Greetings, folks. Welcome back for... well, I've done, like, 70 of these by now. If this is your first one, you should go back and do some reading anyway.
But we're back with another Exalted write-up. And, um... I can't think of anything clever to add. It occurs to me that I should have said in the last post (and will likely go back to edit in) that if you haven't read through the archives recently, it may behoove you to check out the Port in a Storm story arc, as this follows up on that.
Sorry it's been so quiet over here -- we didn't play last week at all, and I wanted to get this out then but I've had some difficulties juggling things on my end and fell a little behind. (In fact, I still need to get caught up on things, like updating the AP index.)
(CW: Discussion of widespread disease, some gross rotting things.)
We start with a shot of a group of folks from Smolder, most of them locals but some visitors, in a group down the road from Smolder to Open Palm. This is clearly a scheduled trip of some sort, and Sunder is at the head of the group. Hidden amongst them is Hǎifēng, disguised as a noble. The group arrives at a dojo built into the wall of Open Palm, where a sign -- depicting a crane standing atop a cloud -- makes it clear they've arrived at the Calm Seas Guardian Dojo.
The double doors open to reveal a monk a little behind on his personal grooming and looking a little ragged: Silver Lining. He gives the group a weary but genuine smile, and informs the group that the class will only have people from Smolder today, but asks everyone to take their marks. He gestures to the courtyard behind him, where people pick out a marked place to stand. Off to the side, a handful of Open Palm residents (some monks, some not) take care of cleaning and maintenance duties. Hǎifēng, realizing they don't know the structure here, gets a little concerned.
Conveniently, Silver Lining begins a spiel for anyone who hasn't been to this class before -- one he's either rehearsed or just given so many times there's little difference. The short version is that they go through a bit of a warmup and then stop so he can sort out who needs more personalized training before getting into some basic lessons. Hǎifēng sticks with them through the calisthenics, which is very much sort of a 'morning tai chi' thing, and then when things break apart for a moment they slip the rest of the way into the walled village.
It's easy enough to find their way around -- the buildings are all new and properly marked for the sake of expected newcomers. The mood is dour, though -- there are few people out on the street, and those that are seem a little worn down. Much of the housing consists of a couple of apartment buildings (as well as some nicer homes, presumably for the nobles), one of which has been recently labeled as set aside for quarantining the infected. Hǎifēng sneaks off to the side, shifts into their monkey form, and then creates a handful of extra monkeys to search the town and look for signs of putrescence and rot.
After a thorough search taking a couple of hours, they find what smells like a contaminated well in one corner of the structure. Hǎifēng gathers up the extra monkeys, absorbing their memories and 'poofing' them into silver dust. They climb down the rope into the well, lighting up their caste mark to use as a light source, and find a dead animal in the well.
They quickly 'turn off' their caste mark and climb back up, thinking it's odd that nobody's caught something like this yet. They slip back into the settlement proper for the moment and find the administration building. They make their way in and overhear an argument between a couple of Dynasts -- an aristocrat wearing the colors and mon of House Peleps, and a monk who seems to be representing House Ragara. The argument appears to be more of a continuation of an ongoing argument that the assistants in the building are pretending not to hear -- whether or not to reach out to Smolder for help with the illness going through the community.
The aristocrat and presumably the main administrator of the settlement, Peleps Kaizoku Agino, argues they should keep things quiet and handle it themselves. The monk, Ragara Danafo, says things have reached a point where they should get help. "Silver Lining agrees with me," Agino argues. "Silver Lining agrees with everyone," Danafo snaps back at her. "He's too afraid of offending or upsetting anyone to take a hard stance here."
As Hǎifēng listens to the pair and watches, undercurrents in the argument become clear: They're both afraid of the Lunars in Smolder. Agino in particular hides it behind bluster, but she's paranoid that the Lunars are responsible and/or they're going to take advantage of access to the settlement to do... something, it's unclear what. Danafo is equally concerned, but she's more concerned about the people of Open Palm.
Hǎifēng leaves quietly, goes back to the well, and finagles the dead animal -- some sort of mammal, it's tough to tell what any more -- into the bucket. They bring it to the surface with the plan to take it into the administration building, but there's a slight obstacle when it springs up and scrambles for the wall despite being clearly dead and half-rotted. With a shriek of panic they whirl the bucket around and smash the creature against the wall, damaging the body to the point where a ghost, no longer capable of possessing it, escapes and is vaporized in the sun.
"Ash," they mutter. They scoop the carcass into the bucket and bring it into town and storm into the admin building. The assistants immediately get out of the way, their finely-tuned 'drama sense' telling them to move to minimum eavesdropping distance. Hǎifēng storms in to interrupt the bickering administrators, being all "Look what I just found in the well, isn't someone checking this?" and both of them are shocked and immediately begin blaming each other for it. Hǎifēng storms out in a huff, distraught, yelling about the argument so everyone can hear -- trying to stir up shit in Open Palm on the way out.
