Enlightenment

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Roth963 said:
according to his current character? I think he would be respectful, and try to raise her up as an ally, hut the nature of their former relationship (him being her lacky and basically whipping boy), means that I don't see any great friendship rising.
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Yeah Va is...not really a great person IMO. She was perfectly happy to put a random medical worker in the hospital just to spite her ex-fiance, and that was before she'd established an ongoing "you get beat up and I give you favors in return" relationship with Yon.

I mean by xianxia standards she's a saint, but I think that's more about "Yon is useful" rather than any actual care for Yon.

And I think Yon would recognize that and react accordingly. I imagine it would essentially be a reverse of their previous relationship -- he'd treat her fairly and repay favors she gives him, that's only good sense. But he wouldn't try to establish anything more, platonic or otherwise, since she's shown to not be particularly kind to those around her.
 
Tylansimov said:
I mean by xianxia standards she's a saint, but I think that's more about "Yon is useful" rather than any actual care for Yon.
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I'm not sure that's actually true. Va knew Yon as dependable above all, someone she could confide in, a person she could discuss important matters with that absolutely wasn't going to betray her for anything. That level of trust is hard-won and, for someone in Va's positions, extremely rare.

There's no way Va didn't care. The question is how much she realizes she cares.
 
I can only agree that, yeah, how we treat Va in the hypothetical future where she's our subordinate is going to depend at least as much on what happens between now and then as what happened back planetside.
 
Tylansimov said:
Yeah Va is...not really a great person IMO. She was perfectly happy to put a random medical worker in the hospital just to spite her ex-fiance, and that was before she'd established an ongoing "you get beat up and I give you favors in return" relationship with Yon.
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I don't believe that that's accurate? Let's look at the pertinent quote.
Academia Nut said:
To be fair, the first time had been an accident because her fiance at the time was an idiot. Yon gave the young lady preferential treatment when he was working the apothecary desk because she was politically well connected. Also because she was hot, he was sixteen when it first happened so of course that was a consideration. But mostly because of politics. Unfortunately her suitor had decided that Yon was getting too close to his bride-to-be and gave him a solid thrashing. Had that been it, that would have been it, but the absolute moron had to go and publicly declare that it was because she was showing too much affection.
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So the fact that Yon was beaten up at that point wasn't her choice.. It was her fiance being an idiot. She then used the situation and fawned over him in the infirmary to maximize the damage to said fiance, and provide at least some sort of favor to establish a relationship with Yon, because she spotted that he was useful.

Tylansimov said:
I mean by xianxia standards she's a saint, but I think that's more about "Yon is useful" rather than any actual care for Yon.

And I think Yon would recognize that and react accordingly. I imagine it would essentially be a reverse of their previous relationship -- he'd treat her fairly and repay favors she gives him, that's only good sense. But he wouldn't try to establish anything more, platonic or otherwise, since she's shown to not be particularly kind to those around her.
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I do agree that the core of their relationship was "Yon is useful". I'm not saying that Lady Va is a saint. She's not. She's temperamental, at least somewhat spiteful, and, as of quest start, feeling vulnerable and lashing out as a result. She is in no way a cinnamon roll. I also think that, by the standards of the culture in which they were both raised, she's treated Yon fairly well, overall, for all that implied death threats are a regular and ongoing part of their relationship. She was also actually willing to listen to him rather than get offended when he presented arguments against aspects of her plans and suggested adjustments. She almost certainly cares more about him than either of them realize... and that's even before you include the fact that their relationship is fundamentally a romantic one at some level. Like, on the one side, everyone "knows" that it's performative. On the other side, the "performative" in question is heavy on acts of physical intimacy, and discussions of what manner of physical intimacy they might be performing, and rumors of physical intimacy between them... and it's focused on times when Lady Va is feeling emotionally vulnerable and romantically starved. Like, sure, both of them "know" that it will never go anywhere... and at the same time, I guarantee that there's something in her monkey-brain that identifies him as a romantic fallback plan, and is soothed that, you know, at least she has Yon.

If things are going well enough for him, and poorly enough for her, I think there's a very real chance that at some point that she may decide to unilaterally make the performative/fallback-plan relationship that they have together into an actual relationship that they have together. At that point... she probably won't actually still have the power to make that decision unilaterally, though. So that will be interesting.

