#Jungle Tertiary

[scryingworkshop]

[fantastic-fr-scries]

Undertide Female

Fern / Bronze / Jungle , Pinstripe / Safari / Nudibranch

Fire goat

[supersonic-pinwheels]

Yesterday's nest with another near-miss for what I need!

The first one has the right colours and right primary and tertiary gene but the wrong secondary gene. Last time this happened it was the primary gene that was wrong. 😂

The good news though is that this time I can breed him with my secondary help fae to narrow the range. Couldn't do that with the other one as they were both female.

96840215 - Wildclaw male, XYZ Hunter/Shamrock/Lemon, Petals/Bee/Glimmer, Common Wind eyes

96840216 - Coatl male, XXY Jungle/Jungle/Lemon, Iridescent/Butterfly/Glimmer, Uncommon Wind eyes

96840217 - Wildclaw female, XXY Shamrock/Shamrock/Lemon, Iridescent/Bee/Glimmer, Uncommon Wind eyes

[aempest-fr]

I don’t think this Sandsurge pair (I planned to breed change the Imp) is gonna work, everything is fine except I’m concerned about the male’s secondary colour offering too much of a range with blue, I just want green!

So if you have a male with anything in the green range (Jungle preferred) for the primary, Eldritch secondary and a white ranged tertiary PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let me know! I already have a breed change scroll and the genes ready, just need the damn dragon. I’d appreciate if anyone kept a lookout for these colours.

[emmybeearts]

Day 4: Impact

As an exoplanetary biologist, I find convergent evolution to be one of the most baffling and fascinating things. Of all the random absurdity that is nature, it's incredible how the same adaptations keep emerging again and again. One can look at a mole, a worm lizard, and a mole cricket and know immediately these animals couldn't be any more distantly related from one another, and yet, looking at their forelimbs you’ll see how scarily similar they are. Time and time again, animals stumble onto the same adaptations for similar problems, or even more strangely, they’ll stumble onto the same patterns of behavior.

The forest began to thin as we came closer and closer to the edge of the jungle plateau. It was still, by no means, easy to traverse, but it was still noticeably thinner. We found glades more and more frequently with a wide diversity of floor and tree polyps. Soon, we began to hear a distant sound. It was further down into the deeper woods and slightly off course of our heading, but I figured it would still be worth investigating. There was no way to tell how far the sound was, only that it kept getting louder meaning we were heading in the right direction. This sound was also… hard to describe. The best explanation I can give is almost like a mix between bouncing an over-inflated basketball in an empty gymnasium superimposed onto that wobbly sound you get when you shake a big sheet of metal.

It wasn’t until we got much closer that I began to notice: whenever this impact sound happened, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up and Lily’s orange color would glitch into geometric shapes of blues, greens, and yellows. As someone who has hiked a mountain on a dark, cloudy day before, I knew this feeling. Whatever was making this sound made the air positively hum with electricity. Seeing as many animals here possess an organ packed with electrocytes, I was overly excited to see what could be causing this phenomenon. 

We soon stumbled upon two brightly colored Peacock Gawbers, one of the few living animals from Atria that we already have back on Earth. While I was able to study the specimen in captivity, observing a pair in the wild is completely different. The bright blue stripes on the larger ones back indicated it was a primary male while the smaller ones' dark blue stripes told me it's a tertiary male. They were most likely disputing territory, or a mate, or it could be any of the multitude of things in nature that would warrant intraspecific combat. 

I watched as they tucked in their heavy forelimbs, shrouded in shield like claws, and charged at one another like bighorn sheep, ramming their heads against one another creating the bizarre bouncing sound and electrifying the air around them as their melons clashed. I assume if I had a melon myself, this buzz i was feeling in the air would be the electrical equivalent of a deafening roar. 

Of all of the infinite behaviors an animal can possess, it's so baffling to see something so familiar. On an alien world I would expect everything to be, well, alien. And yet there are patterns of behavior that just seem to work well in nature. There are strategies that help an animal to survive or pass on genes and so it makes sense that one would see them again and again. A method of fighting where no members of the same species gets hurt is only logical. So even though in the infinite possibility of the cosmos you expect to never see two things repeating ever, convergent evolution stands opposed to possibility and decided to stick with making goats once again.

