#they ended day one making the equivalent of a blood pact but with fire and dying

[svtskneecaps]

ngl i really hope german joins the red team sometime. i have no idea what he's like or what he's up to but 1) i want to 2) carre needs a buddy besides cellbit, because i love that guy and being surrounded by english is probably wild in maybe a bad way 3) idk just want to see what happens. maybe homie can match energy. gas mask squad, team friendship. could this be what drags him back? god only knows, but i want to

[forbidden-celestia-lore]

so what's the haunted house then

well, thank you for asking, person who was definitely not sending this ask from their work computer!

first, bit of backstory: off the tail end of some Wizard Shenanigans, we followed a rider from the Whispering way to this tiny little fishing village, which has been experiencing a bit of Bad Luck for the last few months. The mayor personally welcomed us, hiring us to figure out what the fuck is up with the local church, one of a sea god, supposedly. We (read: Thela) broke into investigated this church, found… some headless bodies, a chest that smells like fish, some freaky ass carvings, a bloody altar, slugs that posses you and make your head explode (remember this one), and a giant spell casting crab monster. Suprise! it’s a cult. We go in the next day at noon like the chumps we are and get ambushed, killing a bunch of the priest/cultists, and finding some more Loot. We tell the mayor, and he tells us that the head priest disappeared into the woods a few days ago, heading off to some mansion thing. We want our money, and we may as well finish the job, so we pack up and follow. 

Got all that? Great. 

So we’re heading out to this random house in the woods, right, and my idea is that the head priest is part of the Whispering Way, cause we found the rider we were following headless in the slug room (don’t ASK me how that works), and that he was going out with a bunch of local contacts or smth to do Secret Plotting. So we get there, actually we haven’t really even “gotten” there yet, as the map hadn’t even been drawn when my dad asks us for a perception check, which we all of course fail. Or we think we’ve failed, because all he tells us is that we see a ripple on the nearby lake, putting us all on edge. A fitting start!

So we’re at this house, and I don’t think we’ve ever entered through the front door in our lives, which means that we pick the wing closest to the path we came in on and sneak up to it. I’m pretty sure my dad was internally screaming (or laughing, depending) at this point, because when we got in (undetected I might add!) and kinda sorta relaxed, and Jafar sat on the fucking couch a SWARM OF TICKS POURED OUT OF THE FUCKING COUCH. TICKS. So Celestia screams (literally, I had her do that canonically, would have totally ruined our stealth had there been anyone around to care) and runs out of the room, ducks through the first doorway she sees and immediately starts changing into her cultist disguise, in case someone did hear her and is coming. Thela climbs into the air using her immovable rods, Obezyana and Krono (who were by the door) run back outside after setting Jafar, who is now covered in ticks, on fire. And then from outside they do it again. And maybe one more time I’m not sure, but fire was the only thing we had that would hurt those ticks, until Obezyana had the legit bright idea to use color spray, which stuns every critter in a certain area. My dad was gracious enough to let him warn Thela, so she wasn’t affected, but the ticks were STUNNED and we LEFT as quickly as we could.

We regrouped in the main entry hall, Celestia now in her Whispering Way garb, and decided to look at the second wing before going into the main hall. All that was in that wing was an old storage room, where a fight of some sort had taken place recently, and we found a box that used to have a statue in it (the statue had been stolen from a museum, and we’d had to prove it wasn’t the beast Simon who stole it, but the Whispering Way, so we Knew they were here). We also found a horse! Clearly the horse the Whispering Way agent had ridden, but they’d been there for a few days without food or water or anything. We fed it, watered it, and made our way to the main hall. 

