Petals of Silver & Blood; a genre remix

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    • Scheduled vote count started by Gazetteer on Apr 7, 2025 at 10:04 PM, finished with 59 posts and 48 votes.
    [look] [weapon]
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    • Part 1, Arc 1: 002 New
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    • Look

    A deep claw mark over your right jugular: 30

    An ugly slash starting from the right of your mouth and curving up your cheek: 9

    A missing eye: 5

    Weapon

    An axe: 24

    A spear: 21

    A sword: 3

    The axe at your belt is ostentatious in its brutality, its silver-washed edge giving way to blackened metal in the same shade as the cord woven around its handle.The crest of the Black Ark gleams dully on its surface. People take a look at it and your uniform and your scars, and quickly decide they want nothing to do with whatever business you're here on.

    So you drift down the main shaft of the port district untroubled, heading for an unassuming side shaft that seems to go straight up relative to your current orientation. This is a shabbier part of the district, all yellowing panels and the distant background hum of machinery. The space is narrower, the shaft lined with access points to warehouse space and cheap temporary habitats for short-term rent. A group of security officers drift past you, heading in the opposite direction. They recognise your uniform and look very determinedly away.

    The place you're looking for is in six-way junction that marks a dead-end in the shaft. Only two of its access hatches seem to lead to occupied space. One of them bears the garish advertising of a small eatery specialising in hand pies. The other is unmarked except for the flat and staring eye of a camera set into the hatch. You push yourself up to the latter, catching yourself on a handhold that feels a little annoyingly loose under your grip.

    "Here on business from Her Highness. I'm expected," you say. You lean in close so that the microphone can pick up your quiet, rasping tones.

    For almost a minute, there's no response. Then with a tired sounding beep, a voice comes over a nearby speaker. "Oh! Guardswoman! He didn't— we weren't expecting you from this entrance. I'll be right there."

    Her Highness had known what they expected — her in person, using secure transport, with you to play bodyguard. She thought that you arriving on your own via a shabby pedestrian entrance may put them off balance. So far, that impression bears out.

    The hatch opens with a hiss of air and a squeal of disused machinery, revealing a nervous looking young man. "Shall I... Shall I take you to see Mr. Tanner?"

    By way of answer, you simply drift through the hatch to stop beside him, letting him seal it behind you. This side of the hatch is almost identical to the the one you just came from, but far better maintained. Tanner spends good money on keeping his facilities in working shape. The young man swallows nervously, his eyes flicking to the axe.

    You've met Dove before. He's short, dark-haired and brown-skinned. Incongruously pretty in an almost feminine way, despite the grease beneath his nails and the mechanics' jumpsuit you've never seen him not wearing. He's friendly, competent and knowledgeable, but he moves through the world as though terrified that he might make someone unhappy with him. It's not surprising to you that Tanner both keeps Dove around, and doesn't seem to particularly like him.

    You'd first met Tanner four standard timekeeping years prior, when your lady had first slipped away from Nyx under threat of repeated assassination attempts by her siblings. So out of favour with the king that she hadn't dared use anything so obvious as an official transport, Her Highness had sought murkier options to bring her to Beryl.

    Tanner is openly a merchant of dubious repute, and less openly a smuggler and information trader successful enough to have acquired a small fleet of ships to his name. Under the circumstances he had charged an exorbitant rate, but he had still borne your lady and her small entourage to safety when he could just as easily have sold her out to one of her better placed siblings. Still, you'd never quite liked the man. Something about the way he looks at people like he's calculating a price.

    Whatever your feelings, though, you could never accuse him of running a sloppy operation. The space that Dove leads you through is bright and well-maintained, and his people are professional and very competent, as criminals go. You go down a curving shaft, eventually coming to an internal airlock. Stopping himself short here, Dove pulls his comm from out of his jumpsuit pockets, and makes a quick voice call. "Yes, she's here at the back access. Yes, just her, the princess isn't here. I don't know! From the street entrance!" He shoots you a nervous glance, which you return impassively.

    Dove listens to the reply, hunching his shoulders down low, before the call ends. He reaches for the hatch, but hesitates, glancing back at you. "If you left now, you could just... throw me into a wall and go."

    You stare back at him, raising your eyebrows fractionally.

    A look of mild panic comes into Dove's voice. He says, his voice dropping to a hissing whisper: "You know this isn't right, don't you? He didn't tell me what, but it's going to be bad."

    You're a little surprised and impressed at the warning. You hadn't previously thought that Dove had the spine to risk so much, let alone for your sake. "I have my duty," you tell him.

