#sonorous windsong

[wingedashley]

Holy crap. Just came home from finishing my first exalted campaign. It’s over.

I’m reeling. The whole goddamn saga ended with Windsong and Harrow clinking glasses over a diplomatic epilogue afterparty, toasting to their next 3000 years as demigods, together.

It’s been kind of an incredible journey, and through said journey I created a tumblr account, made a whole new group of friends, and even found a girlfriend. Can’t thank @winterwombat enough for creating this and inviting me in, and I can’t thank @myrastuff enough for seducing me to the shipper trash dark side.

Here’s to countless RPGs to follow. And who knows? Maybe we’ll even play more Exalted someday.

[shiftingpath]

ohhhh my god honestly i need to stop working on this or i will never stop. @myrastuff sent me her amazing lineart to practice on and I am so grateful. This is @wingedashley‘s Dawn Caste Tepet Sonorous Windsong. I hope I did okay, I have never really had to think about cityscapes and snow and stuff before >_>

[myrastuff]

Also the actual art.

This is Tepet Sonorous Windsong, played by @wingedashley, now with 50% less hair and 50% more robot arm.

[wingedashley]

RWBYまとめ１ by くろだ

[wingedashley]

The Princess & The Treasure Hunter

So. I’ve spent the last year playing in an Exalted campaign run by @winterwombat. My character (Tepet Sonorous Windsong) spent half of it in a will-they-or-won’t-they unresolved sexual tension fest with her circlemate Captain Juliet Harrow (played by the esteemed @myrastuff).

Well, that unresolved sexual tension has been conclusively resolved. Will they or won’t they? They will. They did. Oh yes.

To celebrate, I decided to try and build an annotated chronology of our campaign, as it relates to these two nerds and all the intersession RPs Myra and I wrote together. For those who’ve either been tracking us from the start or want to jump straight to the kisses, here’s where it happens:

Harrow/Windsong IV - Joyride (8k words)

For everyone else, here we go!

All artwork is courtesy of @myrastuff, and I highly recommend searching through her “Juliet Harrow” tag sometime. Each google doc RP alternates between sections written by Myra (Harrow’s) and sections written by me (Windsong’s). The Rest sequences are pretty optional, and don’t need to be read to keep track of the rest of the story.

Act 1

A Circle of Solars are brought together by an ancient pact made by their past incarnations, summoning them from across Creation to the West, soon after their Second Breaths.

Circle descriptions can be found here.

They’re quickly dragged into a desperate attempt to stop a Fae Queen from releasing a behemoth upon the Wavecrest archipelago, while simultaneously fighting a guerilla resistance against a sudden Realm occupation.

Much adventuring is had, as the party gets to know each other. Captain Harrow quickly takes on the role of the de facto “team leader”, drafting the other three Solars into joining her crew on her ship. Windsong spends less time bonding and more time reeling from the fresh facts that her parents left her to die, she’s now an anathema, and the Realm are the baddies.

It all comes to a head in a dramatic naval showdown with the leader of the occupation, Peleps Erena. On the eve of the final battle, Harrow attempts to turn the Queen from an enemy into an asset through the ultimate gambit: offering the Raksha a spot on her crew, and offering herself as a paramour.

It works perfectly.

One tiny problem. This gambit was as much a surprise to the rest of the party as it was to Eyasha (the Fae). And this was also the exact moment that Windsong realized that she had a huge crush on her dashing Captain, before proceeding to promptly have her first Limit Break over it.

Act 2

A month has passed since the battle for Wavecrest. The Circle have taken some well earned R&R time off together. Well, almost: Windsong has been extra broody and distant, and spent most of it burying herself in work and avoiding Harrow. Nika and Sil can see this trainwreck coming from a mile away.

They’re suddenly dragged back into action thanks to a series of unfortunate events, culminating in an ambush by a fully prepared Wyld Hunt party.

The fight is an absolute clusterfuck.

Windsong falls asleep by her captain’s bedside (it’ll be the last time she sleeps for months, kept awake in an endless workaholic fever thanks a few charms and a ton of new nightmares). When she wakes up, she decides she can’t hide her feelings any longer. Leading to the first written segment…

Harrow/Windsong I - Confession (4.5k words)

The Circle now know what they’re fighting for: the remnants of a First Age seabound empire built by their former incarnations. The Boundless Fleet. Three gargantuan superships still exist to be fought over, and they’re in a race with Peleps Erena to see who can reach them first:

The Archive, a priceless library.

Nef Lukai, The Floating City, a ship the size of a small country. Has its own factory cathedral.

The Immortal, the ultimate warship. Practically a superweapon.

They head West, seeking out the Archive. To get to it, they have to fight through the Guild. On the plus side there’s at least one familiar face to help them: Jacintha, the leader of an ex-slave guerilla resistance movement that the party clashed with in Act 1. Harrow kind of hated her and her fellow “Bloodless”, but Windsong got along with her swimmingly.

Did I mention fighting through the Guild? Well part of that involved fighting through the Guild’s terrifying pair of Lunar enforcers: Anastasia Ember (a seductive duelist) and Heartless Sona (a vicious gunslinger).

