Huh.... If @yrsillar is actually taking this as inspiritation, this almost certainly confirm that "going down" is Earth. Still, if Earth is pure Yin... makes me want to use it a bit more. I still would have preferred up, but at least if we get a powerful Yin Earth art it will be very worthwhile.
Huh.... If @yrsillar is actually taking this as inspiritation, this almost certainly confirm that "going down" is Earth. Still, if Earth is pure Yin... makes me want to use it a bit more. I still would have preferred up, but at least if we get a powerful Yin Earth art it will be very worthwhile.
Except the problem with mental balance would get worse. For most elements, it won't matter much, as you can see nearly everything is part Yin and part Yang. It depends on which side you focus upon, though of course, the element's own bias will make it harder to find something coherent.
It's not just our elemental alignment, but our Yin/Yang alignment.
Based on what we know, the relations is that:
-Drawing heavily from similar elements will produce mental skew. Meizhen is packing nearly pure Yin(Water is Yin dominant, Darkness is pure Yin and she's taking Wood in it's Yin aspect), as a family thing, so she's secretive, never initiates conversation, and maintains a facade regardless of whether it's good.
-Ling Qi is very nearly as committed because:
--Zephyr's Breath is the Yin aspect of Wind
--Forgotten Vale Melody is the Yin aspect of Water and the pure Yin of Darkness.
--Sable Crescent Step is the pure Yin of Darkness
-There's no actual drawback to picking opposing elements. However, having multiple arts of the same element means predictable weaknesses and tactical gaps, while picking from opposed elements means having arts which may be more difficult to combine into a coherent combat philosophy. Ideally(aka Xianxia Protagonist style), you develop a synergistic elemental cycle, where opposed forces reinforce and build up each other, leaving no gaps.
As such we should avoid pure Yin techniques outside of our current trio while we work our way closer to equilibrium. We don't need to dedicate to full equilibrium, but picking up an offensive or perceptive Heaven Art goes a long way towards rebalancing, and filling in tactical gaps.
Huh.... If @yrsillar is actually taking this as inspiritation, this almost certainly confirm that "going down" is Earth. Still, if Earth is pure Yin... makes me want to use it a bit more. I still would have preferred up, but at least if we get a powerful Yin Earth art it will be very worthwhile.
As such we should avoid pure Yin techniques outside of our current trio while we work our way closer to equilibrium. We don't need to dedicate to full equilibrium, but picking up an offensive or perceptive Heaven Art goes a long way towards rebalancing, and filling in tactical gaps.
We need to stay pure Yin as the mental unbalance are mostly harmful if we go single element, while Pure Yin or Pure Yang is how we have so far seen every single powerful elder or clan work. I'm assuming there is a very significant reason for that.
We can totally ask about this, but tactical wise Yang gives us nothing, and mental-wise I am expecting staying pure Yin actually very strongly helps.
We need to stay pure Yin as the mental unbalance are mostly harmful if we go single element, while Pure Yin or Pure Yang is how we have so far seen every single powerful elder or clan work. I'm assuming there is a very significant reason for that.
We can totally ask about this, but tactical wise Yang gives us nothing, and mental-wise I am expecting staying pure Yin actually very strongly helps.
Not quite. They found a winning combo and are milking it for all it's worth. Said winning combo uses up most of their slots.
So might as well YOLO it since their family arts are not going to give them a choice in the matter. Balanced combos exist and can be built, but you'd need something like free access to a floor of the library very early on to be able to do so without taking insane risks...and Xianxia trope: if you want to build a balanced combo you need to start very early, because once you pick up a heavy skew you can't consider using the opposite end effectively anymore even if the combo IS good.
In our case, we're going to start seeing confidence issues with increasing Yin, and social withdrawal, as well as conflict avoidance. Meizhen is pretty much textbook for the social ability of a pure Yin build, because they cannot help but to be secretive and deceptive, even if it disadvantages them, they must maintain the facade.
Not quite. They found a winning combo and are milking it for all it's worth. Said winning combo uses up most of their slots.
So might as well YOLO it since their family arts are not going to give them a choice in the matter. Balanced combos exist and can be built, but you'd need something like free access to a floor of the library very early on to be able to do so without taking insane risks...and Xianxia trope: if you want to build a balanced combo you need to start very early, because once you pick up a heavy skew you can't consider using the opposite end effectively anymore even if the combo IS good.
In our case, we're going to start seeing confidence issues with increasing Yin, and social withdrawal, as well as conflict avoidance. Meizhen is pretty much textbook for the social ability of a pure Yin build, because they cannot help but to be secretive and deceptive, even if it disadvantages them, they must maintain the facade.
