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Danarieth

Danarieth

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He tied his boots.
With his two legs he launched into the blinding dawn.

"Why are you called Vanir?"
"Because I'm the god of nature!"

He had peeled off his night; this was more than freedom, this was world-severance. School? “If you want to damn me to a bonfire, make it one brighter. Gnomish firelighters to stain my pyre, scimitar my valediction speech to foes, everything a north wind soul can grant. The dreams night scrolls over us are enchiridion, not mummified scholarship; dint is a sheath to my heart.”

Like turning pages of the book of the sun blades of its strength flashed between black trees as he ran the road down; it was fall; crows made wild devils on the wind, the road curved, no more roofs of home were in sight and he seemed a vorpal shuriken breaching the escape velocity of habit.

Vanir paused at the bridge. If you'd scanned his brain then it would have been flushed like some kind of unfurled flower. I see him as a glass in the twin hands of youth and oxygen, ready to be hurled, shine, fall. That or a boomerang.

He unslung his backpack. He took out a tin cup. He'd worried ceramic would break. He went down to the riverbank and drank a lot. Then he walked around to the bridge's other lee and pulled out two drawstring pouches. He took one rune-scribed pellet from each, held one in each hand, and kneeled facing the ducks on the water. He stared at a spot in their midst. Steadied.

Then his fists traced a rapid sigil and there was an eruption of flight and honking, as the pure kinetic blast he'd cast hit.

Damn. No kill.
Not one.

But casting had been a release, an ice blush of dopamine. His palms were smeared gray with powder. He bathed them off. His casting had not been terrible but there was no way it could yield a missile strong or concentrated enough to waste even a bird.

At least they'd felt it.

He trouped over the bridge, headed north. At first random mental fragments swirled in time with his march, then it ground even them down.

26-Jan-2015 18:47:26 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 18:59:52 by Danarieth

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
More rough, totally spur of the mind stuff:

One Rabid Insomniac Night in the Workshop

I had cleaned out the old machinery. There were still wild elementals down there, wandering through the caves and conveyor belts and drifting among the strata of pipes and catwalks, but they were docile for now. Like flies.

It was late late afternoon, the time we call embertide, and that amber washed the whole one-street town. Think New England. I'd been below all day, working without end, and it was that point where after one face communion with the sun you either decide you've done your work for the day, or you turn back to it and become immortal.

I climbed down the rest of the bank steps and handed him a few bills.

"Bring me a whole sack of restore potions. I'm going back down.”

My noob nodded. He would go into a side alley, trace a magic circle on the ground and wait meditating in its center, eyes closed, as he climbed the queue for use of the teleport circle in Amsidar. Hovering hellishly with the green sparks of the eyelid, unable to think or do anything but maintain that wavelike state that would maintain the spell. Or lose his place. Then jog through the city under sunset to the alchemist, then tele back to the circle here.

26-Jan-2015 18:47:40 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 18:59:26 by Danarieth

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Ariane

Normally, having an academic life made decisions easy. When you can't work on project, read; when you can't even read, sleep. But that day Riane was feeling solipsistic, wracked by recent events, so she blew an astral rune to call someone she hadn't seen for a long time, with whom there'd be nothing lost if they didn't hit it off.

Besides, catching up was good. A chance to talk about her life was a chance to organize it.

She had a suspicion that if civilization didn't hold a universal stigma against talking to yourself aloud, people would think a lot more of their ideas through. But the stigma lived and had infected her, so she said: “I'm in Varrock tonight, want to catch up?" and he said "Sure." And that night they met by a towering bronze on his campus and made their way around the walls of the palace, to the Exchange, lit by an incandescent orb she kept at her shoulder and by the fierce glow of aerial citadels above.

Dr. Owen Casbah, Academic Templar, had a jaw as sharp and a face as airbrushed as he had three years ago.

"I read your big thing," he said, "your Kipple paper. Have you been able to test it out yet?"

"Just a few days ago, actually."

"Do I get to see it?"

"Maybe. After some rebuilding."

"I see. How's the adventurer's path treating you, otherwise?"

“You know. Living the Gielinoran dream. Continual labor and experience, even sleep staved off to the point of breakdown with the magic of super restores.”