Vicious enough to cripple Windsong for life. Windsong’s left arm is vaporized after a desperate attempt to shield a circlemate from a lethal attack.

The Act concluded on a climactic naval / ground battle with the Guild in and around the Archive itself. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. They freed the Archive and even broke the Guild’s back over it, leaving Harrow’s growing trade fleet as the strongest economic power in the West. But Windsong was already mutilated and they lost Jacintha. She died and returned as an Abyssal only long enough to drag half the combatants permanently into the underworld with her. Windsong Breaks again.

The Circle prepare for a long journey up North, to stop Peleps Erena from taking Nef Lukai. Windsong, however, has had enough. Jacintha left her soldiers orders to obey Windsong if she died, and she resigns from Harrow’s crew to take command of the reeling Bloodless.

But before she leaves on a journey to unite her new forces, Harrow has a gift for her…

Harrow/Windsong II - Artifact (8k words)

Act 3

Nef Lukai has a problem. It spent a long while in the pits of Hell after the Usurpation, and only returned to Creation fairly recently. The upshot of this is that it’s absolutely crawling with demons. On the bright side, it means that Peleps Erena can’t just waltz in; she has to bring an army and siege the city.

A month has passed since the fight for the Archive, and Harrow’s ragtag fleet has (more or less) just arrived. Before they can get their bearings on how to approach the City, they’re suddenly caught in a vicious crossfire between the Peleps Navy and Hell’s. They’re forced to escape deeper North, landing on an abandoned island to recuperate and consolidate.

Complicating matters, Windsong’s back. And she brought friends.

A local Bloodless cell mounted a botched attack on a fleet of slave ships. Windsong arrived a little too late to do much more than mitigate the catastrophe: they successfully freed the ships, but they didn’t have the supplies to drop off the newly freed prisoners anywhere in sight. She decided to bring the ships along with her to her rendezvous with Harrow’s fleet, hoping they could render assistance. And they got marooned on the aforementioned island just like everyone else, except with literally nowhere else to go.

Before they knew it, the Circle started a settlement. The island had an abandoned village and temple on it already, which Harrow quickly refurbished. Over the course of a month, they played the long game, spying on Erena’s siege while opening diplomatic channels with the local Realm-occupied nation.

But before they could all play house, Harrow had to say goodbye to a controversial special someone. Eyasha had spent the last Act growing steadily disillusioned with her Fae nature, and asked Harrow to help end it…

Harrow/Eyasha Rest - Eyasha’s Farewell (5k words)

(Note: This segment was written using Myra’s indie RPG “Rest”. Because in addition to being a great roleplayer, webcomic author, all around craftsperson and fantastic artist… she also writes RPGs. Talk about intimidating.

Rest is a micro RPG system for dream sequences, built to interlock into other RPGs. @winterwombat wrote the somewhat-homebrewed sequence in its entirety and Myra played it through, page by page.)

On a happier note, Windsong also got to spend the course of the month getting used to her new arm!

Harrow had spent the month-long timeskip between Acts 2 and 3 building the Mercy Unconquered. Windsong had it grafted onto her left shoulder in the middle of the Hell/Realm naval crossfire, and used it to great effect to defend Harrow’s ship from Wyld Hunt boarders. The surgery was a bit more rushed than either of them would’ve liked, and Harrow decides to take a moment to make sure everything is okay…

Harrow/Windsong III - Checkup (7k words)

The party learn that Erena is on the precipice of an all-out assault on the demon city, one that’s gonna work thanks to the introduction of goddamn warstriders. They hatch a crazy plan to simultaneously sneak their fleet into the city via an intake port into the Canals district, before capturing and securing the sector before the demons can react.

Problem: they sure as hell can’t defend a beachhead in a demon-infested city, while also managing a new settlement and protecting the Hrimval (the aforementioned local nation). So they concoct a plan that’s just breathtakingly stupid enough to work: put all their eggs in one basket by evacuating both the Hrimval and their settlement into Nef Lukai with them. Nef Lukai is huge, each of its five districts being incredibly easy to fortify and the size of a bloody city.

Somehow, this works. They sneak a strike team into the central manse, and defend Nika long enough from demonic horde mode for her to take over and flood the entire district. They secure victory after killing a giant enemy crab (I wish I was joking, it had a keep full of demons on its back) with the help of a mysterious archer. Mysterious sidereal archer vanishes right after the fight, but not before everyone gets a good look at her:

Windsong’s younger sister, Saerie. The one she sacrificed herself for in the first place. That night, for the first time in a long while, Windsong actually falls asleep.

Windsong Rest - The Gilded City (1k words)

(Myra wanted me to playtest Rest prior to publishing it, and wrote me this sequence to play through.)

Windsong’s Bloodless and the Hrimval work together to build a new home in Nef Lukai. Peleps Erena captured the Academy District with her assault, and the Demon Queen of the city called a ceasefire. Said queen throws a lavish party in the central spire, and everyone is invited.

The Circle show up and settle down for a long night of politicking and gunboat diplomacy. On the bright side, they’re joined by two new allies: Anastasia Ember (seductive Guild duelist from Arc 2, now looking for work and FWB status with Windsong) and Auriana (Eyasha’s solar-powered Fae-ish reincarnation!).

