lostcompass | (no subject)

And the votes are in...!

Characters by and large voted to save the miners and not get involved, with some minor differences on whether the captives should be released into the wilderness or taken home.

The results of this beautiful endeavour:

The tides of fortune and a highly questionable array smile upon us! Characters succeed to reach the miners and set them free. The miners’ immediate instinct is to slowly, groggily scatter, attracting attention.

Unhalad’s forces will focus on recapturing the miners. Anurr’s faction will take advantage to slaughter them. Some of Anurr’s people will spot the party and half the contingent will initially set out to pursue them, before withdrawing when they encounter Lee Chang, Xiao Xingchen or Xie Lian. At this point, folks, run home fast. Anyone staying behind will likely be heavily injured or killed.

Of the eight miners, three are slain by Anurr’s men, three run into the forest and two... join characters home.

Sadly, Archeval’s suspicions prove right: the two minors who arrive at the farmhouse progress in their transition to undeath. The transformation can be slowed down by keeping them warm at all times and giving them high volumes of food and water.

The two miners will be terrorised by the nightly voices and repeatedly attempt to escape into the mountains. They will struggle to speak coherently, and will scream violently if they are left in the dark.

In the end, the transition will finalise and the two miners will become fully undead.

The miners held at the farmhouse will be particularly distressed if they are subjected to strong light, or if they see or sense Xie Lian and Xiao Xingchen nearby. Xie Lian and Xiao Xingchen will meanwhile feel an itch to kill them — the intensity of this compulsion is up to the players.

Five can have one of the forest people to teleport home. Please respond here if you’d like it to be a human forest dweller, or a semi-undead one. Also choose whether this captive is male, female, young or middle/old-aged. This will play into the type of information the captive will have available.

The forest captive will try to track down and kill the transitioning miners.

This outcome fell ~~completely~~ a tiny bit out of the mod forecast, so the May calendar has been revised accordingly. As Karsa’s post signals, there are now a bunch of in-character assignments that will need some muscling through, and sign-ups are listed below.

SIGN-UP BASICS: quests are up for grabs, but can only have one character officially signed up as lead/anchor for the assignment. Other characters can still help with the task — ideally, there should be at least two characters helping out with each assignment. Quest leads can ICly make organisation posts or logs to carry out their tasks, and should pretty-please share their findings with the class ICly.

In the spirit of fairness, let’s ask players to only have one of their characters lead a quest. Please propose how your character would try to go about completing the assignment, and you’ll get mod feedback on the price/result!

Available quests:

Interrogate the miners

Interrogate the lone forest person

Find out the farmhouse origins

Investigate the body in the lake

Snoop among Anurr’s followers to figure out anything further about his plans

Get more of that c-c-c-coin

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sizhui will try to actually question them without screaming as a result. He will also be trying to slow down the turning (sorry, dad, he might work himself into exhaustion about that)

Would the prospect for things being slowed down and promise to try to reverse it if they have enough information be able to shake some answers out of them?

It might! It seems like Sizhui and Eleven might take the good cop route, before Mingyu gives them a bad cop turn — do you want to figure out some Qs with Eleven's player for the vanilla take, and I'll let you guys have some answers?

All righty, questions the two boys will try:

- actually really asking them for their names, hobbies to try and keep them in a sane headspace if possible (Eleven)
- what happened insofar as they remember, trying to learn everything he can about the turning undead process to better counter it (both)
- Asking about their gods/religion (Eleven)
- If there is a way to slow down / revers it, would they want to go back to how they were before? (Sizhui)
- Have they run into Unhalad's forces before (them personally or any in the group), aka were they targeted specifically or were they just that unlucky? (Sizhui)
- Do they have any messages they want delivered to people should things go bad? (Sizhui)

The miners are in a fraught, deteriorating state, and will require great pauses between their interrogation sessions — rest, feeding, the inevitable breaks to breathe. Much of what they say will be contradictory and incoherent, drenched in trauma that prevents them from remembering much of what they are asked, at first.

Their names are Knud and Sten. Hobbies, they do not understand. What sort of ridicule is this, to care for their... leisurely life, when they are not released to their families? Why are they not released, will they ever?

This line of thought seems to send one in a solid meltdown, the victim of accruing anguish. The second, older, looking in his mid-thirties, stays clearer-minded. He has a son, he says, a boy of three. He wants a message delivered, indeed. He wants his son to know his father lived well and justly and without fear. That he went — they went to their work in the mines, and did not abandon their families, but the weather turned without notice, and snows buried them in. They made every attempt against the ice and piled snow, they used their hands, their wisdom, their axes.

They'd had no forewarning of the snow. Had not prepared for an expedition spanning days. They did not bring food, commensurably. What few supplies were available or could be foraged were depleted within days, even rationed. One of the older miners — and here, the younger miner catches his face in his hands — passed first. Some of the survivors thought... to not waste his remains.

But they could not bring themselves to cannibalism, no matter how deep the hunger struck, how it hounded them at nights, whispered to them. How they ached and turned and saw their days numbered, tallied only through the change of the scant light they could peer through ice thicker than an arm's length, at their exit.

Another man died. Erik. Then, they were only six, and weak, and Knud — the younger man, finally peering between his fingers — heard them first, when the two dead stirred. At once, as if they hadn't died at disparate intervals, and they seemed to feel no pain at all, no need, no urges. No... hunger. No thirst.

And they asked of the remaining miners, in their dark, What will you give, to make the hunger stop?

And one man said, and Sten does not remember whom, it was not Knud, Knud stood beside him, they were out in the forest and he saw Knud in the moonlight, his eyes were dark, and Erik's blue like summer sea, and —

Knud takes over to say, it does not matter who asked. It does not matter who answered. They had nothing to give. Their axes were blunt now, their food consumed. They only had their worn bodies and their hunger.

And then they woke.

Sizhui is going to have tears silently falling down his face, but his voice is going to be soft and steady.

First he will reassure Sten that his message will be delivered, and anything else either of them want told to others.

Then he'll ask whether because they made the promise, they will keep to it? As the hunger probably will return, even if they are saved somehow...

He'll also ask Knud if he remembers anything from the moments before the bodies reanimated, anything strange at all. A sound, a smell, something through the artes if he had energy to use them at that time, anything.

And... what was the waking like.

There's no judgment about any of his words.

Appeased by the reassurance that his son will hear from him, Sten remains silent now, only begging water and feeding. Knud, finally gaining traction, fumbles that the bodies were dead, they were dead, they would not have thought to eat them if they weren't, they searched, they prodded, don't think them animals, their only fault was — wanting to stay alive.

Sizhui says that he doesn't doubt that, if they had been living, they couldn't have asked him that question.

He thinks... One last question from him. After, were those two with the undead who took them away from the mines, or were they left behind?

When they woke, Sten confirms, they were all bound and dragged around by Unhalad. He saw Erik dead in the field, when Anurr's forces struck. The other man, he suspects, headed into the forest, where the native savages won't take mercy on him.