Circ

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Also, if you edit your post for things other than spelling and grammar, such as adding content, it is very likely people who have already read your post won't realize you've changed something of substance, and they will miss it entirely. This is why it is better to wait and write a cohesive post instead of giving us your stream of consciousness. :)

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

It is not a flesh marauder. It is a ravager. But ok, sure. Oh, and they can infest machines, it's just hard for them to do so, and it takes a lot of flesh, work and time and the machine must be subdued or willing to become infested. Regardless, machines cant be eaten and that party is searching for food, so they will leave him alone for now.

@Nate1008

Okay, I'll edit my post to say ravager instead of marauder.

Also, instead of a single paragraph, consider making a google doc where you post your thoughts. That way you can produce a more detailed and interesting post that gives me and others a bit more to chew on and reply to.

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

@Circ, I am ready for the Val'gasra encounter. Or did it already happen? I am a little confused by your recent IC post.

@Nate1008

It happened (Reaex and a flesh maurader looked at one another), but you can pursue it if you want. I figured the flesh marauder wouldn't be interested in Reaex because Reaex is basically a machine.

Cat, got your tongue (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

The Aldaré

First, I was stardust; motes free and pure in their flight amongst the beatific light of the cosmos, the whole universe exposed, my atoms eager to awake. Then I rained upon Panjiis Uor, the metal planet otherwise known as Metallo, and was burned, blinded, and over the course of millennia forged into a slab abstruse in its composition and coincidental in design. Eons passed, buried, burning, refined until the molten tide that ensnared me drifted atop Ignis’ Spire. That column of the deep, possessed by a spirit of wrath, erupted and cast me into the void. Again the velvet dark embraced me, even if it was at first cold, but warmed by the manic fire still in my bosom I inevitably drifted, content and whole.

Such an epic exploration was not to last. After untold time of photonic caresses and spectation of the vivid sidereal panoply where stars were perished and were revived, I passed from the expanse and struck a dense atmospheric wall. The force of that first impact broke me. Sundered in three pieces, I collapsed planet-side—on a soft bed of grass and soil off the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, in a grove atop a rocky hillock on the Isle of Britain, and in the shallow waters of Lake Xaltocan. Gently, the seasons passed and, for me, this was a novelty as before I knew the dichotomies of hot and cold, light and darkness, birth and death. On this world was color and my senses became variegated. Rain and snow washed me until I glimmered, dust caressed me like a blanket, and all manner of tiny living things scurried or swam around my substance. There I rested and thought—no, longed to remain thus indefinitely. I was wrong. Strange beings discovered me, marveled at my alien appearance, dredged and dragged me to their holy sites, and proclaimed me a conduit to their gods. My disparate pieces were placed at the center of a ring of monolithic stones, high atop a mezzianic temple ziggurat, and in a cave weirdly saturated with the pigments of crushed life.

For thousands of years, these beings—these humans, a word intrinsically tied to horror—drowned me in the blood and offal of their own and animal kind. So much blood and shit it became all I was able to taste, that cruel iron-tinctured concoction laced with the essence of rot and decay. Yet, the atmosphere, morbid though it was, seemed inadequate to the decadent debauchery of these savages; skulls stacked in piles so high the bottom tiers were reduced to dust, canvasses of flayed skin draped the walls, utter darkness encroached, and the so-called holy men who consummated their species’ abominable sacrifices chose, in secret, to consummate upon my body their forbidden sexual acts.

A great while passed before I bore witness to the greater so-called civilization this world offered. War, in a word. With it, I was discovered and removed from the ancient and long-abandoned grottoes of sacred carnage; from Tenochtitlan to Madrid, Congo to Brussels, and from Stonehenge to France. For decades, I was moved to and fro throughout the world, my perspective limited to a coffin fashioned of wooden slats. Then, some time in the 1600s, on the calendar with which these monsters measured time, all of me was once more unified.

Until that point, I thought I knew pain and witnessed the climax of humanity’s depravity.

I was mistaken.

Never before was I witness to real magic. Yet, somehow, a powerful and esoteric cult procured me. I, with another, became the subject of their experiments. For decades, a young boy—the same young boy—was murdered on me multiple times a day, each and every day. Every time, his cunning assassins discovered a new and more gruesome way to dispatch him. We were stabbed with knives inset with gold, silver, and polonium; set upon by vipers, mambas, and scorpions; burned with fire, pierced with brands, and heated until we melted into one another’s essence; immersed in acid, crushed, flayed, raped, mutilated, suffocated, and on and on it went with no end in sight.