"One gulp of which could lard the Varrock Soup Kitchen for a week, yet to you is trash.”

“ 'What is the pain of those living against the catastrophes which stand to block the immortal forms awaiting us?' The new metaphysics has been so drastic to ethics, it's almost superficially regressive."

"Wasn't that what Ivandis said to justify condemning the populace of Morytania to centuries' oppression, just so he could blaze through the sky?

26-Jan-2015 18:48:28 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 22:58:19 by Danarieth

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Don't say you've turned Zam on me."

"No. My point was that it sounds similar, because, and I guess it's unfair to you to say this, but—we are actually facing the apocalypse."

"From the gods? I didn't think you'd be so...birther. Teragard awaits us. So do a thousand others. Any time one node of the infinite city is destroyed we can simply add another, regardless of plane or place. Did the first God Wars disrupt the oceans where we're already planning to build havens? Our race has shown itself capable of organized military action that turned the tide against two invading destructive gods, and now all's been silent for months. The truly heedless destroyers, like Goth, have only been a threat to worlds past because none had our level of magic, as far as I know. And let's be honest, the gods themselves are individuals who wisen up."

"Whether I agree with you or not on all of those, it goes deeper. And more disastrous. I can't say much about this, but essentially our planet is the Matrix—just an anima factory which eventually develops souls complex enough to feed a meanwhile-hibernating cosmic parasite.
Except that, unlike the Matrix, our world is a consumable.
Yeah."

"Oh.
This...can't not be related to Xenia's death."

"You heard about that."

"I assumed you were here today for the funeral."

"I wasn't invited."

"You sound like you know why."

"No, it's just. We had some, we had a. A disagreement."

"You killed her."

"What the ****?"

"It's kind of obvious. You lived with her for a year in recovery after the whole bat**** thing with Ellaron, you're virtually her daughter, and would have been invited in any other case; your reflexes are impulsive and aggressively preservationist, most murders are between people who know each other well, and let's be frank, Xenia was neither in many dangerous situations or very likely to die except to someone she trusted."

26-Jan-2015 18:48:57 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 19:08:55 by Danarieth

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
"You're like a ******* stiletto. Why the hell did I want to talk to you?"

"Everyone knows you did it but you walk free, so she was doing something evil that required you to hunt her down with Kipple and kill her. To me that suggests demonic possession."

"Oh my god, you're enjoying this."

"Which people would want to keep hush. So presumably she was trying to wake this cosmic parasite. Yes, it would have been demonic possession rather than mind control: anyone who could MC her would just do the job themselves, unless it was suicidal—also possible. But the only beings who stand to profit from a plane's demise are creatures of the Abyss, who are demons, and who feed in any case on disarticulated planar fiber. So the SOJ is an egg, is it?"

"This is frankly conspiracy level."

"This is just sounding tests, mixed with echolocation off of your reactions."

"Pray tell, was the World Guardian at the funeral?"

"I was guessing the nosy ******* would be involved in this. No. But I can't see him not being invited. More likely we're so far below his interest that a friend's funeral can't ass him to abandon his endless amulet-making, just in case the world's fate ever hinges on perfect use of a rhododendron mould. Saradomin, I despise him."

Ariane was level. “Well, we owe him a lot. Don't forget he's kind of a genius, even if it's more...hand smarts, craft stuff. And whatever his credulity, it lets him go with the flow."

"If you call the blood of thousands hand smarts."

"He's an attack dog, then, and a damn resourceful one. You were right about it being an Abyssal demon, by the way, one dead thanks to him. Anyway, I didn't mean to end up defending a rube like this."

26-Jan-2015 18:49:26 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 19:10:32 by Danarieth

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Cybertramp

And I was just thinking about the days now that he spends them splayed on that crystal throne when he'd be sitting at the base of the wall in his worn dustcoat and feathered hat doing, in some kind of inscrutable extravagance, nothing, or tramping over the whole city with his friends secreeting huge weblike theories one-liner by piercing eye, himself indistinguishable from a tramp save for the massive red and gold carpet of his cape. Or he'd be down the street in the bowels of the library, combing the driest of records for some pattern. He'd long since read everything worthwhile in the cone of his interest, and I don't think he could tenant the thought of working his way up a different ladder or even of detaching from the ******* of info long enough to weave more than scrim. That was why his scholarship always seemed to me somehow stultified, like a desperate cover-up. Even when he played the tramp, well, it was a mask. The one time I went to his house was the one time I saw him at ease; it was everything the city was not, tea, birch, and trellis.

