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jennamoran · 2 years

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Nobilis 4 Quest Set #2

Hi!

So, I’ve been working on the second quest set for Nobilis 4, and I figured I’d share how this one went too!

This one took a little longer, in part because it was dealing with emotionally tougher stuff—it tends to bog me down indirectly, just like real life stress does—but mostly because I got called in for jury duty, and decided my neck had recovered enough to go in, and it really hadn’t. But, they didn’t actually need me to serve on a jury, so at least it didn’t become a thing.

Anyway!

On to the stuff I typed up as I went! Please be warned that this devlog is the size of a large novella.

Content warning: OCD stuff. Existential horror. Very mild body horror. Minds and reality not being trustworthy. Puppets. Snakes.

OCTOBER 30

All right, Otherworldly quest set.

I can’t get very far today, guest for early dinner, so this is just notes from thinking last night:

I think the character is Vi, short for Vervain. (Parents were Mind’s Eye Theater LARPers.)

... not to mock gamers or people who use weird names, to be clear, just, I think that’s the kind of place you’d be coming from to name your kid Vervain.

Tentatively the name I have for her Estate is “Backdrops,” although it could be “the Stage” or “Physical Context;” the idea is that the central focus is artificial/false context set up behind/around something. Her Estate is what politicians or companies use when they explain away something using a backstory or reasoning that isn’t actually accurate but would sort of or partially justify whatever if it was. It’s stage backgrounds. It’s the painted sea behind an aquarium, it’s Akio’s stars.

It’s a True God Estate; stages on other worlds default to blank, I guess.

Aside: in Nobilis, the Estates of “True Gods” are theoretically Earth-specific: they may have local parallels on other worlds, but they themselves do not appear there. For instance, if the Sea were a True God Estate, then only Earth, of all the worlds upon the Ash, would have a sea. Other worlds might have really big lagoons, or some kind of weird Estate that was “the Sea, only on this world, and with fundamentally different metaphysical properties—it doesn’t have limitless depths, it’s not the cradle of life, instead it’s home to lightning and its hands reach to the sky” or whatever..

Vi’s Chancel is, of course, a stage. A performance, being played out. And, of course, when you’re there, living it, you don’t realize that. It’s only when you manage to see through it somehow, or when you die and go backstage, or when you’re far enough out of focus as a random NPC, that you find out.

Then you’re in the larger, truer world of the Chancel. ... which is, of course, a stage.

A performance, being played out.

Vi starts on Otherworldly 1 and everything’s fine. Everything’s great.

Certainly nobody killed 100 people to make a Chancel.

Aside: some GMs skip this, and alternatives have existed since ... I think Nob2, maybe Nob3 ... but Chancels usually get made with one murder a night for a hundred nights. I can’t remember whether I made any updates to this in Nob4 but probably nothing transformative!

Certainly nobody cut off the little town she’s living on from the outside world completely, sealing it in a pocket world run by a True God, and filled up the souls of a handful of people there with metaphorical acidic gnomes.

Aside: I’ve been told that your Imperator’s Estate “crouch[ing]” in your soul “like an acidic gnome” is one of the more eccentric bits of wording in Nobilis 2nd edition, and while I actually have a pretty good justification for the imagery there when I bother to dig in and remember it, generally lately I just own it and enjoy being acidic gnome soul writing girl.

Vi dreams of a weird labyrinth sometimes, but that’s fine. Sometimes the people around her seem a little off, but that’s fine. Her Amazon delivery is late, and she can’t remember when she actually ordered it, and keeps forgetting to check, but that’s fine.

She knows she’s a Power. She knows she’s changed. She can see the backdrop sometimes. She knows if she wants to face the labyrinth she can just ... pull it into being in the world. She knows if she wants to see the stage, she can just ... twitch the backdrop of things aside.

She doesn’t know what actually happened, though, so the conclusion she comes to at the end of Otherworldly 1 is that she needs to face the labyrinth she keeps dreaming about. She needs to call up the staging of it into the world around her. She summons up the door that leads there in her waking life. She knows she has to step through.

On an Otherworldly Arc, of course, she doesn’t.

On an Otherworldly Arc, step 2 is “putting that off for a bit.”

Talking to her family on the phone about things as she slowly comes to realize, bit by bit, that her neighbor isn’t real. Is just ... stage dressing put back up, after ... after the murder.

As she realizes that the office she works at burned down.

As she realizes that the guy she greets every morning at the store where she gets coffee was killed as part of this whole thing too.

As she realizes that while her dog is a good dog, it’s definitely not the dog she remembers, because the dog she remembers having had a face.

As she eventually remembers that the family member she’s been talking to died years before any of this as well.

[The other option is that “as she eventually remembers that they don’t talk to her any more;” which I think ... hm. Why would that be? I guess most likely they’d be fundie, with her being either LGBT or just involved with someone or something they didn’t like, and her later taking the name Vervain on her own. ... but ... well, I’ll keep that in my back pocket as more interesting, but it’s also a more complicated backstory.]

Anyway, that’s Otherworldly 2, and lets her realize that the world she’s living in is ... not the world she’s living in, which gives her the confidence to face the labyrinth she’s been dreaming of.

The labyrinth in question is loosely modeled on an anime death game/god tower labyrinth, and she probably initially thinks it’s the “actual” reality of where she is. Ah, she realizes, she’s one of five? people who’ve been chosen to be infused with soul-eating divine essence to try to reach the center of a labyrinth and ... become one with the god? Is that desirable? Is there an option?

I think I want her to be mobility-impaired; I haven’t really defined in what fashion, since it’s mostly just on my mind from being stuck in bed so much lately, and won’t be more fully defined until needed. Probably what I’m looking at is “can manage short periods without a wheelchair.” It’s possible that the Imperator just ... omits ... that impairment from the labyrinth stage. It’s also possible that it’s a serious issue there. Either way, what’s going to be a bigger deal here than the actual labyrinth is the pervasive dysphoria/disempowerment of “being changed by the Imperator;” that she’ll change, either way, physically and mentally, as she approaches the center, and won’t be OK with that. At the end, she realizes that that’s because this isn’t her there at all. It’s literally ... a character on a stage; a puppet. She’s ... an actor. Or something else. She sees something at a ... save point, or shrine to the Imperator, or something, a point of ascension, and realizes that the labyrinth too is just a stage, and breaks past it, into reality. Maybe.

Book 2, quest 1 is her dealing with a flower rite.

Book 2, quest 2 is her slow realization that she and the Deceiver she’s opposing are in fact not in the outside world fighting for reality but on another stage.

Book 2, quest 3 is a second try at the labyrinth with the Deceiver, who very much needs an ally since it’s being digested by a True God apparently, trying very hard to convince her that in fact reality still exists, though also that it shouldn’t.

Book 2, quest 4 is their attempt to find the Chancel exit and break out into reality, to become more than just their puppet selves in a True God’s gastrointestinal processes, which succeeds. I think definitionally they at least find an exit with sufficient valence to convince the reader that it’s real, and possibly go through it, just because of how Otherworldly 4 is supposed to end, also because there probably should be an Aspect 4 in here somewhere

And that’s as far as I got while thinking about it offline!

I am not sure how the exit is convincingly real; probably we go back to the flower rite for that? Like, the Properties of Backdrops.

Some Spoilers: Later, I would swap out the family member she was talking to and the Deceiver for different characters. I kind of forgot that the Chancel was *explicitly* set up as a place where behind every performance was another one and just focused on the idea that it was a place that *could* have false worlds in it—that doesn’t change anything, just makes some of the later story bits better, but you’ll see me be confused about it for a bit later on.

[thinking about it as a whole in response to a friend’s comment]

I like how absolutely horrifying it is while also ... like ... we haven’t even really met the Imperator, it won’t be one of the nice ones but it can still legitimately be towards the decent end, or of course can be ohgodwhydoyouexist

All we really know is that it’s kind of in denial about killing 100 people and wants to get to know its Powers better.

Aside: “There is no reality,” Tatiana said. “There are only concentric layers of illusion.” – from The Night-Bird’s Feather

OCTOBER 31

Book 3, quest 1: she’s in reality, but it’s a mess. Her town is devastated, because like it’s not so small that a hundred deaths is everything but it’s small enough that her little neighborhood of it is falling apart. She has to face the fact that there are Excrucians, and the Locust Court, and Powers, and all of that. That the Angels are out there and apparently the same kind of thing as the labyrinthine god. Also there’s a Big Pit outside of town that’s getting bigger every day and no one has the funds to deal with it because all the town’s money went to police (and apparently didn’t even get to them??) and though the mortals don’t seem to notice it LITERALLY has nothing in it, it’s not a big hole in the ground, it’s a big hole in Creation. She doesn’t have the power or knowledge to deal with this kind of thing. She’s going to have to go back.

... I think mostly, she’s just living, haunted by what happened, though, with most of the details there only really explored in quest 2.

Book 3, quest 2: talking to her therapist about all this and how much she doesn’t want to go back. Except the real world is suffering, and she has this conviction, and maybe it’s not even right, that if she goes in and gets a piece of the True God--- This is the kind of plan that makes sense in novels--- That she can patch it. That she can’t maybe fix the broken town, or her harrowed life, or get rid of the Excrucians or the Locust Court or the way the world “really” is, but she can fix the Pit.

Book 3, quest 3: so she goes back into the Chancel, assuming that she was right that she ever left. She doesn’t know. She assumes. She believes. But she can’t know. Even perfect cosmic knowledge could just be a brain spasm. ... but that’s more quest 1-2 trauma, just, it pervades. She goes back into the Chancel. She goes into the depths. She hunts for what she needs, because it’s a True God, so its ability to take herself from herself is two-sided. Right? She knows that. She can steal a bit of it.

Aside: I struggled a bit with the end of this book. You can take the quest 4-5 bit coming up as particularly tentative; it’s sort of on point but the details and nuances change a LOT by the end.

Book 3, quest 4: She’s lost a key part of herself. Perhaps ... “the recognition of the self as separate from the world.”

Her descent to the part of the labyrinth where she can get to what she needs also involves understanding that she’s already a part of the God. And, it of her.

It involves accepting that; involves stepping into a world where it’s true even if it wasn’t true before.

If she isn’t making herself one of the portion-Selves of the God, as it were, then how can she take anything from its heart to be her own?

And the end-of-quest revelation is then the puppet looking out from the stage at the shadow of the actress who still holds its strings, and seeing that something of who she was must still exist ... out there, anyway. That the original Vi must still be there, boundaries intact, in the world beyond the labyrinth, even if the puppet-self that reaches the heart of the labyrinth is lost.

Book 3, quest 5: The greenest option here is a mortal reconciliation—with family, or at most a Familia member. Something like that. Finding human connection.

I don’t actually know how else to continue the story from the moment where the puppet passes the bit of god out to the outer Vi other than that.

It’s a terrible story if that’s instrumental, if she goes “thanks existentially abused puppet-me! I’ll put this +2 GodStuff of Pit Repair to good tactical use!” She has to reach out to someone. She has to take that and respond by doing something hard and human.

So who does she help?

I am thinking either the Deceiver from earlier ... well, they should probably actually be a Warmain to vary things up a bit?

I am thinking either the Warmain from earlier, or, a Familia member that she refused to help earlier with their own totally-broken reaction to all of this? (because she basically was taking it out on them, and maybe a bit the other way around?)

Yeah.

The next most viable model after that would be the Otherworldly 5 variant where you become one with a great force, because then we could have the stage-self Vi become one with that bit of god before exporting it to the outer Vi, as quest 5. But that doesn’t get the emotional tones right.

After that ... reconciliation with parents/sibling, if we retool their relationship retroactively so that that makes sense.

After that ... having her find a preserved jewel of her external self, and then quest 5 is the reconciliation between them. I guess I’d handle that by having two versions of Vi exist as far back as quest 1, have them get into fights about how things should go, treat them as two separate characters “in story” until they’re revealed near the end as the same person, and then move in quest 5 to finding a way to combine them.

... but honestly probably the easiest approach of all, better than any of these, is to change quest 4.

See, we know she’s going to end this with a Green 4 Issue, because of how I structure these. And looking at the Green 4 Issues, we know that that means she’s going to come out of this quest 5 thinking, “I know what I have to do to resolve my entanglement with the labyrinth/god, I just have to go do it.”

And at this point in things she probably thinks that that answer is to draw a hard line and just say “no more, no matter how virtuous the cause.”

And because it’s Otherworldly 5, which usually involves reconciling with someone you’ve been fighting with and helping them find peace or their way back from being lost, that person she reconciles with is probably someone who didn’t say “no more.” Someone who destroyed themselves by continuously going back to sources of power until they lost themselves completely—a Power, maybe of a different Imperator, who gets on her bad side some by driving off her semi-friend Excrucian early on? and who she realizes is burning themselves out? and has to be put down?—then ...

Hrm.

I think what we’re looking at is a Familia member, the Power of ... Erosion? Burnout? Driving Desperation? The Goad/Cattleprod? Monomania? ... and that means that just as the previous quest 4 was a struggle to find reality behind the Backdrop, this quest 4 is a struggle to find perspective and options in a situation that pushes for increasing desperation.

I’ll have to come back to this.

NOVEMBER 1

OK, so there’s another Power in her Familia, the Power of the Illusion of Choice. Seriously broken by both experiences in the Chancel and by the Estate. Says in quest 1 that he’s been drafted to teach her the basics, show her around the Noble world, give her the introduction. Lost any sense of intrinsic meaning, lots of OCD and anxiety, can’t deal with the Excrucian she had tagging along and gets into a fight with the Excrucian and with her over it, is generally a jerk and a downer, but does spend a lot of time introducing her to the basics and trying to put the stars back in the sky over the town because the Chancelling process also got rid of them. He explains to her that she’ll be helping him put them back later, but by quest 2 she’s just telling him to fuck off. At the end of quest 4, though, she’s more: oh god this is what the more ego-messing side of the Imperator does to people? I am going to help clean up your terribly messy apartment and then volunteer to help you with the stars.

Which she does, as well as working on the pit thing, only to realize at some point that while it helps him to see the stars back in the sky, most of his brain is literally just “see? I told you you were going to do that, and you did it.” And that’s when she draws the line of “never, under any circumstances, going back in there. Me and the Imperator are done.” Except, of course, for book 4.

Book 4, quest 1: I don’t know what this book is about yet. I do know that quest 1 is Otherworldly 1, so she’s still dreaming of the labyrinth. That’s honestly not surprising even apart from any supernatural thing.

This particular blank is a lot of why I use the Issues when building quest sets—the whole thing of “each book takes you from Issue X to X+1” is there to help answer “what is this book going to be about?” and in particular “what’s the very first take on what it’s going to be about?” when it’s not clear?

So it’s time I talk a bit about that.

I think I’ve done green Arcs focusing on both Sickness and Vice. It’s possible that I haven’t—it’s possible that when I went to do one for Horizon I wound up duplicating the one I used for GMD? I vaguely remember that that was briefly the case, but I don’t remember if it stayed that way.

The model I’m trying to use here, instead, is one of the nonstandard green Arcs, like “to the Isle of Death!” from the Glass-Maker’s Dragon or “Secrets of the Tower” from “The Legendary 139.”

So level 4, where we’re at on page 1 of this book, is basically: “I have a plan for what I can do to be done.”

And level 5 is more like, “I can’t fix it, but I have a plan for how to turn it around and make it useful for the very thing it was hurting.”

So we go from ending book 4 with “I can’t afford to ever go back, I have to draw a firm line, because this isn’t a slippery slope, this is a predator.”

... to the end of book 5, “I can become strong against the threats to my self and being, there.”

And this makes sense to me, in that like ... she’s correct that she can’t do book 4 again, she can’t go in a second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth time or whatever for power, even if it’s power to save all the children of the world from pits of flesh-eating bacteria, any more than you can go into casinos repeatedly for the money you need to save exploited kids from capitalism.

But her Imperator is also a True God, so if she goes in to try to change her and its identity directly, that’s just incredibly risky—that’s more like trying to rob a crime lord, metaphorically; it’s still a dangerous gamble, but it’s not, like, throwing away your stakes before you start.

NOVEMBER 2

So I talked a bit about OCD earlier, and the thing about OCD is that there are only two ways to beat it. One is when it’s heavily physical—some temporary or long-term physical issue or hormonal state intensifies it, and when that passes, you can overcome it. The other way is to basically just shut down the ritual behavior, refuse to do it until you both break the internal loops and also reinforce that nothing actually happens.

(Er, also medication, but usually medication also needs one of those things, it just makes them hella easier or vice versa.)

The reason you can do this is that while OCD is hijacking the human causal analysis circuitry to some extent, it’s mostly focused on stuff spinning out from food pollution, so it’s actually something you can look at it in your head and distinguish from both your learned experience about the world and your other intuitions.

It’s not comparable to ... like ... experience telling you that if you drop a cup, it will fall instead of float.

This is only true as long as OCD’s predictions reliably fail, of course, but they generally do—that is, they’re almost always either non-specific; or, extremely low-percentage disaster scenarios; or, deliberately and weirdly non-falsifiable things ... to get around the fact that you’re trying to break out of OCD habits.

It would be really bad to be in an environment where obsessive-compulsive-style predictions were no longer reliably false, because it would rapidly become difficult to distinguish them from ... well ... the rest of the causal apparatus.

More generally speaking, I think that what we’re looking at in book 4, quest 4 is the loss of the ability to ... reliably map actions to outcomes using reasonable methods rather than flinch-driven rituals, or possibly even at all.

There’s no mundane procedural answer to that, but the narrative answer to that is to switch from science to sorcery: from modeling the world, understanding the world, and in particular the world of the True God, to imposing a desirable system—which is quest 5. (The variant, in this case; not reconciliation, but becoming one with a greater power.)

Aside: Ever since CMWGE, I’ve defined “Sorcery,” particularly in contrast to science or faith, as the process of pushing reality into shape by deciding how you want it to be. Science proposes a theory, and tests it; faith offers an article of faith, and trusts it is so; and sorcery declares a new truth into existence. Trusting people to make them trustworthy is a positive example of sorcery; monopolistically raising prices would be a negative one.

I feel the impulse to set this book in reality. This would mostly only matter for quest 3—it would mean that quest 3 isn’t a return to inside the Chancel/True God, but a visit to an external environment that is somehow similar.

Aside: As mentioned, I forgot that the Chancel was infinitely layered illusions, and in fact just got sort of generally confused here. Still, the important point is, I had the impulse to not send her into the labyrinth in the heart of the god this time.

Part of the reason for that is just how green Issues work—

The way you get to 5 is that like, you know how to solve things, you’ve figured it out, but the story never goes there before something green happens again.

You’ve made your resolution to kick your gambling habit, and as soon as you get up your wallet in the morning you’re going to hand your bank card to a friend for safekeeping, but unfortunately while you’re asleep your bed falls into the casino of the hammerhead sharks.

You’ve realized that you can probably kick out the ghost possessing you by taking antibiotics, but before there’s ever a good moment where you confront the ghost or see a doctor, you stumble on a Ghost Empowerment Zone.

And what that means here is that she shouldn’t have the opportunity to put her plan into practice and just say no to going back into the labyrinth. She doesn’t do that, and she doesn’t say yes, instead. She doesn’t just get sucked in by her Imperator willy-nilly.

Something happens to escalate the situation, instead.

I guess ...

Since we’re talking about OCD, she could fall in through picking at something she probably shouldn’t pick at. She knows she’s in reality. She’s made it out. She knows that she is the Power of Backdrops and that she defines what a backdrop is and as long as she hangs on to the definition that ruled this as reality it can’t be part of the stage.

But there’s still a part of her life that could be fake in some other way. A place or something, an element, that doesn’t seem real.

And she can’t make herself just leave it.

Even knowing that it’s practically a self-fulfilling prophecy, that she’s practically making the curtain, she looks behind the curtain.

It’s not her fault. It’s what she was chosen for, and also, she’s traumatized.

But as is often the case when someone does Enchantments of a True God Estate, that just ... spreads the True God.

Aside: Further confusion impending!

Oh! Right, I should remember this thought: because of how True Gods work, it is not necessarily the case that her Chancel is the stage; it could have a Chancel and also have the body of the true god, which is where the first books were set. They definitely were, but I started blurring it in my head with the Chancel at some point. Anyway, this does mean that the “reality” with the Big Pit and missing stars and stuff can be a Chancel.

That’s not actually fulfilling the purpose I mentioned above, although honestly it doesn’t have to be a ... book 1-4 style ... illusion that she finds, so she could unravel reality in an exciting new way!

But

Probably since I have an adequate way to have her back inside the true god it’s simplest to just do that.

Logically quest 1 would mirror quest 5 and be her dreaming about her identification with the god, because Powers and their True Gods are incredibly entangled, but that also implies a thematic throughline, that she’s working on asserting control over her reality that way from the end of quest 1 on.

Which ... maybe?

Maybe we can pull a strand of that back from quest 4.

It would work if quest 1 was like “I planned to say goodbye to all this, but instead of trying to lure me back, my Imperator just gave me a bunch of power I literally can’t control that the worst bits of my ritualistic brain are taking the reins on instead, and honestly the anime labyrinth death game and whether I’m going back in there is somehow the least of my problems now?”

... no, that’s not what I want to do.

OTHERWORLDLY STUFF AND GOD STUFF

Right, so the basic Otherworldly path starts with a vision of another place and then you choose a role for yourself there. Then you chicken out for quest 2, grow in the role over quest 3 and 4 while facing challenges, maybe use it in quest 5, come out with the power of that role.

So what I want is for there to be a place of disordered causality, in the world or the Chancel, that she realizes she has to fix. Or realizes that she won’t be able to resist fixing. Or realizes that she’s drawn to. Or whatever. But she fixed the pit, she fixed the stars, so her role in this Arc is probably “fixing this situation” too. A lantern-bearer. And that’s quest 1-2. And it veers into quest 3 like I said, with the inadvertent backdrop-making opening up the path into that place. And quest 4 leads her to the conclusion that the only way to survive is sorcery (in the SFS sense.) And quest 5 is taking that power by drawing on the god within.

Yeah, I think the whole ... theme ... of this god is not healthy to be around.

Illusion of Choice, Backdrops, Cornered Rats, some other options include maybe the Sunk Cost Fallacy, literally OCD, Fixations, Ships of Theseus, Estates That Used to Be “Ships of Theseus,” ... hrm, work in progress

Depersonalization was one of the other Estates I was thinking about for it

Not the kind you do to others, the kind you do to yourself, I can’t remember but I think it’s the same word or depersonalization is the self-word.

[a friend mentions “derealization” might be what I’m thinking of, though depersonalization also works.]

I think her only real option is to treat the god like her legs, which is to say, it doesn’t want to move when she thinks “move” at it, but if she pokes at the neurons enough she can sort of fake it inefficiently

ah, says the reader, no wonder Jenna had to make her movement-impaired

ah, says the reader, clearly that was the reason for it from the very beginning, yes

(In fairness, having trouble walking is green, and true gods are green, so I didn’t completely not plan that convenient connection)

But! Because life imitates art and my knee would have given out tonight if I didn’t happen to already be braced between three walls—strictly speaking, it did give out, it just gave up and relocated because I was braced and didn’t fall down—I have decided that her disability magically fixed itself, even though that’s a Forbidden Plot Template. Yes. Magically! It was better forever, as was her life.

(well, two walls, but I had just opened a kitchen cabinet so it was a lot like three.)

Anyway, I probably need to make this all much, much, much cleaner for actual quests, so I’ll do that next.

Otherworldly 1 Troubled Dreams

You’re having dreams or otherworldly experiences that connect you to something beyond and outside yourself.

Afterwards: you know what you have to do about this—a path you are called to walk, or something you must do to keep these experiences under control. It is possible that you’ve found 2-3 options; if so, it is possible to choose wrongly.

Book 1, Otherworldly 1: She lives in a little town. She keeps expecting her packages to arrive but they never do. Somehow, she’s become the Power of Backdrops. And she dreams of the moss-crusted, bright-lit, ancient, crumbling walls of a labyrinth in the deeps of the world, and the currents of wind and story that slowly circle through it. There’s a door she could open, if she wanted to, to find it. She could just ... twitch the backdrop of the world aside. And she has to, because there’s something wrong with the world she’s living in. She knows she has to. ... but she puts it off.

Otherworldly 2 unnamed (only one version)

You’re on a scary or difficult path. Part of you is resisting—clinging to the way things used to be. Even if you’re on this path by choice, it’s scary, or hard, or against your natural way of thinking, or costing something you really hate having to give up.

Afterwards: You release some of that. More of you accepts that you can’t go back.

Book 1, Otherworldly 2: She talks to an old friend from college, who was into the weirder side of things, on the phone, as she works through what’s going on around her.

Talks about how her neighbor is ... like an automaton, just doing the same thing over and over, no life there, until she finally realizes that that’s what he is, that the original neighbor was (flash of blood) one of the murders. And the friend is kind of excited that fantasy is real and kind of worried about her but mostly just talks because the thing is her town doesn’t even exist any more, there’s no way to get to her, she tried. And she talks about how the office she goes to every day is ... ashes, it burned down, only everyone pretends it’s fine and when she gets into the data entry the burned-out missing roof actually protects her from rain. How her dog is a good dog, it’s not the dog she remembers, because, the dog she remembers had a face.

And finally she realizes, late one night, while looking at the missing stars, that she doesn’t have a friend like that any more. They don’t talk. That friend ghosted her right after the fall that messed up her spine, and while she did try to contact Vi later, after she’d recovered enough to be fun again, Vi wasn’t up for it. She doesn’t even have her number. The world she’s in isn’t the real world, she realizes, so why not ... move forward?