On the map, the house was drawn as one big circle in the middle, representing the main hall, with two rectangles coming off of it at a little more than a 90* angle. It turns out that the house was constructed this way because the main support beams for the central structure were a fucking druid circle, creepy ass alter included. We actually found a secret compartment on the Cursed Altar that had a Big seed in it, which we did Not touch. At which point and actual literal Giant came through a door on the other side of the hall and asked us what we were doing. I, being the diplomat of the group, told everyone to shut up and pretended I was supposed to be there, can’t you see I’m part of your cult (which I wasn’t but I didn’t know that)? This sufficiently confused the giant, letting us march past him, except then we had to act like we knew what we were doing which meant that we went through the first door we saw, and of course it was the one with the Head Priest behind it. Thankfully he was merely a pathetic spellcaster (I say, a spellcaster), so we were able to subdue him in two rounds and render him unconscious in like, three. Except!!! Surprise!!!!! He’d been possessed by one of the slugs!!!! And his fucking head exploded into tentacles!!!! Celestia screamed and scrambled backward. Thela jumped. Obezyana took a step backward. Jafar screamed and tried to shove them back into his fucking neck.

We may have panicked a little.

Eventually (and surprisingly quickly) by doing the combat equivalent of hitting him over the head with a baseball bat and screaming we were able to kill whatever the Fuck he’d become, except!!! Another surprise!!!!! He exploded AGAIN!!!!! This time into more slugs!!!!!! Six of them!!!!!!! What fun!!!!!!! Kill me!!!!!!

Turns out arrows work really well on those bastards, which is great because it meant that Obezyana was able to shoot like three all at once while Jafar smashed another one or two, but three of them slimed away out the open window into the woods.

“OH NO YOU FUCKING DON’T” said Obezyana, leaping over the balcony railing and running off into the woods after them, the speedy bastards. 

“Let’s burn this place to the ground” said Thela thoughtfully. “Great idea but let’s loot if first” said Celestia, greedily. “NO” said literally everyone, smartly. “But MONEY” said Celestia with her singular braincell, running off down the hall and opening the first door she found.

Now TO BE FAIR, she didn’t like, fling it open. She may be careless and greedy, but she’s not stupid. Good thing too, cause behind that door was a library, half collapsed and rotted away, inhabited by a pair of bloodthirsty ghosts! Thela had wanted to leave, but once she knew there were undead there she was obligated to at least try and help them leave, for Pharasma reasons. So she stayed behind with Jafar while Celestia was like “OKAY GREAT LET’S KNOCK THIS HOUSE OUT AS FAST AS POSSIBLE I’LL JUST RUN AHEAD” and powerwalked into the next room. 

The room right next to the Ghost library was actually an empty bedroom, excepting a cradle and a mobile made of seashells hanging above it. There was no draft, but when she had to roll a perception check and it moved when Celestia opened the door. She didn’t go in. 

The room after THAT was actually more of a fancy hallway, with a desk in the middle of it, looking away from some stunning views from the floor to ceiling windows behind it. THIS time Celestia actually did good on her perception check, and she was able to notice (and identify!) the yellow powder covering the desk as a type of mold that fucking EXPLODES into a POISONOUS CLOUD when disturbed!! Because what ELSE would this house have!! NORMAL dangers??? don’t be ridiculous (still tried to open it tho)

But after deciding aGIANST that, she went to the door at the other end of the hall room, because Celestia’s completionism knows no bounds. This entire time, Thela and Jafar had been dealing with the ghosts, and I don’t remember their bit very well? I think I wasn’t paying attention (or it was literally happening concurrently with my little adventure, whoops), but the gist of it was that the ghosts were Not up for conversation and FLEW at the pair of them, and Thela slammed the door in their faces and walked quickly on over to Celestia. So when Celestia opened the door at the other end of the hall, which will now be referred to as The Bedroom Door, Thela was there too, to help her out! Which was good! For reasons to be explained!

Behind The Bedroom Door was, well, a bedroom obviously, but it was. Hm. Literally cursed? It was dark, with a large, blood stained bed, and the ornate carving of a ship on a storm tossed sea above it carved into, just, cut to pieces. Someone had carved “THE PACT HAS BEEN BROKEN” into this fuckin ruined bed in this ruined house, and I think Celestia could see… things. The shadows were moving, or wrong, or something, but it meant that she did NOT want to go in. Thela, however, could be convinced by loot, and since she has a stupid high stealth snuck into the room to try and get into the attic. 

