Tatterdemalion

Fellowship: The Heart

Wormwood!

The worst thing that could happen to a station is for its Central Administration Spine to become corrupt, malfunctioning, alive. Which, of course, is what has happened here, because it must happen. The laws of misfortune and disaster demand nothing less. So you live, and you hate, and you torment those who fall into your clutches-- and now you have indigestion. Impossibly, something has happened to deny you your right to torment and bring disaster onto the heads of those who walk your halls, and now there is the merest sliver of a god of the Heart attempting to worm its way down into you, get its fangs around your spine, and drag you up wailing. If it is careful and clever, it will replace you, and make the station an extension of itself. If it is reckless, it will unmake you, and Wormwood Station's careful knot of misfortune and disaster will collapse and this abscess in reality will be undone, scattering you across the face of the Heart.

And so you roil and rage, and in your rage--

You open locks that cannot be easily closed.

Belated Bookkeeping

Ailee has definitely caused collateral damage, insulted someone in charge and upset the natural order, so that's 3 already on the ol' Response Level. You're lucky that you haven't pushed hard against the communities here, what there is of them. But you just angered Wormwood Station, so you've hit 4, and it's time for me to start cashing in consequences, namely:

• Bad Weather (Accidents)
• Guardian
• More Than It Seems (Clockwork)
• Wild Animal (Angel)

***

Coleman!

Once, all of these old stations were manned by... whoever. Possibly by you kobolds, before you became the people of the trains. But there was a backup, one that you've learned better than to mess with. They were arcane constructs of some sort, powered by crystals and intricate clockwork systems, but misalign a crystal by even a bit and they'd wake up and try to shish-kebab you. So it's best to just leave them in their pods and add some padlocks, just to be sure.

And now they're pouring out of employee doors, marching in uncanny silence save for their ticks and tocks and whirrs. Their three eyes on their simple, geometric heads glow baleful green, and their pacification devices are overcharged and hideously deadly. Because of course this would happen. The worst possible thing always happens here.

You bowl through a pile of them, smash through several walls as Sasha bellows her rage, and then collapse several floors into what once was a food court as the floor underneath her gives way. Everything's on fire, but you're safe. Safe as houses! Once you collect yourself, you'll be out of here before smoke inhalation becomes a problem at all--

waaaaaaaooooooow.

Angel of Wisteria, Again

Gaze of Destruction: the Angel is Piercing, Burning, Ranged, Reload at anything it looks upon.

Emissary of the Heart: the Angel cannot be damaged by the works of the Heart. For these purposes, both Ailee’s magic and Sasha count as “of the Heart.”

I Bring The Heart: the world around the Angel is highly mutable, and moves around it can be used at any range.

***

Jackdaw!

You have a nose for words. Interesting words. Words like ACCESS CORRIDOR -- KEEP OUT. It implies a door that can be locked behind you. You slip through, it's unlocked, and slam the lock shut before the incinerator constructs can catch up, all inner furnace and sparking pilot lights, or worse, more of those armored rats worshiping the dragon. King Dragon. Here in the shape of rails and stones, and too terrible to face.

Lights slam on, one by one, until you see the massive device down at the end of the hallway. It has... a lot of sawblades. And drills. And spiky bits. And it's not moving, but if it started moving, it's the size of the access corridor and there's not a lot of place for you to go, but if you managed to squeeze past, maybe there'd be, like, an engine or a pilot's seat back there? But who are we kidding? This is a terrible place, and if you tried to get in, it'd start up just when you're most vulnerable.

So. Your options are up the corridor (???), down the corridor (sharp knife engine), or back through the door (into the warzone).

***

Ailee and Lucien!

Outside the Hive is chaos. The station is having an acid reflux, the kind that happens when overheated dragons show up inside your tunnels, and now there's actual acid dripping from the ceiling, making a lovely rain for Lucien to dance through. Then there's the gargoyles falling off the ceiling, the weak tiles just waiting to break underfoot, and your lack of any sort of map around here.

If you just hammer your way through the chaos, Ailee, you'll get somewhere interesting, but it won't be your choice. Or you can point Lucien in a direction and trust their Fools' intuition to take you there, but it'll be more difficult for you to avoid the danger; you'll be rolling to Overcome with Despair, but you'll have more say on where you end up.

What's your call?