I think the strand pulling together the friend’s characterization (“I’d come help if I could, but your town doesn’t exist” “stuck in bed, hurting? I’m out.”) is that the friend in question has extremely poor ego and reality boundaries themselves, so her interest in Vi was proportional to Vi’s ... well, being interesting.

This isn’t important at the moment but has potential to be important when finishing out the Arc later.

Aside: I wound up updating the friend’s characterization a lot later.

Otherworldly 3 unnamed (only one version)

Something is trying to make you into something else. There’s usually a sense that it’s trying to take you over, devour you from within, kick you out of your life, or something. Or maybe it’s the other way around: maybe it’s pulling you.

Result: You find a part of yourself that hasn’t changed, or won’t.

Book 1, Otherworldly 3: Behind the backdrop of the town where nothing changed, there’s ... scaled, moss-covered walls, that very slowly move and shift, grinding against one another, and far above, a glimpse of light through the higher levels of the same—like being in a fifth-dimensional anemone, or medusa’s hair on a bad hair day. There’s a nodule with a small population where she’s greeted as a challenger, as someone who can put together an expedition to the heart of the labyrinth to become one with the god, which she has to do because the nodule doesn’t have enough resources to feed people indefinitely if challengers like her don’t do this. They bathe her in a pod of stuff that “fixes” her legs and begins to prepare her for that oneness.

And there isn’t really a point in this where she has much of a choice.

Her parents were fantasy/gaming nerds, so she grew up with this stuff, so she isn’t horribly out of place with it ... but she isn’t happy with any of it either, and the dysphoria only grows as she leads the team towards the center and becomes more and more physically alien to herself to survive the challenges of the regions they pass through.

When that dysphoria hits a certain peak, though, it comes with ... the realization, true or false, that this isn’t even her. That it’s just a character. She isn’t her. Of course. She sees a save point and it all crystallizes for her:

This doesn’t feel like her body any more because it’s just a character she’s playing, just a puppet on a stage; and if she pulls aside that backdrop, she’ll awaken, back in the world, with the part ... well, whole ... of her that hasn’t changed at all.

Now, we all know from earlier discussion that she’s wrong; that this isn’t actually getting her back to reality at all. But that’s fine, because right now her goal isn’t “get to actual reality,” it’s “get out of this, to what I identify as reality.” It’s not until that proves false too that she starts caring about what reality actually is.

This takes her from Issue 1 to Issue 2 ... from “my problem with the labyrinth is itself lost in the labyrinth” to “I have a problem with the labyrinth.” And I think that means that she knows she’s not done. When she emerges, it’s not with a sense of completion. It’s not with a “that was harrowing, never going back.”

It’s with a sense of being haunted by the unfinished journey.

Of still wanting to be strong enough, now that she knows that it’s not ... all of her ... to finish.

Something for her brain to pick at constantly, particularly now that the person she would talk to about it for stability turned out to be ... what? A tulpa?

INTERMISSION

Anyway, we now have a two-quest break in a reality that is not reality before she deals with the flower rite in book 2.

Otherworldly 4 unnamed (only one version)

You’ve lost a key part of your sense of self. You look for a way to get that back.

Reward: you discover that it wasn’t really gone. If that’s observably impossible—e.g., you’re mourning a severed limb—you discover either that your terminology was off and what you were really missing was something else that isn’t gone, e.g., the sense of yourself as a whole person or your ability to play an instrument; or, you find a potential in you to recover it.

What does this mean?

So, here’s what the classic forms of the Otherworldly Arc is like: you go into the realm of shadows and pick up shadow magic. Something in the realm or the magic tries to corrupt you in quest 3, and you fight it off, but then all on your own—maybe as part of fighting it off, maybe because the pressure lets up when you fight it off, maybe unrelated, just, you dive in too deep after that—you lose yourself a bit.

Or, you come back from the battle of quest 3 to realize that you’ve been hurt worse than you realize ... that you are still you and there, but missing part of you.

So the obvious path here, for Vi, is “she lost the part of herself she left behind in the labyrinth.”

And classic approaches to this quest are things like “having beaten off the influence of the god by understanding that it was all a stage, she’s now overwhelmed by that understanding; or, now that she knows she can escape, the need to go back and the dizzying awareness that she is a challenger and one who can become the god is so much stronger; or, she returns to her body, only, it’s not her body any more either. It hasn’t been changed like her in-labyrinth body but her peace with it is gone.”

I think that last one is probably the most accurate version tbh:

She comes back and she isn’t trapped in a labyrinth slowly changing any more, but ... she knows now. She knows that in her blood is the glowing ichor of the god, metaphorically if nothing else. Her comfort in “I’m just Vi, and somehow I became the Power of Backdrops, which is interesting but also whatever” is gone; she’s now ... even when she’s not actively being warped, she’s lost security in her sense of self?

The result, of course, is that that security “wasn’t really gone;” or at least the portion of herself wasn’t really gone, and the security returns; which is to say, at some point, she realizes that she’s come to identify as Vi-who-is-one-with-the-god and that in itself terrifies her but also allows her to organize and settle her body-sense again.

That’s when she begins to understand a bit about how true gods work; to understand that it’s entangled with her, and the distinctions between them are important but on some level just conceptual. She probably understands this in a dream, though, because—like other book 1, quest 4s—this is actually notionally a novella written later. It can’t actually mess with how she processes things in book 2.

Aside: Let me clarify a little! In the CMWGE paradigm, which may or may not translate fully to Nobilis and Glitch, you tend to start a new Arc after quest 3. Accordingly, back when I first did this process for “the Glass-Maker’s Dragon” it was useful to imagine the story of book 2 as picking up right after book 1 quest 3, like it would in a game. But then what IS book 1, quest 4? If we’re pretending these are actual novels, and not some kind of hypothetical devlog entities, I have to imagine book 1, quest 4, book 1, quest 5, and book 2, quest 5 as novellas or short stories released later as secondary content—filling stuff out but not changing the plot progression.

Otherworldly 5 Live Together, Die Alone

You reconcile with someone or something you’ve been fighting.

Result: you help them find peace, acceptance, or find their way back from being lost.

Logically, she’d reach out to her former friend here. I said that she didn’t even have her number but she is a Power. And like ...

While I painted a fairly negative picture earlier, we all know that anyone who instantly dropped a friend when that friend gets hurt was either (a) really, really fucked up, (b) never actually a friend at all, (c) going through too much themselves right then, or, I guess for things that are more social than injuries, (d) dramatically misinformed.

So if we cross off (b) and (d) as options, then (a) and (c) leave some room for sympathy.

I’m a little worried that the friend is a cardboard cutout because I don’t actually know anyone with that particular behavior pattern; all the worst people I know are bad in completely different ways.

But! The most logical interpretation of the quest is that she’d reach out to them.

And logically the friend is ... in a bad place right then—in a place where she needs peace, needs acceptance, or is lost.

[a friend comments that it’s not necessarily cardboard characterization, that some people have the anxious instinct to freeze, and then get too spooked/guilty to open contact again. ... but I was off pacing or lying down or something at the time and had figured out what I wanted to do instead.]

Ahh.

OK, so:

The friend didn’t ghost her at the accident. The friend actually got involved in weird magic stuff long before Vi did, and eventually after it soured the friend’s relationships with Vi and everyone else she fell off the face of the trackable earth.

... becoming part of the mystery cult that summoned the god.

Aside: I love this twist still.

... and in Book 1, Otherworldly 5, Vi tracks her down, and can’t get her to stop doing stuff like walking the daily ritual tracks through town that are unnecessary now because the Chancel’s already formed or bits of self-mortification; all she can do is slowly integrate more mundanely healthful things on the one hand into those rituals and on the other re-engineer them towards building up the friend instead. End quest when for the first time the friend looks up from the daily town-circling trudge to see the ... I was going to say sun, but maybe, missing stars.

NOVEMBER 3

Backdrops

... are aesthetically coherent

... imply a stage

... present a false reality

... provide context for narration or events

... are decorative

...?

I think I’m missing something important to how all this has been functioning, but there’s noise so I can’t process and I’m almost done with coffee so I don’t have time to wait it out; let’s stop with five rough Properties for now. The most important Property here is “Backdrops are aesthetically coherent,” because I think it’s going to be how she verifies reality at the end of book 2.

Spoiler: You don’t have to pay too much attention to the details of the flower rite, since they change later—only the very broadest of strokes stay the same.

Probably the way to flower rite this is an artistic movement spreading among the robots that argues that falsehood is inherently thematically incoherent—that the aesthetic is the natural, and untruth generates dissonance.

The lynchpin of the Rite is an old crusty Warmain that the robots respect and take care of working on a vast 5d mural on the side of the old municipal building, constantly interrogating and complaining about the art, caught in recursive cycles of revision because it fundamentally doesn’t fit together with itself. I’ll revisit post-noise.

Anyway, she figures out the flower rite and how to address it, end of quest.

I think what I was missing from the Properties list is something like

Backdrops

... present a complete picture

... stand in for an entire world

The Warmain’s argument, what he teaches the robots who just wanted to garden in peace but admire his art too much to not get caught up in his ideas, is that art is at war with itself; is that art is in the development of the purest, truest heart of each individual component of the piece, and that the crisis of the artist is that the aggregate of those pieces inevitably conflicts against one another; that even if you tried to theme your art to just one component, the problem would repeat fractally, because that one component would never be a single one true thing but rather a rough form with bumps and contours that would long to develop in their own tangled way. His art is transient, pieces that develop as he paints them and then inevitably self-destruct in the painting process, except for his one grand piece—

No, this is too soft.

Either the robots would just wind up screwing up their gardens and that’s not impressive or anything terrible that happens in the story is a kind of serious overreaction to that artistic theory, y’know?

Hrm.

Working backwards from a suitable story thing to happen:

He shows them an artistic vision that can only be realized by destroying themselves.

The most interesting way for them to destroy themselves is for them to integrate themselves into their art---to become part of their gardens, their paintings, their chalk street art.

Soooooo ...

He shows them an artistic vision that can only be realized by them doing that.

If they can realize that without being purely static, realize that while being separate from their work, or survive while integrating themselves into their work, they pass his test.

So that’s what he’s looking for.

Also, their doing this is a flower rite against Backdrops.

So this gives us two questions: what is he looking for, and why is this a flower rite against backdrops?

Second question first, because it’s more critical.

Backdrops

... are separate from the stage.

... are aesthetically coherent

And the pressure he’s putting on this is basically ... Hrm, no, nevermind, trying again:

Backdrops

... present a false reality

... are aesthetically coherent

And what he’s doing is saying that the falsehood of a backdrop creates an intrinsic incoherency that can only be bridged from the other side of the fourth wall, importing more and more coherency from reality until the artist, as the bridge between them, collapses. He’s looking for beings that can make fully internally consistent dreams/fictions, by either method, because there’s a transcendent being somewhere and his job, his life’s mission, is to keep it dreaming.

So he’s painting something, and his painting keeps inspiring the robots, and the robots, their brains alive with that inspiration, fall into artistic fugues, and then desperation and editing loops as they fail to realize it, and then bit by bit they work themselves into their work and disappear from “reality” to become dead metal in their metal garden, or metal paint melted onto the wall, or inexplicable chalk art, lynchpins to hold their pieces together, which doesn’t even work but they don’t know that because at that point the author is dead.

This is happening in the background around her over the course of quest 1, and Backdrops is upset about it because the idea that you can just throw up a coherent false reality without working too hard is important to Backdrops, and the fact that stage and actor is blurring sucks too.

That was a struggle!

It would have been a lot easier to put together a Deceiver or Strategist flower rite here tbh but I already had a visual on the Warmain, so.

NOVEMBER 13

All right! There was a slight delay due to jury duty, plus stressing before it and physical recovery afterwards. Where was I?

I was doing the quest writeups in clearer form.

Book 2, Otherworldly 1: She lives in a rich but ruined world where society is crumbling under Excrucian assault. She maneuvers her wheelchair onto a rusty jury-rigged car-lifting platform to get to and from her second-floor apartment. She walks her dog past fallen futuristic towers. She hangs out with her voiceless robot street gardener/artist friends. She gets by, day to day, but dreams of the Excrucian flower rite on Backdrops; and, bit by bit, inspired by this grumpy old street painter Warmain, her robot friends murder themselves integrating into their art/gardens. The flower rite is saying “Backdrops present a coherent reality, but Backdrops are sketchy, and that’s freaky. Also, Backdrops present a full context, but Backdrops are separate from the stage, and that’s freaky too! Explain me this, backdrops.”

Book 2, Otherworldly 2: She doesn’t really want to be a Power, fighting Warmains to defend Backdrops in the name of ... whatever. So she hangs out looking at the Warmain’s painting and talking to him about art. And she hangs out with one of the surviving robots in a hedge maze and talks about her mortal life, about ice cream and rain and walking by muddy creeks and generally the things one finds when living in the world, as opposed to, say, destroying yourself for an artistic vision or whatever. And the Warmain talks to her occasionally about bits from his life, wandering the void and breaking the sky over Paris and this incredible bakery down in Buenos Aires. And finally she’s talking to the Warmain and she’s all, “I don’t have the spoons to be fighting you on this but what you’re doing to the robots is kind of inhumane, could we maybe say we fought to a draw and you went away?” And he’s like, “... you look down, Imma gonna grab some Argentinian pastries and coffee from that place.” Which, ultimately, is how they find out that the roads out of town are painted on the sky.

Book 2, Otherworldly 3, Take 1: She peels down the backdrop of the world and returns to the labyrinth save point, this time with the Warmain beside her. She faces a different set of challenges. Hrm. Let’s back up a moment. Probably only have to back up because the involuntary break made me lose my mental place, but, it happened, so!

So:

I don’t think she’s looking for reality quite yet. I don’t think in this phase she really believes it exists, and while the Warmain is probably telling her it does, I don’t think it can motivate her yet. Because finding reality again is quest 4.

I think right now, for quest 3, I need to step back and think about what she was dreaming about in quest 1 again, because like ...

There’s a throughline between quest 1 and quest 3:

For an Otherworldly Arc, if you’re facing THREAT X in quest 3, then at the end of quest 1, you’re effectively affirming that you’re going to go forward and face ... well, to whatever extent you know what’s coming ... THREAT X. Even if you stall on it for a quest, that’s still what you’re doing.

We want to keep that throughline, and there are two ways to do that:

Either she faces the flower rite again right here, in the labyrinth, or, she figured out what she had to do about something at the end of quest 1, in the robots and rain and ruined city bit, and now she is facing that.

What is that something?

Probably ... being a Power in a falling world?

And what do you do about that?

I guess the only real answer to that is to go forward, so we know that the challenge in this version of Otherworldly 3 is either the flower rite, again—that is, finding a way to face the Warmain’s artistic inspiration, to make a work that needs her to put herself into it but then pull herself back out without destroying herself or having him kill her for succeeding—or, accepting herself as a Power, becoming one with Backdrops.

... I like the idea that it’s the flower rite, actually.

I like the idea that his art infects her, and maybe we can skip the pastries and the quiet defeat, maybe it’s when she’s infected by the vision that she realizes she’s not in reality at all, and tears it down, and he goes “fuck”

So that means that this time, in quest 3, she’s wrestling with the need to create something; as she moves towards the center of the labyrinth, she’s also shaping it, echoing the things she saw in the Warmain’s painting?

And to end the quest, she needs to have an actual answer to the flower rite itself, a way to survive the inspiration, which I think is ...

god, Deceiver flower rites are so much easier to work with without getting clunky!

Fundamentally, leaving aside the flower rite aspects, what the Warmain evil inspiration does is open a channel, a possibility, by which one can literally pour one’s existence into the work to enrich and ripen it, and people fail because they run out of existence before art becomes reality.

And the logical answer to that when one is entangled in a true god that is digesting one is to bridge the true god into that channel. To pour the infinity of the god’s existence into the work, leaving the artist enough life to survive.

If that’s the answer to the Warmain’s inspiration, then it’s also the answer to the flower rite; that is, the answer to the flower rite has to be:

* the reality of a backdrop piggybacks on the ground reality of the observer, and

* the distinction between actor, character, and stage is not something intrinsic to the world that can be undermined by evidence but a construal, an act of willful taxonomy, that can be buttressed or undermined by one’s choice of definitions.

(two parts, because the flower rite had two avenues of attack.)

So, as she explores, she learns to manifest a little ... stage, a little illusion of reality, a shard or memory of life outside the labyrinth, a thing to play with and work with while resting at the fire, to keep from forgetting what reality is like and to help expunge the pressure of the Warmain’s inspiration in her brain?

I think that’s as far as I can get today, which is only barely forward progress because some of it is probably wrong, but hopefully it’ll lead into actual motion tomorrow. Or later tonight if I have a thought and return!

LATER

Vague thought in passing that she starts creating a little faberge pocket dimension view of another world, another life for herself, using Domain or something, back in quest 1; artistically crafting it, but it’s not until late in quest 3 that she can actually see what she was looking for in it, the ... bit of memory or life or self or whatever, to know that it hasn’t changed, it hasn’t changed. Not sure, but I figured I’d post it here instead of in a notes file!

NOVEMBER 14

I feel like the “adventure” in the labyrinth in this book is in a more spacious area. Less active challenges and more a long wearying journey with a small somewhat militant squad through a naturally hostile, open wilderness which also has hostile forces. That’s not a kind of story I usually enjoy and I’m kind of glad I don’t have to actually write it? but it’s the kind of aesthetic that feels right for book 2 Otherworldly 3. I think it’s because that can really emphasize a longing for something else? I’m not sure.

Book 2, Otherworldly 1, Take 2: She lives in a rich but ruined world where society is crumbling under Excrucian assault. She maneuvers her wheelchair onto a rusty jury-rigged car-lifting platform to get to and from her second-floor apartment. She walks her dog past fallen futuristic towers. She hangs out with her voiceless robot street gardener/artist friends. She gets by, day to day, in the rain and the green that follows, but she wants to go back. Ever since she saw this weird giant abstract mural that this grumpy old guy in a big grey coat’s been painting, she’s been wanting to go back, has been tormented by this vision of it, this knowledge that she could ... just ... make it. A little dream. A little fake world of her own. Just like the god did. A world where none of this happened. A world where she was still the self she wanted to be and nothing was crumbling. And she keeps trying to make it, little dioramas in the air, but it’s never right. And inspired by that same painting, at the same time, because it’s a flower rite on Backdrops, and a Test of the All-Consuming Dream, her robot friends murder themselves integrating into their art/gardens. The flower rite is saying “Backdrops present a coherent reality, but Backdrops are sketchy, and that’s freaky. Also, Backdrops present a full context, but Backdrops are separate from the stage, and that’s freaky too! Explain me this, backdrops.” And in the end, she decides she’s going to go that way too. She’s going to pour herself, her life, her being, into that backdrop she’s creating, even if it destroys her. But she’s scared, so she hesitates.

Book 2, Otherworldly 2, Take 2: She tries to hang on to the world. She argues with the Warmain about how far an artist has to go. She hangs out with one of the surviving robots in a hedge maze and talks about her mortal life, about ice cream and rain and walking by muddy creeks back when she could walk and generally the things one finds when living in the world, as opposed to, say, destroying yourself for an artistic vision or whatever. And the Warmain talks to her occasionally about bits from his life, wandering the void and breaking the sky over Paris and this incredible bakery down in Buenos Aires. But she can only hold out so long. After a while, when the last of the bottle of bourbon they were sharing runs dry, she shrugs and goes for it. He wins. She pours herself into the backdrop. But she’s drunk, and she misses, and realizes that the world is a backdrop still.

Book 2, Otherworldly 3, Take 2: She peels down the backdrop of the world and returns to the labyrinth save point, this time with the Warmain beside her. She leads a small group (from book 1, plus the Warmain) across a macro-scale forest where the earth and the giant “trees” are the knotted tendrils of the god on what turns into a more survival-themed story. The change in venue, as it often does, has aborted the depressive moment; she’s still playing with the diorama/dream/backdrop of a better time, still wrestling with it, but she’s gone back to trying to make it work without burning herself out, trying to face the Warmain’s challenge instead of losing to it. And the solution she finds is to fuel the reality of it with the god’s life and not her own, and to treat the separation of actor, character, and stage as a matter of willful construal. When she manages to get it to work, when she calls up a perfect crystal vision of the world where things are okay, she breaks down; because look, look, it isn’t gone; it hasn’t changed.

Book 2, Otherworldly 4: The Warmain is all like “dang I wish I could harvest you right now but well uh I’d like to point out that we are not in reality. Possibly if you care so much about the world outside of the god you might want to work with me on getting OUTSIDE OF THE GOD.” Put another way, having realized that she still wants to be something other than this, he encourages her to ... like ... be something other than this. (So he can kill her and take her face maybe but WHATEVER sometimes you have to accept your friends’ little eccentricities.)

So they start struggling, as they approach some grand landmark keep in the distance, to push past this into reality. To push aside the walls of ropy flesh and backdrop and find reality beyond. To see the tracks and traces of the underlying reality in the glowing ichor-rivers and the dust beneath the trees. To tear down the curtain of the forest air and show the streets and screaming angry highway cars beyond. The things that occasionally give them hope—gates to other “worlds” between the gaps between two trees, in the belly of dead monster snakes, and the like—turn out to be/lead to just more backdrops. And the journey is harrowing. She gets hurt. Scared. They lose people, even with a Power and a Warmain in the party. She makes it to the keep, at the end of the proper labyrinth journey; does the whole narratively satisfying sacrifice, giving up the diorama to the god, in order to bond more deeply to the god and open the great sacred door ... and it’s just another backdrop.

It isn’t until she just kind of wanders out to go ... tend the grave a bit better of someone who died along the way, or search for someone who got separated, or something ... that she finds it, just nowhere in particular. Some random weak spot in the world.

That’s the gate into reality, into the thematically inconsistent reality.

It doesn’t make sense, she tells the Warmain. Has a breakdown over it, over unnecessary loss and the overall trauma and that one extra hole punched in the god-grandeur story of how murders make a Chancel and a power. But of course it doesn’t make sense; sense is for stories and backdrops (and Serpent Chancels probably), not reality, you see.

He sighs and they hang out and have a bit of pseudohuman company instead of him killing her.

Book 2, Otherworldly 5: I feel this can be with the Warmain, even though they weren’t formally fighting at the end of Otherworldly 4, because this would be another intermissory novella/short story? Not part of the book itself?

So it’s a short story about her and the Warmain after the book, and like: he was going to kill her, but didn’t because they’d just been through something hella harrowing. She doesn’t know who she is any more, and is scared, and even though he’s a monster and she’s a Power so probably one too, he stays around to help her figure herself out again. And they talk about grounding things, blanket textures and grass smells and dumb dogs and grocery schedules and hot drinks and what she wants if she can’t have magic dreams? And he talks to her about why he Warmains, about the thing he’s trying to keep asleep; about being born in the void, and walking paths the colors of the dawn, and the knowledge and certainty of his purpose. He talks to her about his first kill in the world, the one that tempered him, some long ago Power murdered by a river so that he could have a face and thoughts and could speak in words, and how he has been haunted by that Power’s private visions of beauty and art ever since. How he’s filled his head with so many dreams and visions on this mission that sometimes he forgets who he is, loses practically everything, gets lost in it, and how terrifying that is. How he should be killing her, though he should probably make sure she can still do the thing when she isn’t in the belly of the god? And she doesn’t wind up friends with him or anything. Maybe lovers briefly when they’re first recovering from the labyrinth, maybe not, but ... in the end, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he should do better, but he’s a monster, and sends him off. And because they did share some trauma, he goes. Later, she gets a call from him, when he’s lost track of where he is (see earlier notes about “sometimes he forgets who he is”) and is in a panic but her number was burned into the inside of his eyelids, so he called; and she goes to help.

Book 3, Otherworldly 1: She’s living, haunted by what happened. She’s in reality, but it’s a mess. Her town is devastated, because it’s not so small that a hundred deaths is meaningful but it’s small enough that it casts a shadow and that her little neighborhood where most of them were is falling apart with fear and broken social connections.

The Power of the Illusion of Choice shows up. He has a lot of anxiety and OCD and is generally a mess, jerk, and downer, has no sense of intrinsic meaning in anything any more, but he says he’s been drafted to teach her the basics, show her around the Noble world, give her the introduction to things. At night he tries kind of halfheartedly to put stars back in the sky over town, because the Chancelling process burned out the local sky.

She hates it.

One Excrucian was bad enough, without a world full of vipers. One “god” was bad enough without a bloody-handed king over them all, and angels being real and the same thing, and mountain ranges being giant snakes and the same thing too?

Aside: see the Knight quest set ( https://jennamoran.tumblr.com/post/699243715456352256/nobilis-4-quest-set-1 )

and though the mortals don’t seem to notice, the Pit has LITERALLY nothing in it, it’s not a big hole in the ground, it’s a big hole in Creation. She keeps dreaming about it. It haunts her. It’s like a metaphor for everything that’s wrong.

It was a victory just coming through everything intact as a person, herself. Just surviving. She doesn’t have the power or knowledge to deal with ... other stuff, for other people. But she has to. She can’t just let the pit grow and eat everything. She’s going to have to go back.

Book 3, Otherworldly 2: She talks to her therapist about all this and how much she doesn’t want to go back. How she wants to just tell the Illusion of Choice to f— off and the starless sky to f— off and screw the Locust Court and being a Power and the true face of the world and she can just live under her bed and be a bed-liver-under blanket bug or dust bunny now.

But, the real world is suffering, and she has this conviction, and maybe it’s not even right, that if she goes in and gets a piece of the True God—

This is the kind of plan that makes sense in novels, which she reads—

That she can patch it.