Except we are also seeing Elder Jiao as a pure Yin build and while he is secretive and deceptive, he is also socially forward and love conflicts. Likewise, Meizhen also loves conflict. So your example are kinda going against what's been observed?
They are also not "found a milking combo are and milking it for all their slots", I am not sure why you are saying that.
I would like to hear your argument in favor of this. I think at best you can justify Meizhen wanting to test herself against those she deems worthy. If she loved conflict for itself I suspect she would act more like the sun princess.
I honestly see no reason not to take a Yang ability IF we find one which synergies really at this point there is no reason not to branch out if we find a combo that would be effective.
Ling Qi took a deep breath and stepped to the side, making sure she was well out of the way of anything dripping from above. It would be foolish in the extreme to ignore good fortune like this. Even if the core was gone, other parts of a spirit beast were valuable too, and with her storage ring, she didn't have to worry about the weight as much as she otherwise might. To that end she did a little rearranging of her things, her qi card was tucked under her sash, and a handful of spirit stones were put back into her pockets.
Finally, she drew her flute, and prepared to play. Hopefully it was just the vermin she could see down here, and not anything larger. She began, and the mist rolled out, spilling down over the edge of the ledge in a cloudy waterfall even as it expanded to fill the chasm around her. At first the insects did not even react as they were engulfed, paying little mind to the noise and increase in moisture, so focused were they on their feast. That was fine, Ling Qi was glad that she could get right on to the second part.
She played the first high haunting notes of Dissonance, things changed, her lungs burned with qi as the mist below became a veritable sea of black, the sheer number of targets left her feeling strained… but it didn't stop her. Taking the shape of a veritable plague of insubstantial rats, the the teeth and claws of her mist constructs tore into the swarm, thousands of them died instantly, and the sound of crunching chitin almost overwhelmed the high pitched shrieks of the larger insects, the biggest of which lashed out mindlessly, biting and clawing at the mist even as her qi fueled attacked sparked uselessly off of their thick chitin.
That however, wasn't a problem, not really. There were only a handful like that, most of the larger ones thrashed around with cracked shells and chittering hisses, time would take care of all but the very largest of the vermin. Still, she felt no real worry as she bounded down from the ledge. She would have grimaced as her feet crunched down on the corpses of insects if her flute wasn't in the way. She was confident she could stay hidden in the mist and away from the writhing creatures attentions.
Dex+Stealth+Mist. 10 dice +1 auto success
2 2 10 1 5 2 8 7 9 3. 4 successes. 5 total
36/38 Qi
Sure enough, her footsteps grew silent, even as she rushed over the carpet of dead bugs, more dying every moment, seconds after she brought them into range of her mist. The surviving vermin only biting and snapping at her constructs. With many of the things covering it dying, she was able to get a better look at the creature they had been devouring.
It wasn't a pretty sight. The scent of rot nearly made her gag up close, and she could see great piles of sloughed off gray scales that revealed stretched of rotting muscle and exposed bone. It was perhaps twenty meters long, not including the tail curled up well outside of her mist. It had four clawed limbs and a thick, squat body. Ahead of her in the mist, she could see it's almost skinless skull, an unsettling reptilian thing with a boxy snout and fangs half as long as her forearm.
Most unsettling though was the way the creature's corpse pulsed with scabrous life. Even as she watched, more of the biting, snapping insects emerged from its rotting flesh, only to turn and begin devouring that same muscle and sinew in the moments before her mist constructs tore them apart. It was disgusting and worrying. After the initial surprise, even the bigger ones had returned to feasting, ignoring the shadows nipping at their shells. She couldn't focus on it now though. No, right now she needed to figure out where in the world its core would be. A core was essentially a spirit beasts dantian, so it should be… somewhere in the abdomen, right?
...She was going to have to stop playing for this, she really hoped rotting spirit gunk was washable too. There was little to do but store her flute away, find a patch of exposed rib and start digging. It was difficult to hold down her dinner as she drew a knife and began cutting her way in, releasing some kind of smelly gas as she punctured… something or another. It was made worse by the way the carcass continued to birth more vermin. She tried very hard not to look too closely at what she was digging through. The flesh seemed to writhing under her hands, fighting back at her efforts to dig through it, almost as if the rotting meat was regenerating somehow.
Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, whatever had killed the beast had torn its belly open, thus making her job easier. Otherwise she would never have been able to finish her search before the mist fully faded. Unfortunately… this meant that her aspirations of a full beast core of this size were unfulfilled. Whatever had slain the spirit had broken the crystalline sphere in its gut into pieces, and so she had to settle for fragments of warm dull gray… tissue. It felt weird, like soft clay, but she could still feel fairly strong qi even from the fragments.