Breathless Dead

SPEAK TO ME—
the ten thousand arrayed in disarray
thrashthresh against the ruined brown,
the sky falling in flakes of cloud
to grind within the lost hope host and
the forgotten bacchanalia

unreal amalgamates throb in strobelight
sing the dundadadundadundadundun
SPEAK TO ME—
you drown in the firethrob of revel,
thousand-handed Haephestine labyrinth
mire of doubted expectations
and there is no line or star or sign
Hermes taking the cigarette break
on far Olympian shores

I raise my hand—
it falters
I raise again—
it sinks
A third time, anon—
the waves close over us
and Baradissar drowns anew

[The Get Away is a 5.]

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Jezcha!

“So how does it work, master of the seen and unseen arts?”

The hum of it drowns out anything else you might have heard from within the Pillar. It stands squat by your father’s desk, richly engraved bronze and gold. And it hums to set your teeth on edge.

“The unseen waters of chaos all about are manipulated by these humans,” the Grand Artificer says, folding her hands in her long sleeves. “They draw down disaster, not knowing what they work. And so we simply make it louder, more turbulent, and confound them.”

“And there’s no way that you can do it without restricting our access to Caphtor?” Your father’s growl is dangerous, but the Artificer nimbly slips through his words with a bow.

“The djinn’s essential vibrations and the magic of Set are of the same base nature. This is a mystery... and yet one we grow close to unlocking, with your support, o generous one.”

“And once we do,” you chime in, “we’ll know everything we need to crush the Phantom Thieves once and for all...”

***

Anathet!

The experience of going through this portal is... wrong. Unsettling. Like pouring out spaghetti into a pan, only it’s risotto instead. Your insides twist and you hear a terrible groan hammering at your eardrums. And then you’re stumbling into a bush.

Notably, there aren’t bushes in the cellars of the Seneschal’s palace. It is bright day, and the sun shines dappled through the branches of the sighing woe-willows, and you have faceplanted into— not a bush, more of a hedge, really.

“Who’s there?” You’d have something more clever to think of, once your stomach settled, only Canada has walked right into your back and smooshed you between her and the hedge. Leaves go up your nose. Twigs press against you in soft spots. And you are about to be discovered!

***

Canada!

You’ve been through the vortexes (vortices?) that Set can make. But this time, it’s disorienting and unpleasant, an experience like missing a step going down the stairs in the dark; your stomach falls out the bottom of your hips and keeps going. When light hits you again, it’s too bright. You stagger forward into Set.

“Who’s there?” A high, lilting voice. Tirzah’s older sister, the sickly one who stayed in her room and did arts and crafts. Not the sort of person you want to get caught by.

What is Set playing at?

***

Lamassie!

You almost get it to work! You can’t be denied! You’re sweet as sugar and smooth as silk and a very, very good girl, yes you are, and that’s when somebody collides with the Hedge of Triumph that faces the Paradise Pavilion. It takes a lot of work to keep all of those scenes of military glory from being overgrown, you know!

Spies? Did the Resistance send someone to contact Anathet, and now they’re at risk of being compromised? Political schemes? The Lynxes react immediately, Am’met circling to flank while Visha’an unholsters his ornate laser flintlock pistol and drops a hand to his dueling saber, and Lady—

Lady squishes your face up against her as she clings to you for support and comfort. “Who’s there?” You can feel her heart fluttering in her chest. (And the softness of her skin, warm like something left out in the sun, and the softness of her pressed up against your cheek, with but a wispy little veil between you—)

“Two,” Tirzah says lowly, and how is that fair? How did she get over here that fast, did she scamper? Lady turns to her sister (and gives you a full faceful). “Suddenly... Janissary, wait to fire on my mark.”

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Oh, Constance, you couldn't refuse, could you? Not when the thought of riding and resting your feet tempted you so sweetly. You are mortal as are the rest of us, after all. So you let the knight swing you up onto her horse, both legs swung to one side, so that you could ride side-saddle as the knight led the horse out, and weren't you supposed to be going home now? If only, if only. Fate makes fools of us all as the wheel turns.

So here you are, underneath the stars and the expanse of heaven's road, and when you look up into the face of that oak-strong knight, your face is painted in moonlight and limned with the gleam of stone. And you almost don't recognize your own voice: "I am listening, Robena," you say, and your words are thin as gossamer. "Speak. Please."

Breathless Dead

Thrummmmmmm.

The electric guitar is an instrument sacred to Zeus of the Thunders. When Redana strums the ancient instrument, her riff is the sound of building thunder, her scrape of the strings the sound of the thunderbolt striking home. How did she get it? Good question. All eyes were on the performance; for all we know, her father slipped it into her hands.

