double 9s): 5 successes
You time it well. The King's questing limb explores the hold without catching wind of you. On deck, Pearl is looking the wrong direction for the critical instants you all need to get out of sight. You even see a coil of rope and snatch it up as you run.
The Dragon-Blood's surprising strength comes in handy one more time as you reach the launches stowed near the ship's stern. She doesn't lower it into the water. She finds the right place to grip it, and single-handedly lifts it over the railing and drops it into the water, then jumps after it.
One at a time, you and the other hostages drop into the ship, the Dragon-Blood catching each of you as you fall to cushion the impact. For all the delicacy of her build, she doesn't seem to have any difficulty catching grown men and women.
"Now," she says once you're all crammed into the tiny little boat, "We just need our Lunar friend." You squirm past everyone else to drop a loop of the rope into the water at the prow. "What's that for?" she asks.
"I think it will be easier for the Lunar to pull us like a chariot than try to push," you explain. "No matter what shape he's in, it will just fit better with an aquatic creature's biomechanics, and—"
Suddenly, there's a forceful tug. You exclaim and plant your feet, and others grab hold of you to keep you in the boat.
A tuna has seized your rope in its mouth, and is swimming south-by-southeast with a frantic energy. "He's here!" You call, twisting to shout it over your shoulder.
You think that only you are thus able to see the Dragon-Blood collapse in relief for just a moment. Whatever she'd said, she really hadn't trusted he'd come back for you all.
Behind you, wood continues snapping. When you look back to it, more and larger tentacles are creeping up and over the Impossible Perfection. The fae corsairs, for the moment, you can't see sign of.
True to the Lunar's word, the sea beneath you begins to lighten. You should be over the cliff, then, and hopefully the King won't follow.
Then, the sound of snapping wood reaches a crescendo, and the Impossible Perfection crumples. It ceases to be a single ship and becomes multiple disparate chunks of wood, pieces of the wreckage falling into the ocean separately.
The sea beneath you stirs. The King of Dark Fathoms seems finished with its last prize. Now, you just have to hope that you're in shallow enough depths to be safe, or that it's overlooked your escape and doesn't now notice you at all, or that, failing that, you can outfight its many limbs again.
Everyone is silent, for a few tense minutes, but no sign comes that it's after you.
Instead, the beach ahead gradually becomes more clear. You hadn't paid it any attention during your escape from the shipwreck, but now it's clear that you're actually going to make it. It's a broad, sandy expanse, with no sign of habitation, with a treeline beyond it. The island is large, so that doesn't tell you anything for sure. A good-sized city could be hidden from view just by this not being the best harbor, or perhaps no one has ever lived here, or anything in-between.
Your shoulders are aching, but eventually your faithful tuna swims its way up into the shallows, beaching itself and your little boat. Five of you tumble out onto the sand, and the tuna turns human again. Both you and the Lunar are breathing hard from the exertion, and he has a coruscating sheath of cold-silver fire playing over his body, but he manages a grin. "Guess that was a good distraction that you managed, there, Dragon-Blood."
"You held up your own end of our bargain admirably, Lunar." She gives him a polite bow. She's also surrounded by a faint green haze. That's anima, in both cases: the power of Exalts when they exert themselves creates a towering lightshow. These displays, so far, are still fairly tame, unless the tales you've heard are exaggerated. You glance at your own arms, in case there's a matching sign on you, but if you have one at the moment, you can't see it.
"Naturally," he says, brushing imaginary dirt off of his simple outfit in studied unconcern. "But I'm going to wait a little while before I circle the island and see who else lives here. Not everyone will be reasonable about my anima."
That gets a polite titter from her, before both of them look at you. "And that leaves us with a little time for another mystery, doesn't it?" she says. "Where are you from?"
"Johhadim," you say. "My name is Prince Jinaya, the youngest daughter of the Spear-Queen." You don't hesitate at all in giving the lie. You might not be on Ysyr's hostage ship any longer, but that doesn't mean that you're free to give up on the cover story yet. Ysyr's reach is long.
The Dragon-Blood looks to the Lunar. "Island nation," he offers as an explanation. "Tiny little thing a couple hundred miles east of here. Ysyr's armies conquered it about fifteen years ago."
It's somehow enormously deflating that your homeland is entirely unfamiliar to everyone else here except the man who, according to what you've heard, will devour human hearts to steal their appearance. He also isn't very impressed, either. You certainly knew this already, just from having read so much foreign writing that didn't even consider it, but that's not the same as the emotional reality of it.
"It is good to make your acquaintance, Prince," the Dragon-Blood says, giving you the same sort of polite bow she did the Lunar. "I am Akatha Nei Ylana, Wood Aspect from Prasad. I confess I had not expected to meet any fellow divinities today, and also I was as much a prisoner aboard that ship as you were, so I apologize for my unseemly appearance."
She hardly looks worse than you or the other hostages, but you give her a gracious nod, regardless, appreciating the effort towards normalcy that she is trying to achieve here, although you have at least half a dozen distinct questions from her short introduction.
The other hostages also introduce themselves, and you file their names away. Their stories are much like yours: important-enough hostages from various little conquests, who were being taken back to Ysyr to ensure their home's compliance.
That leaves just the Lunar, who is still lounging bonelessly on the beach, just trying to relax after his efforts earlier. It takes a few awkward seconds for him to realize that the reason you're all looking at him is because it's his turn to introduce himself. "Rhythm of Tide and Surf," he says. "You can just call me Tide, for short. Full Moon Lunar. Don't call me 'Frenzied'; I absolutely am not. Aren't we going our separate ways now?"