It's also the case that, if I'm understanding things correctly, she'll still be above him in status when they meet next. It'll be closer, but she'll still have the clear advantage... and there will still be a basis for trust between them that simply won't exist with the others at her level. Their relationship will change, surely, but there's still advantage to be gained for both of them in having him provide service for patronage, possibly growing into more of a partnership if he manages to get mustanged up. Yon is very good, after all, at the soft-style "not offending people" strategies. This has been incredibly valuable to him, but it's a strategy that you kind of have to keep investing in, or it collapses. Lady Va, on the other hand, is a lot more prepared to go aggro in social interaction, and sometimes that can be very useful.
 
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Sirrocco said:
So the fact that Yon was beaten up at that point wasn't her choice.. It was her fiance being an idiot. She then used the situation and fawned over him in the infirmary to maximize the damage to said fiance, and provide at least some sort of favor to establish a relationship with Yon, because she spotted that he was useful.
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Ah, yeah, you're right. I misremembered the first beat-down as her flirting first and then the beat-down, rather than him simply giving preferential treatment to a Young Mistress and her fiance getting offended.

Sirrocco said:
It's also the case that, if I'm understanding things correctly, she'll still be above him in status when they meet next. It'll be closer, but she'll still have the clear advantage...
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Yup, for now she's still Inner while he's Outer. A high ranking NCO, perhaps, but not a proper Officer yet. (Inner and Outer have likely been remapped within the Chaos army to Inner = low Officer, Core = high Officer, Outer = grunt and NCO.)
 
More on the Lady Va thing, and in particular on the power dynamics of Lady Va vs Yon.

It seems likely that Lady Va will be part of the group of officers that we will be pulled up into. She'll have had a degree of control over her assignment, and will thus be specialized in... whatever it was that she wanted to be specialized in. We don't actually know what that is right now. Her prior history will have left her on somewhat shaky footing with her peers, but, I suspect, less inclined to indulge in Young Master/Mistress stupidity than many of said peers. She has worked with Yon, after all, and their relationship is both pretty close and valuable to her at some level.

Also...
Academia Nut said:
She unfortunately has "Significant NPC Syndrome", as seen with her most recent suitor. This may change with time.
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I'm not exactly sure what this means. "Significant NPC Syndrome" is a googlewhack. Still, I think it means that she's not going to be getting any major unexpected power-ups, and her romantic life is likely to continue imploding.

So... I expect that when we get to her, she'll be doing fairly well as far as the opinion of her trainers is concerned, but socially somewhat isolated. There's a decent chance that she'll have responded to the social isolation by doubling down on whatever the appropriate training is, in a sort of "fuck you all, I'm just going to excel so hard that I'll rise above you, and what you think of me won't matter anymore" in which case both of those things will be a bit moreso.

They probably won't have been getting individual reports about how well specific cultivators on the enlisted side were doing, but I'd guess that she would have found out that Yon volunteered, and possibly that he got into the early group, and what that implied. She'd have every reason to believe that he would survive the process and come out the other side, and would probably have been looking forward to selecting him as her direct NCO once time came for such things. It would effectively have been a return to their old relationship in a number of ways, though the particulars would change. It was something comforting and reassuring to look forward to... not that she'd necessarily admit it to herself.

Having him actually show up in their group as "best of the best" from the enlisted ranks would be a surprise, though not necessarily an unwelcome one. Like, if nothing else, it absolutely would reflect well on her ability to spot and nurture talent. It would call for a bunch of rapid internal reshuffling on how she thought their relationship was going to look, though.

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...and here's where some of that big "culture of xianxia-world" post that I never actually managed to get myself to write comes in, because it's suddenly at least somewhat pertinent.

So one of the funny things about xianxia-world is that everyone wants to gain power, and it is trivial for more powerful people to dramatically improve the power of less powerful people. Lady Va's third major relationship leapt up from "very real marriage candidate" to "I suppose I could offer you a pity concubinage" from finding a random cultivation technique, deep in the stacks of the library. Now, the fact that such a treasure was there to find is an interesting thing by itself, but it's not the one that matters here. Cultivation techniques can be shared by anyone who has them, pretty readily. The sect as a whole could be made enormously more powerful overall if they'd just make these things freely available... but they don't. Why?

Well, everyone's in it for themselves, and a peer is a threat. The relationship between Yon and Lady Va involved him investing heavily to support her while she occasionally dropped crumbs of largesse... but it was defined and held together by the fact that she was so much above him in power. It was important that she keep giving him these rewards, because lackeys that feel like they aren't getting enough out of the deal are potentially problematic in a number of ways. It was also useful, because every time she did, he was more able to provide service to her. At the same time, every time she did, she was consuming a precious resource. Specifically, she was consuming the differential in power between them. If she gave him too much, he'd become strong enough that he didn't need to be her lackey anymore.

