usir | Event #7 Crowning the Cat & The Celebration of Spring

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🜙 Crowning the Cat: Deception of Aegas

	The Celebration of Spring is being held across Idan, and normally the City of the Free Peoples is at its heart. This year due to the fearful farmers suffering losses in their families and herds to werewolves and the broken city torn between its fears and loyalties, the first sprouts of crops planted during the thaw are significantly less impressive than past years and the hunters bring their hauls back to the cities find themselves facing even more dangerous odds in the wilderness, outwitted and outmatched more often than not. Feasting, dancing, music, staged entertainers of illusion and elemental magic, and heavy drinking still overtake the cities and small outlying villages, putting a temporary halt to any work or other priorities, but there is an air of uncertainty that can't fully be shaken, and an uneasy and unspoken fear of a famine year lies just beneath the lighter festivities. Among the celebrating, people go out of their way to honor the feline constellation deity called Aegas. The youngest of the Constellation Deities, he is known for many things. Aegas' stars are fainter in the skies than most, seen just off the left from the Great Golden Dragon Atromo. In April, Aegas is not honored so much as tributed to keep the fickle feline's wiles and tricks at bay. Children and younger citizens of the cities or those with playful or devious minds play tricks on one another, some harmless pranks and others far more dangerous or deceptive. Despite this uptick of shenanigans, however, for most Aegas' day is a day spent ensuring the secretive trickster cat deity that he has not been forgotten, as well as a celebration of Spring. Openly jealous of Atromo's status and reverence, and long overlooked in favor of the other star gods, the people of Idan learned to show their reverence for Aegas in a ritual known as the Crowning of Aegas. Cat sculptures, paintings, figurines, or idols can be found all across Idan for those who can't make it to one of Aegas' shrines, and offerings of fish, sheep or goat's milk, silver or gold bells, silk, or saucers of water are left out for the many wild, stray, or tame felines of Idan to take at their leisure. Known for being a deity over secrets, pleasure, trickery, and charm, Aegas is a favored god of rogues, assassins, bards, bandits, thieves, and charmers. An enchanted spring illness common in Idan has long been attributed to Aegas not feeling that his charms have earned him the favor of the people. The illness is known as The Aegas Affliction and is actually caused by the pollen of a flower that blooms in April after particularly harsh winters (the Golden Bellflower) Aegas' Affliction causes those who have caught the illness to be easily charmed. Their complexion is often flushed and they give in to their whims with very little self-restraint. The main symptoms are: Susceptibility to personal suggestion (Their own whims, thoughts, and desires), susceptibility to charm-based magic, a tendency to be secretive or deceptive, and a heightened sense of hunger. The illness usually goes away on its own within 1-3 days and has no known cure. It's possible to get infected by Golden Bellflower pollen from April 5th to April 30th anywhere in Idan. Only exposure to a nearby flower is necessary. During the Crowning of Aegas and for the rest of April flocks of lesser winged cats can be seen migrating from their winter homes in the Wavecrest Isles back to the unclaimed lands. Occasionally these flocks of small, canary to bobcat-sized winged cats are accompanied by fiercely protective and dangerous greater winged cat guardians while other flocks travel on their own. The playful smaller felines can be seen frolicking in fields and playing over the rooftops all across Idan while the greater winged cats stay far from the highly populated areas, hunting the wild forests, cliffs, and open lands to stock up food for them and their small flocks of fur and feathered friends.


