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.
“HAHAHA, FOOLISH HEROES, KNEEL BEFORE MY GRAND MAGIC!”
Your skeletal body, adorned in robes that have lived longer than any human has breathed, lords over the fallen party of heroes. Your ultimate <span class="mu-s">Origin Magic</span>, though incomplete, has proven more than sufficient to take on the pathetic mortals sent to their knees before its might. Miasma-smoke fills the room, spewed by the necromantic fire left in the wake of your destructive magnum opus. However, to your incredible satisfaction, the Holy Sword itself, the only weapon capable of striking you down, lies corroded beneath the hero’s tattered frame, little more than a sparkly pile of smoldering slag.
Yes, your ultimate victory has been achie–
Pain unlike any you’d ever imagined stabs through your very being, a thin, needle-like blade jutting out from the cluster of mana animating your undead body, destabilizing it, causing your very being to quiver and weaken. Something is wrong— something is very, very wrong. . You collapse to the floor, your head snapping 180 degrees back to see just who had landed the killing blow. If your eyes could widen, they would: the Hero Michael, who you had thought collapsed in front of you, stands proudly behind you with an unknown blade in your back.
“H-how?”
“Lich King Atrebor,” the hero declares, his obnoxious condescension shamelessly leaking into his words as he drives the blade even further through your ribs, “you may have been wary of me, the possessor of the Holy Sword, but you paid far too little attention to my real strength: my friends.”
You turn your eyes back to the party: an illusion, a paltry trick, dissolves from the worthless entourage of the chosen one, revealing a golem in place of his second in command and that same eternal loser, Reinlock, in his place.
“Impossible!” you roar, “I was certain! He– he had the holy sword! He acted just as you would!”
“I’ve been chasing that bastard’s back my whole life, you undead bastard.” Reinlock snickers, blood trickling from his broken lips, “I know him better than the back of my own hand.”
This is infuriating but… it matters not. Your phylactery, the real vessel of your existence, is safe, in an unknown locale far from here. Or at least, <span class="mu-r">that’s how it should be</span>. Golden cracks start to form on you— first on your body’s mana core, then on your bones, then, horror of horrors, on your <span class="mu-i">mana itself</span>. “What trickery is this!” You scream, your rage powerful enough to shake the foundations of your castle.
The year is 1909, and the Great Frost hangs over the heads of every living man, woman and child. In the previous decade, global temperatures dropped to an unsustainable point, and the geopolitical landscape of Earth was changed forever. Mass refugee crises. Starvation. Hypothermia and frostbite. War. Nobody survived unscathed, and billions perished in the chaos.
Many of those that survived huddled around grand Generators, built by hundreds of engineers, acting as mechanical monuments to warmth and survival. Others sought out bold new technological developments, endlessly-running trains, subterranean colonies and grand zeppelins flying above the clouds. But for the majority, there were the Generators.
You never knew the world before, having been one of the “Frostborn” — those that felt their first breath of air in this icy world. Your parents were British refugees, fleeing north from Newcastle with thousands of others. Things were very hard growing up, and you feel strange absences in your memory, repressed parts of your youth locked away by your developing brain. Mum and Dad always told you that the less was said about the White Years, the better. That was the worst time, you’ve gathered.
Since then, many cities have fallen, crushed beneath instability, lack of resources or sickness. Others have developed into busy, industrious centres that now begin to hesitantly chart out the Frostlands beyond just the immediate scope of their perimeter. Your own city, Beacon, is one of the latter.
It's March 1945, you hear about a job in a kind of ‘secret city.’ You don't know what the hell these people are talking about, but it looks promising, even too good to be true. Still, you don't have much to lose after the Great War, so you take the opportunity.
After going through a lot of paperwork and a few other things, in less than a week you're put on a ship with no name and no clear destination. They just told you, ‘It's in the middle of the sea.’
Less than two weeks ago, you were a poor idiot living on the bare minimum, and now you're still a poor idiot, but now you're on a ship heading for ‘the city of the future’. You'd heard of its founder, Andrew Ryan, a rather unique man who was quite crazy about his ideals, which is nothing new in this world.
A couple of shitty days go by. You weren't used to such long boat trips, but you forced yourself to get used to it. The food on the boat is shit, but at least it's better than whatever you could scavenge from the rubbish.
One cold morning, you've lost track of time, sleeping in rooms the size of mouse holes, crammed in with a few other poor idiots like you, seeking a future in an uncertain city. A bell begins to ring, and the ship's crew start shouting announcements: "<span class="mu-s">We've arrived</span>!’ You look out the window and all you can see is sea as far as the eye can see. You run with the crowd to the upper deck.
The crew continue to shout ‘<span class="mu-s">we have arrived</span>’. This is when you see it: an enormous lighthouse, a huge tower, an effigy in the middle of the gigantic and infinite ocean, a shining golden tower rising above the waves.
A submarine appears out of nowhere from the darkness of the ocean, and the ship's officers make preparations to board the submarine.
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, yes YOU will determine the fate of Our Hero! your prompts shape his destiny and his actions (almost) all suggestions will be considered! don't be afraid to get creative!
The radiant summer sun shone down upon the verdant sylvan landscape; these fair meadows and groves had an ethereal quality that was, of course, a vestige of the faewild of old. The sight of its remnant had been among the most enchanting things you had ever seen.
And yet, you couldn't help escape the burden that was so heavily laden upon your head; the crown may be kept safely in the vaults under the Albrechtsburg, but its weight never quite left your head. It was among the elder days of the 13th century, the year 1275 to be exact. And the kingdom of Greifswald was at peace. Still, as far as realms were concerned, yours was still young, for it had been but thirteen years since the formal proclamation of the kingdom, though in truth, it has existed as a polity since 1241, though only as a dukedom. 34 years of an Adlershorst upon the throne, though the lineage stretched back further; by the standards of the continent, the royal bloodline was virtually new money.
Now, in the waning years of the 13th century, the king and court are engaged upon a tour of the northern fiefs, solidifying alliances and ensuring the loyalty of vassals. Yet things are not as they should be; monks travel and do not greet their king, and nobles leave their estates and disappear, only for them to resurface in strange and secretive gatherings. It wasn't rebellion, or at least, it hadn't been able to coalesce into one, but your suspicions were brewing.
War you knew; compared to the soldierly simplicity of that life, dealing with the two-faced members of the aristocracy was something you had grown into, but you still perceived the practice with distaste.
It is not that you don't enjoy the pleasure of conversation with some wine and roasted pork, but you would prefer it without the threat of walking yourself into a verbal trap, where you would need to extricate yourself with utmost courtesy.
All in all, the tour has had mixed results; the count of Hoenstein had provided you with some useful information regarding one Oskar von Schmallhausen and a Hedwig von Merckhayn, though what they were up to is a bit of a puzzle. On the other hand, your visit with the burgrave of Dornheim was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. You said a few things were maybe a tad bit high-handed, he retorted in kind, and you left as soon as you had come, before he would tear up his contract of vassalage to you or do something worse.
The matter left a bitter, though perhaps sour, taste in your mouth, and you didn't really feel like continuing this tour, or at least wanted to speed it up for your sake. If anything, the nobles should come to you; if all of them were in Ritterbach, there would be no more of this. But what was started should be seen through...
This is a collab quest that didn't take off on /i/ so I'm moving it here. It started with submissions from other anons but I'm going to turn it into my own drawquest. I was going to make a Medabots one but the anime is too precious for me to ruin it. I also need to test the waters for some matters.
Wait until I finish dumping if you're participating, thanks.
