Sunrise - a Khepri in the Dark Lands Quest (Worm/Warhammer Fantasy)
- Thread starter Jurric
- Start date
- Crossover
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Yeah, hence the desire for more information.
Currently I'm assuming that they work on the same logic as a tinker power, so intuiting "this works for X reason" and reverse engineering how Y works, but lacks the understanding of why these work the way they do.
Thus she hits the big leagues by getting to somewhere like the college of magic and getting something of a formal education in it.
Doubly so since its not like in WHF access to people to terrify is hard to come by. Turn over a rock you'll find a goblin, ungor or evil chicken that needs a good frightening.
This is (for lack of better terminology) an absurdly target rich environment of at least somewhat deserving beings, although that does make me uncomfortable to think of. But satisfying the moral dilemmas for now we're in the freaking dark lands. If we need to keep Taylor's power charged practically the only people here are Gobins, Skaven and Dawi Zharr.
I mean yes, I do since we were told that.
But also by a similar metric this is the kinda setting where having the piss so thoroughly scared out of you could cause them to start worshipping you (hell its basically Mathlann's entire strategy
) especially if you turn around and do things for them in turn.Terror is terror, but its also a statement of strength to many of the more evil beings of this setting and compared to other ways of getting them to sit down and shut up is comparatively non lethal. If we can get a tribe of Hung or Kurgan on ourside by giving them arachnaphobia I'll take that over the alternatives.
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- Location
- Australia
It's based on the Simurgh's ability to reverse engineer tinker tech, which she apparently does through sheer genius, but your version has much stricter limits and needs a lot more time.
In combat having that power active might give you an idea of how a weapon or spell fielded against you functions, but no idea how to replicate it. Expect to mainly use it to 'research' things with month or year long turns.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
That's actually a lot better than I thought*, and really just reconfirms what I already suspected, that it benefits most from getting access to formalised education on these topics.
*And given how WHF stuff usually works, month or years to make progress on these sorts of things is really good. Its more than a bit ironic that our best bet for sustainability (potentially after Teacher, but Teacher has other uncomfortable implications) is the fear generator.
I'm sure we won't be reverse engineering how the polar gates work any time soon (hell getting started on magic at all is going to take time), but this at least gives an option for that which doesn't mean we have to find some way of choking Lord Kroak to death...again?
Three additional points for people's consideration, which we have to consider no matter what wins
1. These powers are going to affect Taylor's mental state so we really have to keep an eye on it. She's already in a bad place, for her the Golden Morning isn't long ago, she just lost her father, her friends and got shot in the head twice...I'm also assuming some body disphoria until further notice, what with both being in a new one and having it subsequently grow new appendages. Furthermore her power (no matter what it is) will have more impact. Assuming the aggression generator is turned off (I hope) pretty much any power, but Chevalier's seems like it'll put some strain on her mind even further.
Glastig: Strangling people to death.
Teacher: Overwriting people's free will. (potential Khepri torture?)
Smiurgh: Aside from the obvious concern of having Smiurgh wings, generating terror in others likely isn't good for someone with a sense of empathy.
Fittingly, Chevalier's is the most simple power (not in terms of potential applications, but in so far as to how it works), and is probably the best for Taylor in terms of mental state since it is straightforward, and in theory could be used non lethally in most situations as long as we control the strength employed and what weapons are deployed in the tendrils.
2. I think I've already mentioned this, but at least for Glastig and Chevalier, there's two fold problem of either taking knowledge/power that isn't safe or is an active memetic hazard. Glastig's power for example (as I read it) shouldn't work on anyone that uses therugy, since that's mediated through the god, in fact it seems like a god would be able to smite you for trying. It might let her bypass the risks of learning Dhar in the first place, but she'd probably still be unable to use Dhar safely, unless she can grab someone whose mind wouldn't be affected by letting Dhar into their mind in the first place (which is basically nobody in setting, save people who are already too evil for the Dhar to make them worse.) For Chevalier, especially considering where we are and who we are going up against, there's a real risk that we try to eat a Dawi Zharr axe and end up noshing a daemon of Khorne, which would be...really bad.
3. For the Smirgh power set, (like so many people in the setting) our biggest enemy are the undead, though appropriately for the opposite reasons to normal. Usually the undead counter enemies in the setting by virtue of turning their numbers advantage back on them (Skaven, Orks etc.), but we suffer from the weakness chaos has against them, that they have a very low count of entities that can be scared, heroes who are very hard to scare in the first place and very dangerous heroes. (For chaos substitute in scare with corrupt.)
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- Location
- Earth
[X] Data Package: Chevalier
[X] Data Package: Teacher
[X] Data Package: Teacher
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I mean, going off the OP, we're probably QA who thinks she's Taylor or, at the very least, QA has become so dramatically affected by the Khepri merging that it's willing and capable of going against it's original programmed purpose. The aggression and mental affectation of being a host is unlikely to be a problem.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
- Location
- In the Grail's Church
Hallelujah! Let us welcome our Queen of Escalaltion, Simaloyer! Long may her feathery majesty reign in terror!
- Location
- Australia
The next update is almost ready but I'm going to do the edit tomorrow, once I've slept and am fresh enough to find any mistakes.
In the meantime, for someone who knows copyright law a bit better than I do, I've found a picture of Lucifer from the card game Shadowverse and I was thinking that it looks a bit like I imagine Taylor to look in this fic. He's got six wings instead of four, but there's some pictures where the lower two wings aren't visible and he's feminine enough.