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So... when he shows up in the room as, effectively, only a half-step below her tier, that's going to come as a surprise. She would have been assuming that things would wind up being pretty straightforward. He'd come up the NCO track, she'd come up the officer track, she could select him as one of her NCOs, and he'd settle back into a role with power dynamics very similar to the ones they'd started with. Her payoff for her previous relationship with Yon would be that she'd have a competent and trustworthy subordinate filling that NCO slot. Very comfortable and normal - a small island of stability in a sea of change.

This new thing, though? That's a very different kind of payoff. Yon isn't quite a peer, but he explicitly might become one. Once he does, he'll be coming in at the bottom of the band that she's in, but he'll still be in the band that she's in. She doesn't get to have him in one of her NCO slots anymore (assuming that he succeeds at ranking up) but she hasn't actually lost any slots... and hey, now she has a guy who actually knows all of the other potential NCOs personally and has been working with them for some time. So that's a resource to exploit.

It's worth noting here that their culture will have precedent for this sort of thing happening. "My lackey had a fortunate encounter and is now only a half-step below me and maybe not even that" isn't going to be any more alien to their cultural background than "my fiance had a fortunate encounter and is now out of my league." They'll have structures and options in place for such a thing, and not all of them will involve murder. Lady Va will know them. Yon will know them too. Lady Va will be somewhat surprised. Yon will have good reason to suspect that it's coming, and will be prepared... which means that Yon will be in a pretty solid position to guide the next steps in their little dance by presenting her with a path of least resistance that will result in them winding up with a relationship that she's not displeased by. These moments are likely somewhat fraught from both sides.

Also, he has an easy obvious win from their relationship too. Just like she can benefit from his in-depth knowledge of the available NCOs, she has an understanding of their peers, and of the training they've been through in the intervening time, that Yon is likely to find incredibly helpful. Stumbling in the dark is not so great for situations like this. That benefit is above and beyond the simple benefits of cooperation that they can gain just from having a (semi)peer in the room that they know how to work with and can (somewhat) trust.
 
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Sirrocco said:
I'm not exactly sure what this means. "Significant NPC Syndrome" is a googlewhack. Still, I think it means that she's not going to be getting any major unexpected power-ups, and her romantic life is likely to continue imploding.
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It's a fairly common adage in more meta works that the most dangerous place to be is next to the hero. After all, the hero has plot armor. You don't.

Background NPCs have a decent shot of showing up once and then disappearing into a safe and mundane life (unless they're unlucky enough to be Worfed to show off a threat). Meanwhile significant NPCs are always at risk of being killed off to to tug at the hero's heartstrings.
 
...and now, we get to the matter of clans. The matter of clans is funny.

It's pretty clear from the Character Creation and Envoy sections that Clans have an intertwined relationship with Sects. Like, Clans do reach across multiple sects, but the two are very tied together. Notably, as one of the Four Great Sects, the Lotus Eye Sect will likely have a number of the more powerful clans that consider it to be their primary sect, the one where their most powerful cultivators reside... and clans within the sect have a lot of influence. Clans can expect to do a fair bit of jockeying and maneuvering back and forth with one another for influence and advantage, and almost certainly have some way of getting benefits from those of their clan who manage to ascend.

Further, clan influence was a huge deal back in the sect. It meant access to more and better resources, it meant setting up marriage alliances, it meant expectations from your family, it meant someone to take vengeance for slights against you when you could not do so yourself... it meant a lot of things.

Now, though? Well, the first answer is that their current trainers simply do not care about clan influence. They're randomly executing Young Masters because said Young Masters are talking out of turn. They also aren't allowing communication between the enlisted side and anyone outside of their training cadre, regardless of what the higher members of the clan might prefer. They explicitly want to break down those expectations of preferential clan treatment, at least for the duration. At the junior officer level, this is likely the same, except with fewer executions. Also, the inners would have had more Young Masters and Young Mistresses than the Outers, which means that you're more likely to see clusters of clan members working together, and existing clan relationships play out on this smaller stage.