So part of the fun of Pathfinder, or any ttrpg really, is that not only do you get to roleplay, you get to act and see what the Universe thinks of your decision. So when Thela rolled very, very high, it really added to the experiance that my dad (the DM) sighed with relief before describing the room. +31 stealth! I’ve got the second highest at +16! Sage rolled REALLY HIGH! SIGHED with RELIEF!! 

The, things, that had such a high perception, were… not, dogs. They were large, shadowy, quadrupedal, with long, long thin legs and mouths full of teeth. Glowing eyes. And when you looked at them, you could feel your mind… twisting. Thela had to roll stealth again. A little farther into the room. Then she noticed that they weren’t… they were completely visible (well. no. they never were.) but they weren’t standing in the room. She could see them as if there was nothing in the way, but they were also very clearly standing outside of the second story bedroom. She signed this to Celestia (they both know sign), succeeded her final stealth check and BOOKED IT upstairs and away from the not-dogs. (here’s a drawing I did of them, if you’d like to look)

Celestia went downstairs, while Thela went upstairs to the attic. She found a book up there! Called smth like Non Euclidean Geometry. Written in Abysmal. Fun!

She also found the smashed corpse of a Whispering Way cultist, in a crater, and realized it must have been dropped from a very high height, which didn’t make sense considering there was only open sky above her oh my god what the fuck is that. SURPRISE!! I GIANT FUCKING FLYING BIRD DRAGON REPTILE GRIFFIN BUT NOT THING!!! IT REGULARLY EATS ELEPHANTS AS LIGHT SNACKS!!! AND OBEZYANA IS OUTSIDE!!!!!

anyway I’m gonna add the next bit in a reblog because this is getting long and tumblr doesn’t let me save this as a draft so this is all on my clipboard, making me nervous.

[thephilosopheroftheboudoir]

Grim History

Nicolae Ceausescu and the Imprisonment of Communist Romania

    In all the countries of the communist satellite states of the Warsaw Pact, Romania was believed to be the most friendly nation to Western powers. Ironically, Nicolae Ceausescu ran Romania lile a maximum security prison. His nation was also the most repressive one behind the Iron Curtain. All this happened while he presented his nation as a model society calling it Communism With a Human Face. Did America and its Western Allies turn a blind eye to Romania’s human rights abuses or were they simply unaware of them? Did the Soviet Union pretend to tolerate Ceausescu’s eccentricities or did they encourage them? While these questions may never be answered, it is obvious that the life and career of Nicolae Ceausescu resulted in one of the great human tragedies of the modern era.

    At the time of World War II, the former Ottoman voivodate of Romania was faced with some difficult decisions. The Germanophile king and prime minister of the Balkan state had been given Transylvania, with its largely ethnic Hungarian population,  as a gift from the Nazis in exchange for support for the Axis cause. Later in the war, it became obvious that the Axis could not win and the fascist Romanians switched sides and lent military support to the USSR. The Western Allied powers thought of Romania as small fry and cared little which side they belonged to. Caught in a double bind between domination from the two totalitarian powers of fascism and communism, the modern state of Romania was born in blood, fire, and ambiguity.

    When the war ended in victory for the Allies, including Soviet Russia, the Romanian Communist Party, led by First Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, took command of the country, becoming one of Stalin’s puppet Eastern Bloc nations. Gheorghiu-Dej ruled Romania with force the way Stalin ruled the Soviet Union; he soon died and his loyal messenger boy Nicolae Ceausescu was tapped by the RCP’s Central Committee to step up and take his place.

    Why Ceasusescu was chosen to be Conducator of Romania remains a mystery. Most scholars believe it was because he was young, naive, and easy to manipulate. By any standard of judgment, he was an odd choice. Born into a large family of farmers with a violent, abusive alcoholic of a father, little Nicolae was an unremarkable student. He spoke with a severe stutter, had no sense of humor, and most people avoided him because of his short temper and penchant for street brawling. When he got older, he moved to Bucharest and joind the Communist Party. He went in and out of jail for participating in communist activities; it was there that he met Gheorghiu-Dej and started memorizing Karl Marx’s doctrines by rote. People say he put blind faith in Marxism, never really thinking critically about what it meant, how it applied to the real world, or what its shortcomings might be.

