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Thread: Stairway to Heaven

  1. #1
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
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    Level completed: 32%,
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    Stairway to Heaven

    Out of Character:
    ...I've been dying to do this since 2007. Expect a holocaust or nine by the time I'm done. I may or may not put the kibosh on Savas Tigh's little Corone adventures for this.

    Sufficed to say: Solo. Hopefully I can get it done over the course of weekends. WE. WILL. SEE.

    Quote Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire
    Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and burn a trail.
    - Attributed to the the Wizard Greywind, best known for glassing a flat path through mountains between Salvar and Alerar.

    I try not to think in quotes like that, but every now and then...

    Well, I suppose it's as good a point as any to explain my current circumstances.

    Until a few days ago, I was rambling around from ship to ship, doing my best to avoid an existential crisis about the fate of the world, trying not to jump the first boat to Beinost, frantically resisting the urge to look up guides to interracial courtship etiquette*, and contemplating whether or not I should be buying my daughter** some gifts from abroad. I was basically on vacation. I've never actually been on vacation, but that was it. I'm pretty sure that was it.

    A few days ago, as I was asleep, my ship was attacked by pirates. At first I assumed they were Coronian. Perfectly reasonable assumption; the boat's in between Corone and Raiaera, and last I checked there weren't too many elven vessels flying the old skulls-and-bones. Well, turns out I was wrong.

    Orcs came aboard the ship in the middle of the night and slit most of the crew's throats.

    Hilarity did thusly ensue.

    I am, at the moment, sitting inside of an orc cage on a skyship en route for the fabled realm of Kebiras, which I totally have not visited before -- truly. On the bright side, accomodations aren't too shabby compared to my last orc cage. I actually have some companions to chew the fat with, I'm getting about two meals a day, and there's a nice hole in the floor for waste. I'm assuming it goes down a pipe and falls into the ocean, where it then impacts some silly mermaid twat surfacing for her first view of the surface world. I am also fully armed, clothed, and equipped -- this is also good, also new, also convenient. I managed an artful surrender along with the remaining crew, who seem to be under the delusion that I could've taken all the orcs out in one go without destroying the boat we were on or critically damaging the skyship.

    They'll forgive me at some point. Or they won't. Kind of moot now.

    I get the sense that I'm about to embark on something big -- thus the quote. Bigger than Kebiras, bigger than anything. Call it a dreadful hunch. Or perhaps a prophecy, since I'm arguably entitled to make those now. And I'll just leave it vague so I can come back to it later.

    Now, about the orcs? Well, as I've previously written, the orc species is...insanely diverse. There are big orcs, little orcs, civil orcs, barbaric orcs, giant orcs, mobster orcs, hunch-backed psycho orks, whorcs that are what you think they are, tribal orcs, and urbane orcs. And also erks/elks/erfs/whatevers. They come in more shapes and sizes than humanity or elves or dwarves combined. The myriad subgroups are broadly called tropes; a catch-all word that describes tribal, ethnic, physical, national, and even religious differences. Useful things, tropes. Might have to adapt the word for broader use when I get back to Althanas proper.

    The orcs that've abducted me are a different variety from the ones I dealt with last time. They're roughly man-sized, with similar levels of physical aptitude, cunning, and intelligence. I dare say they're basically humans with a palette swap. The males are uniformly bald, except for a handful that have big, serviceable patches of hair on either their scalps or where a beard should be; it doesn't grow long, but it does grow thick. Their faces...aren't human, but I've seen way worse. They have inhumanly strong noses juxtaposed on otherwise flat faces. They grow small tusks compared to their nastier cousins, but most like to decorate the things. They all wear uniform colors even if not uniform styles, presumably to match the ship (which I'll get to momentarily). They all carry either large, heavy knives or cutlasses. The women look much more human, with strong noses and short little tusks, but otherwise human features. Most of them are built like brick shithouses. The ones who aren't are...worth a second look. And a third. And a fourth. And a few hopeless lewd propositions here and there. They basically grow the same hair as a human woman would. Both genders are varying shades of green or brown with pointed ears.

    And having seen some of them nude, I'm amused to say that Humanity Is Superior, thankyouverymuch. At least the men are. Pardon my smug sense of self-satisfaction.

    Pardon it.

    Odds are I've gone insane at this point, considering how I'm talking to this bloody journal...

    Aside from that, their ship is...worryingly advanced. I've previously made note of orcish industrial potential, but this thing seems better than the ones I saw last time around. I didn't get a comprehensive look, mind you, but it both looks sleeker and feels faster. I can detect some powerful magicks -- very systematic enchantments and such -- helping to hold this brick together and keep it aloft. It looked like some kind of freakish naval cutter on spatsy. The engines were external, with shielded turbines and flaming exhausts. The cannons mostly aimed forward but I saw platforms for gunners all along the sides and several more guns that could point straight down if need-be. More worrisome is the fact that the orcs have better guns than bloody Alerar.

    Don't get me wrong. I do not trust Alerians with firearms, but I trust orcs even less. I didn't actually get to see them in action, but I know a lethal weapon when I see it.

    Hopefully my little jaunt through the Other Half of the World does not boil down to "Cripple Kebiran industry and destroy a continent." Because that's pretty much the immediate way to top what happened in Scara Brae. Striking mess that was...

    * I'm seriously considering a relationship with Neesal Danfras, an elven Wizard currently running the show in Beinost.
    ** Incidentally, I adopted her daughter, Iera. I am oddly fond of that little waste factory/sobbing trainwreck of a wretch. She has teddy Wizard privileges.
    "This is all your fault," spat Pontius Grakken, former quartermaster of the Starry-Eyed Maiden and one of just eight survivors out of a crew of thirty-seven. He was a bitter little man with little to do but fix on Caden and blame him for everything. "You coulda done something."

