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One-shot post
At a bank in Sandreef, a woman in a coral dress with a hermit crab nestling in her hair is having trouble with a clerk.
No. The name’s Lucinda Darkeyes: Lucinda as in ‘lucid but not applicable’, and Darkeyes as in ‘eyes which have seen the ultimate horror and yet not been gouged out’.
The clerk grumbles and heads off again. After a short while he returns.
When the bank’s previous owners were bought out by another bank, your account and deposit were relocated to another branch, ma’am.
Moved!!! What do you mean moved? Did anyone ask my permission? Was any attempt made to trace or contact me? Was I even sent notice of this event?
Outside on the streets a batch of instantly soggy muffins materialise and do their ineffectual best to smother surprised passers-by to death. In the palace, the king has a sudden vision of a very angry ice-cream spreading wings dripping with the vengeance of chocolate sauce over his town.
Inside the bank, the clerk mutters something else barely audible or intelligible.
Form? Don’t talk to me about form; you clearly have no kind of form or class at all at this establishment.
She sweeps out in a huff, and every octopus in the institution kept for ink at that moment happens to coincidentally escape.
For a little while longer, Lucinda tries to enter the circle, then gets bored and wanders off somewhere else.
She pops the biscuit in his mouth, and does her best to fondle him as if he were a large dog, flopping his jester's cap as if it were his ears.
Ohh, there's a good boy. Now you must be very careful of the calamari on the way out. Some men who had fierce and hungry expressions on their faces were not very nice to me, when I knocked on the front door, so I gave them some calamari to try and cheer them up, only they seem to have got mixed up and tried to be kept down by the seafood, rather than trying to keep it down themselves.
So there's calamari all over the place.
And there was a sad and grumpy halfling woman who dropped into the Ranger and Dryad at the Bazaar a while back, who might need some of your cheering up.
She's referring to Corona who was killing people all over the place in the Bazaar a short while ago.
So you must be a good dog, and be very careful.
Okay then. She releases him. I suppose you have to go now.
They may be good boys and girls, but they're not nice boys and girls. They're trying to steal back the mantle from the poor little girl, who was meant to have it.
Such silly people, thinking a little girl can't be trusted with all that power.
She pats about herself, flourishes, and produces a biscuit from out of thin air, and moves away a little from the circle, so that the Giggler will have to leave it to get it.
Does Mr. Puppy want a biscuit?
Umm, Kytania should be *really* careful here about getting jealous, is all that I'm saying. Things might get nasty here for her if she goes too far, for all that Lucinda is apparently ignoring her.
Ohh, there's a good dog. Have you been away a long time? Did you know that those good little boys and girls at the Grove of Ancients were trying to put Lynora-Jill back together after she fell apart like the egg from the wall?
She looks up, at the Giggler.
Oh, what a dear little puppy dog!
She runs forward, apparently intending to scoop the Giggler up as if he were a puppy, hits the 'bubble' at the edge of the circle, and bounces back to land on the floor, giggling. She sits up, on her knees and slaps her lap.
Here boy, here boy. There's a good dog.
A beautiful woman in a coral dress and with a hermit crab in her hair is arguing with an apparently imaginary friend as the Giggler and Kytania arrive.
Potato Slaad wrote: Lucinda Darkeyes wrote: ....a bowl of scrummy potato salad.
No, Potato Slaad. Slaad! Come on, say it with me.... You say slaad, I say salad. I don't have a posh upper-class accent unlike you. And the last potato salad I had seranaded me as I ate it. You're just being argumentative. This would be over a lot more slowly if you sang nicely.
Slathers some more mayonnaise on, and fetches herself a baguette.
Patrick:
Have posted to try and clarify things (slightly). Will wait for your response before continuing.
Lucinda dices the cute little slaad, and adds several dollops of mayonnaise.
She chops some herbs and puts on generous shakes of paprika and turmeric, cream, and some salt & pepper to taste.
She mixes it well then tucks into a bowl of scrummy potato salad.
Yes, it's shown up, and a king who expects to be attacked by muffins at any moment, sounds my sort of guy!