That she can’t maybe fix the broken town, or her harrowed life, or get rid of the Excrucians or the Locust Court or the way the world “really” is, but she can fix, at least, the Pit.

Book 3, Otherworldly 3: She’s not really playing along with the concept this time, so this is less formal “challenges” with a group and more just personal hunting/exploration in the internal wilds of the god. Seeking something hidden. And becoming more and more in tune with the god as she does so, because that’s what she’s looking for and because the god’s ... distance from what she believes the world ought to be is key to the crisis of this Arc. And she’s losing her sense of differentiation from it as she approaches the piece of power that she wants. Falling into the slow dreams and rationalizations of the god. But at the end of the quest, she finds something in herself that can’t accept that. That keeps her from just dissolving into the god. I think that’s...

I think that, over the course of the quest, earlier, she’s also coming into tune with the night that is the god’s hunger and the brilliant heartbeat rush of dawn when the wild wakes when the god consumes. Coming to joy in the fire of that, the heartbeat of the power of the god. Until one day she is close enough to the god in nature to feel the tendrils of the morning crawling around some human, subsuming them, swallowing them into its nature and shackling them to backdrops and the illusion of choice to drain out a few drops of ... something ... that fuels that fire? Maybe?

And suddenly it all feels awfully gross.

... of course, this is very high-level, and doesn’t really tell me anything about what happens in the book until the very end. Let’s try again!

Book 3, Otherworldly 3, Take 2: In the mountainous intestines of the god, the heartbeat of the god is a racing wonder, a source of surging life; it is the drumbeat that makes the flowers open, that drives the rising of the sun, that melts the rivers from the snow. It is a life that fills her and strengthens her as she grows in tune with it, as she becomes more, as she unfurls herself like a flower and deepens and grows rich in spiritual wealth and power and begins to understand how with these hands of hers she can shape and save the world, and atop the mountain in the dawn it pierces her, she understands it, and hope, and touches on the nature of the god; and she might have lost herself, become not just herself in that moment but something more, and less, had she not tasted too of the origin of that power, felt deep in the god’s digestive tract how at that moment it swallowed another soul. How its heart beat, powerfully, rejoicing, as another bit of human truth was lost, consumed, entangled. How the world sang with it, fed on it, grew verdurous and rich with life with it, and lush. How she gagged, and vomited up the substance of the god, the life and death of it, to spill into the shadow of the dawn.

Book 3, Otherworldly 4: She’s found a part of herself that’s still the same, in that rejection, that disgust ... but ... she’s still ... entangled with the god. She still realizes, over the course of this quest, that she’s lost her grip on what’s her and what’s the god; on how to be a self that is separate from the world. She knows she’s not okay with the god, she knows there’s still a Vi that is not the god, but she can’t find the boundaries.

... and dealing with the fact that if she does find and establish those boundaries, that’s possibly just ... a loss.

If she establishes them, maybe she just gets eaten; or escapes, but without the power she needs to help the world.

So in this quest there’s wandering the fields beneath a strange sun and strange sky, lost in the flowers, thinking about the colors of the world and the blood inside her and being eaten and the nature of consciousness and differentiation and connection between people and remembering precious moments with family and others on the god’s behalf.

And at the end, she remembers how at the save point she was just a puppet on the stage, and how this can’t really be her, because look at it, it’s a god, it’s the god, walking, and she lets herself fall into it completely so she can pass a bit of the god’s essence outwards to the true her, somewhere else. Because an actual Vi must remain, if not here, then ... out there, beyond the stage; in a world where she had not been previously consumed.

Book 3, Otherworldly 5: In quests 1-2 her attitude towards the Power of Illusion of Choice was mostly “fuck off dude” but after being refreshed on just how much the god messes with the mind she’s more like ...

She looks at the building he’s living in, which is visible from hers, while recovering from the experience above; and sighs, and forgives him, and then goes and helps clean up his messy apartment (inspired by the Eccentric Family anime, I think), and offers to help with putting the stars back in the sky.

And she does, she helps him, and it does ... pull him back a bit from the brink, puts some more person back in his eyes, when the first constellation gleams, but most of his brain is still going “see? I told you you were going to do that and you did it.”

There’s something broken in him that she can’t fix.

And she looks at the lingering power she’s using, manifested as starstuff or pitfilling stuff, or whatever, and it’s glorious, but what she’s thinking is, I’m never going back. I won’t go back. I’m lucky that I didn’t break a lot more myself.

NOVEMBER 15, BUT NOT REALLY (LIKE 12-1 AM)

Book 4, Otherworldly 1: She is in reality, but sometimes she sees someone at a party with a monster behind their face. She is in reality, but sometimes she forgets what being in reality even is or what it means when a phone rings. She dreams of her life when she was young, of the time when a star fell into her garden in the night and sputtered, burning, on the lawn. Of looking out from a porch and seeing spirits moving in the fields. Of the time around her accident, most of all, and a boyfriend she didn’t have at the time talking to her, and rivers running in the street, and tall buildings on dark nights, and magic and weirdness that she’s pretty sure oughtn’t have been there. And she knows that some of what’s going on is derealization, depersonalization, from trauma, and some of it is that she’s carrying the weight of the power of the god, but ... the stuff about the dreams of the past, that seems legit. She’s seeing things in her past that she couldn’t see back then, and ... maybe even changing it.

Because what is our past but the backdrop to who we are?

And she decides that she has to take ownership of that, has to either put it all in order or make it have order, but she doesn’t want to, she wants to just go on telling herself the same story of her history she always has and not risk messing it up retroactively or having it always have been made up or finding that the god was there even back then or WHATEVER.

I mean, seriously, that’s scary stuff!

Book 4, Otherworldly 2: In visions/dreams/flashbacks, she talks to the boyfriend she didn’t actually have about what’s coming. (I think he’s the fallen star fwiw.)

Aside: I never did anything great with that, which is sad, because it’s cool.

She talks to him about impending sudden awful change. About destiny. He talks to her about the dooms facing the world, I think metaphorically rather than Nobilis canon stuff. She talks to her parents in the long long-ago past about whether they’re real or just someone she made up for her backstory. She goes out to the water and gets wind and river spray on her face and can’t feel it at all. She remembers vines and flowers. She argues with the Warmain, still in flashbacks I think, about whether the past being a backdrop or not even matters, and whether it’s right to change it. (He takes whatever side she doesn’t, he doesn’t really have a stake.)

In waking life, she does an office job, filing or data entry, she walks through rows of cabinets and cubicles, she spins on chairs and looks out windows, but it’s not reality or an existential horror: it’s a backdrop she deliberately put up to hide from things, to not be sitting in her apartment with a bunch of half-eaten pizzas and all the responsibility in the world and the ichor of the god puddling at the side of the sink and the Power of the Illusion of Choice for a coworker. When she pulls it down for the day, it’s not “my life was a lie!” it’s “oh well, enough of that.” In the end, she can’t hide forever. She has to face her past, and she has to face her power, so she’ll do both.

Book 4, Otherworldly 3: She goes back to her college days, to the time of her accident. ... I should be resting my neck, not typing. I’ll pick up here tomorrow.

NOVEMBER 15, BUT FOR REAL THIS TIME

Book 4, Otherworldly 3: She goes back to her college days, to the time of the accident. This time it’s literal rather than flashback/dreams—she pulls aside the world, and is there. The college feels kind of dark, swampy, mired in vegetation and oppressive presence. Snakes in the trees. (Though for some reason they don’t show up in the college catalog mailed out to potential students.) Occult battles happening in the darkness. She wants to just take her classes and affirm the reality of things and maybe not damage her spine this time but no. She has too much power, and too little control; every little OCD or paranoid or superstitious twitch of “things should work this way” gets magnified into reality, and pretty soon there are murders on the campus and blood on the sidewalks and her boring professor is melting as he talks and something horrible is lurking in the shadows and skittering in the steam tunnels and when the day of her accident comes and for all her power she can’t stop it because it’s reified into either a beast that has it out for her or a “final destination” like malignant destiny.

Book 4, Otherworldly 4: She wakes up back in the present. She is not happy because while in one sense, reality demonstrated some stability, it wasn’t the stability she wanted and also like it wasn’t very much of it. She doesn’t know how much of that was even real or if not what happened. She’s stopped reflexively changing everything around her with an expectation, but she doesn’t even know if she has a real past. She doesn’t even know if she has a body in any meaningfully distinct way from “has a self-image.” If she has a real past. If her friend joined the mystery cult because she went back into the stage of her past and showed off divine powers there, meaning that that past was always a stage and always where both of them came from. If reality is anything other than a backdrop that’s deferring the whole aesthetic consistency ideal, or failing at it due to Excrucian challenge.

She questions whether reality would matter, whether being “real” would make something more real than a backdrop in the first place.

Other stuff.

She tries to find someone’s grave. She looks at versions of other realities. She gets mired in mud beside a creek. She spends time in nature (which I think means “by the Big Pit and in a little woods with a creek” because her town isn’t very nature-y) trying to reconnect with something real, but it doesn’t do it. In the end, she finds her only option: if she can’t find reality, if she can’t touch reality, if trying to definitively prove something real risks making it real, she has to embrace it, and try to declare the quiddity of honor* she is looking for into the reality she makes.

* inherent integrity; truth

Book 4, Otherworldly 5: This is her attempt to come to an accommodation with her god’s power using that Sorcery-style paradigm. Her attempt to really dig into it and understand the god’s nature in totality, to grasp the currents of its thoughts, to identify it as part of her rather than as an intrusive force that can seize control of her. An attempt to understand what it is to be a boundaryless motion, a recursion, a ritual, a derealization, a backdrop, an illusion of choice, an endless spiraling labyrinth of dissociation and trauma and mossy walls and green snake tendrils in the depths of mind and world. An attempt to be one with the thing that is one with everything without losing herself. And, an attempt to seize reality by declaration, to find a point of grounding, a thing she can anchor in: soil, stone, textures again probably, the fur of her dog, the heat of a hot drink, the warmth of someone’s company, the waves of the sea, the beauty of fire, flowers, sunrise, cliffs. The roughness of bark. Ants crawling on the earth. Night air on the skin. The recovered stars. And ending, like I said, with

... well. She’s not paralyzed, she’s one of the “I need a wheelchair because if I try to walk I can go, like, 20 feet” types. So it ends with that, only for controlling the god/trauma/choice/the world/existing in reality. She can’t do the thing, like everyone expects her to, like she expects herself to do, but she can ... push something at the god, to move its power and sacrifice the essence of a backdrop to make it real.

And that’s enough. For the rest, she can order a reálchair.

I’m not at my best today, lack of sleep, but I think I will just hope that works and possibly revisit tomorrow rather than pounding my head against it indefinitely while not at my best.

BECAUSE I NEVER ACTUALLY REST MY NECK WHEN I OUGHT TO I’M NOT EVEN DOING IT RIGHT NOW WHILE EDITING THIS

As a quick conclusion/summary, though:

Otherworldly 1 - Daily life, knowing something’s wrong via dreams, messed-up guy around, little town aesthetic, recovering from trauma aesthetic, under a cloud aesthetic, things being broken aesthetic, dark nights and missing stars aesthetic, isolation aesthetic

Otherworldly 2 - talking to someone over time about weird wrongness and precious moments and ordinary job and life things and wanting to be normal while the wrongness in question intensifies in the background.

Otherworldly 3 - the labyrinth (moss-covered walls, snaky tendrils, macro-scale forest, mountains lush with dawn, college mired in vegetation with steam tunnels underneath and people-sized vines filling the buildings late in the process), intensifying stress and psychological pressure.

Otherworldly 4 - messed up by all of this, unstable; spending time in nature, confusion about the existence of the self, looking at backdrops/gates into other worlds, thinking about the past and family, graves, something harrowing happens in the external world.

Otherworldly 5 - grounding experiences. anti-grounding experiences. a messy relationship with someone kind of obsessive and/or fuguish—whether friend, frenemy, or lover—probably both grounding and anti-grounding. Their history. Their struggle. To a lesser extent, her own recovery/stabilization.

Summarizing even further:

Otherworldly 1 - Taking Time to Recover

Otherworldly 2 - Slowly Building Horror

Otherworldly 3 - The World is Crushing Us

Otherworldly 4 - Out of Balance

Otherworldly 5 - We Are All We Have

...

Aspect 1 - Taking Time to Recover

Aspect 2 - Slowly Building Horror

Aspect 3 - We Are All We Have

Aspect 4 – The World is Crushing Us

Aspect 5 - Out of Balance

which I think is hilarious

Knight ... is probably the same as Otherworldly. Might be the first time that’s happened?

Shepherd is harder.

We can probably peg “The World is Crushing Us” to Shepherd 4. I have concerns, because it’s the one where she goes back in time and going back in time to fix things is Shepherd 3. But, she fails to fix things, and I don’t think that’s how Shepherd 3 works for the Nobilis. Let’s assume 4.

I think we can rule out “Taking Time to Recover” for Shepherd 3.

I think because Shepherd 2 ends with a big challenge coming up, that probably we can rule out “Slowly Building Horror” for Shepherd 3 ... there’s no feeling in the writeup of “Slowly Building Horror” like something just happened.

We’ve already claimed “The World is Crushing Us.”

So that leaves “Out of Balance” or “We Are All We Have” for Shepherd 3 ... probably the latter.

We have Shepherd 1, 2, and 5 left to figure out, and they map to Otherworldly 1, 2, and either 4 or 5:

* an ordinary life (Shepherd 1)

* having trouble, probably because of a sudden responsibility (Shepherd 2); and

* an extraordinary life (Shepherd 5).

I think we want to map Otherworldly 4, “Out of Balance,” to Shepherd 2. There’s a possible future curve ball where the specifics of the quest shift it to 1 or 5, but as is, that quest feels most like “having trouble.”

That leaves “Taking Time To Recover” as Shepherd 1 and I guess “Slowly Building Horror” as Shepherd 5?

(Weird)

Shepherd 1 - Taking Time to Recover

Shepherd 2 - Out of Balance

Shepherd 3 - We Are All We Have

Shepherd 4 - The World is Crushing Us

Shepherd 5 - Slowly Building Horror

... having “Slowly Building Horror” as Shepherd 5 is hard for me.

The only reasonable alternative would be claiming Otherworldly 5 (“We Are All We Have”) as Shepherd 5, and then Otherworldly 2 (“Slowly Building Horror”) as Shepherd 3, despite the lack of a precipitating event.

Shepherd 1 - Taking Time to Recover

Shepherd 2 - Out of Balance

Shepherd 3 - Slowly Building Horror

Shepherd 4 - The World is Crushing Us

Shepherd 5 - We Are All We Have

Or ... I guess ... Otherworldly 5 (“We Are All We Have”) as Shepherd 5, yes, but Taking Time to Recover as Shepherd 3, and “Slowly Building Horror” as Shepherd 1?

Shepherd 1 - Slowly Building Horror

Shepherd 2 - Out of Balance

Shepherd 3 - Taking Time to Recover

Shepherd 4 - The World is Crushing Us

Shepherd 5 - We Are All We Have

I guess the final option is to discard all of that, and emphasize the “picking up a sidekick at the end of quest 1” thing that Shepherd Arcs often have, which gives us

Shepherd 1 - Slowly Building Horror

Shepherd 2 - We Are All We Have

Shepherd 3 - Out of Balance

Shepherd 4 – The World is Crushing Us

Shepherd 5 - Taking Time to Recover

... I think that’s the one, but it’s shaky.

Knight/Otherworldly/Aspect 1 / Shepherd 5 – Taking Time to Recover

Knight/Otherworldly/Aspect 2 / Shepherd 1 – Slowly Building Horror

Knight/Otherworldly 3 / Aspect 5 / Shepherd 4 – The World is Crushing Us

Knight/Otherworldly/Aspect 4 / Shepherd 3 – Out of Balance

Knight/Otherworldly 5 / Aspect 3 / Shepherd 2 – We Are All We Have

And with that in mind I can probably change the names a bit:

Knight/Otherworldly/Aspect 1 / Shepherd 5 – I’m Dreaming of a Place to Stand

Knight/Otherworldly/Aspect 2 / Shepherd 1 – I’m Clinging to Your Voice

Knight/Otherworldly 3 / Aspect 5 / Shepherd 4 – The World is a Devouring Thing

Knight/Otherworldly/Aspect 4 / Shepherd 3 – The Ground’s Abandoned Me

Knight/Otherworldly 5 / Aspect 3 / Shepherd 2 – We Are All We Have

Maybe?

So for Knight/Otherworldly, it forms a little poem:

I’m dreaming of a place to stand

I’m clinging to your voice

The world is a devouring thing

The ground’s abandoned me:

We are all we have.

But for Aspect, the poem is

I’m dreaming of a place to stand

I’m clinging to your voice:

We are all we have.

The world is a devouring thing;

The ground’s abandoned me.

And for a Shepherd Arc, it’s:

I’m clinging to your voice:

we are all we have.

The ground’s abandoned me;

The world is a devouring thing.

I’m dreaming of a place to stand.

Maybe. Dunno.

Aside: I really like this way of turning quests into lyrics that rearrange themselves but in the end I named quests based on what made the most sense for the individual quest after completing their writeup. Maybe it’s a lost opportunity.

The thing that’s hilarious to me is that the Aspect Arc is basically a comedy.

Like book 1 on Aspect is like:

* living her life, struggling to be better at something

* talking to her friend on the phone about that while weirdness happens in the background, ultimately getting an inspiration about how to become stronk-er

* friend is so exasperating with their summoning murderous true gods and ritualistically walking around town every day! (laugh track) oops reality is just a backdrop gotta go

* in a labyrinth of horrors, let’s fight god! ok, god is dead

* I don’t know how I feel about all this.

... I say that’s hilarious, and it is, but also it bugs me, because it feels a bit inhumane/soulless.

Like ... there’s something I get from all of these that I get sometimes when something I’m writing or reading is going fundamentally astray, and maybe the way the Aspect Arc warps into ... that ... reflects it.

I may also just be sensing the disturbing character of some of the material, though.

Anyway, I’m going forward with this general outline, because I think that the core is probably okay, and there’s just some thematic subtleties that need fixing.

LONG ASIDE

An absolutely fascinating thing I discovered here is that if I make “Taking Time to Recover” more Aspect 3-ish—that is, give it more room for social farce; put another way, make it more social in general—it doesn’t just make it possible to rearrange the Aspect Arc into something less ghoulish, it also addresses an awful lot of what bugs my intuition.

Like, IMO as a writer, book 1 instantly becomes a lot more human if she moves from data entry work in quest 1 to a hypercompetitive digital epets startup.

This fascinates me because “this reads wrong when reorganized into a different Arc” is such a skew way to diagnose the problem, and changing how it reorganizes as a way to fix that is like doing book surgery with waldoes.

...

In the end, though, it didn’t satisfy me as a fix; I addressed things more directly, looking at the end of each book (since the beginning and end of a book is where I personally tackle themes most directly) and fixing things there.

BACK TO THE LOG!

...

I think that the inhumanity of book 1 can be fixed by ending, not with “saved, log out, I was just a puppet on a stage” but with the person in reality showing grief for the self that was in the labyrinth and processed herself as a puppet on stage.

Heck, Book 1 can be named “Weep for the Puppet,” and can parallel that ending by beginning with her getting through the day by denying that things are real or pretending they don’t matter—

That is, it can start with “can our sense of self be real when we’re prisoners of our bodies and environment?” and end with “what does it matter, we should grieve even for a puppet if it suffers.”

Which like ... feels like truth from a really weird angle?

I don’t normally construe “sense of self” and “real” in a way that raises the first question, but if I did, then the answer seems sound.

Will this change the quests? Who knows! It does increase the weight of grieving/graves in quest 4, at least, and tweaks my overall mindset.

Book 2 isn’t as bad. It doesn’t need as much fixing. Maybe name it “Pain Never Is” and focus more on her being upset that it wasn’t for anything, the things she gave up in the labyrinth, but that might be wrong. Hrm.

... not sure if that’s right for book 2, but for book 3 I was thinking that maybe I’d shift to ending by, like:

Illusion of Choice guy tries to wave away the moment of things getting better as you still did what I expected, there was no choice here, but her mood is more like: “choice is a quibble; we (people) are wonder”

(Because my opinion on free will, in general, is that “choice” is a weird abstraction maybe coming out of formal debate or politics or something; when you frame things in terms of choices, yeah, choices matter, but in the rawness of the world, it’s not “choices” or “decisions” that life is about, but rather, the ability to unfold the compressed truths inside you in a healthy and nourishing way, or not—whether or not you get to express yourself without being crushed into someone else’s shape. In the face of that, arguing about stuff like how much choice you have in who you are and the circumstances you deal with and how your brain works and all that is just a distraction.

So that would be a message of the book?)

I’m hindered by the fact that I’m thinking about these while lying down instead of while actively reviewing but I think that might fix book 3.

NOVEMBER 16

Book 4 ...

Maybe book 4 ends better if some NPC or inner voice wonders if it’s fine then, if it’s safe now, if it’s all OK, and even though she has “control” now, she admits that it’s all still as terrifying as all hell.

LONG ASIDE!!

Around here a friend asks whether I had any logs of the development I did on this for GMD or Glitch. Now, for GMD, the stories themselves are in the book, so, like ... you can see most of the process there. Some of the stories like Jasper’s are sketchier but, well, that’s just what they are, I was new at the process and going as fast as I could and it still took years.

For Glitch ...

Well, SKIP THIS PART IF IT WILL SCREW UP YOUR USING THE GLITCH QUEST SETS, but.

The sets for Glitch were built around Lexiarchos Caducine, Adhémar Hetairh, and Filimer Sarus, long-established canon Strategists, though none of them are Chancery Strategists in canon. Filimer doesn’t show up in the core books for Nobilis 2nd or 3rd; you can find more about him in an earlier post,

https://www.tumblr.com/jennamoran/126363471948/purity-pollution-and-the-soul-part-3-the

as well as the terrene stuff in:

https://jennamoran.tumblr.com/post/126441798888/purity-pollution-and-the-soul-part-4-the

https://jennamoran.tumblr.com/post/128218784458/purity-pollution-and-the-soul-part-6-shameful

https://jennamoran.tumblr.com/post/128276380813/purity-pollution-and-the-soul-part-7-cursed

https://jennamoran.tumblr.com/post/130662119128/purity-pollution-and-the-soul-part-8-horrors

I don’t have much for the Lexiarchos quest set; just:

Story 1 - She completes a grand plan to eviscerate the world, but pulls back at the last second, and gets captured by Powers instead. Her first quest in the first story is being captured and interrogated and suspected. Her second quest is them trying to help her fit into the world. Her third quest is realizing that she’d have to give up too much +(to fit in on their terms), and finally turning away.

Story 2 - Her first quest in her second story is wrestling with herself and her personal flaw. Her second quest is finding something she wants to protect somewhere. Her third quest is being put in opposition with her own people. Her fourth quest is struggling to turn said Excrucians aside and ultimately finding something wonderful.

Story 3 - Her first quest in her third story is about trying to put that something wonderful to use but being too static and set in her ways for it. Her second quest is following that thing out into the world and experiencing that. Her third quest is the way it requires change from her. Her fourth quest is a battle with herself. Her fifth quest is putting old stories to bed.

Story 4 - Her first quest is about waiting, because even aging as she is she knows she can’t move too soon. Her second quest is about fear. Her third quest is about the tragedy that is not knowing what’s going to happen, where she’s going. Her fourth quest is closing off some terrible realm. Her fifth quest is discovering what happens now.

That’s all I seem to have for that one, which turned into “the Long Road to Recovery.”

Adhémar’s set, which turned into “Absurdist Comedy,” was ... a bit more detailed:

Book Zero —

Adhémar Hetairh is living his normal life. It’s heroic and grand but also kind of ... routine? Part of that is his ongoing project to subvert a Power.

... he gets subverted instead.

He’s swallowed fire and poison in the past. This is worse.

Book One —

His routine is damaged by this. He tries to go about his ordinary life but it’s all messed up. He can’t break the world like he wants to. Everything’s confusing. His friends in their towers laugh at him. He feels funky when he breaks things. He eats puffy desserts and stares at water and makes tongue-tied speeches and is embarrassed about her. Finally, he realizes that this is another spur in his heart, like the fire and poison. Knowing that, at last, he can embrace it. He can allow himself to change. He can show up at her court, travel-sweat on his brow, and ask to pay her court.

Aside-in-an-Aside: I don’t think the default heterocentrism of the imaginary books has any way to get into the quest sets themselves but I’ll try to make at least one of the next two sets queerer.

Book Two —

He has a place in a city. He has a home. He and the Power are actually working something out. But it gets screwed up because the city is threatened by a friend who is on the border of revenance. He tries to help his friend through to the other side before everything is destroyed. He travels the world looking for a way into a secret citadel where he can recover his friend’s heart, or build him a new one. (The shameful devices of what’s-his-name?)

Aside-in-an-Aside: The devices of Abd-al-Rashid are undeniably masterworks—from Bahir Hibah, the book whose passages can open any portal, to Zakiyya, the mechanical odalisque whose tears are made of gold. At one time or another, many Powers have considered delving into Abd-al-Rashid’s forgotten city in search of these devices. So far, they have refrained. Abd-al-Rashid died a traitor’s death, seduced into betraying his Imperator by mortal lust, and the taint clings to his artifacts still. How would a Power dare to take them? Her peers would point and whisper, “There goes one who claims a traitor’s goods. What else might not she do?”

—from Chronicles of Wonders, by Kip Narekatski

Book 3 has some notes in it like >2; I think this is me reordering quests to see how they look in a different order, but I don’t know if I was experimenting with alternate quest colors or what. I’m leaving them in in case they actually mattered and removing them would somehow lead someone to confusion!

