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May Event Log A: The Song of Suffering.
| 🜙 Bottom | ⤛ Navigation |
| 🜙 Mod Note | |||||||||||
| The Song of Suffering's resolution is jointly dependent on the choices all our players make (Who will take charge of the city?) and on the resolution of the Return to Einjar excursion. After you have read through this post please respond to This Poll as soon as you feel comfortable making the choices in it. Please respond even if your character is not participating in this event as the choice made effects the game world/all players. | |||||||||||
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| 🜙 First Blood April 26th | |||||||||||
| In the late afternoon a challenge is made over the courier by Captain Lykos challenging the 'King' to come and properly fight him for control of the Defenders the way the old orc custom the Defenders were built on demands. In the message, he calls Koroc a coward and a thief, unfit for his role in the Defenders and unprepared to handle the even larger role he has claimed for himself. He accuses Koroc of not even trying to manage the werewolf curse he and Lykos share and says he may be to blame for Koroc's affliction, but Koroc's reckless endangerment of the city is to blame for the rise in werewolf attacks on the city. Lykos sets the battleground as King Ardis' camp outside of the city, a neutral ground away from the citizens who could get hurt in the crossfire. An enraged, Koroc takes a large group of his Defenders' newest forces out of the city to lead an attack on the former Captain and the invading King Ardis supporting him only to find the camp deserted of anyone but Lykos. The discussion between Lykos and Koroc appears publically on the couriers within the city, and everyone with a courier is treated to the impromptu visual of their meeting and the fight that follows it. Lykos gets Koroc to admit to working with the cult and imprisoning and using werewolves to attack the city, as well as implicating both himself and Koroc as werewolves as well before the feed ends, and the abrupt ending leaves the fate of the former captain uncertain. | |||||||||||
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| 🜙 Children of the Revolution April 26th-May ?? | |||||||||||
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With clear evidence now out that Koroc and the Defenders are not only working with some form of undead in their ranks, but also that both Koroc and Lykos are werewolves, Koroc's allies, Lorna's rebels, the strange travelers, and King Ardis's soldiers are all spurred into action, bringing the fight for the City of the Free People to a final confrontation for power. The city splits, rallying behind different sides in the battle. The battle encompasses the city streets and spills out into the surrounding land to the South and West of the city. The Defenders, their numbers padded with risen soldiers, hold the city. From within the rebels and the strange travelers fight the Defenders to force them out fo the city streets. Alice, Amy, and a small force of armed civilians and former revels focus on getting people out of the battle zones, teleporting people out where possible and defending them in an escape route out of the city with larger groups, while outside the city King Ardis and his knights storm the warcamp and put pressure on the Defenders, helping to clear a path out of the city. As the fighting overtakes the city another terrible set of howls sounds from the West beyond the city, and a pair of creatures join the fray. The white one assaults the city with unbridled destructive rage while the red one seems fixated on the people, hunting like a starved beast without pausing to feast on its downed prey. The beasts are unaffected by silver, wolfsbane, and other standard werewolf weaknesses and stand at around eleven feet tall, nearly twelve when straight-backed. They are closer to the size of a small swamp troll than an ordinary werewolf, their eyes glowing blue. The protrusions coming off of them are hardened bone and sharp enough to cause damage equivalent to spearheads or daggers if used to attack. Bites/Scratches from these creatures do not inflict any curses. They do not seem to fear anything but also appear to be mindlessly enraged. At different times during the onslaught from the mutated wolves a large white wolf appears, drawing the monsters away from fleeing citizens and members of all sides of the struggle, outrunning and distracting the creatures. | |||||||||||
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| 🜙 The Song of Suffering April 28th-May ?? | |||||||||||
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Two days later an unsettling prophetic orc threat from the not so distant past begins to ring true. The river that flows from the Northern mountains down through the City of the Free People begins to sing with ringing, echoing hums and runs red with a dark, thick liquid that looks like blood and smells like copper and rust. The touch of sound or liquid begins sending citizens into fits of raw, violent, amplified emotions. The fight for the city devolves into one of almost directionless, desperate violence and begins to lose what little point or meaning it had, spurred on by a madness that latches on to everyone within earshot or touch of the river and its endless ringing song. People quickly begin to change in more than just mood. Paranoia, Fury, or Desperation overtake them, causing mental and physical changes that reflect the emotion. More than one reflection can overtake people and while the infected waters remain so do the symptoms.
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no subject
"The plan is to deal with this thing!" Strange calls out, as he continues to try and bury the wolf. It'll attack him, it wants to kill him, he needs to kill this thing before he dies himself, the magically induced paranoia and tenseness of the situation overrides the rational part of Strange's brain.