Tentacled horrors feast on the remains of the soldiers and wizards that attempted to stop her from entering their castle, the blast marks of fireballs and acid marks scattered liberally all over the ruins.
Oblivious to the destruction all around her, Lucinda approaches the stone circle in the basement in the inner keep and - to her frustration - bounces out of it, as if there were an air-bubble within that she cannot penetrate.
She tries several more times, then sits down, bored.
Too much attuned to the Eldest Elemental Evils to wander through one of the few remaining gates into/out of the Realms of Dream.
Lucinda glides serenely through the city, idly peeling open one of the fish which had been following her, and poking around with its insides, before pushing it back together and releasing it. It swims off, its eyes glowing and swirling with such pretty colours.
She waves a hand, and dismisses her train.
This city is so much fun, that she intends to come back here one day.
There isn't so much as a single Hound of Tindalos in sight, and the place is mercifully free of Heralds too.
She makes for the omniportal.
Meanwhile, the swarm of pseudonatural piranha ferociously attack a delegation of surface dwellers, who were visiting, attending Mirathan's coronation, causing many casualties before they are finally deal with, and the fish with the glowing eyes explodes at the height of the battle unleashing a powerful area magic dispelling effect that causes countless more casualties as waterbreathing and shapechange magics are suddenly neutralised.
Mirathan wrote: ... wrote: The brother, Skorrag, arrives at his clan's encampment and croaks out :
Treachery! The Pearl! All dead!
He collapses, his features warped and hideous
sure. blame the Pearl. *sigh* my underwater invisible stalker got time-warp ninja'd by Lucinda. oh well, politics. :( two words - plausible deniability ;) Oh, you're cute. If it weren't for my darling Pete, who I'm giving a little bit of breathing space at the moment to, I might come after you.
Oooh. I may have more of them, may I?
Look of wide-eyed innocence.
Okay, I'll see what I can do.
One of Blurghoot's brothers finds himself in the treasure vault of the Black Pearl syndicate, stripped of his armour and weapons, in a 'stealth suit' of tight-fitting camouflage clothes and with a garland of stringy seaweed wrapped around his neck, just as a very senior Black Pearl boss is checking out a valuable item whilst accompanied by his retinue of ninjas.... An item which the brother is discovered holding.
The ninjas, pleased to find an intruder with something so handy about his throat, make use of the opportunity to throttle him.
The other brother to vanish from the inn finds himself naked in the bed of the boss of bosses of the Black Pearl, with that godfather of the organisation's most beautiful mistress, just as he returns home. His end is neither swift nor pleasant...
Meanwhile, the brother with the amulet arrives home hideously deformed and warped. (-8 Charisma, +4 Strength)
If anyone wants to develop the Black Pearls as an angle to under sea life, they're a sort of underwater gangster/ninjas criminal organisation, I had imagined. Since Blurghoot was killed fighting one, I thought it might be interesting if a couple more of his brothers went out in ways involving them, since they were offered up for sacrifice.
Consider him mysteriously vanished from the inn.
Edit:
Weird. New messageboard feature that rolls over posts from the top/bottom of pages?
Anyway, I specifically did the silence so that Pete can make noise, unless of course the poor man's choosing not to do so.
A shoal of illusory piranha appear swimming through the air and swarm to attack Devlyn for a moment, before disappearing silently in a shower of green sparks.
Residual chaos charge.
Lucinda wakes up, and gets off the illusory bed, which promptly fades from sight. She wanders over to the giant clam and for no particular reason which she can think of speaks to it.
I hope that helped, she says, although she's not quite sure why.
Gathering her train of fish to her (which have changed whilst she slept to become much prettier and more friendly) she takes to the balcony and departs.
Lucinda dreams. She has a happy dream, where a merfolk called Blurghoot falls into a magical vortex just outside his home, and is sucked through to the city of the Pearl of the South, where he ends up in hand-to-hand combat with a thug about to knock on the door of the apartment in the palace where Lucinda is staying. They fight hand to hand with starfish, jellyfish, and rubber ducks, and kill one another.
Argh, dinnertime!