Gained, Beast Core Fragments.
Hastily stowing away the bloody and viscera coated chunks of material in her ring, she rushed toward the exit and away from the much reduced swarm of vermin. She slowed a moment when she passed the creatures skull, reaching down to scoop a handful of fallen fangs and scales into her ring as she ran out of the dissipating mist
Gained, Beast Materials
It seemed her caution was for naught though, the screeching swarm did not follow her, or even seem to much mind her passing as it turned back to its feast. She had an unsettling feeling that it had been there for a very long time… she could remember the way the rot slick guts and muscle had seemed to slowly recover in the wake of her digging.
That didn't matter for the moment though, as she slowed from dash to a quick walk, sticking close to the wall in the down sloping tunnel. Slowly the pounding of her heart returned to more normal levels, and Ling Qi calmed herself. That had went as well as she had any right to expect.
She passed several minutes or steady walking down the round sloped tunnel, it seemed strangely symettrical to her eye. More of a tube than a tunnel, and the rock on all sides was smooth and strangely rippled, as if it had melted and then been left to harden again. At least it wasn't cramped. Ling Qi had never been fond of tight spaces even when she was a small child. She kept herself alert as she walked, wishing that there was some form of cover for her to creep behind.
Eventually the tunnel flattened out, the slope slowly growing level and opening up into a much larger space. Here the ceiling was dozens of meters above her head, and the walls extended a good fifty or sixty meters across. Ahead of her lay a great pit, as wide as the tunnel she was in now. She couldn't see the bottom.
Gingerly working her way around the lip of it she peered further into the room. It was shaped vaguely like a huge upside down bowl, with a pool of what looked like liquid silver in the center, well over ten meters across. It's surface gleamed in her vision, perfectly still. The walls though, were riddled with small tunnels, some a few meters across and others barely wide enough for Ling Qi to fit an arm into. The floor was extremely uneven, seeming to be carved through by a thousand channels like irrigation ditches in the stone. Thick veins of what she thought was some metallic ore stood out on the walls.
Most importantly though, she saw Bai Meizhen ahead, sitting beside the odd lake. She looked a bit scuffed, her snow white gown dirtied at the hems, but not otherwise worse for the wear. She looked up as Ling Qi began to pick her way across the room. "Ling Qi," she greeted, rising to her feet in a single graceful movement. "I am glad to see you well. I did not expect to be separated."
Ling Qi felt a bit of relief as she approached her friend. She had been hoping they hadn't been sent to entirely separate places. She glanced at her hands, which were still covered in filth and grimaced. "Yeah, I didn't end up in the best situation," she came to a stop a short distance away from her friend and the shore. "Where is Cui? Is she alright?"
Meizhen paused for a moment before responding. "She was wounded in my initial encounter, I am letting her rest in my dantian. It is of no concern," she replied dismissively, turning her eyes away from you to peer around the cavern. "There is a door on the other side, but I believe this pool to hold something of use. I suggest we investigate it first," she added, gesturing for Ling Qi to come examine it.
Ling Qi took a few steps forward, but then frowned. Something wasn't right. "Do you need some healing salve for her?" She asked carefully, eyeing Bai Meizhen in confusion. "I would have thought you had some, but…"
"Perhaps later," the pale girl replied. "For now, it is more important that we puzzle this out so that we may leave this place. I fear the creatures which dug these tunnels may return."
That was sensible, but Ling Qi didn't like it. This wasn't right. If it were anyone else, even Ling Qi or herself she could imagine Bai Meizhen dismissing a bit of hurt in favor of pursuing a goal… but not like that, not so easily. Bai Meizhen was not very expressive, but she couldn't imagine the girl would truly look so unconcerned about her cousin being hurt.
A knife slipped surreptitiously into her hand. "I think it's more important that we help her first. Why don't you bring her out."
Bai Meizhen scowled at her, studying her face for several seconds as if deliberating on something. Then she lunged.
Ling Qi's eyes widened and she backpedaled, and her face paled as her Bai Meizhen's face, set in an angry scowl tore in half like it was made of wet paper with a terrible ripping sound. It exposed a maw filled with sharp twitching mandibles, overshadowed by the much large ones that erupted from where her cheeks were. Ling Qi ducked under the snapping sword length things and leaped back, giving her distance from the Meizhen thing.