Book Three —

He has taken responsibility for that Citadel and thus taken on a sort of Power role. The machinery is breaking down, though. And there’s a threat on the horizon. Most likely it’s the Locust Court, which is sniffing around. >3

He tries to use their love to perfect it. >2

He travels to the Locust Court. >5

He wields the shameful devices and defeats them, and ultimately swallows down her punishment. >4

Book Four —

He is living on an island, anchoring a part of reality. The world is wobbling, though. Dissolving. Decaying. He tries to save the island without just ruining things. He discovers that it’s ultimately his own fault for swallowing all this stuff, but tries to see his way through to the worth of the world to anchor it, to expunge the wrongness. When he’s done so, he travels to the Hierarch Eternal to drive that in. He returns and can settle down with his romantic interest because he’s nobody.

Aside-in-an-Aside: I just wrote “Hierarch Eternal” down in the file, I don’t think there’s any canon on them

Filimer Sarus’ set, which turned into “Folk Tales:”

Book Zero —

Filimer Sarus lives in a hidden realm and purveys ethical blindness. Every day he encourages Powers to abandon their own ethical judgment and the service of their Imperators and instead immerse themselves in echo chambers of scorn and outrage. Every day he encourages inattention—not acceptance, not even true apathy, but unwillingness to face—the suffering of the world. But increasingly he faces his own blindness. One day it’s too much.

Book One

He goes out to find truth. He goes out to find ... a reason why the wrongness of the world endures. To find something beyond his own revulsion. He meets someone whom he almost idolizes. It’s a very spiritual journey, very Illusions. He faces a flare-up of his disease that tears the world around him apart. He loses his grip on his realm. In the end, he realizes that the world is hard. He is dying of ... presumably he is being devoured by the earth. The world is eating him.

Book Two

He is back in the world, living a new life. He has shed his high position and has decided to live an ordinary life as a rail inspector. It falls apart when the world begins to swallow him again. He becomes fascinated with the idea of binding the world together and down with railway and postal lines. With the stomping the world flat, or the maps at least, that people do these days. But ultimately he doesn’t think that he has time. What can he even do? No matter what he does, no matter how he lives, it just keeps happening. In the end, he remembers why he decided to live—the thing in him that he found that moves even when made stone. The filament that he named himself Filimer for. The life. He chases a great railway-spirit horse and ultimately tames it, finding a moment of laughing freedom before he dies.

Book Three

He spends a while in Ninuan, only going into the world to get the coffee he likes and see his friends from afar. But a Power tracks him down and is all, look, we know you’ve turned, we want your help to get the new guy. He helps explore the new Filimerverse, eventually confronting “the new guy,” who turns out to be a false him. A ... Mimic him? Should that even be possible? He figures out eventually that it’s not, that it’s a Mimic taken from some force of malleability that’s simply been pushed into his shape, a mud-Mimic, but it’s still impossible, because, like, it rubs his nose in everything, and also, he feels ... kind of responsible? Like, just killing it would be cruel. Eventually, he decides that it’s a fine Filimer, and he can’t take it down, but he’ll speak against it. He takes down some of his own great artifacts, and eventually finds, in the stave of morality (see the Purity and Pollution series), the ability to make truth. He thinks ... that might be it. He holds a colloquium on what the right thing ought to be. Ultimately, he decides.

Book Four

The world is no longer wrong (yay colloquium!) but it is slowing. It is congealing. It is right, but nonfunctionally so. He decides that this is a dead end, and walks into the Seal of Time to return to another path. He becomes fascinated with the mechanism of time and possibility—with Attaris’ thousand thousand paths—but in the end, the shifting ground unnerves him. He finds himself wanting to return. He can’t. He’s lost. In the scattered timeways, he chases the riddle-beast that lives there, and ultimately finds the song-law that can chart the way to a golden world. Will he go there?

He’ll walk ten thousand silvered paths before, instead.

There was also a quest set where the “books” were about a random Strategist dying of nightmares, Liza (probably actually Leza or Liecza, for name correctness, but I hadn’t worked out the names at that time). This one became the “Dystopian YA” quest set:

Book Zero

Liza is a guardian of nightmares. She has been bitterly opposed to the world because her nightmares devour her. But after she partners with a nightmare wolf to survive a Power’s hunt, she realizes she can’t keep attempting to destroy the world.

Book One

A nightmare needs help because therapy is erasing it. Still fending off the search parties of the Powers, she gets an understanding of the situation and the weirdness of the town—a Power’s laboratory of sorts, where dreams are raised and slaughtered. She comes up with the idea of smuggling the nightmares out together with the town escapees, as, essentially, munitions. The process of escaping with them goes through a nightmare realm and forces her to confront her own greatest fear. She manages to feint the Power that’s been hunting her off into it and leave a nightmare-of-the-truck-getting-eaten rather than the truck itself getting eaten while the actual truck of evacuees makes it onto the road.

Book Two

The Power that’s been hunting her is in disgrace, and uses a hostage—knowledge about a friend of hers, held captive—to coerce an alliance. It needs help obtaining the stone that holds its soul. They work together to seize it, and it tells her where her friend is and how they can be saved. She investigates the gaol of the Imperators. It’s Sakhrat’s

Aside-in-an-Aside: Sakhrat is the Imperator of Trails, Bureaucracy, Records, and Mazes, introduced in the sample campaign in Nobilis 2nd. It’s one of three “Inquisitorial” Imperators who hunt Mimics and traitors. The others are Ambrolam and Parasiel. They compete a bit because they get to eat them afterwards. AAnnabelle Zupay is one of her Powers; Annabelle likes to do high summoning and hang out with weird creatures from beyond the world. Ambrolam is a True God who really wishes it could leave Earth. Sakhrat’s Chancel floats above the mind.

so it’s possible that Liza can in fact get into it via nightmares. However, the path is tricky to chart, and requires taming a number of rare slitherers. She develops an implements a plan to break in through a nightmarish waylet path and manages to rescue her friend. ... who is in ruins. She decides that she is going to change things. She is going to force Sakhrat and the Inquisitors to acknowledge the Chancery by inflicting a true nightmare upon them. This is probably her own Glitched nightmare, which ravages the place. Whether this has any impact, at the time she does not know.

Book Three

There’s no way to switch to negotiations at this point, so she works with one of the weird allies of Annabelle Zupay to push them into compromise. They wind up conspiring and counter-conspiring in the Beyond to dominate a weird society. Ultimately, she seizes enough influence to escape the trap. She follows the breadcrumb trail to something Sakhrat will actually exchange peace for, to wit, a scheme of hope that fell into the nightmare world a long, long time ago. This she has a chance of rescuing, but the expedition is haunted by Inquisitorial attacks and the personal trauma of the friend she rescued. Eventually she comes up with the plan of using their brokenness to catalyze and draw forth hope. From their shattered mind she grows a nightmare of a way forward, of things not having to be so terrible. She finds Sakhrat’s lost desire. She can’t just give it to Sakhrat. That would just ... lead to betrayal. Instead, she tries to smuggle it into the world welken-rite style as a tamed beast—a weapon of hope, now turned into the Chancery’s service. A world of her own. There’s no way to manage except to become it.

Book Four

She is nightmare and she is hope and she is still dying, still falling from the world. Now she must begin a weird romance with Sakhrat herself, stirred by alien drives, knowing that a misstep will lead to her being flayed in the Inquisitorial fashion, and work out how this is going to be. She realizes slowly that Sakhrat is Glitched. That Sakhrat—and with her, Trails, Bureaucracy, Records, and Mazes—is sinking into the lower dream, precisely because she is glitched. That Sakhrat may very well be a Strategist, or, worse, a revenant-to-be. And of course that if anyone finds out about this, as of course Parasiel and Ambrolam’s Powers are starting to, if anyone finds out that Sakhrat is extra-doomed, she is doomed, and the budding compromise is doomed with her.

Liza manages to distract them with nightmares, though they are pulling through it, but just when they finally break through, her plan is revealed—she was subverting Ambrolam, possibly through the Power that had been hunting her before:

Offering it a way offworld.

Allowing Ambrolam to expand offworld through a waylet is tricky and a little scary. Will it be worth it? Who knows? She works her hope into the path, revealing that she is interlinked into it and therefore now has a hold on two of them. Parasiel stares her down, then finally says, I will allow your life, if you do no harm. It … probably doesn’t mean this.

And that’s what the quest sets in Glitch were based on!

NOVEMBER 16 STILL

OK! Time to start building the actual quests!

Let’s bring together the quest 1 writeups, then simplify them a bit so I can look at them all at once, then do that.

Otherworldly 1

Troubled Dreams

You’re having dreams or otherworldly experiences that connect you to something beyond and outside yourself.

Knight 1

You’re putting on airs. You’re dreaming big. Bigger than the life you have. You’re aspiring, you know? But you don’t really know how to get there.

Reward: you’ve put a name to the thing you want to become, and you’ve put your feet on a legitimate path to making that aspiration real.

Aspect 1

You’re blocked. Frozen. Stuck. There’s something you can’t get past.

Reward. You push past it.

Shepherd 5

You’ve become a new person—a stronger, better person. Isn’t it awesome?

Result. You create or do something amazing and revolutionary.

Aside: Listing all these didn’t really help, since I wound up consulting my memory rather than rereading them. But, well, listing them is what I did!

Book 1, “Weep for the Puppet,” Otherworldly 1:

She lives in a little town. She gets through her day pretending that it isn’t real, it doesn’t matter. She keeps expecting her packages to arrive but they never do. Somehow, she’s become the Power of Backdrops. And she dreams of the moss-crusted, bright-lit, ancient, crumbling walls of a labyrinth in the deeps of the world, and the currents of wind and story that slowly circle through it. There’s a door she could open, if she wanted to, to find it. She could just ... twitch the backdrop of the world aside. And she has to, because there’s something wrong with the world she’s living in. She knows she has to. ... but she puts it off.

Book 2, “The Automaton’s Grave”, Otherworldly 1:

She lives in a rich but ruined world where society is crumbling under Excrucian assault. It is wrong, and she so desperately wants it to be right. It is broken, and she so desperately wants it to be whole. (It’s not her body she wants whole, for clarity, though if the dysphoria aspect of fixing it could be avoided fixing it would be great. Just ... things. Things should be whole.)

She maneuvers her wheelchair onto a rusty jury-rigged car-lifting platform to get to and from her second-floor apartment. She walks her dog past fallen futuristic towers. She hangs out with her voiceless robot street gardener/artist friends.

She gets by, day to day, in the rain and the green that follows, but she wants to go back.

Ever since she saw this weird giant abstract mural that this grumpy old guy in a big grey coat’s been painting, she’s been wanting to go back, has been tormented by this vision of it, this knowledge that she could ... just ... make it. A little dream. A little fake world of her own. Just like the god did. A world where none of this happened. A world where everything is right. A world where she was still the self she wanted to be and nothing was crumbling. And she keeps trying to make it, little dioramas in the air, but it’s never right.

And inspired by that same painting, at the same time, because it’s a flower rite on Backdrops, and a Test of the All-Consuming Dream, her robot friends murder themselves integrating into their art/gardens. The flower rite is saying “Backdrops present a coherent reality, but Backdrops are sketchy, and that’s freaky. Also, Backdrops present a full context, but Backdrops are separate from the stage, and that’s freaky too! Explain me this, backdrops.”

And in the end, she decides she’s going to go that way too. She’s going to pour herself, her life, her being, into that backdrop she’s creating, even if it destroys her. But she’s scared, so she hesitates.

(N.B. The way I’m going to handle book 2 and making it work, I think, is that its ending will construe her wanting to be “right” as her form of obsessiveness/OCD, since there’s kind of a theme/thread of that in who the god chooses; and the current ending moment of the book, while it still might have the Warmain telling her that “pain never is” worth it on the last page or two, is just the sudden dizzying ... sloughing off of glaciers as she realizes that “right” and “real” are so completely unconnected that “right” is a mental bugaboo, and reality washes in like the tide on a crumbling sandcastle.

... yes, it’s sort of reiterating some of the Night-Bird’s Feather, there, but whatever, it’s not like I’m actually going to be writing these, and if I do, it won’t be any time soon! I have had to create so many series I didn’t actually write for quest sets, and most of them are better choices than this series if I actually wrote one.)

Book 3, “Marvelous Symmetry,” Otherworldly 1:

(opening quote:

“What a piece of work is man ... in apprehension, how like a god.”)

Her GPS can never decide which seven-minute route is best to take to work. That’s left to the majesty of her free will.

Anyway.

She’s living, haunted by what happened. She’s in reality, but it’s a mess. Her town is devastated, because it’s small enough a hundred deaths can cast a shadow. Her little neighborhood where most of them were is actively falling apart from fear and broken social connections. The Power of the Illusion of Choice shows up. He has a lot of anxiety and OCD and is generally a mess, jerk, and downer, has no sense of intrinsic meaning in anything any more, but he says he’s been drafted to teach her the basics, show her around the Noble world, give her the introduction to things. At night he tries kind of halfheartedly to put stars back in the sky over town, because the Chancelling process burned out the local sky. She hates it. One Excrucian was bad enough, without a world full of vipers. One “god” was bad enough without a bloody-handed king over them all, and angels being real and the same thing, and mountain ranges being giant snakes and the same thing too?

But most of all there’s a Big Pit outside of town that’s getting bigger every day and no one has the funds to deal with it because all the town’s money went to police (and apparently didn’t even get to them??) and though the mortals don’t seem to notice it LITERALLY has nothing in it, it’s not a big hole in the ground, it’s a big hole in Creation. She keeps dreaming about it. It haunts her. It’s like a metaphor for everything that’s wrong. It was a victory just coming through it intact as a person, herself. Just surviving. She doesn’t have the power or knowledge to deal with ... other stuff, for other people. But she has to. She can’t just let the pit grow and eat everything. She’s going to have to go back.

Book 4, “Squish the Holy Light of God,” Otherworldly 1:

She is in reality. Her body sucks, like bodies do.

... She is in reality, but sometimes she sees someone at a party with a monster behind their face. She is in reality, but sometimes she forgets what being in reality even is or what it means when a phone rings.

She dreams of her life when she was young, of the time when a star fell into her garden in the night and sputtered, burning, on the lawn. Of looking out from a porch and seeing spirits moving in the fields. Of the time around her accident, most of all, and a boyfriend she didn’t have at the time talking to her, and rivers running in the street, and tall buildings on dark nights, and magic and weirdness that she’s pretty sure oughtn’t have been there. And she knows that some of what’s going on is derealization, depersonalization, from trauma, and some of it is that she’s carrying the weight of the power of the god, but ... the stuff about the dreams of the past, that seems legit. She’s seeing things in her past that she couldn’t see back then, and ... maybe even changing it.

Because what is our past but the backdrop to who we are?

(NB the title refers to the fact that our ability to move our bodies is a holy mystery comparable to the fundamental sorcery she learns at the end, including, e.g., if one squishes the floppy bit of your arm to get some holiness to spark.)

... I don’t know why I spent so long on the titles when I am not going to actually write these books.

NOVEMBER 17

Let’s synthesize the four quests and find some possible quest flavor options!

Otherworldly 1 –

* dealing with the finicky idiosyncracies of your transportation

Here, I’m extrapolating from the rusty jury-rigged car-lifting platform out to parallels in the other quests

* a rich experience of ruins or urban decay

Here, I’m trying to draw a throughline between the dream-ruins in book 1 and the decaying city in book 2

* a rich experience of absence, of something lost

Here, I’m trying to draw a line between the futuristic towers in book 2 and the town under a shadow (and maybe the pit) in book 3

* something you usually think is fine is briefly monstrous or horrific or traumatic to you

Here, I’m trying to tie together “seeing monsters behind people’s faces” with the abstract mural, and “pretending it isn’t real” and “a hundred deaths cast a shadow”

* getting stuff from an eccentric, poorly-stocked local store

This is core to “little town” to me, I guess?

* a rich experience of looping, loosely circular motion

This is from the wind in the labyrinth and the ritual walks in book 1, the art in book 2, the kinds of rituals of the Power of Illusion of Choice in book 3 (and the wind around the pit), and the spirits moving in the fields in book 4

* in a dream, fugue, art, vision, or otherworldly space, experience greenery, flowing water, or rain

* experience an arid heat and dying vegetation while fully present in a worldly space

It took me a while to figure out why there was no flowing water in book 3, quest 1, but I think this is why.

* hang out with a quiet friend, preferably eating and admiring a view

This is synthesizing quiet robots + college friends + work friends maybe?

* forgetting for a moment how something basic works

This is mostly for “why is this phone ringing” in book 3, but I think the other books are in weird enough environments that it plays through

* trying and failing to articulate your dream

^ from the diorama

* experience something you might liken to a whirlpool, undertow, or eerie gravitational phenomenon

^ why does the star fall into the garden? Because the labyrinth is a garden-equivalent and pulls at the sky

* the heavens are drawn to the earth

^ a better phrasing, but probably too specific and will go away.

* ritualistic behavior (your own, or someone else’s)

^ mostly from the Illusion of Choice, but also from waiting for packages.

* you open a door

^ this is a weird one, but mark it [[BLUE]] and it’s not bad

* someone exposits in the background while you look away

This is something I imagine the mystery boyfriend doing, also the Power of Illusion of Choice

* feeling unreal

NOVEMBER 18

pulling it all together without notes

* dealing with the finicky idiosyncracies of your transportation

* a rich experience of ruins or urban decay

* a rich experience of absence, of something lost

* a rich experience of looping, loosely circular motion

* experience something you might liken to a whirlpool, undertow, or eerie gravitational phenomenon

* the heavens are drawn to the earth

* ritualistic behavior (your own, or someone else’s)

* something you usually think is fine is briefly monstrous or horrific or traumatic to you

* getting stuff from an eccentric, poorly-stocked local store

* in a dream, fugue, art, vision, or otherworldly space, experience greenery, flowing water, or rain

* experience an arid heat and dying vegetation while fully present in a worldly space

* hang out with a quiet friend, preferably eating and admiring a view

* forgetting for a moment how something basic works

* trying and failing to articulate your dream

* you open a door

* someone exposits in the background while you look away

* feeling unreal

... 17 options is definitely overkill, so I won’t guess quest size from that.

Which ones are major goals?

* You’re drawn in by a metaphorical, psychological, or literal current---often, one that circles back to its beginning.

* The heavens are drawn to the earth.

* Something you usually think is fine is briefly monstrous, horrific, or traumatic to you.

If it’s just those, it’s a 35 XP quest, and we just need 7 of the others.

... I can trim the remaining list down to 10 pretty easily, maybe one of them is a major goal, too, then it’s a 45 XP quest.

* dealing with the finicky idiosyncracies of your transportation

* a rich experience of ruins or urban decay

* a rich experience of absence, of something lost

* ritualistic behavior (your own, or someone else’s)

* getting stuff from an eccentric, poorly-stocked local store

* in a dream, fugue, art, vision, or otherworldly space, experience greenery, flowing water, or rain

* hang out with a quiet friend, preferably eating and admiring a view

* forgetting for a moment how something basic works

* trying and failing to articulate your dream

* someone exposits in the background while you look away

Is that too long tho? Hm.

How long does this feel like it takes?

45 XP wouldn’t really be too much for quest 1 except ... quest 2 isn’t really a very significant update. It mostly just continues, which makes me not want to have quest 1 be too long.

I can accept 40, I think.

...

QUEST 1

…

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* You’re drawn in by a metaphorical, psychological, or literal current---often, one that circles back to its beginning.

* The heavens are drawn to the earth.

* Something you usually think is fine is briefly monstrous, horrific, or traumatic to you.

* You momentarily forget how something basic (like a window) works.

You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 20 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest from:

[[ORANGE/GOLD]] ritualistic behavior (your own, or someone else’s)

[[GREEN/BLACK]] a dissociative or somehow depersonalized experience of lush greenery, flowing water, or rain

[[SILVER/BLACK]] a rich experience of ruins or urban decay

[[SILVER/BLACK]] a rich experience of absence, of something lost

[[SILVER/BLACK]] eating with a quiet friend, preferably somewhere with a view

[[SILVER/PURPLE]] the finicky idiosyncracies of your local transportation

[[SILVER/PURPLE]]] getting stuff from an eccentric, poorly-stocked local store

[[SILVER/RED]] exposition or a narrative voiceover from someone who isn’t actually there

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them.

I’m going to go ahead and make the simplified version now, while it’s fresh.

My first pass gets us down to six quest flavor—

Aside: I appear to have just written the first pass at the simplified quest down without sharing process.

[[GREEN/PURPLE]] working with mental illness or trauma

[[ORANGE/SILVER]] coping with thirst, heat, aridity, or burnout

[[BLACK/SILVER]] a rich experience of ruins or urban decay

[[BLACK/SILVER]] a rich experience of absence, of something lost

[[BLACK/GOLD]] your local infrastructure (transportation, shopping, whatever) utterly fails you, in a single incident or a montage

[[BLACK/RED]] you watch a friend go through their life

Major Goal: exposition or a narrative voiceover from someone who isn’t actually there

This turns into:

QUEST 1, SIMPLIFIED

...

Aside: I skipped a lot of process here too.

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* The heavens are drawn to the earth.

* Something you usually think is fine is briefly monstrous, horrific, or traumatic to you.

* You get exposition or a narrative voiceover from someone who isn’t actually there.

You can earn up to two of these bonuses, once each, for a total of up to 10 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest from:

[[GREEN/PURPLE]] working with mental illness or trauma

[[ORANGE/SILVER]] coping with thirst, heat, aridity, or burnout

[[BLACK/SILVER]] a rich experience of absence, of something lost

[[BLACK/RED]] a bit of narrative focus on an NPC friend as they just ... go through their life ... in your vicinity

[[BLACK/GOLD]] your local infrastructure (transportation, shopping, whatever) just utterly failing you, in a single incident or a montage

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them.

Of course, we also need like a ... title, and flavor text, which I think will be:

Life, Amidst Ruin

You live your daily life in a world haunted by things left undone, by accumulated damage to the way of things, by an aching absence. It may be that you can name what is undone, what is damaged, what is absent; or just one or two; or they may be nameless, uncertain wounds. You dream of something better. Of a way you could make things ... better. It’s impossible to articulate it, to boil it down to a specific plan. The dream is a great and vast and wild thing, so much bigger than the head you’re dreaming with.

Final Aside for Quest 1: This quest gets updated, a little, later.

MOVING ON TO QUEST 2!

So tentatively---and it is tentative---I am swapping Aspect 2 and 5, as another step towards making the Arc more humane. I didn’t want to do it before because it put some events in the book in an awkward order, but I think fixing that is better than fixing thematic stuff.

Aside: I made the swap while not at a computer. I think this was actually wrong, and it was Aspect 2 and 3 that I meant to swap. This confusion spun out until by quest 4 I stopped thinking about where things fit in the Aspect Arc at all! I uh haven’t actually finalized it at the time I’m editing this document up. I’m assuming that I’ll go back to things and assign Aspect quest order when I’m done editing the writeup and it’ll be quick and easy but possibly I’m not actually done yet! ... for now, I’ll just ignore the issue.

Otherworldly 2

Afterwards: You release some of that. More of you accepts that you can’t go back.

Knight 2

This quest is a story of the thing that’s in your way. Think of it as a “documentary”—it’s not about how you conquer your problem, it’s just a tool to help explore what that problem is. A vice? A weakness? An enemy? Or is it just that you’re kind of raw and new?

Outcome: this chapter of your life is over—things are about to change. You’ve either just made a big decision, just gotten the first big sign of that change, or you’ll do so tonight or tomorrow morning.

Shepherd 1

This is the story of your ordinary life—the everyday work, stresses, and pleasures that form the fabric of your days.

Result. A responsibility falls on you out of nowhere.

AND THE QUEST SUMMARIES!

Book 1, “Weep for the Puppet,” Otherworldly 2

She talks to an old friend from college, who was into the weirder side of things, on the phone, as she works through what’s going on around her. Talks about how her neighbor is ... like an automaton, just doing the same thing over and over, no life there, until she finally realizes that that’s what he is, that the original neighbor was [[flash of blood]] one of the murders. And the friend is kind of excited that fantasy is real and kind of worried about her but mostly just talks because the thing is her town doesn’t even exist any more, there’s no way to get to her, she tried. And she talks about how the office she goes to every day is ... ashes, it burned down, only everyone pretends it’s fine and when she gets into the data entry the burned-out missing roof actually protects her from rain. How her dog is a good dog, it’s not the dog she remembers, because, the dog she remembers had a face. And finally she realizes, late one night, while looking at the missing stars, that she doesn’t have a friend like that any more. They don’t talk. That friend got into weird cult magic stuff and fell metaphorically off the face of the world. She doesn’t know how to contact her. She hasn’t heard from her in years. The world she’s in isn’t the real world, she realizes, so she might as well open the labyrinthine door.

Book 2, “The Automaton’s Grave,” Otherworldly 2

She tries to hang on to the world. She argues with the Warmain about how far an artist has to go. She hangs out with one of the surviving robots in a hedge maze and talks about her mortal life, about ice cream and rain and walking by muddy creeks back when she could walk and generally the things one finds when living in the world, as opposed to, say, destroying yourself for an artistic vision or whatever. And the Warmain talks to her occasionally about bits from his life, wandering the void and breaking the sky over Paris and this incredible bakery down in Buenos Aires. But she can only hold out so long. After a while, when the last of the bottle of bourbon they were sharing runs dry, she shrugs and goes for it. He wins. She pours herself into the backdrop. But she’s drunk, and she misses, and realizes that the world is a backdrop still.