"Either kill it or distract it so I can bury it myself!" The hare continues to dart forward and charge at the wolf, biting at it's heels in a manner that's downright bloodthirsty.
no subject
She slams the blade down, point first into its shoulder, angled toward its neck. There can't be a person under this monster. She refuses to believe this could be anything like the other werewolves. It's some forgotten monster that has been unleashed on them to hunt them down like a ferret after rabbits in a warren.
She shudders at the awful screeching howl that the injury rips from the wolf beast, but it doesn't stop it from moving and even as she tries to hoist her weight down into the blade it sinks too slow, much too slow, and its other arm comes at her again and again, trying to rip her from its back.
Strange's blood, the beast's blood, and her own are all in the air around her, and her mind races down dangerous threads, goading her into fighting back teeth for teeth. So much power must be in this thing's blood but it smells awful, makes her stomach roll even while her mouth waters. Fire flares up around her hands like an aura and she screams right back at the howling thing, tapping into survival instincts fueled by the racing dhampir blood in her veins. She lets go of the blade, sticking out of the creature, lodged in muscle and skin independently of her efforts, in favor of grabbing the beast's face with her hands. Her fingers search for its eyes and the smell of burning fur sizzles into the air around them.
no subject
But she is. And the moment Rey grabs the werewolf by the head, Strange realizes that shit, if that thing manages to pick her off it's back, she's dead. Thankfully, a flaming dhampir near it's face is a good distraction: the creature isn't paying much attention to Strange. So, he ups the ante, practically uprooting the street with magic as more earth rises up in a column, trying to envelop the werewolf's arms.
Unfortunately, exhaustion is hitting Strange at the same time. He can do this for maybe a minute more before passing out? It isn't good. So, voice strained, he yells in Rey's direction,
"If you're going to keep doing that, then hurry it up!"
gruesome descriptions and monster death ahoy
Earth captures the arm trying to rip her off the creature, and she wrenches her sword free before the earth can trap it and lock it out of her grasp. A flicker of a thought insists Strange did that intentionally. He didn't want her to have her weapon, but she can't focus on that thought. Her eyes are glowing white now, and she sets aside thoughts for actions the next time the blind wolf goes to snap its mouth shut on her.
She slams the sword pointy end first into the oncoming mouth and the wolf keeps going, trying to the last to grab her. Its determination becomes its undoing as the two opposing forces meet, forcing the sword deeper and deeper into its throat. Blood comes up out of its mouth and over her hands, both on the hilt of the sword. Rey doesn't stop there, the panic and the violent desire to force more blood out of it combining until her hand and part of her arm are inside the creature's mouth, pushing the blade until it won't go any further.
When she comes stumbling off the buried, gurgling monstrosity her arm and sword are both a bright, unsettling red and Rey's breathing and white eyes are wild and frenzied.
rip poor werewoof
Strange only gets a good look at the werewolf when Rey stumbles away, covered with blood. That, plus the fact that Bell has finally stopped attacking the thing as her berserker frenzy fades, gives Strange a fairly good idea of what just happened.
"I think it's dead. It—gods, what the hell?!"
As Strange talks, the wolf starts to transform. The fur melts away, leaving behind flesh and scales. There's something human underneath, but most of the body is covered in blue scales. Strange backs up, ready to hurl some sort of magic at whatever the thing is (despite the fact that he is obviously winded), but the creature remains dead. Covered in earth and still bleeding out of the mouth is a dead, disfigured dragonborn.
"That's a dragonborn," Strange breathlessly says, as he points out the obvious. "But those spikes...dragonborn don't have bone spikes like that."
they knew it not well at all
"Aren't all the dragonborn dead?" She says it like she's still trying to believe any of what they just went through. Like the evidence isn't right there in front of her. Her stomach turns and she covers her mouth with a bloodied hand before really looking at her own blood-stained hands. Released from her manic struggle for survival the realization that she is drenched in not just werewolf's blood, but the blood of a dragonborn, spurs her to move for the water.
It's the wrong color and she has avoided it until now, but the prospect of turning into whatever that mess of a body she just had a heavy hand in killing was is far more frightening than red waters and her rational mind is still somewhere back before she leapt onto the blood wolf's back. She kneels by the water and shoves her arms into it, frantically scrubbing the blood off her skin. Even as she washes it off, though, the red of the river covers her arms, crawling up over her skin and then disappearing into it. She stumbles backward, but her arms look fine once the water has soaked in, no longer tainted by blood.