🜙 The Bloom

	Among the celebrating the dangers of spring are temporarily forgotten. Not all threats come with fangs, talons, and claws. Creeping vines and sprouting plants lurk in the tall grasses of the plains and the dense forests. Some of the more dangerous varieties bloom and thrive in the earliest month of spring. Viperlily. A small free-roaming flowering vine with two thorns that protrude from the middle of its flower. The vine slithers along the ground in the grass toward sources of movement or sound and sinks its thorns into the feet or lower limbs of any living thing it encounters. The vine subsists on blood rather than water and uses the gathered blood to provide itself with the nutrients it needs to keep moving. It injects its victim with a venom that causes them to become weak, sluggish, and unable to use their magic so it can continue to drain blood. Most Viperlilys are too small to cause much permanent damage to their victim, but being left vulnerable in the wilderness does lead to many post-bite deaths, especially with the smell of blood in the air. Bloodthorn. A dying Viperlily that has gone dormant and taken root. Small Viperlily seeds grow all over its vines, each one prepared to drop off and grow into a new Viperlily. A thorn protrudes from the bloody sap-filled bulb of this vine. It points up toward the sun with a thorn as sharp and dangerous as a needle dagger. Those unfortunate enough to be stabbed by its thorn are injected with a modified Viperlily poison that causes victims to become feverish and reckless, encouraging them to remain nearby and engage anything near the Bloodthorn aggressively. The bloodshed caused by its victims or the Bloodthorn's own destruction causes the dozens of Viperlily seeds to sprout and take off to find their first meals. Creeping Dragontrap. A member of the carnivorous plant family, the Creeping Dragontrap is a fully mobile creeping vine with one to four heads that each have thorn-filled 'mouths' they snap down on the prey they find. The acidic toxins inside their mouths prevent their prey from being able to fight free on their own. An antitoxin is produced by the sap within their vines, but a victim captured by one of these plants will need help getting free and provided with the antitoxin before the vine escapes in a speedy retreat into the wilderness or ground. Rogue's Blush. The dense cover of this flowering ground vine is a network of sensitive thin vines can sense vibrations in the ground. The night-flowering vine is covered in dormant flowers that open in the darkness. They release pollen into the air when vibrations are sensed nearby. This pollen is collected and used in a common rogue tool: Flash Dust because eye contact with the pollen results in a blinding white flash that causes temporary blindness for 24 hours. Bramble Mimic can shape its vines into any form it has collected a template of. The thorny brambles rest in the form of a dense bush, usually settling itself partially into worn paths made by creatures or people. It uses the blood it collects from creatures or people that bump into it as a template to rearrange itself into their form, though its size is dependent on how large the original mimic has grown. It then uses its new form to hunt for food to sustain itself, holding a natural preference for predators, carnivores, and herbivores. The most common forms are those of predatory forest or swamp creatures such as jaguars, bears, wolves, and alligators.

🜙 A Mod Note

	A "Network log" will be going up the week of the 19th that will be paired with the next event log. The network log will contain courier messages from Queen Adira, King Ardis, King Sitka, Self-Crowned King Koroc, Resistance and Rebel Leader Lorna, Former Defenders Captain Lykos, and Former Defenders Lieutenant Alice. Player characters will be able to ask these leaders questions and attempt to communicate with them personally if they wish.

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The cat statue is a wash, after all. He'll have to let the merchant know to replace it, later. Sweeping it into the same small sack he'd deposited broken pottery shards in, he finally gets up, hooves thudding softly against the ground as he looks Billie over.

Daud doesn't laugh. Even so, there's the slightest crinkle at the corner of his eyes, quickly smoothed away.

"You look like you wish you had a bag of sleep darts."

"For myself or the cats?"

Billie could go either way. Knock herself out until the end of the holiday or— actually, darting the damn cats probably counted as gaining that asshole Aegas' ire, so perhaps not that. By the time Daud has made his decision and gotten back up, there are about five kittens at varying points in climbing their way up.

The leather, thankfully, is enough to defend against tiny kitten claws, and maybe, just maybe it's worth putting up with. Daud may not smile or laugh, sure, but she recognizes the closest he ever gets to it.

Edited 2019-04-17 13:35 (UTC)

"Why not both?" Daud asks. "Now hold still."