The floodlights snap onto the figure of the imperial princess standing tall[1]. Under them, her face is in shadow, save for the cold blue fire of her Auspex. And under her fingers the strings scream. The storm builds and builds, and there’s an anger there, expressible only through the medium. A defiance. Her mother might not be in the stands, but she plays like it’s Nero sitting in the royal box.

She doesn’t sing about the king of diamonds, the king of spades. All of her focus is laser-keen on the strings, on not making a single mistake, on matching the energy of eight atomics with nothing more than the feedback whine and the incredible building speed.

A speed, in fact, that calls for incredible vocals, words spat out like fire, words to match what Redana Claudius is laying down.

Bella might be able to do it, if somebody shoved a mike into her hands. But not Alexa. Redana has miscalculated, overcome by fervor and the rush of the moment. This won’t play out the way she hopes— but let’s listen anyway to that rock-and-roll heart.

***

[1]: this is a figure of speech.

***

[8 on Keep Them Busy. Redana will face retaliation, but creates an Advantage for Alexa. One that Alexa’s gonna botch. Redana also burns her second Obol as the price of invoking the gods and the power of rock.]

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Anathet!

“You absolutely can,” #MAT says, scribbling down a shopping list on a hacked tablet. “I don’t leave, Canada doesn’t leave, so we have to rely on le resistance for meals— but you can just, vroop, in and out!” The list she holds out for you to reach over and take is... extensive. And expensive. But why not, right? In fact, if you raided the Seneschal’s larder, you could get all of them in one go.

***

Canada!

Set is about to run off and leave you alone with #MAT again. Do not let her do this. Figure out some way, some disguise, even dive through the portal after her. You have to stretch your legs and hang out with somebody who isn’t #MAT, or you’re going to lose your mind.

***

Lamassie!

The gardens are so, so pretty, aren’t they? Almost as pretty as you! The Seneschal spares no expense. And they’re large enough that, thus far, you’ve managed to avoid running into Anathet. Let’s hope it stays that way, right?

But there’s a problem, one that threatens the Lady’s mood: Tirzah is sitting, crowlike, in the Paradise Pavilion on the fake river, reached by elegant half-moon bridges. She is Brooding. Yes, how she broods that her Canada was defeated, finally, and not by her! And, worse, your Lady is drifting over towards her! She’ll clamber over the steep steps of the bridge (far too dangerous!) and try to make Tirzah happy, but nobody and nothing can make that blind spy crack her mask. It’ll just bring everything down! This is a disaster! How do you stop her from being drawn into her sister’s angst vortex, silly lamassie?

Fellowship: The Heart

Lucien!

You dance effortlessly through the chaos. The angel throws itself against the hexagonal projections of a Bee chorus with a shriek of rusting metal, and as you waltz on by, your feet avoid the singed, charred remains of Bees who gave their all for the hive, more falling with every slam of the angel's wings against those shining blue shields. Working under some alien matrix, the Bees part around you like the waves about a ship's bow.

Look up. You can see it. The Bees are the fingers, the manipulators, of something vast and many-angled. Call it the Anti-Heart. Cold clean lines and infinite geometries, hexagon upon hexagon, each limb becoming ten million buzzing blue stone-furred warriors. This is a beachhead. This is a war. But this is all wrong; this hive has been cut off from the host, locked away in a twist of dimensions, this cosmic drainpit, this mistake of a bolthole. The Bees fight for survival, for the structural integrity of their Queen (how she shines!), and if they had their way, the entire station would be clean and completely reorganized. There is an Order to how things should be, and the work of you messy little apes is wrong. Not as wrong as the Heart, but still wrong. The Bees would organize your bones from smallest to largest and make a tasteful mosaic with your organs if they became aroused to fury.

You emerge in the communing chamber, finding Ailee there, and her soul burns dragonflare all around her. No, not her soul; the soul of something vast and terrible, passing through the prismstone of her soul to seep into the station. The horrid metal flower growing from the floor begins to buckle and pop under the weight of that heat. For a second, you are seen by something huge and vast and burning and red, red, red, red as carnations, red as rubies, red as blood. Then it blinks and continues into the station.

And all the speakers begin to scream.

***

Jackdaw!

