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KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

@Bork Lazer Would you prefer that the Page 1 Gang start interacting with each other, or wait for the others to get their intro posts in?

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

Khur-kheeeeeee. Khur-kheeeeeee.

The familiar crowing of a ridgehorn rattled off the walls, sent little spills tumbling down their edges. They weren't like the walls shared with the mountains back home—rigid, jagged, glassy-black, always brooding in their God-given shapes—these walls came with stripes of color. Color they left on your fingers, your blankets, anything you touched to them. They crumbled away with even the careless brush of a shoulder; a shoulder which the Tsercheg slopes would've flensed open without care. And that corner of the girl's arm wasn't the only place where they had marked her: below her ankles. Past her wrists. It was strange feeling sadder for the walls than the people inside them. They seemed like they wouldn't last very long. Then where would people live?

Then again, the girl suspected she would come to feel nostalgic, soon, for the ruddy dust staining most of her from the knees and elbows down. The land's brownish-red, like dried blood, also stained the bottom-side of her rawhide blanket, but that only meant the blanket would be her journal of sorts. She'd seen people scratching a system of symbols into thin pieces of wood to remember their travels, but why would someone need to learn any of that when the earth remembered for them? Maybe the next place the girl visited would have white walls, or sulfur-green. Those colors would paint themselves over this place's brownish-red as she laid the blanket down to sleep in them. Soon it would be a tapestry of all the places she had slept in, enriched with all their clays and soils and mosses.

Khur-kheeeeeee. Khur-kheeeeeee.

Khurkhee was still in the room somewhere, but he sounded angry. Wondering if some happy creature had brushed up beside him hoping to make friends again, only to writhe and curl as the poison set in, the girl shrugged herself out of her shaggy cloak and crawled in the direction of the screeching. Khurkhee spooked easily. He'd have more friends if he could only learn that not everyone was scary. Like the one with the bushy tail, and the one with the humped back. Sometimes they gave her what they called "candy," little glass balls which melted in the mouth and gushed sweetness into it. They said they'd be giving everyone a feast today, too! They'd probably have some worms to give Khurkhee if he wasn't so mean to everyone.

The ridgehorn frog was in the corner, definitely tussling with something. He had it in his mouth and spun from his back to his belly to his back, kicking, thrashing it across the ground. The girl hurried to free it, but Khurkhee held on tight, trying to gum and gnaw his way through its supple skin. She held up the bag of dream-worms, now damp with frog saliva; he must've been able to smell them through the leather.

"Let go, Khurkhee," said the girl, trying to wrest him away without hurting him, but he had latched himself fast to the bag. "Ugh. Bad frog!" When he eventually let go, he loosed a squeak so furious it bounced from one side of the room to the next, and sent another spill of sandy powder down from the corners.

Somehow Bogavhaana hadn't woken yet in all this commotion. She only stirred to her other side, still jutting her hip into the air, the rest of her spooling onto the ground. On that ample hip, however, was a rawhide sheath, containing a knife with a bone handle and a knapped black blade.

"You really want some worms, huh?" asked the girl to the frog. Creeping over to the woman, her footsteps a barely-perceptible pat-a-pat on the pliant dust, she took the knife from its pouch. "Okay. Let's go find some."

It was cold out here despite the sun, and the vents protruding from this red ground. None of the earth's heat moved through the soil of this place like through the black glass; in fact it stole heat, if anything, sapping the girl through her feet. The others seemed comfortable enough, but those from the Black Shelf (as they called it) were goosebumped and shivering, always shivering, always swaddled in as many hides as they carried along with them.

The plants didn't mind. They carried on in their jellied green way, so it must've been warm enough for the locals, if not some of the intruders. They also didn't complain when the girl picked out a hardier species, put the glass knife to two of its branches and hacked them off. She put Khurkhee down only when he promised not to go far, then sat in the sun beginning to whittle these sticks into the tool she needed: a sort of musical instrument, played by dragging one stick along the other after they had both been filled with notches. She scooped small wedges of wood from the sticks, making sure there were sharp corners to catch the "bow," and when the thing was finished she stuck it into the dirt and began to play. The notches were bleeding a blood-colored sap—it was sap, right?—but the branches seemed rigid enough to play on.

It was an ugly song, this scraping, knocking, wood-on-wood cacophony; but uglier for the worms, who mistook it for rain battering the surface, seeping down, drowning them in their tubes and tunnels. Sure enough, they started wriggling out from underneath the leaf litter; the crisscrossed blanket of dead twigs; the vaguely fetal fruits, burst from their sacs and rotting underneath the fresher buds; the worms even evacuated the fruits themselves, popping from the bulbous little heads, the ridges which looked like arms and legs curled up against emaciated bodies, purplish skins.

