Thursday, September 29, 2016

Same Same Same

Literally just the old 'law contrasted with chaos' shtick.

Anyhow.

Faith, and by extension God, and by extension Law and Organization and Domination, is represented by and often takes the form of a swarm of flies.
God is the Saturn Devouring His Child, God is the He-figure without being a patriarch or progenitor of other deities or even male-gendered, God is the penultimate dictator who craves for everything to be under his control, God is the uniform swarm operating with a collective will and singular purpose, God wants to be everything so as to keep everything in order.
Faith is the atomized culture where the individual is illuminated like nuclear light, contributing to a glow alongside but separate but grouped to infinite other individuals.

People who have faith can do some of the following things:
A prayer to consume spirits with nuclear flame.
An invocation to call swarming, biting flies.
A chant to disorient everyone under the sun.
A chant to still movement and halt heat.
A hymn to imitate another living person.

Doubt, and by extension Lucifer, and by extension Awareness and Indecision and Agony, is represented by and often takes the form of a colorless white head with a hole where a face should be.
Lucifer is the fever-dream of morals and ethics, Lucifer is the Neuter-figure at a distance and never fully believed, Lucifer is the gentle Superego that craves nothing but well-reasoned balance, Lucifer is the monolith with a hundred thousand sides to explore and get lost inside, Lucifer wants everything so as to know what things are and what things aren't.
Doubt is the collective self-aware infinite that mutually supports itself because there is nothing but itself because all things are it.

People who doubt can do some of the following things:
A dance to drive spirits into frenzy.
A compact to link distant locations together.
A song to dissolve memories into liquid.
A rite to inflict endless terror on a person.
A ritual to hide oneself from any detection.

Disbelief politely and surely says fuck all to the above options.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Let's Take A Ride

Fifth session, and what a session it has been.

People of Interest:
Dom Poe, a strong and cruel brute.
Aria Noir, a tiny thief who wants to take over the world.
Alice Lepidoptera, a runaway princess of some faroff jungle monarchy.
Sariell, an extremely fashionable recluse.

People Met:
Brady Katz, a friendly ginger bartender.
Father Felux, a blind priest with terrible laryngitis.
Sister Miche, an absolutely huge French muscle nun.
Jackson De La Sangue, smug and loud leader of Cobra House.
Zitia Chrime, tall, long haired woman who knows something.

Gains:
One wooden lockbox, containing:
A picture of Jenny Bones and the mysterious assailant, dated five years ago.
A latex nose.
Pearl earrings and a pearl necklace
Two notes saying "I'm sorry", "It's okay."
One cleaver and one boning knife.
Files on Zitia Chrime and Fernando Du Sade.
Really cool fashion!

Losses:
Any sense of safety.

After Sariell received a text about where to meet Zitia, she actually calls the hostel and tells them the when, which is nine at night since she works late.

This gives the party quite a lot of time to go about their business for the next eight or so hours. Alice decides to make proper arrows for her bow with the sharp pile of bones they have while Dom and Aria prepare to go to their respective job interviews; even so, there's a consensus that Sariell should remain at the hostel to make sure Alice doesn't get into trouble, since she wants to also investigate where that corpse disappeared to later.

First, Dom goes down to the Yellow Sign bar and sees Brady Katz again, who is happy to see him. Yan Selken, who in the light looks like a neater version of Danny Devito, is also pretty happy to have a new bouncer on the premises. It all goes over very quickly and easily, with Yan talking a lot.
Afterwards, Dom reluctantly returns his borrowed apron to Brady and wanders around the side streets and back-alleys of the Serpent's Nest neighborhood. He comes across a wellspring-fountain that people seem to collect water from.

Second, Aria ventures up to Cobra House, early to the event but very sure of herself. Behind its liquor store facade she is sent up to a fourth-floor office complex, which has a lot more windows than Viper House and is in much better shape. A man with a long braided beard and thick eyelashes greets her in a pleasant, deep voice; he introduces himself as Jackson De La Sangue, owner and leader of the collections house, and asks if she is Aria Noir.
They head into his office while he prepares coffee and asks her about herself, why she wants to get into the collections business, if she knows anyone in the city. Aria reveals she's very confident in her abilities as a thief, blatantly, and after some cajoling admits she did interview at Viper House but that interview went very poorly. Jackson gets excited at this, and disappears for about fifteen minutes. During this time Aria goes through his papers—commissions and jobs—and sees that something called the 'Slow Asp' has been stolen and popping up all along the seaboard, and might show up in Croixsing. It's worth ten thousand dollars as a job, and Aria keeps that information.

Jackson comes back with a large mug saying 'best boss', a smug expression, and the company of one Jenny Bones. She very unhappily expresses that Aria seems to show up only when her life goes to shit.

While this is happening, Sariell leaves Alice to her own devices and wanders up and down the Ward of The Sleeping Fish's streets. He's looking for weapons to round out what the rest of the party is carrying.
So too, Dom finds that aside from being a free source of clean water, nothing much up is going on with the fountain, so he goes back to the hostel.

Back in Cobra House, Jenny gets laughed at by Jackson as the extent of how badly Aria fucked up her day. Jenny lets slip that her secretary is gone from the middle of her lunch, food still on her plate, and that she suspects Aria for taking her over to Cobra House. Jackson says he knows nothing and wouldn't want to intrude on the 'little thing' Jenny and her secretary have going on. Aria doesn't know either but suggests the secretary left because Jenny is a horrible person.
Overall the whole thing sucks for Jenny, but both she and Jackson agree it would be good for the competition between the two houses to have a possible "spy" visibly work for one. It turns out that the collection house conflict is mostly for business and mostly artificial. Then Aria gets the job.