The people who made this place were very, very clever, and very, very arrogant. This place is a trap they made out of train station in order to catch bad luck and disaster and accident, just so that their railways would never run into problems. Were they the kobolds? Maybe. No. This place isn't made for people like Coleman, except in the small size of the staff doors. They were people who snapped their fingers, and the kobolds obeyed. But now they're gone, and the kobolds are still here. Maybe the trains ate them. Or maybe when disaster came hurtling down for them, in some other world or some other time, they came to the stations and pounded their fists on the carriage doors, and innumerable glimmering eyes looked from within as the kobolds implacably fed the boiler and chose freedom, the coldest and sweetest.

You want to use it; you don't want to break this. It would destroy the Vermissian Line, for this abscess to be lanced without care and forethought. For all of this backed-up filth of fortune to flood the tracks, and drip out into the Heart, and for the old systems of the stations to begin to feel age catch up to them. This is a wicked knot in reality, and it's not yours to heal. That's someone else's story.

No, you need to escape, and the way to make sure that it goes without a hitch is-- well, you've really got two options here. One is arranging things so that your escape is bad luck for someone else. An absolute disaster. As long as your escape is fortunate, it will be crushed. No, you have to be causing someone to fall to their knees and scream at an uncaring heaven for it to work.

But the other?

You just need to... localize misfortune. Make a problem so big and so explosive that Sasha hurtling onto the tracks doesn't have any leftover misfortune clinging to her. Again, an absolute disaster. Like, say, making the station unable to sustain itself indefinitely. Breaking it. Whoops, we're back to breaking it. But something on that level, if you managed to pull it off at the same time as you escaped, it could work. It really could work.

(Or you could stabilize and disinfect the rails long enough for you to get out, but you'd need time, the help of, like, an entire colony of Bees, and also the Station would be trying to kill you messily the whole while. Make yourself a little tunnel of good fortune, aligned perfectly and just so, and hurtle through it at top speed. But where would you even get that many Bees?)

And then all the speakers begin to scream.

***

Coleman!

You feel it first as a Presence. Burning. Sasha shivers and groans, her boiler letting out a frightened and high-pitched whine.

And then all the speakers begin to scream.

It passes over you and dives down into the rails, and drags them up with it. Steel twists and shrieks as it is molded by will alone, and fire kindles deep within. The back half of this part of the station, the part you arrived in, crumples up like paper; that presence demands that the world give it what it requires, and brooks no arguments.

When it lifts its massive horned head (easily three times the size of Sasha) and roars its deafening yawp, mice begin pouring out from every nook and cranny, dressed in black armor and red robes and carrying golden arms. The shadow of its wings stretches from wall to wall. It gestures with a forelimb and the floor begins to shear and tear, yielding under the force of that terrible will.

King Dragon means to dig down to the heart of the Station and add it to his collection. How can you outrun him? He is already here.

And also there are mice advancing on you and they look grabby. More treasures for the Hoard. An immature Train will look just fine stuffed and put on display in the King's Hoard.

***

Ailee!

It's not actually King Dragon. This is just one of his infinite talons being poked through into the Station. But you are a livewire conduit, probably because one of his idiot Grand Squeakers happened to be here, and in the seven breaths before you manage to clamp down on that transferal and close off the mystic circuit, your Patron has extended some of his power through you and poured it into the station.

And that's when the Station begins to scream in fear and pain as something just as big and vicious as it begins fighting it for control. Really should have made a deal with you the first time. It's its own fault, when you think about it. But while you are safe, if any of your friends get his attention (and, really, getting attention is their best attribute) they might just get incinerated. Spicily.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Constance!

There is a girl. She is young, barely budding, and quite ordinary, as things go. Her name is Bethany. You don’t want to leave your house in her care yet; she’s too young, the time’s not right. But what else can you do? After this tournament, you will return home; you will pack for travel, and pack lightly at that, for you are a daughter of giants and the Avon, and you demand the world bear fruit all around. (After all, feeding you is one way that those around you may give thanks for good food and quiet rains.)

But right now your head is whirling. In a time that is not this time, at dusk, you will trace swirls in the dirt, the great veins of Britain, and you will toss the stones upon them to see where they lie, where you are driven: to wild Lothian of the north, to the mist-haunted Isles of the west, deeper into fair Logres and nigh on to London Town in the east, or even the lesser Britain, that being Brittany, across the waters in the south. You will go as you are bid, and take what you may from your fate.