The second part is that there's a lot of severing going on, in a permanent way, and everyone knows it. Some selection of inner and core disciples will have been left behind in the sect, and everyone knows it. Given that they were allowed to discuss their assignments for themselves, it will likely have been done largely as Clan decisions, but that doesn't mean that the entire clan went one way or the other. Any assets that couldn't be moved would be left behind at the sect, and clans would have wanted to leave behind enough of their people to keep those assets into the next generation.. so in a lot of cases, the clans will have been deliberately split - especially since there likely would have been rewards for sending their scions given to those that stayed behind. There will have been a lot of diplomatic maneuvering.

Now, in Lady Va's case? She was going to be jumping on the first boat out regardless. She needs this... and, honestly, her clan could probably get more for selling her to the envoy than she was worth as marriage material at this point. As far as the ones that stay behind are concerned, it's a way to bring this whole sordid affair to a close in a way that saves face for all involved. What we don't know is how much of her clan came with her. We don't know nearly enough about her clan as a whole to know their positioning on such matters. We also don't know what fraction of the inners and cores were taken. Like, sure, they took 2/3 of the outer disciples. They also gratuitously set the nearby mortals on fire. I'm pretty sure that they have a process and a plan for how many they take at each level and how many they leave behind and I have no idea what it is.

Still, I think it likely that Lady Va's cadre has been out of touch with their clans for the intervening period. That's just standard MO for military training of this variety. I further think that it's highly likely that everyone's internal clan dynamics will have seen some serious churn by the effective removal of a significant fraction of their core members... and just because she isn't there talking with them on a regular basis doesn't mean that she and her peers won't be able to work through the implications themselves. I also think there's a not entirely trivial chance that the significant majority of her clan decided to stay back on planet. Regardless, we're going to see a reduction in the importance to her of her Clan and its benefits and its expectations. The only question is how much of one.

Oh, and this also holds true for pretty much every other Inner Disciple clan scion in the group. There's going to have been some churn here. Lady Va will have a very good idea of how much churn. Yon will not. If the answer is that Lady Va has thrown herself to the mercy of the winds, and has almost no clan support in this strange new world... well, she's not likely to admit that to Yon outright up front if she can avoid it. If she thinks that someone else will tell him first, then she'd prefer to be the one breaking that news, but otherwise it's only going to be something that happens if she desperately needs advice/sympathy on the matter (and I don't think her position is likely to be so desperate as that) or if she's looking to crank up the level of their relationship rapidly. (I don't think she'll be that kind of desperate, either.) So, barring those... well, she'll have to admit it eventually, but if at all possible, she'll want to re-establish initial grounding on their relationship with as much of an advantage in the power dynamic as she can get. Any admissions of weakness can come later, if at all.
 
Sirrocco said:
As far as the ones that stay behind are concerned, it's a way to bring this whole sordid affair to a close in a way that saves face for all involved.
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Cultivators might usually be monsters, but credit when credit is due, they usually do genuinely love family.

I doubt her family wanted their daughter gone, she was not "despoiled" or anything, she did well in the sect for her station, sure, she didn't have a successful love life, but she is a cultivator, if you aren't sixty, you are still basically a baby to them, and that low balling it, most xianxia sects would probably only truly consider a 100+ guy an adult.

I am also not sure how much the envoy, well, payed, let alone how much it payed for each specific scion, I think they mostly came, told the people they were blessed for helping them, maybe dropped some technology or artifacts, and took two thirds of the sect, Va was bought as part of a bulk, not by herself.

I think the sect is very much unhappy with the situation, considering how the guy that told us what will happen was distressed.
Sirrocco said:
Any admissions of weakness can come later, if at all.
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I think clan kids will still have serious benefit over others regardless of backing, because they have access to better techniques and higher cultivation, not having their elders around likely mean that they would be reordered, like how Yon is rising, but if clan kids can maintain their minions, than they start off better than clanless kids… theoretically, so far we comapred fairly favorably to inner sect kids.

That could be that cultivation isn't that big of a boost early, either way, their higher cultivation didn't make them better than us, and having good start techniques doesn't mean much of their mastery of said techniques sucks, a genius poor person can outcompete a lazy incompetent rich person regardless of said rich person's tutors, and I got the impression that most young masters in our location are spoiled rotten, possibly too rotten to put in the effort to train.

I think Yon will see significant rise in status amongst his peers for one main reason, alchemy, we are one of the only potential sources of pills, and pills will be the thing that determine people's status in the long term, being at the head of your peers now is irrelevant if you don't get pills and everyone become better than you in two years.

I think lady Va will do fine even without support, she still has her clan's training, her beauty, which should attract suitors even in this situation, giving her a wide pool of allies, and she is friends with an alchemist.
 