Is it legal for me to post a credited image in the character sheet for the sake of a clear reference idea, or not?
In the meantime, for someone who knows copyright law a bit better than I do, I've found a picture of Lucifer from the card game Shadowverse and I was thinking that it looks a bit like I imagine Taylor to look in this fic. He's got six wings instead of four, but there's some pictures where the lower two wings aren't visible and he's feminine enough.
Is it legal for me to post a credited image in the character sheet for the sake of a clear reference idea, or not?
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Well I'm not a lawyer, but I believe its fine as long as you're not saying you made it/own it.
Oof. Poor Taylor.
Can also ask people to post appropriate pics if you want, if you give a general description someone might find something closer than "a bit" to what you imagined.
Here's one that took me but a moment to find, not sure if it hits what you were thinking though since iirc Taylor's new body hadn't been described as of yet.
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Images of MTG cards can be found all over the web and WotCs don't care, so it should be OK, I think.
BTW, speaking of MTG. Please, check if you can find to you liking there: linky. Note the "next" button. I personally love those
- Location
- Australia
Thank you, that does look like a four-winged person, but I don't think Taylor would dress like that willingly.
They've made some pretty cool-looking cards over the years, haven't they? Thanks for sharing.
16 characters
Sick and tired of being Sick and Tired
- Location
- Alta California
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[x] Data Package: Teacher
You can grow four, twenty foot long tendrils from out of your back. They are thin and whip-like, with only a small spike on the end. Your spine, ribs and neck are reinforced to ensure you are not damaged by the high speed maneuvers these limbs are capable of. These tendrils require momentum to be effective, but can reach high speeds and are capable of throwing/dragging you around if used correctly. If destroyed it will take less than a day for these limbs to reform.
Each tendril has a 'rule,' and each rule grants a power. In order to inflict a rule upon someone, that tendril has to strike the victim directly on their skin and draw blood. The lower-right rule is 'Do Not Murder,' this makes the victim pathologically incapable of killing another sapient being, they will also become capable of sensing within a short distance people who have killed sapient beings. The lower-left rule is 'Do Not Lie,' this makes the victim incapable of directly lying and allows them to sense lies as they are told. The upper-right rule is 'Do Not Die,' this makes the victim unable to take actions that may directly result in their death, and gives them a short-range danger-sense. The upper-left rule is 'Do Not Teach,' this prevents the victim from willingly passing on information regarding a subject that they consider themselves expert, they also gain a pseudo-Tinker power that makes them a genius at their chosen field, or sets them decades or even centuries ahead of their time if they are already a genius.
[Secondary Power?] I am not sure why we need to suggest this but I think A good secondary power derived from this would be an ability to give one of our chosen servants one of these tendrils of their own tentacles but only one and of one type. That feels like a natural and not overpowered extension of the power. Maybe even only of the type that effected them?
I am interested in this power because it seems like the most socially versatile one among all the options the best for actually building up a following without relying on people finding us pretty which may not work if they are blind or are advanced mages(with say windsight) I assume. It is also not useless for combat but does not exist solely for the sake of aiding combat.
I confess I also am extremely curious to see what an orc would do if touched with the arm of do not murder or what a Skaven might say if unable to lie.
Our all too human neck is extremely vulnerable even at the best of times so I really also quite badly want that to be reinforced and think such could help us even in the long run.
I confess the angelic powersuite appeals to me as well but the character interactions seem too constrained by just terror for it too really hold my attention.
EDIT: I am so sorry! I did not notice voting had closed when I posted this :-(
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Chapter 2: Conflict
- Location
- Australia
There's a crash as a massive iron battering ram pounds against the simple wooden door of the warehouse, smashing through the thin cedar and shifting the crude barricade of crates piled behind it. It won't hold long, but it buys a little time for the slaves to tuck themselves into the empty crates at the far end of the warehouse, as you instructed earlier. You personally have already ascended to the ceiling and wrapped your new wings around the top of one of the pillars near the door.
You use your bugs to get a sense of what is waiting outside and take another memory-dip to cross-check it with Elva's knowledge. There's about thirty heavily armed and even more heavily armored Dawi Zharr, or Chaos Dwarves, accompanied by over a hundred small green humanoids without any significant armor carrying knives and whips. The latter must be goblins, specifically hobgoblins. You're not sure why this world seems to operate on fantasy tropes, but it does.
Their numbers are a problem, but one you can deal with. Your swarm already outnumbers them a couple of hundred to one and your reinforcements are streaming in by the minute. The dwarves have some very nice armor, with overlapping plates and joints so finely made you can barely get a gnat into the cracks, but they have to leave holes in their helmets to see and breathe through, which leaves them vulnerable. The goblins should be even easier to deal with, their poor hygiene means they're bringing in reinforcements for you.
What other assets do you have? The slaves are… well they're used to following orders, you expect they'll do what you tell them to, provided you use a commanding tone and appear to be on top of the situation. You just can't expect them to do anything but die if you send them unarmed against trained and armed targets.
Then there's your new power. Your wings are large, soft and so white they're practically luminescent, speckled with flecks of pale gold. They're beautiful, but they're about as stealthy as a rave party. You've countered that by coating them in a thick layer of darkly patterned bugs.
The wings don't physically connect to your back, at rest they hover a couple of inches away from your spine. When your weight is supported by them, like it is right now, there's about six inches of air between you and the rounded golden nubs where the wings begin. There's some sort of non-physical, semi-elastic connection between the wings and your torso, which you may need to test later. The wings are strong, light, powerful and they come with some sort of minor Thinker power that allows you to intuitively understand how to move all four wings in concert to create zones of pressure and provide the thrust needed to lift a fully grown human, if only at roughly walking speeds unless you're riding a thermal or diving.
