Welcome to CBF, a game set in the cyberpunk future of Charleston, SC, using the horror/urban fantasy world of Changeling: The Lost (and most of the rest of World of Darkness) as it's larger backdrop.
You will be a <span class="mu-g">Changeling</span>, someone that was taken by the <span class="mu-r">True Fae</span> to an alien realm, <span class="mu-r">Arcadia</span>, across the hedge between reality and dreams. They left a <span class="mu-g">Fetch</span> behind in your place, a simulacrum that took your place among your friends and family, making your disappearance unnoticeable. While in captivity, you were traumatized, and forcibly transformed into a creature, or perhaps a decoration, or tool. You've since escaped, back to the real world, back to Charleston, SC, now, in the year 2198.
You command certain supernatural abilities by making contracts and pacts with the forces of nature and reality, and can also make magically binding bargains with other Changelings and mortals. To non-fae creatures, you are by all appearances a human, maybe quite similar to your original self, but possibly older, younger, scarred, or with certain traits having since been altered - time passes in strange ways within <span class="mu-r">Arcadia</span>, and the marks left by the <span class="mu-r">True Fae</span> vary in their subtlety. Other Changelings, fae creatures, and certain other supernatural beings, however, can see past the <span class="mu-g">Mask</span> of concealing faerie magic, and view your true self - be that a musclebound troll, or an automaton cobbled together from wax and copper in your own former image.
Megacorporations and stranger monsters than yourself pull the strings of society in these neon nights, and you will struggle with maintaining your humanity, and sanity, while navigating the maddening world of the fae, and the soul-crushing dystopia that's been produced by generations of greedy, sociopathic humans. You escaped from the creature that abducted you some ten years ago, and have survived in that time by honing your skills and picking your battles.
You are a <span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-b">Wizard</span></span> and it is high time that you build a tower.
What do you mean you look like a witch? Silver hair? Black clothes? Skull motifs? The spooky gothic ruby choker that your old party's paladin never snapped with his ever-victorious pure-white Holy Sword because he was a thick-headed himbo who didn't know how to read the fucking mood and <span class="mu-i">accept your many invitations into your atelier</span>? No that's just your preferred aesthetic. Your tender taught you that human men - especially handsome paladins - wanted big tiddy goth mommies, and as an elf you can do two of those three things.
Your tits? Biggest in your decantation batch. Your aesthetic? Humans consider it goth, <span class="mu-i">especially</span> since your specialized school of study is necromancy. Your ability to bear children and become a "mommy"? Well, you don't have a womb, but nothing's stopping you from growing a child in your atelier with some blood from you and your husband.
<span class="mu-i">If you had one</span>.
You don't. This is a problem. No one wants to marry an elf after her two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Twelve adventuring parties came and went throughout your career as a wizard, and every fucking time the Paladin or Warrior's childhood friend - usually a priestess who stood in the back row, squealed in terror, and cast heal cure spells - won before you could even shoot your shot. So now you're three hundred years old (and have been so for over two centuries), exhausted, single, a virgin who has never even seen a man's sword outside of paintings.
Not for lack of trying. Sun above and moon below you tried. You even went as far as to strip naked and walk into a camp of savage orcs rumored to take human women for their vile pleasures... only for their warchief to throw his cloak over you, take you aside, and explain quite clearly that orcs don't work like that. All male orcs may be, just as elves are always female, their reproduction is tied to battle and so most aren't keen on using their clubs like that.
The "breeding pits" you read about in the Central Library were the perfidious lies of the Holy Church.
How dare they give you <span class="mu-i">hope</span>.
You'll extract your revenge against them and all their wretched, man-stealing priestesses later. Right now, you're making a <span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">Tower</span></span> to get your mind off of your perennial loneliness and elfin desire to take a human male who vaguely resembles <span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-b">The Creator</span></span> to husband. Not a great spindling thing that pierces the space between dream and truth and anchors the real like the Elfhomes, just an ordinary wizard's tower, insofar as any wizard tower can be ordinary.
