Yup, me again. Can't be rid of me that easily.
(Unless something goes wrong between me starting and finishing this post and I forget to come back and adjust the intro, this'll be the third of my posts to go up in a week, so my brain's only got so much to work with for intro material.)
Before I get into it, while not Exalted-related, Onyx Path has been doing sales all this year to celebrate their 10th anniversary. They've just started off December with a massive sale on the Trinity Continuum books in PDF. (That link might be wonky on mobile) How massive? Everything's only 10%. Not 10% off, but 10% of the usual price. That includes the Trinity Continuum core, Æon, Aberrant, and their various supplements (barring a couple that came out very recently). So if you've been meaning to delve into the Trinity Continuum, now's a very good time to start picking stuff up because you could get the entire line for under $30 USD. May I recommend the Æon core, Terra Firma, Under Alien Skies, and Prometheus Unbound? I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I recommend all of it, quite frankly; those are just the ones I worked on.
(Actually, that reminds me, I need to update my 'stuff I've worked on' page. Not that there's a lot of changes, but it's the principle of the matter. And... done.)
And with that, on with the show!
So the group wakes up with the sun the next day, Hǎifēng waking with an obnoxiously-loud yawn. Xương says he's glad they're feeling better today. Shango gets cleaned up and dressed and the group takes their time meandering out to the plaza, plenty of time to get breakfast on the way.
Once they're out in the square in front of the rented theater, Xương spots Nam-Kyu trying to get his attention. Xương separates himself from the rest of his Circle to follow Nam-Kyu behind some food carts for privacy, and Xương buys some noodles since they're technically using part of the vendor's space for this meeting.
Nam-Kyu starts by nervously thanking Xương again for not kneecapping him, as there've been incidents of certain people seeking certain knowledge who'll let you limp away if you give it up quickly. Xương says that Nam-Kyu wouldn't be able to come back today if he'd done that, and Nam-Kyu sayss that while he knows Xương doesn't associate with the Lintha any more (having presumably asked around), many of them wouldn't care about that. Xương says he's not about that sort of life any more, and that he has to keep moving forward.[0]
Nam-Kyu says he's figured out a time he can have Xương look at what they've got for the demon-summoning ritual. He says his sister's been very paranoid about the whole thing and so they've been very secretive. Almost nobody has seen the entirety of the ritual as they've concocted it -- they've worked with some savants and occultists on research so there are people who've seen bits and pieces of it, but only Nam-Kyu and his sister have seen the whole thing. But he's willing to trust Xương because he's a 'proper' doctor, not one of those fake ones who just robs their patients and dumps the body. (Xương is briefly very concerned that that's a thing, and Nam-Kyu has to quickly explain he's describing a general sort of banditry, not something currently happening in Lathe as far as he knows.)
It also helps, according to him, that Xương seems like he can handle himself in a fight, though Nam-Kyu does specifically ask if he has any experience fighting demons. Xương gets the distinct vibe that's not a hypothetical, and he asks if Nam-Kyu has any reason to suspect they may encounter a demon. Nam-Kyu explains that they have a summoned demon guarding another part of the theater, and while he has no reason to assume it would wander off and find them, he's a little concerned that it could. Especially if his sister thought he was up to something and had it keep an eye on him. Xương asks how much trouble they'd be in if he had to, in his words, 'unsummon the demon by hand.' Nam-Kyu says he figures Xương wouldn't be in any trouble, but he himself would appreciate a ride out of Lathe at that point. Xương says that's no problem, though he couldn't guarantee his long-term safety.
And at this point, Nam-Kyu explains that the demon guard is an Anulhe, a demon spider. They summoned it to guard the prize room, and it was present when someone broke in and ripped off a bunch of stuff, and it identified the culprit as a Lunar.[1] He didn't get the full description of the Lunar, but as they're shapeshifters it hardly matters. Nam-Kyu says that his sister's been getting more and more paranoid, that running the tournament alone would be stressing her out, but things are bordering on getting out of hand. They came to Lathe to find ways to protect Wavecrest from the Skullstone Archipelago back home, and have wound up parlaying their Gateway club into a demon-summoning situation.
And segueing back to the matter at hand, he says that when the first match of the day starts at about noon, everyone will busy and distracted enough that that will be the window. They'll have, about an hour or so -- maybe less, maybe more, but about an even chance either way. There's a teahouse attached to the theater and he'll leave a side-door unlocked for Xương to come in, and he'll meet him in there and take him to the room. Xương agrees, though he is a little concerned about the potential for a trap.[2]
Which gives us the perfect segue to jump ahead to tournament time.