"We could, but we don't know what's on this island: if there's any one who lives here and who they are, if a ship could be chartered..." Ylana spreads her hands. "For the moment, doesn't it make more sense to work together a little longer?"
Tide gives her a calculating look. Your pep talk earlier is wearing off, or else he feels like you're already past what he had proposed, which was just about getting away. "Sure," he says, finally dusting himself off again and getting up off the sand.
Ylana gives him a gracious nod, then starts walking around the island. She's picked clockwise, as the beaches that way look a little more inviting than the other direction. Still, it's going to be some time, probably hours, to make your way around, so... there's no telling when you'll find something, or if you will.
You realize after a few minutes that the other freed hostages are on the far side of Ylana from you... and from Tide. They're all keeping their distance from him, and you alone were distracted enough that you didn't really think about it for a moment.
He gives you an impudent grin when he sees that you've noticed that it's you and him, slightly separate from the others. He's a good-looking man, but you think he might be relying on that too much, especially given that he's also... well, he's asked you not to call him a 'Frenzied', but this type of dogma is most of what you've heard about people like him. "So," he says, exactly as if that isn't a concern at all. "You Exalted. It's amazing, isn't it?" He doesn't wait for you to respond. "I remember when I did. It probably wasn't exactly the same. We are different types, but... that moment of power, of connection, of opportunity and of vistas opening. There's nothing like it! Isn't it grand? There's lots to learn about what you can do, I know, but never mind that. What's the first thing you want to do now that you can basically do anything you want?"
On one level, he's half bragging. On another, it does seem to be a friendly gesture, of a sort: he's giving you a chance to share how you feel. Coming down from a deadly fight and a terrifying flight from danger to relative safety makes it... easy to answer truthfully.
What is your priority? This can be thought of as a personality vote. Mechanically, it will represent our protagonist's Virtues. Essence has a social system based around Virtues and Intimacies; we'll look into this in more detail soon, because we already know that this is a strength for Jinaya, but to summarize: Virtues are defining things, central axioms about how one interacts with the world, what sort of things to prioritize. Intimacies are guiding principles and ties, more specific elements of what is important to a character.
[] "I think I have a score to settle with Ysyr."
Your primary Virtue is Justice. You strive to do what you see as good, and seek to set right the injustices and wrongdoing you see around you. Ysyr's crimes will not be far from your mind.
[] "Our friends here need to be brought to safety."
Your primary Virtue is Compassion. You value empathy and selflessness. Today, that means that your fellow hostages need to be seen to, but even once they're safe, you'll find others who need care.
[] "I need to make sure that Johhadim is safe."
Your primary Virtue is Discipline. You are goal-focused and precise, methodical in how you approach everything. Your generally unflappable nature offers many advantages in achieving your ends.
[] "I need... a drink. And a really good meal."
Your primary Virtue is Wonder. Curiosity and a sense of adventure drive you, which explains why you've learned as much as you have already. You know how to appreciate the finer things when chance arises.
[X] "Our friends here need to be brought to safety."
Your primary Virtue is Compassion. You value empathy and selflessness. Today, that means that your fellow hostages need to be seen to, but even once they're safe, you'll find others who need care.
[X] "I need to make sure that Johhadim is safe."
Your primary Virtue is Discipline. You are goal-focused and precise, methodical in how you approach everything. Your generally unflappable nature offers many advantages in achieving your ends.
These interest me. I recently read a rather good piece about a certain exalted commoner jumping into a river to rescue a drowning boy and I wouldn't mind this story following a similar line of selflessness, but I also like the Idea of Duty, of a stoic person with a sense of attachment to their home.
[X] "Our friends here need to be brought to safety."
Your primary Virtue is Compassion. You value empathy and selflessness. Today, that means that your fellow hostages need to be seen to, but even once they're safe, you'll find others who need care.
[X] "Our friends here need to be brought to safety." Your primary Virtue is Compassion. You value empathy and selflessness. Today, that means that your fellow hostages need to be seen to, but even once they're safe, you'll find others who need care.
[X] "I need to make sure that Johhadim is safe."
Your primary Virtue is Discipline. You are goal-focused and precise, methodical in how you approach everything. Your generally unflappable nature offers many advantages in achieving your ends.
[X] "I need... a drink. And a really good meal."
Your primary Virtue is Wonder. Curiosity and a sense of adventure drive you, which explains why you've learned as much as you have already. You know how to appreciate the finer things when chance arises.
I really do like the idea of our Prince here allowing herself to enjoy the upsides of the situation she's tripped into. Knowing things she didn't before, doing things she couldn't before; heck, even without taking the Exaltation into account, being somewhere and meeting people that she never would have imagined before...!
Sure, the way she got there was shitty, and sure, she's still got her current mission of getting everyone in the group to safety - those are undeniable. But being able to focus on the bright spots even in the face of that, just seems like a really neat direction to me.
[X] "I need to make sure that Johhadim is safe."
Your primary Virtue is Discipline. You are goal-focused and precise, methodical in how you approach everything. Your generally unflappable nature offers many advantages in achieving your ends.
I believe this to be the virtue most suited to the Ultimate Advisor.
[X] "I need to make sure that Johhadim is safe."
Your primary Virtue is Discipline. You are goal-focused and precise, methodical in how you approach everything. Your generally unflappable nature offers many advantages in achieving your ends.
[X] "I need... a drink. And a really good meal."
Your primary Virtue is Wonder. Curiosity and a sense of adventure drive you, which explains why you've learned as much as you have already. You know how to appreciate the finer things when chance arises.