[End Transcription]

[roundseys-raffle-roulette]

November 30 - December 6

For this week's Roundsey's Raffle Roulette-

1 Lucky winner shall receive a Jungle/Leaf/Thicket Undertide male with the Boa/Saddle/Pufferfish genes and Wind Primal eyes

1 Lucky winner shall receive an Abyss/Aqua/Turquoise Undertide female with the Octopus/Rings/Sailfin genes and Water Primal eyes

10 Lucky winners shall receive the Tertiary Gene: Capsule for Undertides

And 50 Lucky winners shall receive the Marva's Invisibility Cloak apparel item

.

Whaddya say?

[tuxedo-floracat]

also does anyone else tend to hatch a disproportionate amount of g1s with certain colors? out of the 32 hatched so far i've gotten 3 jungle primaries, managed to hatch 2 wisteria primaries in a row (out of 3 wisteria primaries total plus a wisteria tert), 2 peacock primaries, 2 sky primaries, 2 camo primaries plus a camo tertiary, 2 dragons with murk in a row, 2 azure secondaries.... like i am getting confused trying to tally up all the colors i got multiple instances of so I'm stopping there but there are more. like why am i getting so many repeats out of such a large color wheel?????????

[toomuchdragons]

My first egg gave me this lovely yellow/copper/chocolate who I’m very excited about. Not positive which secondary I’m giving her yet. Named her Bumble and already gave her 2/3 genes :)

Less enthusiastic about the other one I hatched who is flint/jungle/purple. I like that his eyes match his tertiary but I may sell him and buy a different male

[msb-lair]

Dragon: Lucian - Wildclaw Male

First Record Second Record

(Smirch scroll applied on 2024-04-08)

Purchased For: 950,000 treasure Hatched On: 2013-11-05 ID: 1205178

Parentage: Quateara/Citroen Flight: Lightning

Primary: Grey Tiger Secondary: Navy Shimmer Tertiary: Goldenrod Basic Smirch Eyes: Common

Comments: Time to start a new scatterscroll project, as the previous one hit tree colours I'm willing to work with last Monday, and is now lounging in hibernal waiting on a new breed to come along. Found this first-two-million-dragons guy going at a price I was willing to pay. He's continuing the ongoing tradition of most of my scatterscoll projects needing smirch thrown at them so I can see the tertiary colour.

May keep him as a wildclaw after he rolls colours I like; I have very few of them and am currently trying to increase my percentage of modern dragon breeds.

Lucian is the name he came with.

Scatterscroll #28 (2024-11-04): Tomato-Ivory-LavenderOriginal Colours: Grey-Navy-Goldenrod Scatterscroll #1 (2024-04-08): Garnet-Jungle-Oilslick Scatterscroll #2 (2024-04-15): Raspberry-Eggplant-Cantaloupe Scatterscroll #3 (2024-04-22): Cinnamon-Red-Periwinkle Scatterscroll #4 (2024-04-29): Shale-Ivory-Jungle Scatterscroll #5 (2024-05-06): Amber-Tarnish-Crimson Scatterscroll #6 (2024-05-13): Carrot-Mint-Pear Scatterscroll #7 (2024-05-20): Aqua-Overcast-Sky Scatterscroll #8 (2024-05-27): Moss-Bubblegum-Algae Scatterscroll #9 (2024-06-03): Buttercup-Ruby-White Scatterscroll #10 (2024-06-10): Smoke-Antique-Chartreuse Scatterscroll #11 (2024-06-17): Pink-Sand-Berry Scatterscroll #12 (2024-06-24): Slate-Marigold-Clay Scatterscroll #13 (2024-07-01): Latte-Navy-Brown Scatterscroll #14 (2024-07-08): Denim-Buttercup-Tarnish Scatterscroll #15 (2024-07-15): Plum-Cornflower-Leaf Scatterscroll #16 (2024-07-22): Maroon-Obsidian-Thistle Scatterscroll #17 (2024-07-29): Cerulean-Abyss-Garnet Scatterscroll #18 (2024-08-05): Shadow-Chocolate-Buttercup Scatterscroll #19 (2024-08-14): Teal-Orange-Lemon Scatterscroll #20 (2024-08-21): Cream-Moss-Red Scatterscroll #21 (2024-09-02): Mantis-Peach-Metals Scatterscroll #22 (2024-09-16): Terracotta-Platinum-Silver Scatterscroll #23 (2024-09-24): Orchid-Honey-Mint Scatterscroll #24 (2024-10-08): Indigo-Platinum-Swamp Scatterscroll #25 (2024-10-14): Gold-Spruce-Magenta Scatterscroll #26 (2024-10-21): Banana-Dirt-Crimson Scatterscroll #27 (2024-10-28): Smoke-Lead-Terracotta Scatterscroll #28 (2024-11-04): Tomato-Ivory-Lavender Scatterscroll #29 (2024-11-11): Mist-Tangerine-Sunshine

