Exalted: Threefold Symmetry (IC)

[GryffonDurime]

Leneine
It's a dark night: even Luna has hidden herself, though the Maidens burn just bright enough to be seen through the thick clouds and the endless leaves of the Eastern sky. You can see the minute imprints of doe tracks as they veer off deeper into the woods, but your game tonight is something larger, stranger: it's been calling to you, louder even than Darling. A voice like a woman's--no, like every woman's, and every man's, and every thing's. Every voice screams out, peeling across your dreams with all the subtlety of Malfeas himself. For their part, the Althing seemed curiously indifferent, but happy enough to send you on what they no doubt consider a wild Metody chase.

The world smells like loam fresh from the rain, and you can scent a distant discharge of ozone--lightning is coming, a storm in the East. A light swells on the horizon, and you run, weaving through and around trees to find a great circle of stones that hold a portal, like water, at their center. It's bright green, almost violently bright. It quivers at the touch.

Tiger Blossom and Glass Firefly
What strange bedfellows: the secret Solar and her supposed Terrestrial companion, an Outcaste running off into the woods to answer the call of the Wyld. The pair met on the outskirts of Matashi, the nearest village to the Bordermarches. Firefly had been spurred on by visions of a gate in the East and a general sense that she should be there: whatever spurred Tiger Blossom on, she didn't choose to share.

It's midday when the pair of you first notice the distant blaring of sickly green light. You rush forward to the circle of stones, open-mouthed at the sight of something curiously similar to the Calibration Gate, at least in the appearance of it's event horizon. A shape burbles up from the depths, emerging like a bright green shadow before falling back into the liquid depths of the portal.

Shadowed Greenery
Shadowed Greenery sits on a gnarled throne at the heart of his marsh-like demense, a general sense of ennui prevailing from the lack of tasks at hand. A figure approaches in the distance--a great shambling mass of muck and vines that the Abyssal recognizes at once as the smartest of his animations to date--admittedly, still not quite "smart" by most definitions of the word. Nonetheless, the thing makes a vague attempt at an amorphous curtsey before speaking:

"The stones you told me to watch are glowing green, master," it begins, voice slow as thickening mud, "and they look like they have water in them."

[Lochar]

Shadowed Greenery is a fairly young man, but does not look too much better than his creations. Body scarred from a horrible fire, and vines winding in and out of skin that is crisped, one could wonder if he isn't an undead animation as well. But his chest rises and falls with breath, and there is an odd intelligence in his eyes that aren't present in any undead, even the smartest ones.

Standing, skin ripples and peels a bit before resealing once more. "Good, good, good. Good." Looking to his left, Shadowed Greenery addresses the air next to him. "How long as it been, hmm? Years, I think. I think years, yes."

Pausing for a moment, head tilted as if listening, Shadowed turns back to his creation. "Good, good. Now my little one, if you would be so kind as to go back with me. We'll see what we'll see, yes?"

Standing from the tree growth throne, Shadowed picks up a heavy gnarled staff, and leans heavily against it. "Come come come now, my child, the three of us should hurry."

[Tengu_temp]

Glass Firefly stands still, her dress, scarf and long, white ponytail flowing slightly at the mild wind as she looks up in order to see the wholeness of the portal in front of her. Opening her mouth wide, she lets out an expression of absolute amazement.
"Woooh."
It looked and sounded closer to a bored yawn, actually. The girl wastes no time and starts the first from many experiments she plans to perform in order to determine the nature of the portal - she walks up to it and, without changing her expression of lazy disinterest, carefully touches the green surface with the tip of her long walking stick.

[Yuki Akuma]

The apparent Wood-aspect stares at the portal before her, head tilting slowly to one side. "...I was expecting it to be smaller, somehow..." Other than that, she doesn't move to do anything - she just watches as her Solar companion goes to poke the portal with a stick.

[GryffonDurime]

Glass and Tiger

The stick passes through the portal, which proves to be no more unyielding than normal water. Even still, the end of the submerged stick doesn't appear to be there anymore--through the translucent watery green membrane, both of you can clearly see that the stick just seems to end. If withdrawn, it comes out seemingly unscathed. If plunged in further, even more seems to disappear before returning when pulled out.

