Last thread’s synopsis is brought to you by DJ Headphones.
“H-Huh? *hic* But I don’t know how to sing.” DJ Liu doesn’t know how to do a recap.
“Liu. DJs don’t sing.” Vera furrows her eyebrows. This mousy lady isn’t the navigator of this team, so she should stay quiet from this point onwards.
“Then allow *me* to take over. Lydie here! We’re about to embark on the 2nd stage of our magnificent plan to save the city from the gangster takeover!” The Shameless Spotlight Thief continues. “We stole their leader from his cushy throne, and huh... Question! How does this woman of iffy reputation fit in the equation?” Lydie pokes at the unconscious Sasha Langdon, who she’s carrying. They’re *not* the group driving Youhao to the police. Also, they’re driving your van.
“She’s, like, <span class="mu-i">super</span> evil. So we’re taking her to Giorsal’s house, so she can take her soul away! You know, typical Gio stuff.” Aurora has a messed up image of Giorsal in her head. It doesn’t make it less accurate.
“And her soul is in here, in this vacuum flask, ‘cause we have a soul snatcher on our ranks too!” Crossbill pulls out the bottle. “Brag a little, Spooks.”
“W-When did you…?” Aurora didn’t realize she wasn’t carrying the vacuum flask!
“Don’t call me that, bird.” Odetta frowns. “And keep your eyes on the road, or you’ll get us killed.”
“Multitasking is easy, Oddie.” Crossbill whistles as she continues driving.
“I can’t believe Crossbill got Xavi’d…” Aurora looks down. Being the designated driver is a worse fate than death… or being a navigator.
“Who the hell is Xavi?” Odetta raises an eyebrow.
“There we go! Our current situation is crystal clear.” Lydie sounds content.
“F-Fine, come over. But next time, you all need to inform me of your hijinks beforehand!” Giorsal isn’t pleased, but agrees for the group to meet at her home.
And like this, Lydie’s team (Crossbill, Aurora, Lydie, and Odetta) continue driving towards Giorsal’s House…
>What is a quest? An interactive story in which a Quest Master (QM) writes and provides the readers with options on how to proceed — similar to a choose-your-own-adventure book or an old text adventure.
>Formatting guide: Only the thread's OP can format. Note that should the OP change ID, they will lose this ability as well. Remove the spaces between the [] brackets and the letters: Bold: <span class="mu-s">text</span> Italics: <span class="mu-i">text</span> Red: [ red ] <span class="mu-r">text</span> [ /red ] Blue: [ blue ] <span class="mu-b">text [ /blue ] Green: [ green] <span class="mu-g">text</span> [ /green ]
>Formatting guide for everyone: Dice (type this in “options”): dice + [no. of dice]d[no. of sides on the dice] (optionally you can add modifiers: dice + [no. of dice]d[no. of sides on the dice]+[modifier]; for a negative modifier type: +-[modifier]
Examples: dice+1d100 = a 1d100 roll, dice+1d100+10 = a 1d100 roll with a +10 modifier.
Spoiler: spoiler or by pressing alt+s in-thread (doesn't work in OP)
>QM Question: Do you worry much about board preferences and tastes when coming up with or running a quest? Do you make active efforts to tailor your output to what is "popular," or do you just do your own thing?
>Player Question: What do you look for an appreciate most in a quest: quality of prose/artwork, an appealing setting or world, an interesting plothook, or is it all about the waifus characters for you?
>General Question: Do you think /qst/ has enough activity, and has had enough good candidates, for anotehr king/queen tourney this year? Who would you nominate?
>Lurker Question: Why not at least +1 or comment on the updates so the QM knows someone is appreciating their work?</span>
You are a dwarf, proud, sturdy, strong. Your race has a rich and ancient history, though you know few details of it. Life finds a way to keep one from sitting down and hitting the books. On your end, it was the constant need to keep food on the table and learn a proper trade.
You do not live in a dwarfhold. In fact, you live rather far from any dwarfhold. This is the city of Anbenncost, the largest city in the Empire of Anbennar. Though there’s all kinds of creatures here, it is ruled, and mostly populated, by humans. You were born and raised here, yet your parents used to live in a proper dwarfhold, the hold of Khugdihr, far to the northeast, at the mouth of the great Serpentspine mountains. It was lost to the Greentide, a great invasion of orcs led by one Korgus, who was killed by a shieldmaiden by the name of Corin, who then supposedly rose to godhood as Goddess of War in the Cannorian Pantheon.
You don’t know much about all of that either. It all comes from rumors, hearsay, sermons… The older dwarves told you most of it, and they are spiteful and bitter about the fall of Khugdihr, you nodded along when they recounted the story of their battles against the orcs and goblins of Korgus but that’s all it was to you, stories and tall tales from your elders. You didn’t fight in the collapsing tunnels of Khugdihr, you didn’t desperately march through the depopulated wastelands of Castanor to reach Anbennar, you didn’t face the initial backlash from the locals when they saw the hordes of refugees at their gates, you didn’t struggle to adapt to strange customs and find work among those who hated you just for being there.