You'd love them if it wasn't for the concern the Simurgh has somehow made you a mini-Endbringer.
Elva's stark panic had set a single, nine-sided dice rolling in the back of your head. It landed on a nine, which gave you some sort of ability designed to help your brain detect and parse exotic energy waveforms. You've activated it, but you're still figuring out what all the extra colors it adds to your vision actually mean. They're distracting and you can't figure out a way for them to be immediately useful, so you suppress the sense for now. Instead you focus on your directing your swarm. There's hundreds of these weird ten to twenty-foot-long centipedes in the cave-system below and figuring out how to get them out of their little caves and up the mine-shafts is taking a bit of attention. It's a labyrinth down there.
When the Dwarves break barricade they see nothing but your swarm clone, made from the smaller and more readily available bugs of the warehouse district. They stop immediately, forming a shield wall with admirable discipline and pointing the business ends of their blunderbuss weaponry at the clone.
"Spawn of Nurgle, this is the land of Holy Hashut! Leave or be purged!" one of the dwarves, one with a particularly tall and fancy hat, thunders.
You have no idea who Nurgle or Hashut are. A quick check through Elva's memories indicates that they're both rather nasty local gods.
"A question first," you have your swarm insist. "There are five children among the slaves here… what will you do with them?"
The leader eyes you and shifts his grip on his blunderbuss slightly, then he grunts in annoyance.
"They'll be an example of what happens when slaves try to escape, just like the others. More effective even, particularly for slaves who have children themselves," he says.
"What exactly do you mean by 'an example?'" you ask.
"There's a sack with difference execution methods written on paper slips, they get whatever we draw after the sentencing. Immurment, the giblet, the brazen bull… the variety keeps it interesting. Always a bloody nuisance to kill one of your kind, so we might be willing to cut a deal and let you have the kids instead, you'd need to talk with one of the Daemonsmiths about it," the dwarf says gruffly.
You watch the dwarves carefully. Their masks cover most of their faces, but there's no obvious signs of dissent. The goblins are easier to read, clearly almost gleeful about the topic if their faces match up to a human frame of reference.
"Ah. I see. Well that makes my choice easy then," you tell him.
Your clone collapses and the rest of your swarm falls from the ceiling. It isn't the biggest swarm you've ever wielded, but it's big enough. The dwarves respond with incredible speed and precision, raising their shields and locking them together to block the falling mass of bugs, locking themselves into a tight, huddled tortoiseshell formation. There's small gaps and you get a few bugs through, but it's amazing how well sealed it is.
The goblins are less well trained and less fortunate. You have no practical method of restraining them so you target the nose and mouth, blocking their airways. They panic, a few flee, some of them lash out, both at the bugs and even at each other.
From inside the shield formation you hear a horn, one blown powerfully enough to shake your bones in a pattern that makes it obvious they're signalling something. You assume they're calling for help.
The dwarves occasionally make breaks in their tortoise shell formation, just enough room to fire one of their blunderbuss at whatever the largest mass of bugs is. You force a few more bugs in through the gaps created, biting and stinging at their eyes to make sure they don't get a clean shot. Taking flight would just make it impossible to hide, so you use your wings to work your way around the pillar, putting thick stone between yourself and the shards of shrapnel those guns expel.
A couple of the slaves panic and try to run, and you're forced to herd them back into their crates with a wall of bugs before they can blunder somewhere that they'll get shot by accident. Not that those huge blunderbusses couldn't drive their flechette rounds through the crates, but you're being careful not to invite shots in the direction of the slaves, so it's safer than anywhere else.
Things devolve into something of a standoff. You can only get a few bugs into the shield formation at a time and the dwarves inside are doing a phenomenally good job at maintaining discipline with what few insects you have managed to sneak in working their way under eyelids and down nostrils. It's a war of attrition that you'd have eventually won, they can't perfectly seal everything and you're still bringing in reinforcements from the tunnels below.
You're a bit worried about things dragging out long enough for the help the dwarves summoned to arrive, and you're quite relieved when the suffocating goblins give you the tools you need to break the stalemate early.
Of the hundreds of goblins slowly drowning in a tide of bugs, only five feel enough fear to trigger your new power. Either there's a horrifically high ceiling for the level of terror you need to inflict, or they're some sort of race without a strong sense of fear. Maybe both. One of the slaves you forced back into their crate also triggered a roll, so that's six rolls of that dice at the back of your mind, and since one of the nine numbers came up twice, five new powers.
Once again your mind opens up to senses it's never had contact with before and your power begins to parse them for you. This… this fractal, diffused pattern… it's hard to describe, because it's like seeing color for the first time and no one has ever invented the word for 'red' before. It shows you, in a thousand twitching ghost-images that were and were not seen by your physical eyes, how the remaining goblins are going to thrash and when the dwarves are going to try and open a gap. A power like this would be a game-changer all on it's own, but there's much more.
You jump, spreading your wings into a controlled glide that carries you over the shields of the Dawi Zharr. You juke at the last second and feel the wind generated by the blast of a blunderbuss brush past your cheek as one of them somehow senses your approach and opens a gap to fire. Then you're upon them, unleashing a wave for powerful force that slams into their formation in a cacophony of shrieking metal.
Looking back the blow was hard enough to shatter several of the shields, break and twist the armor of the two dwarves, driving them into the ground with enough force to crack the rock.
