ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ ᴜɴᴅʏɪɴɢ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
necrolord) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2021-09-03 09:19 am
necrolord) wrote in deercountry2021-09-03 09:19 am
o1 . like an old enemy
Who: necrolord and you!
What: A necromancer comes to town.
When: Early September.
Where: The docks, Gaze, and anywhere.
Content Warnings: Undead, implied murder of NPCs, and all the usual warnings of this character.
(1) ghost ship.
Maybe, in your wandering, you've come to the harbor. There are fishing boats and trading vessels here among the dark, choppy waves.
One of them looks like astonishingly bad news.
If at any point you got dredged up by pirates, you will recognize it immediately. The hull is dark and oily; the sails are tattered and grim; the crew are all horribly corrupted. They are scaled and tentacled and barely-human. But they seem to have lost all aggression: they move in rote, mechanical ways, taking no notice of their surroundings.
Only one man stands out from them. He looks remarkably average: dark clothes, dark hair, dressed in a captain's coat of black and gold. What might stop you, though, are his eyes. They are black from edge to edge, sclera and all, with an oily shimmer that feels wrong to look upon.
"What do you think," says the captain, to whoever has stopped to stare. "Corpses or skeletons? Skeletons are a classic, but I do hate to get rid of the tentacles; loses the novelty."
(2) weak and weary.
Gaze is absolutely drenched in ravens. Dripping ravens. He's pretty sure ravens don't flock, typically, unless they are scavenging the dead on a battlefield; so that's promising. Regardless: there is a man before you trying to coax one of the ravens onto his wrist.
It perches there, and he looks briefly, utterly delighted. He reaches out a few fingers to stroke its feathery breast, and the raven lets him. His voice drops low, soft, somber:
"Is there balm in Gilead?" he murmurs. "Tell me; tell me, I implore."
The raven considers this. It cocks its dark little head towards him. It leans forward, the shaggy feathers of its throat bristling, to speak.
FUCK OFF, croaks the raven. It pecks the Emperor Undying on the forehead, takes a shit, and smacks him with a wing on its way out.
The man, left in the wreckage of this situation, does something vaguely impressed with his eyebrows. He chews his lip. He says, "Welp."
Then he turns to you, the poor sap who witnessed this, and spreads his hands in defeat.
"Worth a shot," he says. "Did you know the collective term is an unkindness of ravens? I see why."
(3) wildcard.
[ Happy to match formatting! ]
necrolord and you!What: A necromancer comes to town.
When: Early September.
Where: The docks, Gaze, and anywhere.
Content Warnings: Undead, implied murder of NPCs, and all the usual warnings of this character.
(1) ghost ship.
Maybe, in your wandering, you've come to the harbor. There are fishing boats and trading vessels here among the dark, choppy waves.
One of them looks like astonishingly bad news.
If at any point you got dredged up by pirates, you will recognize it immediately. The hull is dark and oily; the sails are tattered and grim; the crew are all horribly corrupted. They are scaled and tentacled and barely-human. But they seem to have lost all aggression: they move in rote, mechanical ways, taking no notice of their surroundings.
Only one man stands out from them. He looks remarkably average: dark clothes, dark hair, dressed in a captain's coat of black and gold. What might stop you, though, are his eyes. They are black from edge to edge, sclera and all, with an oily shimmer that feels wrong to look upon.
"What do you think," says the captain, to whoever has stopped to stare. "Corpses or skeletons? Skeletons are a classic, but I do hate to get rid of the tentacles; loses the novelty."
(2) weak and weary.
Gaze is absolutely drenched in ravens. Dripping ravens. He's pretty sure ravens don't flock, typically, unless they are scavenging the dead on a battlefield; so that's promising. Regardless: there is a man before you trying to coax one of the ravens onto his wrist.
It perches there, and he looks briefly, utterly delighted. He reaches out a few fingers to stroke its feathery breast, and the raven lets him. His voice drops low, soft, somber:
"Is there balm in Gilead?" he murmurs. "Tell me; tell me, I implore."
The raven considers this. It cocks its dark little head towards him. It leans forward, the shaggy feathers of its throat bristling, to speak.
FUCK OFF, croaks the raven. It pecks the Emperor Undying on the forehead, takes a shit, and smacks him with a wing on its way out.
The man, left in the wreckage of this situation, does something vaguely impressed with his eyebrows. He chews his lip. He says, "Welp."
Then he turns to you, the poor sap who witnessed this, and spreads his hands in defeat.
"Worth a shot," he says. "Did you know the collective term is an unkindness of ravens? I see why."
(3) wildcard.
[ Happy to match formatting! ]
no subject
At least, that's what she's pretending to think. Though the harder she fights for the lie, the more she kind of starts believing it as a generally good idea. "For all we know, we're infecting the soil with potion of turn you into a squid. Definitely ain't worth whatever mystical secrets we can divine or whatever. Even if divination were real."
no subject
"It just seems a bit untidy," he agrees. "I'm reluctant to go sloshing blood around before we understand what it does."
He is reluctant to go sloshing blood around for another reason, though not one locally relevant. But the Emperor Undying has had a very difficult week, with rather a lot of surprises, so he'll keep to his principles on this one. His principles include not handing out weapons to be used against him without very good reason, and magic flowers do not pass the mark.
"That said, if squidly transformation magic checks out, I think divination has a pretty good shot."
no subject
"Don't know if that's more or less encouraging. Divination's just a fancy way of saying destiny, and I lost faith in the idea of destiny when some shit started happening that the universe definitely couldn't have planned for." Ostensibly, she means getting shunted into a different reality like this. "Not unless there's some hive mind of universes all pulling strings at once. But obviously that's bullshit, right?"
no subject
"I'd hope so," he says, "or things just got more complicated than I was prepared for, personally speaking."
It's funny because he is God. It's funny because his kingdom is in shambles, and now he's a squid.
"But I'll admit the magic here seems to include tricks I haven't seen before."
no subject
Kind of a large list, she realizes, but it's fine. She's paying more attention to whether there's any sort of recognition on his face when she says each of those things. "Can't wait to see what they manage to surprise me with next."
no subject
He would rather like to know who created her, and how. Not with any urgency, mind; it's an academic interest.
"The blood magic has come as no surprise to me," he contributes, like he's adding to their collaborative list. "Though I will confess even I do not know how to turn a man into a squid and back. That's a new and oddly specific trick."
no subject
She gives a noncommittal shrug. "Not sure how much I believe the idea that we're all actually those squids now. I've heard enough about who and what I'm destined to be that I'm just kind of like, yeah, okay, whatever you say, big spooky blood dudes."