Muttonhawk

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

IT'S LITERALLY IN HIS CHARACTER SHEET, YOU NUT

@Antarctic Termite

It is?

Oh.

Shut up, you legume.

Call of the Hunt [EliteCommander and Muttonhawk]

Sabine swallowed and nodded at Do'rhajul's words. She tried to find a moment to speak between the cramps in her stomach. "Okay...you are right..."

She remained looking at the new yellow puddle on the ground and tried not to notice its smell. She had to concentrate just to breathe evenly. She half-turned her head to Yerig when he stilled her hand. "I just..." Sabine had trouble wording her thoughts with all that was going on. She sniffed. "I think...I am ready to go home now." Sabine said slowly. "I want to go home." She stopped for a long pause, holding back her built-up tension. She paused as if thinking what else to say. She did not think of anything else. "I want to go home."

Do'rhajul's emergence drew Sabine's attention enough to make her stand upright again. She approached Do'rhajul and looked closely at the axe with her exhausted eyes. She reached her hand out to grasp the top of the axe lightly and closed her eyes. Small magic from her fingers explored the magic in the axe. The way it was made, what it was made from, its durability, and its purpose.

She opened her eyes to Do'rhajul. "This is the Rueful Axe. This is what we need." Sabine swallowed again and stepped back. She spoke almost in a monotone for how physically and emotionally drained she was. "I can make a portal home now. My pack will be worried. This is your last chance to decide, both of you, so what do you want to do?"

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

*Slams post onto the IC forum*

There. A post done with an uncharacteristic lack of proofreading.

I had to break my own drought somehow, especially with this flurry of activity.

Enjoy what Rulanah has become, duderinos! I felt the Catholic Retort was appropriate in response to Chiral Phi actually putting in the effort Sularn hadn't so far in IC.

P.S. I had the dogma in mind before everyone started calling Vestec literally the devil in OOC, so mnyeh

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Trial

c. 16 PR

"Nought is there greater a sin than to squander yourself!
The teachings of your prophet are presented not as a new master to take the yoke from your slave driver Chaos.
They sing in the order that makes us rovaick great in the eyes of our perfector!

Would you shun your potential?
Would you give yourself over to the filth of savagery only to till fields for fattened kings and manipulative ghosts while you chew cuds like a goat?

Death is the fate of such hypocrites.
Death in mind. Death in body. Death in breed.

So says the words of our prophet. So shall be the fate of the heretic."

Cralt did not lift his hanging head to any of the priest's scornful words. He let his shackles support him by his wrists as he hung from two posts, just painfully enough to keep his knees from supporting him on the ground. But he did not protest. They had broken his legs already. And if he could not suffer the pain now, he would not die well to his sentence.

"Cralt the tanner! Troll of Rulanah. He was your brother, o people! And now he hangs his head in shame! Look! He knows his fate. Toun has decided it. And what was his sin?" The priest in his white robes lowered his pitch menacingly. "None other than consorting with Meteran barbarians!"

The crowd in the cavern announced their displeasure. Growls and angry hoots bellowed from rovaick throats large and small.

Cralt only blinked at the stone floor.

"But!" The priest continued, quietening the crowd. "As is our law, Toun will hear your defence, Cralt the tanner. Speak, or submit to the wordless animal you have become."

Chains rang a tiny ring. Cralt lifted his stony face to survey the crowd. They stared back with upper lips lifted and eyes narrow. Cralt's slow pan lifted up. He looked at the four metal-armoured rovaick legionnaires, their armour etched with red characters that gave them Toun's blessing and extraordinary powers. Their full, smooth-faced helmets allowed them the only notch less in emotional expression than Cralt himself.

And then Cralt's eyes finally met the priest. That slimy green azibo priest. Slimy in mind, anyway. His countenance and clothing was immaculate white and red. The never-touching circles of Toun were emblazoned on his chest. Inquisitor Zaba. He had a fire in his eyes that fed on cruelty.

"I won't allow you the pleasure of seeing me bleat, Zaba. You know the southern trade died in the ongoing war. You know I needed to feed my family. You know that Metera is trading with everyone. What I did, I did for my family. And my family have already escaped. So there is nothing you can do to me now that I'll care about." He hawked his dry mouth and spat on the floor. "That is all I need to say."

The priest leaned down. The white scales jutting from the corners of his face indicated Toun's reward for personal worship. It only made him look blemished to Cralt. "We'll find your wife and two children, Cralt," he hissed through a grin. "We know you bought their passage to Alefpria. It is only a matter of time."