And then there were his -friends-, the ones who followed him on these rampages.

The most twinging to see gusting behind him in her weird brass clothes of the south was Sekastra. She was insane, she claimed the name of the goddess of claws and made everyone call her “it”.

---

"Ast*a, not sure what you're getting at...”

The psychoactives made a wavy purple neon clasp his brain tighter and tighter, just begging him to—

Everything was a little bit metaphorical. A badly-articulating dream. It could be hard to remember that thoughts could be discarded as objects could not.

Sekast*a took off its metallic mask. It was a little girl who bit its lip defiantly.

"Stop being a tramp. The truths we've committed to uncovering demand no science, only scholarship, only connection. It's shameful we haven't solved everything by now when all the research has been done for us, whose only job is to collate it from across

26-Jan-2015 18:50:10

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
long-sundered regions."

“Chill. Have some marrentil. I know our position, I'm not an idiot, just trying to understand.”

His face was...
slanted across by orange light.

Sekast*a took the marrentil he reached across, but put it down on the table. Instead it went across the room and began fishing through his cabinet.

With its back to him it poured itself (he swore aloud) the tiniest trickle of pure black liquid.

“Do not drink that. Or you will die.”

It leaned against his desk, looking back over to where Cyber sat, testing the weight of the glass in its hand.
"You swig this at Bandos, though."

"Yeah
a semidivine adult male with unnatural constitution, and only in combination with”
it was tipping the glass to its lips
“at least take it with brew.”

"This is dumb.” Clang of glass on surface. “We have work.”

He let out a long breath. “Thank you for not doing that. Okay. What you said about collation. It's teleportation that changed things. Just think what people were living like, 70 years ago, what kinds of lives were possible then. To do anything like what we do now, we'd have to spend our lives traveling.”

“Along those lines, I was thinking about the effect of alchemy and the devaluation of gold. When the nature runes you used were an even more valuable resource, it was a circumstantial spell used mostly by criminals for liquidation.

Anyway. Nearly five years ago, when I was just a little kid, a huge crimson pulse of power wracked the planet, emanating from Dragonkin Castle, resulting in a minor but statistically significant increase in mean anima levels across the populace. That's based on data from Varrock, Falador, Lletya and Meiyerditch."

"And thanks to Ali we know it was Bilrach's death. Once the Frem get to the bottom of the dungeon we'll know how he died. Be patient, it's just a matter of time."

"I'm not content with that, and I have another theory.
Think what the Ritual Marker does: it collects

26-Jan-2015 18:50:28 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 18:55:51 by Danarieth

Danarieth

Danarieth

Posts: 1,370 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
the anima of a sacrifice, then redistributes it to those around. We've never figured out how one mahjarrat death can rejuvenate an entire tribe, our only guess is they either have some powerful fundament or soul, or the Marker acts as an amplifier.

We read Bilrach speak of an alternate source of power, then, thanks to that excellent Fre* skald, saw his stolen Marker charged up with portal mojo. We also know he meant to free Zamorak, and judging by Zamorak's return, apparently succeeded. Moia can drain power from portals, so we can only assume Bilrach does the same. So the mahjarrat soul theory can't be right. It has to be an enhancer."

"Okay. He went down there to a plana**y unstable region, cut portals, and used the stolen Marker to multiply the power he drained from them. All with the aim of—"

"Sacrificing himself to Zamorak. Or just freeing him. Whatever."

"You once had a theory that the Rift was an elder artifact. What do you think of that now?"

"One sec, let me finish. What I'm saying is that since we have proof it's an enhancer, not limited to mahjarrat souls, there's no reason the strange power had to be Bilrach's death. In fact we know it COULDN'T be, or the power would have gone to Moia! Since there was a maj around to soak it up, the strange power could only have taken place if it was intentional. Its own point. Devised.

A signal, a call, a worldwide summons to Daemonheim.

Or a faked death."

26-Jan-2015 18:50:45 - Last edited on 26-Jan-2015 19:14:34 by Danarieth

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