On the less bright side:

Windsong tries to befriend the Wyld Hunt monks, and is utterly dismantled by them for being the naive, stinking traitor she is. How innocent is she really when mortals flock to her banner to die for her causes anyway?

Phaedra, the Demon Queen, is an Infernal. One with complete free will, who rejected her demonic masters and set out to conquer the world into a better place. She’s a perfect counterpoint to Harrow, a warmongering corrupted Solar with ominously familiar goals of world domination and affable charisma.

Harrow’s finally met her match, and has her first Limit Break over her building self doubt.

Nonetheless, they persevere. Windsong sorts her shit out and figures out where her loyalties lie (hint hint, with a certain Solar admiral). Harrow pulls herself out of her fugue too, with Windsong fussing over her every step of the way.

Some skullduggery and clandestine adventuring ensue, culminating in a vicious blitzkrieg by the Realm. They burned a path through the Gardens district, besieging the Canals with warstrider support. Windsong and Sil defend the walls, barely, scraping together a victory thanks to a 11th hour superweapon piloted by Harrow: The Ascendant Justice. Nika and Harrow had managed to capture and consecrate the Cathedral District, giving her access to the personal warstrider of Windsong’s former incarnation.

After the dust has settled, a lot of people are dead. Phaedra shows up to announce her official alliance with Peleps Erena, along with a formal declaration of war in 4 days.

Things are looking grim, but grim is the Circle’s specialty.

A few days into their preparations for the Battle of Nef Lukai, Windsong seeks out Harrow in a quiet moment…

Harrow/Windsong IV - Joyride (8k words)

Afterword

And here we are. It’s been one heck of a journey, and I’ve skipped and skimmed over so much of this campaign (an entire half of the Circle and a ton of supporting characters). Shoutout to @winterwombat again for keeping this carnival going.

I remember throwing in the “Windsong has a crush on Harrow” development on a lark in Act 1, and @myrastuff really ran with it. It’s been almost a year and it’s so very cathartic to see it finally come together. This isn’t the end of their story either, and I can’t wait to see how they develop over the Arcs to come.

Fun fact, I created my tumblr account in the first place just to take part in the tumblr Exalted community. You’re all wonderful, and it’s been a wild ride. ^_^

[wingedashley]

Falling for you

(Notes: This fic is 4K words long. Shoutout to @myrastuff for helping with editing, and for creating this superhero AU in the first place.)

Alice Song woke to the soft beeping of her watch’s alarm.

She took a deep, shuddering breath and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. She’d fallen asleep resting her head against the window by her seat, and on any other day the view would’ve taken her breath away. Cruising 85 kilometers above the ground, the shuttle just barely skimmed the edges of outer space. So close to the Kármán line, the upper half of the sky was black as night despite the harsh glare of the sun. She could see the curvature of the Earth dipping into every horizon.

But today wasn’t about sightseeing. She had a job to do.

She shifted in her seat, straightening her back as she stretched her arms and legs. The shuttle’s interior was dark and quiet, sparse but still surprisingly cosy. Her mid-flight nap hadn’t left her cramped and sore like on a regular airplane, where the upholstered seats weren’t designer-made for style and comfort. The soft hum of the shuttle’s engines reverberated through the small space, its automated lights still calibrated for broad daylight. She smiled. That’s what you got for flying without a human pilot, she supposed.

As she stretched, a holographic window opened up a few feet from her face, projected from the shuttle’s ceiling. The plane’s soft spoken AI chimed through the speakers.

“Incoming call from-”

“Put her through.”

It would take a few seconds for the call to connect, enough time to freshen up. After all, it wouldn’t help to give Juliet the wrong impression. With practiced ease, she detached her brain’s chronology from the rest of her body and compressed it, accelerating her mind’s eye in tandem to gloss over the span. She blinked, and blinked again.

By the time Juliet’s office sprang into view before her, she’d been awake for hours.

By the time Dr. Juliet Godsmith extricated herself from the ongoing soiree, the sun had started to set on the horizon. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stalked through the labyrinthine halls of the company office towards her private lab, the click-clack of her cane slowly drowning out the sounds of laughter and music from somewhere behind her.

Of all the times for a crisis like this to happen, it had to happen now. She should have been handling this herself; her mistake, her neck on the line to fix it. But that would put the whole company on the line in the process, and probably end up getting her killed as the icing on that cake. It had to be Song, fighting her battles and saving the day. A proper superhero, for all she seemed set on denying it. Her plan was ludicrous, but it was the best one that either of them had.

By the time she made it to her office she was already breathing heavily, exhaling sharply as the door slid closed with deceptive softness. “Security level to maximum, Aurora,” she spoke to the AI as she settled herself in, resting her cane against the desk as a dozen holographic displays opened in a panoramic array before her. “Run this operation on the burner rig, I want all records wiped as clean as we can get them.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.” The AI affirmed it had completed the action with a short, mechanical chirp.

The overhead lights came on gradually, replacing the dimming daylight from the floor-to-ceiling one-way windows with her own perfectly replicated blend of artificial sun. The tender reds and oranges of twilight mixed with the artificial afternoon to cast her office in a riot of warm colours. All of which stood in remarkable contrast to the shadowy shuttle camera feed projected onto the central display before her.