The lake rippled now as thrashing, chitinous coils emerged, carried on dozens of clattering legs. The things mask… and she hoped to every great spirit she could name that was all it was, now hung in two limp halves from either side of its wide upper body, which formed a 'hood' of chitin around its ugly head. The chitin formed something that looked like a half melted human face above its chittering mouth, and its dark eye sockets burned with emerald fire.
"The little ape just had to have its questions," the things voice hissed in her head, making her feel as if bugs were crawling over her skin. "Can't it see how hungry we are? Hold still, little ape, and it will be over quickly, as it was for the other," the things statement was punctuated by half of 'Meizhen' falling to the shore with a meaty thud, as it slowly began to dissolve into black sludge.
"Like I'd buy that," Ling Qi snapped. "She would break you," she was confident in that, despite the horrifying visual. The thing's body was thicker than her torso and several times longer, and she had a feeling it was very fast indeed for its size, there was a wicked spike of a stinger at the end of its body emerging from the pool. "How about this, you leave me alone and I won't kill you like I did the rest of the bugs down here," she replied, bluffing confidence.
The thing hissed, and Ling Qi shuddered at the fury in its mental voice. "So that is the scent…" It raised it's body higher, towering over her. "You will replace them soon enough, we will offer your bones and skin to the Father-Mother." Some kind of disgusting, sticky black fluid dripped from its maw to sizzle on the stone
Well, she didn't really think that would work. She should really figure out what her plan was though. She had fifteen meters of starting distance from the thing, which left her q good twenty five meters from any of the walls.
[] Lure it back toward the entrance and fog its senses with your Melody. There was a pit, and gravity has served you well so far
[] Get to the walls, find a tunnel too narrow for it to follow you through, if it shapeshifts to do so… well it will be smaller then.
[] Simply try to kite it around the room, you have plenty of room to maneuver
[] Try to bait it with the core fragments? The other bugs focused on the dead beast even when they were dying after all.
[] Write In
I would like to hear your argument in favor of this. I think at best you can justify Meizhen wanting to test herself against those she deems worthy. If she loved conflict for itself I suspect she would act more like the sun princess.
Sun Princess has no manner. There is a reason Meizhen pities her. Meizhen does want to test herself against those she deems worthy, but she also loves striking first and fast. May 'love' is not the right word, but she considers conflict necessary and good.
Yeah, I would have to say that gravity probably wouldn't work in this situation. Insects have a great propensity to not be damaged by falls.
Getting to the walls and finding a smaller tunnel would be even worse in my opinion because mobility is our greatest advantage and trapping ourselves in a tunnel would be counterproductive towards that end
I would rather not try and bait it with the spirit cores right away because we don't have anything to use as the trap in that instance.
So I would go with simply kitting it around the room. We play all the FVM for a total of 8 ki, and we should just try to stay out of its reach.
Yeah, I would have to say that gravity probably wouldn't work in this situation. Insects have a great propensity to not be damaged by falls.
Getting to the walls and finding a smaller tunnel would be even worse in my opinion because mobility is our greatest advantage and trapping ourselves in a tunnel would be counterproductive towards that end
I would rather not try and bait it with the spirit cores right away because we don't have anything to use as the trap in that instance.
So I would go with simply kitting it around the room. We play all the FVM for a total of 8 ki, and we should just try to stay out of its reach.
I would feel far more comfortable about causing real harm to it with our knives if it was forced into a smaller form. On the other hand I'm not exactly sold on the idea of fighting a shrunk down version of this thing in a tunnel with less room for us to evade.
Exactly. In order to use the spirit cores as a bait, we would need to do the damage necessary to make it worthwhile. At the moment, we don't, and so we should instead kite around her. With Starlight Elegy and Dissonance of the night, we can probably do decent damage to her.
Lure it back toward the entrance and fog its senses with your Melody. There was a pit, and gravity has served you well so far
Trying to do what we've done before. Don't think this is a good idea - this is a creature of deception. [] Get to the walls, find a tunnel too narrow for it to follow you through, if it shapeshifts to do so… well it will be smaller then.
I like this plan. It's stats aren't better then ours. Make them worse and we'll do well.
[] Simply try to kite it around the room, you have plenty of room to maneuver
Slog, and we took the path of misdirection and subtlety. I think the test would punish this. [] Try to bait it with the core fragments? The other bugs focused on the dead beast even when they were dying after all.
Should work, but then we'd lose the fragments.
So... [X] Get to the walls, find a tunnel too narrow for it to follow you through, if it shapeshifts to do so… well it will be smaller then.
This said, with the core fragments and a write in we just might make for a trap, like increasing the probability for lure it into the pit. Even if it does not work, we could still kite.