They're likely dead. You didn't intend that, you thought you were holding back.
The gap you just created allows your swarm to pour into their formation and opens you up to direct attack.
It would be nice to turn their tactic back on them and hide behind a wall of shields, stolen from their grasp. Unfortunately that's not quite how your new variant of telekinesis works. It's more about generating sudden bursts of force in the direction of your choice than 'holding' things, and once you generate a blast there's a timer before you can generate another one. The stronger the blast, the longer the timer. That blow was about half of your maximum and now you can't throw another one for thirty seconds.
Rather than try to dodge you decide to trust your precognition, spread your wings, close your eyes and weather the storm of flechette rounds.
You skin stings, your wings lose a few feathers, but for the most part you're unhurt. Your durability power seems to work in two parts. It does something weird with fluid dynamics to harden your skin and other tissues moments before an impact, and it also generates a passive vibration field that weakens the structural integrity of objects it recognizes as dangerous when they approach your skin. It's useful, even directly harmful to certain types of weapon, but it's probably only good at dealing with physical attacks. You'll need to do some tests later to see if your power does or doesn't have a way to make you heatproof.
"No effect! I'll delay her! Rally at the plaza!" their leader yells, spitting, huffing and grinding his teeth frantically to keep his mouth clear of the bugs you direct towards his lips.
You could kill them all if you wanted to. It would be easy enough, most of the goblins are already halfway there. They're murderous slavers, and it's not like you can cart them off to prison. The problem is how new you are here, and how little information you have. You should probably take Yamada's advice about not jumping into things head first and get information from multiple sources, do a proper ten-count, maybe even sleep on it before you commit your largest deliberate mass-slaughter to date.
The rest of the dwarves start running and you let them go with only some light stinging on the eyelids, since once the wounds swell that should leave them incapacitate for a few days without being lethal. You also extract your bugs from the noses and mouths of the goblins, most of whom were crawling around pitifully, trying to find an exit that they couldn't see because of the bugs over their eyes. The ones that aren't fully unconscious don't need much encouragement to get up and join the rout once you clear enough bugs for them to see where the exit is.
You're well aware that the dwarven leader is charging you, and you were going to just block his axe-blow with your arm until your precognition shows you having your arm cut off. You step to the side as their leader, blinded by bugs and frothing blood at the lips, barrels past you, swinging wildly. Your exotic waveform analysis power draws your attention to some sort of energy in the rune carved onto the axe-head. Is that why your durability power could potentially have been compromised? Perhaps.
"The Daemonsmiths are going to destroy you for this!" the dwarf roars.
"Is that who you summoned with the horn earlier?" you ask. He doesn't reply, in fact he can't reply, because when he inhaled at the end of that sentence he took a small chunk of your swarm into his lungs and now he's running on just what oxygen was in his blood, which he's expending by swinging wildly at the bugs you used to ask the question.
You take a couple of steps back and wait.
The goblins seemed to last about as long without air as a human would. This guy lasts a couple of minutes longer. Eventually he starts getting too close to the back of the warehouse, where the slaves are still hiding in their crates, so you blast the axe from his hands, use a wing to sweep his legs from under him, then you grab his ornamental helmet and slam it into the ground a few times, until the lack of air and the dizzying blows finally drives the fight from his body.
Your swarm settles, the seething buzz of millions of insects fades. You check on the goblin casualties… seven dead, all from knife-wounds inflicted by other goblins, either in panic or deliberately. There were a few wounded as well, but none wounded so badly they couldn't flee with the rest. Then there's the two dead dwarves, and that's it. It could have been worse. Would have been worse, if the slaves had tried to fight.
Finally you decide enough time has passed and you allow the dwarven leader to breathe. You played it safe and kept choking him well after he stilled, the tiny bugs you sent onto his chest can barely feel a fading heartbeat and depending on how his physiology functions he might have brain damage, but you can't quite bring yourself to care.
"You can come out now. They're dealt with."
The first slave to leave his crate is a brave young boy, and when he isn't immediately shot or swarmed by bugs the rest follow. It couldn't have been easy for them to huddle in the dark like that, listening to the screams and the gunshots in silence.
You haven't had anymore rolls from your second power though. There really is a high ceiling on that.
"The daemon… actually did it?" a woman mutters.
"Alright everyone," Farrah says, "I'm glad that worked. Now we need to actually get out of here and make sure those who sacrificed themselves didn't do so in vain. Since we'll need to travel fast and light we want just enough water-skins to make it to Mt Grey Hag and some gold or gems to purchase further supplies from the goblins once we get there. Someone in the merchant district probably has weak enough guards for us to overwhelm them."
"The goblins will just kill us!" one of the women yells.
"We don't know that, Nistra. The Dawi Zharr might have just been playing up how barbaric they are so that we're too scared to go to them? I mean, they can't be worse than hobs, right?"
"You think I don't know how goblins behave! I grew up in the Border Princes you ignorant…"
"Stop!" you instruct. The slaves collectively flinch and you sigh and switch to speaking through your own mouth instead of the swarm. "Tell me. How many slaves are there in this city, and how many guards?"
Most of the slaves look blank, likely not educated enough to know about city population statistics. The woman - Nistra, who you notice wears slightly finer clothes than the rest, does have an answer for you.
"Your majesty, I estimate this city currently has about twenty-four thousand slaves, three thousand or four thousand of the Dawi and six thousand hobs," she says. "Astragoth Ironhand himself took most of the garrison into his throng, he marches on Crookback Mountain. Ghark Ironskin is bringing in a new shipment of slaves today as well, and most of the remaining Dawi are overseeing the transfer in the central marketplace. There's barely enough of the Dawi Zharr left to man the outposts. That's… that's why we thought we might actually escape."