Shadowed Greenery

As you hobble along the path that leads to the outer rim of the great marsh you inhabit, you pass a few ramshackle shanties. Mortals peek out through the windows: children and old crones, mostly. Even before your arrival, the marsh has proven a haven for those alone and abandoned. They're not subjects, technically, and most are happy as clams to leave you alone in return for reciprocating the favor.

Most, not all.

A boy no taller than a shrub rushes after you, eyes narrowed into an angry glare.

"It's your fault," he says, kicking at your shin. "It's all your fault!" A horrified crone clasps her hand over her gaping mouth, rushing up to take the boy.

[Lochar]

Shadowed Greenery looks at the boy oddly, tilting his head. Looking to the left, he speaks. Do I know what he's talking about?"

Pausing for a moment, and then looking at the boy, Greenery smiles, the burned and growing skin on his face crinkling as he looks closely at the boy. "It probably is. But then again, most likely not. You know, we're not quite certain what your talking about."

Bringing his staff forward, Greenery pokes the child with it, pulling the crone's hand from his mouth. "Did the woman steal your voice? Speak."

[Tengu_temp]

"I see." Glass retrieves her stick and analyzes its end as if she was reading an interesting, but difficult scroll. Making a miniscule, almost impossible to notice nod, she steps up closer to the portal and puts her left hand in - if she feels that it's surrounded by air and not, for example, burning acid, and nothing grabs or attacks it, she pulls it out and enters the portal, face first.

[GryffonDurime]

Glass Firefly
Glass' hand enters the portal and fiends it yielding, cool, and pleasant as freshwater. As she enters--and presumably as Tiger later follows--she feels a
sudden, drastic change in Essence. It's like walking from a cold room into a warm one...or, rather, walking from a warm room into a sweltering one, because the Essence is so abundant, so plentiful, so powerful that it almost swims into sight here. She steps out of a replica of the stone circle: inside, it's all trees and canopies as far as the eye can see. Light comes from below: moss and fungus gather at the roots of the great trees, exhaling light and soft, dusty spores. There are neither roads or nor paths--if there is civilization in this strange new world, it is likely not near here.

Spoiler

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To find your way around, I'd like Perception + Survival. If you can stunt a different skill to get the effect, I'm all for that too

Shadowed Greenery
The woman claps the child, setting her hands around his shoulders strongly, maternally--but with a forced sort of motion. This isn't her child. At least, not by blood.

"Excuse him, he doesn't know what he's saying," the crone offer placatingly, sending the child into the house. "His father died in the most recent expansion of the Wastes. Not a bright man, and I wouldn't put it past him to accuse you...given...your condition. And now I'm stuck with him. Great nephew, and all. He's young. He'll learn," she says, then turns away, tarrying for a moment as if she wants to say more.

[Yuki Akuma]

Tiger watches as the Twilight simply steps into the portal, and looks down, giving a slight sigh. "...Twilights." She then follows, of course - no good just standing around here all day.

[Tengu_temp]

Glass looks around at her new surroundings, and then over her shoulder at her companion - she's glad that the dragonblooded girl followed and she won't have to go back for her, not that her expression shows that.
"An interesting place. Your aspect is Wood - can you find your way in a forest?"

[Yuki Akuma]

"I might be able to do that had my father not focused my training entirely on martial arts," the girl says, with a sigh. This is actually more-or-less true - her Wood aspect father did neglect to actually teach her any survival skills. "Hm. Hang on a moment, I'll see if I can see anything." Before the Twilight can interject, the apparent Wood-aspect leaps at a tree and begins to scale it quite effortlessly! She leaps up onto a high branch, and then promptly jumps up into its highest boughs, looking around herself. "This place feels all wrong," she says, more to herself than Glass Butterfly.

Spoiler

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Um... do I need to roll Athletics to climb the tree? Anyway, Perception+Awareness (?) to look around for stuff:

Edit: In retrospect I should have rolled them separately.