Book 3, “Marvelous Symmetry,” Otherworldly 2

She talks to her therapist about everything wrong with the world and how maybe she could fix it if she went to the labyrinth and, and how much she doesn’t want to go back. How she wants to just tell the Illusion of Choice to fuck off and the starless sky to fuck off and screw the Locust Court and being a Power and the true face of the world and just live under her bed and be a bedliverunder blanket bug or dust bunny now. And she doesn’t, doesn’t want to go back. But, the real world is suffering, and she has this conviction, and maybe it’s not even right, that if she goes in and gets a piece of the True God--- This is the kind of plan that makes sense in novels--- That she can patch it. That she can’t maybe fix the whole broken town, or her harrowed life, or get rid of the Excrucians or the Locust Court or the way the world “really” is, but she can fix at least the Pit. Does she even have a choice?

Book 4, “Squish the Holy Light of God,” Otherworldly 2

In visions/dreams/flashbacks, she talks to the boyfriend she didn’t actually have about what’s coming. (I think he’s the star that fell into her garden in the flashbacks in quest 1.) About impending sudden awful change. About destiny. He talks about the dooms facing the world, I think metaphorically rather than Nobilis canon stuff. She talks to her parents in the long long-ago past about whether they’re real or just someone she made up for her backstory. She goes out to the water and gets wind and river spray on her face and can’t feel it at all. She remembers vines and flowers. She argues with the Warmain, still in flashbacks I think, about whether the past being a backdrop or not even matters, and whether it’s right to change it. (He takes whatever side she doesn’t, he doesn’t really have a stake. But mostly he probably argues for the responsibility of power because of how the Otherworldly 2 quest works?) In waking life, she does an office job, filing or data entry, she walks through rows of cabinets and cubicles, she spins on chairs and looks out windows, but it’s not reality or an existential horror: it’s a backdrop she deliberately put up to hide from things, to not be sitting in her apartment with a bunch of half-eaten pizzas and all the responsibility in the world and the ichor of the god puddling at the side of the sink and the Power of the Illusion of Choice for a coworker. When she pulls it down for the day, it’s not “my life is a lie,” it’s “oh well.” In the end, she can’t hide forever. She has to face her past, and she has to face her power, so she’ll do both.

…

This could be an any-time orange quest—

Aside: Oh!

For those who ONLY know Glitch, the color mapping is: BLUE Decisive, with the two gears ORANGE Struggle, with the swords GREEN Poisoned, with the snake RED Receptive, with the lightning GOLD Flame, with the er flame PURPLE Pastoral, with the crook SILVER Setting, with the road to the setting sun BLACK Falling Star, with the falling star I’ll try to use those names sometimes—I used icons in the actual chatlog, so they’re just as technically easy as RED/BLUE or whatever—but it’s not as natural to me.

This could be an any-time STRUGGLE quest, but any-time quests don’t work as well for Arc quests in Glitch/Nobilis as they did in Chuubo’s—sneaking an any-time quest into your main character Arc isn’t as seamless due to how focus works.

So, we’ll put together some quest flavor!

In book 1, her neighbor is an automaton. In book 2, she hangs out with robots. So let’s try:

* watch someone going through their life like an old, rusty machine

In book 1, her office is ashes but it works anyway. In book 4, she spends time in her old family home.

* take shelter in the remnants of an old building—its memory or shell

In book 2, she talks about muddy creeks. In book 4, she goes out to the water.

* visit a place of running water, possibly in a flashback

In book 1, she stares at the missing stars. In book 2, the Warmain talks about breaking the sky.

* the sky is broken

More rain

[[GREEN/BLACK]] it’s raining, and something doesn’t seem real

Of course, again and again, she talks to someone about this stuff. That’s the frame for this quest:

* you talk to your Arc touchpoint as you try to make sense of your life and everything going on

And again and again there’s something weird about that person:

* (probably a major goal) you realize or discover something and, with a horrible sinking feeling, understand that you shouldn’t have been talking to your Arc touchpoint at all

^ needs work

In book 1, her dog doesn’t have a face. There aren’t obvious equivalents in other books, though, except variants on:

* you stop pretending that something is normal. If the group was playing it as normal, you can work out with the GM/group retroactively how it’s actually been abnormal, messed up, or horrific all this time.

In book 1, there’s a flash of blood as she remembers a murder. In book 2, she has intrusive thoughts from the Warmain’s art. In book 4, she has weird flashbacks.

* a momentary, disturbing vision or flashback

There’s a lot of data entry. In book 2, I think she works on rebuilding a rock wall and maintaining a bit of land. It’s super slow given her limitations. In book 3, where she’s focused more on being a Power, I think the equivalent is maintaining a backdrop.

* simple, honest work to help maintain a larger system

There’s ice cream and pastries and bourbon in book 2 and pizza in book 4

* indulging in junk food or some other minor vice

There’s a nexus of conversation topics about fantasy and art and what is real

* talking to someone about stories, magic, or art

She remembers vines and flowers in book 4. I think ... I think, trying to match that to book 1, that’s actually

* you walk along a particularly scenic road

And then there’s this theme from the denial of sacrifice for art and arguing against the past mattering of like:

* arguing against your responsibility for something

And lastly

* you realize or discover that the world around you isn’t real

15 options, so I’ll probably get to actively pick the quest length again.

ROUNDUP!

Major Goal: the sky is broken

Major Goal: you realize or discover something and, with a horrible sinking feeling, understand that you shouldn’t have been talking to your Arc touchpoint at all

Major Goal: you stop pretending that something is normal. If the group was playing it as normal, you can work out with the GM/group retroactively how it’s actually been abnormal, messed up, or horrific all this time.

Major Goal: you realize or discover that the world around you isn’t real

FLAVOR

* watch someone going through their life like an old, rusty machine

* take shelter in the remnants of an old building—its memory or shell

* visit a place of running water, possibly in a flashback

[[POISONED/FALLING STAR]] it’s raining, and something doesn’t seem real

* you talk to your Arc touchpoint as you try to make sense of your life and everything going on

* a momentary, disturbing vision or flashback

* simple, honest work to help maintain a larger system * indulging in junk food or some other minor vice

* talking to someone about stories, magic, or art

* you walk along a particularly scenic road

* arguing against your responsibility for something

This quest can be up to 45 XP, plausibly, because it’s slow-building horror, but even at 45 XP that’s still two too many flavor options.

... probably the last major goal is redundant with the one above it. And honestly, I’d like to make that a flavor and not a MG. So we now have 2 and 12, which is worse, and need to move at least two to major goals.

... the particularly scenic road can be a MG.

Aside: I didn’t explain this at the time, but I’m imagining this as a television series, and the scenic road is from a particularly quiet, impactful episode—not something that happens in every episode.

And the first flavor option can be an MG too. So:

MG: the sky is broken

MG: you realize or discover something and, with a horrible sinking feeling, understand that you shouldn’t have been talking to your Arc touchpoint at all

MG: you walk down a particularly scenic road

MG: you watch someone going through their life like an old, rusty machine

FLAVOR

[[PASTORAL]] simple, honest work to help maintain a larger system

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] talking to someone about dreams, ambitions, and art

[[SETTING/PASTORAL]] indulging in junk food or some other minor vice

[[POISONED/PASTORAL]] you talk to your Arc touchpoint as you try to make sense of your life and everything going on

[[POISONED/FALLING STAR]] it’s raining, or water is rushing by, and something doesn’t seem real

[[POISONED/RECEPTIVE]] a momentary, disturbing vision or flashback

[[POISONED/RECEPTIVE]] you realize that something you’ve been playing as “normal” has actually been abnormal, messed up, or horrific all this time

[[STRUGGLE/FLAME]] arguing against your responsibility for something

... OK, so that’s a 40 XPer.

Inversions for the simplified version:

[[FLAME]] frantic work to help maintain a failing system

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] obsessing about a hobby or idea

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] binging (e.g. on food, liquor, or media)

[[FLAME/STRUGGLE]] you frantically consult your Arc touchpoint for help

[[SETTING/STRUGGLE]] coping with thirst, heat, aridity, or desolation

[[DECISIVE/STRUGGLE]] a momentary, disturbing vision or flashback---is it a warning?

[[DECISIVE/STRUGGLE]] you suddenly recognize something you’ve been accepting as normal as a horrific abnormality or threat

[[POISONED/PASTORAL]] someone convinces you to take responsibility for something

^ wait, does that mean this is Shepherd 1 and not 2?

... wait, it’s already shepherd 1, cool

Let’s see. We can make that last one a major goal, I guess. And we can definitely combine the two [[DECISIVE STRUGGLES]].

Major Goal: the sky is broken

Major Goal: you walk down a particularly scenic road

Major Goal: you watch someone going through their life like an old, rusty machine

Major Goal: someone convinces you you have a responsibility you’ve been trying to deny

[[FLAME]] frantic work to help maintain a failing system

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] obsessing about a hobby or idea

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] binging (e.g. on food, liquor, or media)

[[FLAME/STRUGGLE]] you frantically consult your Arc touchpoint for help

[[SETTING/STRUGGLE]] coping with thirst, heat, aridity, or desolation

[[DECISIVE/STRUGGLE]] an intrusive idea, image, or possibility removes all sense of safety from the world

We need to get it down to at most a 25 XP quest.

I think we can drop the frantic work.

I think we can prrrobably drop the road? Though quiet moments are good tbh.

Major Goal: the sky is broken

Major Goal: you walk down a particularly scenic road

Major Goal: someone convinces you you have a responsibility you’ve been trying to deny

Quest Flavor

... when you:

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] obsess about a hobby or idea

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] have to cope with the aftermath of a binge (e.g., on food, liquor, or media)

[[FLAME/STRUGGLE]] frantically consult your Arc touchpoint for help

[[SETTING/STRUGGLE]] have to cope with thirst, heat, aridity, or desolation

[[DECISIVE/STRUGGLE]] an intrusive idea, image, or possibility removes all sense of safety from the world

I briefly experimented with having “the sky breaks” as the major goal, but it was wrong.

... at some point, for all the strategy and process, this stuff comes down to artistic instinct, possibly even wrong.

... looking at this, y’know, I don’t think we actually need that broken sky at all, or the thirst thing for that matte,r in the fast version.

... actually, the thirst inversion was probably too weird and fancy to begin with, too much trying to pull a trick and too little verifying it would work, it should probably actually be ... flooding? Drowning? Let me update both Otherworldly 2 and Otherworldly 1 there.

OTHERWORLDLY 1, SIMPLIFIED, TAKE 2

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* The heavens are drawn to the earth.

* Something you usually think is fine is briefly monstrous, horrific, or traumatic to you.

* You get exposition or a narrative voiceover from someone who isn’t actually there. You can earn up to two of these bonuses, once each, for a total of up to 10 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest from:

[[POISONED/PASTORAL]] working with mental illness or trauma

[[STRUGGLE/SETTING]] water rises or floods, often in a dream

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] a rich experience of absence, of something lost

[[FALLING STAR/RECEPTIVE]] a bit of narrative focus on an NPC friend as they just ... go through their life ... in your vicinity

[[FALLING STAR/FLAME]] your local infrastructure (transportation, shopping, whatever) just utterly failing you, in a single incident or a montage

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them

Aside: Struggle Setting and Falling Star Reception are now the name of my band. (It needs two names because of the prosaic/mythic divide.)

OTHERWORLDLY 2, SIMPLIFIED, FIRST COMPLETE TAKE

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* the sky is broken

* you walk down a particularly scenic road

* someone convinces you you have a responsibility you’ve been trying to deny

You can earn up to two of these bonuses, once each, for a total of up to 10 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest when:

[[FALLING STAR/STRUGGLE]] you’re overwhelmed

[[DECISIVE/STRUGGLE]] an intrusive idea, image, or possibility removes all sense of safety from the world

[[FLAME/STRUGGLE]] you frantically consult your Arc touchpoint for help

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] you obsess about a hobby or idea

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] you have to cope with the aftermath of a binge (e.g., on food, liquor, or media)

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them.

Doing these made me want to change one icon in the main quest, which unfortunately means doing some shuffling of their order:

OTHERWORLDLY 2, TAKE 2

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* the sky is broken

* you realize or discover something and, with a horrible sinking feeling, understand that you shouldn’t have been talking to your Arc touchpoint at all

* you walk down a particularly scenic road

* you watch someone going through their life like an old, rusty machine

You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 20 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest when:

[[PASTORAL]] you do simple, honest work to help maintain a larger system

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] talking to someone about dreams, ambitions, and art

[[SETTING/PASTORAL]] indulging in junk food or some other minor vice

[[POISONED/PASTORAL]] talking to your Arc touchpoint as you try to make sense of your life and everything going on

[[POISONED/RECEPTIVE]] a momentary, disturbing vision or flashback

[[POISONED/RECEPTIVE]] you realize that something you’ve been playing as “normal” has actually been abnormal, messed up, or horrific all this time

[[POISONED/SETTING]] it’s raining, or water is rushing by, and something doesn’t seem real

[[STRUGGLE/FLAME]] arguing against your responsibility for something

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them

NOVEMBER 19

Here’s the flavor text for quest 2:

Reaching Out (Otherworldly 2)

Things are a mess. You’re a mess. You’re coping, probably, at least on the surface, but beneath that veneer of okayness and ordinary life, however comprehensive or not it may be, things are awful or weird or broken or out of control. You’re reaching out to some NPC, your Arc touchpoint, for help—talking it out with them, mostly, letting them help you sort it all out in your head ...

—but is that really such a good idea?

Thinking about this Arc overall:

So far it’s looking post-apocalyptic pastoral, or more generally “after the fall,” or even more generally “after the big thing, not necessarily a bad thing,” key of star-of-bethlehem as it were.

(This is a Nob3 reference.)

Let’s start gathering stuff for building quest 3!

Gathering quest 3!

Otherworldly 3

Result: You find a part of yourself that hasn’t changed, or won’t.

Knight 3

The Challenge

Something infects you or tries to change you. Something challenges your conception of yourself.

Result: You err. Or fall from grace. Or are changed. Or possibly you grow.

A Fish Out of Water (Alternative)

You’re taken completely outside your normal context. Maybe you try to stick to your role and vice and aspirations. Maybe you take a break from them. I don’t know! Everything is different for a while.

Reward: This has a two-part reward:

first, you have new inspiration about how to be what you want to be and do what you want to do

second, if there’s nothing preventing you—that is, if there’s no pressing story reason why you have to stay out of your element—it’s time to wrap things up and come back home or back to normal.

Shepherd 4

You’re facing a big challenge or adventure.

Result. It ends, leaving you battle-hardened or refreshed and, either way, ready to face the trials of your ordinary life.

Book 1, “Weep for the Puppet,” Otherworldly 3

Behind the backdrop of the town where nothing changed, there’s ... scaled, moss-covered walls, that very slowly move and shift, grinding against one another, and far above, a glimpse of light through the higher levels of the same—like being in a fifth-dimensional anemone, or medusa’s hair on a bad hair day. There’s a nodule with a small population where she’s greeted as a “challenger,” as someone who can put together an expedition to the heart of the labyrinth to become one with the god, which she has to do because the nodule doesn’t have enough resources to feed people indefinitely if challengers like her don’t do this. They bathe her in a pod of stuff that “fixes” her legs and begins to prepare her for that oneness. And there isn’t really a point in this where she has much of a choice. Her parents were fantasy/gaming nerds, so she grew up with this stuff, so she isn’t horribly out of place with it, though she isn’t happy with any of it either, and the dysphoria only grows as she leads the team towards the center and becomes more and more physically alien to herself to survive the challenges of the regions they pass through. When that dysphoria hits a certain peak, though, it comes with ... the realization, true or false, that this isn’t even her. That it’s just a character. She isn’t her.

Of course.

She sees a save point and it all crystallizes for her. This doesn’t feel like her body any more because it’s ... just a character she’s playing, just a puppet on a stage; and if she pulls aside that backdrop, she’ll awaken, back in the world, with the part ... well, whole ... of her that hasn’t changed at all. That wakes, haunted by unfinished journey. That thinks of that poor puppet, that was her and not-her both at once; and grieves.

Aside: This is where I realized I’d gotten confused about how I wanted to rearrange the Aspect Arc.

... I screwed up the Aspect swap, I was swapping 2 and 3 not 2 and 5.

Wasn’t I?

... I’ll poke at it more after I do the roundup.

Maybe I was swapping 3 and 5. It was very clear when I was doing it but I wasn’t at the computer and so it just kind of floated in my head

Book 2, “The Automaton’s Grave,” Otherworldly 3

She peels down the backdrop of the world and returns to the labyrinth save point, this time with the Warmain beside her. She leads a small group (from book 1, plus the Warmain) across a macro-scale forest where the earth and the giant “trees” are the knotted tendrils of the god on what turns into a more survival-themed story. The change in venue, as it often does, has aborted the depressive moment (from quest 2); she’s still playing with a desire for, a diorama/dream/backdrop/vision of, a better time, still wrestling with it, but she’s gone back to trying to make it work without burning herself out, trying to face the Warmain’s challenge instead of losing to it. And the solution she finds is to fuel the reality of it with the god’s life and not her own, and to treat the separation of actor, character, and stage as a matter of willful construal. When she manages to get it to work, when she calls up a perfect crystal vision of the world where things are okay, she breaks down; because look, look, it isn’t gone; it hasn’t changed.

Book 3, “Marvelous Symmetry,” Otherworldly 3

In the mountainous intestines of the god, the heartbeat of the god is a racing wonder, a source of surging life; it is the drumbeat that makes the flowers open, that drives the rising of the sun, that melts the rivers from the snow. It is a life that fills her and strengthens her as she grows in tune with it, as she becomes more, as she unfurls herself like a flower and deepens and grows rich in spiritual wealth and power and begins to understand how with these hands of hers she can shape and save the world, and atop the mountain in the dawn it pierces her, she understands it, and hope, and touches on the nature of the god; and she might have lost herself, become not just herself in that moment but something more, and less, had she not tasted too of the origin of that power, felt deep in the god’s digestive tract how it swallowed another soul. How its heart beat, powerfully, rejoicing, as another bit of human truth was lost, consumed, entangled. How the world sang with it, fed on it, grew verdurous and rich with life and lush. How she gagged, and vomited up the substance of the god, the life and death of it, to spill into the shadow of the dawn.

Book 4, “Squish the Holy Light of God,” Otherworldly 3

She goes back to her college days, to the time of the accident. This time it’s literal rather than flashback—she pulls aside the world, and is there. The college feels kind of dark, swampy, mired in vegetation and oppressive presence. Snakes in the trees. (Though for some reason they don’t show up in the college catalog mailed out to potential students.) Occult battles happening in the darkness. She wants to just take her classes and affirm the reality of things and maybe not damage her spine but no. She has too much power, and too little control; every little OCD or paranoid or superstitious twitch of “things should work this way” gets magnified into reality, and pretty soon there are murders on the campus and blood on the sidewalks and her boring professor is melting as he talks and something horrible is lurking in the shadows and skittering in the steam tunnels and when the day of her accident comes and for all her power she can’t stop it because it’s reified into either a beast that has it out for her or a “final destination” like malignant destiny.

OK, I’m pretty sure it was Aspect 2 and 3 I wanted to swap, not 2 and 5.

So Life, in Ruins is Aspect 1, and Reaching Out is Aspect 5, and the current quest is Aspect 4.

* Aspect 1 – Otherworldly 1 – Life in Ruins

* Aspect 2 – Otherworldly 5 – Working Title “We Are All We Have”

* Aspect 3 – Otherworldly 2 – Reaching Out

* Aspect 4 – Otherworldly 3 - THIS ONE – Working Title “The World is a Devouring Thing”

* Aspect 5 – Otherworldly 4 – Working Title: “The Ground’s Abandoned Me”

... I’m still a little confused, though, so let’s finish the quests first before doing a final analysis.

Aside: This is redundant with what I already told you in asides because I didn’t know in the past what I would be asiding to you in the future. That’s my greatest and probably only personal flaw.

QUEST FLAVOR!

So scaled, moss-covered walls, moving; a macro-scale forest with trees that are knotted tendrils; mountains; a swampy college:

* perceive the world around you as a living thing

* something slithers or writhes

* something still and frozen comes to life

* the sky is occluded by some great power

Then there’s the nodule and the whole challenger thing. I was thinking about implementing that with something to do with “leadership” because she leads a group but I kept bouncing off leadership’s complete absence in book 3 and 4.

* a role, destiny, or relationship you didn’t ask for changes you

While looking at book 3 more, I found another possible way to tie to the challenger thing in books 1 and 2:

* someone dies for you

Circling back to the challenger thing, and again poking hard to fit to book 3 which is otherwise the most different:

* experience something as sacred

Then there’s the dysphoria thing, which was key to book 1 green 3 here:

* you lose a bit more of yourself to the Arc sickness (nb I should specify in the main description that there is an Arc sickness, which is probably about alienation from self or world. Or loss of control, I guess?)

Aside: This is where I pause to look ahead and verify that I did that, which I did! Though I left out the bit about loss of control, in the end.

There’s physical challenges, which seem pretty generic tbh:

* you face environmental danger or hardship

The bath in the pod that fixes her legs feels like quest flavor, something special; trying to capture the way that echoes in the other things that isn’t either covered already or just “you bathe” I get:

* you dissolve or melt into the world

The diorama has some echoes too:

* you struggle to conceptualize and articulate your goal

Hm, the heartbeat of the god is tricky. No, wait, we got it early on as “something still and frozen comes to life.”

Finally, she takes classes

* you learn

12! That’s a good 40 XP quest right there if four of them are major goals. Or, I can make three major goals and get rid of/combine 2!

Pulling them together:

Major Goal: someone dies for you

Major Goal: you dissolve or melt into the world

Major Goal: the sky is occluded by some great power

* perceive the world around you as a living thing

* something slithers or writhes

* something still and frozen comes to life

* a role, destiny, or relationship you didn’t ask for changes you

* experience something as sacred

* you lose a bit more of yourself to the Arc sickness

* you face environmental danger or hardship

* you struggle to conceptualize and articulate your goal

* you learn

I think I can combine “a role, destiny, or relationship you didn’t ask for changes you” with “you lose a bit more of yourself to the Arc sickness,” as long as I mention that in the quest text. I think I don’t actually need “the sky is occluded by some great power.” So that’s a start at trimming it down:

Major Goal: someone dies for you

Major Goal: you dissolve or melt into the world

Major Goal: something still and frozen comes to life

* perceive the world around you as a living thing

* something slithers or writhes

* experience something as sacred

* you lose a bit more of yourself to the Arc sickness

* you face environmental danger or hardship

* you struggle to conceptualize and articulate your goal

* you learn

... OK, that’s a decent 35 XP quest.

Let me assemble it properly:

The World is a Devouring Thing

The world is dangerous, and you are losing yourself.

In this quest, you spend time in a dangerous and wild place, or, the place you’re spending time becomes somehow more dangerous and wild for you.

There, in that place, you sicken, somehow, with the Arc sickness—a progressive real-world phenomenon like a physical change, magical effect, or growth in your understanding, accompanied by increasing alienation from yourself and the world. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but, for the duration of the quest at least, it’s ultimately bad for you.

Often, this sickness the direct result of a role, destiny, or relationship imposed on you by others: you have been chosen, and that change is sickening you, whether that’s as simple as being thrust into a position of leadership or importance and having a breakdown over it even as it strengthens you or as complex as a spiritual transformation initiated by your Imperator.

When the quest ends, if the sickness is neither resolved nor heading towards impending resolution, it generally goes into temporary remission instead, fading away until a later iteration of this quest or until time drains it of relevance.

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* someone dies for you

* you dissolve or melt into the world

* something still and frozen comes to life

You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 15 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest when:

[[POISONED/FALLING STAR]] you lose a bit more of yourself to the Arc sickness

[[POISONED/FALLING STAR]] you perceive the world around you as a living thing

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] experience something as sacred

[[RECEPTIVE/STRUGGLE]] something slithers or writhes

[[FLAME/STRUGGLE]] you face environmental danger or hardship

[[FLAME/PASTORAL]] you struggle to conceptualize and articulate your goal

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] you learn

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them

Inverting the quest flavor to start building the simplified version (somewhat tentative):

[[STRUGGLE/SETTING]] you’re losing yourself to the Arc sickness

[[STRUGGLE/SETTING]] the world is a devouring thing

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] choosing to treat something as sacred

[[DECISIVE/POISONED]] confronting something you fear

[[PASTORAL/POISONED]] you’re worn down by the world

[[PASTORAL/FLAME]] you struggle to conceptualize and articulate your goal

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] you don’t get it

Boiling down and refining, we get:

OTHERWORLDLY 3, SIMPLIFIED

MAJOR GOALS

The GM can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

* someone dies for you

* you dissolve or melt into the world

* you willfully decide, this shall be sacred

You can earn up to two of these bonuses, once each, for a total of up to 10 XP.

QUEST FLAVOR

1/chapter, when you’re in focus, you can earn 1 XP for yourself and 1 XP for the quest when:

[[STRUGGLE/SETTING]] afraid of the Arc sickness

[[STRUGGLE/SETTING]] afraid of the devouring world

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] choosing to treat something as sacred

[[PASTORAL/POISONED]] worn down by the world

[[PASTORAL/FLAME]] struggling to understand or explain

... and so can any other player, 1/chapter, if they substitute their PC for yours or otherwise involve them.

Moving on to Otherworldly 4!

Otherworldly 4

You’ve lost a key part of your sense of self. You look for a way to get that back.

Knight 4

You’ve fallen short of who you wanted to be. You’ve erred, or lost your path. Now you have to make amends, and grow.

Outcome: Redemption is an ongoing process, but you’ve made a start. If possible, an NPC acknowledges that. Either way, the weight of guilt and wrongness on you lightens.