Song was brooding in the passenger seat. Piercing blue eyes glared out at the sky below, her pitch black hair blending into the darkness behind her. Gone was her cocksure grin, the happy spark behind a perennial smile. For all her too-young-to-die posturing, she looked very… mortal. Juliet sighed.

“Aurora, add reminder for tomorrow, 9 am. Review personal privacy filters on camera AI, update recognition algorithm.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.”

She closed the feed with a wave of her hand, leaning back into the oversized office chair. Song did this every few weeks, there was no need to feel this nervous.

If she had any more time… well, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any time left at all.

She opened a call to the shuttle, clasping her hands before her and leaning forward on her elbows. She smiled, and it didn’t feel all that fake at all.

Juliet’s face popped onto the stream, all prim and cunning and perfect. She was wearing a full-length sequined gown, and a smug little half-smile that told Alice she’d invented something that would disrupt another million-dollar industry… or impressed another supermodel.

Let’s not think about that.

“Party went well, I take it?” said Alice.

“Is going well, I hope. We’d better make this fast, or they’ll be fresh out of hors d’oeuvres before I get back.” Juliet’s smile widened into a grin as she leaned back in her throne-like chair, tapping on a keyboard off screen. “Are you ready?”

“Born ready.” Alice grinned. She stood from her seat, stepping closer to the open space by the bay doors to begin her warm up routine. The holographic window followed her… not that she minded. It wasn’t every day that she got to do calisthenics in a skin-tight plugsuit, let alone in front of little miss Stark herself.

Juliet, for her part, seemed far more interested in some readouts floating in her side screens. Poo. “On an unrelated note, I took your request for swim goggles and whipped up something a bit more… fashionable.”

Alice could hear the clack of manicured nails on a keyboard as a hidden compartment opened in the wall with a pneumatic hiss. It was a visor, a single ear-to-ear screen designed to fit across the bridge of her nose, between two large over-the-ear headphone pieces held together by a strap. Same colour and size as the one Juliet wore, except for the ear covers. Fashionable, indeed. She lifted it from the compartment, pulling it over her head to adjust it in place on her face. She smiled, it still had that heady newly-replicated smell.

Whipped up indeed.

Juliet piped up, directly in her ears this time. “If you do find a way to break this one, could you try to bring it back in one piece? I could use the test data. It’s hard enough building a sensor suite that can survive the G forces you put out, let alone one that can wirelessly communicate through all your… temporal folding.”

Alice had to laugh. Juliet always made it sound so frightfully gauche. The visor’s insides lit up after a quick boot sequence, mapping an augmented reality display into the shuttle around her. Her eyes flicked across the visual keyboard as she filled in her login details.

“And what about my… other request?”

With the clack of a keyboard through the visor comm, a second compartment (how many did this damn shuttle have?) opened behind her. Alice turned to look at it, and stopped. She stepped up to it with more than a little trepidation, before pulling out a device she’d only seen on TV. Modelled in museums.

“Really, I should be making you something custom-fitted, but it’s been years since I played with this sort of tech and I was having difficulty with the…” Juliet cut herself off ahead of the technical explanation, conscious of the time. “Anyways, it was easier to convince a few world governments and one admiral that they owed me a favour. I hope you don’t mind something secondhand.”

It was a smooth disc of chrome, with a series of glowing blue rings embedded inside. Like a comic-book arc reactor. Leather straps hung from its sides, a surprisingly oldschool harness for such an incredible piece of technology. Courtesy of its last user, she supposed.

The visor mistook her hesitance for confusion, and layered diagnostic data over the machine:

97% MATCH CERTAINTY: Prototype Soltech egomorphic field reservoir. Last seen…

She dismissed the window. Impulse’s field projector, custom built by Dr. Godsmith herself. She squelched the automatic pang of jealousy.

The device was synonymous with the late superhero, and ever since she’d inherited his powers she’d always wondered when she’d get her hands on something like it. Even now, held at arm’s length, she could feel her field slipping and sinking into the device. Filling and feeling it out like it was meeting an old friend.

She shivered.

“It’s… thank you, Juliet,” she muttered, before slipping it onto her back and tightening the straps around her chest. Impulse always wore the damn thing on his chest, and it certainly made for a pretty striking heroic silhouette. But for the next 30 minutes, the less blinking lights she had pointing forward, the better.

Besides, it clearly wasn’t designed to fit across breasts.

It normally took a bit of effort to stretch her field to something new and foreign on her person. It was still licking at her visor, assimilating the device over long minutes. But the ring pulled at her, drawing her aura into it like a black hole, twisting and coiling it around its core. She stepped up to the starboard bay doors, stretching her face in a mock yawn as she tested the airtight seal around the visor’s screen.

“Song…” The inventor’s voice wavered for a moment, until she restarted with more conviction. “Alice. You know you don’t have to do this alone. It’s the best plan we have now, but that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal solution. We can figure something else out, I’ll handle any fallout. I’ve dealt with worse.”

Alice looked down at her feet, and saw the Earth projected below the shuttle’s floor on her aug display. Drexler’s lab was marked on the ground below, to her left, along with the curving ballistic trajectory of her projected route onto the site.

