[Blood0Dimmed Tides] Chapter 5A -Around the Fire

Smiling, Pearl let Xandra go and waited there rolling on her feet as she gazed over Porta Royale as if it was eons ago since she last saw it. It wasn't. For someone dead she turned out very pretty and...well, happy. Than after amoment her brow creased.


"Uh, where is my corpse anyway?"


@Rei


You do find the mechanism, it's damaged but in working order. It resembles something you've seen before.

You asked for it, now you've found one. In the arm of the warstrider you find the modified makings of a Motonic Lens Disrupter. It has the damaged artifact flaw. Whenever you use it, you roll a d10 first. Whenever it comes up 1 it won't function for that scene.
 
I was just hired to do a big project for a local woman's football team, and it was a bit sudden, rushed, and very large. So, feel free to continue and enjoy. I'm caught up until tomorrow.
 
“This…machine entity was using human puppets of some kind to transport it,†Dorissa says briefly. “Puppets who are living, but who die when their strings are cut. I want to know where it got its victims from, and how many more it has.â€
 
Hunger blinked. "They used living people as puppets but didn't bother to keep using them after they died?" She tried to process this for a moment before shaking her head, declaring it, "Wasteful."


Hunger stood a moment, stretching and limbering up. "So. We need answers to why they were here and what they wanted, right?" Probing with her tongue, she seemed to check her teeth for anything caught between them. After a moment, a taloned finger reached up to pick free a ragged shred of flesh from one of the Lintha she'd fought earlier, placing it on the ground. She looked to Dorissa, "Blackfish? You want your answers, I can try to get you some of them now, but you'll have to watch my back. I don't think Green-gills or Lambshank there would be too sorry to see a knife suddenly sprout from my spine." She chuckled, showing her shark's smile again. "Not that it'd kill me, but it might spoil what I'm about to do."


After a moment's further thought, she looked over at Xandra and Rei. "Salt. We're in an island port and everyone's dead. Find some...no, find a lot of it." She cut off, yawning. "What I'm about to do is going to take a while. That gives you time to drag any of the corpses left that weren't eaten by demons or incinerated from our fight with the Lintha. Drag them ashore and ring them each, one by one, in salt. When the hungry halves of their souls rise, we'll want them contained, so they can't sneak up and fall upon us while we sleep. Beyond that, find any fresh food you can, butchered meat, grain, anything. If we're alone in this town, then we'd best make what we can of it."


Stifling another yawn and rubbing at her eyes with back of one hand, she began to scratch a steady, even circle in the ground before her with one clawed nail, etching the circle deep enough that no mere scuff or scrape could break the line, not stopping until she'd fully encircled a space large enough for a man to stand in about the ragged morsel of Lintha-flesh. "Now. This'll take time. Until it's done, no one bother me, except to tell me if you botch making salt-circles around the corpses. Or the largest pieces of them, for the ones that aren't all-together."


In a sudden and vicious motion, Hunger dug a clawed nail across a wrist, drawing forth a slow welling of blood. As the crimson flow trickled down her wrist and past her clenched fist to drip onto the ground, it began to smoulder with a black-red smoke, the first real sign of the spell she'd begun. The second swiftly followed, as Hunger's glossy eyes began to emit a trails of billowing violet-fringed clouds of essence, more issuing from her mouth with her every word and breath. "While you're at it, find me livestock. I'll probably need more blood in the future than what I can spare myself. Go check the butcher's, they might have some blood they kept about to sell for broth or something."

Hunger is attempting to use the spell Summon Ghost on one of the dead pirates. 15m peripheral
 
The Dynast shrugs.


- There is a saltern just behind the pier, down there - she points.


If you'll excuse me, I have to go fetch the damn lens.


...


Rei!


For the Empress, what are you doing now?
 
ffs people Rei was out of hearing range unless you are shouting so stop talking to her like she is there.


Rei turns at Cinder's shout, "I wanted to see if we could salvage that weapon! It looks like I put an arrow through most of it, but this part here seems ok still!"


