The Gifted
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Another turn, and its eyes widened with anticipation. An old oaken door, now bent and splintered was the sign it had been looking for. The objective was at hand. With effortless grace, the being slipped through the opening, and there it was. The wooden box, battered by time, but by nothing else.
The lid was pulled open with a groaning crack as the being produced a handful of coins at the tips of its elegantly plated, deadly claws.
The dry sound of the coins bouncing against the bottom of the old box followed, too few and far apart to give out the more pleasing clinks. Then, silence. It was only a few seconds before the abandoned cave chamber flared up, its ancient lamplights blazing alive as the sound of grinding stone against stone was received with great anticipation.
Its voice, unnaturally alluring. Each word and each syllable sounded like a promise of greatness, of necessity, of glory. Each tap of its tongue, each twist of its lips, each smack of its palate, each graze of its teeth - a lustful temptation, a yearning promise, a desire to sin and be sinned upon.*
"Here I come, precious one."
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As the party has learned from some of their contacts, the encroaching darkness coming from the south is spreading at alarming rate. A fair section of the Rawlins has now succumbed to it, and it does not appear to be stopping. On the bright side, the threat remains deep enough that it has not interacted with humans, at least for now.
//I've set up a barrier in the Far Northeast section of the Rawlins - please don't trespass without letting me know! Do post in the forums or in PM if there is anything you want to do about it. There will be server-wide events related to it soon, too.
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Coraline Frears
Description: This small, skinny girl looks barely into her teens, with a thick mane of chestnut brown hair and a pale, slightly freckled face that still retains some of the roundness of childhood in her cheeks. You might be tempted to think her cute, were it not for the too-intense look in her bright green eyes.
Public Knowledge: Coraline claims to have escaped one reformatory school only to fall in the clutches of another. Her background isn't well known, but she bears few overt signs of hardship in the form of scars or callouses, and her accent suggests a moderately well-to-do status.
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((Even though they may be gone after one event.))
Loche the Blooded
Description: Even at a young age, Loche is tall and strong of body. Oddly colored gray eyes seem to track every movement around him. He seems to have a penchant for blood and the hunt, and his body is covered in scars.***
Public Knowledge: The son of a prostitute in Lyrabar, his oddly colored eyes were taken as an bad omen and his mother left him to die in the Gray Forest, in Impiltur. How he survived is not known, but he came back with a taste for blood and a thrill for the hunt. Fully embracing the Beastlord, even as a child.
Music: The Hunt by Savfk
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OOC> For the next event, I would like anyone who wants to participate to create a new character for an experimental type of event. Here are the premises:
- The character can be any gender, class, or race of your choice, the only condition is that the character's alignment must be Evil (any evil).
- The setting of the event also will require the characters to be teenagers. The precise age doesn't matter, and they can be extremely mature and level-headed teenagers if you choose to. It's just a premise of the situation in which the characters will find themselves.
- Goes without saying, that those players who could not make it to the first event are more than welcome to join this one!
- Upon joining the event on the day when we run it, I will ask you to tell me the name of one of your existing characters. I won't spoil the reasons for this but rest assured, it matters, so choose wisely.
I wanted to run it originally this Saturday, but I don't think I will be ready by then, and I'd also like to give you all at least a few days to create your new character. I'll do my best to find a time when most have the chance to participate if they wish.
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Ushered by upstart tinkerer Jenna Starsong's request, and with the aid of a couple of her gadgets, the party of adventurers departed southwards to find the location of a valuable asset. If Jenna's words were correct, only a fraction of this power source fueled the weapon Miranda provided the heroes of Narfell with the ability to cripple and expose a greater demon queen, a true divinity like Kali, to be defeated in her own home realm.
