Salut, September — it’s only been a thousand years since August began!

To keep things short and brief: characters for whom insufficient activity was found are listed below. Comment if you’d like to reclaim one by 23:59 on 5 September — you’ll have to produce regular activity over September and October, in exchange!

Jens Macher | arsmechanica — RECLAIMED
Magnus Bane | incantates — RECLAIMED

Please flag if any activity was missed. Don’t forget to use your character tags when you comment into posts or logs, to help find your activity proofs — thank you!

ADMIN

First off, just wanted to thank everyone for your time, energy and feedback in the last post — it’s so much more helpful than you probably realise, and some great suggestions were put forward!

■ PLAYER CAP: we currently have 42 players in game, and we will cap at 55. This excludes any returning players.

■ With a cap in place, obligatory reminder: eastbound is a primarily plot-geared game, and it's at its most fun when you can jump right in. If you’ve felt a bit shy about getting involved with the plot — and we’ve all been there! — don’t hesitate to reach out, and we’ll figure something out!

■ ACTIVITY: a suggestion was made to consider log top levels with at least one open prompt as an activity proof. This makes sense. Adding that in, you can now meet monthly activity requirements by producing one of:

a network post OR
a log top level with open prompts OR
10 network/inbox-style comments OR
5 log comments

Standard disclaimer: please don’t repeatedly meet your activity requirements by tagging inboxes/just castmates or the same players. This can require more proofs in future months.

■ UPDATED: the September calendar.

■ ...yes, ‘Dragon Bachelor’ will be a monthly fixture during the Serthica arc, purely for everyone’s entertainment and for character incursions into gambling.

■ We'll hold our next test drive meme (and game-wide log) in late September.

■ As we cozily settle into Arc IV, your character might end up called on by NPCs, or dragged into various plot rolls. Please do not hesitate to opt out if you're not feeling that vibe!

■ THE STORY SO FAR: Arc IV summaries have nowkicked off, and you can catch up on anything you missed in September below:

Newcomers arrived ahead of the remaining, seaborne party, securing passport papers into Clockwork Serthica — a citadel divided in two adversarial halves: dragon and magic-loving Eidris and disciplinarian, tech-geared Minaras. Everything in Serthica feels alive, including the recently dead. Serthica was splintered by a now-gone plague, who killed all those whom it infected, the Doctor learned. Currently, Eidris emerges from the underground depths over 6:00-18:00, while Minaras surfaces nocturnally between 18:00-6:00. The two citadel halves meet overground over 6:00-7:00 and 18:00-19:00, with natives occupying spaces in the Neutral Zone bridges and Sanctuary.

The party joined a trade summit at the Sanctuary, where attendants from which side briefly... glitched for a series of moments of jarring, puppet-like behaviour. The terrorist group Remembrance attempted to kidnap Minaras' high councillor Arabella. Escorting her to safety, Wrathion, Licyn and Beitang Moran found a key pointing towards the inherited factories of Eidris dragon warlord Cain d'Ubiq and to Serthica's impoverished underground world, the Mouse House. Wrath and Emilia read out an anonymous note Arabella received, which triggered her into possessed behaviour.

Party members were assigned a stay in one of the two halves of Serthica: in Eidris, a dragon went berserk and the party helped recover her hatching eggs, following injury to her mate — at the presumed hands of a Minaras scout ship, whose reconnaissance work was decommissioned days before the incident. In Minaras, the local indoctrination centre sought to cure the rot of citizens. Meanwhile, Kaneki Ken discovered some Minaras morgue corpses have a strange, unexpected 'rot'-like sickness inside their bodies...