The party reconvenes at their hostel and talks a bit of the jobs they got and what they need to do next.   Aria reveals that the secretary is missing, Alice thinks it has something to do with her kidnapping and the larger mystery of the rooftop watchers, Sariell has only a vague idea of what's going on, and Dom doesn't care.
With a little time before they have to meet Zitia, they all decide to get new phones and minutes to consolidate their communication network. Sariell also buys a collapsible bo staff. However, when they all try to purchase the phones, none of their stolen credit cards work. It appears that the original owners have all cancelled their plans, leaving the party with little money. They flee, get drinks at the Yellow Sign bar to pursue more information about the corpse that washed up, but find nothing. Brady Katz is nice, though.

Then, as a whole they realize that none of them have eaten anything all day, but remember they do know about one place to eat—the Soft White Underbelly. They go there and eat and wait for Zitia to show up.
There is a quiet few hours and the characters begin to actually talk to each other, sharing a little history. It turns out Sariell, before he lived in the church, was at an orphanage most of his life. Aria admits to a hard life in a shitty town called Greyhall. Alice conceals that she is a runaway princess. Night falls on Croixsing quietly and slowly, and Aria leaves the party—to pursue information about the Slow Asp.

In the night, she follows someone very deeply involved in a phone call, mentioning that something called the "Slothful Snake" was being shown at a tiny church on the water, and that Deep would indeed vouch for him. It's mentioned that the phone call is using a voice modulator.

At the Soft White Underbelly, a sedan pulls up as Sariell receives a text telling him to look outside. They pile inside, Sariell in the backseat lined with folded clothes and bedding, Alice and Dom in the shotgun seat with a cooler at their feet. Their driver is a tall woman with longer hair than anyone has ever seen; one Zitia Chrime.

Aria, certain of her suspicions, trips the man into an alley and threatens him with her knife to tell her about the Slothful Snake. He tearfully tells her it's an exclusive film with a group of friends, who want to know he's legit. She guts him, and takes his phone while he lays dying in a pile of blood.

Alice asks if Zitia lives in the car, or if she wants to take a drive. Zitia pulls a gun on Alice, and affirms that she does in fact want to 'take a ride'.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

We Agressed a Priest

Fourth session!

People of Interest:
Dom Poe, a strong and cruel brute.
Aria Noir, a tiny thief who wants to take over the world.
Alice Lepidoptera, a runaway princess of some faroff jungle monarchy.
Sariell, an extremely fashionable recluse.

People Met:
Brady Katz, a friendly ginger bartender.
Father Felux, a blind priest with terrible laryngitis.
Sister Miche, an absolutely huge French muscle nun.

Gains:
One wooden lockbox, containing:
A picture of Jenny Bones and the mysterious assailant, dated five years ago.
A latex nose.
Pearl earrings and a pearl necklace
Two notes saying "I'm sorry", "It's okay."

One cleaver and one boning knife.
Files on Zitia Chrime and Fernando Du Sade.
Really cool fashion!

Losses:
The respect of a priest.

Starting immediately from the previous session's ending, the party is interrupted from going into the back rooms of a tall, grey-spired church by a terribly hoarse voice. This turns out to be one Father Felux, a very small bearded white guy with drifting milky-white eyes, who just is a little sick and does not normally sound like hell itself. Alice introduces herself and explains that she just wants to see the top of the bell tower.

Meanwhile, the sole person in the church aside from the religious staff, Sariell, is quietly praying for his fashion. Aria stealthily goes over to him and they have insulting banter about his fashion, her height, the nature of fashion in relation to expressing the soul, and how terrible some comebacks sound. Aria then goes back to the party just as Father Felux says he will go back to get the bell-ringer to show them up.

When Sariell himself goes up to confront the party, asking why Dom and Alice can't control their child, Aria pulls her knife on him. There is a tense moment. Father Felux then comes back and exclaims that the church is a house of God, and demands to know what Aria intends to do. This kind of defuses the situation, and while Alice, Dom, and Sariell are led up to the belltower top by an absolutely hugely muscled nun with a soft French accent, Aria just sulks in the pews.

The silent sulking goes on until Felux decides to sit beside her and ask if something in her life is bothering her. She replies she's completely fine, which the priest does not believe at all, offering if she ever needs anyone to listen, the church's inhabitants are there for her. He then goes off to fill the holy water.

Meanwhile, Alice has been using her high vantage point to look around the city for any suspicious rooftop personages. She finds none but notices that a bald person that may be Jenny Bones is standing outside Viper House, that there is a mansion on the far eastern part of the city on a steep hill, that the church's roof itself has missing tiles as if people were climbing up on it. Sariell asks why exactly Dom is on his journey; Dom responds that Aria ruined his job interview in the first session. Then everyone starts talking about the weird stuff that has been going on, like the 'house fire' at Viper Street, or the mysterious body that washed up in the southern wharf and disappeared later. Exactly the same body Alice heard from a drunk fisherman last night, though she doesn't mention this publically.

Alice then wonders about where Zitia Chrime actually lives, and in a moment of strange synchronicity, Aria rushes up the tower while they bring Sariell up to speed on their bizarre adventures and look up as to where Chrime could be found: turns out she was listed as living on 171 Street of The Squid.

Alice is way more interested in the mansion, and insists the party goes there. After a meaningful departure from the church—we learn that Sariell has been the only visitor to the church in five whole years and decides to pursue his fashion—everyone goes to the mansion and meet a gardener who lets slip that the place is owned by one Mr. Deep and family, whose assistant has an awful name. Like Chrime.

Deciding to call her directly, the party goes back to their hostel and calls her once; at the mention of Visper House she yells she doesn't know them, but after a text insisting they know something was up and just want to help they're told to meet her at a cafe called the Soft White Underbelly.