    Before he can work himself up to replying, you push past him and press the panel that makes the circular hatch slide open with a hiss. It closes behind you as you enter the cramped confines of the airlock, giving you a few seconds of listening to the quiet life support hum. You reach into your pocket, pull out your own comm, and send a text message. You receive the reply almost right away, and have time for a brief exchange.

    You
    I will be in front of him within two minutes.

    HH
    always so punctual

    You
    Should I have been late?

    HH
    🖤​

    The last comes just as the second hatch slides open of its own accord. You put your comm away, and focus on the task at hand.

    You drift out into a brightly-lit warehouse, one black-tiled wall taken up by heavy metal doors marked as exterior airlocks, three more by banks of carefully stowed cargo units in every shade of grey imaginable. Here, ships can dock and either unload or load cargo. That's not what's going on tonight.

    A suspicious number of hard looking personnel are present, floating near the walls around the edge of the large compartment, unsmiling and wary in their drab attire. The man himself is positioned near to a portable magnetic table anchored to a grate above one bank of cargo units, a barely respectable assortment of refreshments in zero-gravity containers stuck fast to its white surface. One has to make some sort of attempt, of course, but you can only go so far when you know that your intended guest doesn't actually eat solid food.

    Tanner is a tall, broad-shouldered man, pale and perpetually smiling. He's started shaving his head at some point in the past few years, although he's kept the neat, dark beard. The bright blue and white of his sleekly cut clothing is very nearly the only splash of colour in the entire room.

    "Guardswoman Honey," Tanner says, his welcoming expression barely straining. You've seen him look like that a second before shouting at a port official — the smile means nothing, no matter how much it seems to reach his eyes. "I will admit, I'm surprised. Her Highness indicated that she'd be speaking with me today." He detaches one of the zero-gravity wine glasses from the table, sipping the red liquid through the attached straw, long experience allowing him not to spill a drop.

    You push off from the hatch, drifting toward the table at a controlled rate. As you do, you can't help but notice a large and ominous shape amid the storage units — a deactivated war armour is nestled there. Pre-conquest models still float around on the margins of the system in their thousands, the scratched and fading yellow paint on this one belying the fact that it is still entirely lethal in the right hands. You can tell that at least five of the silent watchers are armed as well, and you suspect all of them are. It all makes you very glad that your lady isn't here, and that Tanner doesn't know about Amber.

    You expertly catch yourself short on the edge of the table. It's clamped tight enough to the surface below it that it barely shudders with your weight. You're directly across the table from him, positioned so that the airlocks are directly overhead. You lean forward enough that your whispering tones can be audible. "She said that she would speak to you in person."

    "Has she sent you ahead of herself, then?" Tanner asks, politely confused. You suspect he's rather more frustrated than that.

    "In a manner of speaking," you whisper back. You can already feel the presence at the back of your head, something cold and lifeless and deeply familiar, an icy finger brushing against the edges of your mind. Despite every hindbrain instinct screaming at you to do otherwise, you take a deep breath and open yourself to the presence, letting it slip past your defences. With a forcefulness that still sometimes startles you, it takes hold of you fully, unnatural cold flooding through your limbs.

    Tanner sees you freeze for a moment, your expression going fixed and distant. When you come back to yourself, it isn't you anymore. The unpleasant prickle of blood sorcery fills your body, and at once, your feet fall to land flat on the floor the table is anchored to, fully in the grips of an unnatural localised gravity. Your lips turn up into an enigmatic smile utterly alien to your face, and your body shifts to perch on the edge of the table, your mannerisms turning languidly feminine in a way you could never hope to match. Those same phantasmal fingers seize your tongue — the panic is manageable enough, this is far from the first time.

    "Mr. Tanner," your mouth says, in a voice that your damaged throat and vocal cords could never hope to produce — dark, full-bodied, and rich, the tones arresting and educated. "I hope you aren't offended by the manner of my attendance."

    His smile doesn't actually slip but it does waver, and he stares at you with surprise and dismay. It's a moment before he knows how to respond. Beyond him, the assembled workers stare in open fear and shock. Tanner quickly ducks his head respectfully. "Your Highness. I apologise if my hospitality has proven inconvenient for you?"

    "Oh, no, very convenient," she says. Your hand reaches out and plucks the other wine glass up off the table, swirling its contents speculatively, before sampling it with your mouth. It's dry and sharp, although you personally have difficulty appreciating it with the metallic tang of your lady's sorcery at the back of your throat. She lets out a pleasant sigh. "Lovely, although you really shouldn't be opening a red this good in microgravity. It can't breathe properly, covered like this."