They find a place to shift to bird form and head back to Smolder. They find Xương right away and drop down in front of him, startling him but shifting back into human form before he reflexively punts them. "We have a problem," they say as they explain what they encountered. Xương asks if they saw any sick people and Hǎifēng says they didn't see anyone sick out and about, but they saw the leaders, more interested in bickering than solving the problem. They admit they also made a bit of a scene on the way out where enough people would see it so the leaders might not be in office much longer.
Hǎifēng adds they think Captain Ash is responsible,[0] trying to stir up conflict between the Dragon-Bloods and the Lunars. Xương says that it seems like a petty thing to do. Hǎifēng feels like it's potentially making bodies for the undead army. Xương says it seems odd that nobody's noticed, but Hǎifēng points out that it might have hidden itself when people came looking. Which, to be fair, is the advantage of having a ghost hide out in the dead animal and not just leaving it there to steep. Xương asks if he should go take a look at things, being a doctor and all, and Hǎifēng says he can try but that's assuming they'll let him.
While Hǎifēng goes to talk to Bokano, Xương puts off the investigation with Gou for a while to go check on things[1], and he flies down to Open Palm in parrot form. He easily finds the building being used as a quarantine and slips in through a window, where he takes a close look at the sick. It looks to be a cholera outbreak -- which is potentially very bad, but it can be treated with magic.[2]
He goes to the well to put a lid on it with a notice warning people away. Also, after a moment's thought, he scribes a prayer to the local gods (disease gods and otherwise) to post on the well, asking for mercy for the people of Open Palm. He has to gently warn away some looky-loos who have heard about what happened and gone out to the well, but he gets the well closed off.
We cut back to Smolder, as Hǎifēng bursts into a room in Fort Gamon, Kramer-style, to interrupt her meeting with some people while they go over a regional map. The other people in the room, apparently somehow used to this sort of thing, quickly excuse themselves without having to be told while Bokano lets out an 'oh gods, now what?' sigh. Hǎifēng tells her that Captain Ash has fouled Open Palm's water supply with a possessed beast, and that's the cause of the plague. She opens her mouth to ask why they'd do that, and she stops and quickly works it out.
Hǎifēng tells her Xương's looking into it, which confuses her for a split-second before remembering he's a doctor. They say it's easy to forget, given how good he is at taking people apart. She says "Well, he's the Bonetaker, not the Bonegiver, except in certain corners of Creation," with a perfect deadpan in that last bit. She waves for Hǎifēng to walk and talk with her as she grabs people and tells them to go get Serenity and Silver Lining and begin putting together water supplies for Open Palm.
Xương catches up with them as they get outside, and she asks him how bad it is. He tells her it's blue death[3], which is consistent with the carcass in the well. He stops himself partway through to ask what the thing was before Hǎifēng obliterated it with the bucket, and they say they don't know, it was pretty decomposed. (Bokano says 'Ew.') Xương tells her to give them clean water and they can make a treatment with moldy bread[4] to give to those who aren't already too close to death. She says she's already got someone on the water issue.
Someone asks how long this has been going on, and she says they've been shutting people out for a couple of weeks but Smolder's deal with Open Palm involves a certain degree of autonomy for the 'embassy village' and she hasn't wanted to force the issue. Hǎifēng says they don't want to overstep their bounds, but somebody should have caught this, that there's a necromancer infecting people. Her face darkens at the mention of a necromancer and she says she's well aware.
Hǎifēng tries to get a read on her to determine if she's upset that it's happening or if she's just pissed she's being called out on it... and they botch the roll and come to the absolutely wrong conclusion that she doesn't give a shit about the Dynasts and is just mad it's potentially blowing up in her face. They then respond to her dark look with an accusatory glare.
She goes from annoyed to pissed, aware of the look that Hǎifēng's giving her, and with a growl easily mistaken for the rumblings of an earthquake, she says "Get out of my way, I have to do something to fix this." They step out of the way and she walks past, and they call out after her "See that you do."
And we left off there.
[0]-- The Captain of the Ashen Umbra (they/them), aka 'Captain Ash,' a local Deathlord pirate lord who's been causing trouble in the region for a while. They've got a plan to turn the ocean into one big Shadowland, overlapping Creation (the world of the living) with the Underworld. Just a reminder.
[1]-- Gou's player, Bryan, had to duck out of the session early, so we used this as a workaround to keep going for a bit longer.
[2]-- Meaning 'magic' broadly to mean alchemy, thaumaturgy, etc. Arguably it kinda also means some advanced-for-the-setting science that survived the end of the First Age (like, I think we'd previously-established at one point that Xương knows about penicillin, but I can't find it in my notes), not that there's much functional difference.
[3]-- An old name for cholera. When possible, I try using such names in-character since the modern scientific names wouldn't exist. Sure, we can just use 'cholera' as a placeholder and say that in-character they're using a more culturally-appropriate term, but if I can find something better I will.
[4]-- Technically, what he said was 'feed them moldy bread and clean water,' but there's a little more to homemade penicillin than that.
No comments:
Post a Comment