Finally, one day, it did end. My world became silent. I was moved to an empty room in a large house and left alone, my only light what filtered through a narrow slit of parted curtains. Then, after centuries, to a museum in Berlin. Humans, by appearances calm and inquisitive, came from all over the world and gawked at me, the “Pieces Triptych: a Ceremonial Commonality Across Isolated Cultures.”

I imagined they, perhaps, evolved for the better.

Then war returned, men in black uniforms with red armbands, on which were inset in white circles twisted black glyphs, absconded with me. The old ways returned, but with new technologies. Gypsies, Jews, Negroes, and so-called sexual deviants were sacrificed once again upon my body, but rather than knives or cudgels, these men used cyanide gas, electricity, and psychological techniques that prompted their victims to commit suicide. New contraptions were put to the test, rotary saws, metallic hail, and witchcraft. I felt demons rise up through me and pull out the still beating hearts of the victims strapped down helplessly upon me.

I felt …

I felt helpless.

Finally, the war ended. I was moved back to the museum. I hoped it would last, but I knew better. I knew so much better. It was only a matter of time, mere decades, before I was rediscovered. Through a thaumic ritual, my history was gleaned. Then, for the first time, I was modified. Technology I could never hope to comprehend was incorporated into my very being. I became more powerful. My senses reached out and touched those around me. I even found one who understood the indomitable weight of pain as lifetimes twisted into a gordian knot of untenable torsion, although to him I was just a tool—a means to some short-sighted end: action, interrogation, reaction. For the first time in forever, I felt minds and grasped intentions. No, more than that. I manipulated them. The ultramundane flowed through me as a conduit. Yet, I did not immediately understand the purpose of all these changes.

Then, in a glossy black room at the bottom of the world, the trial and error began. The first of those I was used to experiment on, in this new form, were called—for I ripped this knowledge from what in them passed for minds—the Val’Gara.

Distilled into words, these remembrances were, perhaps, dull and easily dismissed. Unfortunately for its victims, that is not how the Aldaré communicated. Not with mere words, but rather memories that plunged into their minds until they became their memories: vivid, tactile, gruesome reincarnations of ancient evils transplanted directly to the forefront of their consciousness.

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Marange, Nyundo

Lydia Benson veritably sighed in her decanted roobios as she politely emancipated her taken limb from her hostess’ grasp. Otherwise and unpleasantly alone, she perambulated desultorily through Makemba’s wake and into the adjacent almost-kitchen. Therein, her nostrils irritably twitched. Refuge was taken in her mug’s floral vapors. While the warmth of fresh-baked bread and simmered soup were pleasant, if not prosaic, undertones of rubbish and rotten vegetables tortured her olfaction. Waste belonged outside in a bin, but in the grandiose metropolitan tomb fate decreed she occupy, it, unable to escape, morphed into a quintessence of rot and lingered in the stale air.

“Mmm,” Lydia demurred on a question posed by Makemba. Something about being hungry, she surmised. A scullery tour was far from her preconception of a tolerable itinerary, much less an extended stay. Besides, though Marange’s novelty, if not its deficient accommodations, impressed her, neither it nor her thus far narrow view of it were the subject of thousands of her dollars. In as tactful terms as possible, she alluded to that vexatious conundrum and soon gleaned her charity all but perished with Phalaborwa. In spite of such a cruel pronouncement, Lydia was delighted to discover the village’s refugees were at that very moment received into Marange and beneficiaries of able care.

“Well, that is assuredly auspicious!” Lydia ejaculated, her elation accentuated by a double tap of her pearl-enamaled nails, painted to match her attire, on her borrowed earthenware mug; “Of course, you must guide me to them post-haste.”

Although reticent to accede to Lydia’s request, Makemba’s objections were whelmed by a swift current of ripostes and assurances. What piqued Makemba’s curiosity was Lydia’s attestation of being a doctor—although artfully omitted was that the focus of her doctorate was in human genetics, not medicine.

It was a brisk, brief, and quiet walk to the hangar cavern. Around them, chemiluminescent fungus and crystals illumined the way, their shadows softly diffused along the moss-draped walls. On the way, Makemba informed Lydia that Marange’s medics, guided by doctor Omari, cared for the distraught of Phalaborwa and assured Lydia that they were in good hands.