    "And gotten us all killed," Caden noted. "I'd rather wait a little while. Try not to worry so much."

    "Strike you dead," Pontius snapped. "Bloody Wizard."

    Caden rolled his eyes and closed his book. He stuffed it back up into his Hat and leaned back on his cell. At this point, the bars felt like windows and the world's troubles were miles and miles below. Nothing to do now but wait for the inevitable chaos, madness, bowel-quaking terror, so on and so forth. As a veteran of such affairs, the Wizard Blueraven adopted a nonchalant attitude about the whole thing. The terror would come, yes. And he would likely murder a lot of people, almost guaranteed. Somewhere along the line, he'd suffer from that existential crisis he'd been putting off. One way or another, the world would be saved.

    All that remained now was to sit and wait.

    "Wonder what the slave market's like this time of year..."
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    Stairway to Heaven - Complete.
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  2. #2
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
    Level completed: 32%, EXP required for next level: 8,215
    Level completed: 32%,
    EXP required for next level: 8,215
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    It was just before dawn when the ship finally burned its way into port, coasting along the last few miles on low power. Caden made it a point to rest and recover his strength the night before, and he met the day with wide open eyes and goggles on his face. His glasses were securely tucked away in his Hat. He didn't bother drawing his sword or preparing anything flashy in advance; that would've been too obvious. Caden waited, quietly and patiently, counting down the seconds until the orc skyship had smacked into place on the docks. Pontius was still griping, and so were the others. They all had a vague idea of what was going to happen to them, if they were lucky.

    Eventually, someone came to get them all. Several someones, in fact. Two big, burly orcs who were brown and green, respectively, wielding rigid leather pouches stuffed full of what sounded like marbles; Kebiran slapjacks, basically. Wielded properly, such weapons would bruise, injure, and incapacitate without outright killing the victim. The orcs looked like they knew how to wield them. They got to the end of the row of cages, then the green one started opening them up and dragging sailors out by the scruff of the neck, shackling them all in a row. Caden waited for three sailors to meet this terrible (temporary) fate before speaking up.

    "Is this the Bay of Long Teeth?" he asked in more or less perfect Kebiran. It was a more guttural language than he was used to, but the tropes were so disimilar to each other that they had to be able to understand it across a wide range of local and national dialects, accents, and speech impediments.

    The two orcs looked at each other with some surprise, then the brown one barked out, "Yeah, what of it, Outlander?"

    "Just checking," Caden reassured them with an entirely discomforting smile.

    The orcs looked at each other, then edged close to Caden's cell. One of them drew a long knife and nodded to the other. His survival up to this point had basically been a fluke. Orcs live violent lives, almost regardless of the differences between tropes. To see a man of Caden's build with so many scars and oddities, carrying at least one weapon and seeming utterly calm as he was when he surrendered; for them, to see such a man is to know that he is dangerous. They were not going to give him much of a chance to fight back if they could help it.

    "Although," he said, and the green one with the knife jumped back. The brown one was less twitchy. "I should point something out for you. My name's not Outlander. I actually go by a lot of names, but here...

    "Here they call me Berk."

    Cue the slow, unsettling realization that Caden had hoped for. The orks had called Caden Berk almost obsessively, to the point that he had always assumed it might be a title or just a catch-all phrase. In his first jaunt through the Bay of Long Teeth, they had basically been the only ones to call him that as well. It was like a verbal tic unique to them. And the orks were the single most violent trope he had encountered on that trip. Caden had been called Berk, he was a scar-covered man with a weapon and all kinds of unsettling details about him, and this cage...

    This cage wasn't dehlar.

    Caden shot a blast of raw force through its bars and slammed both orcs to the farthest wall. The cell door's hinges, already rusted and ill-maintained, snapped away like nothing. He stepped out into the hold and took his sweet time stretching out some kinks as the two orcs got back to their feet. The green one charged him, roaring in a way that no human vocal chords could properly match.

    Caden broke his leg at the shin with one good thrust of his staff. He stepped out of the way to let the orc fall, then swiped the knife from his hands and buried it to the hilt in the side of his neck. Spinal cord severed. Blade tip jutted out from green skin, accompanied by gushing red blood. Scream terminated in a shocked gag. Not much pain. Not much dignity. Caden never took his eyes off the brown one for any of this.

    He cleared his throat and finally Said, "Go get your captain. I'm renegotiating the terms of your surrender."

    "You're insane," the orc told him.

    "I'm a Wizard," Blueraven answered. "Not much of a difference."
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  3. #3
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
    Level completed: 32%, EXP required for next level: 8,215
    Level completed: 32%,
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    To the best of Caden's reckoning, the captain was an albino orc by the name of Gargamet. He was easily the cleanest of the crew, wearing bright blues in contrast to everybody else's reds. His hat, which was actually quite nice, was a tricorn number with actual bones sewn onto it in a stylishly lopsided cross. He wore a white neckerchief, like a boss, and carried a cutlass the size of a falchion, also like a boss. He was also armed with a repeating handcannon that could've passed itself off as a ten-shot revolver if it wasn't the size of a small shotgun, both of which were...uncommon, even in Alerar. Caden really only knew of them because he'd passed through that dismal land a few years before the Corpse War, and even when he'd left it seemed like firearms were only just becoming a less-than-rare commodity.

    Gargamet was only one of thirty or so orcs with a gun, and Caden was willing to bet there were more firearms onboard than what he was seeing. That was just the number of orcs who could cluster at the door without getting in each other's line of fire.