All joking aside, he's really no expert in kitten handling, though his hands are gentle enough as he reaches out to pry the kitten that's made it the furthest off, supporting its body with one and using fingers to tease off the claws of another. Provided that's successful, he'll be depositing it right beside a refilled bowl of milk.

"Should I take that as leave to go and take a catnap somewhere instead?"

After the airship ride back trying to keep Red from running off to explore, Billie could probably use one, yet here she is and here she'll stay. In any case, she holds still as Daud dislodges a kitten from the arm of her coat. It mews and wiggles, protesting right up until the point where it's set down by the bowl.

Daud doesn't deign that with a verbal response, focusing instead on the laborious (but oh so adorable, if he was the type to be moved by a pair of big eyes set in soft fur) task of extricating the kittens that have latched onto Billie patiently and repeating the treatment until she's cat-free ... presuming any bolder felines haven't tried to get friendly in the meantime. As usual, it will be up to Billie to actually talk.

Edited 2019-04-19 05:27 (UTC)

For the most part, the other cats lost interest in harassing Billie as soon as there was something new to investigate placed at the shrine. It's really just the kittens who are left and she's well capable of reaching over and plucking one up off her hip by the scruff before it gets any further.

"I can handle a few kittens, Daud," she tries not to make that sound like too much of a complaint while setting the little furball back down on the street. This one turns right about around to begin batting at her boots. She'll ignore it. "I wonder if Aegas actually notices when people fix up his shrines or if kicking one over is the only real way to get attention?"

It's an idle question. She knows she isn't liable to get an answer for it. If anything, it's a lead up to what she says next.

"Because I wouldn't say no to some luck from a god right about now. The trip to Krimnos didn't turn up a whole lot on either sister, only that they were, as far as I can tell, never knights of Krimnos. Not in recent years, anyway."

Daud keeps any opinions of Billie being able to handle kittens to himself, though he will relent and let her take care of the rest. Billie and her rhetorical questions aren't really new, either, so it's no effort to let the conversation switch tracks without comment.

"So they lied about their identity," Daud interprets. That ... is probably no real surprise at this point, but it's also a bit of a dead end at least as far as that train of investigation goes.

And she does handle the kittens one by one. They'll leave her be for the moment, though she's sure they'll be back once all the food is gone.

"Or they're older than they look," Billie suggests instead as the last kitten is plucked off and put back on the ground. "The records went back only eighty years, not a hundred."

"You think they're like us." It's not a question, though. It's more a statement of fact. He doesn't elaborate on what 'like us' means either, not in public, but Billie's smart enough to glean the rest.

Daud glances up, at where Mercy's perched on the edge of a rooftop, diligently preening her own feathers, then frowns.

"But how much like us?"

"Well, they aren't knock-offs like those hordes, that's for sure," Billie says. She sounds pretty sure about it at this point. "Remember how Lykos had a few interesting facts about the sisters to share? Strange necklaces, being overprotective of a 'pet', Lorna surviving missions that none of the other Defenders came away from. The only difference sounds like they're from an earlier wave of... us."

Whatever they are.

Daud's silent, considering that point. It's not so unbelievable, he supposes, given the circumstances that brought them over in the first place seemed so incredibly unbelievable in the first place, but even so, what does that mean for them.

"Hm." The tiefling frowns. "That complicates things."

In some ways it doesn't -- their plan is as it is before, oust Koroc and restore a functioning government to the Free Cities. But it also means other potential options -- like a swift and permanent death -- aren't on the table. And the question of where their loyalties lie...

"I suppose they'd be no more willing to give up that secret than we would."

"They want to get rid of Koroc, we want to get rid of Koroc. Lorna's rebellion is losing to the Defenders regularly, so if nothing else, we can just let her pick at him until she ruins herself."

But take over the government? Billie's less sure how good an idea that would be. That holds too many unknowns, though she does pause to think it over for a moment, her own attention wandering up the building to where Mercy sits, alone. Deirdre is on dragon duty again, as is the tern's lot in life these days.