Apparel: TBD

Familiar: Mith Loremaster

Progeny Testing: 

N/A

Broods: 

[theultrablog]

Pulp Storytime #40: The B-Team! Part 1

There was no need to execute prisoners; troublemakers would die soon anyway. They all would. We start with Lala arriving with lawyer Tacito Uriel Velasco at H&M Wakefield prison in England. The characters are paroled, facing trial in a few months because of their tertiary culpability in bringing William the Conqueror to England. Devika whines that the pillows were lumpy and they didn’t even have third helpings. This is the worst prison in the world. No adventure this week, vacation time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world… Detective JP Diamond, ‘Big Man’ Adonis Carcetti, and Whistlin' Inquo were in the exercise yard of Devil's Island. On the way to help their escape was Trudy Truman, ace reporter. This week featured the B team! The players selected their favorite minor characters from previous sessions. JP was the PI-turned-zombie from "Beignet, Done That." Adonis was one of Baltimore’s crime lords from "The Demise of Dr. Enigma". Trudy was Florence’s constantly kidnapped girlfriend, and Inquo was Atlantean royalty turned hobo, who had joined the team on the "Race for the Electric Orb!". Each character was expanded; JP was a southern gentleman, gangly and willing to dig into any mystery, including his own death. Big man was not just a gang leader, but a utopian philosopher who ran a health food restaurant in addition to his gym. Trudy was a former rich girl, and basically immune to criticism from strangers. Anyway, prison was hell. Luckily, the party was extremely hardy. The real Devil’s Island had a mortality rate north of 70%, with heat exhaustion, tropical disease and squalor earning it the nickname “the dry guillotine”. Inquo decided to scan the yard for a fixer, discovering Dormand, a fellow Atlantean. Adonis quickly whipped up a gang, was thrown into the hole, and used his fellow inmates as stepping stones while he bent the bars. Patience, charm, burglary and muscle were all vital in arranging the escape. Trudy had arranged a fishing boat and new, false documentation. But even with Inquo and his new pal sabotaging a patrol boat, the group barely escaped! Trudy drove at ludicrous speed, crashing the boat into the jungle. After a series of haircuts and new outfits, the group made their way back to Baltimore… To find out who had sent them to prison in the first place! Trouble reared its head quickly. A routine dinner at the big man’s ‘health food restaurant’ was interrupted by an addled college student. He entered normally, then pulled out a piece and plugged one of Garc’s best lieutenants! Before anyone could react, he turned the pistol on himself. Horrifying. Now, JP Diamond is the best investigator our campaign has ever seen. He rolled a +7 and +8 on his two rolls, unraveling the mystery at will. The shooter had old tickets stubs for a local hypnotist. Another similar slaying at a boxing arena confirmed the group's suspicions: someone was committing hypnotic murders! At the hypnotist’s venue, the group ran into some old friends. Bebe was there, eager for stage time, being told that the hypnotists had booked out the rest of the month. In the showroom, Devika was arguing that she deserved a refund because “you couldn’t even hypnotize me.” Yes, the gang was relaxing from their British prison sentence by crashing with Dr. Enigma at his mansion! A highlight of the session was Devika interacting with every member of the B Team. Trudy she loved, Adonis she was scared of (being a crime boss who had flirted with her mother), JP she barely remembered but sensed his mystical essence… and Inquo she just said hi to...

[nitro-nova]

"frutiger aero" refers to the aesthetics of the graphics chosen for the video. it's the name that CARI (consumer aesthetics research institute) associates with design motifs from the early 2000s-2010s. easiest example i can think of is like, Windows Vista's aero look (hence the name). so glass orbs, tertiary color palettes, auroras, etc. it refers to a collection of pro-tech designs that continue that optimism in the 2000s but more futurey.

y2k jungle tech dnb refers to the playlist having a sort of melting pot of jungle, dnb, and techstep. These are pretty similar genres although if you ask me the glitchy sounding chops in some of the songs make it tiptoe into breakcore type beats (it can be hard to tell). There are videos that help break down different subgenres of dnb, if you're interested:

Strap in the for the last one, it's an hour long if you want some lengthier explanations.

[scryingworkshop]

[fantastic-fr-scries]

Guardian Male

Cinnamon / Splash / Jungle , Tide / Flair / Stained

[supersonic-pinwheels]

Yesterday's nest (again):

First one is pretty close, just has the wrong tertiary colour.