“Me going in alone gives you the highest plausible deniability, and I can improvise a high speed exit strategy without worrying about anyone else slowing me down. Going now means we can solve this before it becomes an international crisis.”

Alice looked forward, staring through the doors at the void beyond. She grimaced.

“And of course you’ve dealt with worse. We wouldn’t have powers if we hadn’t dealt with worse…” Her voice faltered. “… It doesn’t change a damn thing.”

I couldn’t be there for you then. But I sure as hell can be there for you now.

She could practically hear Juliet smile.

“Fine.” said Juliet. “Though I have to ask, when did you become an expert in breaking into secure military facilities?”

“Since when did you start building tech that could end the world if it fell into the wrong hands?”

“Mmm, touché.”

They faded into a companionable silence, the visor’s clock ticking down the final few seconds before the shuttle arrived at the drop window. She briefly considered leaving her now-obsolete watch behind, but decided against it. As much as she’d fought to not do the jump in a bloody space suit to keep her weight down, a few grams wouldn’t kill her.

And, well… she ran a thumb over its screen nervously. The thought of being without a working timepiece was too difficult to bear. Never again.

“Alright,” Juliet’s voice through the visor broke the silence, “it’s showtime.”

The bay doors flashed green as they waited for Alice’s signal. She checked her harness, flexed her fingers in her suit. Her visor was comfortably saturated in her field at this point, and it had completed the software handshake with the projector on her back. Which, in turn, had finished absorbing as much of her field as it was able. Ideally, optimally, she’d want to hyperventilate before this next bit… but it really wasn’t all that necessary.

Besides, in the off chance that she actually died, she really didn’t want that to be Juliet’s final memories of her. She smirked.

Taking a few deep breaths, she hit the bay door controls. She made sure to exhale sharply as the shuttle’s interior explosively decompressed. As much as she’d have loved to hold her breath, the vacuum would’ve ripped it right out of her chest anyway. She felt her saliva bubble away as the insides of her mouth froze.

To her pleasant surprise, her ears didn’t so much as pop. Thank you, Juliet.

She stepped forward, to the lip of the void. She felt her lungs and heart slow, her power deftly scaling back the speed of her metabolic processes in tandem with her mammalian diving reflex. Her eyes drooped, arms spread wide by her side, as she fell forward into the cold sky beyond.

Juliet tapped her fingers against the desk in nervous anticipation. Now began the wait.

At Song’s altitude, she’d take almost 10 minutes to reach the lab. Her desk’s holographics were dominated by a volumetric display of the atmosphere between the shuttle and the landing zone, Song just a blip on a parabolic track. A side screen showed a camera feed of her receding further and further away from the shuttle.

Juliet clenched her teeth. Any lower, and the spaceplane would drop out of the ionosphere and risk detection. Song was plummeting into this absurd, half-formed plan at terminal velocity, completely alone.

She glanced at another side screen, the internal feed from Song’s visor. It depicted a sharp cross section of the girl’s face: her unfocused blue eyes. Her fingers tapped harder, she bit her lip.

Sod it.

“Aurora, hook me into the company satellite mainframe.” It barely took her a minute to coordinate every Solnet satellite in the hemisphere to train their sensors on the girl. Her windows shifted as a new volumetric display took center stage, a perfectly triangulated 3D reconstruction of Song in free fall. She’d have to scrub a lot of mainframes after this whole mess was over.

She looked… angelic.

Without an atmosphere in the way, the sun burned bright on her skin. Her hair floated in a soft wave behind her, utterly ethereal. And oh god, her in that suit… Juliet tore her eyes away, flushed. Form fitting, ideal for speed, of course Song would insist on it. Impulse always had, and Juliet was starting to realize what his legions of fans had seen in the damned thing. Thank you, aerodynamics.

Wait.

She snapped her focus back to the visor’s screen. Song’s eyes weren’t unfocused anymore. They were tracking something on the ground below with the focus of a hawk.

“What do you see?”

Juliet’s voice felt tinny and distant in Alice’s ears. She scanned the ground again, straining her eyes through her torpor.

Shit.

In lieu of trying to type out a text message with her eyes, she fragmented a new timestream for her visor and carefully decelerated it. Show, don’t tell: the slower anything moved in relation to normal time, the faster the subjective frequency of any waves. All she had to do was pull the visor’s cameras down the EM spectrum juust far enough to-

“Oh,” said the voice in her ear.

Song’s eyes were incredible, even by metahuman standards. They were one of the many adaptations her body had been pushed through to adopt Impulse’s powers. She could see radiation ranging from gamma rays all the way down to, say, radio waves.

There were three radar installations below her, ringing Drexler’s lab. Scratch that, four. She could maybe risk falling past one. But with that many triangulating together, probably on high alert, she didn’t stand a chance. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

“They’re SAM sites. Surface to air missiles. You could probably take one direct hit with that projector online, but you can’t take four.” A pause, an intake of breath, “I’m pulling the plug. We’re aborting the mission.”

Juliet sounded panicked. Which made sense, there wasn’t really an exit strategy for this leg of the mission. If Alice had to guess, Juliet would force the shuttle out of its thermosphere cover and probably risk the world’s most one-sided dogfight to buy her a few minutes.

