This Too Shall Pass [Exalted, Abyssal]

[Skelm]

[] Risala Seaborn
Risala sounds like a name to me. Peleps Lasari is dead, and her right to claim a name died also.

[] Righteous Fist Destroys The Wicked
A name of vengeance. A victim risen from the dead to bring justice to her killers. But we're not doing that, are we? We aren't trying to track down the Anathema that killed us, or to recover whatever artifact they stole. I'm sure we will do some of this sort of thing, but it's not really our defining quest.

[X] Dark Waters Cover The Dead
Indeed they do. Fitting, for one who is sent to the West. A name of peace, perhaps, of proper respects given to the unquiet dead. Perhaps one day the dark waters will cover the whole world and all it's brokenness.

[] Write in - Wretched Tide Upon Forsaken Sorrow
Honestly, I have trouble getting any meaning from this. What sorrow has been forsaken? What does it mean for us to be a wretched tide upon it?

[] Write in - Wisdom Drowns The Faithless Penitent
A name of broken faith, of terrible truths imposed. She-who-was-once-Peleps-Lasari did everything she could to fulfill the Dragon's teachings, even after they forsook her, even after seeing the depravity of their chosen, but in the end it amounted to nothing. She died, and those she cared for were destroyed, and her faith amounted to nothing, and in that wisdom she drowned. I can see the appeal to this name, but I think the question it implies has already been answered. "The world is broken, Peleps Lasari. It has failed you. It has failed your companions. It will fail countless millions more." That is a faith too, of a kind.

[] She can work as a sailor, surely?
...Can we? It would make sense if we were given that power, seeing how we're being sent to the West, but we've never actually done it before. I wouldn't really want to rely on an untested skill.

[] A monk may beg for alms. Perhaps that will grant enough?
The lifestyle of a monk is meager, it's hard to imagine we'll ever earn enough to afford passage across the world. I suspect the Immaculate Order has opinions on who is allowed to act as a monk, and we don't really have any good answers to their questions.

[X] The ocean floor holds many treasures. Maybe she can find some?
Weirdos pulling old treasures out of the ocean also draw attention, but it's not heretical or anything, so as long as we pay the proper respects this should be fine. We also know we don't need to breath, so we have a pretty big advantage just from proven abilities.

 

[Nevill]

[x] The ocean floor holds many treasures. Maybe she can find some?

 

[WolfKit]

[X] Dark Waters Cover The Dead

 

[Shane_357]

Honestly, I have trouble getting any meaning from this. What sorrow has been forsaken? What does it mean for us to be a wretched tide upon it?

Click to shrink...

Yes it is kinda unwieldy but with a single change it becomes appropriate!
[x] Write in - Wretched Tide Upon Forsaken Shore
[x] The ocean floor holds many treasures. Maybe she can find some?

 

[giodan]

[X] Write in - Wisdom Drowns The Faithless Penitent
[X] The ocean floor holds many treasures. Maybe she can find some?

 

[Kadmus]

Chapter 1: Wreck

Wisdom Drowns The Faithless Penitent enters Fajad as the sun sets, after four exhausting days of travel through hilly pine forest, taiga-turned-swamp, and an underwater walk across the strait separating Jazrafel, the island Fajad occupies, from the mainland . Her shroud is mud-stained and starting to tatter around the edges, and her clothes are no better; for all that she can jump three times the height of a man and punch through trees, she cannot walk on water for more than a pair of steps, or pass through thick brush without catching her clothes on it. She's been able to see the Needle, the mile-high spire of solid rock in the centre of Fajad, for the past two days, but it has only taunted her; no matter how long she walked, it seemed to get no larger.

The heavy wooden gates are gilded with abstract patterns, and they are wide open as she approaches, just one of the stream of peasants and beggars washing through the city. She keeps her hood up and her head down as she passes through. There is an Immaculate temple here, and many other Dragon-blooded to boot. She has no desire to run into an acquaintance or a relative. She lets the crowd dictate her footsteps, following the flow through the merchant quarters near the gate and down towards the docks, where taverns and brothels and less-savoury establishments spill light into the approaching dusk.

Realm naval vessels wallow next to merchant carracks and hundreds of smaller fishing boats. It smells like salt and fish and rotting seaweed, with the strong undertone of burning blood and hair that fills the entire city. Fajad rests on the back of a buried monster, and the entire city stinks of its body. The wagons that, even now, carry barrels filled with its blood and lymph and other, stranger fluids do not help with the smell, which grows stronger as they pass. She stares out at the ships, noting down in her head which ones look like they take passengers, and which to avoid if she wants to get to her destination.

There are a few likely suspects, but she is in no condition to approach a captain at the moment. She is filthy and dishevelled and, even if she were clean, she has no money. She has also not slept for the past four days, and, while she feels she could go longer without rest, she is still tired. She has been too focused to stop, and too worried about what will happen when she closes her eyes to dare it. She can go a little longer, though, and does not want to try to sleep in the city. She is here for a reason. Money and passage. She has to remember that, through the noise of the crowd and the stink of life all around her, deafening and choking.