    "I had no idea that Her Highness was a connoisseur," Tanner says, still thoroughly disarmed by this mode of conversation.

    "Only when my Honey lends me her mouth. Not a vintage I can appreciate otherwise." Your smile turns a touch more amused. You catch sight of your reflection in the delicate wall of the wineglass: your dark eyes have gone an unearthly, faintly luminous blue-grey. Your lady's eyes. "Onto business, though. You came to my aid, once, in my hour of greatest need. This is why I gave you the benefit of the doubt, even when you cut ties so abruptly. Even when you summoned me to come speak to you under suspect circumstances, after three years of silence. I have heard very troubling rumours — would you be so kind as to assuage them?"

    Tanner squirms at his place on the far end of the table. He speaks slowly, reluctantly. "Your elder sister is due to arrive in Beryl to conduct a royally-sanctioned 'audit'." Words that should strike fear into any kind of merchant or public figure operating in the colony, given the bloody reputation of your lady's elder sister.

    Your head nods, expression falling into one of disappointment. "Amaranth? That is inconvenient. Advanced warning about her arrival would have been deeply appreciated. But that's not why you tried to call me here, is it?"

    "No," Tanner admits, wrenching himself away from her/your gaze with effort.

    "You're trying to earn leniency by helping to eliminate an enemy for her before she arrives. Or perhaps by capturing one to serve to her on a platter?"

    Tanner's silence is more damning than any confession. From the gloom at the far corner of the compartment, a figure glides into view, unnoticed before this. The humans nearest to him unconsciously tense at his presence, sheep in the presence of a wolf. He scowls, an expression that makes his fangs very prominent. Those baleful, red eyes are ones you recognise very well. "So, this is a wash," he says. The way he's looking at you is not encouraging. "I wanted to finish tearing this dead-eyed bitch's throat out in front of her lady. Guess I'll have to settle for sending her a picture."

    Your lady shoots him a look of utter disdain. "I see. What an unfortunate note to end our dealings on, Mr. Tanner. I wish you luck with your new... associates. Honey? I leave this in your capable hands. Resolve the situation as you see fit."

    She leaves you again, provoking a full-body shudder you do your best to conceal as the cold seeps back out of body and sold. The taste of blood lingers in your mouth. You grip the edge of the table to steady yourself — your lady may be gone, but her magic clings to you for a moment or two longer. You're still perched on the edge of the table where everyone else is floating. Your flat gaze goes from Tanner back to the vampire. "Lash," you say, putting a name to a face.

    "You remembered," He says, not looking any less murderous. He's short, running to outright scrawniness, but you know from bitter experience how good he is at making use of his physical gifts anyway. You resist the urge to touch the ugly scar that goes across your throat at the memory. He's generally a cruel, skulking creature, someone that Princess Amaranth has used for her more underhanded work in the past. You'd hoped you'd seen the end of him.

    You reach for the axe at your belt, and the entire compartment tenses for the fight that they must surely know is coming. Lash begins to drift slowly closer to you.

    Tanner takes stock of the situation, and takes the opportunity to push off from the table, putting some distance between you and the oncoming vampire. "No hard feelings," he tells you, shrugging.

    "What's it been, three years?" Lash asks you, ignoring him.

    "Four," you say. Your voice doesn't carry very far in the large room, but Lash can hear better than the humans. You slip off the table, your feet hitting the floor, the blood spell still telling your body to treat that direction as down. "I spaced you," you add, frowning a little.

    "Yeah! On the night side of the planet, though. That'll teach you not to finish the job, idiot. Love the new voice, by the way — I do good work." He flexes his hand, and razor-sharp claws extrude from his fingertips.

    You don't dignify it with an answer — he's trying to distract you. Your lady has given you a task, and it is your duty to complete it, however open-ended her instructions may have been.

    Article:
    You face a murderous vampire assassin, and are surrounded by enemies. They don't know that you have backup on the way. What do you do?

    [ ] Escalate to violence (roll Steel: +2)

    [ ] Keep them talking until Amber makes her move (roll Ice: +1)

    [ ] Scare as many of them off as you can (roll Flame: 0)
     
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    • [X] Escalate to violence (roll Steel: +2)

    Normally I would be averse to the unnecessary spreading of violence, but our lady gave us the go ahead to solve it however we see fit.

    A shame about all the blood being wasted though.
     
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