96948551 - Imperial female, XYZ Jungle/Emerald/Flaxen, Petals/Butterfly/Glimmer, Common Wind eyes

96948552 - Imperial female, XYZ Jungle/Shamrock/Sanddollar, Petals/Butterfly/Glimmer, Rare Wind eyes

96948553 - Imperial female, XYZ Jungle/Emerald/Flaxen, Wasp/Butterfly/Glimmer, Bright Wind eyes

[itsbenedict]

Two-Faced Jewel: Thunderbrush 21

Kicking Butts

A conwoman disguised as a noble and the delegation of university students studying her have arrived in the jungle city of Thunderbrush, ruled by ancient dryads and organized crime. Will they manage to stay uninvolved in shady conspiracies? (No.)

Story so far | Session log index | Previous session

Last time, the party infiltrated a magically-radioactive deathscape and dove into the bowels of a double-dead ghost dryad to uncover the truth behind why she's involved in some sort of conspiracy to attack the school. While looting exploring the place, they found some dead bodies with necromantic tethers binding them to their souls, and did a little healing to resurrect a couple of 100-year-old gangsters.

This time, though... they'll be encountering much younger gangsters than that.

...I said that like it was ominous but it really isn't ominous at all, is it?

After Looseleaf bungee-jumps into the afterlife to keep a corpse's soul from falling into the Thanatic Sea, she manages to resurrect Curly Fry, the quartermaster of the Does. On being resurrected, her first thought is... "oh, for Pete's sake. How much is all this going to cost to clean up?" In her mind, she's playing a base management sim, and the fact that people and crimes are involved is a tertiary annoyance.

She knows about the "Cervix"- the big project going on in the basement, which Jane apparently kept her out of the loop on for the most part, to her frustration (vis-a-vis the accounting books and the materials expenditures). She's pretty sure that's the source of the death field, and sees shutting that down as step 1 to rebuilding their operation. What a mess!!

They proceed deeper into the building, going through various sleeping quarters for officers. This collection of bodies likewise contains a number of intact and unlooted corpses that the revenant bugs haven't gotten to... but unfortunately, they're currently dependent on Orluthe for healing, and he's only got enough juice in him to bring back one more corpse. They'll need to come back with a small army of clerics to save all these people, so they opt to hold their last rez in reserve.

They quiz Curly Fry about which of these corpses might have the most information on the secret project- and she's pretty sure someone named Deirdre would know more, and guides them to a body. Unfortunately... it seems the necromantic tether holding up her soul has snapped, so that's a no-go.

She's pretty sure no one else here knows what's up- no one outside the "Cloven Hoof division" is supposed to- which means heading down to the main room.

(She does let slip that they shipped in a lot of stuff from someone called Sycamori, but that's all she knows- the supplier and the shipment dates.)

Heading deeper down, Oyobi, Orluthe, Curly Fry, and Miriko hang back a bit, exploring the upper floors some more. And as the rest descend... they hear a quiet "fuck!" from downstairs. Someone else is here.

Immediately, "Erin Doe", aka Lydia Glye, the conure woman they resurrected, draws a knife and offers to go take out the intruders. Looseleaf says not to kill them, what the hell, the party is here to get information- and Lydia says capture and interrogation isn't her specialty but she can give it a try.

Also Vayen vanishes at this point, as he's wont to do. Saelhen blind-fires a flicked ball bearing in his general direction, and with a lucky roll...

Saelhen also opts to go invisible and spy on the downstairs people. Oliver tries, but he can't get his invisibility working with this death field breaking his concentration. So it's Saelhen and Lydia, sneaking down into this large, dark chamber.

Inside, they spot...

A tiger man, an infernal teenager, a halfling woman... and also a goblin and three other halfling men. They're all wearing ragged gray-and-orange uniform-ish things, and they've got some large crates and weird tools with them. They're standing around some huge wooden gourd thing in the center of the room.

It's dark in here, but by these people's torchlight (and a bit of darkvision), Saelhen can see... the walls are carved floor to ceiling with an intricate fractal pattern, twisting and branching out from a large round object in the center of the floor. The carvings appear to be filled with an oily black substance, and Saelhen, with a good roll on Epistomancy (she knows the basics from Oliver teaching her some voice-throwing tricks), can recognize that these carvings are drawing out some sort of super-complicated spell of an unknown magic type.

Saelhen sneaks up close to the group, invisible, to eavesdrop on their conversation and get a better look at them.