She pushes through to the waterfront itself, and stares out at the ocean. No people under the water, not here, but she knows there is a god who claims the area. Her best bet is to head out along the shipping lanes until she finds some cargo worth bringing back to the surface, or a strongbox full of jade or silver. She scowls. She has never wanted to concern herself with money. It is a sin against the Dragons to covet it. She may be dead, and half her faith proclaimed a lie, but she cannot shake it off with only a thought.

Her ears filled with the raucous partying of sailors and her mouth with the stink of the living city, she turns around and leaves. The gates are just about to shut, but the guards are eager to see a beggar out of the city and herd her and a mob of others away with sharp blows from the butts of their spears. The others set themselves down just outside the walls, the downtrodden and the poor ignored now that they are out of sight, and Drowned Wisdom feels sick at the sight of it. The world is broken. She knows this, but every time she sees more proof it dries another splinter into her.

She hurries away, slips beneath the waves and hides herself amongst the seaweed and the rocks, tucked into a cave that is little more than a crack in the seafloor she noticed on her trip across the strait. She closes her eyes, and lets herself rest, weightless. She does not dream. She wakes, no more rested than when she closed her eyes, and begins her search in the light of the morning sun, filtered through the water until it is barely more than a glow.

She fills her lungs with water and her robes with stones, so that she can stay on the seafloor more easily, and walks the route that hundreds of ships follow every year. It is slow and tedious and with every day she spends, getting deeper and deeper, ever further from the sun, she gets ever more tired. Fish shoal overhead and whales sing hundreds of kilometres away and strange, many-legged things squirm past her knees, but she finds nothing for more than a week. She has to fight off an overly-inquisitive shark at one point, and leaves it with broken teeth and a missing eye, a fair trade for a wound to her side that gapes open now, half a hundred neat slits carved into her back and abdomen, not bleeding but not healing, either.

She is a corpse, and she is never allowed to forget it.

The first find she makes, ten days in, is a small, fast caravel, broken in two against a low bank of sediment. It must have been down there for decades, at least, and she is not optimistic about her chances, but it is a good sign. She makes her way to it, in those long, arcing jump-steps she has grown so used to, leaving little plumes of sediment in her wake, and enters through the break. The ceilings are so low she has to keep herself bent almost in two, as she pushes her way past slimy tube worms and razor-edged shellfish, carefully negotiates around crabs waving warning pincers as big as her fist, and explores the vessel.

It was carrying something intensely valuable on a weight-to-money scale, and perishable, she determines. Probably an exotic food, judging by the barrels now filled with dead shells and the crates empty of anything but seawater. The crew quarters hold only an irate eel, twice as long as she is tall, and she has to wrap dead hands around it and break it in seven places to get past. Her grip is implacable and the eel does not even manage to bite her. She barely notices the fight. The captain's cabin brings more disappointments. The desk is half-rotted and the drawers filled with the mushy remnants of papers and maps. The safe is rusted open, a gaping void that was probably emptied before the ship even sank.

She sighs, water into water, and keeps walking.

It takes three more wrecks and another ten days before she finds something worth all the effort. A pleasure cruiser, massive and elaborate, sitting pretty on the sea bed, almost as though it is about to lift up and sail away on the surface. The wood itself is inlaid with gold and gems, and those alone would probably net her enough to book passage, but she holds off. Something like this would carry passengers who could never be seen in public without their own body weight in jewellery.

She sets foot on the main deck, and is immediately beset by something invisible. It opens a rent in her shoulder and slashes open her cheek, but she circulates that black Essence to her eyes and it snaps into clear focus. A thing of many chitinous legs and hundreds of waving whiskers, knife-edged claws and a thousand empty black eyes, stares at her, and her shredded flesh dangles from one of those claws. She grips the deck with her toes and forms her hands into blades, fingers clamped tight together and thumbs tucked against the palm. They exchange the next flurry in the space of a breath, and now that she can see this sea-floor elemental she can fight it on even terms. Essence edges her fingers, letting her touch and sever and tear at the thing, and she rips free six legs and a dozen whiskers with precise, merciless strikes. She takes a crushing blow to the chest in exchange, and it sends her reeling backwards with a flash of remembered agony.

She grits her teeth through the rage and descends upon it with the fury of a tidal wave. It comes apart in gouts of ghost-white sediment and a glut of Essence, and she opens her mouth wide to suck the power right out of the water. She feels more awake than she has in weeks, refreshed and ready to take on another foe, despite her arm hanging half-severed and her smile that reaches all the way to her ear on one side.

More elementals stir, and she smiles even wider.

She emerges from the ocean a week and a half later, her robes little more than rags, her shroud re-purposed into a sack. Her once-shaved head is now covered in a short tangle of dark blue hair. She is carrying enough money to make a Dynast green with envy, her own severed arm, and the pride of a successful mission. She needs someone to sew her back together, new clothes, and passage to Wu-Jian.

