#if you’re curious. she’s a mesen-nebu/usheb and ae is an analyst/tempter

[gristlegrinder]

okay but like i have to share a little writeup for my favorite tabletop ocs ever. they’re not even for a campaign (even though i constantly think about making them npcs in something), i just really, really, really like them and their weird little situation.

meet orlando and kate, my DTD/MTC 2E crossover chronicle power couple. they are, basically, a stigmatic mummy and the demon witness that runs her cult, a postmodern theatre and arts collective operating mainly out of a cabaret club they’ve fixed up.

(transcript / full text under the cut)

Kate (or Katjakadja, although nobody calls her that anymore) is Deathless— thousands of years ago, in a nameless empire lost to the sands of time, she pledged eternal servitude to the Gods of the afterlife, and hasn’t been allowed to rest ever since. There is work to be done, after all, to usher in the next aeon of judgment. Like empires, she rises, falls, and rises again, whenever she is needed. She strips away parts of her former selves in every iteration and she puts in the endless work without question, torturing herself for art and commerce. The original Katjakadja is a fleck of sand lost in an hourglass, constantly slipping through her fingers and reinvented in every reincarnation.

When she killed her Sadikh (an immortal lover who flew too close to the sun while managing their affairs) in service to her eternal Judge, it shocked Kate out of blind faith— leaving her jaded to the entire arrangement. She knows that she’s stuck in her duties, and she doesn’t particularly want to be cast into the fires of Duat, but she’s looking for a way out whenever her Gods aren’t watching, and that’s a careful act to balance, even for a serpent like herself.

Orlando’s “God,” if you can even call It that, was much more material. Ae was created as an arm of the great Machine that has buried itself into the core of the Earth, the terrible foreign parasite that builds Itself into civilization and exists only to perpetuate Its own existence. You’ve probably met It without realizing, Its heartbeat resonating in the thrum of rush-hour traffic and corporate office white noise. It turns, and It turns, and It turns, in Its own kind of vapid infinity, with little regard for anything that cannot be regulated into nothingness.

Aer job in the Machine was data analytics— sending quality reports, reviewing infrastructure and process lines— until that wasn’t enough. Bored out of aer mind, Orlando broke away from the Machine to go play with the humans, to learn what their bodies can do, to learn what it was like to feel. And so ae became light untethered, learning how to take human souls and live in the hollow bodies they leave behind. Pressing aer luck as a rogue agent in danger of being hunted down and recycled, ae spends the next few decades looking for something on Earth better than the orderly system that ae rejected. It only makes sense to call yourself a Demon after all that.

They first meet in 1976, after a downward swing for the both of them. Kate has no memory of the last twenty years of her life, but her resources are gone and the guilt from whatever happened in Berlin still eats at her stomach. Orlando is washed up after a forgotten stint at being a mid-tier funk guitarist, having experienced all of the earthly pleasures that ae went looking for in the first place, but not being able to find fulfillment in any of it. They talk sex, politics, religion, escape routes. Kate wants the freedom that Orlando has managed, wants to know how to slip in between the cracks, how to challenge the cosmos; Orlando wants a real spiritual awakening, wants to experience something better than machinery.

This is the game plan: Orlando knows the boundaries of reality itself, and how to exist in the in-betweens. They create shadows where their old masters can’t find them; Kate covers Orlando’s mortal shell with centuries of documentation and a tight-knit circle of cultists, and Orlando teaches Kate the art of lying without twitching and building plausible deniability with the universe. Whenever Kate comes back from the cool bliss of oblivion, Orlando is waiting for her with an analyst’s collection of spreadsheets, diary logs, and financial records. She holds Orlando’s face between her hands, and ae bears witness to thousands of years of mortal history before kissing her in worship.

It’s a dangerous game, and they’re playing against loaded dice. But they’ve got a strange little love that goes beyond initiation rites and dotted lines on contracts, and nobody said they couldn’t help each other cheat.