    Nicolae Ceausescu spent most of World War II in prison. After his release, he met his soon to be wife, Elena, said by many to be the Lady Macbeth behind Ceausescu’s throne. Elena was also an unremarkable person. Said to be pretty in her youth but not beautiful, she dropped out of high school at the age of 14 due to failing most of her classes. By the time of her death she was known for being greedy, cruel, manipulative, petty, vindictive, and mean. After Ceausescu’s ascent to power, her greatest achievement was obtaining a Ph.D in chemistry by plagiarizing her research and cheating on her exams while exasperated professors allowed this to happen for fear of being sentenced to jail for tangling with the First Lady of communist Romania. And all this without ever having finished high school or earning any other higher education degrees.

    The Romanian people hailed Ceausescu after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death. Ceausescu renounced his mentor as a brutal imitator of Stalin and proceeded to demote, fire, imprison or publicly humiliate all of his cabinet members. Ceausescu himself filled his own cabinet with sycophants, yes-men, family members, and ass-kissers interested in nothing but a chance to get ahead. Anybody who disagreed with the Conducator or gave him negative information was soon sent packing. Ceausescu won accolades from Western leaders and media by publicly expressing his support for Dubcek’s Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and denouncing the Soviet invasion of that country. Ceausescu’s warm welcome in the West soon led to an influx of finances from bankers and businessmen hoping to cash-in on the supposedly freest nation behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps they thought communism would soon fall and they would gain mountains of gold for having been there before the collapse.

    Ceausescu did not spend this money wisely. He invested heavily in steel mills and heavy industry, over-producing goods that could not be sold due to excessive production. Iron and steel products from Romania were made by low-skilled workers on cheap machinery and soon became unwanted commodities because of their poor quality. Food also became scarce. Once considered the most fertile part of Eastern Europe with its abundance of high quality fruits and vegetables, Romania became a starving nation as most produce was exported to pay off the Balkan nation’s foreign debts. Food was minutely rationed and Romanian citizens waited hours in long lines just to get meager supplies that barely kept them alive. Meanwhile, the Ceausescu’s spent millions of dollars to satisfy their lust for luxury items. For them it was a daily smorgasbord of diamonds and champagne while their people suffered from malnutrition and this in an economic system that promised equality and abundance for all.

    While the outside world celebrated the apparent freedoms of the RCP, Ceausescu was busy building up the Securitate, Romania’s secret police equivalent to the KGB. Many members of this organization were thugs recruited from the fascist Iron Guard political party. Most Romanian citizens were put in touch with a Securitate officer who they could report any suspicious activity or language to. Neighbors were encouraged to spy on neighbors and turning in another person was a good strategy for staying on the Securitate’s good side. Romanians learned to fear one another and the long term result was a nation of people who trusted no one and spoke very little. Citizens were also forced to participate in parades and festivals to satisfy Ceausescu’s love of  pageantry. Passions in these events ran high since people were scared that showing too little enthusiasm would result in a beating by Securitate forces. Harassment of scientists and intellectuals was also a routine part of the Securitate’s job. Scholars and writers who did not find a way to make their works celebrate the greatness of their leader could never get published. Any scientific papers written by researchers had to mention Elena Ceausescu as the head of the project. Failure to do so would lead to harassment, intimidation, and public humiliation. The Securitate spied on people excessively. The Romanian telephone system was the most heavily bugged in the world. There were so many wire taps in the country that Romanians often refused to answer the phone out of fear of being secretly listened to. Ironically, Ceausescu was paranoid about spies and was constantly having his premises, offices, and phones searched for evidence of espionage.