Roth963 said:
Cultivators might usually be monsters, but credit when credit is due, they usually do genuinely love family.

I doubt her family wanted their daughter gone, she was not "despoiled" or anything, she did well in the sect for her station, sure, she didn't have a successful love life, but she is a cultivator, if you aren't sixty, you are still basically a baby to them, and that low balling it, most xianxia sects would probably only truly consider a 100+ guy an adult.

I am also not sure how much the envoy, well, payed, let alone how much it payed for each specific scion, I think they mostly came, told the people they were blessed for helping them, maybe dropped some technology or artifacts, and took two thirds of the sect, Va was bought as part of a bulk, not by herself.

I think the sect is very much unhappy with the situation, considering how the guy that told us what will happen was distressed.
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Huh. I'd forgotten the bit about the stress. Good catch. Let's grab the quote.

Academia Nut said:
Eventually though after hours of waiting, High Elder Hu of the Division of Internal Security strode out from the buildings where the leadership had been meeting with the Envoy. The normally robust man was clearly wan with stress even from a distance in the dark, but he still managed to project confidence and authority when he spoke.
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So this was, at minimum, been a very trying time for the leadership of the sect. It also involved hours of discussion to decide who wound up doing what. So those weren't trivial choices. There would have been horse-trading and jockeying for position.

I'm not claiming that her family did not love her, or considered her to be a shame to the family or whatever. I think, however, that they might have considered her somewhat awkward. Like, she'd initially been intended as marriage-bait for the sort of familial maneuverings you use marriage-bait for, and her value as that thing was clearly diminished. They would have been trying to figure out how to use her to best advantage, given the recent awkwardness... and "sign her up for the Most Honorable Task of the Celestial Envoy, with her full and enthusiastic agreement" is a great way to get full value out of her as a Scion Of The Clan in a way that gets to simply ignore all of the recent unfortunate events. It's not that they'd be throwing her under the bus just because. There's going to be some pretty serious pressures on them to send a certain number of people - they have to send somebody. Even better, given her enthusiastic consent, there's no bus-throwing at all.

As for payment... look, I literally do not know the details. The Celestial Envoy might or might not have offered anything in return... but I'm pretty sure that someone was offering something. If the Envoy had a quota, then you can be pretty sure that the clans were jockeying back and forth about who had to send how many of their own people to fill that quota, and in an environment like that, "I have a talented young junior here who wants to go on the first ship" is a small but meaningful trading chit that you can get some kind of value from.

That's also not the important bit. The important bit is that we don't actually know how much of Lady Va's clan actually came with us, but it almost certainly wasn't "all of them". Given that hers was one of the more entrenched clans, there's a decent chance that it wasn't even "most of them". Between that and the massive change in circumstances, she will have effectively lost some of her backing. We really do not know how much.

I also don't think it was necessarily two thirds. Like, it might have been. It's also possible that they took more of the lower ranks than of the higher. The fact that they left anyone at all suggests that they wanted the sect to be able to continue as an entity so that they could come back and do this again later, and I feel like the higher cultivation types would be both more important to maintaining continuity and possibly more intractable when it comes to obeying their new overlords. Currently, we just don't know.

Roth963 said:
I think clan kids will still have serious benefit over others regardless of backing, because they have access to better techniques and higher cultivation, not having their elders around likely mean that they would be reordered, like how Yon is rising, but if clan kids can maintain their minions, than they start off better than clanless kids… theoretically, so far we comapred fairly favorably to inner sect kids.
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Oh, I agree. Their previous backing will absolutely have given them a healthy head start in a number of ways. As I said, even if he does manage to get mustanged up to officer, he's still at the bottom of that band. The trick is that backing comes with external requirements and expectations alongside the power and protections. It comes with inter-clan alliances and rivalries and so forth. The bad will have degraded with the good... and we don't know how much. We don't even know whether or not Lady Va has any fellow clanmembers in the group we're going to be joining.

On other thing - the Clan kids will have advantages over the others, but not as many as they had before. In addition to everything else we've mentioned, a lot of their social status came from expectation of future status and value. With their clan backing eroding, that erodes as well. It came from an expectation that they'd continue to have arts and resources fed into them, and the ability of their seniors to arrange for such things will have diminished. Clans aren't going to suddenly become meaningless, but they won't mean as much going forward as they did back at the sect... and ability to adapt to that new reality is going to have some value.

Roth963 said:
I think Yon will see significant rise in status amongst his peers for one main reason, alchemy, we are one of the only potential sources of pills, and pills will be the thing that determine people's status in the long term, being at the head of your peers now is irrelevant if you don't get pills and everyone become better than you in two years.