Alice grimaced. Not if she had something to say about it.

She splayed her arms and legs out in a spread eagle, before reaching out to the field enveloping her body to clock it down.

Time slowed. Every nerve, every atom throttling to a crawl. The world around her exploded into blinding blues and purples as high frequency light overloaded her sluggish retinas. She felt warm, the air spiking in subjective heat and pressure to her slowed skin. She felt her stomach sink as her drop to Earth suddenly accelerated. A kinematic illusion, her brain playing catch up with her subjectively faster trajectory.

But for all the things that sped up around her, gravity did not.

The earth spun beneath her, far faster than it ever should. But she still fell with the force, and speed, of a single G, relative to her own pocket of time. Her visor struggled for a long second to recalculate her new trajectory… one that plateaued over the lab to land in the ocean well beyond it. Her face broke into a smug grin with the sharp intake of breath from the other end of the com.

“Well then. That’s a neat trick. Didn’t realize you could slow your fall like that.” Alice listened in a happy daze; Juliet’s voice was wonderfully, gloriously, legible. No speed up at all. Somehow, the inventor had built a machine that could package her voice perfectly across compressed time. She always hated having to keep her auditory nerves running at a different rate than the rest of her, it was such a debilitating experience.

With the boosted atmospheric pressure, she decided to finally open her mouth and inhale a few, deep breaths. Some of that daze was feeling a bit too literal.

Juliet was speaking again. Blinking the fog away from her mind, she tried to pick up the thread of the conversation she’d lost. Audio compensation or not, there was no fixing the fact that Juliet was literally in a faster timestream than her. Her messages came thick and fast. Something about the view being spectacular?

“- will bring the shuttle around and pick you up from your new landing zone. I trust that you can swim.”

She almost rolled her eyes, until Juliet paused, left her hanging on her words like she hung in the air. Even with her mind running a bit faster than the rest of her body, a second of silence was a worryingly long gap in realtime.

“…Don’t worry about Drexler, or the transponder. Don’t worry about diplomatic incidents. Just come back safe, Song.”

Practically a whisper, it almost felt like an admission. To what, she didn’t dare guess. She had to focus on what came next. Slowing down was always the easy part.

She’d been tracking the sweeps of the radar beams, putting together a map of how they intersected, the transient gaps and windows. But everything moved so dizzyingly fast, her crawling nerves struggling to keep up with the shifting sensor net.

She felt her mind fragment, executive functions slowing further and further as her planning functions endlessly accelerated. Her vision narrowed. Blood rushed to her head. Tinnitus keened in her ears. A dull pain settled between her eyes-

There.

Like a bolt of lightning down her cortical stack, she felt the raw certainty of a route found, a plan committed. Her mind telescoped back in on itself as she heard her lungs draw a deep, shuddering breath. She was drifting right above the installation, the SAM sites forming a perfect ring of interlocking death.

What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“… Song?” Juliet was talking to her. “Song? The visor doesn’t have much of a biometric suite, but your-”

Tyger Tyger, Juliet.

For a single dizzying moment, everything clicked into place. Alice reached the laboratory’s zenith. The radar beams finished sweeping directly over the installation, to return to scanning their surroundings.

She let go of her power.

Her body snapped back to real time, the world dropping back to chilly normality as every particle in her body sprung back into action. And then she kept on pushing, driving her temporal momentum forward as she clocked her entire self up.

The world was dark, redshifting into a red and black hellscape. The world was cold, chilling to near absolute zero.

The world was still.

She couldn’t breath, the air frozen in time around her. She couldn’t see the SAMs, her eyes shifting frantically to adapt to the grim red sun. She hung in the sky, frozen for a gut wrenching moment, her momentum reduced to negligibility.

And then she fell.

She pulled her arms and legs tight against her sides as she picked up speed, dropping like a javelin through the frozen sky. Her power was red lightning in her veins. The world was a shrinking cage of radio waves, flanked on all sides by the invisible eyes of an angry god. She felt herself break the sound barrier, stabbing out of the stratosphere like an orbital strike.

A dozen seconds into her breakneck descent, she heard Juliet’s delayed gasp in her ears. She laughed with aching lungs.

Welcome to my wonderland.

The laboratory grew in her vision as she felt the shockwave of compressed air stretching against her finally ignite. Fire scorched her sight, seared the caked frost from her visor. Countless warning windows exploded across the edges of her vision, which she ignored for the only readout that mattered: altitude.

500 meters from the ground and dropping, she decided to prime the projector, slid her eyes across the ring’s controls, and-

ERROR: RADIO BLACKOUT. Potential causes: active jamming, spacecraft re-entry, ionospheric anomalies…

No. No no no.

The emergency release. She’d seen it in the museum, briefly noted it when she picked the thing up on the shuttle. Teeth clenched, she whipped her left arm behind her back to grab for the switch.

Her arm had only extended from her profile for a microsecond, but a microsecond was all that the angry sky needed. The sudden asymmetry to her profile whipped her into a tailspin. The burning, freezing night spun her end-on-end as she flailed for the release.

