Never Full: A Tale of Adventure, Curiosity and Hunger Without Ending [Original Quest]

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[x] Take the long road to the Graver's Hills. This region of rolling hills and burial mounds is famous for its gloomy atmosphere, its restless dead, and its ample opportunities for graverobbing and ruin-exploring. The locals aren't quite friendly, and the opportunities are very specific, but it's close by, and who knows what might be waiting beneath those hills?
 
That's an intimidating wall of text, @Wicked Sanguine, although it flows well enough when I get in to it. Could I persuade you to break those paragraphs up a little?

As for the vote:
*I don't really want to head somewhere with a lot of other Locusts unless we'd get to join a guild or the constabulary, which might be a mark against Iash Quoma. On the other hand, 'weird west detective sheriff' is pretty much my ideal role for Grail, and this might be the best way to get that.
*Graver's Hills seem to offer dungeoncrawling opportunities, which is a perfectly respectable profession, but I kind of want to see more of the world than it appears to offer. It'd be fun to go learn history after we've already seen the present.
*Meanwhile, there's Pandemonium. Sounds weird enough to be interesting, and I do love traveling by bat. Also sounds like the local America equivalent, which would mean even odds of becoming a PI or getting involved in a gang war. Some concern that we'd get conned, but we're probably dangerous enough to make sure that doesn't happen twice.
*And finally, we could set sail for Iad Ekrekein. Distant lands, interesting people to meet and kill, and I've been warming up to jungle aesthetics ever since I found out that there are Asian jungles (meaning they aren't unfortunate caricatures dating back to colonial Britain). That said, it seems a little much for a first outing, not least because it'd be difficult to leave if we're ever imprisoned for trying to found our own mercenary outfit.

Thus, my votes are:

[X] Take the bronze mirror to Iash Qoma, a cosmopolitan city built atop a stalagmite rising through a hole in the earth from a subterranean ocean. There's trade and opportunity galore here, wealth and different cultures and even transport to a lot of the world from there, if you get bored. However, if a place has a lot of opportunity, it also has a lot of competition, and the Locust population here is high.

[X] Take a bat to Pandemonium, capital of the Brimstone Republic. Hedonistic, opportunistic, and ostensibly egalitarian, the Devils of the Brimstone Republic love a good scheme and a good party, and both are to be found in rollicking Pandemonium, rising from its caldera lake. Bustling, boisterous, and hot, you'd have to watch your step here, but what else is new? There's a lot of potential here. Devil-trickery is different from Locust-cunning, though...
 
[X] Take the bronze mirror to Iash Qoma, a cosmopolitan city built atop a stalagmite rising through a hole in the earth from a subterranean ocean. There's trade and opportunity galore here, wealth and different cultures and even transport to a lot of the world from there, if you get bored. However, if a place has a lot of opportunity, it also has a lot of competition, and the Locust population here is high.

I was going to vote the same as Veekie, as Graver's Hills just SCREAMS necromancy, but I love your reasoning (let's see the world, not a cavernous system that'll teach us bad social habits, like murderhoboing), so I'll put that off until later. I'm taking the mirror because Qoma has "transport to a lot of the world from there, if you get bored." Keeping options open, and all.
 
Wait, what?

How...?

Wow. Ok.

Um.

*Flips coin* Yeah, I'm keeping my vote where it is. We can dungeoncrawl AFTER learning Socializingness. Seriously, we need to pick up non-murderhobo habits!

Plus, easy transportation! If we want to leave, we probably can!
 
Voting closes tomorrow and 1.2 goes up after Abnormal Behavior 330 lets out, but I'll answer questions in the meantime if you want
 
Welcome to Iash Qoma 2
  • Threadmarks
    • You may be setting out for a new horizon, exploring beyond your boundaries, and all of those pretty Expansionist words, but you are, at heart, a city person, and finding another city to explore sounds better than just about anything else. The Hills are tempting, but they're also right there--you can see the spires of Vespergren from them on clear days! No, for your first expedition, you want to go somewhere far, somewhere big, somewhere with a lot of chances for getting out, if you so need them.

    You're going to Iash Qoma.

    You get in line behind a procession of robed and masked individuals carrying a large, cloth-draped palanquin with the vague shape of some kind of urn or jar under it. With a little thrill down your spine, you realize what they have to be--the guards with their glaives, eyes on a swivel, the masks fashioned from molted chitin, the faint but undefinable smell of hackle-raising power--that must be a shipment of Ves, the Sacrament, the stuff you've been trained to fear and covet all your life as the source of the Locust people's transformations. They must be delivering it to whoever the authority is in Iash Qoma. You've only seen this procession in person once, and that was right before your First.