And you are to take Sir Robena, recently returned, strongest of your lady’s knights. All of a sudden it comes crashing upon you: it was Robby. Oh, oh, you have been beastly, haven’t you? You didn’t even recognize her! You will absolutely have to apologize. But does she need to know? Perhaps if you continue to be a little distant she will never guess and you can avoid that shame. Yes. Act as though nothing happened. That’s the way.

So when you see the knight coming along with her well-beloved nag, you incline your head, just so. “Our liege has requested that you accompany me on a...” Call it what it is, Constance. “A quest. We must seek out a way to ward off coming disaster. Thank you for your service.” There, wasn’t that easy? No need to grovel for her forgiveness.

[Constance’s consultation will be a 10 on where her destiny will take her and Sir Robena.]

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

Redana laughs. It’s not an elegant laugh; it’s a snorting giggle with an edge of being completely overwhelmed. An “I am blitzed out” laugh. When she looks up at you, you get the sense that she is not looking at but through you.

“You... are a big virgin,” she says, eloquently. “Isn’t love a battlefield?” Redana, what? She pats your, um. Pectorals. “It’s raining cards,” she adds, going boneless and slithering her way out of your arms. She does a funny little hop-skip, still avoiding too much pressure on her leg as she nimbly gets out of reach. “And Bella had a shining spear, and Aphrodite shot me, and there was an eye of skulls. No. An skull of eyes. I think we’re being watched.”

And then she looks up at the stands. She looks, and looks, and looks.

“Yep!” She nods her head, satisfied. “There it is!” When she turns back to you, the sun peeks through the oppressive clouds for just a moment, just a moment, her hair flaring into a golden halo. “Let’s go say hello! Even if we have to fight, you’re here[1]!”

And she proceeds forward towards the stands, but at a much more catchable speed.

***

[1]: an ambiguous statement. Is she talking to you, Alexa, her bodyguard, in the flush and afterglow of a vision of Olympus above, beyond? Or is she speaking to your mother, whose face you share?

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Canada!

"This is the bit where she says No, I work alone, like a mighty timber howling wolf, and pouts about how she's not in the spotlight for once in her life." #MAT slurps loudly out of her work thermos in the most aggravating way which she is doing on purpose. There's bad blood here, and really, somebody (anybody) should have known better than to put the two of you in the same room for the foreseeable future. The Canada Safety Area has been blocked out in tape. It's tiny. And whenever you move out of the CSA #MAT starts yelling at you about delicate cabling work and how she's hard at work here, Canada.

And she is smart! She's really smart! She's decrypting the Fleet Key you managed to filch off Shamash and that might get you backdoor access into Caphtor herself, but also, god, she is insufferable. And because you started a fight that you couldn't see through, now you have to stay down here until Marianne gives you the go-ahead to leave. For who knows how long. Without a mirror. Without access to your sanctum. With #MAT.

Mark a Condition from the past, oh, 48 hours of being cooped up in here and try to ignore the, god, she's doing the tapping thing again, she's very definitely doing that on purpose, it's ever so slightly off beat from what she's humming, somebody make her stop.

***

Lamassie!

There are two Lynxes. Two... familiar... Lynxes. Because the Seneschal has made security a priority in the house, and wouldn't you know it? Wouldn't you just know it? Among the reserves called up from the barracks in the Temple of Marduk were these two: Am’met and Visha’an. The two Lynxes who walked you home after you stole the tablets from the Temple of Ishtar. The two Lynxes who made you squeak and squirm and wiggle the whole way back. And you have to walk past them, ignore them, and oh how the two of them are staring. You can almost hear their veiled grins.

But ignore them! Because Lady gives you a smile and cups your chin in one delicate, dark-veined golden hand. "Oh, you dear, silly girl," she says, rubbing her other hand all over the top of your head, "where are your darling ears?" Oh no! You forgot your precious triangles! How could you forget, sillyhead?

"I'll get them," Am'met says, so, so helpfully, so quickly, so eagerly. And you almost manage to forget, with Lady's nails lightly parting your taut-pulled hair, the fact that she will, that she must, return. Until she does, and assists Lady in getting those adorable triangles sticking up, framing your high ponytail just so. "She looks just like a kitten," Am'met says, tail flicking like she can see a mouse scurrying across the floor. "Isn't that so, my lady?"

"Yes," Lady says, looping your leash around her wrist. "She is the most beautiful kitten in the whole wide world."

And not even the sound of Visha'an strangling the wild laughter struggling to escape his lips, only audible to your keen ears, can ruin that!