Aspect ??

Shepherd 3

Absolution

There’s something haunting you from the past, but you’ve got the chance to make it right.

Result. It’s the most amazing thing. You do.

An Extraordinary Life

This is the story of your extraordinary life—the larger-than-life magic, battles, and wonder that form the fabric of your days.

Result. A chance at greater happiness falls on you out of nowhere.

nobody resents Nobilis like strategists on Shepherd Arcs

Book 1, “Weep for the Puppet,” Otherworldly 4

She’s back and she isn’t trapped in a labyrinth slowly changing any more, but ... she knows now. She knows that in her blood is the glowing ichor of the god, metaphorically if nothing else. Her comfort in “I’m just Vi, and somehow I became the Power of Backdrops, which is interesting, but also, whatever” is gone; she’s now ... even when she’s not actively being warped, she’s lost security in her sense of self?

This lasts until she realizes (probably subconsciously, or in a dream) that she’s come to identify as Vi-who-is-one-with-the-god, and that it’s entangled with her, that its distinction from her is important but also just conceptual—which is also terrifying, but allows her to organize and settle her body-sense again.

Book 2, “The Automaton’s Grave,” Otherworldly 4

The Warmain is all like “dang I’d like to harvest you right now but I’d like to point out that we are not in reality. Possibly if you care so much about the world outside of the god you might want to work with me on getting OUTSIDE OF THE GOD.” Put another way, having realized that she still wants to be something other than this, he encourages her to ... like ... be something other than this. (So he can kill her and take her face maybe but WHATEVER sometimes you have to accept your friends’ little eccentricities.)

And the journey is harrowing. She gets hurt. Scared. They lose people, even with a Power and a Warmain in the party. She makes it to the keep, at the end of the proper labyrinth journey; does the whole narratively satisfying sacrifice, giving up the diorama to the god, in order to bond more deeply to the god and open the great sacred door ... and it’s just another backdrop.

That’s the gate into reality, into the thematically inconsistent reality.

He sighs and they hang out and have a bit of pseudohuman company instead of him killing her.

Her sacrifice wasn’t worth it, she says, and he says “pain never is;” and then ...

There’s this sudden, dizzying ... sloughing off of glaciers ... as she realizes that “right” and “real” are completely unconnected, as she can let go temporarily of the OCD need for “right” because it isn’t real, and reality washes over like the tide over a crumbling sandcastle.

Book 3, “Marvelous Symmetry,” Otherworldly 4

She’s found a part of herself that’s still the same, but ... In what turns out to be a direct echo of book 1 Otherworldly 4, she’s still ... entangled with the god. She still realizes, over the course of this quest, that she’s lost her grip on what’s her and what’s the god; on being a self separate from the world. She knows she’s not okay with the god, she knows there’s still a Vi that is not the god, but she can’t find the boundaries. And dealing with the fact that if she directly establishes them, that’s possibly just ... a loss. If she establishes them, maybe she just gets eaten, or escapes but without the power she needs to help the world.

So there’s wandering the fields beneath a strange sun and strange sky, lost in the flowers, thinking about the colors of the world and the blood inside her and being eaten and the nature of consciousness and differentiation and connection between people and remembering precious moments with family and others on the god’s behalf.

And at the end, she remembers how at the save point she was just a puppet on the stage, and how this can’t really be her, because look at it, it’s a god, it’s the God, walking ... and lets herself fall into it completely so she can pass a bit of the god’s essence outwards to the true her, somewhere else. Because something of her must remain, if not here, then ... out there, in a world where she was not consumed.

I think it’s OK that this reiterates book 1 Otherworldly 4 as long as there’s a secondary plot that is going on in book 1 that I don’t know yet but figure out while doing the options, so that the book 1 Otherworldly 4 novella can be about “the first time Vi was losing herself to the god”

Book 4, “Squish the Holy Light of God,” Otherworldly 4

She wakes up after her flashback stuff back in the present. She is not happy because while in one sense, reality demonstrated some stability against her world-changing power, it wasn’t the stability she wanted and also like it wasn’t very much of it. She doesn’t know how much of that Otherworldly 3 experience was even real or if not what happened. She’s stopped reflexively changing everything around her with an expectation, but she doesn’t even know if she has a real past. She doesn’t even know if she has a body that isn’t a self-image. If there was a real past under the backdrop. If her friend joined the mystery cult because she went back into the stage of her past and showed off divine powers, meaning that that stage was always a stage and always where they both originated. If reality is anything other than a backdrop that’s deferring the whole aesthetic consistency ideal, or failing at it due to Excrucian challenge.

She questions whether reality would matter, whether “being real” would make something more real than a backdrop in the first place. She tries to find someone’s grave. She looks at versions of other realities. She gets mired in mud beside a creek. She spends time in nature (which I think means “by the Big Pit and in a little woods with a creek” because her town isn’t very nature-y) trying to reconnect with something real, but it doesn’t do it. In the end, she finds her only option: if she can’t find reality, if she can’t touch reality, if trying to definitively prove something real risks making it real, she has to embrace it, and try to declare the quiddity of honor* she is looking for into the reality she makes.

* inherent integrity; truth

I think I will need to start here tomorrow by thinking about book 1 a bit more, and the equivalent of “wandering in fields beneath a strange sun and strange sky, lost in the flowers ...” for robotworld or world-becoming-robotworld, which is where she’d be.

... I think that’s where she finds the wall in the woods she works on repairing in book 2, and maybe where she repairs the thing she uses to get up and down to her second floor place without help or overdrawing spoons. Possibly general working on mechanical stuff plus wandering the region and becoming one with the world.

NOVEMBER 20

Book 1, “Weep for the Puppet,” Otherworldly 4, Take 2

She’s back and she isn’t trapped in a labyrinth slowly changing any more, but ... she knows now. She knows that in her blood is the glowing ichor of the god, metaphorically if nothing else. Her comfort in “I’m just Vi, and somehow I became the Power of Backdrops, which is interesting but also whatever” is gone; she’s now ... even when she’s not actively being warped, she’s lost security in her sense of self?

She’s living in an abandoned auto repair shop because this place is clearly basically Old Molder. That’s why she has to live on floor 2 and that’s why there’s no elevator but there’s an unused lift.

Aside: Old Molder is a place in the default Chuubo’s setting that ... isn’t directly on point, but clearly came from the same place in my brain as the setting where Vi starts in book 2. One small part of how Old Molder works is that nobody uses the ground floor any more; another is that people there have stopped driving cars.

She spends her time picking up fish out of traps and scavenging and either refurbishing or making art out of pre-apocalypse stuff. And one day while on a particularly extensive roam she finds the remnants of a modern art sculpture garden and ... cleaning up the area some, and getting the rust off of the pieces, and such ... it helps. This is also how she meets the robots; I think she’s passed them, and their work, in town, and at some point when she hits her physical limits working on the place, one of them just shows up.

Eventually she has a bit of security in herself again, probably prompted by realizing (probably subconsciously, or in a dream) that she’s come to identify as Vi-who-is-one-with-the-god, and that it’s entangled with her, that its distinction from her is important but also just conceptual. That’s terrifying, but it allows her to organize and settle into her body-sense again.

ASSEMBLING QUEST FLAVOR

That’s four books worth of quest, so we can start assembling quest flavor.

So we have glowing ichor-rivers, book 2, ... and rivers to collect fish from in book 1, and getting mired in mud in book 4. And in book 3 ... blood?

* struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

We approach a grand landmark keep in book 2; which I think matches a defining sculpture in book 1, the sun in book 3, some big town building in book 4.

* look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

She tries to push away the world and find reality in book 2; in book 3, she tries to push away ... her current self, to find the truth; in book 4, she tries to push away her false ideas, her world-model, to see what she’s missing; in book 1, she’s trying to push away the present to find the past, sort of. Hm. I’m actually not sure, let me summarize as:

* struggle to connect with reality

* struggle to reconstruct something lost

The image of tearing open the air to a highway of screaming cars in book 2 is vivid.

* you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

The journey in book 2 is harrowing; she is hurt, scared. The journey in book 3 is more spiritual. In book 4, she gets mired, stressed. In book 1, more of a fugue.

* the world is emotionally overwhelming

There’s a grave theme in 2 and 4, but in 1 and 3 ...

* try to connect to someone dead, or in another world, as by tending to their grave

In book 2, she gives up the diorama and the world where things are “right,” pointlessly. In book 3, she gives herself up entirely ... not really pointless, I guess, but wrong in the book’s aesthetic. Probably tuned to giving up her choices, considering the book theme. In book 4, she gives up on a deeper reality. In book 1, ... possibly something more about the automaton/human distinction, since the robot’s right there, or just “giving up on the full distinction of self and god.”

MG: sacrifice something core to your journey on this Arc, or abandon an emotionally important goal, to no immediately obvious gain (except 5 XP).

She sloughs off metaphorical glaciers in book 2, and her whole self in book 3:

* let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

^ except this probably merges into the above major goal rather than being its own goal or flavor

In book 2 and 4 she looks at backdrops of other realities. In book 3, she looks at art and scavenges stuff from the past.

* catch a glimpse of another world, literally or metaphorically

In book 2, she works with the Warmain. There may? be similar figures in other books

* accept help from a frenemy

In book 3, she wanders beneath a strange sun/sky. This has potential parallels in book 2, and generally:

* travel beneath a strange sun or sky

In book 3, she gets lost in the flowers. In other books, she spends time in nature:

* travel through the fields

In book 3, she thinks about the colors of the world, the blood inside her, being eaten, and the nature of consciousness. These are pretty generally applicable:

* get lost in the colors of the world

* blood flows

* talk or monologue about the nature of the self

In book 3, she remembers precious moments

* remember a time that has gone before.

It might also be:

* think about the past

In book 1, she does art, and cleans, and meets the robots. What does this match in other books? In book 4, hanging out by the pit and Power stuff; in book 3, wandering in a fugue, and meeting creatures; in book 2, maybe doing art by the fire, and daily tasks, and hanging out with the locals.

* lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

* do daily maintenance <= needs work

* work with someone quiet

This set feels particularly rough; I’m not at my best today. Still, let’s see what happens!

SUMMARY OF POSSIBLE QUEST 4 FLAVOR/GOALS, TAKE 1

Major Goal: sacrifice something core to your journey on this Arc, or abandon an emotionally important goal, to no immediately obvious gain (except 5 XP).

* let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

* struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

* look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

* struggle to connect with reality

* struggle to reconstruct something lost

* you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

* the world is emotionally overwhelming

* try to connect to someone dead, or in another world, as by tending to their grave

* catch a glimpse of another world, literally or metaphorically

* accept help from a frenemy

* travel beneath a strange sun or sky

* travel through the fields

* get lost in the colors of the world

* blood flows

* talk or monologue about the nature of the self

* remember a time that has gone before.

* think about the past

* lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

* do daily maintenance <= needs work

* work with someone quiet

There are a lot because they’re not quite right; many need like 20-30% more goodness.

Still, starting with 20 + 1 MG puts me in a good place to address that!

I guess I will begin by assigning colors, and then if that doesn’t lead to incidentally adding goodness and reducing the numbers to something manageable, I’ll put it off until my brain is better!

Aside: My brain didn’t really get better but the quest came out OK I think.

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

[[PASTORAL/FLAME]] struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

[[SETTING/FALLING STAR]] look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] struggle to connect with reality

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] struggle to reconstruct something lost

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

[[SETTING/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] try to connect to someone dead, or in another world, as by tending to their grave

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] catch a glimpse of another world, literally or metaphorically

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] accept help from a frenemy

[[SETTING/FALLING STAR]] travel beneath a strange sun or sky

[[SETTING/FALLING STAR]] travel through the fields

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] get lost in the colors of the world

[[SETTING/FALLING STAR]] blood flows

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] talk or monologue about the nature of the self

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] remember a time that has gone before.

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] think about the past

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] do daily maintenance <= needs work

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] work with someone quiet

Organizing:

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] struggle to connect with reality

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] struggle to reconstruct something lost

[[PASTORAL/FLAME]] struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

[[SETTING/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

[[SETTING/FALLING STAR]] look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] try to connect to someone dead, or in another world, as by tending to their grave

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] get lost in the colors of the world

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] catch a glimpse of another world, literally or metaphorically

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] remember a time that has gone before.

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] think about the past

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] travel beneath a strange sun or sky

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] travel through the fields

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] blood flows

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] do daily maintenance <= needs work

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] work with someone quiet

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] accept help from a frenemy

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] talk or monologue about the nature of the self

… no brain today, punting until tomorrow for the rest.

NOVEMBER 21

OK, gonna trust myself a bit and work from there rather than starting over, but also review each of them more carefully than usual as I go.

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

> This is a Major Goal or gets dropped because it only happens once per book, is set up to merge with an existing goal, and its icons are awkward for building the list.

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] struggle to connect with reality

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] struggle to reconstruct something lost

> I think this is actually [[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] searching desperately for something you’ve lost

[[PASTORAL/FLAME]] struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

> This also has awkward icons, and feels like a major goal, so mote it be.

[[SETTING/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

> let’s make this [[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

... but it’s good

[[SETTING/FALLING STAR]] look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

> Let’s make this [[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]].

I know I said that that icon pair was awkward for building the list, and it is (it’s awkward because the list looks nicest if every given icon is either always first or always second in the list, but if there’s PASTORAL/DECISIVE, PASTORAL/FALLING STAR, and DECISIVE/FALLING STAR, you can’t do that) ... but it’s still correct in this case, or at least the most correct I can do right now.

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

> ... tentatively, major goal, but this is also the first major goal on the chopping block. It’s cool but not ... that cool?

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

> I still like this one.

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] do daily maintenance <= needs work

> actually gonna just delete this instead of doing that work on it, it’s not as good as the one before it.

Running out of discord characters for typing in a single post and not enough brain to deal with it chiding me for typing too much at once, so pausing to consolidate:

WHAT WE HAVE SO FAR

Major Goal: sacrifice something core to your journey on this Arc, or abandon an emotionally important goal, to no immediately obvious gain (except 5 XP).

Major Goal, possibly merge with that: let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

Major Goal, probably drop: you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

Major Goal: struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] searching desperately for something you’ve lost

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] try to connect to someone dead, or in another world, as by tending to their grave

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] get lost in the colors of the world

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] catch a glimpse of another world, literally or metaphorically

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] remember a time that has gone before.

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] think about the past

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] travel beneath a strange sun or sky

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] travel through the fields

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] blood flows

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] work with someone quiet

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] accept help from a frenemy

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] talk or monologue about the nature of the self

continuing where we left off ...

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] try to connect to someone dead, or in another world, as by tending to their grave

> I think probably move this to the simplified quest, as the parallel to the first [[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] quest item; if I don’t do that, change it to [[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] tending to a grave

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] get lost in the colors of the world

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] remember a time that has gone before

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] think about the past

> These are good, though there are too many of them. Probably drop one of the last two, and then maybe drop one more?

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] catch a glimpse of another world, literally or metaphorically

> let’s make this [[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] catch a glimpse of another world or another time

... and trust players to figure out metaphors on their own.

... but maybe drop it, anyway, too.

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] travel beneath a strange sun or sky

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] travel through the fields

> These probably get combined into one travel montage bullet point.

[[FALLING STAR/SETTING]] blood flows

> this one isn’t really necessary, so it’s a good deletion candidate, but it’s fine.

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] work with someone quiet

> I think this should be [[PASTORAL/SETTING]] or [[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] work with someone in companionable silence

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] accept help from a frenemy

> I think the icons should be [[STRUGGLE/DECISIVE]]

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] talk or monologue about the nature of the self

> maybe [[FLAME/DECISIVE]] fret or monologue about the nature of the self

...?

I’m still not at my top icon/quest flavor game, but I think that’s better.

Collating ...

COLLATING ...

Major Goal: sacrifice something core to your journey on this Arc, or abandon an emotionally important goal, to no immediately obvious gain (except 5 XP).

Major Goal, possibly merge: let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

Major Goal, probably drop: you find some of the reality you’re looking for(?) and it is screaming

Major Goal: struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] searching desperately for something you’ve lost

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] get lost in the colors of the world

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] catch a glimpse of another world or time

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] remember a time that has gone before.

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] think about the past

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] travel places vivid, beautiful, and strange

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] or [[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] work with someone in companionable silence

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] lose yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] look to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

[[DECISIVE/STRUGGLE]] accept help from a frenemy

[[DECISIVE/FLAME]] fret or monologue about the nature of the self

Down to 4 and 12, which is already a lot better!

I’d like to make this a 40 XP quest (4 major goals, 8 quest flavor), although I realized earlier that a 45-XP quest is potentially viable because ... well, that feels like it’d be too long, right? Except! This quest typically ends in a sacrifice, so filling in the final 5 XP by [doing the Nobilis equivalent of taking Cost to finish quests in Glitch] isn’t a problem.

Let’s see.

I think we can jump straight from here to a draft of the final:

OTHERWORLDLY 4, TAKE 1

MAJOR GOALS

* let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

* struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

* accept help from someone you’d really rather not have to deal with

* catch a glimpse of another world or time

QUEST FLAVOR

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] working with someone in companionable silence

[[RECEPTIVE/SETTING]] dwelling on the past

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] searching desperately for something you’ve lost

[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] the world is emotionally overwhelming

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] traveling places vivid, beautiful, and strange

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] losing yourself in a work of craft (from simple repairs to great artistic projects)

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] looking to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif [[DECISIVE/POISONED]] wrestling with a threat to your boundaries or your sense of self

The order isn’t quite neat, so maybe the first one becomes Pastoral/Falling Star. We’ll see when simplifying!

INVERTING THE FLAVOR AS THE FIRST STEP IN SIMPLIFYING THIS

... ah, the first one inverts into a major goal, so it doesn’t answer the question after all.

Major Goal: working with someone in companionable silence

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] drawing on a memory

[[DECISIVE/PATORAL]] reaching out to someone dead or in another world (e.g., when tending to a grave)

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] finding balance in an overwhelming world

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] or [[DECISIVE/RECEPTIVE]] finding something fascinating or beautiful

[[FLAME/SETTING]] your tasks are overwhelming

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR] (not inverted for some instinct-based reason) looking to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

[[RECEPTIVE/STRUGGLE]] your sense of self is under threat

Major Goal: let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

> still important in the simplified quest

Major Goal: struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

> less important? Probably?

Major Goal: accept help from someone you’d really rather not have to deal with

> I think this becomes “[[RECEPTIVE/FLAME]] people are overwhelming”

Major Goal: catch a glimpse of another world or time

> I think this becomes [[FALLING STAR]] glimpses of other worlds and times

That’s the first pass!

COLLATING ...

Major Goal: work with someone in companionable silence

Major Goal: let go of something you’ve been hanging on to

Major Goal: struggle against a current, undertow, or mire

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] drawing on a memory

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] looking to a specific tall/high landmark that serves as a quest motif

[[DECISIVE/RECEPTIVE]] reaching out to someone dead or in another world (e.g., when tending to a grave)

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] finding balance in an overwhelming world

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] the world provokes an emotion or decision

[[FLAME/SETTING]] your tasks are overwhelming

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] people are overwhelming

[[STRUGGLE/RECEPTIVE]] your sense of self is under threat

[[FALLING STAR]] glimpses of other worlds and times

SIMPLIFYING ...

Simplifying a bit, trying to get down to a 25 XP quest:

Major Goal: working with someone in companionable silence

Major Goal: letting go of something you’ve been hanging on to

Major Goal: struggling against a current, undertow, or mire

[[DECISIVE/FALLING STAR]] remembering

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] exploring the world

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] reaching out, possibly to someone absent

[[DECISIVE/PASTORAL]] finding a bit of balance

[[FLAME/STRUGGLE]] falling apart

OK, that was definitely pushing my neck too far, done for at least a few hours

NOVEMBER 22

Here’s the description for it:

Stretched Thin

You have been worn down. Stretched thin. You don’t have enough left in you to maintain the coherent sense of reality and self that you used to have. It’s hard enough just making it through each day.

For the Nobilis, this quest rarely represents inadequate power. Unless both Aspect and Ability are very low, it’s unlikely to express inadequate physical or mental resources, either. Rather, a Power generally gets stretched thin by stress and trauma: direct threats to and assaults on their sense of self and reality and experiences, wounds, and responsibilities that are simply too much to bear. If you wind up at this quest and aren’t sure what’s stretching your character thin, it’s likely that the things they’ve seen and the things their Imperator, other Imperators, and the Excrucians have done to them and their vicinity have gotten to them more than has been previously known.

MOVING ON TO QUEST 5!

Otherworldly 5

Live Together, Die Alone

You reconcile with someone or something you’ve been fighting.

Result: you help them find peace, acceptance, or find their way back from being lost.

Book 1, “Weep for the Puppet,” Otherworldly 5

Vi’s friend, the Arc touchpoint, actually got involved in weird magic stuff long before Vi did, and eventually after it soured the friend’s relationships with Vi and everyone else she fell off the face of the trackable earth.

... becoming part of the mystery cult that summoned the god.

In this quest, Vi tracks her down, and can’t get her to stop doing stuff like walking the daily ritual tracks through town (that are unnecessary now because the Chancel’s already formed) or bits of self-mortification; all she can do is slowly integrate more mundanely healthful things on the one hand into those rituals and on the other re-engineer them towards building up the friend instead. The quest ends when for the first time the friend looks up from the daily town-circling trudge to see the ... I was going to say sun, but maybe, missing stars.

Book 2, “The Automaton’s Grave,” Otherworldly 5

This is a short story about her and the Warmain after the book, and like: he was going to kill her, but didn’t because they’d just been through something hella harrowing. She doesn’t know who she is any more, and is scared, and even though he’s a monster and she’s a Power so probably one too, he stays around to help her figure herself out again. And they talk about grounding things, blanket textures and grass smells and dumb dogs and grocery schedules and hot drinks and what she wants if she can’t have magic dreams? And he talks to her about why he Warmains, about the thing he’s trying to keep asleep; about being born in the void, and walking paths the colors of the dawn, and the knowledge and certainty of his purpose. He talks to her about his first kill in the world, the one that tempered him, some long ago Power murdered by a river so that he could have a face and thoughts and could speak in words, and how he has been haunted by that Power’s private visions of beauty and art ever since. How he’s filled his head with so many dreams and visions on this mission that sometimes he forgets who he is, loses practically everything, gets lost in it, and how terrifying that is. How he should be killing her, though he should probably make sure she can still do the thing when she isn’t in the belly of the god?

And she doesn’t wind up friends or anything. Maybe lovers briefly when they’re first recovering from the labyrinth, maybe not, but ... in the end, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he should do better, but he’s a monster, and sends him off. And because they did share some trauma, he goes.

Later, she gets a call from him, when he’s lost track of where he is and is in a panic but her number was burned into the inside of his eyelids, so he called; and she goes to help.

Book 3, “Marvelous Symmetry,” Otherworldly 5

In quests 1-2 her attitude towards the Power of Illusion of Choice was mostly “fuck off dude” but after being refreshed on just how much the god messes with the mind she’s more like ...

There’s something broken in him that she can’t fix.

And some of her reaction is, like, I’m never going back. I won’t go back. I’m lucky that I didn’t break a lot more myself. And some of it is to marvel at the starstuff or pitfilling stuff power she’s using. But some of it is like: so what if I didn’t have a ‘choice?’ choice is a quibble; we (people) are wonder.

Otherworldly 5 (Variant)

Blurring the Boundaries

You merge with some spiritual force. You become its exemplar or its host. You are you and you are also that.

Result: you’ve grown into who the new combined-self you will be.

Book 4, “Squish the Holy Light of God,” Otherworldly 5

This is her attempt to come to an accommodation with her god’s power using her new Sorcery-based paradigm. Her attempt to really dig into the god and understand its nature in totality, to grasp the currents of its thoughts, to identify it as part of her rather than an intrusive force that can seize control of her. An attempt to understand what it is to be a boundaryless motion, a recursion, a ritual, a derealization, a backdrop, an illusion of choice, an endless spiraling labyrinth of dissociation and trauma and mossy walls and green snake tendrils in the depths of mind and world. An attempt to be one with the thing that is one with everything without losing herself. And an attempt to seize reality by declaration, to find a point of grounding, a thing she can anchor in: soil, stone, textures again probably, the fur of her dog, the heat of a hot drink, the warmth of someone’s company, the waves of the sea, the beauty of fire, flowers, sunrise, cliffs. The roughness of bark. Ants crawling on the earth. Night air on the skin. The recovered stars. And ending, like I said, with ...

Well. She’s not paralyzed, she’s one of the “I need a wheelchair because if I try to walk I can go, like, 20 feet” types. So it ends with that, only for controlling the god/trauma/choice/the world/existing in reality. She can’t do the thing, like everyone expects her to, like she expects herself to do, but she can ... push something at the god, to move its power and sacrifice the essence of a backdrop to make it real.

... it’s a victory, but she admits to herself that it’s all still terrifying.

SOME SHARED POINTS AMONG THESE

There’s tracking down the Arc touchpoint in book 1, and dealing with the Warmain in book 2, and the Power of the Illusion of Choice in book 3, and the god in book 4:

Major Goal: you make an emotional connection with someone you’ve been fighting with

There’s the walking ritual paths in book 1, and the Warmain walking dawn-colored paths in book 2, and the boundaryless motion in book 4.

* someone travels a sacred or ritual path

In book 1, her friend does self-mortification. The Warmain, on the other hand ... kills? sometimes forgets who he is? Power of Illusion of Choice is just a mess. The god ...