Lucinda suddenly feels very tired. She waves a hand, conjuring the illusion of furniture, goes across to the bed, and lies down on it. She draws her train of fishes down over herself as a protective blanket, and promptly goes to sleep.
Lucinda surveys the room carefully, one hand resting on the mysterious clam as she does. She checks carefully for any corners or angles which Hounds might come forth from, all the while ignoring the Herald of The Lord of the Waters and her words.
Lucinda looks around the room, blocking out the sound of the Herald's voice. It seems a very *dull* room, which could do with some brightening up.
She waves a hand, and a blue and green lightnings streak through the water to for some reason crackle up and down a short length close to the floor. Then they fade away, leaving glowing runes and glyphs lined up in a neat row above one another. Lucinda smiles at the funny sight.
Lucinda looks around the room of the palace, noting that it seems to be completely empty apart from a giant clam mysteriously floating in mid-water, and the great and terrible Herald of Krakilos, whom she instinctively blocks out the sight of. She heads across to the giant clam, pats it on the top, and speaks to it.
Oohh, who's a cute little oogie-woogie clam then?
Lucinda spots an interesting looking building and heads for it. As she goes, small fish begin to gather in her wake, coming together forming a living train that swims after her. Since she is still beyond the ability of most people to notice, this spectacle causes some puzzlement in onlookers.
A woman in a gown of living coral and with a hermit crab nestling in her hair emerges from the omniportal.
For a moment, she flaps around in panic, opening and shutting her mouth, then regains her equilibrium and simply gets on with breathing water.
She seems perfectly at home in the environment, drifting through the water at a serene pace, without any apparent physical effort required to so move.
Where her shadow falls, buildings heave and rumble as buttresses of living coral twist and strengthen, plots of farmed seaweed suddenly run rampant, and foodstock fish go into mating frenzies.
The thrum of a distant elder pulse throbs like a faint drumbeat through the water column, and the temperature in the city rises ever so slightly.
Craftsmen in her vicinity at their jobs find themselves suddenly and weirdly (slightly disturbingly in some cases) inspired.
She passes almost unnoticed however, whilst she drifts randomly through the city.
She turns and heads back to the omniportal muttering as she goes.
The Knight. The Troll. The Wanderer. The Monk. The Banker. The Princess.
She stops on the threshold and shivers.
The Destroyer. The one who has looked in the great eye and lived.
Seven Heralds. One fate. Darkness which waits beyond Night.
The omniportal opens spilling jelly-beans onto the floor, and then she steps into it, and is gone from the Eyrie.
I may draw up aliases for other heralds as needed.
Umm, no thank you. Fire doesn't burn very well underwater, and I probably should go somewhere wet next.
She gives a sigh.
Much fewer corners underwater.
You can swim for miles without coming within a hundred yards of a corner.
Her expression changes to one of worry.
Umm, although is Princess Silmarand around? I *don't* want to bump into Princess Silmarand. She's one of the Heralds.
She twitches slightly, and a pattern of some sort of monster sea-serpent of the deeps coils and undulates across her skin.
Sorry about the mysterious robes. It's just that in the Bazaar, people were looking at me, so I got robes to wear so that they'd stop looking at me.
She wanders forward and brushes her way through the wall of force as if it were a curtain of water, letting it fall back behind her. She looks out of the cave mouth, sighs, then wanders back and brushes her way back through the wall of force.
Maybe another day.
Will correct this description if the omniportal isn't that close to the cave-mouth.
Breastplate. Vambraces. Paltroons.
She begins to point to all the items of armour which she sees Djuhah as 'wearing'. Apparently she believes him to be in a suit of full-plate.
It's possible she's seeing his spiritual devotion and/or magical protections as armour, or then again maybe she's just imagining it.
I mean you're a knight errant, so you protect this beauty spot, right, so you must have armour?
Umm, maybe she's being deposed by a secret conspiracy? I know all about secret conspiracies. They drive you mad, which is how I know about them. Sort of. I mean they would drive you mad if you weren't sane-worse-than-mad in the first place. But anyway, there's a godlike being, with ties to this place, called Arielle, and somewhere there's someone who's worshipping her, I assure you.