There were spiny, striped, yellow-black worms, undulating rhythmically toward higher ground (the wall of the hostel). Ones with prongs in front, either for snatching prey or feeling seismic tremors deep from within the earth's fires. There were furry ones, glistening with the morning's dew, and hairless pale ones, leaving trails of slime where they crawled. Khurkhee swiveled when he heard one, and took a moment to watch and choose. Then, with a lash of his tongue, he dragged his first taste into his eager, glistening-pink mouth. Smack, smack, smack, swallow, lick.

With her forearm getting tired, the girl stopped bowing just to watch her friend eat. When he had his fill, and the rest of the worms on this spiny, dry ground were free of the wrath of Khurkhee for at least an hour, maybe she'd snatch up a few of them, too.

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

Post won't be done tomorrow. I got a wedding at 2. But it's started.

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

Either Wednesday or Thursday will be dedicated to getting the first post rolling. Thanks for having me btw.

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

11 | F | Mutant (Esper) | Soothsayer _______________________________________ [+] Attributes Haruspicy: Ongü-Sarishai is skilled in analyzing and interpreting the metaphors seen in her dreams, thanks to the tutelage of the tribe's Far-Mother. Stealth: Wherever she goes, she quickly develops a reputation for sneaking off where she shouldn't. Blowgun: As a last resort, her father gave her a small reed, and six bone darts to shoot through it. It makes for good entertainment on the road. Mutations Ongü-Sarishai is immune to some poisons, and resistant to most others. By ingesting a type of hallucinogenic vent-worm, women from her father's lineage are said to be able to scry the future in their dreams. As a result of some kind of stress the dream-fevers place on her nervous system, Ongü-Sarishai is regularly subject to debilitating headaches. Equipment Ongü-Sarishai has taken along two friends with her: a woman from the tribe (serving as interpreter) named Bogavhaana, and a poisonous frog she named Khurkhee. A rawhide pouch filled with dead vent-worms, for ingesting as part of the fevering ritual, or for feeding to the pet frog. A blowgun, with six iron darts. Probably scavenged from somewhere else, as there is no metal on the Black Shelves. Misc. traveling comforts like a blanket, dried provisions, warm clothes, and a second pair of shoes.	The girl has her father's teeth, but not his smile; his tattoos, but not his skin; his hands, but not his eyes. The missionary woman returned the next winter and gave her to him in a bundle, saying the girl did not belong in that breast-shaped palace where she and the other pale ones dwelt like milk. A long journey for such a venomed gift; for the tribe didn't particularly want her, either. She sliced tender feet on their bladed black hills. She squirmed in their geothermic heat. They wasted precious hides fashioning shoes and cloaks for her. And when she should have been old enough to eat from the algae pools like the others, it made her stomach writhe, forcing them to feed her from the sacred parts of the glass-stepper: those parts which remained after the women received the ribs and the legs, the men received the lungs and shoulders, the elders their liver and head, the children their kidneys and marrow. The beast's heart belonged on the blood-altar, returning to the earth to nourish the next brood and fecundate the next hunt. Instead, because someone pitied the odious little creature only half-formed of their blood, that meat went to the girl's mouth. Soon, blasphemy issued from every noxious eye and every murmured threat. They began to whisper that they were doomed. They whispered that she doomed them. An instrument of the evil god Enkhorpaa, devouring the earth's flames, cooling the obsidian slabs, and smothering the village in neverending winter. Though children in the Yüülün tribe were named for lucky things, prosperous things, things which would bring blessings, the names they reserved for the girl were snide and hateful. Only her father, bearing his bastard's shame with a quiet strength, gave her an auspicious name, one which filled their yurt with warmth: Ongü-Sarishai, "Ever Favored." She would realize, as she grew, that the name was a promise: no matter how far she drifted and wandered, no matter how big she grew, she was welcome in that bone-and-rawhide tent tucked away in the black glass. She was always loved. Somewhere.

She also believes in the name's power. It was the name, she will tell you, which saved her on the day she was marked for death.

Like many times before, Ongü-Sarishai had waddled down into the valley, where the black pans collected sulfur-blue waters; and the waters, in turn, spawned life. She poked at the furry worms which waggled under the surface. She snatched frogs from the edges of the pools, and splashed after their tadpoles. Beetles, swaying salt-drunk on the pungent air, were no match for her deft hands. She tried to make friends with most of them, though most would squirm away once she let go.