Rei moved off towards the town and waited for Cinder so they could head to see Feather, that and Rei needed to find out about more about this rock place Thaddeus went to.
 
Dorissa blinks, then nods and goes to do as Hunger says. Fletcher never speaks of necromancy, except with extreme distaste, but she is curious. Besides, it gets her away from the Fire-aspected woman, who she is beginning to feel a strong dislike for, and the Solar, for whom she feels a mild contempt.


If someone had murdered Jezath in front of her, there is no way under Heaven that she would blithely join the same circle as his killer. She would eat that one alive, or die trying.
 
Cinder hastens after Rei.


- Never took you for the techie type, but I'll lend you a hand afterwards.


@Feantari: yup, Cinder was yelling.


But I didn't understand Rei was THAT far, otherwise I'd have put the direct dialogue in bold. ^_^
 
Hunger continued in her ritual, beginning to murmur out prayers to the Neverborn in the archaic, primeval dialect of Old Realm she'd learned so long ago, that she might pray to her mother in her native tongue. The irony inherent in the language of her devotion to her mother becoming the language of her devotion to Siakal's destruction escaped her, not that she'd accord the thought any weight were it to cease to do so.


Suddenly shifting back to seatongue, she murmured, "Bones. I'll need bones as well. Got that, Greengills?" She continued her murmurings to the dead titans powering her magics. When it became evident that Rei hadn't heard her, she tried another name, "Lambshank?" She continued in her ritual another few moments before finally looking up, to see that everyone had wandered away. Shaking her head, Hunger gave a shrug. "So much for telling one of them to grab some clothes for me while they were getting the salt, bones, and blood."


Ah well, it's not like she was thin-skinned as most folk, so being naked was unlikely to do her much harm. And if they couldn't be bothered to go fetch bones, then they could just figure out their own way of entrapping and retaining a discreet force of hungry ghosts. They'd have to figure out their own nasty surprises to spring on the Lintha the next time they saw them.

If Hunger wasn't currently occupied by having something of some importance to do, she'd probably have fallen asleep by this point. She simply hadn't noticed that Rei had wandered off.


-Hunger will be occupied with preparing and then casting the spell for the next hour.


-Rolling 10 dice on (WP + Ess) roll-off for summoning.


-EDIT: Wow. That's the worst dice-luck I've had in a long time. that 8's the only thing keeping it from being a botch several times over. ._.
 
Dorissa is the first to return, bearing a sack of salt; assorted bones -- mostly fish and whale from the look of them; a battered cooking pot that, when the lid is opened, proves to be full of blood; and a bemused expression.
 
Cinder looks at Dorissa with disgust.


- I will not be partaking in your disgusting Anathema meals.
 
Xandra smirks at Cinder's discomfort. "Don't be so picky, Cindy. We keep you around dispite your flaws, so why get so up tight about what Hunger eats?"
 
Hunger snarled in frustration as, at the culmination of her ritual, the ghost escaped her bindings. She began cursing up a blue streak fit to make a sailor blush. After a moment or two of this, she sat down, clearly exhausted. When she noticed Dorissa's return, she waved sleepily up at her. Pushing herself up to her feet, swaying a moment, she regained her balance and, asking the Lunar to set the various goods down, she made her way to the wreckage of the Lintha ships, to begin dragging any surviving corpses to shore. Once there, she instructed Dorissa to help her encircle each body with a line of salt, taking a small cutting of flesh from each as she did so "There. Now if any of 'em rise as normal ghosts, they're stuck in those circles with the expectation of a hungry ghost to follow. Should loosen their tongues nicely."
 
Xandra


Pearl's smoldering form slid up behind Xandra in one long stride and wrapped its arms loosely around her neck. Despite looking like a storm of fire compressed into a comely human body she felt cold like a fresh breeze off the ocean's surface. Leaning against the Dawn, she waited and listened. And more importantly, she laughed at all the banter between everyone.


"Oh, you are all so adorable. What have I missed since my departure?"


