SchNGrBTwM

Bah, let's ditch 'em, get a better tour guide. It's not like we can parse that accent anyhow.

9

You gesture rudely at Pepperstrelle, prising a stray seed from a molar and launching a contemptuous loogie in her direction. You've got better shit to be doing than dragging yourself through mud for someone who probably isn't even a real princess. Have some self-respect.

You stride off with renewed confidence down the boardwalk, turning your nose up at the indignant yelling. She eventually gives up, probably slinking off to go find some other total stranger to extort into a feudal contract.

Fucking mers.

Your boardwalk eventually reaches a t-intersection. A sign lopsidedly lashed to a tree proclaims this matchstick agglomerate of dwellings as Roosteries*.

You hear a splash behind you-

"-A traveller! A tourist! Hello! Greetings! Well come to our fair city!"

A mer** bounds smartly back out of sword's reach as you spin around, hand at your hilt. It grins, in what's probably supposed to be a friendly gesture.

"I don't need a tour guide," you preempt. The mer wilts, just a little, but springs back just as ingratiatingly fast.

"A common misconception! True true, Roosteries is known far and wide for its tethered star-"

"I'm so utterly enchanted by this town you talk about. I'm going to go miraculously somehow walk toward it without you holding my hand."

"Yet! It's also ranks fearsome a vicious den of thieves and brigands as any gule-town! Were you privy to that precious snippet?"

"Look at me goooooo," you say, to little effect. (Come to think of it, you actually were*** privy, but you're not engaging this leech.)

Cult policy probably opposes stabbing children for being annoying, because that's a good and sensible rule and your cult is a good and sensible organisation of mostly-upstanding morals. If, for some reason, the cult had an explicit policy of child-stabbing,**** you'd still be pretty opposed to it!

Holy hell is this kid trying your patience though. Do they even count as a minor with vocabulary like that?

"Ugh, fine. Show me the sights. Point out the obvious deathtraps. Don't expect to get paid for this."

"Negotiable!" The merkid plunges off the boardwalk, surfacing ahead of you and scrambling into a leg-using position again. "Would you be interested in Salvage Street, The Dire Mire, Ganker's Nook, or Roosteries' latest attraction... a weird Stiggan I just found?"

*"Home of the Grandfloam! Best and Brightest!*"

**same black eyes, glossy seafoam skin, white hair, paddles for hands, beautiful legs as her Royal Cadgesty.

***the guy whose name and other useful identifiers has completely slipped your mind told you a bit about... Guleson? Solger? Whatever this place is called. You recall "den of thieves" coming up, verbatim.

****which it almost certainly (probably) doesn't, let's be clear here-

/9

Princess Pepperstrelle

10

"Impersonatin' royalty? I could have yeh right clean off for that," the princess snaps. You clearly aren't grasping the gravity of your faux pas, so she demonstrates with a martial arts-esque swing of the fin and a "w'chaaa."

She stares at you with deadly seriousness during this charade.

"Naw but f'real. Ah've only so many wordways to call you a tall, clammy, stupid legger. Gimme somethin' ah can yell at yeh without any other tall, clammy, stupid leggers turnin' mah way, would yeh?"

/10

>"Evangeline Morelock-Lanceblood."

SpoilerShow

And now for someone completely different, because I'm almost five thousand words behind lmao

The King of Light sounds intriguing to me.

1

You are a King, but no king. A conceptual King, the regal air and the state-headly grace neatly pruned from its roots in reality.

You know not the first idle thought adjunct to ruling a kingdom. Could you give it consideration, would that you knew what must a King be to be more than an idea extract, you may well be alarmed.

It becomes a king to know what a king must do, no?

No?

Apparently not.

You were approached at what some may say was a critical time. You had few truths upon which to leverage the world into explicable place. Them being:

You are an existence, a consciousness, discrete and contained against the vastness that is without*.
That existence Is, in the deepest and most profound way something can be, a King Made of Light.
You are elsewhat. In some directional regard relative to Being a King Made of Light,

you Are,

We The People.

Let's go from the top, shall we?

*To the extant, this seems trivial. If you bothered to take reflect on your truths, to ingest them and let them gouge your non-existent innards and find the one which carved you up the most, this would be it.

/1

>Proceed

[1] Form a more perfect union

Form a more perfect union

You wouldn't know how or why you'd want to do that! Try again later, perhaps.

2

You are We The People.

Your formative minutes were spent in what was, for most intents, senses, and purposes, a featureless void. There were six beings and one creature whose name you may one day learn is "horse", though the latter barely registered in what we shall mistakenly describe as your "childhood."

Your attention was dominated by an entity at least as powerful as you, if not stronger. It had a quality to its voice betraying its fondness of half-truths and grey areas, which seemed to you improper - even amusing. That grey voice, trying on True words, solid words, words to build on - it said like it knew law the following (when you were too young to laugh):

You six were chosen,
It was a great honor, that,
this Orchestrator had sought them out,
to fight to the death.

(You were introduced)

A star, of a kind, in a shell, of a kind
Inexpertly summated with an explanation, of a kind
-And in its greyest voice, a phrase more becoming of it than any other-
There's much it's forgotten.
Perhaps it'll rediscover itself
before you lot figure out how to kill it?

It said it like a challenge, a barb
like you should ache with incompleteness
For something you lack senses to perceive?

Amateur hour.

Anyway.

Your formative years, with a ragged old bear and a toy train and a horse and a bird and a tiny delicate flying machine that wouldn't make it to the ground intact if you launched it out your nursery window.

And a vampire, though she doesn't fit in this allegory as nicely.

---

Your first-after-those-first memories are these ones, right now - where you stand amongst giants, their arms criss-crossing overhead and sealing the world in, close and low. Your ambient glow, bouncing off the shimmering mirrored floor and the waxy underscales of the giants' cloaks. Every wave of your hand and turn of the head changes the play of light about you, yet returning to the same pose renders the same adjoining planes, the same stark bisections over the same [leaves].

It's your first act upon this world, the first time in memory your actions impacted something Without. It's exhilarating.

You laugh, and with no precedent to call on lungs and throat and tongue the sound just happens, and it's incredible, and you can't stop. You don't stop.

When you figure out how moving around and touching stuff works, it's going to blow your goddamned mind.

Before that, though:

What finds you in the gloam?
/2

2

Folk'a th'Gulespoor know well not'ta tromp through th'depths, less raise a din on th'scale of We The People.

'Cause deep'n the gloam, foolishness like that'll have yeh meet yer end fer failin' t'heed a simple warnin':

'Katuali'.

2

A kind soul.

2

An ominous yet comforting darkness.