The halfling plumber woman- named Ember, apparently- seems to think this black gunk stuff in the carvings had to have been pumped from somewhere, and the group needs to find this pump and... well, it seems like their objective is to collect a large amount of the black stuff and put it in the big crates and bring it back. Ember seems to be experimentally trying to dig this stuff out with a weird-lookin' black-tipped chisel, and not having much success.

The group doesn't seem to be super friendly with each other- in particular, the infernal teen, Red, is supposed to be "in charge", but the tiger man, Zeego, clearly chafes at this. Saelhen's subtle attempts to fan the flames by adding whispered insults to their statements (using mimicry) don't seem to have much of an effect. Shit-talking is par for the course with them.

They agree to split up and search for this pump situation, heading down three different hallways in three different groups. Zeego and two halfling men go down one way, Ember and the goblin go down another, and Red and the remaining halfling go down the third corridor.

They argue telepathically for a little while about how to split up, leading to this exchange:

^ This isn't really relevant, it's just a callout post for Farn. In fairness, you miss 100 percent of the dumb portmanteau shots you don't take!

Anyway- Saelhen goes after the goblumber team, Vayen it turns out already went down the corridor Red was heading down and will take care of that with Lydia, and Looseleaf and Oliver hang back a bit to investigate the weird gourd core thing.

First off, magic science time! Looseleaf's pretty new to necromancy, and... well, at least she can tell that this spell mostly isn't doing necromancy, despite using black mana as a substrate. There's a little bit of it in there, and she can tell there's a huge necromantic tether attached to the gourd itself, but the spell is mainly doing something else.

Spirit reading reveals that... the gourd is basically like this dryad's "brain", except that it's not natural exactly. A dryad's nervous system is normally distributed throughout the tree, but it seems like it was artificially yanked out of her extremities to concentrate it in the gourd. Weird!

Oh, right! Oliver was our first double-20s! Which means he gets a ton of information about this spell.

Oliver- you're pretty good at epistomancy. You know how rune arrays are constructed, and you know that the arrays here don't make sense. Like, they're not accessing any of the standard entry points for arcane effects. It's like, by analogy, if all spells were cast by hitting http:// endpoints, this is a spell that's being cast by hitting a completely different protocol you've never seen before. This is a new form of magic you've never seen written out like this before- and you have some idea how to read it. It bears a suspicious resemblance to how Looseleaf has described working with Spirit. This is a spell written to perform spirit magic directly using mana. And your best guess here is... this spell is, indeed, the death field. It seems to be a hugely complicated effect with a ton of redundancies and things it's just bombarding the target with- a bunch of ways one might kill anything of any biology the creator could've conceived of. It's projecting a global effect that basically exists to trick the brain into thinking that it's died, via its spirit- thereby ejecting that spirit into the Thanatic Sea without having to physically damage the body. But that's not all, because you got double twenties. The other part of this effect is that it's not supposed to just kill things. It's supposed to attach those necromantic tethers to their live spirit and the immediately-resulting spirit of their corpse, allowing the subject to bungee-jump into the space between the Jewel and the Thanatic Sea. Anyone it kills, a lifeline is attached to ensure they have a way to return. You can also tell- because double twenties- that this spell was not written by one person. It was written by multiple people, working at cross-purposes. The part of the spell that was supposed to attach tethers and allow the spirit to climb back up into the body was sabotaged by someone working on the project. It seems like the intent of the spell was to bring everyone back up right after making the "jump", but somehow the ability to control the reeling-in effect was centralized to a single user- judging by the size and complexity of the part of the array that does this, Jane herself. Jane got her gang to build a giant device that would let them all bungee-jump into the thanatic sea with the promise of coming back up, and then didn't let them come back up.

This is a few different kinds of fucked up- but what really gets to Looseleaf about this is that apparently the special magic unique to her people? Isn't necessarily just an innate power. There are runes that allow it to work the old-fashioned way, with epistomancy and mana. And this technology... seems to be totally lost, except here by this one long-dead evil tree lady. What the fuck????

But that's not the end of it- Looseleaf and Oliver then work to check the tether attached to the gourd, and find that- like many of the corpse tethers- it's snapped, and there's no soul on the other end. And looking at the way it sheared... it looks like Jane was trying to swing around in the space between the Jewel and the Thanatic Sea. Just what the hell was she trying to accomplish down there?

They relay all this to the team.

While Looseleaf and Oliver are having extremely dramatic magical discoveries, Saelhen's following the goblumber squad. The plumblin squad. You remember that episode where Ash caught a Plumblin?