She picks her sword back up, stopping a foot away from the body to stare at it more closely, her breathing ragged and her grip on the sword tightening. She could feel the blood lust still at the back of her mind, whispering and coaxing her toward violence, but worse now was a rising anger, directed toward nothing and everything at once. A hand goes to her head and she winces, her other hand locked around her sword.
"How is that possible? How did it even get here?" Dragon's blood. Which dragon, though? Were the young ones she had hidden with Thorn in danger? Her focus waivers as she frantically tries to reach Thorn with her thoughts, searching for his familiar voice in her head. To Strange she's just standing there, her clothing drenched in blood and her brows furrowed in concentration, a white-knuckled grip on the hilt of her still dripping sword.
no subject
"As long as there are dragons, there can be dragonborn," Strange explains, still focusing on trying to wiggle that scale out. "Considering that the dragons have returned, it's not a stretch to assume that one of them made dragonborn, either willingly or by force."
He's still kneeling down near the corpse, but turns to look at Rey. Her hand is on her sword. Is she going to kill him as well? She was borderline feral when she killed the dragonborn, she can't be trusted. One hand still remains on the scales while another hand slowly moves to touch the ground. She might try and strike at him. He'll want to strike back.
no subject
When her focus turns back to Strange he's trying to remove something from the twisted dragonborn and Rey's paranoia, against any reasonable thought in her mind, shouts at her that it's evidence he is trying to hide. Some clue as to who made this tortured creature that tried to kill them, or how. Maybe it had been attacking him for a reason and she had just done his dirty work for him. Her jaw tightens, the river's rage setting her blood boiling once more.
"By force?" She questions, trying to catch where the hare that had been fighting the creature went, her tone wavering with suspicious undertones. She doesn't wait long for a response. The river's fury has found its target, and that target is Strange. Without much more warning the effects of the river flood through her and she lunges for Strange, intent on running him through with her sword.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCI18qAoKq4
"There's theories that one could force—"
And then her sword runs him through. Strange chokes out a gurgling noise of surprise as the pain just spikes through his body. But while he's dying, he's not dead yet. Bell the hare launches herself at Rey, a bundle of fangs and fury, eyes bright red as she tries to attack what she views as a threat. At the same time, Strange's free hand grips around the earth. It starts to raise and buckle in Rey's vicinity as Strange tries to trap or inconvenience her with the earth in the same way he tried to trap the werewolf.
Look at the /Bones/.
She charges for him and lurches when the earth suddenly rises up under her feet, sending her rolling. She's close enough that the smell of his blood is stronger than the blood coating her, and her eyes flash white again. She scrambles to her feet, trying to tackle him, but her foot is caught in the ground he's manipulating.
Fueled by the burst of power from the river's infection she calls a powerful gust of wind to her, trying to knock him forward with the intent of putting him in reach. She isn't aware of how much blood she's losing, her mind is too far gone into fury to concern herself with trifling things like survival or how much damage Bell is doing while her focus is far from the hare or the injuries she sustained from the wolf. If she could sink her teeth into Strange she could end him, and heal herself enough to deal with the animal attacking her.
that rabbit's dynamite
As the wind pulls him forward, Strange continues his spell to manipulate the earth. Though while it was raising and buckling before, now he's calling forth spikes made of earth and rock, hoping that at least one of them will puncture Rey.
Bell continues her assault, biting and tearing at any part of Rey's flesh she can get her teeth on.
Always look on the bright side of death- wait wrong movie but also CW: Character deaths ahead
There is blood there, right in front of her if she could reach it, and the temptation is overpowering for the young dhampir. Still, her attempts to keep moving forward only drive the spike deeper and her struggles worsen the damages until she manages to puncture a lung on it. The blood leaking from the corner of her mouth is as bad a sign as her struggles to breathe properly.
In a last frustrated attempt she throws a ball of fire at Strange before a particularly vicious bite from Bell gets her in the throat. Even propelled by a fury she had no control over, her body can't last the combination of trauma and blood loss. She collapses, trying weakly to grab the hare or throw it off of her with her hand still alight with fire, before collapsing against the spikes Strange created, the struggle vanishing from her limp form.
rip these two, have fun with those awkward conversations later
The fire doesn't help matters. There is no way he can dodge or counterspell that in his current state: her ball of fire hits Strange squarely in the chest. Strange slumps over, hitting the ground hard, as the combination of burns, stab wound, and sheer exhaustion finally does him in. As Strange dies, Bell vanishes in a puff of red smoke.
Unfortunately for Rey, him dying doesn't do a damn thing with regards to the terrain he changed. The spikes of earth still remain.