"You..." Cralt pulled uselessly at his chains to shout closer to the priest. "You'll never find them! You hear me?! Never!"

Zaba already sprang upright, turned to the crowd, and swept a gesture to Cralt. "See already how his base Chaos overtakes him! He would lash out at a holy servant of Toun in passion! Only a beast cares so little for blasphemy!"

The crowd sounded a low chord. Disgust.

"And you, Cralt!" Zaba extended an accusing pointed finger to the accused. "No good Tounian would stoop so low as a Meteran. They wallow in their worship of ghosts, of their rejection of gods. Of their lies and their sloth. Gods, dear people, are the extrema of ourselves! So says our prophet." Zaba's voice softened to explain. "We were born from Chaos in Vestec, cursed be him. Such an extreme is our fate if we lose sight of our other ideals! Such an extreme is our fate if we turn away from the gods, from Toun. From Teknall and his daughter, the toolsmith gift."

A subcrowd of goblins chanted in the back. Co-Na-Ta! Co-Na-Ta! Co-Na-Ta! Co-Na-Ta... Their voices faded as Zaba continued.

"But Toun, at the end of our path, he is our ultimate perfection! Our zenith of existence! He is the opposite ideal -- nay, the counter! -- to our inexorable slide back into savagery. It is by his challenges upon us that we have the strength to repel the beastly dwarves of the evil empress Lazarus! It is by his demands that we enjoy strength from sustenance and knowledge! We prepare for his call!" Zaba leaned and lifted a finger. "It is by his will that we improve every day." He turned slowly to Cralt. "And slough off the dead weight!" He straightened. "Cralt, you have turned your back on Rulanah, on Toun, and on yourself."

The chains tightened as they winched Cralt up until his feet left the ground. He snarled at Zaba defiantly as the priest was handed a porcelain tabled, written with red calligraphy.

"For your betrayal of self and your pursuit of betterment, you shall meet the fate of all heretics," Inquisitor Zaba read from the tablet. "You will be left behind in the mud we washed away years ago."

More white-robed priests ascended a podium behind cralt with styluses and inkpots in hand.

"You shall die in mind, you shall die in body, and -- whereon your family is found -- you shall die in breed." Zaba ended the last word with a sinister grin.

The priest atop the highest podium step laid a hand on Cralt's bald head. Cralt immediately tensed to a wide-eyed paralysis. A small glow told of the mind magic holding him in place. The other priests took delicately to his flesh with pen and ink.

"May you return to the wraithstone, feeding the fate of a better cause."

The first character was finished on Cralt's arm. It was a deadly simple character. One that took hardly any time at all and yet caused so much pain. It was at once his sentence and his punishment. It read waste.

"So says our prophet."

Cralt's arm ached. The energy faded from it. The strength, too. The pain of his own nerves shrivelling wracked his body. He could scream, but he closed his eyes instead. He thought of his wife and his children. Safe behind the golden walls of the City of Demigods.

Another character was complete. Another would go somewhere else. Soon he would lose the strength to breathe and think.

Soon he would die. His family would not.

The Showtrial Must Go On!

A quick fluffpost showcasing the state of the Tounic Rovaick in the Ironhearts. They be cray-cray now!

This post was written fast and loose. It shows an inquisition trial of a troll tanner named Cralt. He has been accused of trading with Meterans, which is very naughty because they're savage pagans who worship a ghost and dislike the gods.

Cralt's judge and prosecutor, Inquisitor Zaba, is clearly an azibo who loves his job. He loves the spectacle, the crowds, and the look on a desperate criminal's face! He preaches to the crowd using a set of self-improvement morals that could have once-upon-a-time been quite healthy, but have since been twisted by the totalitarian pursuits of war and purity-testing.

Cralt accepts his death in the knowledge that he was able to buy a smuggler to take his family to Alefpria. Being a heretic, his immediate family would be killed as well if they stayed.

Here we can see that the rovaick Tounians are now a rather touchy lot. They have holy texts now, which they selectively cherry-pick as the situation suits, both to enrapture the populace and crush dissent. This is as much a natural evolution of Toun's original dogma as it is a reaction to Chiral Phi making cults a nice fashion and Lazarus having cool invading armies.

We can also see that the rovaick grasp on Tounic calligraphy has been developing nicely! They now have a metal-equipped military augmented by Tounic calligraphy (and possibly more in behind the scenes!)