    "So," Gargamet rumbled as he took a seat at the bottom of the staircase that lead into the slave hold. "You wanted to renegotiate the terms of your surrender."

    "Yours, actually," Blueraven replied, his Voice echoing blue on the brain. He kept a leery eye on the firing squad. He trusted his precautions to save the day, but no Wizard is perfect...

    "Something tells me that's not how this is going to play out," said Gargamet, scratching at his nose as he spoke. He snorted afterwards, but did not spit it out the way his crewmen would have. He was, for all the savagery attributed to orcs and pirates alike, a gentleman of some kind. Well spoken, well dressed, very calm, at least as calculating. Barbarism was probably a minimal tactic for him, Caden reasoned, and not because he was nice. No, men like Gargamet keep violence to a minimum so that each application has that much more impact. Get punched in the back of the head all the time and you grow numb to it. Get punched in the back of the head just once or twice in a week, you'll be looking out for it all day.

    "Then how is it going to play out, Gargamet?" Blueraven warily asked. "With your crew dead, your ship in flames, and your broken body lying in a Long Teeth gutter?"

    Gargamet did not emote in any way, shape, or form. He looked the Wizard square in the eye and said, "You can leave if you want. We'll take the rest of the crew and that'll be that."

    Pontius and company screamed bloody murder. Caden gave every appearance of seriously thinking about it.

    "Make a fight of it and I can guarantee none of you will leave here alive," Gargamet added. "Though some of you might be chewed upon and partially digested on your way off the ship. My crew's not uncivilized, but I swear you people taste like bacon."

    "What do you plan on doing with my crew?" Blueraven asked.

    "Probably sold as novelty items on the auction block. General Larkatz has been looking for...knowledgeable types about the Outlands for few years now. Build-up for the day when we finally come calling for all that tribute you folk should be paying us," Gargamet explained with neither obvious pride nor sadistic enjoyment. To him, these were just facts.

    "Who is General Larkatz?" Blueraven asked.

    "Get off the boat and find out," Gargamet told him. "Now make up your mind, Berk. I haven't got all day."

    Caden gave every appearance of really thinking about it.

    And then he Said, "There won't be any apocalypse."
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    Stairway to Heaven - Complete.
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  4. #4
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
    Level completed: 32%, EXP required for next level: 8,215
    Level completed: 32%,
    EXP required for next level: 8,215
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    An epoch ago, a Dark Wizard named Tön're wrote that you should never, ever give a Wizard time to prepare.

    Gargamet didn't get the memo.

    Blueraven shot a blast of fire up the stairs and killed five or six of the firing squad right off the bat, forcing the others to flee from the doorway unless they wanted to get burned alive right along with them. Shots were fired and every single one missed. Gargamet himself avoided the blast, drew his cutlass-falchion in the same fluid motion, then came at Caden with a dispassionate grimace. He struck with a tight swing and the Wizard blocked it with his staff, but only just. Steel sparked on prevalida, Caden lunged forward and slammed his elbow into the orc's jaw, then drove the bottom end of his staff up into Gargamet's groin. The orc grunted but did not relent. He tried to backstep and bring his sword to bear again. Caden brought just one finger to bear over his shoulder and killed him with a lance of solid ice through the nose, into the skull, and out the back of the head. Bone chips and gore flew everywhere.

    Gargamet dropped to the ground in an undignified heap. Caden cracked his neck from left to right a few times, then picked up the sword and gave it a few practice swings. It was heavy, but functional. He sheathed it back on Gargamet's belt, then greyhawked it and slung it over it shoulder.

    "The hell didn't ya do that sooner?" Pontius snapped from somewhere behind him as Caden stooped down and picked up the tricorn. "Could'a saved us a week or more o' bein' trapped in those damnable cages!"

    "Any of you guys know how to fly a skyship?" Caden asked. He was met with a round of blank looks. "Then I suggest you learn. I'll deal with the crew, but you're on your own after that. If you make it back to the West, head for Beinost in Raiaera."

    He tossed the tricorn over to Pontius, took up his staff and got moving without another word. A few small explosions later, the crew followed him.

    It was a dreary morning in the Bay of Long Teeth. The Wizard Blueraven had returned.
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  5. #5
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
    Level completed: 32%, EXP required for next level: 8,215
    Level completed: 32%,
    EXP required for next level: 8,215
    GP
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    Quote Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire
    It is six sharp in the Bay of Long Teeth and I am all alone. It's raining right now. The engines of the Western Vulture are burning orange and trailing steam and leftover magic as the ship rises high and unsteady, guided by a crew who have no idea what they're doing, aimed at a destination thousands of miles away. Most likely, they'll never actually reach the city of Beinost, but they're still going to try. Their only alternatives would be suicide or misery, in one form or another, be it slow and hesitant or fast and willful. I can't say I'll miss any of them, but I do wish them luck -- if only because Althanas needs to know, to be warned, of the giant lurking on its Eastern fringe. "There won't be any apocalypse," I told them, "Because I'm going to kill it in its crib."

    That assumes I know which apocalypse I'm looking at.

    Right now, I'm sitting on a bench under an overhang near portside Long Teeth, watching the streets hustle by as the tropes of orcs blend and clash. I've seen nine bloody brawls and a rape in the past half-hour. It's a cosmopolitan place, this city, but it's also dystopic and warlike in the extreme. I have to wonder how the hells these people ever managed to even rise up enough to have cities, let alone keep them from burning down every five minutes. For all the hells on these streets though, the Bay of Long Teeth is as cosmopolitan a place as any I've ever seen. Orcs are dominant, but I've seen humans here and there. A few like Era, who descend from orcs, humans, and elves by the look of things. I've even spotted some wyrmfolk too. The one thing we all have in common is that we are armed, all of us looking over our shoulders, all of us walking like we'll kill whoever so much as blinks at us wrong.
    The page ends here, followed by a few drops of blood.
    Quote Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire
    I just killed someone who thought they could sneak up on me. In the past two hours, I've acquired a second sword and a brand new knife, both through greyhawking. The sword's so big I can barely use it with one hand and the knife is an ugly number that'll probably serve me much better. The rule of the street seems to be Look Dangerous And You'll Be Okay.