    Someone behind you clicks and chirrs in frustration, and you realize with a start that the line's moving again. The mirror glows, from a faint shimmer to a massive bloom of white light, before discharging it with a bone-rattling thrum as each person and party going through is sent on. THROOM as a hulking 7th steps through, weapons rattling. THROOM as the Ves-bearing procession steps through, and another THROOM for their rearguard. Finally, it's time for you to go through. The Gatekeeper, enormously tall and thinner even than you, their collection of prisms and mirror-charms rattling, signs to you as you approach.
    <Going to Iash Qoma, yes?>
    <I am. First outing.>
    <Congratulations. Eat well and fear naught, cousin.>
    You hand them the carefully-hoarded offering, a little bundle of dried meat, polished glass, and two golden coins wrapped in a scrap of bathide, and they nod before slamming the base of staff against the ground. The mirror begins to charge up again, and you take a deep breath before stepping into the glow, into Iash Qoma, and out of Vespergren, to greatness or to death.
    THROOM.

    Traveling by mirror turns out to feel like being struck by lightning, but also being too drunk to feel the pain--every nerve in your body going into a blind panic under a blanket of toxic numbness. You stagger through the other side, smoke pouring off you in hot white plumes. You haven't been able to vomit since your First Treatment--you kind of wish you could. As your vision clears, you register the chamber around you, rounded, smooth stone walls inscribed with line after line of names, a large drain in the polished floor, white werelights bouncing around the ceiling. Another Gatekeeper waits by the side of the mirror, and waves when you register him.
    "Welcome to Iash Qoma! First outing?"
    You nod, not trusting your voice right now.
    "You're out of Vespergren, so here's the local rules. Don't get caught killing or stealing but it's still okay, no trafficking with the dead, and you'll need to figure out money at some point. Have fun, and get out of my Xhaal-damned mirror room."

    You stagger forward and pause at the door. Sure, you just got your entire body fired from one city to the other on a beam of light, but the room beyond was nothing you haven't seen in Vespergren. Beyond is the real outside world, full of victims, threats, and people who haven't even taken the Ves. Academically, you have a vague idea of what to expect. In reality? You're
    [ ] Terrified.
    [ ] Eager.
    [ ] Ready.
    [ ] Not at all ready.
    You take a deep breath, quickly check to make sure you have everything you brought, and step through the door.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Wicked Sanguine said:
    THROOM as a hulking 7th steps through, weapons rattling.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Wait, Third Treatment isn't the max? Huh. I guess there are some enormous monsters out there.
    ...Does eating another Locust let you absorb their Ves, I wonder? Probably not safely, because of the mutation frenzy, but maybe you could extract it. Or maybe you could make yourself grow a cocoon or something, work it out like a more natural metamorphosis. Hmm. *notes in journal of deviant science*
    Anyway, I still want a basically-professional persona for Grail, which precludes everything except:

    [X] Ready.
     
    HoratioVonBecker said:
    Wait, Third Treatment isn't the max? Huh. I guess there are some enormous monsters out there.
    ...Does eating another Locust let you absorb their Ves, I wonder? Probably not safely, because of the mutation frenzy, but maybe you could extract it [...]
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    13th is actually the maximum, but the few who actually get there are in a weight class orders of magnitude above Grail. Also, Vesakh have no sapiophagy taboo, but a strong one against eating those of their own kind, deriving from something not dissimilar to graft-host rejection--when the Ves binds to a Vesakh's DNA, the resulting cocktail is actively hostile to other Ves-host concoctions. This is common knowledge (without the sciencey nitty-gritty) taught before First Sacrament.
     
    Wicked Sanguine said:
    13th is actually the maximum, but the few who actually get there are in a weight class orders of magnitude above Grail. Also, Vesakh have no sapiophagy taboo, but a strong one against eating those of their own kind, deriving from something not dissimilar to graft-host rejection--when the Ves binds to a Vesakh's DNA, the resulting cocktail is actively hostile to other Ves-host concoctions. This is common knowledge (without the sciencey nitty-gritty) taught before First Sacrament.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Ah, so the really Mad science is figuring out how to combine Vesakh concoctions without rejection. And the slightly-less-difficult-but-still-crazy stuff is giving already-bound Ves to unmutated people.
    Wait, what am I saying. They probably get 'neutral' Ves by ripping it out of dead or regenerating Vesakh and purifying it. Unless maybe there's a plant or mineral or something? Anyway, traditional blood-donation-to-make-more-vampires trick should still be valid, if even more dangerous than normal Ves treatment.
     
    YES!

    Alright, there's a lot of roleplaying that's possible. That said, I'm still flashing back to RWBY V7, where emotional "in-character" decisions led to EVERYTHING GOING WRONG.

    [X] Ready.

    We don't have to be God. That would be Saitama's path- i.e. boring.

    But let's have a minimum level of competence.
     
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    Man we at a three-way tie here, heck
    In a couple hours I'll break it if it ain't broke yet, but for now just thanks for the response y'all!
     