I think lady Va will do fine even without support, she still has her clan's training, her beauty, which should attract suitors even in this situation, giving her a wide pool of allies, and she is friends with an alchemist.
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I definitely think that Yon's skill with alchemy is going to be valuable... though it's also the case that they'll get more alchemists over time as the ones who didn't volunteer get dragged in. Still, for the immediate term, that's definitely something that Lady Va is going to be hoping for from him - both for herself and for favor-trading. There's going to be an interesting bit of negotiation between them, I think, as to the nature of their relationship going forward.

As for romantic prospects for Lady Va...? The dating pool hasn't really changed for her. Like, every single one of these people was at the sect before. She wasn't attracting suiters of what she considered to be her calibre then, so....

There will have been churn, yes, and that offers new faces, but given the way she was described, I wouldn't expect "wide pool of allies".
 
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I can't help, but find these arguments to sound suspiciously like why Va and Yon should date and I find it hilarious. Though everyone is admitting that it's not going to happen in the current environment.

I just want actual persistent characters to stick around. :V
 
bluefur87 said:
I can't help, but find these arguments to sound suspiciously like why Va and Yon should date and I find it hilarious. Though everyone is admitting that it's not going to happen in the current environment.

I just want actual persistent characters to stick around. :V
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Dating is Slaaneshi. In the current Nurglite environment that Yon finds himself in, he and Va should cough and sneeze into each others' faces.
 
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    • Scheduled vote count started by Academia Nut on Mar 22, 2025 at 10:42 PM, finished with 90 posts and 59 votes.
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    Scheduled vote count started by Academia Nut on Mar 22, 2025 at 10:42 PM, finished with 90 posts and 59 votes.
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    We have done it lads, we have become Sergeant Kiss-Ass
     
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    • CW: body horror, implied past sexual assault

    [X] Take up Gosrick's invitation

    When Yon had agreed to take the Sergeant Major up on his invitation, he had done so for eminently pragmatic reasons. He didn't dare turn down an invite from a superior. He wanted something of a guided tour of the region surrounding the training facility. He was interested in making connections with the people in charge.

    He had not expected to be taken on a tour that was at once shockingly mundane and yet also felt like it was out of a lurid tale of depravity told to slander a rival noble family.

    The first day away from the training facility had started off with descending down a long set of spiralling stairs that eventually opened up into a series of walkways along the ceiling of an absolutely massive chamber that was stuffed full of poorly slapped together buildings a dozen floors high. The stench of unwashed bodies was overwhelming, and Gosrick moved for the whole crew to get to a series of articulated carriages that ran along rails suspended from the ceiling.

    Grinning at the half dozen disciples he had invited out with him and a number of his subordinates, the senior NCO explained, "Slave holdings. We're a bit overstuffed because we have to reserve one of the holds for training the conscripts. After sending the fodder through basic and winnowing them out we should be able to keep training up with just the regular facilities, so things won't stink so much.

    Yon just nodded along with everyone else, but he could taste a hint of spiritual energy in the air that he hadn't noticed in this realm before. It was simultaneously invigorating but also required extra attention to digest properly. He wondered if anyone else was noticing, and after a moment he picked up subtle cues that Lin was having to hide not having a very good time. A moment's thought suggested that given his skills and background, Lin probably had a sensory expansion technique and the smell was getting to him.

    Yon actually had the sudden realization that there was the possibility of swapping techniques. It wasn't really something done normally, but he had come to the conclusion that resources from the sect would be inconsistent, and that the Celestials had a wildly different system of cultivation. The weeks he had spent had made him realize that they had a much higher baseline for certain things, which was why they valued mortals and low level cultivators about equally. And really, it made sense, when a single mortal with a Celestial weapon could kill a low level cultivator with luck or surprise, and the Celestials had lots of weapons. The cost of training a single Outer Disciple could cover a dozen mortals, who would win every time by a wide margin.

    And having seen the Envoy and his subordinates, Yon also knew that they had much higher level cultivators. They just didn't need larger masses of lower level disciples to train up to do necessary tasks when they had all sorts of sorceries that mortals could use that did the same thing. Of course few other disciples from the sect would see it the same way, but Yon could see why the Celestials could order the sect around so casually.