So that’s why Impulse always wore this thing on his chest.

The altimeter kept draining.

In a handful of terrifying moments, she found the latch, grabbing and holding on to it for dear life. With a silent scream, she clocked up as hard as she could with every iota of power she had left, and clocked her mind further still.

5 meters

The world collapsed into darkness, her eyes failing her completely, her breakneck fall suddenly slowing to a lethargic sink. She couldn’t tell up from down. It felt familiar… like diving.

Like drowning.

3 meters

She screwed her eyes shut and pulsed her senses through her field. It caressed the edges of her temporal bubble, tracing a thousand soft fingers against walls of frozen sky.

With a slow spin she righted herself, orienting against her wake. She extended her feet to help cushion the landing. She splayed her right hand before her, fingers outstretched.

(1 meter)

Her fingers and feet touched the roof of the laboratory. They sank into the concrete like it was dust in the wind.

Two knuckles deep, she flicked the switch.

The field stored in the projector blasted through her body like a shockwave, pumping down her legs and arms to dig deep into the concrete. She felt her power stretch across the rooftop, licking down at the load bearing supports. The effect was immediate, the concrete hardening and absorbing the shock of her descent. Dust became rubber as her momentum scattered into her field.

And like a wire snapping, she whipped back to realtime.

The world gasped back into light and warmth as she slammed into the flexing rooftop. Her fragmented mind was still a step ahead of her body, watching with dispassionate curiosity as the shockwave rippled away through the ground beneath her.

It rippled up her body too, her bones and limbs twisting and warping far beyond their breaking points, held together by the aftershocks of her field. The wave rippled through her skull and she struggled to hold onto consciousness, shivering as it passed up through her hair.

And then, finally, it was over.

Her brain crashed back into realtime all at once, following the rest of her. For the first time in far too long, she was all in one piece; even the minor instinctive temporal eddies that wormed their way through her metabolism had all collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

It was a surprisingly nice day out. The sun was high in the sky, and all she could hear was birdsong from the nearby forest. No surface to air missiles, no foxy geniuses, nothing. Only the soft chime of her visor rebooting broke her from her reverie. She laughed, gasping for breath, and rose from her three-point landing.

Cheeks flushed, flakes of cement scattering from the grooves she’d dug into the ground, Alice stood tall, turning back to look up at the sky and straight into the eyes of her audience.

She winked.

[wingedashley]

In the thirty minutes or so it took for me to pack up all my stuff from the last Exalted session, @myrastuff drew me some Windsong doodles.

The stuffed animal she’s protecting at the bottom is Pookie. Myra’s the best.

[wingedashley]

So, I’ve been really enjoying playing in @winterwombat‘s Exalted game. They’re a great GM and I love my fellow players. But something particular I wanted to mention was the inter-session RP.

A long long time ago, I wanted to run a particular scene that kinda wouldn’t work very well as an in-session one. It was the conclusion to the “Windsong has a secret crush on Harrow” mini-arc, via fixing that ‘secret’ part. Sure, I could potentially roleplay a super sappy teary awkward confession scene with @myrastuff, but not only would it feel hella awkward with the live audience, it would take up waaaay too much time and space. So we decided to do it via google docs and it was an adorable, sappy blast!

And slowly, sloowly... this has started a Thing.

I’ve been in a bunch more mini sessions with my party, ranging from text RP to white room combat training montages. I’m even getting one with my GM soon, shining a bit more spotlight on the lieutenants in Windsong’s new army. I’m kind of really enjoying this and would love to integrate something like it into future games.

(Also, it’s been cute watching the Harrow/Windsong dynamic evolve from “awkward rejection and delay tactics” to “reciprocal pining” to “super flirtatious best friends” over these inter-session shorts. The first RP ended with Windsong scurrying away to lick her wounds, and the latest one ended with her walking Harrow home. Best ship.)

[myrastuff]

Our Dawn caste, Tepet Sonorous Windsong, is going through an angsty phase (AKA, like, the entire game) and just cut her hair off super short (her left arm has also been cut super short. That was less intentional.) So, redesign!

(The arm thing will be resolved pretty shortly with a ROBOT ARM! Yeaah artifact crafting.)

[wingedashley]

Session Recap: Act 2, Session 2

So. Two days ago, @winterwombat ran a wonderful Ex3 session for my Solar circle (including @myrastuff​‘s Captain Juliet Harrow). This was maybe my favorite session yet, and definitely ranks in my top 10 roleplaying experiences in general.

So here’s a quick recap of the highlights from the perspective of my character, Tepet Sonorous Windsong:

Prelude:

Windsong has had a tragic crush on Harrow for a handful of sessions now, ever since Harrow effectively offered her own hand in marriage to the fae queen Eyasha in a gambit to help disarm a Behemoth.

The campaign’s first act ended soon after, giving all the characters a month of downtime before the second act kicked into gear. Windsong spent her vacation brooding and doing her best to distance herself and redefine her relationship with her captain as employer/employee rather than friends. She avoided her Circle as much as she could, and always looked for the first excuse to leave the room and work elsewhere when Harrow entered the picture.