Where shall you build it? >In the desert, near to the elfhome of those harem building thots. >In the city, where it might catch some handsome stranger's eye. >In the mountains, where you can bicker with the dwarves. >In the islands, where you can shamelessly flaunt yourself. >In the plains, where many sturdy farmhands can be found. >Write in
Sing, goddess, of thirsty Argos, and of the glory of Hippomedon Aristomachides - sing of the folly of Adrastus, of the savagery of Tydeus and of Oedipal transgressions! Sing, O Muse, of Zeus’ designs, which even now come to fulfillment…
It is nearing a year since you, The Courier, fought and secured independence of the Mojave from domestic and foreign powers. Mr. House was put on ice, the NCR got sent packing and even the mighty Legion tucked tail and fled back East.
Now, the New Vegas Directorate, your new government, faces as many challenges as it does opportunities. Industry is rapidly expanding and agriculture is now firmly established while migrants from around the wasteland flood in looking to change their fortunes.
But the Boomer Blight, an engineered plague from parts unknown, is spreading throughout the Wasteland and little looks uncontainable. You continue to walk the line in courting both the NCR and the Legion, seeking to be a stable power between the two warring giants.
A new player comes into the picture and he brings with him hundreds of Enclave descendants eager to start again. You have agreed to welcome them into the NVD but time will tell if you can hide their influence from the NCR while keeping other factions happy.
With the looming NCR election, the hostile President Kimball seems poised to lose to the unknown Allgood Murphy while Caesar continues to see you as his Augustus, urging greater cooperation between both nations.
The one-year anniversary is rapidly approaching and while a grand celebration is planned, existential threats lurk everywhere and with Mr. House on the loose, you can be sure you’ll see him one last time.
You are Phlegna, the underworld goddess of plague. The world has just been ravaged by a cataclysm, and although you had nothing to do with it, you got empowered by the ensuing generalized bad health. Most of the old gods were killed or driven away. You escaped your prison while more powerful and far more evil deities made their escape into the outer planes. You thought about escaping as well, but the material plane right underneath your sacred stars was just - rather empty. You don't think there are more than 100,000 souls in the entire world. Most deities think this is too scant a meal to bother, so you're alone - for now. You are now looking for a particularly gifted individual or group that you can empower so as to restart your ancient cult. And who knows - maybe this time around you'll achieve divine supremacy.
Searching far and wide, you find only small scattered groups. There are a few representants of most races, but they are all scattered. There are places where members of the same race are continents apart, with little hope of ever rejoining. You look around for a resilient little group, and you find a race of:
<span class="mu-r">This is the end of the world.</span> It's also the birth of a new one, or an old one, depending on who you ask. Maybe it's more like an overdue arranged marriage.
You might not have been fully aware, but the world used to cast a Shadow: a separate realm of spirits, kept away by a barrier that only a certain few were ever meant to cross. Spirits are capricious, rarely logical, and often dangerous beings composed of the essence and energy of all things real; scuttling reflections with their own arcane hierarchies and motivations.
But every wall has its rats, and the barrier between your world and the spirit world was no exception. The Beshilu are a nasty manner of demon - derived from and connected to the spirit world, but fettered to the world of flesh, and gifted with many terrible abilities. They massacre and they multiply, and their only desire has ever been to tear down that wall between worlds... to gnaw at its foundations in greater and greater numbers, until the wolves could no longer keep them at bay.
They succeeded.
Too many tears. Too many crumbling wounds between worlds. The gauntlet was sundered, and when that wall crumbled away, the world of mortals and the world of spirits were merged into one. In those first terrible moments, everyone on Earth could hear a trillion shrill voices screeching out in triumph, and swarms of rats swelled across streets and forests in writhing tides.
The fabric of reality is now like a sieve, the threads wavering apart and stretching in new directions; space and time operate differently. The sun no longer rises, or sets, and light instead seems to meander from one place to the next according to whim. Places seem to stir and shift, reacting to their occupants in sometimes unpredictable fashion. The rules have changed, and will likely change more, but things will never go back to the way they were.