---

* post roll count doesn't match database

[Yuki Akuma]

Spoiler

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Real rolls! (1d10)[4] (1d10)[5] (1d10)[1] (1d10)[4] (1d10)[2] There has to be a better way of doing this...

Edit: ... Tiger has apparently gone blind.

[Tengu_temp]

Glass looks up, observing quietly as the other girl disappears between the branches. After several seconds she starts to take action herself - first, she analyzes the tree trunks carefully, looking for any clues on directions (maybe the moss grows only on the northern side?). Afterwards, she kneels down, picks up a bunch of the glowing moss, closes her eyes and smells it - maybe some creatures passed through and the moss caught hints of their fragnance? No matter the results, the smell helps her focus - she opens her eyes and starts to look around for footprints - someone had to go through this portal before them.

Spoiler

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Perception + Survival: (5d10)[4][2][6][1][6](19)

Not a single success? C'mon...

[Lochar]

Shadowed Greenery sighs and looks to his left again, tilting his head and listening to something only he can hear. Shaking his head, he cracks himself once with the staff. "We were going to see other things, remember? Stones? And it hurts." A pause. "Compromise then?"

Turning back to the woman, who by now has started walking after her momentary tarry, Greenery shakes his head. Vines writhing in his skin tighten for a moment as muscles bunch and Shadowed Greenery is airborn, moving over the head of the crone and landing in front of her, staff balanced in his hand, before he quickly puts it back out, balancing on it once more, his body obviously over-exerted.

"Where did the Wastes expand? I have other business, but I can at least go look at it, if it's at least partially on the way."

Behind the crone, Greenery's bogman is looking at the point where his master jumped, still looking around trying to find where he landed. Seeing him, the creature seems to move with glee as it moves to catch up with it's creator.

[GryffonDurime]

Glass and Tiger

Tiger Blossom ascends one of the nearest trees with an Exalted grace, emerging from the canopy to look out over...endless forest, with yet another canopy above. The branches and boughs of the first support the latticework roots of the second. Tiger does manage to catch sight of what may...maybe...be a small patch in the tree cover about a mile and a half to the northeast. Whatever that means.

Glass Firefly, on the other hand, scents a strange, heady perfume as she examines the moss. It's rich and sharp, curiously spicey-smelling. As she sets her handful down, she begins to notice patterns in the undulating light of the moss--a pathway leading towards the west. It fades from vision abruptly. Will she dare to chase it?

Shadowed Greenery

"It expanded into the edges of the firewell southwest of here," the crone admits before sweeping her children back into her home.

In his head, a little voice croons out in a soft voice:

That's the other way, then. You can go see your stones first if you wish, it concludes at last after a moment's pause. It's bartering. Or maybe it just wants you to be able to focus on the problem.

[Lochar]

Greenery pauses. Maybe new artifacts for creation though. He seems almost giddy. "Dead things and live things, all tangled up as one."

Grinning to himself, Shadowed Greenery absentmindedly forgets to stoop as he begins walking to the southwest, to the firewell.

"Stones, master?" The bogman tries to remind it's errant master.

"Yes, yes. Go play with your stones." Greenery's already put them out of his mind, already onto the next thing.

The bogman's great, stitched together shoulders shrug, and it turns and trundles off to the stone portal.

[Tengu_temp]

Glass Firefly looks up at the canopy, approximately where her companion should be. "Do you see anything? The lights are forming a path to the west, but it's quickly disappearing. I am going to follow it." She does not waste time, and already starts walking west while saying this and waiting for a response.

[Yuki Akuma]

The 'Wood-aspect' leaps down from the branches, landing gracefully like only the Exalted can. "...There are trees growing from the canopy. It's really weird. It's almost like we're suddenly at the Elemental Pole of Wood, except... well, there's a floor." She looks down at her feet, and then begins to follow Glass Butterfly as she begins to follow the trail.

[Tengu_temp]

"My current assumption is that we either are close to the Elemental Pole of Wood, or in a completely different land away from Creation. The latter is more probable." Glass puts the oatch of moss into her bag, for later. She continues following the path, but tries to remember the position of the portal in case she'll need to return to it.