    I have little optimism about the dining options here. Currency seems to be based on plain old gold pieces though, so at least there's that. I managed to greyhawk my would-be murderer's purse too, feeble thing that it is.

    The skies are choked with air traffic here. Most of it is low. I've seen several near-collisions between ships and buildings, and I don't even know how some of the buildings here got to be so tall. They look ramshackle at best. I've spotted a handful of authority figures that my old notes list as Borcs -- big orcs. The borcs are all huge and most of them sport some kind of symbol on their left cheek; usually a chalk-white skull or hand. I'm assuming the Bay is divided between the two groups the skull and hand represent, but I could be wrong. I've seen a handful of chalk-white bones, weapons, and teeth too. Only one red symbol though, and it was on the opposite cheek. The borc in question was walking with his head down in shame but noone had the gall to attack him.

    Aside from that, the ork presence seems to have dropped significantly from my last visit. The whorcs are...slightly more prevalent, I guess you could say. As are Era's people, both in the capacities you might expect.

    I also saw another thing that worries me: A cart that moved without a horse. It had big thick wheels that looked like rubber, clearly patterned for grip, but everything else seemed to be made out of metal. When I asked, a man on the street told me it was called a bunch of words that translate as automatically mobile -- or automobile -- and that the locals called it a car, which has no translation I'm aware of. It took up most of the street and turned more sharply than a horse-drawn carriage might. Knowing the orcs, I'd bet somebody else's left testicle that there's a weaponized version out there somewhere.

    Guns, skyships, cars.

    Kebiras would be a nightmare if someone ever managed to unite the disparate tropes and city-states of the orcs. I'm told that is not the case, but this General Larkatz could pull it off. He's a warlord from the south-eastern border of orc country, originally just a tribal thug. He managed to convince several other tribes to back him, then took over five villages and a full-blown city-state before crushing one of the nearby human kingdoms that opposed him. He goes by several epithets, including Larkatz the Conqueror, Larkatz the Great, and Larkatz the Butcher. To be called a butcher as an insult in Long Teeth requires you to be on a whole new level of monstrosity. Again, worrying. I'm going to try and set up a meeting with him at some point soon, preferably en route to tear down whatever military-industrial complexes I can. The orcs are getting too prolific and too damn good at manufacturing and research. I don't think even the elves in Alerar could keep up with them if they really put their back into it.
    Caden shut the grimoire and stuffed it up into his Hat. He looked around, through the hustle and bustle of Long Teeth at morning. A fight broke out across the street. It was short, violent, and one-sided. Closer in, he spotted a short green boy swiping the purse right off an older, more powerful orc's belt. The youngster made his escape before Caden could even voice his approval.

    Welcome to Kebiras, he later wrote. Abandon civility, ye who enter here.
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  6. #6
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
    Level completed: 32%, EXP required for next level: 8,215
    Level completed: 32%,
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    Quote Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire
    "...and in this state of Nature, unblessed by Her Majesty, it is the lot of man to live a life that is hard, nasty, brutish, and short." - Reverend Jeremiah Evernorth, the father and patron saint of my old hometown, espousing the right mix of dogma and terror to guarantee loyalty from the half-frozen masses.

    I vaguely remember hearing my old reverend, Caden Wellman*, giving a sermon that climaxed with that quote. Now there was a man who knew how to scare the piss out of the faithless, let me tell you...not that it made me believe, of course. I never believed.** I was right not to believe. But damn if they didn't have it right about the life of man in a state of nature being hard, nasty, brutish, and short, unblessed or not. I'm on my first morning here in the Bay of Long Teeth and I've already witnessed about thirteen murders in the street, and another two or three in-doors. And that's just murders, nevermind everything else. For now I've opted to take shelter at night, outside, in alleys and nooks and crannies and maybe even on rooftops. I trust the innkeepers even less than I trust the roving bands of street gangs that seem to have free reign here.

    Except when they don't.

    From what I've gathered -- in conversations with humans, some of the more sane orcs, and the wyrmfolk -- Long Teeth is an effective microcosm of Kebiras as a whole. In that regard, it turns out that the orcs are loosely united under one leadership already; a high council of sorts, cobbled together from anyone cunning and vicious and powerful enough to join its ranks. The thing that unites them is an outside threat, and a nasty one by the appearance of things. I've yet to get anyone to actually, consistently identify the threat in question. The best I can do is nail it down to some common themes.
    • It comes from a place roughly identified as the Underground. Actual terminology varies. I've heard Downbelow, the Underdark, the Earthen Realm, and Subkebiras too. The Underground is what the orcs (mostly) call it, so I'll stick with that.
    • It is more than any one particular nasty. Most stories emphasise packs between three and eight strong.
    • They always strike from dark places, but they have no particular aversion to light.
    • They are not human. They are partially humanoid. Teeth? No idea.
    • Their most common names are Arachs (orcs), Wilderfolk (humans), Shadowcallers (wyrmfolk) and Huskers (common epithet).
    • That last name? Apparently the most common modus operendi for them is to carve off someone's skin. I'm gonna sleep so well tonight!