You could see how the dwarves might be able to slaughter unarmed and untrained slaves in job lots, but that was a serious number discrepancy…
"And how do you know all that?" Farrah sneers. "You arrived here just last week, this is the first time you're out of that damned tannery!"
"You can get some good estimates on population numbers from waste removal, if you know what to look for. And you told me about Ghark," Nistra replies primly.
"Nine thousand…" you muse, cutting them off. "I might be able to deal with that many… Or at least break enough formations and destroy enough defensive infrastructure to let the slaves overrun them…"
Particularly if you 'scare up' the rest of this weird pseudo-Simurgh powerset. Ugh, no, that pun was bad even in your head.
More seriously, you don't think you could afford to hold back if you go that route. Not like you did here. There would be oceans of blood on your hands by the end of it.
Well that wouldn't exactly be anything new. Would it?
"The Daemonsmiths know how to deal with your kind, you'd never survive meeting them," Farrah says. "Come with us! It's a long, hard trail to Mad Dog Pass and some people won't be able to keep up… well they'd die anyway, so we'll sacrifice them to you as payment for protecting us, and everyone wins!"
You turn and regard him for a moment.
"You remind me of a man named Trickster. It is not a comparison you want me to be making. You should know that if you practice or encourage human sacrifice again I will kill you for it," you tell him.
That shuts him down for now.
There's an awkward silence which you use to get a better feel for the area through your swarm. The nearby district is some sort of storage site, mostly for oil, tar and a whole ton of crates that are sealed well enough that your bugs can't figure out the contents from a cursory crawl. Most of these storage sites are warehouses, carved into the mountain like this one. They're also all locked, and while you could likely break into them, finding the supplies you need might take some time.
This place is more spread-out than the cities you're used to, more a series of well made and heavily fortified towns all within walking distance of each other than a true wall-to-wall city.
"There's no rivers along the Silver Road until you're east of Mad Dog Pass, we will need food and especially water, all we can get. Plus overland travel gear in case it rains," Nistra hints.
"And there's bound to be some minor merchant we can rob to get what we need," Farrah insists.
"Where are we going, your majesty?" Nistra asks.
[ ] To break into nearby warehouses, looking for supplies
[ ] To rob a guardhouse
[ ] To the central marketplace
[ ] To wherever slaves sleep
[ ] To the center of government
[ ] To the armory
[ ] To the merchant district
[X] Write-In: Track down the records, recordkeeper, or both, of these warehouses. Once found, use them to zero in on the most useful merchandise - specifically human-sized armour, weapons and medicine. Next, locate keys or the tools necessary to strike chains, and head for the nearest concentration of slaves, freeing and arming them too.
Continue holding back enough to leave your enemies alive?
[ ] Yes
[X] No
Image credit goes to the Lucifer card from Shadowverse
You use your bugs to get a sense of what is waiting outside and take another memory-dip to cross-check it with Elva's knowledge. There's about thirty heavily armed and even more heavily armored Dawi Zharr, or Chaos Dwarves, accompanied by over a hundred small green humanoids without any significant armor carrying knives and whips. The latter must be goblins, specifically hobgoblins. You're not sure why this world seems to operate on fantasy tropes, but it does.
Their numbers are a problem, but one you can deal with. Your swarm already outnumbers them a couple of hundred to one and your reinforcements are streaming in by the minute. The dwarves have some very nice armor, with overlapping plates and joints so finely made you can barely get a gnat into the cracks, but they have to leave holes in their helmets to see and breathe through, which leaves them vulnerable. The goblins should be even easier to deal with, their poor hygiene means they're bringing in reinforcements for you.
What other assets do you have? The slaves are… well they're used to following orders, you expect they'll do what you tell them to, provided you use a commanding tone and appear to be on top of the situation. You just can't expect them to do anything but die if you send them unarmed against trained and armed targets.
Then there's your new power. Your wings are large, soft and so white they're practically luminescent, speckled with flecks of pale gold. They're beautiful, but they're about as stealthy as a rave party. You've countered that by coating them in a thick layer of darkly patterned bugs.
The wings don't physically connect to your back, at rest they hover a couple of inches away from your spine. When your weight is supported by them, like it is right now, there's about six inches of air between you and the rounded golden nubs where the wings begin. There's some sort of non-physical, semi-elastic connection between the wings and your torso, which you may need to test later. The wings are strong, light, powerful and they come with some sort of minor Thinker power that allows you to intuitively understand how to move all four wings in concert to create zones of pressure and provide the thrust needed to lift a fully grown human, if only at roughly walking speeds unless you're riding a thermal or diving.
You'd love them if it wasn't for the concern the Simurgh has somehow made you a mini-Endbringer.
Elva's stark panic had set a single, nine-sided dice rolling in the back of your head. It landed on a nine, which gave you some sort of ability designed to help your brain detect and parse exotic energy waveforms. You've activated it, but you're still figuring out what all the extra colors it adds to your vision actually mean. They're distracting and you can't figure out a way for them to be immediately useful, so you suppress the sense for now. Instead you focus on your directing your swarm. There's hundreds of these weird ten to twenty-foot-long centipedes in the cave-system below and figuring out how to get them out of their little caves and up the mine-shafts is taking a bit of attention. It's a labyrinth down there.