Shango is assigned his next tournament opponent, the younger of the two Lintha. Shango doesn't know her name, knowing that outsiders may only refer to Lintha as 'Lintha,' but for the sake of this narrative I'll go ahead and use her given name of Ongsai. She's an intense young woman (seeming quite young to be a captain), carrying signs of traditional Lintha heritage if you know what to look for but not as strongly as Xương or the other Lintha captain with the catfish-whisker mustache.
She gives Shango an intense stare that suggests she's getting a read on him as she confirms he is who he's supposed to be. She says they've both done well to get this far, and she's looking forward to a good match. She gives him a slight bow, before they begin.
Shango, drawing on teachings of ancient masters and strategists, uses a spearhead strategy like a cavalry charge to try and split her forces in half, attempting to literally divide and conquer. She attempts to have her pieces flow around the wedge like water, but he's able to push far and hard enough to successfully break up her initial defense.
She scrambles and tries to reassemble her forces as he presses the advantage, keeping the units divided and isolating them from each other to make hard for her to coordinate movements. She scrambles out of his attempts to box her in, stalling for time to find an opening to strike back, but this is more survival than success.
In the late game they bounce around each other before he does something bold and sacrifices a major piece in a staged mistake. She falls for the trap and overextends herself in an attempt at a counterattack, and the match finishes much like one of those chess matches where one player is desperately keeping their king ahead of checkmate as their opponent closes in until they can't dodge it any more. Eventually he's got her good and cornered and that's the match.
She looks up at him, pissed and barely containing it, and gruffly says "Well played, good luck." She stiffly gets up and leaves, kicking a chair on the way out.
And now we rewind the clock to the start of the match, picking back up with Xương -- with Hǎifēng, in monkey form, in tow. Well, less 'in tow' and more 'on Xương's head,' before Xương gently but firmly relocates them to his shoulder so as to draw fewer stares. Hǎifēng whispers "Rude" into his ear. The door at the side of the teahouse is unlocked and unguarded, and Xương slips in.
Nam-Kyu is there waiting for him, and waves Xương into the theater proper and leads him to a door. He has to undo some sort of security mechanism on the door and takes Xương and Hǎifēng into an office where all of the usual theater stuff is piled up around the edges of the room, and there's a desk covered with journals and scrolls and pages and all sorts of things. He emphasizes that once they've done the test run they'll consolidate everything down into a single document.
Xương goes over it using the occult knowledge he's picked up over time, and Hǎifēng helps buy jumping down and finding relevant pieces of info to shuffle in front of Xương under the guise of pretending to be a silly monkey causing chaos. Nam-Kyu desperately tries to stop them, for fear of the monkey making some sort of mess and giving away what's happened, while Xương leafs through the material. He makes little notations to help arrange the pages into a certain order and scribbles observations into the margins.
His analysis is that the ritual doesn't seem terribly dangerous, and that if it goes wrong it'll simply fizzle rather than cause an apocalypse and reshape Creation into a hellscape. He does make sure to note where it looks like they've made mistakes and where certain elements of the ritual are going to cause more trouble or harm than intended. It's actually pretty solid, albeit involved for unExalted mortals, though it's still not guaranteed to work. During all this, Hǎifēng discovers their mistake of sticking to the assumption of a Third Circle Demon (which, wasn't an unreasonable one) rather than an army of First Circle ones, and they feel self-conscious and a little bad about destroying the kimonos.
Nam-Kyu comes over and takes a closer look at Xương's notes and observations. He's reassured at having someone else who knows what they're doing look over the material and starts indexing some of Xương's notes for ease of arrangement later. Once they're done, Nam-Kyu starts to escort them out, but once they leave the office his sister catches them and demands to know what's going on. He tells Xương to go on without him and turns to give her a story he's obviously rehearsed about how he'd hired extra security on his own initiative after what happened with the prize room.
And we leave off there, with Xương and Hǎifēng slipping back out the way they came in.
Next week, assuming something doesn't go completely off the rails, should be the conclusion to this story!
[0]-- Yes, that is a shark reference.
[1]-- There's sort of a brief aside where Xương asks how the demon knows it was Lunar, and Nam-Kyu says 'Magic' in so many words. I'm blanking on how much detail I went into at the time, between playing out the conversation and keeping up with it in my notes, but pretty much every demon, spirit, and god in the setting has a Charm called 'Measure the Wind,' which lets them identify the nature of another being under specific circumstances. This means if they're an Exalt, what type, and their rough comparative power level.
[2]-- As Sean put it in so many words, he remembers what happened to Luca Brasi.
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