* someone denies their own personhood, and acts accordingly

In book 1, she tries to integrate health and rebuilding into the friend’s rituals. In book 2, they talk about grounding things. In book 3, she cleans. In book 4, more grounding things.

* consciously ground yourself, as with a cup of hot tea or coffee or by focusing on a texture

* help stabilize or organize someone else

Pause to feed cat.

In book 2, the Warmain talks about the thing he’s trying to keep asleep, and presumably the friend talks about the god, and so forth:

* someone talks to you about their purpose or their faith

Similarly, key events in the past and personal crises:

* someone talks to you about a formative event

* someone talks to you about their fears

The Warmain might be a lover, and the god technically is:

Major Goal: you merge with someone else, in one sense or another, for a time

And some general social things:

* someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa

Major Goal: someone, trapped by their habits or fears, is unable to emotionally connect with you

And another general one:

* someone witnesses the wonder of the world

COLLATING THESE, ADDING ICONS

Major Goal: you make an emotional connection with someone you’ve been fighting with

Major Goal: you merge with someone else, in one sense or another, for a time

Major Goal: someone, trapped by their habits or fears, is unable to emotionally connect with you

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] help stabilize or organize someone else

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] someone talks to you about their fears

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] someone travels a sacred or ritual path

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] consciously ground yourself, as with a cup of hot tea or coffee or focusing on a texture

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] someone talks to you about their purpose or their faith

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] someone talks to you about a formative event

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] someone denies their own personhood, and acts accordingly

[[DECISIVE/SETTING]] someone bears witness to the beauty of the world

UPDATING, REFINING, TO GET OTHERWORLDLY 5 TAKE 1

Major Goal: you make an emotional connection with someone you’ve been fighting with

Major Goal: you merge with someone else, in one sense or another, for a time

Major Goal: someone, trapped by their habits or fears, is unable to emotionally connect with you

Major Goal: someone you care about hurts or loses themselves

[[PASTORAL/FALLING STAR]] someone travels a sacred or ritual path

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] someone talks to you about their fears

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] you help stabilize or organize someone else

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] you consciously ground yourself, as with a cup of hot tea or coffee or focusing on a texture

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] someone talks to you about their purpose or their faith

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] someone talks to you about a formative event

[[FALLING STAR]] the world is beautiful

INVERTING AS THE FIRST STEP TO GETTING THE SIMPLIFIED QUEST

[[FLAME/SETTING]] someone wears themselves down on a sacred/ritual journey

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] someone is overcome by their fear

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] someone hurts or loses themselves

^ this is an interesting parallel to the major goal in the regular version of the quest; should we make it explicit, turning this into “someone you care about hurts or loses themselves,” and then make “someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa” into a Major Goal for the simplified quest, so they’re directly parallel?

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] ...

^ it looks to me like the inversion of “someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa” and “you help stabilize or organize someone else” are the same—they both invert to “someone hurts or loses themselves.” So no new entry here.

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] you struggle to stay in touch with reality and yourself

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] someone tries to sell you on their purpose and their faith

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] someone talks to you about what broke them <= needs work

[[SETTING]] scenery <= also needs a lot of work

Thinking about Major Goals and how to invert them.

Aside: I don’t always do this explicitly because a lot of the time what I actually want to do is “take the new Major Goals that came out of the inversion process, and the most important Major Goals from the regular version of the quest, and those are the Major Goals for the simplified quest.”

But when I’m not at my best I have to go over them more carefully, treating each Major Goal as if it were a quest flavor, finding icons for it, inverting the icons, inverting the description, and seeing if that makes a better major goal or if I should just delete it or leave it as it was.

Major Goal: you make an emotional connection with someone you’ve been fighting with

> On review, this still seems “right.”

Major Goal: you merge with someone else, in one sense or another, for a time

> less important in a simplified quest, but a TV series would still include this bit when rushing through the plotline and prrrrobably even a book would, and in neither case would it change it much?

Major Goal: someone, trapped by their habits or fears, is unable to emotionally connect with you

> this inverts to [[PASTORAL/SETTING]] someone struggles to emotionally connect with you.

... oh! But that’s already covered in the first Major Goal, so one of them can get dropped.

Major Goal: someone you care about hurts or loses themselves

> this is tentatively becoming [[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa

So before we shrink it down to size we’re at:

MAJOR GOALS

* you make an emotional connection with someone you’ve been fighting with

* you merge with someone else, in one sense or another, for a time

QUEST FLAVOR

[[PASTORAL/DECISIVE]] someone helps you figure yourself out, or vice versa

[[FLAME/SETTING]] someone wears themselves down on a sacred/ritual journey

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] someone is overcome by their fear

[[FLAME/RECEPTIVE]] someone you care about hurts or loses themselves

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] you struggle to stay in touch with reality and yourself

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] someone tries to sell you on their purpose and their faith

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] someone talks to you about what broke them <= needs work

[[SETTING]] scenery <= needs work

This winds up as a 2 Major Goal, 8 quest flavor quest; we probably want to end up at 3 Major Goals and 5 quest flavor.

... let’s start by dropping [[SETTING]] scenery rather than working on it; that’s currently just a “you should do some slice of life stuff,” which, like, isn’t really a very useful quest flavor option.

Poking at it a tiny bit more, we get:

OTHERWORLDLY 5, SIMPLIFIED, TAKE 1

MAJOR GOALS

* someone you care about has a breakdown

* a sacred/ritual journey proves to be just ... too much ... for somebody

* someone preaches to you of faith, purpose, or numinous things

QUEST FLAVOR

[[PASTORAL/POISONED]] you merge with someone else, in one sense or another, for a time

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] someone helps you work through things, or vice versa

[[PASTORAL/SETTING]] you make an emotional connection with somebody difficult

[[FLAME/FALLING STAR]] you struggle to stay in touch with reality and yourself

[[RECEPTIVE/FALLING STAR]] there’s a flashback to an important event in the past

If you don’t quite follow all the steps to how I got there, that’s because I did some of them inside my brain, where it is very dark.

The quest description, then, is:

Taming Divinity

Living in the presence of the transcendent is difficult. Divinity has the natural tendency to overwhelm the mind, to crack its boundaries, to unmoor the self. Witnessing the wonders and horrors of the world of Nobilis ... it is difficult. The weight of it accumulates. This quest is about finding a way to live with it all, to bundle it up into neat cognitive packages while maintaining one’s balance and sense of reality and the self; or, perhaps, about helping someone else to do so.

P.S. This means the title for the simplified quest is Taming Divinity (Simplified), by the author of Achieving Immortality for Dummies!

So, what do I call the genre for these quests?

... well, it would seem to be about recovering from something that happened to you, with “no, I was always this way” at one end and post-apocalyptic “no, it didn’t happen to me, it happened to everything” at the other.

It’s adjacent to philosophical fiction—you can see how it like 33% maps to Night-Bird’s Feather—but that’s not right. Calling it theological fiction is the wrong idea, although there’s definitely some wrestling with god going on. Just calling it “Recovering the Self” is too close to Glitch’s Long Road to Recovery, and worse because it’s not at all similar. Hm.

One could argue that it’s Gothic but

NOVEMBER 23

I guess I will go with “Divinity Gothic,” which is the genre where the gods (Imperators, or rarely Excrucians/fellow Powers) are great and wondrous and legitimately holy but also dealing with them messes you up.

There really aren’t good genre names for a lot of things out there tbh.

(LATER)

Imperator Gothic or Imperial Gothic, let’s just leave Excrucians out of it for now. The media I can think of that fits the quests is stuff like Labyrinth, Watership Down, and Harrow the Ninth, and those all seem more concerned with Imperator-like figures than Excrucian-like ones.

So, OK! That just leaves one last question/check: are these in the right order for Knight and Shepherd, and what is their correct order for Aspect?

I think the Knight Arcs are correct.

...

NOVEMBER 25

OK, 1, 5, 2, 3, 4 is Aspect.

I think Shepherd has to be Otherworldly 2, 1, 5, 3, 4, though that might mean changing the name of Oth4.

Life, Amidst Ruin — Otherworldly 1, Knight 1, Aspect 1, Shepherd 2.

Reaching Out — Otherworldly 2, Knight 2, Aspect 3, Shepherd 1

The World is a Devouring Thing — Otherworldly 3, Knight 3, Aspect 4, Shepherd 4

Stretched Thin — Otherworldly 4, Knight 4, Aspect 5, Shepherd 5

Taming Divinity — Otherworldly 5, Knight 5, Aspect 2, Shepherd 3

That means that the Otherworldly and Knight Arcs go:

* Life, Amidst Ruin

* Reaching Out

* The World is a Devouring Thing

* Stretched Thin

* Taming Divinity

The Shepherd Arc goes:

* Reaching Out

* Life, Amidst Ruin

* Taming Divinity

* The World is a Devouring Thing

* Stretched Thin

And the Aspect Arc goes:

* Life, Amidst Ruin

* Taming Divinity

* Reaching Out

* The World is a Devouring Thing

* Stretched Thin

I don’t like “Reaching Out” as the title for an Aspect 3 quest, or “Stretched Thin” as a title for a Shepherd 5 quest, so I will fiddle with those in the final!

Maybe “Checking In” and “Power, Overwhelming” ...

NOVEMBER 26

Building the fancy PDF for you guys today, which involves finalizing quest names and such.

First quest renamed “In a Living World” to fit the name of the quest set, reflavored:

You live your daily life in a world haunted by spirits and the past, surrounded by magic, vastness, the scars of war upon Creation, and an aching absence. It is a fallen world, a damaged world, though you may not be able to name what has been lost. It hurts, though you may not be able to name the way in which it hurts. Conversely, it holds in it a great openness that opens you in turn: there is an inexorable richness to it, a welter of possibility that batters at your soul. It is a world of wonder and of burning dawn. It wakes in you a vast and wild dream—a nameless dream. A dream of something better, difficult to articulate: like wild horses, and so much bigger than the head that’s dreaming it.

Second quest renamed “Hanging On:”

Things are tough. Chaotic. A little too tough, a little too chaotic, in fact, to get into gear and push things forward right now. There’s no room in your life right now to even really process how big the world around you is, how full of wonder (and horror) it is; how can anyone expect you to do something about it? Consciously or subconsciously, you’ve decided that the best thing to do for right now is to just ... keep your head down and get by. There’s someone you’re talking to about everything going on. Someone helping you sort it all out in your head: your Arc touchpoint. Later in the quest it’ll probably turn out that you’ve chosen them poorly—that they’re not the stable, uninvolved lifeline you were hoping for, but rather an integral part of everything that’s gone wrong. ... but maybe they won’t!

Third quest keeps its name “The World is a Devouring Thing:”

The world is a devouring thing; learn its truths, and you may lose yourself. ... alas that no but halfway reasonable alternative exists. In this quest, the environment around you is dangerous and wild. Perhaps you visit a dangerous and wild place, on a quest-long adventure or intermittent series of journeys. Perhaps adventure comes to you, and the world around you becomes more dangerous and wild. Either way, and regardless of how well you survive the dangers that surround you, you sicken. This is the Arc sickness—a progressive real-world phenomenon like a physical change, magical effect, or growth in your understanding, accompanied by increasing alienation from yoursel, the world, or both. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, in the long run, but it’s difficult to deal with for right now. If it’s not obvious where it’s coming from, consider the possibility that this sickness is the result of a role, destiny, or relationship imposed on you by someone else: you have been chosen, and that change is sickening you, whether that’s as simple as being thrust into a position of leadership or importance and having a breakdown over it or as complex as a spiritual transformation initiated by your Imperator. When the quest ends, if the Arc sickness is neither resolved nor heading towards impending resolution, it generally goes into temporary remission instead, fading away until a later iteration of this quest or until time drains it of relevance. On an Aspect Arc, it may sometimes linger into Open to the World; on a Shepherd Arc, it may sometimes flare up again during that quest.

“Stretched Thin” becomes “Open to the World”:

The walls of the self that kept the world away have crumbled. The openness of the world that battered at you has broken in. You are terrifyingly unguarded before the endless wonder of Creation. Perhaps experience and trauma have worn you down. Perhaps you have grown great-hearted. Perhaps there is guilt and horror and tragedy for you to face. Perhaps there is only joy. It will be ... difficult ... regardless, until your defenses have regrown.

Finally, “Taming Divinity” becomes “The Lantern”

In this quest, you pull together everything you’ve learned over the course of the Arc to illuminate a path—a way to live with the mythic and divine, a way to endure the devouring world, a way to develop your Domain and your own divinity without losing too much of yourself. Most often, you hold up this light not for yourself but for someone else: someone having even more trouble than you have had, or perhaps less trouble quantitatively but of a sort that you find easier to address. You may wind up advancing your own understanding over the course of this quest, or revealing a richer understanding, or synthesizing what you’ve already learned in useful ways, but that’s not the goal; your goal, the thing you’re working for, is helping them survive. It’s as an incidental feature of doing that that you find your place, or realize just how far you may have come

The new names mean I have to swap Shepherd 1 and 2.

Writing some quotes ...

I’ll share one quote that got deleted, the rest you can just look at the fancy PDF:

If you were to ask me, what even is reality, I think I would have to say, the past. It is the things we carry with us. The chains anchoring us into eternity.

That which is spun up into being without true past, simply ... declared into existence, without precedent: be it ever so detailed, so complete, so luridly convining, so buttressed up by shouting as to overwhelm with its reality, it is not real. It is at best a miracle and at worst a lie.

That which follows on that which follows on that which follows, so on unto the beginning of the world—

... take away its accidental properties and presence, its weight upon your senses, your experience; take everything recognizable as reality, and still I will tremble with the weight of its existence: still I will kneel before the altar of its being, and say to it, you are.

— from (not determined)

In a few minutes, there’ll be a laid-out version available at:

https://afarandasunlessland.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/two-quest-sets-for-nobilis-rough.pdf

Please enjoy!

Aside: Some screenshots from the discord follow so that sighted readers can see the icons. I’m a little concerned about my physical limits here so rather than typing in alt text I will direct vision-impaired readers to the even-more-polished version of the same content in the laid-out PDF.

#nobilisrpg #patreon-supported content

23 notes · View notes

thetourguidebarbie · 5 years

Note

You know that angsty KC thing you wrote some time ago? The one you said there was a possibility for more? The one that ended with Caroline’s neck snapped by witches? And klaus was like a galaxy away or whatever? It was great and I am still asking myself what will happen next and I remembered that you said that there could be a ‘next’. So pls if you can, and have some time could you maybe write a part 2? And an happy ending Cause God knows I can’t take more angst...

Sequel to this drabble. NSFW. Tagging @itsnotacrimetoloveyou @goldcaught @sunshineandfangs @storm-pirate and @honestgrins who I believe all asked for the sequel. Mention of what Damon did to Caroline but nothing graphic. Hope you enjoy!!

-------------------

Caroline stirred slowly, groaning as she tested whether she could move all her limbs and extremities. She didn’t feel any restraints or the lingering ache of vervain. Her sweater felt heavy, the temperature hot and humid despite the lack of sounds that indicated being outdoors. She opened her eyes slowly, noting the cell around her. Grey stone walls, no windows, a single ceiling light, heavy metal door, no furniture, and complete silence.

Definitely not the best prison she’d been in, but it hopefully wouldn’t be the worst either.

She’d been kidnapped more than a few times over the decades since she’d left Mystic Falls, and she’d learned there were two kinds of Klaus Enemies. Some of them wanted to bargain with Klaus or make some sort of agreement, which meant that they wouldn’t kill her, at least until they got what they wanted, and they all died before that happened. The more dangerous ones were the revenge-seekers. They were generally content to torture her on video or make her talk to Klaus on the phone to prove that she was still alive, playing a sick sort of cat and mouse game until he managed to catch up with them. They usually had a plan to kill her in the end, and the closer Klaus got to finding her, the less certain it was that she’d come out alive unless he pulled off a flawless rescue.

His plans had gone awry only once and he’d managed to resurrect her in a relatively timely manner, but both of them preferred to avoid that particular outcome.

She’d bet any number of valuable things that her kidnappers were soldiers in the human army that had tried to lure Klaus into a fake negotiation. Hopefully they were just trying to leverage her to get a better deal from him, a rookie mistake but she could respect the nerve, rather than outright torturing her.

She looked up at the door when it opened slowly, the man in the doorway lingering just shy of coming into the room. Likely a magic barrier then. They both remained silent, just staring at each other. The seconds stretched to what felt like minutes, though there wasn’t really any way to tell, and though she was getting impatient, she knew better than to break the silence. That showed weakness.

“Caroline Forbes?” he asked finally, his voice lower than she’d expected.

“Yep.”

“Where’s the doppelganger?”

Caroline’s eyebrows flew up to her hairline. That was a question she hadn’t heard for awhile. She hadn’t seen Elena in centuries, even before she’d gone to rescue Klaus. “I have no idea,” she said truthfully.

“Weren’t you friends?”

“We lost touch,” Caroline said blandly, not wanting to bore her captor with the whole ‘supposed best friend dated my rapist’ story. “Is that all? Because if it was you can totally let me go now and we’ll call it even.”

“It’s all right. I’m patient. I’ll wait until you’re ready to reconsider.”

She watched in complete disbelief as he slammed the door in her face.

“You have got to be kidding me. I honestly don’t know!” she shouted at the shut door, groaning when it didn’t open and backing up to lean against the stone wall. “Guess history does always repeat itself,” she muttered, closing her eyes and trying to say positive.

She had no doubt Klaus would comb through all three solar systems to find her if he had to, would hire any and every witch he could find to track her down. The question was whether they’d bothered to send him a ransom note if it wasn’t about him. If he had no idea where they’d taken her and they hadn’t left any clues, that could definitely be a problem.

Whatever. She’d do her best to escape before anything bad happened. If they were after Elena and hadn’t bothered to do any research on her other than know about their childhood friendship, it was likely they’d vastly underestimated her. Hopefully she could use that to her advantage.

Maybe she’d let Klaus lick the blood of her captors from her body if he arrived in time.

------------------

Klaus frowned as Caroline’s phone went to voicemail for the third time after ringing out. She’d seemed less than pleased on the phone, but it wasn’t like her to ignore his calls. He hung up, barking for his hybrid to drive faster and flipping the phone around in his hand, staring out at the rain and trying not to panic.

Leaving Caroline for longer than a day was less than ideal. She did go on the occasional multi-week getaway with friends, but he always made her promise to stay with at least one other person and text him once a day just to let him know she was alive. They’d learned to compromise over the years, especially once Caroline made absolutely clear that if he wanted her to stay he had to stop being ‘red flag central’ about monitoring her whereabouts, but it was difficult for him to shake that something wasn’t quite right in this particular case.

His suspicion turned to full-blown worry once his hybrid guards’ phones each went to voicemail as well.

“Let me out and meet me there,” Klaus ordered, out of the door as soon as the hybrid pulled over and speeding to the house as fast as he could. He swore when he found the door unlocked, punched a hole in the wall when he couldn’t detect Caroline’s scent on the property beyond the faint lingering trace in their bedroom, and felt his rage grow when he saw his hybrid with his throat slit on the ground, his heart on the floor beside it. He inhaled and frowned when he found the blood scentless, his alarm bells ringing even more fervently when he realized it was likely spelled to keep Caroline from being tipped off.

Witches.

He pulled out his phone, easily finding the number and holding it out to display the hologram of Bonnie’s face when she answered.

“Klaus,” she greeted, her tone cool. Though he and the Bennett witch had grown to be on better terms than they had previously, he was under no delusion that it wasn’t solely due to Caroline. Witches tended to hold grudges, and Bonnie was no exception.

“Caroline’s missing.”

He appreciated the clear effort it took for Bonnie to restrain herself from asking him whether Caroline had finally come to her senses and left, instead running a hand through her hair and giving him a distrustful glance. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Text me the details of how you managed to let her get kidnapped so that I don’t have to hate you to your face.”

She hung up, leaving Klaus to wish, not for the first time, that Caroline wasn’t fond enough of the Bennett witch to object to just a spot of torture.

------------------

“Out of curiosity, why do you need Elena?” Caroline rasped, her throat burning from lack of blood.

The minion tying her to the coffin paused, clearly considering whether to answer her question. She hadn’t been able to detect a heartbeat and he didn’t smell like dinner, so she suspected he was a species of humanoid alien that didn’t have consumable blood, though the light was too low to see which one.

“Just a spell,” he said casually, his accent thick. He sounded like he might be from somewhere in Solar 4, which was a bad sign. She and Klaus were most definitely not welcome in that sector. Hopefully he wasn’t an avid political junkie and wouldn’t know who she was. He tugged the chain to test the strength of it and she hissed at the pain from the scratch of it against her skin.

“Why?”

“The spell is a bodyswap. He found a few friendly vampires willing to make a bargain. In exchange for the doppelganger being returned to their care, they would give us her blood. As I’m sure you’re aware, traveller blood is needed to cast the spell.”

“What vampire made the deal?” she asked slowly, already pretty sure of the answer, and when the captor confirmed her suspicion she couldn’t help rolling her eyes.

Damon Salvatore would be a perpetual thorn in her side. She’d stopped Klaus from killing Stefan out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia, but if he was going to keep resurrecting his brother indefinitely then they both needed to go, toxic but fondly remembered high school friendships be damned.

At least this meant Elena had hopefully finally come to her senses and ditched both of them. Good for her.

“Well, unfortunately for you and Damon, Elena and I lost touch like, a century ago, so I can’t help you find her. No blood, no spell. You might as well just let me go.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” a familiar voice said from across the room. Her body felt heavy, her limbs too leadened to move even without the chains securing them to the coffin, but she managed to turn her head enough to catch sight of the total asshole standing in the doorway.

“You,” she hissed, attempting to struggle against her bonds as the human approached, the sound of his heartbeat giving her a surge of energy, every instinct she had screaming at her to pounce. He’d been a general in the last uprising, though not a very good one, and his army had been dealt with quickly and efficiently. She’d disagreed at the time with Klaus’s methods, knowing that if they used the guy’s girlfriend as an example it would just escalate everything and make it worse, but Klaus had worn her down. He’d been doing it for centuries, he reminded her. He knew how to take care of a few enemies.

“It’s just one girl,” Klaus had said at the time as they rode the ship back to their home base, his arms tight around her as he nuzzled her neck, nipping her ear with a fang. “He’ll get over it.”

She felt so stupid. She’d known that the general wouldn’t let go of his grudges as easily as Klaus expected, and she should have insisted that they find another way. He was clearly not over it, and now she was clearly going to pay the price.

“When I escape, and I will, I will drain all of you dry and I’ll make it hurt,” Caroline spat.

The general laughed. “You won’t have the chance. We’re going to leave you here to dessicate nice and slow while we track down the doppelganger, or find a witch who can use expression instead as a last resort. Whatever witch we use will swap us, and you’ll get thrown in that pretty dungeon over there to waste away in a human body while I track down Klaus, who will be so pleased with your return that he won’t even notice the white oak stake until it’s through his heart.”

She felt every bit of her insides turn to ice, her breath catching in her throat. “The white oak stakes are gone. The trees were destroyed with Earth.”

“I got the last one. Also part of the bargain with the Salvatores.”

Ugh. She should have known.

“Once I’ve taken care of him I’ll have a ready-made army who’s already loyal to you.“

“He won’t believe you,” she said, her thirst making it harder to speak. “He knows me.” Sure, she’d been a little grumpy lately because of the distance, but Klaus knew her idiosyncrasies better than anyone.

“You’d be surprised at how far people are willing to go to suspend their disbelief if it gets them what they want, especially if they’re distracted by other activities.”

Caroline felt her heart race, the reality that not only could this work, but she and Klaus could be in very deep trouble, crashing into her like a punch to the gut. Her eyes burned with tears. They’d killed the bodyguards Klaus had left with her and she had no idea how long it would take for him to get back. He had no way of knowing what happened.

She was alone.

------------------

“I can’t believe you lost her,” Bonnie said grumpily, her fingers tapping on the table as she looked out the window of the ship, and he could tell she was deliberately avoiding his gaze. There was no scenery to take in, after all. The endless inky blackness around them perfectly reflected Klaus’s foul mood.

“I didn’t lose her,” he ground out.

“I mean, she wasn’t exactly where you left her,” Bonnie pointed out, shooting him a glare before staring intently at the map in her lap she was using to channel the tracking spell. He could see that the pages had begun to glow a bit brighter with magic, indicating that they were getting closer.

He bit back a retort to Bonnie’s rather rude implication that this was somehow his fault, knowing that Caroline wouldn’t appreciate it if the first thing she learned post-torture was that he and Bonnie had gotten into a spat. “How long?”

“Twenty minutes. I’ll go give the pilot the coordinates.”

He ran a hand through his hair as Bonnie got out of her seat to go talk to the hybrid manning the ship, every inch of him on edge. He’d been alive for over 1,500 years, long enough that months felt like mere moments in the grand scheme of things. Seasons passed in the blink of an eye, the concept of time a measurement that now seemed insignificant at best. He had eternity to do whatever he pleased, and the pastime of watching the mortals around him struggle to live their lives to the fullest while they still could had lost any appeal long ago.

However, whenever Caroline was in danger, time seemed to return to dragging on the way it had when he was young. Every moment was precious. The knowledge that the difference between Caroline being alive and being ripped away from him could be a single second was a terrifying reminder that though the mortals struggled to survive, the luxury of endless opportunity out of reach for them, at least if they made a fatal mistake it all ended soon enough.

If he lost Caroline because of his certainty that he knew best how to protect her, because of his arrogance and unwillingness to compromise, he would have an unending eternity to never forgive himself.

“Take off your broody face,” Bonnie said, her voice cutting through his dark mood.

“I’m not brooding.”