That day a group of four lean, furrow-faced hunters from the village approached the pools. Ongü-Sarishai thought they might finally want to play with her until she saw that they held their long, crooked tubes; the ones they carried out onto the dunes when they wanted to eat meat. Every time they squeezed the throats on those tubes, the long metal snouts belched fire and bellowed like a thundercrack, echoing far over the mountainside. If the sound was deafening it meant they would be back in a few minutes, but if it was a small, muffled sound from far away then the men would return hours later with the animal carcasses desiccating on their shoulders, strung up by their hooves, splayed, glistening-red. Either way they'd then return to their yurts and wait for their wives to turn the meat brown and succulent over the glow-pools. Ongü-Sarishai didn't want to become limp and sad like those animals so when the men leveled the tubes and pointed them at her, she covered her ears and squinted her eyes shut. She heard her froggy friend hit the ground; she had been holding him and was very sorry, and would apologize later. She wondered why the men would want to eat a little girl, though.

When she opened her eyes, however, they weren't paying attention to her; they argued between themselves, pointing fingers at the frog, even seeming afraid of him. Two of them were saying something about how the frog's poison should have killed her by now, but she rose to her friend's defense, saying he would never hurt her. They ignored her and continued with their argument; the other two said the Far-Mother would want to see her, and killing her would get them killed. Ongü-Sarishai didn't understand anymore, and that's when they picked her up, and they were too strong and too many for her to wriggle away.

She was brought back to the village, but to a part of it she had never seen before: a certain tent. Children were forbidden from entering, and the adults hesitated as well. But those four hunters shoved Ongü-Sarishai inside, without following past the curtains, and introduced her, for the first time, to the Far-Mother.

The crone (she could not have been younger than eighty) listened intently, and as the hunters reached the part of their story involving the frog and its poison skin, her rheumy, jellied eyes slid down toward the girl's hands; the skin which had touched the frog's. Ongü-Sarishai couldn't tell amusement from annoyance in the woman's gaze, but the words whistling through her lips and past the curtains let the tribesmen know they had made the right choice bringing the girl to her. And now that they had, training could begin.

As she would learn over the next year, hers was a rare and highly valued mutation within the Yüülün. It meant she could not die from bites, stings, or from another tribe's blowdarts; she would not brush up against a venomous snake or eat poisonous berries and meet her end thereby. But, more importantly, she could ingest the dreamworms she had innocuously noticed inside those aquamarine pools so many times before; and the worms, said the woman, would show her the future. Bedu Nersi was her name, and she sent Ongü-Sarishai the way she had come, back to the sulfur pools, to retrieve some of these worms. When she returned, she was shown how they are speared on a skewer and held over a dung-fire to burn off the hairs; placed in a bowl; ground into a paste; flavored with blood or diluted with ash, should one need it; and finally, swallowed. The girl thought she suffered all this to finally be accepted or appreciated in some way. She couldn't have predicted that she would become pivotal in the tribe's entire fate, as the dreams developed (and worsened) in her mind's-eye.

Ongü-Sarishai's first dream-fever showed her their home, the razor-black slopes of the mountain they called Tsercheg ("The Smoldering One"); whereon a great horned animal gored one of the huntsmen as he went to fire his weapon and found he had depleted its battery. Sputtering ineffectually, the long metal cylinder produced no fire, no thunder, and no deterrence for the beast which charged head-down. The girl warned her mentor, who, impressed, passed this warming along to the hunters. A few days later they came back with the beast gutted and lashed to a spit, celebrating a hard-won victory, but a bloodless one.

By the time of her thirtieth dream, Ongü-Sarishai had seen a short hairy creature with big ears, a long black snout, and a bushy tail. It walked on two legs and wore clothes like a person, and it hacked a path through a damp, green hell overgrown with all manners of vines and drooling fruits. This creature was fighting for its life; and if receiving this vision was of any significance, he may have needed her help to get where he was going in one piece.

Men weren't allowed in the Far-Mother's tent so she hadn't seen father in a long time, but he was there to kiss her forehead and weep from his eyes and watch her departure from the slopes. He gave her biltong and a shaggy hide blanket for comfort on the road. He made sure someone else from the tribe would be going with her, for protection and for translation. He'd heard his daughter's screams as the poisons coursed through her veins and melted her insides; as the headaches throbbed through her eyeballs. Father knew the pain she'd already endured for others. And when he couldn't persuade her to stay, he then assured Ongü-Sarishai that although she would always be his little girl, he suspected she'd be a woman when she returned.