Session:

Soon after the session began, Harrow cornered Windsong by asking for her help in a (frankly adorable) crafting scene where they worked together to smelt a Behemoth scale. After they were done, she confronted Windsong about her avoidant behaviour, and asked if she was okay. Things were going okay to a point, after which a couple of chained misunderstandings had them both talking past each other. This culminated in Harrow effectively friendzoning Windsong before she could confess her feelings, leading to Windsong storming out of the room and out of the scene.

Half a session later, the party were navigating their ship through an underground cavern looking for a macguffin, when they were ambushed by the Wyld Hunt, lead by the Wood Aspect Joyous Thorn. The party had a somewhat positive relationship with her prior, leading her to loosen the leash on us in our last act. Apparently that slack only counted for about a month, and negotiating our way out of this fight proved impossible. The fight was a lot of fun, with Sil (Night) and Feng (Twilight) maneuvering the Hunt’s Fire Aspect frontline fighter into a decisive trap, Nika (Eclipse) and Harrow (Eclipse) defending the ship from the long range DBs peppering it from afar, and Windsong (Dawn) doing her pacifistic best to defend everyone else with her Crane Style martial arts.

Did I mention that it was hard? It was really hard. Windsong had gotten through the entire first act without taking a single scratch, and on the very first turn she was gutted for almost all of her health levels by the Fire Aspect. Not only did she have to dodge firey attacks from her own flaming wound for the rest of the battle, but it really set the tone for how gritty the fight would be. I genuinely wasn’t sure if we had a chance of surviving, let alone winning, and wondered if Winter expected us to lose. On the flipside, Windsong got to pull a Zuko! She leapt in the way of a lightning strike (that was hurled at Harrow) to parry it, before absorbing and redirecting the lightning right back at the sorceror who cast it.

Eventually Sil and Feng managed to land the killing blow on the Fire Aspect, which let him reflexively trigger a death charm to explode, taking a chunk of the ship, hurting everyone in the party and nearly incapacitating a wounded Windsong outright (thank the UC for Seven Shadow Evasion).

Then things got desperate.

Joyous Thorn used the distraction to hurl a whip of vines onto the ship and grab Harrow, yanking her overboard into the water where she was standing. JT could walk on water (by spawning lily pads underneath her feet), Harrow could not. It was a one sided fight. Windsong (who can also walk on water) leapt off the ship to land besides the two of them. More DBs were heading to the ship, one of the Immaculate Masters was dead… Windsong pleaded with JT to stop the fighting. She knew that JT was a good person, someone who thought of the party as good people too. It didn’t work. Thorn lifted Harrow out of the water on a frame of vines and lunged towards her. Windsong grit her teeth and surged between them to deflect the strike…

… And failed.

Windsong was bloody, singed, had lost almost all of her essence and even drained her willpower. She was on her last legs, and Joyous Thorn easily bypassed her defence. She struck Harrow for lethal, incapacitating her completely and pouring poison into her arteries; Essence Venom Strike. Harrow screamed, veins burning black as night, before dropping unconscious into the water and sinking. That she hadn’t died outright was GM mercy, that she’d be dead in a few minutes a certainty. Without immediate treatment, it would eat her from the inside-out so thoroughly it wouldn’t even leave a soul.

And then Windsong struck back.

Windsong had already spent her action that round, but used Crane Form to generate a reflexive counterattack. She had exactly 7 motes of essence and 1 point of willpower left… the exact cost for Wisdom of the Celestial Crane. In a moment of grief and determination, surrounded by fire and fury, Windsong bypassed the material defences of Thorn entirely to strike at her soul. The decisive strike pulled a damage pool from both their initiative pools, a full 37 dice of damage. It totalled Joyous Thorn’s health pool twice over. But the Wisdom of the Celestial Crane can never hurt, never harm. It incapacitated Thorn peacefully, and with that incapacitation triggered its final effect: it could take any one appropriately-stunted Intimacy in its target and strengthen it to Defining. Windsong reached out, reached in… and fanned Thorn’s spark of mercy into a bonfire. In a blaze of anima, the moment had passed. Thorn was lying faceup in the perfectly still water, eyes staring wide at the cavern ceiling. Windsong kneeled by her side for a moment, before listing to the side and crashing through the water’s surface, completely drained, a mortal once more. She turned her focus from Thorn to dive and rescue Harrow. The rest of the Wyld Hunt landed on the ship, and Thorn ended the fight in a single word: “Enough.” The Hunt left, the rest of the circle fished us out of the water, and some immediate supernal Medicine on the behalf of Feng sufficed to just about save Harrow. After being treated for her own injuries, Windsong fell asleep by her captain’s bedside. Aftermath: Myra and I both knew there was gonna be one hell of an emotional scene after our characters woke up. Rather than postpone it to an extended spotlight-hogging realtime one at the start of our next session, we negotiated with Winter to do an epilogue together via google docs. We finished it yesterday. It was long and sad and sweet and wonderful. 12 pages of the two of them talking about the nightmares of their pasts (in Windsong’s case, some from a very immediate past) and their hopes for the future. It culminated in Windsong finally confessing outright to Harrow. She got rejected, but Harrow reassured her that she had no feelings for her fae queen, and told her to definitely ask again a year later. This pretty much made Windsong’s entire month.