That was three days ago, and it would be a stretch to say the dust has settled, but you are adjusting to the chaos. You're a survivor, and while you may not fully grasp what's going on, you're not unfamiliar with the supernatural. You are determined to knuckle down and make your way in this fucked up new world....
It has been 100 years since ancient beings, known as the Old Ones, walked the Earth with their two strong feet. Now they are gone and we animals now rule the remains that they left behind. With our new knowledge of sword and sorcery, we were able to survive in peace for a while, but then came the three factions. The Apes: Strong giants, claiming to be as just as the old ones and believe they should be the ones to rule over the new world. The Pigs: An intellectual but slothful group who wish to rule the world with an iron hoof and remain kings while the others remained as dumb animals. Then there the Lizards: A fast and large group that want to set the world a blaze. Trying to forget the harsh past that the old ones left. All three sides wishing to go war and destroy one another to bring in what they believe to be true peace. But, unbeknownst to everyone, there was another group. One that was trying their best to find a way to heal everyone. To bring back order. You found it.... and now you are taking care of it.
Your name is Shelly Suzume, and you’ve finally discovered what really happened to you all those years ago. About your condition, your mind, and the mess it’s become.
Unfortunately, the truth isn’t good news.
After a retrieval mission was abruptly changed at the last minute, you decided to take matters into your own hands and infiltrate the Black Sheep Family’s headquarters. You’d been here before. Partially, at least. But with the city under blackout and Grimm swarming the outskirts, this seemed like the perfect time to go deeper.
And, somehow, it paid off.
You found her. The scientist who once worked as a nurse back at Haven Academy. Cerise. You interrogated her, accidentally broke her nose, and finally learned what really happened to you. Why your mind fractures the way it does. Why children flinch when they see your eyes. Why… you’re the way you are.
To put it bluntly, Grimm-infused Dust emits waves that warp the brain in unnatural ways. That’s what happened to you. No cure, at least not yet, and considering how experimental this whole thing is, you’re not even sure if one even exists. But you’re not about to stop looking.
Cerise asked for your help finding someone. An associate of hers. You agreed, partly because you’re not a monster, partly because you needed her alive and cooperative if you wanted answers.
Then came the elevator. A tight, hidden shaft buried deep beneath the mountain. Halfway down, the power started to flicker. You tried to stabilize things with your Semblance, but it didn’t hold.
Long story short, the elevator crashed. You got off light. Just a few broken fingers and toes. At least you’re alive.
Cerise isn’t… that well. She’s unconscious, with a hit in the back of the head, and without Aura to heal herself.
Now you’re trapped deep in the Black Sheep’s hidden laboratories with a dying scientist in your arms. Given what you’ve heard about this place (The experiments, the lack of ethics, the vast number of unholy secrets), you have no idea what’s waiting for you down here.
But one thing’s clear. You have to save Cerise. Mostly because she’s probably the only person in Remnant who can help you fix what’s been done to your mind.
This is part 8 of the "side quest" for "Disappearing Hogwarts". An unofficial alternate timeline based on HeadQM´s highly praised quest, Disappearing Hogwarts. Reading the original story is not exactly necessary but heavily encouraged since this quest will contain references to it. Created mostly as a place to wait while HeadQM was away for a while but slowly evolved into his own thing.
Quick recap so far: >Recently graduated Ravenclaw student is hired at Hogwarts as the new Caretaker. >Merlin somehow ended up inside your head. >Harry Potter´s daughter died, letting Salazar Slythering (previously stuck inside her head) free to continue his quest to control The Beast, an all powerful ancient creature accidentally created by Merlin. >He is currently now trapped inside a poor and weakened girl named Artemis. >You obtained a piece of The Beast >The Beast is now trying to escape under any circumstance >Because of it, magic is now gone and you now have to find a way to get the rest of the pieces before The Beast escapes What will happen now? Let's find out!