Rei and Cinder


No trace of Feather was found. However, resting on the bar, stood a single package. Inside were the pieces to the elemental lens wrapped in the gauzy fabric of two dancing costumes; scant and very sheer. Both colored for you particular elements. Also, is a leather tube. Inside that is his poetry, love letters to Rei. A few of them are very saucy, and others are just out right good.
 
- Rei, you heartbreaker!, teases Cinder, overjoyed.


- Your friend is more of a sweetheart than I thought, after all.


I'll keep the ridiculous dress, I owe him a performance.


Cinder inspect the Lens slowly, feeling it with under the thumb, and reads the names of the Five Dragons carved in the jade.


In the centre, it reads: "Five to create, Five to cleanse".


Then she locks the fine jade chains behind her neck, and lets the Lens dangle just above her solar plexus.


She looks at Rei, obviously in a disturbing good mood.


- It's the second time I get to attune an Elemental Lens.


I got barred from ever attuning one after the first time.


I was eight.


Attuning the Lens.


Please edit out any detail you don't like.
 
Hunger looked over at Pearl, then shrugged. She yawned, gesturing to the circles of salt. "Trapped the Lintha ghosts in there. Blackfish," at that she smiled over at Dorissa, "brought me food, and I tried to bind one of the ghosts...failed. Too," another yawn, "tired."
 
Rei blushes fiercly and moves on to admiring the lens. "It is a thing of beauty and destruction. I think it suits you just fine." Rei laughs lightly a little more relaxed without the tensions from before. She picked up her dress giving it a critical eye with Feather's words scrolling through the back of her mind.


"I imagine Feather had to attend to other business in the wake of this attack... I'm sure we'll see him again sometime soon, right? We should go back to the others and figure out what to do next."
 
- You are such a lovely flatterer, Rei.


Yes, Feather seems sleazy enough to survive this.


I wonder how he got his hands on such an artefact.


Does he even belong to the Host?


Anyway, you are right.


Let's reach back to our beloved Anathemas.
 
Xandra relaxes in the afternoon sun, gently holding Pearl in one arm while idly stroking Keiku's feathers with the other hand. Without a doubt, the past few hours have been some of the most interesting of her life. There are now Solars, Lunars, Dragon Blooded, and whatever kind of Exalt Hunger is, all working together, fighting Lintha pirates and self-operating warstriders. "Pearl, what do you know about that tattoo on your back? Do you know what it leads to?"
 
Xandra


Pearl hid in Xandra's shadow and the Dawn could feel her presence there, invisible hands caressing her back and kneading the sore muscles under her skin soft and relaxed.


"I was seven when I got it. The ink disappeared as if my skin was drinking it. There's not much I can recall. I was given tea and then it was like I was looking out from within a hurricane. Everything was a blur and little made sense. But my echo, you know, that flash of my entire life before I departed, I heard something about a place called Clapping Dragons rock. " She then paused and she reached through Xandra's body and caressed her beating heart. Those hands then sprouted from her chest and Pearl quickly followed them, twisting to face Xandra, her own torso jutting out of the Dawn's. Her yellow eyes serious.


"There as an invisible man. In my memories I see him just as a figure no face, clothes, anything. He's like a human shaped bed sheet and his voice...garbled. I think that map either directs you through the Clapping Dragon's spires or it leads you through somewhere darker. Speaking of my body, where did you put it?"
 
"It is, or at least, it was, at the room we had together at the inn. I was going to have your body burned in a pyre, but when we saw the map, we waited until we had the lenes needed to properly read it. Then, all Malfias broke loose with the Lintha and the warstrider attack, and I haven't gone back for it yet."
 
- Yo, Xandra, need something burned?


Hey, we're back!


How's Pearl by the way?


The last question sounds... Genuine?


Cinder does not seem to be teasing Xandra, but rather in a cheerful and strange good mood.
 
Pearl, sticking out frm Xandra's chest gazes over the Dawn's shoulder.


"How am I, is she kidding? That's like bringing a 'get well card' to a funeral. Someone should tell her that I'm dead." And then she laughed.
 
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