    The council has no true leader. It's kept in check by the fact that membership is fluid and anyone who starts gathering too much power automatically earns the enmity of the others. For all the tropes of the orcs, only a half-dozen or so are actually represented there. And the only thing they can all agree on -- without fail -- is the fact that Long Teeth must survive.

    Extrapolate all of that to a continental level. All they need to unite them is survival and the presence of a genuine external threat. If they ever learn about Alerar, with its high technology and magic, Althanas is screwed. There is no other way to say it. I have my doubts that even the Forgotten would be able to hold back to the kind of tide the orcs seem able to bring to bear. Long Teeth alone could probably subjugate most of Corone or all of Scara Brae as I last saw them.

    I think I should've been having nightmares about Kebiras, not most of the other things that've kept me awake at night since I got back from N'Thayn'sal.

    * Reverend Caden Wellman is the man I was named for. He handled my...he oversaw my Consecration as a little boy. For the benefit of anyone who ever reads this without insight into Salvic Wizardry and its relation to the Church at the time of my childhood: Genital mutilation. I am still functional. It doesn't even look bad. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.*** I don't remember if he was alive when I last visited Evernorth. Hopefully not. I'd hate to miss up a chance to kill him for what he did to me and others.
    ** There are times, of course, where I did believe. And then I learned better.
    *** Nix that. Considering all the candidates for my Worst Enemy, yes, I would wish it on them. All of them. Twice.
    Caden closed the grimoire and looked around. He was alone by the look of things, but Long Teeth was a place that engendered paranoia just by looking at it. The skies were always overcast and gold in both mornings and afternoons, with drearier mid-days and starless nights. Caden had only been here for a day, but he knew the weather well enough. Ask a few questions and the locals just couldn't shut up about it. It was a risk though. He already stood out like a sore thumb by default as a pale-skinned human in utterly alien clothes. Most of the humans in Long Teeth -- and in Kebiras as a whole -- ranged from soil black to light brown, with short hair and dark eyes. The fashions emphasised green and red colors over everything else. Swords looked nothing like Caden's Raiaeran conscript blade.

    On the one hand, being exotic was a novel experience that Caden hadn't experienced before. Even in Fallien and Dheath, human Wizards weren't all that unusual. Here? He didn't know if people even knew what a Wizard was, but odds were against it.

    On the other, being exotic is a good way to get a knife in the back.

    Quote Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire
    Pretty sure I'm being watched and/or followed. No idea by who or what. Will kill or maim them later.

    I should add that I've heard an interesting bit of news: Not only is Larkatz coming here, but he intends to meet with the council. He's going to try and put them under his banner through diplomacy first. Common sense dictates that he'll probably kill them all or they'll kill him first, depending on how the little meeting goes. I have my work cut out for me but there doesn't seem to be a right choice to make here.

    If I kill just Larkatz, his nascent empire collapses.

    If I wipe them all out, or even just take out most of the council, odds are good that a unitary figure will come up to fill the power vacuum. Nothing quite like an absence of existing authority to make a new one.

    Alternatively...
    Caden looked up at the sky. He blinked a few times, then put his hand on the ground and reached out with his extra senses.

    Just a few feet down, bedrock. It was full of metaphysical holes, a roiling mass of energy that resembled nothing so much as a nine-dimensional hurricane clashing with itself all over the place. This was not the work of a mage. This was the work of civilization's very own gravity, no matter how barbaric it might've been. This was power. More power than Caden had drawn upon when he scourged Tembrethnil, and also much, much worse. It was unwilling power, out of synch with a human's will and intentions. It was self-preservation. Caden automatically checked off a dozen and one plans for bringing about localized cataclysm.

    There was still one left.

    It is a well-known fact that Wizards have the scariest smiles.
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  7. #7
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    The Council of Long Teeth gathered in a huge room with domed walls and an elevated opening in the middle of the ceiling, similar to the covers on a swell-made smokestack. The room's walls were completely covered with the vandalism of knives, of names and creeds that had been stabbed, hacked, dragged, slashed, and mangled into the woodwork over the course of decades. There were four doors in and out, and a shallow pit sank into the room's center, its bottom lined with grates for drainage's sake. Around the pit, a long table interrupted only twice, so that two orcs could get in and out at the same time. Thrones lined the table in various states of both novelty and disrepair, each one marked according to its (currently) permanent owner.

    The Council numbered just thirteen and it was not a democracy. The orcs sitting at that table had come to power because they had cut throats and severed heads and flayed husks from the bones of their enemies to do it. Some, like Warlord Helldrake, came from outside the Bay to impose their own savage wills on it. Helldrake was a good example of this lot because he was an archetype of them: a tall green orc with no shortage of brown scars that formed a huge pattern of mismatched tiger's stripes all over his body. He wore a chainmail shirt under a metal chestplate, along with other bits of armor scattered all over. His eyes glowed. His mark of office was a battle-axe bigger than he was, literally standing beside him without the need to lean against anything.

    Directly across from him was Papa Viscero, a much more urbane sort with dark green skin and one eye whose colors changed like a swirling rainbow. He wore leathers like a working orc, up to and including a long leather coat and a wide-brimmed hat. His weapon was a much more distinguished rapier carved out of a dragon's tooth, laid on the table in front of him as an implicit threat to anyone who came within striking distance. Nevermind the revolver he carried in his coat.

    Not far from Viscero sat Long Teeth's preeminent mage, whose skin was actually blue with a few choice red symbols here and there. He had no real access to the traditions of the West, but Elder Ghastfire could've easily passed for a Warlock, a Witch, or a Necromancer in his own foul rites. He wore an orange and black robe, open at one shoulder, and carried with him a staff that was actually an enslaved demon. Most of its length was a rigid tail, while the 'head' sported two short horns arching forward above a small mouth filled with far too much teeth. Its arms and legs were broken, bent harshly around its body as part of a symbolic restraint. Ghastfire also wore a necklace of glass beads, each of which sported at least one screaming face composed of mist rushing around beneath the transparent surface.