I can hear the whispers.
Do you ever get tired of wearing all that armour?
Oh that one.
She giggles, and relaxes, and the triangle patterns fade away, as the buzzing stops.
She went crazy. I'll let you into a secret mister djinn. She went crazy because of the hounds. A great big pack of hounds. She tried to destroy things to make everything go away, so she'd stop hearing the hounds.
Well that's my theory, anyway. You'd go crazy if you knew about the hounds.
I mean if you didn't know about them already, I think.
I worry about them. I worry about them a lot. Not just because of the regular ones, but because the fifth has some special servants who are the one thing and another, to make a third. I could have been one of those, she sighs, if I hadn't been deemed 'fit for greater things'.
So, mister djinn. This place feels empty at the moment, and you say it isn't because of the Queen of Golden Truth making it seem empty, so it must be because your goddess has gone away on holiday, right?
She c0cks her head a little on one side, as if listening for a moment.
Your goddess is called 'Arielle', and she's away at the Bazaar at the moment?
Oh. That's where I just was. Poor, poor Pete, was so very sad. Men in black from Leng came because they weren't looking for me. They must have talked to him, or they should have, except they're not very talkative.
There's probably some sense that Djuhah will have by now that this latest visitor is either a current or ex high-ranking servant of a deity. There are probably little signs that very high ranking clerics or other divine chanellers are familiar with.
Edited (Spelling):
Oh.
Her face becomes crestfallen, and she suddenly looks quite panicky.
Is that one of *her* aliases? The Queen of Golden Truth's, I mean.
Her skins suddenly crawls with menacing, dark triangle shapes, twisting an swarming all over her, and a low buzzing sound fills the air.
If this place belongs to *her* no wonder it looks so friendly. It's to lull you into a false sense of security, but she's waiting as she reels you in...
The antimagic isn't affecting her immediate person, but the triangles might seem to Djuhah like some sort of natural skin-pigmenting ability which she has if he doesn't want to assume that she's over-riding the antimagic.
The buzzing is possibly another matter altogether though...
Temple? Oh this place is much too pretty to be a temple. And much too circular. She glances about nervously. Temples have lots of corners. So the hounds can get in from any angle which they please.
The omniportal crackles into life, a strange yellow substance begins to trickle from it and pool in front of it (actually custard) and then Lucinda emerges into the cave.
Oh, what a pretty place! she exclaims in delight.
By this point the black robe she bought (if it was a black robe at all - sometimes her perceptions of reality are a little different from actual facts) has mutated into a dress of living coral, and she has a hermit crab in her hair.
An evil miasma, redolent with despair, descends on the streets of the Bazaar in the vicinity of Lucinda as she wanders around aimlessly for several minutes after leaving Pete's shop.
But then she claps her hands to cheer herself up and motivate herself, the fog blows away, and surrounded in a halo of bright sunshine, leaving a trail of dead butterflies behind her as she walks, she heads for the omniportal, whistling cheerfully.
She pays the toll-keeper at the omniportal with a banana, steps through, and vanishes from the Bazaar.
Not-Quite-Right Pete wrote: Lucinda Darkeyes wrote: Oh, Pete, is that any way to treat an old friend?
I've heard that some BAD men were here earlier in the day, so I came here to look because they weren't looking for me, and I thought you'd be scared by them.
She continues to wander around the store talking out loud as she does so. Items rattle up and down as she passes, and green sparks sizzle and crackle.
Would you like me to cook for you Pete, like I used to? Make you a nice apple dumpling, to cheer you up?
"No. Please, no. Just leave me be." He is shaking in terror. "I don't want no dumplings no more. I can't be thinking straight round you, Lucy. I has a nice quiet life here. I likes that, I does." Straight thinking, pfft!
The room fills with green smoke for a moment, which rapidly coalesces into writhing insubstantial tentacles, which Lucinda seems not to notice.
I spent a decade thinking straight, Pete, a servant for unimaginable evils outside of existence. In the end thinking straight drove me worse than insane.