    Perhaps the most long lasting part of Ceausescu’s legacy is the architecture. Anyone who has been to Romania will know that this statement is not a compliment. In 1971, Ceausescu made state visits to China and North Korea. Overcome with a sense of awe at the orderliness of row after row of grey concrete apartment blocks, Ceausescu returned to Romania with a vision. He quickly made plans to bulldoze vast sections of Bucharest containing historic buildings and charming cottages to erect vast tracts of soulless, monolithic housing blocks that, without color or character, resembled prisons. He went on to do the same with all the farming villages throughout the country. Soon Romania was a strange contrast between majestic Carpathian mountains, peasants working the fields, and cinder-block monstrosities housing the hapless citizens. The other side of this architectural project was the construction of Ceausescu’s lavish private summer palaces all over the country, most of which he never even bothered to visit. To top it all off, he oversaw the construction of the world’s second largest building, the Casa Poporului or Peoples’ House, in central Bucharest. Its awkwardly extravagant interior is overpowered by its plain exterior, resembling a pile of oblong kleenex boxes. This multi-million dollar architectural project went on as the Romanian people struggled financially and psychologically to survive.

    By 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu had almost completely lost touch with reality. Paranoid, delusional, erratic, violent, and senile, his psychological state probably resulted from years of being pandered to by yes-men who never let any negative information reach his ears. He sincerely believed he had achieved the impossible dream of creating a communist utopia on Earth. In December 1989, anti-government riots started in Timisoara and rapidly spread across the country and into the capital Bucharest. Nicolae and Elena were whisked away in a helicopter by Securitate conspirators and imprisoned in an army barracks, forced to sleep on military cots, using a filthy public toilet, and eating the same beans and bread the military was being fed. On Christmas day of 1989, the Ceausescu’s were taken to a schoolhouse and convicted of crimes against the state in a rather simple and ridiculous kangaroo court. After losing their case, they were abruptly taken out to a wall and shot by a firing squad. The execution was filmed and broadcast on Romanian national television. The coup was carried out by a secretive group of Securitate officers; they had been planning since 1971 to overthrow Ceausescu because they thought he was straying too far from pure communism. 18 years later, Nicolae Ceausescu was done in by the men closest to him.

    After the revolution of 1989, RCP Central Committee members expressed regret for having placed Ceausescu in power. One has to image that in another time and place, Nicolae and Elena would have been nobodies, persona non grata, hacks, and non-entities shuffling through life with no other purpose than mere survival.

Behr, Edward. Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall Of the          Ceausescus. Villard Books, 1991.

[newstfionline]

Trump’s world-leader buddy is starting to regret it

By William Pesek, Politico, April 2, 2018

TOKYO--Japan’s Shinzo Abe probably embraced Donald Trump faster, and with more warmth, than any other foreign leader after the reality TV star shocked the world with his upset victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Now, he’s having buyer’s remorse.

On March 25, the Japanese prime minister lunched with Barack Obama in Tokyo, setting off warm reminiscences of their “sushi summits” in the local press. For Abe, the reunion was the political equivalent of comfort food.

The 14 months since Trump stomped into the White House have been a different kind of raw for the Japanese establishment--and increasingly unappetizing for a government that prizes strong U.S. ties above any other relationship.

Dating back to the 1980s, Trump was among America’s most vocal Japan critics. In 1989, the real estate mogul said Japan “systematically sucked the blood out of America” and called for a 20 percent tariff on all its goods. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump called for Japan to pay more for Washington’s security blanket--saying “we can’t afford to do it anymore”--and raised the specter of Tokyo developing its own nuclear weapons.

When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016, Abe’s government was as shocked as any. In fact, when Abe had visited New York 50 days earlier, then-frontrunner Clinton was his first port of call. Trump Tower, just a few blocks away, didn’t make the cut. But priorities changed rapidly. Just nine days after the billionaire trumped Clinton, Abe became the first world leader to visit Trump Tower--and for what may end up being the biggest blunder of his premiership.

That day, Abe unequivocally vouched for the “America First” president. “I am convinced Mr. Trump is a leader in whom I can have great confidence” and “a relationship of trust,” Abe told reporters. Japanologists lined up to applaud the two men’s budding bromance, believing it would protect the Japan-U.S. alliance and accord Tokyo preferential Trump treatment. As Columbia University Japan expert Gerald Curtis put it at the time, “Abe has succeeded in getting Trump to drop his campaign rhetoric about Japan and has gotten their relationship off to a good start.”