    Across from Ghastfire, there was the solitary ork of the council, Captain Graghok, who wore all kinds of gaudy bright colors and who was armed right to the teeth and back again. He was the owner of the world's first, and possibly only, five-barreled rifle, among other things. Then there was Street Lord Choman, who ran much of Long Teeth's auction industry and who had a hand on roughly half of the city's prostitution industry. Warlord Eye-Berk, an old rival of Helldrake come to fight him in the city, next to Chief Zhyelson of the Dead Stars, a barbarian tribe-turned-apocalyptic cult-turned-hyperviolent street gang.

    All these and more made up the Council of Long Teeth. They were formidable. They were dangerous. And they were all watching the exact same door as Warlord Larkatz the Butcher came striding through it. Their eyes were wary and rightfully so. For an orc to call you a butcher and mean it as an insult requires a special kind of barbarism, the sort that cannot be adequately captured in most human languages. Larkatz had earned it the hard way. So hard that it made orcs sympathize with the human kingdom of Achu Kintan, which no longer existed as anything more than a hushed whisper. And he certainly looked capable of that kind of savagery. He was of a rarer trope than most orcs, even among the Council's darwinistically cutthroat membership. He was an uruk, which was, in effect, an überorc.

    He was seven feet tall, or more. Muscular in ways that humans and elves simply weren't; packed tight and stretched taut and somehow flexible in spite of all that. His jaw was sturdy and his tusks were small, while his eyes sported slit pupils and glowed green without any iris. He wore a long black leather vest and matching pants with metal-plated boots and an upper chestplate. Around his waist, under the coat, there was a heavy sash woven from silk around chainmail and impact plating. He had on a pair of vambraces with claw-like blades extending over the back of each hand, and he carried an enormous pair of axes across his back.

    It'd take a mage to see the wards tattooed into his skin, every single one colored to fade into the background flesh surrounding them. It'd take a good mage to spot similar wards in all his clothes. It'd take a master with a microscope to find the destructive runes all over his weapons. Larkatz carried no gun because he didn't need it, and everyone with two braincells to rub together knew as much.

    He was accompanied by just one attendant: a grubby little goblinoid, barely five foot six or seven, whose name nobody could remember. Most of them just called him Berk and he didn't seem to mind, and even if he did mind none of them would care. He dressed in second-hand reds and beiges, carried a rifle almost as big as he was, a much smaller carbine, and a plain revolver. Every single one of them was loaded with magekiller ammunition. Where Larkatz entered the room like he owned it and paid no mind to the rest, Berk entered the room like he didn't belong there and immediately set his sights on Ghastfire.

    The old mage returned the favor with a sadist's grin.

    What would have followed was politics. Deals being cut, threats being swapped, that kind of thing.

    It can safely be said that would have happened is not what actually happened.
    Last edited by Caden Law; 09-02-11 at 09:08 PM.
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  8. #8
    Resident Pointy Hat
    EXP: 68,785, Level: 10
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    Caden Law's Avatar

    Name
    Caden "Blueraven" Law
    Age
    26
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Light blond
    Eye Color
    Blue
    Job
    Wizard for hire, freelance alchemist, translator, navigator, and archivist

    It began with a rumbling on high, not unlike a particularly close thunder strike.

    Then there was a flash so bright that it could be seen through eyelids, limbs, clothes, even solid walls; a flash that somehow failed to blind anyone at all.

    The whole Bay of Long Teeth shook and shuddered, and a Sorcerer spat all manner of obscenities across fifty different languages as he realized that he'd made a handful of errors in trying to set up his spell. Because the spell in question was an act of thaumaturgy on a truly grand scale. The Sorcerer in question had affected geography before, but he'd miscalculated. He'd gotten arrogant. He had forgotten that all those disasters and cataclysms had been accidents.

    Turns out that when Blueraven intentionally tried to nuke something, he wasn't all that good at it.

    It was the world's biggest, most completely useless flashbang grenade, engineered over the course of hours through long-distance geomancy from a hilltop far outside the city. There were runes as big as houses hidden under the surface dirt, exploding into view as the spell triggered, sapping the leyline nexus beneath Long Teeth in the process. Net effects included a few thousand orcs jumping out of their shoes and hacking into the nearest target. Plenty of guns were fired. The Council, in fact, turned on itself as a pure reflex action. Ghastfire struck first, fastest, hardest -- he blew Zhyelson right out of his seat and flash-fried his shadow into the wall of an adjacent building. There was nothing else left of the big barbarian chieftain. Papa Viscero slit Warlord Helldrake's throat so deeply that his head hung on by stray threads as his body staggered and flailed, reaching for an axe it was no longer remotely equipped to wield.

    Larkatz and Berk got in on the act too. They all did. Larkatz tore open Street Lord Choman's chest cavity while Berk shot down Warlock Eye-Berk, who had already returned spells against Ghastfire. The two mages both went down, but Ghastfire was faking it and Eye-Berk most assuredly wasn't. Wards flashed for both, but the Warlock's had never taken into account magekiller bullets. He stumbled towards the door in a frenzied attempt to escape and Berk shot him over and over and over again until he stopped, dropped, and didn't move again.

    Then Berk ran up and shot him again in the back of the head, just to be thorough.