Writing effective Tounic calligraphy is usually a long process for anything useful, but for narrative reasons, and because the symbol is very simple, the Tounic character for the verb 'waste' is being used to cruelly execute criminals. If written on a living being, it causes the local area to atrophy in a rather painful manner. Enough instances of the character inevitably cause said criminal's death.

Oh yeah, and Teknall and Conata's cults are tolerated because they bring in good advances in crafts and technology, as well as being already entrenched in the culture. Goblins rather like Conata because her persona isn't as stiff as Toun's.

Call of the Hunt [EliteCommander and Muttonhawk]

Sabine only gave the crate of silver an errant glance. After going back to her searching, she gave a quick, quiet comment. "Could be."

No matter how much they searched through, Sabine never quite stopped shivering. A keen eye saw that she was breathing shallowly.

Yerig's announcement turned Sabine's head. She stood upright to hear him. Perhaps in too much haste, she trotted over towards the tower doors. The smell hit her hard, making her slow down and pinch her nose. She held her breath. She was almost afraid to look inside. When she did, she spun and walked stiffly away several paces.

She stood, holding her breath and scrunching her eyes shut. After a cramp hit her stomach, she doubled over. Just one attempt to breathe and she gagged. She tried to resist again but it was too late. Bile-covered substances shot up her throat and pattered onto the mud. The vomiting only lasted as long as Sabine had volume in her stomach. Dry gagging followed for several minutes, delimited by her desperately trying to catch her breath and spitting.

Tears were dripping off her nose. She was oddly pitiful and vulnerable to look at in comparison to just a moment earlier when summoning forth the strongest frost magic likely seen in Tamriel for decades.

"I can...I can use..." Sabine paused as another dry gag constricted her abdomen. "Telekinesis...I can pull it out..." she said tiredly.

Call of the Hunt [EliteCommander and Muttonhawk]

Sabine jumped back just in time to avoid the dragon's head landing on the mud with a wet thump. Through the shimmer of her ward fanning out and peeling above and around her, she stared at the instantly killed face. The dragon's large, glassy eye.

Time went by without Sabine for a while; she did not respond to either Yerig or Do'rhajul's initial actions. She had killed with her magic plenty of times before but never with this much power at her disposal. And so, like one who had never killed before. She started to shiver. Her jaw quivered. Her knees lost some of their stability. She had to clutch her staff tightly to keep hold of it.

Finally, the axe was mentioned. Sabine nodded, turned, and made steps towards the pile of luring treasures the dragon had haunted. She only realised the sky cleared and released her ward once the warmth of the sun seeped onto the water in her hair. Reaching down to pull aside the first errant hide that was covering some other items made her show how much her hands were shaking.

Call of the Hunt [EliteCommander and Muttonhawk]

Sabine jolted upon the bolt striking. Fortunately, it was only in surprise. Sabine's surprise was only compounded by what the dragon said. She had no idea that the one she fought had been so close to Alduin. It gave some explanation as to its wish to fight the Dragonborn.

Then it lunged. "No!" Sabine released her ice spear on reflex into the roof of the dragon's open mouth.

Sabine had heard the story of how Janius and Kaleeth killed Leaps' mother and she figured the underside of the skull could be similarly thin on a dragon. Even then, if it glanced, the deadly cold icicle would go right down its throat.

Call of the Hunt [EliteCommander and Muttonhawk]

Sabine angled her ward towards the freshly opened heavens. She was unsure exactly how powerful natural lightning was, but if it was anything like Meesei produced, she could deflect it. The split second decision she had to make was whether to kill the dragon.

She stopped near it. She poised herself to cast a spell to pierce its neck. But she did not release it.

"I am stronger than you!" Sabine shouted over the rain and thunder. "Tell me your name!"

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

<Snipped quote by Muttonhawk>

...as badass as Aeramen is and as much as I like him, I'm still sad that the good-guy-crusader-djinn niche is now occupied.

_{I totally had an idea for a djinni lord of light that would eventually pop up and run around purging stuff with an army of crusaders}

@Cyclone

Well, I did say that Aeramen was up for adoption. You could always pick him up if you wanted.

Or if you preferred a more flawed 'purge the unclean' flavour, you could make a separate character like that, by all means. Him and Aeramen might eventually butt heads, though.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Cosmic knights errant!? They sound like great recruits for the Knight Protectors!