It's not that your life was simple either. You are the son of refugees, and a dwarf, in a city that hasn’t yet fully accepted dwarf-kind among them. They’d much rather you left for one of the Cannorian holds, those that were built among mountains far away from the Serpentspine and thus were unharmed by the Greentide. Maybe it’d be best to live in one of those holds but it would be a hell of a trek, and you heard many rumors that they’re not accepting newcomers. They’re full, they say. Well, Anbenncost and its people also insist that they’re full to the brim.
So, if they’re full, then you’re going to make a life of your own as an adventurer. Adventurers are the kind of folks you hear magnificent tales about, they fell evil and restore good. That’s what the tavern songs and bard tales say but you know it’s not so simple. It’s grey, really. You need coin to live, and sometimes the people hiring don’t have the interests of all that is good and well at heart yet they still need a good sword to take care of their issues.
Good, bad, you’re not really sure what your path is going to be, but it’s going to beat slaving away as a menial in the docks of the city for the centuries of live you have yet to live.
Your name is Vincent Cruz. You work in a shady government-backed facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. You're not here of your own volition, but you've grown used to your new life. By all accounts, you are a complete and total nobody to the Powers That Be.
Your job, frankly, sucks. You wake up, you spend hours upon hours studying fickle anomalies that could kill you at a moment's notice, you go to sleep, 30 GOTO 10. All so you can make money for the Abnormality Regulation Coalition (also known as ARC), the group who kidnapped you.
On the bright side, at least, you've been doing good at your job so far. You've been recently promoted for your hard work and you've been steadily earning more and more money from your research. At least you're making more money in one day than you did in a week during your last job.
It's cold comfort though. You can make all the money in the world but it doesn't change the fact you're stuck in the same ol' wringer. The same old rat race. Will you manage to make it out of here, you wonder, or will you die here? Left as nothing more than a rotten corpse in some random hallway in the facility.
Who's to say? All you can really do is to keep moving forward. One step at a time.
As for a recap of some notable things that happened recently?
You had an awkward, if friendly, reunion with your younger brother. He has gotten REALLY invested in religion and hey, if that helps him, you're not going to stop him.
You had another dream about the <span class="mu-r">Heart.</span> It's obsessed with you, but you still don't understand what it sees in you. Apparently it's also been pestering your brother and one of the corporate reps you work with, so who knows what its end game is?
You got a new anomaly called HARD TIMES but you don't know much about it still. All you know so far is that it REALLY loves to work and, hey, at least that's something you share in common with it.
You managed to resolve the situation Liz got herself involved with through some clever equipment usage and pure brute force. It feels nice to help people, you know? You even managed to help resolve a dispute she had with her friend Nicole.
Lastly, you subjected yourself to an incredibly painful shift by accepting five sponsorships that are going to make your job a nightmare. It'll make you a lot of money, yes, and it'll earn you a lot of respect with corpos. So the pain will be worth it, won't it?
That's your motto, Vince! You'll ENDURE at any cost! No matter how much your job sucks, no matter how much pain is inflicted on you, you'll keep moving. You are a flesh automaton and nothing, and you do mean NOTHING, will stop you from finishing your shift.
Your name is Johan, no last name given. Although you had to admit that self-nomenclature was of little import at the moment.
Especially now that you were in such a surreal landscape, one that was ever shifting and turning. It was a place were neither day nor night reigned--yet both divided their realms in the sky in an almost perfect line. What remained of the moon brightened your way in spite of this paradox; the newly minted stars speckled the sky like... well, stars.
On the subject of the heavenly bodies, the moon itself was shattered in the sky, bleeding out a waterfall of clear-dark liquid onto the mountain that it was closest to. The theater that was once proudly upon it was in shambles, barely recognizable. These three changes were, somehow, direct consequences of the actions of your lover. You intended to speak with her about that later, preferably after you all stop running for your lives.
The once strange and twisting town, placid as it also once was, was now slowly inundated with a deluge of moon-water, overwhelming the streets and alleyways until merging with the ocean. Said sea rose into the ports and piers and made the canals overflow. Market stalls were extricated by the water's force and slowly drifted away, roads became slick with a dark tinted water, buildings became flooded. But oddest of all was that the winding, changing, shifting and almost living town had now gained a semblance of stagnancy despite being overwhelmed by a flood.
Two people tailed behind you: Jeremy keeping a steady pace while Mimi was quickly catching up to you. While Jeremy was a good friend and a decent enough fellow in your eyes, though to be fair you'd only known him for less than half a week, Mimi was the person most close to you. And she was your aforementioned lover. While the idea of having a <span class="mu-i">girlfriend</span> was something you never really considered in your mind (at least not in a conscious level) there was definitely some romantic tension the two of you shared with each other. Now that you thought about it, <span class="mu-r">it was mostly at Mimi's insistence and assertion to be close to you that served as the catalyst to the relationship.</span> At the very least, <span class="mu-b">that strange aversion and frustration you held towards mimes was slowly being eroded, thanks to her.</span>
Kattleya wakes up in her humble abode, a floating house in the ocean city of Nereida, with the sound of her entrance bell echoing through the wind.
