[2E Exalted: The Infernals] Green Suns Dawning

[The Corinthian]

Chapter One:Exalted

Five days away, at the far end of infinity, there is a city.

It is like no city in the world, for it is not of the world. It is a city of brass and basalt and black iron, where the sun shines green and the wind is death and every shadow is as deep and dark as a scrap of the night.

It is Malfeas, the Demon City, prison to the enemies of gods and men.

The greatest enemy is the city itself: Overthrown, mutilated and laid low, Malfeas the Demon Emperor contains his fellow Yozi bound inside his inverted self. The rage and pain it feels at the wounds dealt in this binding to its pride and to its corpus have not cooled for five thousand years.

And sometimes the city... convulses.

Out of nowhere on a day with nothing to mark it as unusual, the streets and spires of Malfeas are rent by a massive quake.
The streets buckle like wild beasts, and towers burst forth from underground like bamboo.
Even the layers of folded space twist and writhe; entire neighborhoods appear out of thin air to crash and grind against one another, killing all within.
Canals and alleyways slam shut, and facades fall away like shed skins, revealing taller, grander structures underneath.
Armor and crenellations grow on the walls like fungus.
Chasms tear open to swallow heaps of rubble, and streams of molten brass flow like wax to fill the gaps.

It seems to last forever, an unending chaos of construction and devastation with no clear purpose. Then as abruptly as it began, it is over.

Read this:

Spoiler

Show

(It is still technically Thursday... but seriously, I'm sorry. I was far more busy today than I expected to be. But better late than never, let me welcome you to the game!)

You are not at the Conventicle when the above happens, but other than that you could be anywhere in Malfeas: In your luxurious apartments, with your mentor, in some kind of training, engaging in commerce, or just seeing the sights of the Demon City. Describe where you are and what you were doing when the quake hit. What is interrupted, and what form does the interruption take? How do you react?

[Astro_sol]

Tyrannus Invictis

Tyrannus kept his fists up as he dodged a spiked tentacle that stabbed into the mats beneath him. He heard an instructor shout something about his footwork, which he returned with a nod of acknowledgement while never keeping his eyes off of his monstrous opponent. Just weeks ago, he never would have guessed that he would have been living in a city full of demons, but when life gave you power, you took it, you dumb sack of meat.

The Crucible of Brass and Iron. After the ceremonies and instructions, Tyrannus had immediately sought it out. The palace was hard to miss, even in the chaotic din that was Malfeas. The Infernal knew his skill in the martial arts were lacking, at least compared to the feats he'd seen on the battlefield and in the city, and that godsdamn demigod that had been his enemy had been swatting his troops left and right with graceful sweeps and strikes. It had been like watching a dance.

Tyrannus had wanted to crush him.

Suntarankal was there when the Infernal first arrived, with the demon strolling around in his elderly form. Tyrannus could feel his eyes on him; perhaps he had heard of his Exaltation? He'd made no secret of his wish to learn the martial arts. He'd been accepted easily, and immediately set to brawl with comparatively weak demons.

He'd been fighting until he literally could fight no longer. Sleep came only when he wished it, now, and his sleep was disturbed by the dreams of his troops dieing around him, the feeling of helplessness weighing down. Then he would awake, seek healing, and fight again. He had to build up his skills.

That was what he was doing now, fighting yet another demon, when the quakes struck. The floor rippled beneath him, and he struggled to keep his footing. His opponent, held up by tentacles rather than normal appendages, had a much easier time, and moved to finish him; the instructor had not signaled the end of the match. Tyrannus leaped over the whipping spiked ropes, bringing his fist into what looked like an important bulge in the creature's upper regions. Dark ichor sprayed out, and Tyrannus instinctively dodged, having figured out the hard way that these creatures' blood had a way of burning. Blood shouldn't do that, unless he could get his too, as well.

His tattoos itched as he stumbled back from his opponent's body, still barely keeping his footing. His instructor had no trouble adjusting to the chaotic rolling of the ground, it seemed, nor did he...she...it seem perturbed by the crashing sounds that were echoing across the city. Finally, after much tossing and turning, the quakes settled down. Tyrannus wobbled his arms a bit until the shakes subsided.

"What just happened?" he asked, a hand in his messy white hair. "I haven't felt any shakes that powerful since I got here. Oh, yeah, and I won."

[Maugan Ra]

As a mortal woman, Ceres Mnemnon had always been painfully aware of her own limitations. Moving in the same circles as her Exalted family members, she'd had every possible reason to become intimitely familiar with the exact definitions of her own weakness and fallibility - no matter how hard she strove, how keen the mind she applied to the problems in front of her, at the end of the day she simply wasn't able to play on the same level as the Dragon-Blooded around her, and any attempt to do so would merely result in failure.

More than one of them had taken great delight in reinforcing that truth in her mind. They'd crushed her on the duelling grounds, outperformed her at thaumaturgy, and on more than one exceptionally humiliating occassion, outright seduced her with charm-assisted prowess that was as infuriating as it was irresistable. She'd despised them for it with a relentless and vicious pattern that was almost legendary in scope, even if she had to admit to a certain morbid gratitude over it - an easy life would have made her soft and mediocre, and to her mind that was infinitely worse than any amount of cruelty endured.

As it turned out, an awareness of your own falibility was an invaluable defense in the Demon City. After the ritual had been concluded and the Infernal Exaltation had been bonded to her soul, she'd been smuggled out of Creation by teams of dedicated cultists that all but worshipped the ground she walked on. She'd been ferried across a seemingly infinite desert by a train of strange and terrifying monsters, and greeted at the gates of an eternal city by a parade of powerful beings that all but knelt at her feet and declared her god.

It had been incredibly tempting to accept it all at face value - to throw away a lifetime's insecurities and simply accept that yes, at last, she had made it. To accept a place in this grand and strange hierarchy, and spend the rest of eternity revelling in the power her new position apparently afforded her. But the instincts of a lifetime are not so easily thrown aside... and when she had met the Ebon Dragon, her new sponsor, she was profoundly grateful that she'd kept her own vulnerability in mind.

She thought he'd been amused. It was hard to tell with something like that.

With all thoughts of invulnerable superiority once more banished from her mind, she'd been making the rounds of the Demonic social circuit, cautiously getting a feel for how things worked around here, when the quake had struck. Fortunately for her slowly developing reputation, she'd been seated at the time, and hadn't needed to do much more than set one hand on the stone floor of the elegent parlour she was visiting to maintain balance. To have been sent flying, like so many of the lesser demons around her, would have been quite unfortunate.

"That happens quite frequently, I take it?" she said in a calm voice to the propreitor, a bizare thing with far too many arms, once the tremors had subsided.

[Gareth3]

Shigeru is working in the hearthroom of the Translucent Stupa, building a large elaborate model. It's a squat, single-story tower with a roof shingled in black jade, with a jade-steel spike curving up from each corner, higher than Shigeru's head at its highest point. The walls of the Stupa are invisible to Shigeru, so he can clearly see the chaos of the quake starting in the distance and sweeping towards him. He calmly continues attaching shingles to the model, confident that the manse will perfectly defend against the quake.
The shockwave slams into the manse, shaking it like a leaf in a storm. Magitech equipment is flung around the room. Shigeru is thrown to the floor and the model shatters. After the shaking stops, he picks himself wearily off the floor and stares at the pile of wreckage.

Maybe Cecelyne would be more stable...