[The_Snark]

Leneine's step quickens as the green light seeps through the trees, and before she knows it she is running, darting around trees and ducking under branches and refusing to slow for either. Maybe she's more glad to be out of Malfeas than she realized before now. The Demon City was beautiful (and still just a little strange), but she hadn't felt comfortable running down its streets, and she's used to exerting herself a little more than she'd done there. Or maybe this was seeping through from Darling; a luminata probably would enjoy this.

She reaches her destination all too soon, slows, and stops, reluctantly putting away those feelings for another time. She has a job to do, and she can't let herself get carried away. The portal puts her of a pool of vitriol; although she knows it isn't, the thought reminds her to be careful. She's going to go through the thing if at all possible... but she doesn't know if it is possible yet. Maybe there was a reason she hadn't been able to find any mention of what lay within.

Leneine aligns her thoughts in the proper manner, and channels power through the framework created. She examines the portal with Yozi eyes, ignoring its physical appearance and concentrating on the Essence flows that doubtless lie under it.

[GryffonDurime]

Leneine

Your Yozi eyes disect the portal's Essence with surprising alacrity and suddenly the patterns strike a chord of familiarity with you. You know what this is--at least, in part.

Glass and Tiger

The path slopes downward now, and then rises up into an almost vertical hillside. Glass Firefly catches glimpses of the flow of light through the moss several more times. As the pair of you crest the hill you find yourselves overlooking something huge. Something impossible. At first glimpse, it's not dissimilar to many of the insects of Creation, except in scale. It's the size of a small island, with two great round globes covered in eyes. It's head is unmistakably akin to a dragonfly's...but it's body? That is long, serpentine. And floating. Right there, in midair, just floating. Countless tiny legs--many quite pointy--dot it's body.

And about two hundred yards away, you can see two people. Or at least people-shaped outlines. Whatever the darkness may do to obscure the sight of them, it does nothing to hide the sound: they're loud, shouting, angry. Probably fighting.

Shadowed Greenery

The firewell is a distance from the village: a deep stone indent where Essence pools into liquid fire. As you round the crest that overlooks the well, you suddenly understand what the crone meant with a twinge of disappointment: just beyond the firewell, you can see the border of this newest Waste ebbing and flowing like the tide. On the other side of that vague border, color darkens and drains from the world. The Wastes are a crumbling place: bare trees and stark homes crumble slowly and nothing moves. Even still, with each ebb the Waste surges, inching closer to the firewell. If you wait a moment, it finally surges close enough to spill in: a particle of that shadow-place tips over the rocky lip and explodes in a gout of fire.

For whatever reason, the firewell seems resistant to the spread of the Wastes.

[Tengu_temp]

Glass Firefly stares at the huge insect - such a fascinating animal! She has heard of creatures in Creation reaching its size, of course, or even larger, but hearing about one and actually seeing one with your own eyes are completely different matters - and on top of that, if insects in this land can be so colossal, then it's hard to even imagine the size of other creatures! All this amazement takes place completely inside her head, though - on the outside, the only sign of it are the apples of the girl's large eyes widening slightly.
"Ah."
The angry shouting snaps Glass out of it. She starts trotting towards the humanoid figures.

[Lochar]

Greenery tilts his head, walking towards the firewell. "Pure essence, solidified as essential fire? It burns away the Waste, yes? No?"

Moving around the well, Greenery gets probably a little too close, but still has some frame of mind to not actually step into the Waste itself.

Looking around, he espies a long limb, one left behind for gaining flame from the firewell.

"Does it weaken taken from the well, one might wonder? Yes, one would." Picking up the stick, Greenery looks at it. "I wonder..."

Instead, Greenery uses the stick to poke at the forward pushing waste, seeing if he can dig underneath it without losing his stick, trying to dig a bit more of a trail into the firewell.