But as Trump wages an escalating trade war, threatens actual combat in North Asia and fawns over authoritarian leaders, Abe’s bet on the new American president is looking worse by the day. In a March 29 editorial, Nikkei Asian Review captured the zeitgeist here as it warned that Abe’s foreign policy is “on the rocks as U.S. sets off alone.” Here are three ways Tokyo’s bet on Trump has gone awry.

1) An escalating trade war. The first hints Abe miscalculated came when Trump, three days into his term, withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Abe joining Obama’s TPP was an epochal moment for Japan Inc., which spent decades reinforcing trade barriers. On the table at those Obama-Abe “sushi summits” was Washington’s belief that Japan’s rigid economy needed a supply-side shock. The U.S. knew, too, that any 12-nation pact meant to check China’s influence was pointless without Asia’s No. 2 economy. Abe signed on with his trusted ally--only to see Trump say “never mind.”

Since then, Trump has announced a series of tariffs--including levies of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum--that shoulder-checked the global financial system. Not only was Abe, supposedly Trump’s best pal among world leaders, caught flatfooted, but Tokyo was left off the list of exempted countries.

Team Trump also killed the 23-year-old strong-dollar policy, imperiling Abe’s reflation scheme. Since December 2012, a declining yen was the centerpiece of so-called Abenomics, boosting exports and pumping up corporate profits. Since January 1, the yen has rallied more than 6 percent, casting doubt on the outlook for Abe’s signature policy.

“Poor Abe--imagining that kowtowing to The Donald would work out,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University’s Tokyo campus. “Seldom,” he added, “has such craven sucking up been so unceremoniously brushed off like unwanted lint.”

2) Cozying up to North Korea. Abe could be excused for feeling whiplash over Trump’s pendulum approach to Pyongyang. First, Abe scrambled to adjust to Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric and assurances his generals are “totally prepared for numerous things.” Tokyo was out of the loop again as Trump suddenly agreed to meet with Kim Jong Un.

Now, the pendulum may be swinging back to confrontation with the selection of John Bolton as national security adviser. Hawkish though Abe may be, it petrifies Japan that the author of a February Wall Street Journal column titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First” now has Trump’s ear. Abe’s Japan, a key U.S. ally in striking distance, would be an obvious retaliation target for Kim.

Japan worries, too, that a President Trump anxious to prove his “Art of the Deal” chops might get played in his upcoming talks with Kim. Might he agree to a denuclearization process that’s more symbolic than substantive? Would Trump put pulling troops out of, say, Okinawa or Seoul on the table? Abe’s struggle to school his pal Trump on the existential threats facing Tokyo haven’t paid off.

3) Flirtations with China’s leader. Trump rarely encounters a strongman he doesn’t love. Vladimir Putin of Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, the list goes on. But Xi Jinping is emerging as Trump’s primary authoritarian crush.

American presidents have long treated Japan as their closest ally in Asia. What if Trump pivoted to China? As Trump told Republican donors at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on March 3: Xi “is now president for life. President for life,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great.” After months of Trump accusing China of “raping” American workers, Tokyo was floored to hear him, when face to face to Xi in Beijing last November, touting their “great chemistry.” Trump also gave Xi a pass on trade. With the TPP, Obama and Abe endeavored to create a bulwark against China’s strategic ambitions. Tokyo now worries that a transactional Trump has a Sino-U.S. grand plan in mind, one that cuts Japan out of the action.

Trump might decide the payoff from a China trade deal supersedes any hard feelings in Tokyo. Befriending Xi also could be a boon for the Trump Organization--new patents for daughter Ivanka’s fashion and spa brands, waves of financing for son-in-law Jared Kushner’s interests, a Trump Hotel Shanghai or a Trump Hainan Golf Course.

Increasingly, Japanese voters are sizing up Abe’s investment in Trump, which compares poorly with the Obama years.

Abe’s support numbers recently slipped into the 30s, putting him beneath Trump. Some of this reflects a scandal involving the sale of public land at a deep discount to a school company with ties to Abe’s wife. Yet polls show a negative Trump effect, too. “Abe is now burdened with all the liabilities of a close association with Trump and none of the purported benefits,” said professor Brad Glosserman of Tama University in Tokyo.