She calms down a little and the tentacles cease to grope for things, and disperse.
I'm sad you don't want my dumplings Pete, but if it's quiet which you want, it's quiet you'll get, and I'll go.
She walks out of the door, in much the same fashion that she entered, leaving behind her an ominous and brooding silence that refuses to go.
Basically, Lucinda's just accidentally cursed the entire premises with a silence variation, so that the only thing there which makes a sound (beside herself) is Pete. ND and Daughters of the Morning are exceptions (not sure on the Eiboria front), and a deity in person (such as Lynora-Jill) would be muffled and feel very oppressed by the magic in the place.
Removing this curse, before it naturally expires at the next full moon would be very difficult.
Not-Quite-Right Pete wrote: Lucinda Darkeyes wrote: Excellent! she claps her hands together and gives a cry of delight. It's closed, so that means it must be open.
She walks through the door, as if it were ethereal, and enters the shop.
Pete! Where are you Pete? she coos. It's your precious little mermaid, Lucy, here...
Just a thought, as to why he might be 'not quite right'.... :D
If not, she's just saying it because she feels like it.
Pete screams.
"No! Nononoononononoooooo! I walked for hours, days, weeks. There isn't an ocean for miles," he moans. Oh, Pete, is that any way to treat an old friend?
I've heard that some BAD men were here earlier in the day, so I came here to look because they weren't looking for me, and I thought you'd be scared by them.
She continues to wander around the store talking out loud as she does so. Items rattle up and down as she passes, and green sparks sizzle and crackle.
Would you like me to cook for you Pete, like I used to? Make you a nice apple dumpling, to cheer you up?
Not-Quite-Right Pete wrote: Lucinda Darkeyes wrote: Feeling a lot more stifled and obvious since she bought the robe, but with people paying a lot less attention to her, Lucinda arrives outside of Slipknot Pete's store. She rattles the handle, to see if the store is closed.
The door is locked, and all the windows are covered. Excellent! she claps her hands together and gives a cry of delight. It's closed, so that means it must be open.
She walks through the door, as if it were ethereal, and enters the shop.
Pete! Where are you Pete? she coos. It's your precious little mermaid, Lucy, here...
Just a thought, as to why he might be 'not quite right'.... :D
If not, she's just saying it because she feels like it.
Feeling a lot more stifled and obvious since she bought the robe, but with people paying a lot less attention to her, Lucinda arrives outside of Slipknot Pete's store. She rattles the handle, to see if the store is closed.
Lucinda emerges from the Ranger and Dryad, and heads down the streets of the Bazaar, chaos erupting all around her. Fistfights break out, stalls are overturned, and lovers make fools of themselves in public. It is only once she feels herself becoming the unwelcome focus of attention, that Lucinda hurriedly fades into view and dashes for the nearest clothing retailer where she obtains a shapeless black robe with hood with which to garb herself.
The shopkeeper seems enraged by the priceless ancient silver coin with which she pays him, however, and she leaves the shop with him down on the floor underneath the paws of a swarm of fluffy bunnies, with big dark eyes and soft velvety fur.
Lucinda decides that since the Denizens of Leng were recently at Slipknot Pete's store, but NOT looking for her, it makes sense that she should call in there to equally not look for them, and so she sets off in that direction.
Eventually, Lucinda finishes her drink, pays as she is used to doing, with a handful of leaves, and heads towards the door.
My, what fine gemstones, the man behind the bar examines what he has been paid with.
Meanwhile another patron stares in horror at the carrot that appears to be growing out of the middle of the face of his drinking crony.
The ordered insanity of the geometric designs to the R&D (or at least to her eyes) make one newcomer to the bazaar feel at home in the tavern, as she sits relaxing after a long hard morning of foraging for supplies. Some activity which stirred up the Denizens of Leng earlier in the day gave her a scare, but it was alright - it turned out that they were after someone else, and weren't spies out looking for her.
Still, despite the reassuring angles of the place, she is a little on edge in case a pack of hounds of Tindalos, in full cry, should burst forth at some point. A place with some of the comforts of home also reminds one of some of the disadvantages of that place...
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