Jenna's gadget turned out to be some manner of homing beacon that led them southwards, and as the party followed it, they were intercepted by one known to some of them only as Graaz, to their best knowledge, an entity involved in previous Abyssal dealings, a turncoat Balor General that used to serve Kali the Skull Queen, now under the rule of the Arch-Succubus Nenufar. Graaz claimed that the party would find no joy where they were headed, and made a sizable offer to the party, in exchange for Jenna's trinket and giving up on their search for the alleged power source. The offer was not trivial - ten million gold coins, ten thousand abyssal shards, and the salvation of one soul of their choice, previously condemned to the Abyss, but after short consideration, it was turned down, and the leashed Balor General accepted it with resentful politeness, leaving the adventurers to their devices without further interfering.
At the destination, the party found that their target was deep beneath solid rock, but that did not stop them. With stalwart determination and polymorphing magic, they managed to create an opening wide enough to reach what seemed to be an abandoned facility. Breathing in the rancid and stale air, the adventurers found that the place was littered with discarded utensils, weapons, humanoid bones, equipment that would belong in a prison or torture chamber, and numerous other signs that some sort of calamity had occurred, leaving the place in complete disarray and potentially killing all of its inhabitants - a number between 30 and 60 humanoids, judging by the number of bone groupings resembling vaguely each skeleton.
Lacking deep forensic expertise, the party could not discern the causes of their deaths or the races of the creatures the bones belonged to, but by sheer logical deduction, they learned that a large number of the bones belonged to creatures that were shorter than those of an adult human, concluding that these would belong to either the members of a smaller humanoid race or the small members of an average humanoid race. With this realization in mind, the party searched the ruined library thoroughly, and through the wreckage of torn-down shelves and burned-down books, a single splintered desk that escaped the fires held a moldy book of soft covers, and lengthy notes within.
Without time to read it to any significant detail at that location, the party moved into the inner chamber, what seemed to be a dormitory judging by the number of toppled and wrecked bunkbeds. They found a large number of smaller humanoid bone groupings, some of them still holding daggers in their hands, others having them still stuck through their bones or skulls. When one of the adventurers meddled with the remains, a chilling sensation ran through the bodies of all present in the chamber, as a manifestation shaped itself in front of them, its form outlined as that of a female human child, perhaps a teenager, with features unrecognizable as they seemed to be sculpted out of shadows.
Impossible for them to tell what this manifestation was at the time, the party took some distance, appalled by the overwhelming feelings of angst that they felt within. The manifestation attempted to approach the party, its movements unnatural, broken, and somewhat disconcerting until it seemingly couldn't physically advance any further as if an invisible force was reigning it in. After a few attempts, the manifestation stood there, staring at the party, silently observing.
Despite their best attempts at communicating with it, the party received only silence, and eventually, the creature retired to the corner of the room, curling up there where it appeared to start crying. Torn about it, the group decided it could be a trick and it was too dangerous to get close to it, so they decided to leave without disturbing it any further, to return at a later time with more knowledge and means to dispel it, or help it move on, as one of the dominant thoughts was it being a remnant, a spirit from the tragedy that caused the death of the human it might have been once. As they walked away talking about these possibilities, they heard what seemed to be its voice for the first time. A childish, disconsolate, helpless cry for help. "Help", it echoed time after time, beggingly, so heartbreakingly that some of the adventurers began to doubt, and turned back to check.
The manifestation was still there, curled in the corner, repeating its cries for help, with a disarming, torn voice. One of the adventurers thought it was inhuman to leave without at least trying something, as the creature appeared to be extending its vocabulary, very particularly to words that had been pronounced by the party themselves previously, for what the adventurers deduced it was mimicking, and not entirely aimlessly, there seemed to be intent behind the choice of words and the tone used to voice them out. When one of the adventurers finally gathered the courage to approach the manifestation, it attempted to grab him and pull him into the darkness and followed with vicious, painful stabs of its dagger against the adventurer's ribcage.
Flinching back in pain as he managed to break away from the manifestation, it was clear to them now that this manifestation was not friendly, and was not something they could "help", at least not at the time, as they turned away and finally left. And still, as they did, they could hear the disconsolate, childish cries for help coming from the inner chamber.