    After a few minutes of travel along the carriage with the instructors chatting among each other about things the disciples had no context to appreciate, they arrived at the far end of the slave holding area. Here the massive urban slum terminated in a collection of ramshackle but better put together buildings that consumed the walls like glowstone covered barnacles. Armsmen walked along the station where the carriages let them off, nodding respectfully to Gosrick and those with him.

    The air here was completely taken over with a riotous melange of perfumes and incense mixed together with the metallic tang of blood. The sounds had also changed from those of thousands of people packed together in close proximity and trying to survive through their misery. Now a dozen different strains of music fought with chants and cries.

    "And here we are! Hold C Foreward, home of the Entertainment District! Unless you get invited to an Officer's Lounge, the best place to kick back and blow off steam. And while I might not have an invite to the Lounge, I do have all the best proprietors owing me favours, so in some ways that's even better," Gosrick bragged, while his buddies all grinned and smiled and were nudging each other over prior visits.

    Rubbing his chin, Gosrick looked at the other instructors and asked mischievously, "Now, where should we take the recruits first?"

    "The blood pits!" Kaisen began enthusiastically.

    "The blood pits are for the middle!" Conradki retorted.

    "Madame Silk!" Dirrin offered.

    "Pfah! You'd spend the whole time there!" Kaisen said with a snort.

    "Yeah, no the blood pits are after you've already had a drink or two in you, and Madame Silk is how you finish out a night after you've already got your blood pumping," Gosrick said, dampening both Kaisen and Dirrin's spirits. After a moment of humming he snapped his fingers and went, "Squealing Pig!"

    That got a bunch of agreeable nods and thoughtful looks as all of the instructors present agreed that wasn't a bad option to start them off. So it was that they decided on which exit from the carriage station to exit from, the armsmen at the gates giving them barely a glance as they exited the secure area for the lords of this place and stepped into the place set aside for the slaves to entertain their masters.

    The higher levels closer to the checkpoints were clearly of a higher class, but they took a broad, spiralling walkway further down into the warren of buildings. Tubular glowstones bent into writing and simplified images flashed with a riot of colours, proclaiming every manner of entertainment a mind could dream up. About halfway down the spiral they went through a tunnel structure that took them past an incredibly noisy structure covered in the sigils of the Storm Lord, its advertising declaring it as a place for the demonstration of martial prowess and betting on the outcomes. Combined with the longing look on Kaisen's face and how strong the smell of blood was, this was presumably the place he had called the 'blood pits'.

    The other side of the tunnel brought them to another spiralling road, but this one went around a large open space that had grown into a dome around a sort of silo structure, clearly unable to attach onto it but wanting to remain close. This also allowed for dozens of business fronts to be seen at once, and from the advertising it was clear that they were peddling flesh as their primary entertainment. And while the crowds had already included streetwalkers, here all other mercantile sorts had disappeared in favour of those who were selling access to their bodies and those who were buying.

    All of the disciples had to stop and gawk at one particular creature though. A dead eyed amalgam of flesh and steel, it was an unseemly display of every possible form of artificial sexual organ stuffed into a single body. It sat under a sign showing off the pricing for its services, with a miserable looking slave collared and chained nearby holding a hose. Most horrifically of all the thing's mouth was completely gone, replaced by a rubbery simulacra of a vulva.

    "Now now recruits, we've got far better in store than that low-class public-use trash," Gosrick said dismissively. "Unless of course you're wondering what it is, in which case just always remember to never piss off the cogs. If you're lucky there's nothing left of you to feel anything when they're done. If not, well, you can tell when those ones are fresh by the way the eyes dart about, screaming without a mouth."

    Training hadn't covered what a 'cog' was, but Yon definitely engraved the advice deep into his memory. There were afterlife hells that sounded worse, but he'd never thought it possible to subject someone to such tortures in life.

    Somehow the experience got stranger as they moved into the brothel district, as there were numerous spontaneous cultivators on display. Normally a curiosity from mortals suffering overexposure to unusually high concentrations of spiritual essence, the poor wretches were usually dissected by the sects to try to learn more about the strange ways flesh could rearrange under unguided cultivation. The lucky ones might end up like Yon, deemed stable and useful enough to induct into a sect. Most ended up like every other servant in Yon's experimental group. Here though they were discarded slaves, showing off extra breasts and prehensile genitalia and stranger things to try to attract clients.

    Gosrick lead them confidently past a guard at the doors of a place that advertised itself with glowing tubes that flashed on and off in sequence to give the impression of a scantily clad woman repeatedly 'impaling' herself on a pole. The only reason Yon couldn't use more explicit terms was because there was a deliberate attempt to blur violence and erotica in the presentation. Was the 'squealing' implied by the establishment's name pleasure or agony?