[GryffonDurime]

Glass Firefly

As Firefly nears, the shouting reaches a sudden, violent crescendo. One of the figures--a petite woman dressed (in the very loose sense that she had cloth covering at least her naughtiest bits) in revolting blue scales--lashed out, plunging his fist into the other figure's spine. The man, a twiggy sort dressed in thick red wool, went limp as she drew out...something. It was as big as a tarantula: a pulsing purple sac that skittered in her hand on spindly tentacles. She set it on her own neck and it hardened, burrowed, nested against her spine. Before it was all in, she turned to face Glass, mellow contempt in her demeanor:

"Can I help you, princess?"

Shadowed Greenery

As the stick digs into the soil that Greenery hopes is beneath the Wastes, it sticks fast--try as he might, he can not withdraw it. It finally gives way with one last tug. The end that had been submerged crumbles into dust and motes as it is withdrawn.

[The_Snark]

Interesting. This is Primordial work, not Incarnae. Autochthon or Gaia, perhaps? Or another? It could predate the Primordial War. The idea of finding something made by one of the Yozis prior to their imprisonment is exciting. Of course, it could just as easily have been made by something that was now a Neverborn. That could still be useful somehow, but she isn't quite sure how. Maybe...

You're not going to find out anything by sitting here and staring at it.

Darling is right, of course. In some ways, it resembles the gateways between Malfeas and Creation; this is obviously not a link to Malfeas, but it seems reasonable to assume that it's similar in function. The easiest way to find out would be to step through.

It was also one of the riskiest ways, since she has little idea what is on the other side. A rock thrown into the center produces no result, other than the disappearance of the rock. Prodding the portal with a stick tells her that it doesn't shred anything that goes through. Nobody emerges from the portal to see where the rock came from, so it probably isn't guarded from the other side.

That's as safe as she can ask, really. Leneine steps into the center of the gate.

[Tengu_temp]

"Yes. Who are you, and this man?" Instead of looking at her interlocutor's face, Glass' eyes focus on the weird sac thing.

Spoiler

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Intelligence + Occult, to identify what the hell is that thing: (7d10)[7][4][7][1][1][8][7](35)

[GryffonDurime]

Leneine

Leneine emerges on the other side of the portal, stepping gingerly from a near-replica of the other standing stones. All around her: life. Lushious, verdant, chromatic life. It's night in this jungle, and yet things only seem to be waking just now. Frog-like things stir on each trunk and great moths the size of eagles descend from the canopies. The moss glows, breathes out luminous motes of dust.

And, to Leneine's right, a great man-shaped creature of bog muck, vine, and stray branches shambles closer. It's voice sounds garbled and impotent:

"You have come through stones?"

Glass Firefly

"Sonnerie, the Curled Bell That Hungers," she says, her demeanor warming just slightly as she wipes her stained hands on the nearest branch. The man in red's blood...if it is blood...pools below her, glistening like a sickly, oil-skinned rainbow. "And I'm afraid this," she says, kicking his body, "is Foolish Lache."

Closer examination of her reveals strange qualities similar to both demon and god: her fingers end in slightly bulbed stubs and her nails are long, thick, deadly as talons. Her skin looks slightly leathery, tougher than mortal. And that thing? Whatever it was--you're still not entirely sure--it seemed to pulse with a rhythm akin to the heartbeat of the Elemental Poles of Creation.

[Yuki Akuma]

Tiger looks rather shocked as she sees the woman ripping something right out of the man's spine. Ignoring the woman - Glass Butterfly seems to be handling that well enough - she kneels down beside the man to check to see if he's still alive!

He's probably not. But you can always hope.

[The_Snark]

Leneine examines the plant-thing with both mortal and Yozi eyes for a second before answering. "Yes I have." There does not seem to be any point in denying it. Especially since the thing might be able to tell her something about the gateway—clearly, it at least knew what it did. Perhaps it could tell her something of where it had led her.

"What do you know about the stones?"

[Tengu_temp]

"I didn't mean just your names. I am Glass Firefly - you know my name now, but you still don't know anything about me beyond that. Only that I'm a princess." Not a shade of sarcasm in the girl's voice. Or any other emotion, for that matter. "I've heard shouts - why were you fighting?"