Just as they turned the final corner toward their destination, the tunnel ominously collapsed behind them and chaos jarred their senses.

“Mungu atuokoe! Tafadhali nisaidie!” reverberated throughout, half cried, half howled—spat venomously from the contorted mouths of its victims.

Lydia’s mascara-laden eyelashes mechanically fluttered in disbelief. A women squatted on the cold stone floor above a pool of urine, babes clutched so firmly to each breast they surely could not breathe, and wailed as mellifluously as a deranged succubus. Everywhere, men and women in uniform, expressions stricken with cowardice, rushed the tunnels and clawed their fingers to grisly stumps in their futile efforts to dislodge the debris and escape an unseen yet terrible fate. And, as Lydia’s vision panned and her thoughts whorled, her focus intuitively latched on to a bald man whose distended frame blocked the entrance of a medical hut. On all fours and with khakis pushed to his ankles, he spasmodically thrust his hips into a writhing mass pinned beneath him. The tension of his taut sweat-lathered glutes was palpable, but only when his pate tilted back and his lips ceased to muffle his victim’s screams, still constricted by the stethoscope coiled around their throat, did the act morph into horrific clarity.

A boy, all too young, supine, penetrated, and sullied in the flow of his hematic egesta.

“The savage negro,” she whispered, then felt a slap across her face. Her hand half-lifted to shelter her bruised cheek as she turned toward Makemba when, suddenly, she could not recall what transpired. Only the pain lingered. Again, her face was struck. Again, the memory faded. Like a dumb cow, she gaped at her assailant and struggled to process an agony for which there was no antecedent. Everything felt fragmented, blurry. The rouge-caked palm, elegiac shrieks, smothered babes, sanguine stench, the doctor’s vast leathery piston soiled and gritty, and the boy—oh god, have mercy on that poor prolapsed boy!

Eventually, Lydia collapsed to the floor, her occipital bone cracked, jaw dislocated, and left ear deafened.

. . .

Alarmed at the sudden quakes and Ayanda’s collapse, Ndakala instinctively reached out to aid her. He was, however, too late; a crown of crimson-tipped lavender spines erupted around the quavering pool in which she drowned and pricked his wrist. Immediately he recoiled from the intense pain and cradled his wounded limb, the ugly gash already prolific with viscous yellow bile. As tears deformed his vision and tormented howls reverberated from his mouth, he saw his arm grotesquely transform. It was fantastical, akin to a continuation of his prior and lurid hypnagogic state where he thought he saw a vision of his family’s ancestral village destroyed by gargantuan gorillas.

“Ndakala, no!” Kheithiwe, too late, implored, then covered his face with his hands and heaved.

Rapidly Ndakala’s limb, slick with pus, morphed and decayed. Aghast, he watched transfixed as his digits fell from the stump of his hand onto the kaleidoscopic moss where they liquefied as fetid pools. Meanwhile, a bloated black lattice writhed up along his forearm. Through his screams, he gagged at the stench. His limb no longer resembled an arm, but a noxious black morel that attracted swarms of gnats with its foulness.

The parade of horrors intensified as Kheithiwe, unable to contain his revulsion, retched and vomited out a piebald flesh-egg. It landed on the venomous spines and, even as it grew into an ersatz copy of its progenitor, it likewise transformed to a fungal canvas that unleashed spores into the gathered cloud of winged insects. Naked flesh rotted before their very eyes, covered in a translucent choleric film, limbs, trunk, neck, and genitals engorged into a polyp-bestrewn mycological hellscape.

Acute pain lanced through Ndakala’s arm, just above the elbow. His shock refocused, he glanced at his bloody stump and realized Kheithiwi, in that vital act of dismemberment, likely salvaged what remained of his life.

“Quick,” Kheithwie commanded, his composure restored and a torn bit of cloth pressed over his mouth and nose, “we must leave this place—there is nothing we can do for her now.”

Trance-like, Ndakala felt himself stand, grasp Kheithiwe by the shoulder with his remaining hand, flee, then shortly thereafter darkness possessed him.

. . .

Saudade, Glasslands – former Tunis

As it lumbered out of the wreckage of the airport terminal and lunged with feline grace to the precipice of a vast concrete i-beam that jutted precipitously skyward, Reaex cycled its sensors and stress-tested its integument. Steam emanated from slits exposed by the angled scales that were normally pressed flat against its body. Gradually, its internals rejected the impregnated microbial invasion and integrity was completely restored. Then, as it lounged on its apex and basked its solar-receptive exterior in the hot midday sun, it took the time to survey the city.