When the Dwarves break barricade they see nothing but your swarm clone, made from the smaller and more readily available bugs of the warehouse district. They stop immediately, forming a shield wall with admirable discipline and pointing the business ends of their blunderbuss weaponry at the clone.
"Spawn of Nurgle, this is the land of Holy Hashut! Leave or be purged!" one of the dwarves, one with a particularly tall and fancy hat, thunders.
You have no idea who Nurgle or Hashut are. A quick check through Elva's memories indicates that they're both rather nasty local gods.
"A question first," you have your swarm insist. "There are five children among the slaves here… what will you do with them?"
The leader eyes you and shifts his grip on his blunderbuss slightly, then he grunts in annoyance.
"They'll be an example of what happens when slaves try to escape, just like the others. More effective even, particularly for slaves who have children themselves," he says.
"What exactly do you mean by 'an example?'" you ask.
"There's a sack with difference execution methods written on paper slips, they get whatever we draw after the sentencing. Immurment, the giblet, the brazen bull… the variety keeps it interesting. Always a bloody nuisance to kill one of your kind, so we might be willing to cut a deal and let you have the kids instead, you'd need to talk with one of the Daemonsmiths about it," the dwarf says gruffly.
You watch the dwarves carefully. Their masks cover most of their faces, but there's no obvious signs of dissent. The goblins are easier to read, clearly almost gleeful about the topic if their faces match up to a human frame of reference.
"Ah. I see. Well that makes my choice easy then," you tell him.
Your clone collapses and the rest of your swarm falls from the ceiling. It isn't the biggest swarm you've ever wielded, but it's big enough. The dwarves respond with incredible speed and precision, raising their shields and locking them together to block the falling mass of bugs, locking themselves into a tight, huddled tortoiseshell formation. There's small gaps and you get a few bugs through, but it's amazing how well sealed it is.
The goblins are less well trained and less fortunate. You have no practical method of restraining them so you target the nose and mouth, blocking their airways. They panic, a few flee, some of them lash out, both at the bugs and even at each other.
From inside the shield formation you hear a horn, one blown powerfully enough to shake your bones in a pattern that makes it obvious they're signalling something. You assume they're calling for help.
The dwarves occasionally make breaks in their tortoise shell formation, just enough room to fire one of their blunderbuss at whatever the largest mass of bugs is. You force a few more bugs in through the gaps created, biting and stinging at their eyes to make sure they don't get a clean shot. Taking flight would just make it impossible to hide, so you use your wings to work your way around the pillar, putting thick stone between yourself and the shards of shrapnel those guns expel.
A couple of the slaves panic and try to run, and you're forced to herd them back into their crates with a wall of bugs before they can blunder somewhere that they'll get shot by accident. Not that those huge blunderbusses couldn't drive their flechette rounds through the crates, but you're being careful not to invite shots in the direction of the slaves, so it's safer than anywhere else.
Things devolve into something of a standoff. You can only get a few bugs into the shield formation at a time and the dwarves inside are doing a phenomenally good job at maintaining discipline with what few insects you have managed to sneak in working their way under eyelids and down nostrils. It's a war of attrition that you'd have eventually won, they can't perfectly seal everything and you're still bringing in reinforcements from the tunnels below.
You're a bit worried about things dragging out long enough for the help the dwarves summoned to arrive, and you're quite relieved when the suffocating goblins give you the tools you need to break the stalemate early.
Of the hundreds of goblins slowly drowning in a tide of bugs, only five feel enough fear to trigger your new power. Either there's a horrifically high ceiling for the level of terror you need to inflict, or they're some sort of race without a strong sense of fear. Maybe both. One of the slaves you forced back into their crate also triggered a roll, so that's six rolls of that dice at the back of your mind, and since one of the nine numbers came up twice, five new powers.
Once again your mind opens up to senses it's never had contact with before and your power begins to parse them for you. This… this fractal, diffused pattern… it's hard to describe, because it's like seeing color for the first time and no one has ever invented the word for 'red' before. It shows you, in a thousand twitching ghost-images that were and were not seen by your physical eyes, how the remaining goblins are going to thrash and when the dwarves are going to try and open a gap. A power like this would be a game-changer all on it's own, but there's much more.
You jump, spreading your wings into a controlled glide that carries you over the shields of the Dawi Zharr. You juke at the last second and feel the wind generated by the blast of a blunderbuss brush past your cheek as one of them somehow senses your approach and opens a gap to fire. Then you're upon them, unleashing a wave for powerful force that slams into their formation in a cacophony of shrieking metal.
Looking back the blow was hard enough to shatter several of the shields, break and twist the armor of the two dwarves, driving them into the ground with enough force to crack the rock.
They're likely dead. You didn't intend that, you thought you were holding back.
The gap you just created allows your swarm to pour into their formation and opens you up to direct attack.
It would be nice to turn their tactic back on them and hide behind a wall of shields, stolen from their grasp. Unfortunately that's not quite how your new variant of telekinesis works. It's more about generating sudden bursts of force in the direction of your choice than 'holding' things, and once you generate a blast there's a timer before you can generate another one. The stronger the blast, the longer the timer. That blow was about half of your maximum and now you can't throw another one for thirty seconds.
Rather than try to dodge you decide to trust your precognition, spread your wings, close your eyes and weather the storm of flechette rounds.
You skin stings, your wings lose a few feathers, but for the most part you're unhurt. Your durability power seems to work in two parts. It does something weird with fluid dynamics to harden your skin and other tissues moments before an impact, and it also generates a passive vibration field that weakens the structural integrity of objects it recognizes as dangerous when they approach your skin. It's useful, even directly harmful to certain types of weapon, but it's probably only good at dealing with physical attacks. You'll need to do some tests later to see if your power does or doesn't have a way to make you heatproof.