    The interior of the building was a three storey cylinder, with a central bar that was wrapped within a spiraling staircase in the centre that extended over the central interior space. Walkways extended out from the central pillar to a variety of activity spaces. The first floor seemed dedicated to games of chance and dance floors where off-duty servants and armsmen gyrated to strange, bass-heavy music. The second floor had numerous circles of chairs and couches around elevated stages where scantily clad and outright naked men and women put on displays of acrobatic skill for enthusiastic audiences. The third floor had numerous mirrored windows reflecting the strobing lights of the rest of the place back out, no doubt concealing private rooms for more intimate activities.

    Clapping his hands to get their attention even as the veterans left to do their own thing, Gosrick addressed the disciples and said, "Alright you lot! This is just where we get warmed up! Grab a few drinks, do a line of frenzy off a stripper's thigh, throw some dice, that sort of thing! In an hour or two we'll get out of here, loosened up and ready to see some skulls bashed in at the pits. Get your dicks wet if you want, but the quality guys and gals are for the end of the excursion, so don't go exhausting yourselves at the first stop."

    He then slapped Yon on the back and said, "Except of course for our boy over here! Don't go breaking any of the whores, Piggy actually likes me!"

    What does Yon get up to?
    [ ] Write-in
     
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    • [X] "Stay aloof and sober, watching and listening."

    This, as we say, is hard-ick.

    I may expand the actual writeup above into something more verbose, but the nuts and bolts of this are such- Yon cannot afford to be inebriated in this situation. He cannot afford to stick it in unsavory, unsanitary, or insane. He arguably cannot afford to be in the same postal code as all of the above, but this is a wealth of soft-skill intel.

    The good news is that Yon's cultivation techniques can probably inure him to incidental toasting and recreational narcotics use, but I'd still avoid as much as possible.

    This is a scary place, that is going to pay dividends in terms of inteligence gathering, but is not going to be fun. As much as Gosrick is presenting this as a reward for compliance/excellence, we are on the clock right now. This is work- and at a more characterful note, it'd be interesting to establish what Yon is and is not into in terms of recreation. Va might've been the worst kind of tease and a manipulative young mistress, but she fit more neatly into their homeworld's beauty standards than all of the above.

    Amusingly as I type this, it also occurs to me that most of the cultivators probably don't like excessive bloodsport. Martial discourse is one thing, but who fights to the death? That's gauche.
     
    [X] Do small amounts of drugs and drink--using the kinds of tricks where you seem like you're doing more than you actually are--and try to talk to people--make it seem like flirting if that's what's needed--and otherwise scope out the joint without looking like one of those people who isn't willing to go along with this.
    -[X] Be willing to seize some opportunities. If someone seems particularly interesting, whether for sexual or social or information purposes, feel free to go with them in private... and if it's for the latter two, Yon can always play it up later as sex. And if it's for the former, well, have fun, practice safe sex?

    Going around sober and non-participating ENTIRELY is going to stand out, and Yon does have an Iron Stomach.
     
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    The Laurent said:
    It's Mature, so we can in fact just... say we do drugs and have sex? If we want to.
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    Have to agree with Shyft that this place doesn't seem very appealing, but then again Yon has been in basic for at least weeks at this point his standards might be a bit low.
    [X] Do small amounts of drugs and drink--using the kinds of tricks where you seem like you're doing more than you actually are--and try to talk to people--make it seem like flirting if that's what's needed--and otherwise scope out the joint without looking like one of those people who isn't willing to go along with this.
    -[X]Try and find out if any of the food or drink here has any spiritual value.
    -[X] Be willing to seize some opportunities. If someone seems particularly interesting, whether for sexual or social or information purposes, feel free to go with them in private... and if it's for the latter two, Yon can always play it up later as sex. And if it's for the former, well, have fun, practice safe sex?
     
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    More importantly what can we do that won't come back to bite us? Uh, figuratively and quite literally.

    Gambling is risky when I don't think we have any money. I don't think Yon had any on him when he volunteered (and I doubt they take Sect money anyway), and Yon hasn't been paid yet or had a chance to get some loot.

    I guess:
    [X] Do small amounts of drugs and drink--using the kinds of tricks where you seem like you're doing more than you actually are--and try to talk to people--make it seem like flirting if that's what's needed--and otherwise scope out the joint without looking like one of those people who isn't willing to go along with this.
     
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