"The other sister might be worth trying to talk to. Lykos trusts her, only I'm pretty sure he has a thing for her, too, so how much of that is based on a crush, I don't know."

Too many unknowns and Daud doesn't like any of it. Doing jobs was something he'd always felt comfortable in because he never went into one without information, a plan. Here, it's just one fumbling step forward in the dark after another.

"If it is just based on a crush, let's hope she's inclined to let him down gently," Daud says grimly. "Though it's not as though she couldn't come to Lykos physically, if she wanted to. Makes you wonder what's keeping her away."

"It does," Billie agrees, no answer appearing from her, having not dug that deep into it just yet. Her kneejerk reply would be 'wet dog smell' but Daud won't find that funny, so, she doesn't use that. Her attention flits back down and away from Mercy, to Daud, then to the shrine he'd put back together.

The cats look to be almost about done, meaning...

"If you're done with the cats, could we move on?"

Unless he had another reason for stopping here, anyway.

Edited 2019-04-24 23:10 (UTC)

“We can go,” Daud agrees. The cats are unlikely to miss him more than they’ll miss Billie, with all her intriguing smells, so he looks at her with a quiet expectation. She’s the one who wants to get away and has more to say, so she gets to pick her spot.

The normal option is to step back into the general foot traffic passing by them but with the cats finishing up the milk and beginning to eye her again, she already knows just enough of them would try following, so she picks a harder to track way to go. Billie nods towards the alley they're near and walks farther in, out of sight of the street and then up a crate or two stowed behind the shop Daud had been more or less helping.

She's transversing the rest of the way, first up to a flat roof on the far side of the alley, then farther up to one empty balcony, then across again to another, longer one, that looks out over the river than over a busy street. The windows and door of whatever the balcony is attached to seem to be shuttered, so it's a good a spot as any other for a spot of privacy.

At least, that's what she thinks. She'll lean against the balcony railing, content in the thought that they're free of cats now... for all of ten or so seconds.

Then one of the small flying cats lands on the other end of the railing and meows at her. Fantastic. Billie scowls at it, as though offended.

"...this is the worst time of the year," she can definitely be heard muttering under her breath when Daud joins her up there.

Daud doesn’t take his sweet time getting up there, but he isn’t in a hurry either. Mercy will be faster, landing on the railing she’s leaning against, between Billie and the cat, which she cocks her head at and clicks her beak at in turn.

Catching the tail end of what Billie says as he transverses on the other end of the balcony, Daud can only shake his head slightly, tail curling as he fishes a cigar from a metal case tucked into one of the many pockets on his person.

“It’ll be over soon enough.” And arguably, it’s the least of their problems. Too bad it just seems to be one that likes following Billie around.

"You'd think so but Aegas is getting one last laugh this year," Billie says, although even she can't help but find some humor in it, so it's far from a bitter complaint. Once she's sure the cat is locked in a staring contest with Mercy and not planning on walking over to bug her, she'll fish something of her own out of a pocket.

Not a cigar or anything, just a small collar with a charm on it. Glamour magic, although from the alchemical side of things.

"I picked this up for Red while skulking around Krimnos. The default illusion is a winged cat."

Because, of course, it would be.

"Hm," Daud says, looking it over critically. "From the one in Krimnos." He'd listened to that offer, when it was made, though he didn't have any reason to take it up himself. When Billie mentions what Red will be disguising himself as, though, the corner of Daud's mouth twitches.

"That might make it hard for you to tell which one is yours, with enough of these around."

Yeah, she knew he would find that funny — and that is what that is, she can tell, even as everyone else complains about Daud lacking a sense of humor. In any case, she pockets the collar again.

"Which is why he doesn't have it yet. I don't need to lose him when the flock migrates again," Billie says, though it's in better humor now that the many cats on the street have thinned out to one winged cat who's more interested in creeping towards Mercy than it is her.