"Kaaaat!" she hears a youthful voice calling for her as she yawns and walks through the house, scratching her belly with one hand as she opens the door with the other, and she's confronted with three of the local children, their faces morphed into pleading full with pouting lips and teary eyes.
"Mister Furball Two is missing again! Can you help him pleeeeease?" one girl asks, and Kat smiles as she feels her magic waking up alongside her mind. She's a Witch, a Cat Witch, and it's her job to deal with the town's problems. But first...
>"Sure, kiddos! Where have you seen him last?" (Kat is altruistic and genuinely a good person, and will help people in need to the best of her abilities just for the sake of it)
>"You guys can pay?" (Kat is opportunistic and lazy, and normally only bothers herself with things if rewards are involved)
>"He's a cat, he'll come back when he feels like it. Now, shoo!" (Kat is apathetic and antisocial, and doesn't like to bother with other people, more interested in her research — napping)
The world is flawed. It is not imperfect though, just purposefully made that way.
Life is full of suffering and conflict, a race where the living fight to find meaning and solace, either by giving themselves and each other meaning, or by taking it from those weaker.
An unwinnable race, a race against time, a race against “The World”. A losing battle from the moment one is born, the pure soul is slowly drained of its myriad colors, then cast away once it has been consumed.
There exists a gate beyond “The World”, and past that gate is the infinite. A cold and unfeeling infinity, impartial and silent, an infinity where despite the existence of suffering, you witnessed the radiance of all souls of all ages.
So you, <span class="mu-i">[????]</span>, decided to bring “This World” into the infinite. Not for anyone in particular, you… don’t exactly have many people you care about to begin with, not out of resentment for the life you had to live, after all that’s just how life in this world is. Simply because you felt like things should be as they are beyond the Gate.
Another five? joined you out of their own volition, together you worked for millenia to bring the world beyond The Gate, and failed.
The Gatekeeper sent two away, who knows where. Another had to merge with the world and keep it from breaking apart under the immense strain from The Gate… And you’re not sure if the other two even existed.
As for yourself, The Gatekeeper pushed the world away using you. Your cultivation burned away as it set the skies ablaze, your body shattered as it tore through the ocean and the world’s crust, and your soul was fragmented into infinite specks of spiritual energy, leaving nothing behind.
But that doesn’t matter, you reached the gate and went beyond it. You learned things that even The Gatekeeper itself is unaware of. Your existence is perpetual, it will simply resume some indeterminate amount of time in the future. Fate is simply <span class="mu-s">ABSOLUTE</span>, and your destiny is <span class="mu-i">ours</span>
"Next time... I will..."
.... .... ....
Axle Era, Year 3266
Your consciousness begins to awaken once more in a mortal’s body, who had been gazing at the stars after a long day’s work in their master’s estate.
You’ll run a check on your “Body” and “Soul”. >roll a 2d20 for body and soul in that order.
The body is that of >A male >A female
You can ask yourself a question to refresh your knowledge about something (optional) >write in
//If any of the old players from last year end up here, stuff happened and I lost everything noteswise, I will be re-using a few things from that first run, but you can consider this a complete reset for the most part, I can only apologize for not properly backing things up.
You have three basic Approaches that function as a base for your character's strengths and weaknesses when facing problems, represented after the three Noxian principles.
To perform a <span class="mu-s">roll</span> you just have to <span class="mu-s">roll 2d6</span>, plus whatever points you have in the most appropriate <span class="mu-s">Approach</span> for what you're trying to do.
<span class="mu-s">2-5 - Failure </span> — Suffer all of the appropriate consequences. <span class="mu-s">6-9 - Complication</span> — The action is partially successful. Something goes wrong in the process. <span class="mu-s">10+ Success! </span> — The action succeeds without problem. The higher the better!
<span class="mu-s">This post will be a one-shot quest; we'll run the full story and then be done with it for now!</span>
They'd warned you that the weather in the Freljord was the coldest in all of Valoran but you hadn't expected it to be this bad. Snow falls all around you as you try fruitlessly to peer into the horizon from the deck of the warship that's bringing you and a hundred other bastards plus a handful of commanding officers into the frozen hell that is the Freljord. You can't see anything, though; all you get is a white screen of fog and snow in every direction, were it not for the lapping of the waves against the black hull of the ship and the gentle rocking they bring you would think you're not even moving at all!
It's... scary, truth be told. You know this is your one chance, the only opportunity you've got and you don't want to screw it up, and still the fear that grips your heart doesn't let go. You look away from the sea of white to notice General Darron is there, walking from conscript to conscript, all in similar situations to you. Forced into this mission without even knowing what you're doing. All young. All lacking equipment beyond the bare minimum Trifarian armor and blades. Darron, a tall man with dark skin and an even darker suit of heavy armor, is approaching you and you quickly straighten your back, hand to your chest in the proper salute though he's already waving his hands dismissively as he gets closer.
"Name and origin?" He inquires, pulling a small wooden board with papers on it, it's clear he's doing a census of sorts for all the conscripts.
<span class="mu-s">Who are you?</span> > Name > Gender > Nation of Origin
Also choose a Background, check the pic to see the options.