"No effect! I'll delay her! Rally at the plaza!" their leader yells, spitting, huffing and grinding his teeth frantically to keep his mouth clear of the bugs you direct towards his lips.
You could kill them all if you wanted to. It would be easy enough, most of the goblins are already halfway there. They're murderous slavers, and it's not like you can cart them off to prison. The problem is how new you are here, and how little information you have. You should probably take Yamada's advice about not jumping into things head first and get information from multiple sources, do a proper ten-count, maybe even sleep on it before you commit your largest deliberate mass-slaughter to date.
The rest of the dwarves start running and you let them go with only some light stinging on the eyelids, since once the wounds swell that should leave them incapacitate for a few days without being lethal. You also extract your bugs from the noses and mouths of the goblins, most of whom were crawling around pitifully, trying to find an exit that they couldn't see because of the bugs over their eyes. The ones that aren't fully unconscious don't need much encouragement to get up and join the rout once you clear enough bugs for them to see where the exit is.
You're well aware that the dwarven leader is charging you, and you were going to just block his axe-blow with your arm until your precognition shows you having your arm cut off. You step to the side as their leader, blinded by bugs and frothing blood at the lips, barrels past you, swinging wildly. Your exotic waveform analysis power draws your attention to some sort of energy in the rune carved onto the axe-head. Is that why your durability power could potentially have been compromised? Perhaps.
"The Daemonsmiths are going to destroy you for this!" the dwarf roars.
"Is that who you summoned with the horn earlier?" you ask. He doesn't reply, in fact he can't reply, because when he inhaled at the end of that sentence he took a small chunk of your swarm into his lungs and now he's running on just what oxygen was in his blood, which he's expending by swinging wildly at the bugs you used to ask the question.
You take a couple of steps back and wait.
The goblins seemed to last about as long without air as a human would. This guy lasts a couple of minutes longer. Eventually he starts getting too close to the back of the warehouse, where the slaves are still hiding in their crates, so you blast the axe from his hands, use a wing to sweep his legs from under him, then you grab his ornamental helmet and slam it into the ground a few times, until the lack of air and the dizzying blows finally drives the fight from his body.
Your swarm settles, the seething buzz of millions of insects fades. You check on the goblin casualties… seven dead, all from knife-wounds inflicted by other goblins, either in panic or deliberately. There were a few wounded as well, but none wounded so badly they couldn't flee with the rest. Then there's the two dead dwarves, and that's it. It could have been worse. Would have been worse, if the slaves had tried to fight.
Finally you decide enough time has passed and you allow the dwarven leader to breathe. You played it safe and kept choking him well after he stilled, the tiny bugs you sent onto his chest can barely feel a fading heartbeat and depending on how his physiology functions he might have brain damage, but you can't quite bring yourself to care.
"You can come out now. They're dealt with."
The first slave to leave his crate is a brave young boy, and when he isn't immediately shot or swarmed by bugs the rest follow. It couldn't have been easy for them to huddle in the dark like that, listening to the screams and the gunshots in silence.
You haven't had anymore rolls from your second power though. There really is a high ceiling on that.
"The daemon… actually did it?" a woman mutters.
"Alright everyone," Farrah says, "I'm glad that worked. Now we need to actually get out of here and make sure those who sacrificed themselves didn't do so in vain. Since we'll need to travel fast and light we want just enough water-skins to make it to Mt Grey Hag and some gold or gems to purchase further supplies from the goblins once we get there. Someone in the merchant district probably has weak enough guards for us to overwhelm them."
"The goblins will just kill us!" one of the women yells.
"We don't know that, Nistra. The Dawi Zharr might have just been playing up how barbaric they are so that we're too scared to go to them? I mean, they can't be worse than hobs, right?"
"You think I don't know how goblins behave! I grew up in the Border Princes you ignorant…"
"Stop!" you instruct. The slaves collectively flinch and you sigh and switch to speaking through your own mouth instead of the swarm. "Tell me. How many slaves are there in this city, and how many guards?"
Most of the slaves look blank, likely not educated enough to know about city population statistics. The woman - Nistra, who you notice wears slightly finer clothes than the rest, does have an answer for you.
"Your majesty, I estimate this city currently has about twenty-four thousand slaves, three thousand or four thousand of the Dawi and six thousand hobs," she says. "Astragoth Ironhand himself took most of the garrison into his throng, he marches on Crookback Mountain. Ghark Ironskin is bringing in a new shipment of slaves today as well, and most of the remaining Dawi are overseeing the transfer in the central marketplace. There's barely enough of the Dawi Zharr left to man the outposts. That's… that's why we thought we might actually escape."
You could see how the dwarves might be able to slaughter unarmed and untrained slaves in job lots, but that was a serious number discrepancy…
"And how do you know all that?" Farrah sneers. "You arrived here just last week, this is the first time you're out of that damned tannery!"
"You can get some good estimates on population numbers from waste removal, if you know what to look for. And you told me about Ghark," Nistra replies primly.
"Nine thousand…" you muse, cutting them off. "I might be able to deal with that many… Or at least break enough formations and destroy enough defensive infrastructure to let the slaves overrun them…"
Particularly if you 'scare up' the rest of this weird pseudo-Simurgh powerset. Ugh, no, that pun was bad even in your head.
More seriously, you don't think you could afford to hold back if you go that route. Not like you did here. There would be oceans of blood on your hands by the end of it.