She knows the dream was significant somehow, as was the person she met inside it. Now she must only find him, and aid him in his strange foray deep into the heart of this world's most terrible mysteries.

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

... And with that said, here's the human I started writing last week when I thought I'd be the only one 😅

little tribal girl from the Black Shelves

11 | F | Mutant (Esper) | Soothsayer _______________________________________ [+] Attributes Haruspicy: Ongü-Sarishai is skilled in analyzing and interpreting the metaphors seen in her dreams, thanks to the tutelage of the tribe's Far-Mother. Stealth: Wherever she goes, she quickly develops a reputation for sneaking off where she shouldn't. Blowgun: As a last resort, her father gave her a small reed, and six bone darts to shoot through it. It makes for good entertainment on the road. Mutations Ongü-Sarishai is immune to some poisons, and resistant to most others. By ingesting a type of hallucinogenic vent-worm, women from her father's lineage are said to be able to scry the future in their dreams. As a result of some kind of stress the dream-fevers place on her nervous system, Ongü-Sarishai is regularly subject to debilitating headaches. Equipment Ongü-Sarishai has taken along two friends with her: a woman from the tribe (serving as interpreter) named Bogavhaana, and a poisonous frog she named Khurkhee. A rawhide pouch filled with dead vent-worms, for ingesting as part of the fevering ritual, or for feeding to the pet frog. A blowgun, with six iron darts. Probably scavenged from somewhere else, as there is no metal on the Black Shelves. Misc. traveling comforts like a blanket, dried provisions, warm clothes, and a second pair of shoes.	The girl has her father's teeth, but not his smile; his tattoos, but not his skin; his hands, but not his eyes. The missionary woman returned the next winter and gave her to him in a bundle, saying the girl did not belong in that breast-shaped palace where she and the other pale ones dwelt like milk. A long journey for such a venomed gift; for the tribe didn't particularly want her, either. She sliced tender feet on their bladed black hills. She squirmed in their geothermic heat. They wasted precious hides fashioning shoes and cloaks for her. And when she should have been old enough to eat from the algae pools like the others, it made her stomach writhe, forcing them to feed her from the sacred parts of the glass-stepper: those parts which remained after the women received the ribs and the legs, the men received the lungs and shoulders, the elders their liver and head, the children their kidneys and marrow. The beast's heart belonged on the blood-altar, returning to the earth to nourish the next brood and fecundate the next hunt. Instead, because someone pitied the odious little creature only half-formed of their blood, that meat went to the girl's mouth. Soon, blasphemy issued from every noxious eye and every murmured threat. They began to whisper that they were doomed. They whispered that she doomed them. An instrument of the evil god Enkhorpaa, devouring the earth's flames, cooling the obsidian slabs, and smothering the village in neverending winter. Though children in the Yüülün tribe were named for lucky things, prosperous things, things which would bring blessings, the names they reserved for the girl were snide and hateful. Only her father, bearing his bastard's shame with a quiet strength, gave her an auspicious name, one which filled their yurt with warmth: Ongü-Sarishai, "Ever Favored." She would realize, as she grew, that the name was a promise: no matter how far she drifted and wandered, no matter how big she grew, she was welcome in that bone-and-rawhide tent tucked away in the black glass. She was always loved. Somewhere.

She also believes in the name's power. It was the name, she will tell you, which saved her on the day she was marked for death.

Like many times before, Ongü-Sarishai had waddled down into the valley, where the black pans collected sulfur-blue waters; and the waters, in turn, spawned life. She poked at the furry worms which waggled under the surface. She snatched frogs from the edges of the pools, and splashed after their tadpoles. Beetles, swaying salt-drunk on the pungent air, were no match for her deft hands. She tried to make friends with most of them, though most would squirm away once she let go.

That day a group of four lean, furrow-faced hunters from the village approached the pools. Ongü-Sarishai thought they might finally want to play with her until she saw that they held their long, crooked tubes; the ones they carried out onto the dunes when they wanted to eat meat. Every time they squeezed the throats on those tubes, the long metal snouts belched fire and bellowed like a thundercrack, echoing far over the mountainside. If the sound was deafening it meant they would be back in a few minutes, but if it was a small, muffled sound from far away then the men would return hours later with the animal carcasses desiccating on their shoulders, strung up by their hooves, splayed, glistening-red. Either way they'd then return to their yurts and wait for their wives to turn the meat brown and succulent over the glow-pools. Ongü-Sarishai didn't want to become limp and sad like those animals so when the men leveled the tubes and pointed them at her, she covered her ears and squinted her eyes shut. She heard her froggy friend hit the ground; she had been holding him and was very sorry, and would apologize later. She wondered why the men would want to eat a little girl, though.