    Welcome to Iash Qoma 3
  • Threadmarks
    • In all honesty, you're more excited than you've ever been. Fear has rarely been your guide in the relatively short time you've been alive, and you're not going to invite it into you now that you're facing the biggest opportunity of your entire life. You push open the door and step through, getting your first look at Iash Qoma proper.

    Beyond the doors stretches a vast chamber with high, vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows letting in dull shafts of sunlight. The walls are covered in mosaics depicting elaborate allegorical scenes--groups of people hoisting various weapons and tools in front of sunrises, towers being built by what look like crabs wearing treasure chests on their backs, even a group of Vesakh standing triumphantly over the corpse of a nine-headed snake. Bars and bulbs of glass containing white and yellow light illuminate everything that the many werelights and gaslamps do not, shedding their light on various tiers and terraces of floor connected by ramps and stairs. On the far side from where you stand--a short balcony beneath a sign that says VESPERGREN 1-06--is a tunnel entrance from which emerges an enormous hissing machine, pulling a string of carriages behind it. The first train you've ever seen in operation, and not as a picked-over carcass on the outskirts. Over to the left, a variety of clattering machines that move on a mixture of steel legs and large wheels rattle in and out of the station. And between it all moves more non-Locust people than you've ever seen in your life.

    Across the tiled floors of the station move crowds of people in more shapes and varieties than you've ever seen outside of the presentations in school. Humans, like you used to be, in various shades of brown and beige, Erzan, taller, bald, and horned, with no noses, long ears and skin in shades of orange and yellow, muscular Oriza with formidable external teeth and manes of quills for hair--nothing new to you, save in how many of them look so similar--all familiar to you from the clutch you grew up in, before you all took First Sacrament and changed for good, leaving whatever you were born as behind.
    Among these crowds scuttle Teuthis, covered in chitin and waving tentacles, their long, centipede-like lower bodies rushing over the shining floors, and Mimics, most of them just tangles of crab-like legs extending from the bases of boxes, coffins, barrels, and carriages. And everywhere, distinguishable by the universally cocksure way they move, are Devils, looking like versions of all the other peoples but with warm or metallic colors and glowing eyes, dressed in a way that makes even you, who has worn the same thing since First Sacrament, feel fashionably inadequate.
    The members of your own people, your fellow Vesakh, look less shabby and hungry than they do back home. Other types of person that you don't recognize mingle with the crowds, and you resolve to learn what's what as soon as possible.

    You step down to join the crowds, and nobody looks at you twice--another skinny little Locust in a shabby coat and leathers, nothing exceptional in this throng of seemingly everything that all the world has to offer. Smells rise up to meet your sharp nose, of metal, coal, steam, sulfur, magic, spices, sweat, greed, fear, lust. Clutching tight to your bag, you look around for your next goal:
    [ ] Someone to ask questions of--you're alone and new, and need information.
    [ ] Something to eat--it's been a whole two hours, after all, and your stomach rumbles now that the mirror nausea is gone..
    [ ] Something exceptionally new to goggle at--there's so much on offer here!
    [ ] Someone to tail--no need to start a conversation to get intel out of someone, after all.
    [ ] Some way out of the station--surely the streets of Iash Qoma have more to offer than the very first thing you see upon arrival...
    [ ] Write-in.

    (Two will be chosen.)
     
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    • I want to see what the job options are, so I'm going to vote for these three. They seem like they'll aim us in the right direction.

    [X] Someone to ask questions of--you're alone and new, and need information.
    [X] Something to eat--it's been a whole two hours, after all, and your stomach rumbles now that the mirror nausea is gone.
    [X] Some way out of the station--surely the streets of Iash Qoma have more to offer than the very first thing you see upon arrival...
     
    [x] Something to eat--it's been a whole two hours, after all, and your stomach rumbles now that the mirror nausea is gone..
    [x] Someone to tail--no need to start a conversation to get intel out of someone, after all.

    Eat something, creepily tag along and stare at someone. Seems like a good day.
     
    [X] Some way out of the station--surely the streets of Iash Qoma have more to offer than the very first thing you see upon arrival...
    [X] Something to eat--it's been a whole two hours, after all, and your stomach rumbles now that the mirror nausea is gone..

    Station stuff is probably aimed at scamming noobs. Thats just how it goes, since it has the highest probability of running into either people who don't know shit, or people who want to exploit people who don't know shit.

    Move forward and we're more likely to meet people who know things and aren't super into scamming.
     
    [X] Something exceptionally new to goggle at--there's so much on offer here!
    [X] Someone to ask questions of--you're alone and new, and need information.
     
    If anyone knows a good, reasonable commission artist (or even, dare i speculate, fanartist), point 'em my way--I want visual reference for this thing I've made!
     
    [x] Someone to tail--no need to start a conversation to get intel out of someone, after all.
    [x] Some way out of the station--surely the streets of Iash Qoma have more to offer than the very first thing you see upon arrival...
     
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