Who repairs her?

[] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.
[] She does. It's just like repairing clothes, right?
[] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[] Write in.

What does she wear?

[] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[] The fine fur-trimmed and silk-embroidered clothes of a wealthy corpse from north of Fajad.
[] Write in. It must be associated with death and I will veto anything too over the top (for the moment).

Who does she book passage with?

[] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.
[] The independent merchant ship carrying a load of furs and other non-perishable goods. It will take longer, but is cheap and only has the crew and merchant on board.
[] Write in.

 

[LotusPocus]

[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[X] The fine fur-trimmed and silk-embroidered clothes of a wealthy corpse from north of Fajad.
[X] The independent merchant ship carrying a load of furs and other non-perishable goods. It will take longer, but is cheap and only has the crew and merchant on board.

 

[Nevill]

[x] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[x] The fine fur-trimmed and silk-embroidered clothes of a wealthy corpse from north of Fajad.
[x] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

 

[zang269]

[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.

Show us the dead and the lawless and the hiding, and let us smile.

[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.

It's a classic, isn't it?

[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

Let's start a slave revolt! it'll be fun, and we're scarier than the consequences!

 

[query]

[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

 

[VagueZ]

[x] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.
[x] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[x] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

She doesn't know what it means to be hurt and heal as an Abyssal. You don't take chances with your health.

Un-health?

The Guild ship just seems more interesting as a plot hook.

 

[Ru_]

[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

This seems to be close to a consensus already, so I don't feel much need to justify my thinking on this. While I do think it'd be good to focus on practicing some charms and whatnot, healing ourselves through trial and error strikes me as a bad way to do that.

 

[astergremlin]

Minor typo
"Straight" should be strait

 

[Skelm]

[x] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.
This has risks, but we are going to be ditching this place basically as soon as our arm gets stitched back on, so I don't think we need to worry to much about word getting out from our healer and so we should go for the best.

[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.

[x] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

 

[Negation]

[X] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence

We want our body to be in top condition, not put together by some 3rd rate hack.

[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.

[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

 

[Kadmus]

Also if people want to start figuring out what other Abyssals in the service of the Weeping Daughter they would like our main character to meet, feel free! She's supposed to be meeting up with her Deathlord's agents, after all.

 

[Skelm]

Are there canonical servents to draw from here?

 

[Kadmus]

No, the Weeping Daughter is an original Deathlord.

 

[Siual]

[x] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.
[x] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[x] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

 

[Baltika9]

[x] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.

[x] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.

[x] The independent merchant ship carrying a load of furs and other non-perishable goods. It will take longer, but is cheap and only has the crew and merchant on board.

===
We seem like a down-to-earth, no-nonsense type. And we don't appreciate being surrounded by degenerates who make others miserable. Why join their ship then? Unless we're planning a jailbreak?

 

[Skelm]

Why join their ship then? Unless we're planning a jailbreak?

Click to shrink...

Well it's faster for one thing, but we're not really in a hurry right now. Beyond that...

I'm not sure what form Resonance is going to take here (the canonical version is often criticized for being too harsh), but it's likely that surrounding ourselves with deserving targets is a good idea. Similarly for our probable need to feed on living people to regain essence.

The presence of more people is possibly a downside, since there's more chance of someone noticing how weird we are, but even the smaller ship is likely to have a significant crew and a bigger ship might also give us more chances to blend in.

 

[veekie]

[] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.

This would have somebody who might report it, but the work would look the most professional.

[] She does. It's just like repairing clothes, right?

Total secrecy, but we've no experience with medicine, the stitches will draw attention.

[] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.

Compromise option. The surgeon won't report it, but its not wholly secret.


[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.


What do we even know about our Deathlord anyway?
Hard to speculate without more information than that she appears to be driven by compassion and rocks the Sadako look.

But at a guess, the Weeping Daughter prioritizes passionate, dedicated candidates who have been let down by the world.
The Immaculate monk, who did her best, but denigrated by those inferior in heart but greater in might. Who cared for the people.
The healer, witch or herbalist, who was strung up for giving relief to those who were beyond help.
The thief, who takes from those who have everything and gives to those with nothing.
Along those lines is my gut feeling.

 

[Shane_357]

[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.

 

[Nanolyte]

[X] The best healer in Fajad. She can afford it, and money can buy all sorts of silence.

[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.

[X] The independent merchant ship carrying a load of furs and other non-perishable goods. It will take longer, but is cheap and only has the crew and merchant on board.

 

[Wreith]

[X] There's a back-alley surgeon somewhere. She can find her.
[X] Robes in funeral white, in the style of the Realm.
[X] The Guild ship about to leave. There will be drugs and slaves and wealthy merchants on board, but it will make the trip quickly and at a reasonable price.