When she opened her eyes, however, they weren't paying attention to her; they argued between themselves, pointing fingers at the frog, even seeming afraid of him. Two of them were saying something about how the frog's poison should have killed her by now, but she rose to her friend's defense, saying he would never hurt her. They ignored her and continued with their argument; the other two said the Far-Mother would want to see her, and killing her would get them killed. Ongü-Sarishai didn't understand anymore, and that's when they picked her up, and they were too strong and too many for her to wriggle away.

She was brought back to the village, but to a part of it she had never seen before: a certain tent. Children were forbidden from entering, and the adults hesitated as well. But those four hunters shoved Ongü-Sarishai inside, without following past the curtains, and introduced her, for the first time, to the Far-Mother.

The crone (she could not have been younger than eighty) listened intently, and as the hunters reached the part of their story involving the frog and its poison skin, her rheumy, jellied eyes slid down toward the girl's hands; the skin which had touched the frog's. Ongü-Sarishai couldn't tell amusement from annoyance in the woman's gaze, but the words whistling through her lips and past the curtains let the tribesmen know they had made the right choice bringing the girl to her. And now that they had, training could begin.

As she would learn over the next year, hers was a rare and highly valued mutation within the Yüülün. It meant she could not die from bites, stings, or from another tribe's blowdarts; she would not brush up against a venomous snake or eat poisonous berries and meet her end thereby. But, more importantly, she could ingest the dreamworms she had innocuously noticed inside those aquamarine pools so many times before; and the worms, said the woman, would show her the future. Bedu Nersi was her name, and she sent Ongü-Sarishai the way she had come, back to the sulfur pools, to retrieve some of these worms. When she returned, she was shown how they are speared on a skewer and held over a dung-fire to burn off the hairs; placed in a bowl; ground into a paste; flavored with blood or diluted with ash, should one need it; and finally, swallowed. The girl thought she suffered all this to finally be accepted or appreciated in some way. She couldn't have predicted that she would become pivotal in the tribe's entire fate, as the dreams developed (and worsened) in her mind's-eye.

Ongü-Sarishai's first dream-fever showed her their home, the razor-black slopes of the mountain they called Tsercheg ("The Smoldering One"); whereon a great horned animal gored one of the huntsmen as he went to fire his weapon and found he had depleted its battery. Sputtering ineffectually, the long metal cylinder produced no fire, no thunder, and no deterrence for the beast which charged head-down. The girl warned her mentor, who, impressed, passed this warming along to the hunters. A few days later they came back with the beast gutted and lashed to a spit, celebrating a hard-won victory, but a bloodless one.

By the time of her thirtieth dream, Ongü-Sarishai had seen a short hairy creature with big ears, a long black snout, and a bushy tail. It walked on two legs and wore clothes like a person, and it hacked a path through a damp, green hell overgrown with all manners of vines and drooling fruits. This creature was fighting for its life; and if receiving this vision was of any significance, he may have needed her help to get where he was going in one piece.

Men weren't allowed in the Far-Mother's tent so she hadn't seen father in a long time, but he was there to kiss her forehead and weep from his eyes and watch her departure from the slopes. He gave her biltong and a shaggy hide blanket for comfort on the road. He made sure someone else from the tribe would be going with her, for protection and for translation. He'd heard his daughter's screams as the poisons coursed through her veins and melted her insides; as the headaches throbbed through her eyeballs. Father knew the pain she'd already endured for others. And when he couldn't persuade her to stay, he then assured Ongü-Sarishai that although she would always be his little girl, he suspected she'd be a woman when she returned.

She knows the dream was significant somehow, as was the person she met inside it. Now she must only find him, and aid him in his strange foray deep into the heart of this world's most terrible mysteries.

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

>Bork Lazer designs a bizarre, quirky, and sometimes creepy world where we can be anything
>we all play humans

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

I'll be cutting it close to the submission deadline, but I'll be here.

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

Right, thanks. I wanted to ask because it smacked of in media res, and I didn't know whether we met him and set off from the same place, or that was one of the stops early in our journey, or what.

Okay, since my character probably wouldn't have been sheltered in an eco-dome, I guess my last last question is what mutations look like. Are these comic book mutations where we're all given unique abilities and survivability, or are these actual mutations fucking up our bodies and brains? nvm I found the Mutations section 🥴

KARSTS - A World Beyond Eons

@Bork Lazer Noice. Thanks for all of that. One last question for you: where are we and Alu meeting, and/or where is the expedition actually starting?