“Aren’t you though?” Bonnie asked dryly, sitting down next to him. Her expression softened when she saw his face, and Klaus turned away, unwilling to let her see his weakness. His fear. “She’ll be fine,” Bonnie said reassuringly, her voice holding a confidence Klaus didn’t at all share.

“We don’t know that.”

“If she was dead the map wouldn’t be able to track her down,” Bonnie said patiently. “And even if she was, we’ve pulled her back from the other side before. It was a huge pain in the ass and you totally made me want to kill you once or twice, but we managed.”

“Right,” Klaus said noncommittally, flicking a piece of dried blood out from under his nail.

“Do you have to do that in front of me?” Bonnie complained. “It’s so gross.”

“The longer you let blood dry there the harder it is to remove.”

“Then wash your hands,” Bonnie said exasperatedly, huffing and turning back to her map. “Men. Ugh.”

------------------

Everything hurt.

The wood of the open coffin was hard against her back, her heightened nerves making the scratches in the wood feel like sandpaper against her oversensitive skin. Her lungs hurt when she tried to breathe, and she could feel her muscles growing weaker by the second even as she tried to struggle uselessly against the cold hard metal that bound her. She could hear voices in the hallway bartering over witchy services and the combination of that and hunger was making her head pound.

It wasn’t long before they seemed to reach an agreement, and she eyed the witch who came in with disdain, struggling to keep her eyes open as she felt the last dregs of energy leave her.

She gathered every piece of false bravado she could, taking a shaky breath. “It won’t work. Klaus will find out. Your deaths will be slow and painful. I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, sweetheart.”

Caroline had barely gasped out, “Klaus?” before she felt the rush of him go by her and the witch was crumpled on the stone floor with her neck snapped.

“What did they do to you? Were there wolves?” he asked sharply, his eyes roving her body to check for a bite even as he bent to free her. Caroline took a shaky breath, flinching in pain as the chains scraped against her skin when Klaus ripped them.

“No. Just hungry,” Caroline wheezed, coughing around the words, her throat too dry to explain more.

He pulled her up to cradle her against his chest, sitting on the coffin she’d been chained to and steadying her in his lap before pressing his wrist to her lips. “Drink, sweetheart.”

Her fangs were through his skin before he’d even finished. She was unable to suppress a moan as the blood hit her tongue, her pulse pounding in her ears as the rush of magic surged through her veins, the gashes on her arms knitting closed, her skin regaining some of its color. His eyes never left her face as he watched her feed, his fingers carding through her hair.

“You could have at least whooshed me with you,” Bonnie complained from the doorway, her breathing harsh as if she’d been running. “Oh my god.”

“She’ll be alright,” Klaus assured her quickly. “Everyone else in the building, however...”

“Revenge, we know,” Bonnie said impatiently, bending down to inspect Caroline herself. “No magic stuff?”

“They didn’t get to it,” Caroline said, curling into Klaus as much as possible, inhaling his scent and internally repeating to herself that he was fine. They were fine. Nothing bad had happened.

But if he hadn’t come in time...

“Let’s go home,” Klaus said softly, clearly sensing that she was too upset to explain. “You can tell us what happened on the ship, all right?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

He held her for a few moments even after she’d recovered her strength, his nose buried in her hair, and she curled against him, listening for the reassuring thump of his undead heartbeat. She could hear Bonnie moving in the background, objects rustling as though she was trying to figure out what the plan had been.

“I love you, sweetheart,” Klaus whispered, his voice so low that Caroline doubted Bonnie had heard. “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

“Technically I did have bodyguards,” Caroline pointed out with a strained smile, shifting against him to press a soft kiss to his cheek. “And I love you too.”

“They’re lucky they were killed by the enemy. Their deaths by my hand for losing you would have been much more painful.”

“If it’s really bothering you we can resurrect them and you can kill them again,” Caroline teased, rolling her eyes when Klaus looked more thoughtful than amused. “I was just joking.”

“Were they going to do a body swap spell?” Bonnie interrupted, her eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Caroline said tiredly, tangling her fingers with Klaus’s when he stiffened. “They were going to let me die of starvation in a human body while they used mine to kill Klaus and then take over the army we built.”

She tried her best to keep her tone flat, to not let herself listen to what had come out of her own mouth and risk the fear of what could have been making her break down, but she felt Klaus stiffen against her. “Surely you haven’t forgotten that I can’t be killed?”

“They had the last white oak stake,” Caroline said, watching Klaus’s face darken.

“Did they, now?”

“He showed me.”

“It’s probably a fake,” Klaus said, his overconfidence kind of making her want to scream.

“I mean it looked pretty real when he showed me,” Caroline said with forced patience, shifting in Klaus’s arms. “And even if it was a regular stake, you’d still trust not-me enough that he could have stabbed you with it, and it would still kill you for long enough for them to...lock you up, or something.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, love,” he promised.

She swallowed her skepticism, not wanting to have a deep conversation about their recent lack of contact in front of her already anti-Klaus best friend and some fresh corpses. “Can we go?”

“I want to take a look around in case they have anything useful,” Bonnie said. “I’ll keep an eye out for the stake too. Can I meet you back on the ship in an hour or so?”

“Of course. I’ll send a hybrid to escort you,” Klaus said, standing up with Caroline still in his arms.

“I can walk, you kn--” Caroline began, her protests interrupted by Klaus speeding them back to the ship in a blink of an eye, carrying her into their usual suite and setting her down on the bed.

“How do you feel? Do you need anything?”

“Achy,” she admitted, shifting slightly against the mattress. “But just some more blood, maybe?”

“I’ll get you a glass,” he said, reaching to squeeze her hand before leaving the room, returning moments later with a glass, which he handed her. Her mouth watered at the scent, but she forced herself to sip slowly, needing something to do with her hands.

“I’ll kill them all,” he promised. “They’ll never hurt you again.”

“I know,” she said, trying not to sound too irritated despite being somehow annoyed that that was the first thing he wanted to say. “I’m fine, though.”

“And I’m glad of that,” he said slowly, clearly sensing that something was off beyond her physical injuries and the mental toll it took to be tortured. “What’s troubling you, sweetheart?”

She bit her lip, sitting up and leaning against the headboard, setting her mug down on the bedside table before patting the spot next to her. He eyed her warily before kicking off his boots and sitting beside her, their thighs pressed together, his hand resting on her knee. “Caroline?”

“What if you hadn’t gotten there in time?” Caroline asked softly, her voice hitching. Klaus looked vaguely alarmed by the question, his eyebrows furrowed.

“I did, sweetheart. You’re safe now.”

“But what if you hadn’t?”

“Then I’d have figured it out, and I’d have come for you.”

He sounded so confident, so sure, but somehow that only made her more upset, and she felt her eyes heat as tears built. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders and pulling her closer. “I like to think after the last few hundred years I know you rather well.”

She let out a slightly watery laugh, sniffling when the tears started falling. It was probably the thousandth time she’d cried in front of Klaus, and he still made the same alarmed expression as though he was frantically trying to figure out how to make her stop. “Caroline, I...what...”

“Are you sure?” she asked again, sniffling. “Because we haven’t seen each other for longer than a few hours in like, weeks. Months, maybe?”

“But we’ve been together for over two hundred years,” he pointed out, looking more confused by the moment.

“Yeah, so you trust me, right?” Caroline pressed, wiping her eyes. “Like, if you’d come home and fake me had just jumped you, you would have gone along with it, and then he would have stabbed you with the white oak stake, and--”

“I’d know,” he said, the finality in his tone annoying her even more. “I promise. I’d be safe and I’d find you. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“But--”

“What’s actually bothering you, love?” he pressed, studying her face.

She huffed, wiping at her cheeks and trying to blink the tears away. “I just...I don’t know if you would.”

“What?” he asked, sounding more offended than she’d ever heard him. It would have made her laugh if she wasn’t so upset. “Of course I--That’s...Caroline. You can’t possibly think that I don’t care enough to notice when you’re not yourself?”

“No, like, I know you care about me,” Caroline said reassuringly, grabbing his hand. “I just feel like we don’t really get to spend time together anymore.”

“We’ll have eternity together, sweetheart. Especially once the war is over.”

“Yeah, a war that’s been going on for decades. Full offense, but I’d like to spend my eternity with you, not waiting for you,” Caroline burst out. “Do you know how it makes me feel for you to just leave me behind to twiddle my thumbs and do nothing? When you leave me out of all of your semi-evil plots and treat me like I have no value other than being your...your girlfriend? Or whatever? I don’t want to be an afterthought or taken for granted, and I feel like you’re dangerously close to that.”

She felt a bit guilty when she watched his expression close off, his lips pressing together into a thin line as he processed, clearly weighing his words, and he swallowed before he spoke, the only sign that he wasn’t as collected as he looked. “How long have you felt that way?”

She shrugged, looking down at her hands. “I don’t know. A while.”

“I wish you’d said something,” he said, wincing at the look on her face. “Not that I shouldn’t have been paying more attention, of course.”

“I mean, you haven’t really been around to notice,” she bit out, regretting her words when he recoiled slightly. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have--”

“No, you’re right,” he interrupted firmly. “I haven’t, and I apologize.”

She let out a sharp breath. “No, that wasn’t nice of me. I’m sorry. I know you’ve been busy with everything.”

He was quiet for a moment, looking thoughtful, and she took the opportunity to lean against him, tucking herself against his side. “What can I do to acquit myself?” he asked, and she laughed softly.

“No more crazy commute meetings or solo murder sprees,” she said, a slow grin spreading across her face at the way his expression darkened, likely because he thought she was attempting to get him to give up the war entirely. She turned slightly to sling a leg over his lap, cupping his cheeks, the stubble familiar and rough beneath her palms. “Not unless I get to rip out a few hearts with you. Understood?”

He smiled slightly, his hands landing on her hips. “Understood.”

She bent to kiss him softly, but he pulled back what felt like much too soon, making her frown. “What?”

“I never want you to think even for a moment that you are anything less than my first priority or for you to feel that I’m taking you for granted. Nor do I wish to give you the impression that I don’t value your counsel, or that I would prefer you to be left waiting rather than always at my side. Nothing has come more easily to me than loving you, Caroline. I need to trust that you’ll tell me if you’re feeling neglected so that I may remind you of that.”

She felt her breath catch in her throat at the clear affection in his eyes, the way his voice curled around her name in a way that made warmth bloom in her chest even after all their years together. She’d missed the way her heart would skip a beat when he looked at her, everything seeming to fade away other than the intoxicating rush of how he made her feel.

“I can do that,” she promised, slightly breathlessly, and he gave her the dimpled grin that was uniquely hers, the one that only emerged when they were alone and wrapped up in their own little world.

“Good,” he said, pecking her on the lips and shifting underneath her to get comfortable, settling against the headboard, his palm sliding underneath her top to rest on the base of her spine. “I should also note, again, that I object to the term ‘girlfriend’. It’s juvenile.”

Caroline huffed. They’d had that argument what felt like over a hundred times, but neither could come up with a better title. ‘Partner’ reminded Caroline of cowboys (which had made Klaus snort brandy up his nose when she’d complained about it, and she’d only stopped the ensuing explanation of historically accurate cowboys by shoving her tongue down his throat). ‘Lover’ was too sappy, even if Taylor Swift had sort of brought it back for a hot second. They weren’t married. ‘Significant other’ was too long and formal. They’d given up about a decade into their relationship. Caroline had settled for ‘girlfriend/boyfriend’ and Klaus simply expected everyone to know that she was his and be respectful of that, lest their heads be lopped off.

Multiple heads had been lopped off.

It had been a thing.

She hummed noncommittally, deciding not to get drawn into a discussion about it, instead wriggling out of his grip and stripping off her shirt. “I need a shower. I’m covered in blood and dirt.”

“Of course, love. Do you want company?”

She bit her lip, considering. She still felt gross, the remains of the dirt on the coffin and the blood of her captors still sticking to her skin. Almost more unsettling was the knowledge of how close she’d come to having someone else inhabit her body, what they’d planned to do with it. Even though they hadn’t succeeded, the idea of it still made her feel ill, taking up what she felt was too much space in her mind but refusing to budge. She swallowed.

“I’ll be here when you’re done, sweetheart. Just call if you need me,” Klaus said, clearly reading her answer on her face. Klaus was far from stupid, had likely put together where her mind had gone. They’d body-swapped before as a sex thing, but the idea of someone she didn’t know wearing her as a costume without her permission, of being inside of her, was such a violation. It was something she’d had multiple conversations about with Klaus when he’d proposed a body swap for subterfuge as a war strategy. She’s put her foot down. Hard. The idea of it still made her queasy, and he knew it.

She gave him a weak smile, slipping into the bathroom and turning on the spray. The water turned a deep rusty color as it dripped down from her body, the heat flushing her skin. It felt good to have everything washed away, the smears of blood over what had been gashes on her arms and legs rinsing off to show the healed flesh underneath. She worked the bubbles down her body almost mechanically, the indulgently expensive hair products she favored slick under her fingers as she worked them into her blonde curls to make them soft and smooth again.

She could hear Klaus shifting in bed, his fingers tapping against what was probably his tablet, waiting for her to emerge.

She knew that just the talk they had wouldn’t be enough in the long term. Letting herself grow so resentful without bringing it up had been a mistake, one she knew better than to make after being in a relationship with him for this long. It brought up all her old insecurities about clinginess and being too needy, ones she thought she’d outgrown centuries ago. Klaus had never made her feel like she was being too much, but that didn’t squash her deepest fears that one day he might.

But not today, she told herself firmly as she shut off the water, grabbing a fluffy towel and humming to herself as she dried her hair, trying to recenter herself.

“Feeling better, love?” he asked when she came out, his tone so determinedly casual that he had to have been making an effort not to sound too concerned.

“Yeah,” she said, pulling on some pajama bottoms and an old henley from the closet. “Move over.”

He obliged, lifting his arm so that she could lean against him, pushing a mug of blood into her hands. “Do you want to talk?” Klaus asked after a few seconds of her sipping from the mug in silence.

“I’m mostly all talked out,” she said, closing her eyes, cracking one open for a half-hearted glare when he chuckled. “You know what I meant.”

“I do,” he agreed, his thumb stroking the dimple in her elbow.

They were interrupted by a sharp knock on the door, Bonnie’s voice floating through. “Caroline?”

“Coming!” Caroline yelled for the benefit of Bonnie’s lack of supernatural hearing, swinging her legs out of bed and whooshing to let her in.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Bonnie said, pulling her into a tight hug. “I was so worried.”

“I’m fine.”

“Good,” Bonnie said, turning to look at Klaus, who was trying to leave them discreetly to give them a few moments of privacy (or because he anticipated squealing once they started catching up). “Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

“I suppose.”

“The white oak stake is definitely fake,” Bonnie said, squeezing Caroline hand as she slumped slightly, a good half of her stress evaporating all at once. “Damon probably just figured the guy would do his stalking for him and he and Elena would be far away by the time he found out the stake didn’t kill you.”

“Not too far for me to kill, however,” Klaus muttered. “And the ripper, I suppose. They’ve both become equally as bothersome. Pity. He used to be such—.”

“Fun. Yeah, we know, you used to have twinsies murder sprees in the twenties,” Bonnie interrupted impatiently. “We have heard every story more times than how many years we’ve been alive.”

Caroline snorted at the revolted look on Klaus’s face at the word “twinsies” and kind of wished she had a camera to capture it.

“Anything else, Bon?”

“Just some spellbooks and reagents. I’ll take them home to study.”

“Okay.”

“You should get some sleep, Care. I’m exhausted and I didn’t even get tortured.”

“I agree,” Klaus said, reaching to slip his arm around her waist. “I’ll wake you when we arrive.”

------------------

“Good morning,” Caroline muttered, tipping her head to the side to allow Klaus to nip her ear. “That feels nice.”

He laughed quietly, letting his blunt teeth drag along her earlobe and sucking on it lightly before moving to press a soft kiss to her lips. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she said, her word dragging into a yawn. “Definitely a nicer wake-up call than yesterday.”

Though Klaus had stuck to his promise to wake her when they were dropping Bonnie off, she barely remembered what had happened, the memory blurry and consisting only of an agreement to call her best friend that afternoon when she’d recovered. She was pretty sure Klaus had carried her to bed when they had arrived to their house, since she didn’t remember their arrival.

“I should hope so.”

“What time is it?”

“Just after second sunrise,” he said, grinning at Caroline’s returning groan. “But we have a significant time difference, so you’ve been asleep quite awhile.”

“Where are we?”

“Sector eight. Our planet.”

She hummed, slinging a leg over his waist to pull herself on top of him and pressing her cheek to his bare chest. Their private planet meant top notch security and zero responsibilities. Perfect for more naps.

He pressed his palm lightly against the base of her spine, his other hand fiddling with the ends of her hair. “Still tired, love?”

“No. You’re just comfy.”

“Not hungry?”

“Not enough to let you move.”

“You should eat,” he said, beginning to move her off of him, presumably to get her some blood, but she shoved him back down, pressing soft kisses down the tattoo inked across his shoulder.

“Fine. Breakfast in bed?” she whispered between brushes of her lips, letting a fang scrape against the bird closest to his neck and flicking her tongue against the cut. She felt Klaus tense under her fingers, heard his swallow when she let out a satisfied hum at the taste of him.

“Are you offering?”

“Demanding,” she shot back, pushing herself up on her palms to look him in the eye. “It’s the least you can do.”

“I suppose,” he drawled, tilting his head to the side, his hand already drifting down to press against her thigh, gently nudging her legs apart. “Since you asked so nicely.”

“Jerk,” she muttered, more affectionately than insulting, and he groaned as she bent and sank her fangs into his neck, his nails curling to bite into her skin, his hips jerking up to grind shamelessly against her.

He’d never held back with her, never tried to restrain himself from reacting to her touches, never hesitated to show her exactly how much he wanted her. Even when they were just watching each other or he was teasing her with infuriatingly gentle brushes of his fingers against her skin or the light flick of his tongue just shy of where she needed it, she never felt the least bit of doubt of how much he loved her, loved being with her.

It was one of the many things she loved about him.

That, and how delicious his blood was on her tongue.

She could hear his harsh breathing, the way he whispered her name when she was on the edge of taking too much. She pulled back slowly, still dazed and high on the rush of it. He caught her lips with his, sucking lightly on her lower lip before tangling his fingers in her hair and tugging her head back to expose her neck. She shivered when he ran his tongue over her pulse and pressed a soft kiss to it, running his nose along the line of her throat to her ear, inhaling her scent. “Better?”

“Yeah.”

Her entire body was pulsing with need, her nipples sensitive, her pussy aching. “I want you. Now.”

“Again, so demanding,” he murmured, nipping her earlobe.

“Oh, well, I guess if you don’t want to,” she teased, laughing when he flipped them over, already kissing his way down her body.

“You should know better than to think that there could be anything else I’d prefer to be doing,” he said softly, looking up to fully meet her eyes.

The moment felt heavier suddenly, his point clear. “I know,” she breathed.

He gave her a dimpled smile, one that was soft and rare and reserved for their most private moments. She felt all of the air leave her lungs, and she knew he could hear how his effect on her made her pulse race, the rush of it so quick it could have been a human’s for just a moment.

“And I do recall I promised to remind you.”

“You did.”

He pressed a soft kiss to her inner thigh, his blunt teeth dragging along the skin for just a moment after, making her shiver, her eyes closing. “Look at me, Caroline.”

She fought to keep her eyes open, but as soon as she met his, she couldn't look away. He held her gaze as he began to lazily drag his fingertip back and forth across the back of her knee, smirking when she shivered. "What do you want me to do, love?"

Klaus had always had the ability to coax out confessions of things she craved. When she'd finally allowed herself to give into him, she'd been surprised by his attentiveness, his determination to convince her to tell him all of her filthiest desires. She'd never exactly been shy, but he'd managed to get her used to making demands, to be unashamed to ask for things she wanted. His light touch was a deliberate tease, designed to make her admit what she wanted from him.

"Make me come."

He chuckled, pressing a soft kiss to her inner thigh, just shy of where she wanted his tongue. "I intend to. More than a few times, in fact."

"That's ambitious for someone who's been doing a lot more talking than touching."

"I'll get to it, sweetheart," he promised, sliding his hands underneath her thighs to push them apart and back, nipping at the exposed skin. "And if I recall correctly you do like it when I talk."

"You do recall correctly and you know that," she said impatiently. "But right now I want your tongue on me."

"Good," he murmured, bending to let a fang drag across her inner thigh frustratingly close to her entrance, the burn of the venom only making the sensation of his tongue sweeping along the cut even sweeter. "Watch."

She inhaled sharply at the first flick of his tongue against her clit, the soft hum of satisfaction when she rolled her hips instinctively to draw him closer. She kept her eyes locked on his as he swiped his tongue across her entrance just the way she liked it, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hips to pull her closer, groaning at the taste of her arousal on his tongue. The barest hint of shame she used to feel for melting against his touch had long been overcome, and it was almost amusing to remember how hard she fought to pretend that he wasn't exactly what she wanted, that his tongue against her clit would result in anything other than her writhing against him demanding more.

He knew how to draw her out, to tease her for hours as she begged for release, but he knew better than to make her wait this time. Her first orgasm was quick and almost harsh, her ragged breathing muffled only by the rip of the sheets as she dug her nails into the mattress. He barely waited for her to come down from her high to build her up again, watching with dark, wanting eyes as he brought her to the edge twice more before she sank bonelessly against the mattress, watching him with glazed eyes. "Good?" he asked, his expression as smug as ever.

Her undead heart was racing in her chest, her entire body still thrumming with need. "More. Your cock this time."

"Bossy."

She raised an eyebrow, reaching to wrap her hand around his cock, grinning at his low groan when she began to stroke him lazily. "You want bossy?"

"I want you," he shot back, the thickness of his voice and the flash of gold in his eyes taking a response that could have been cheesy and turning into anything but. His cock was hard and hot in her hand, the twitch of his shoulders a certain tell that he was growing impatient. She knew he'd likely been burning with anticipation for hours now, waiting for her to wake and recover so that he could touch her for the first time in weeks. He'd missed her as much as she'd missed him, and she knew that. The way he drank her in now was a sure sign that he'd take her any way he could, and that if she didn't decide what she wanted in the next few seconds she'd be pinned beneath him with his fangs buried in her neck as he took her hard and fast.

Not a bad outcome, but one she wanted to save for later.

He let her flip them, watched her with hungry eyes as she got up on her knees and shifted to straddle him, nosing the line of his neck as he shifted to sit against the headboard, pulling over with him, his cock hard against her belly. "I want you too," she said, the admission as easy as breathing, tipping her head to the side to allow Klaus to press light kisses against her neck.

He groaned out her name when she reached to stroke him a few times, positioning him at her entrance and sinking down, his lips catching hers in lazy kisses as they found a familiar rhythm. He pressed his forehead against hers, his fingertips branding her hips as he filled her, chuckling at the soft sigh that escaped her lips when he began to move faster, her head falling back to allow him to run his tongue along her pulse point. “I’ve missed this,” he whispered against her neck. “The feel of your skin beneath my fingers, the way your breath catches when I touch you..."

"I missed you too."

She hissed when his fingertip found his bite wound on the back of her thigh and shifted slightly to try to soothe the burn of it, the skin pulsing with a sharp pain that was starting to overtake the pleasure it gave her. He always seemed to know exactly when the venom began to grow to be too much, and he tipped his head to the side, a clear invitation.

"Good, sweetheart," he praised as she drank, stroking her hair with a gentle touch even as his hips moved faster, rougher, just the way she liked it. The more he touched her the hungrier she became to rediscover every part of him. "Close?"

She pulled back from his neck and nodded, letting her fangs retract and humming her assent before burying her face in his shoulder, moaning when his hand tangled in her curls to tug at them gently, making her clench around him. She could feel her release building quickly now, her toes curling, fingernails digging into his back. She could hear him breathing harshly, hissing out her name when she fell apart around him, coming inside of her moments later. She stayed comfortably pressed against him as she waited for the rush to fade, humming in contentment when he began to lazily stroke her spine, burying his nose in her hair.

"Can we just stay in bed today?" she asked, making no move to slide off of him.

"Of course, love. Still tired?"

"No, I'm good. Just lazy."

He chuckled, pressing a kiss to her cheek and helping her shift to a more comfortable position draped across his body. "Well, I'm perfectly content to stay here for as long as you like."

"Don't you have important supervillain meetings?" she teased. "To terrorize your enemies and put all of the werewolfy predator fear in their hearts?"

"None that are so important to necessitate us interrupting the well-deserved vacation I promised you."

"Good. I know you always say we have eternity for vacations, but--"

"Even eternity is too short to waste a moment that I could be spending with you," he interrupted, his tone much too formal for the total Disney content that had just come out of his mouth.

She snorted, turning on her side to look at him, reaching to stroke the stubble on his cheek. "I know you hate it when I say you're cute--"

"I do."

"But that was cute. Cheesy, but cute."

"I am neither cheesy nor cute, love. I'm--."

"Yeah, yeah. The nightmare of many. Supernatural boogeyman. Evil supervillain predator who rips out all the hearts. You can still be cute with me. Those aren't mutually exclusive."

She grinned at how offended he looked. It wasn't the first time she'd said it, not by a long shot, but it never failed to push his buttons.

Exactly her plan.

"It's okay to be a cute supervillain predator," she continued, trying to fight down a smile and mostly failing. "Everyone is a multi-faceted person with a lot of layers and nuance, and--"

His smile was all teeth, his eyes flashing gold. "Don't you think it may be unwise to insult the most powerful creature you've met, sweetheart?"

Her hair brushed against the bird tattoo inked along his shoulder as she bent to nip his ear. "Why? Do you bite?"

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