    Take what happened in the Council and extrapolate it all over Long Teeth. The results were incredibly messy. Fires swept through the streets in minutes. Shots rang out everywhere. Someone, somewhere, somehow managed to roar WAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR!!! to its entirety, followed by an explosion. And that was just the ground game. Up in the air, things were even more destructive. Several ships collided, plenty of others opened fire in every direction they could. But Blueraven was watching, and that wasn't all that happened.

    Lightning struck Long Teeth. It passed through two ships to do it, clawing from the cloudy void all the way to the ground and back again. Several times. Caden watched it happen. He felt hairs stand on the back of his neck. Because real lightning doesn't produce spiral sprays of feathers or dust, and he certainly hadn't meant for that to happen. He checked the layout of his spells, his great act of geomancy, and was able to confirm that nothing he cast would've produced such lightning.

    Blueraven cringed a little bit and sputtered his last, "Fuck," as the whole mess wrapped up. He had done catastrophic damage to Long Teeth, yes, but nothing terminal. Nothing the Bay could not recover from. And he had no way of knowing whether or not he had achieved the goal of killing Larkatz or any other potentially unitary figures.

    He flopped back from his knees to his backside, put his face in his hands and took a deep, deep breath.

    "Excuse me," spoke a familiar voice in oddly accented Raiaeran. Caden drew his hands from his face and tried not to look up.

    "This was His doing, wasn't it," he said rather than asked. "I stumbled onto something bigger than I realized, didn't I."

    "You really don't have any idea," the voice told him. Caden registered footsteps coming up beside him, and a desert wind that was right at home on a continent like Kebiras. It would be, Caden bitterly noted to himself, it would be. "He has the best interests at heart."

    "Notice the lack of specificity regarding whose interests are best," Caden replied. He finally looked up, to the side. Grinned nastily. Tried to really put his heart in it. Couldn't do it. The worst he could do was huff, causing a spray of sparks and feathers to manifest from his nose. Breathing magic. "What's the deal?"

    The Drifter smiled more cryptically than any mere mortal mage ever could or would. Caden had only encountered him once before but he practically stank of the Sage God of Deserts and Libraries, the Elder Thayne Khal'jaren. He was a tall man, with maybe an inch on Caden himself, built lean and sporting the coldest blue eyes the Wizard had ever seen. He looked to be in his early thirties, aged like a soldier, and he dressed in what looked like a military parade uniform from a time and place unknown to this world. The whole outfit was red and gold, with pants tucked into sturdy black boots near the knee, a waist-hung cape that opened in the front, and a high, stiff collar with gold trim. There were no insignias of rank, no badges, no armor. Over this, he wore a desert yellow cloak with the hood blown back, revealing dark gray hair that blackened near the ends; old dye that had never been replaced. He carried a sword that looked like an Akashiman katana, securely bolted to the left side of his belt on a swivel mount.

    More than anything, the Drifter looked like a man who belonged in this world by virtue of not belonging at all. Caden tried, and failed, not to think too hard about it.

    "You're assuming that there's a deal at all," the Drifter noted. "What messenger comes to negotiate a deal?"

    "One so empowered by a higher authority," Caden replied.

    "And do I seem empowered for that?" the Drifter asked.

    "No," Caden answered. "You seem empowered to be a living plot device in the convoluted narrative of my life."

    The Drifter blinked at him and admitted, "That is both the most correct and incorrect statement you've ever made. I didn't think I could be surprised anymore."

    "You're a messenger that can think and you can be surprised. You look pretty human but that means nothing. You're sure as hells not an angel. So what are you?" Caden asked.

    The other considered him for a long while before softly answering, "A drifter in shadows, paying penance for a life of high-minded, well-intentioned wickedness. What more do you need to know?"

    Caden thoughtfully stared at him, parsing the words out in his head for a long while. Then he asked, "You're not Xem'zund, are you?"

    "Zundalon the Cantor will never walk this world again," the Drifter answered with casual certainty. "What more do you need to know?"

    "...what have I stepped into?" Caden asked.

    The Drifter smiled before answering, "Not into, Caden Law. You've set your foot upon the first step of the stairway to heaven. What more do you need to know?"

    Caden grit his teeth as he asked, "What more do I need to know?"

    And here, at last, the Drifter clapped. It reminded Caden, rather dreadfully, of the way his boyhood teachers used to clap at the slow kid in the back of the room. "You need to know that it's already time to get your little band back together and place yourself in good company once more. You need to know that you've already laid the framework for such things. And you need to know that you've still got all the authority you need to save the world. You are on a mission from somebody else's god.

    "And at ripple's end, you will know your enemy."

    "That's cryptic bull-" Caden blinked. "-shit."

    The Drifter was gone. All that remained was a slip of paper. Caden slapped himself before deigning to read it.

    Go knock out some teeth.
    Or don't.
    Doesn't matter either way.


    "GOD," Caden read, pronouncing the capital letters as only a Wizard can. He snapped his fingers and set the paper on fire.
    Last edited by Caden Law; 09-03-11 at 10:12 AM.
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  9. #9
    Member
    EXP: 2,350, Level: 1
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    1,100
    Leaf on the Wind's Avatar

    Name
    Rowan Stormwind
    Age
    21
    Race
    Human
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    White
    Eye Color
    Green
    Build
    6'3, 220 lbs.
    Job
    Wandering asskicker

    It is fair to say that things don't always go as planned. You might even say that life just sort of goes off the rails every now and then. You wake up one day, go for a walk, then boom! You're not there anymore and nobody knows where you went or what happened to you. And then, a few months and several thousand miles later, everything snaps back into place and all you can think to do is scream, run around, and fight for your life in the middle of an utterly alien warzone the likes of which is somehow infinitely less terrifying than where you've just been.