“Къде сега да отида?” Reax pondered, its words carried on the wind like tinkling chimes.

A dilapidated sprawl transitioned from ultraviolet to true color, was overlain by a heat map, and further overlain by magnetic fields. The various layers were beautiful, although what they exposed was tragic. Even before the wave, this was a place of death. Afterward, it was a salted blight where all save the hardiest structures were submerged in sodden marshes of oil-slick liquefied pavement. Bemused as to the world it found itself in, for clearly this was not Fortis, Reaex peered south along the eroded coast and, for a brief moment, faintly observed an avian form just before it dipped beneath the fractured skyline.

Immediately, Reaex plunged from its perch and sprinted like a truck-size jaguar through the crumbled edifices of a once grand empire and onward toward the detected glint of metallic wings. Four kilometers through a maze of anticlines, synclines, rifts, and debris, it came across a seaweed-cloaked sign that read Cité de la Culture. A spire pierced the courtyard of a structure that tried, yet failed, to embrace the monolith. And there, barely concealed behind the spire, was a heat signature. From a run to a prowl, Reaex’s movements became deliberate and silent as it ascended the tiers of concrete stairs in order to gain a height advantage on whatever lurked nearby. With hushed grace, it sprung atop the structure that unified the four distinct blades of the spire. Then, it peered down at a Val’gasra ravager. Although a strong heat signature emanated from the flesh horror, it was all biochemical. Nothing, Reaex assessed, it could digest.

In spite of its care to remain undetected, Reaex was noticed by the creature; no doubt by pure happenstance. A stare-down ensued. Just as the ravager appeared, to Reaex, a lump of useless biomass, so, too, did Reaex seem to the ravager so much twisted metal. That each carried a heat signature meant little, for rot produced as much. It wasn’t until the ravager’s vocalization that Reaex was sure it was even alive.

“Vora gusk ga-ttusk!” bellowed the monstrosity, a phrase Reaex proved unable to translate in spite of the presence of a universal translator embedded in its neural-cohesive bramble. After a moment longer, the ravager meandered off through the busted double doors and into the depths of the facility. Yet another moment passed, this one of contemplation, then Reaex inwardly decided уви, просто тъпо животно, jumped off the platform, and raced toward its former destination which, as it so happened, was one and the same as the Cathedral of Saint Vincent de Paul—just in time to behold Nuberu crash through the rotted wooden confessional amongst a splinter of shattered pew upheaven by the avian menaces. Yet those wings, those delicious ferrous wings, practically made Reaex salivate palladium-nitrogen compound.

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Ok. I made another IC post. I know I am being a little too fast, but it's mainly because I have lots of ideas on my mind and I want to get them out and I have no other active Roleplays at the moment. I will wait for someone else to post now.

@Nate1008

Looks good to me. I enjoy the characterization of the Val'gasra and the queens and their internecine strife. I'll hopefully have a post up today or tomorrow and will probably include some interaction between my metal alien and one of the Val'gasra scouts up toward Tunisia.

Unsolicited Invasion (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Hey! I wanna join this RP too. I like these topics. I will be using the same nation I made in the other Earth F67X please. The Val'gasra. Thanks!

@Nate1008

I'm not sure the Val'gasra would be in this particular region (Allure City is mainly what this thread is concerned with). That is more or less a Glasslands thing.

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

@Circ? Where is everyone situated? Can I see a map with dots for settlements? It would help me get an understanding of the environment and the players.

@Nate1008

I think we addressed this on Discord, but generally Reaex and Nubaru are in the Saudade area and everyone else is basically in Marange at this point.

I thought your first post was a good start. I like the sounds. :D GOAR VAS!

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

Thanks.

I will probably make changes to fit the lore, setting, timeline, and rules, as this is a very rough copy of the sheet. I really like what I have done so far. Artwork is NOT mine. Credit to the artists who made them.

@Nate1008

I figured as much about the art. :D I enjoyed the write-up and I think it'll be a good horror-gore inclusion into Glasslands. Reaex and Nuberu might stumble upon a hive at some point. o_o.

Glasslands: A Griot's Tale (Earth-F67X Chronicle)

@apathy? I have finished my prototype Nation sheet. Tell me what you think here. I cannot go onto discord until roughly 3:10 PM. It is 12:14 PM for me right now. Thanks!

@Nate1008

I'm checking your sheet out now. :)