The corridor here is... weird. There's a bunch of locked doors, in sequence, breaking up this otherwise featureless hallway. The goblin, who calls himself "Scrap-King", is affixing little blasting caps to the locks in lieu of lockpicks, smashing through door after door with precisely-aimed demolitions from his big sackful of bombs. Saelhen opts not to screw with this process for now- she's no bomb expert, and sabotaging bombs could go bad in a lot of unpleasant ways.

They eventually end up at a total dead end- and it's at this point that Saelhen tries a trick.

Scrap-King hands Ember a bomb and tells her to use it on the fake wall ("what fake wall?!"), and then the two split up. Saelhen then... fucks with Ember a bit by knocking on the walls while invisible, and- oh, huh.

...She rolled to refresh her invisibility at this point, and then rolled the mixed success, which causes me to roll on the d100 table of invisibility consequences. And on that table she rolls a 5, and- I can't remember if I remembered to apply that consequence, because I did say that nothing appears to happen, yet. Something was supposed to happen later! I may have forgotten, though. I should bring that back at some point, if I did.

Anyway, Saelhen notices something in this dead end. Her bracer... when she turns invisible and partially shifts into the other world, it seems to locate places in that other world that kind of match the layout of where she's standing, so she can navigate both at once cleanly. And this time it didn't quite do it right- she notices the "fake wall" in this room, because in her bracer-world, that wall is just some woody vines she can see past.

Meanwhile, the goblin guy has walked back out into the main area. Where Looseleaf and Oliver, not invisible, are inspecting the Cervix.

Just before this goes to shit, Oliver thinks to check something. He checks himself for one of those necromantic soul tethers- and indeed finds one. It was there the whole time. The implications are-

Time for a fight where they pretend to be zombies!

...Or, uh, not really, because as soon as Saelhen makes it back, she slashes this guy's tendons. And Oliver traps Ember in pneumantic goo before she can back him up. And Saelhen steals Ember's chisel, her only actual weapon. And Looseleaf uses Mage Hand to steal Scrap-King's bag of bombs. These two are disarmed and subdued almost effortlessly- almost like they weren't combatants at all!

Looseleaf opts to play the heel, here.

Ember and Scrap-King surrender basically immediately- but unfortunately don't know anything about why their boss wants the black mana, so it's not worth much to interrogate them. They just give 'em a little bit of tendon healing and tell them to run upstairs and get the fuck out of here before their protection against the death field expires, which they're more than happy to do.

With that dealt with... Looseleaf, Oliver, and Saelhen head back down that corridor to check out that "dead end". They push past the false wall easily, and find...

A spot-on deduction! But a secret reading room. Inside, they find a letter:

Dearest Jane, I appreciate your timely payment and your history of smooth transactions. The information you've requested is packaged within, unciphered, in plaintext. Though this was not included in the terms of the deal, I remain curious as to the nature of your inquiry- if your aim were simply to compromise Comare's security, you wouldn't need nearly so detailed a report. I would know! A statement on the reasons underlying this report may be accepted as payment for further services at a rate of 1 Jugular.

They find the pages of this report, which seems to be... an absurdly detailed report on everything there is to know about Comare and the Green Hats circa 100 years ago. It becomes pretty obvious that this report was compiled and sold by the Watchwood, a gang of spies and informants that Miriko belongs to. It includes a handful of code-phrases that are supposed to identify messages from missing agents:

"vision of pluperfect beauty" for a Hats assassin who was killed competing for a job with the Thorns and whose body was never found

"long-buried carrion" for an attempted mole in the Watchwood that Ana had killed

"those gem-studded golden shores" for an agent sent to threaten the ecumene of Understanding who apparently never returned

(All these codephrases were in use like a hundred years ago, so impersonating any of these people comes with a big hundred-year question they'd need to answer.)

But what they also find is... tons and tons of testimony on Comare's behavior and mannerisms when interacting with her gang. Details on what she's personally like, how she talks... useful stuff for, like, a method actor being hired to play her in a documentary, or something.

They question Miriko on this, who explains the Watchwood's bespoke currency system. They've got various units of damagingness for quantifying the value of secrets!

She doesn't know anything about this report personally, though- she's old, but this is still before her time.

Next time: they've still got a big scary tiger and a surly teenager to deal with. Maybe one of them will know more about what the Ashtray want all this black mana for!

[bonusdragons]

July 17, 2023:

Jungle Tertiary, Imperial, Peregrine.

Yuletide of Cyrce's Amethyst Peak!