    That's not exactly what happened here, but it's plenty close enough. Lightning struck the ground in the Bay of Long Teeth, and a distinctly foreign shop stood where nothing had been just a few seconds earlier. The appearance of its walls cleaved right through a few people, and one who stood at the epicenter of its arrival was ripped apart from the inside out. It was as if Time and Space were having an argument about whether or not the shop had been there before now, and a few hapless bystanders got caught in the middle. A few seconds later, the front door ripped right off the hinges, which spewed blood the same way that a freshly severed artery might. The door crashed down into hard-packed dirt and wrenched in half, wriggling and flailing as a scrubby little man in a three-piece suit kicked and screamed on top of it.

    He had a thick red blade lodged in the center of his chest; a katar, scaled up to the length and shape of an arming sword. The hand holding it was clenched white-knuckle tight, wrapped in the same teal aura that covered the rest of the man the hand belonged to. He was a young twenty-something, tall and sturdy, wearing a pair of bright red pants and a gold-colored sash around his waist, as well as a pair of metal braces and matching shin guards; nothing else. He had no shortage of scars. His hair was a dirty, discolored green that went down to his shoulders, and he had a thick beard to match.

    "Show me what you really are!" the man yelled, his Voice only barely formed. "I WANNA SEE YOUR REAL FACE!"

    He wrenched the katar sideways, snapping an ungodly number of bones in the little man's chest cavity. The response was an utterly inhuman scream as limbs flailed about with no regard for joints. The suit finally burst apart at the seams as the man, for lack of a better word, exploded. His limbs split and multiplied, his head collapsed into a gaping maw, and bits and pieces stuck out all over the place. The shop behind them echoed that same horrible scream, then lifted off the ground and imploded in on itself at the front door. There was a rush of air and a sound like glass breaking in reverse. The teal man looked down and saw that the demon at his feet was already decaying into nothingness.

    He looked around.

    From one warzone to another. The combatants had changed, but the rules were the same. Kill or be killed. Live at all costs.

    Get out or make someone else die trying.

    Rowan Stormwind laughed as he looked up and saw the blue sky of Althanas for the first time in months.

    He looked down and saw an ork rampaging at him with a meat cleaver bigger than his upper torso.

    "It's good to be back," Rowan Said with a relieved sigh, just before lunging into the thick of it.

  10. #10
    Member
    EXP: 2,300, Level: 1
    Level completed: 10%, EXP required for next level: 2,700
    Level completed: 10%,
    EXP required for next level: 2,700
    GP
    900


    Name
    Aeraul Smythe
    Age
    27
    Race
    Half-Human, Half-Orc
    Gender
    Male
    Hair Color
    Glossy black
    Eye Color
    Variable by lighting and mood
    Build
    6'6", 295 lbs.
    Job
    Journeyman, Swordsman

    It's a fact of life that the Call to Adventure knows where you live, what you're doing, who you're close to, and what buttons to push to make you be heroic. Or villainous, but generally heroic. Anyone who's ever watched their backwater village burn only to embark upon an epic quest of revenge will cynically tell you as much, and most of them don't even need to be all that sober to do it.

    The Call knew exactly where to find Aeraul Smythe, but he was thankfully removed from any backwater villages waiting to suffer a death by origin story. He was, as a matter of fact, standing atop the peak of a mountain on the border between Alerar and Salvar, clad in nothing but light mountaineer clothing; boots, a pair of pants, and an undershirt that should've all been buried under several outer layers of hide and more. He carried a sturdy journal hanging on his belt, water-proofed, and a ridiculously oversized jian on his back. He stood atop the mountain at sunset and the air boiled around him. He did not need so many layers because he had perfected the art of controlling his body temperature. It was a cloudless day, soon to be night, and the stars were already coming out. This high up, Aeraul almost felt as if he could reach out and grab hold of the moon.

    So, in a moment of whimsey, he tried to do just that.

    Lightning struck out of nowhere. The world was blue, then it was a desert, then everything turned gold and he was standing in the middle of a town square-turned-warzone, assaulted from all sides by the feeling of minds both alien and familiar to his own. A few months ago, it would've reduced him to a screaming wreck of a man on the spot; all that blind rage, all the shared empathy of the orcs crashing into his naked mind like a tidal wave full of razors. Atavistic remnants of his mother's heritage churned just beneath the surface, and Aeraul still screamed at the top of his lungs as he reached for his sword.

    But it was a man's scream, not an orc's.

    When he moved his feet, it was with the precision of a man trained from early childhood. Reflexes bowed to reason, his mind did not bend or break under the pressure, and his hands were guided not by love of battle but by love of life -- his life, not somebody else's.

    Aeraul drew six feet of jian from his back and cleaved three orcs in half in one spinning motion. He stabbed an ork through the mouth, neck, and upper back, then wrenched the blade free and charged at a nearby borc. The huge orc brought a rifle to bear on him and Aeraul stabbed through it, muzzle to buttstock, splitting it in half and then embedding the blade into the borc's forearm. He brought his free hand to bear immediately, two fingers beneath the borc's lantern jaw, and then a blast of fire -- salamander red flame, igniting from a point less than a tenth of an inch from his fingertips. The borc's head was the size of a human torso.

    Aeraul's fire reduced it to a hollowed slab of charcoal and burnt meat.

    The borc collapsed. Aeraul looked around. He was confused, adrenaline was rushing, people were dying all around him and the city was in a blind rage. He didn't yield to it. He was a man. His skin was green, his tusks filed down to oversized molars, his eyes only just barely glowing. He was a man. Orcs mobbed and brawled, loved with violent caresses and died howling with laughter. He was a man.

    And he was going to survive.

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