"I know how to swap out the illusion, anyhow. It's the vial in the charm that does it. All I would need is some blood and a few plants from up in Krimnos."

So protective of a miniature version of the creatures that doomed them all, Daud could comment, but doesn't. Instead, he turns to watch the small drama playing out on the rail, Mercy turning her head to eye the sneaking cat warily out of the corner of one eye.

"He'd just come back home even if he strayed," Daud answers, after a moment's thought. "You'll have trouble finding disguises that'll work when he grows bigger."

If it means not bringing more trouble down on their head for a little while longer, Billie will do what she can for Red, regardless of doom.

"Maybe, but then you have a tiny dragon running around in the city." As a cat, sure, but only as far as the eye can see. If it fails, an upset over someone spotting Red trying to, well, she doesn't know, raid a trash can or something isn't as funny as it sounds. "And I know. I have time to work that out, though. Upper limit might be a hippogriff. After that, you run out of tame animals people won't bat an eye at."

She shifts how she leans on the railing just enough to watch the cat and Mercy, too, though now that Mercy is eyeing the cat, the little puffball with wings freezes, staring back. Maybe it thinks if it holds still enough, Mercy will forget that it's there.

Edited 2019-05-03 05:28 (UTC)

"By the time he grows that big, I doubt concealing him will be the least of your problems," Daud says, as much of a wet blanket as ever. Red might manage to stay within the physical size of a variety of tamed beasts for some time yet, but he's no tame beast. Once he grows intelligent enough to understand the world around him, to speak and think for himself, well ... anything could happen.

"Strange have any useful advice on raising your own dragon?" Oh, he hadn't responded to that, and he hadn't heard Billie respond over the courier, but he'd be surprised if she didn't. Mercy keeps watching the cat back, challenging.

"Yeah, you're right. He may decide to keep on being a cat, just a large one. I'm not sure I could live with that," Billie replies dryly. Sure, she isn't unaware that one day, Red's going to be making his own decisions. It's just tough to imagine it now, while he still thinks wrestling with the cobwebs back at the house is the height of entertainment.

As far as dragon advice goes, though... Billie has to pause and consider, even as she observes the staring contest between Mercy and the cat. She's had a lot of conversations with Strange since he first jumped on the courier about dragons, she realizes, and less about dragon care than Daud might imagine.

"Some," she admits. "They start figuring out how to fly at around two months, then develop their lung magic not long after that. Sounds like that varies based on what they've been eating and what kind of magic they've been around."

What else is there? Oh, right.

"And that Red isn't a suitable name for a dragon but he knows where he can stuff that opinion."

Yeah, Billie's not accepting that particular piece of advice from someone who names anything Alistair Fucking Tourmaline. Thinking of the other dragonet brings her to a new and unfortunate thought, though. Daud is going to figure out who also has a dragon sooner or later and if he figures it out without her saying one damn thing about it, he'll know she was keeping even more secrets from him.

Her attention turns away from the cat and bird, back to Daud, suddenly watching him much more closely. It's a snap decision, letting him know, but it makes no sense otherwise. She doesn't mind Strange and Shura or their company, depending, only they haven't spent years earning her loyalty and that's what settles it in the end.

"He has one, too. A blue wyvern, smaller than Red."

Daud's silent for a moment or two, just quietly puffing on his cigar, before he answers.

"I thought as much when he started talking about raising dragons," he says, expression and voice flat like it's the least surprising news in the world. "If that wasn't enough to give it away, the mewling out of his courier certainly was."

In retrospect, what's actually amazing is that Strange didn't go around trumpeting his possession of a baby dragon from all the rooftops. So the man does have self-awareness, after all.

In a sudden flutter of feathers, Mercy flips her tail up at the cat before suddenly taking off the railing, the gust of her wings powerful enough to send Billie's hair whipping briefly agianst her face.

Event #7 Crowning the Cat & The Celebration of Spring

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wtf dw, i thought i hit send on this

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