Well that wouldn't exactly be anything new. Would it?
"The Daemonsmiths know how to deal with your kind, you'd never survive meeting them," Farrah says. "Come with us! It's a long, hard trail to Mad Dog Pass and some people won't be able to keep up… well they'd die anyway, so we'll sacrifice them to you as payment for protecting us, and everyone wins!"
You turn and regard him for a moment.
"You remind me of a man named Trickster. It is not a comparison you want me to be making. You should know that if you practice or encourage human sacrifice again I will kill you for it," you tell him.
That shuts him down for now.
There's an awkward silence which you use to get a better feel for the area through your swarm. The nearby district is some sort of storage site, mostly for oil, tar and a whole ton of crates that are sealed well enough that your bugs can't figure out the contents from a cursory crawl. Most of these storage sites are warehouses, carved into the mountain like this one. They're also all locked, and while you could likely break into them, finding the supplies you need might take some time.
This place is more spread-out than the cities you're used to, more a series of well made and heavily fortified towns all within walking distance of each other than a true wall-to-wall city.
"There's no rivers along the Silver Road until you're east of Mad Dog Pass, we will need food and especially water, all we can get. Plus overland travel gear in case it rains," Nistra hints.
"And there's bound to be some minor merchant we can rob to get what we need," Farrah insists.
"Where are we going, your majesty?" Nistra asks.
[ ] To break into nearby warehouses, looking for supplies
[ ] To rob a guardhouse
[ ] To the central marketplace
[ ] To wherever slaves sleep
[ ] To the center of government
[ ] To the armory
[ ] To the merchant district
[X] Write-In: Track down the records, recordkeeper, or both, of these warehouses. Once found, use them to zero in on the most useful merchandise - specifically human-sized armour, weapons and medicine. Next, locate keys or the tools necessary to strike chains, and head for the nearest concentration of slaves, freeing and arming them too.
Continue holding back enough to leave your enemies alive?
[ ] Yes
[X] No
Image credit goes to the Lucifer card from Shadowverse
Charge Cluster #1 - Time Remaining: Two months
1, Telekinesis: 1 hour (Active)
2, Precognition: 1 hour (Active)
3, Singing: 1 hour
4, Strength:
5, Durability: 1 hour (Active)
6, Scream:
7, Beauty: 1 hour
8, Technological Intuition:
9, Magical Intuition: 2 hour (Active)
1, Telekinesis: 1 hour (Active)
2, Precognition: 1 hour (Active)
3, Singing: 1 hour
4, Strength:
5, Durability: 1 hour (Active)
6, Scream:
7, Beauty: 1 hour
8, Technological Intuition:
9, Magical Intuition: 2 hour (Active)
Telekinesis
Creates powerful blasts of force. The stronger the blast, the longer the time until you can create another blast. Easily able to bend toughened steel at half strength.
Precognition
A difficult phenomena to describe to those with standard human senses, this power allows the user to 'see' the near future as something akin to ghost images. It's true nature may involve the detection of faster-than-light particles.
Durability
This power mimics the effect of physical durability in two parts, first by using exotic fluid dynamics to solidify sections of skin, and second by vibrationally disintegrating solid objects on a damaging collision course. Possibly Manton limited, this is unfortunately a very imperfect defensive mechanism.
Magical Intuition
A power that allows for the detection of exotic energy emissions local to the host's Trigger world. The 'intuition' part of this power is almost able to disguise itself as common sense.
Creates powerful blasts of force. The stronger the blast, the longer the time until you can create another blast. Easily able to bend toughened steel at half strength.
Precognition
A difficult phenomena to describe to those with standard human senses, this power allows the user to 'see' the near future as something akin to ghost images. It's true nature may involve the detection of faster-than-light particles.
Durability
This power mimics the effect of physical durability in two parts, first by using exotic fluid dynamics to solidify sections of skin, and second by vibrationally disintegrating solid objects on a damaging collision course. Possibly Manton limited, this is unfortunately a very imperfect defensive mechanism.
Magical Intuition
A power that allows for the detection of exotic energy emissions local to the host's Trigger world. The 'intuition' part of this power is almost able to disguise itself as common sense.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
[X] To wherever slaves sleep
We've got around 100 people behind us at the moment, I think - probably not enough that arming them will matter much, given the lack of training. Grabbing people first means we'll be able to carry off more supplies when we go for them.
[X] Yes
Dead people don't feel fear, and we're not exactly going to personally depopulate the army here.
We've got around 100 people behind us at the moment, I think - probably not enough that arming them will matter much, given the lack of training. Grabbing people first means we'll be able to carry off more supplies when we go for them.
[X] Yes
Dead people don't feel fear, and we're not exactly going to personally depopulate the army here.
16 characters
Sick and tired of being Sick and Tired
- Location
- Alta California
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Huh, I was actually a bit surprised all these slaves were human I thought the dawiizhar were also in the habit of enslaving Skaven and gnoblars, well and practially anyone they could get their shackles on perhaps barring other dwarves? I imagine they probably just kill other dwarves.
I really like the marketplace idea, liable to be lots of supplies there.
Edit: Would it be impossible to grab more people after grabbing supplies for this group?
[X] Yes
I really like the marketplace idea, liable to be lots of supplies there.
Edit: Would it be impossible to grab more people after grabbing supplies for this group?
[X] Yes
Last edited:
- Location
- Australia
They aren't. You actually mistook a few halflings for children there. You haven't had a chance to really look them all over yet.
Not impossible, no.