More Pretendy Fun Time.
The Seventh City: Part the First
In some capacity, we had all gotten lost. One guy was walking through an outpost of Hell. Something else had been physically misplaced and wound up somewhere completely different. My character was dancing (eventually we decided he was doing the Time Warp and jumped a little too far to the left.) Regardless, in the end this left us all in one place: an eerie infirmary of sorts run by a weirdly happy blonde woman who proceeded to welcome us to Kaddath, one of the Seven Cities.
So there we were-a pathologically cheerful and violent hunter, a Japanese pro wrestler of sorts, a cowardly, bisexual thief, a mind-blowingly beautiful dancer and a priest of The Church of Hot Addiction. After some preliminary questioning we found that we had ended up in a strange, tiny land run by three factions formed by people who had wound up there after getting lost. We were in a safe zone of sorts, surrounded on all sides by cities controlled by the factions:
Aut Crecis Morda (ACM or Morda for short, made up of equal parts inbred weirdoes and horribly diseased factory workers)
Surcia (creepy nature-worshippers who mostly lived in the scary forest to the far south)
and Delganome (essentially a cross between the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984.)
All the factions were constantly squabbling over local territory, a slightly futile endeavor since all controllable territory belonged to the respective faction-controlled cities, and the military forces of said cities were so equally matched that in the end it pretty much added up to a deadlock.
It was slow going at first. We formed into a loose band of brothers-in-lostness and began making our way around the Seven Cities, trying to find out how to get back to our homes and summarily failing. We ransacked crypts. We browsed the library in a Morda town bordered by a strange lake that seemed to make the town residents really stupid. We talked with everyone we could find from the rulers of nearly all the cities to a freaky Surcian dude named Mandrake with way too much hair to a crazy ancient Egyptian girl. The turning point came, though, when we decided to follow some Mordan “footsoldiers” back to whence they came.
In the Seven Cities, if you stayed out at night you would die. Every night the armies of the different factions would clash just about everywhere-highly trained werewolves from Surcia, freaky humans with 360-degree vision from Delganome, and horrible little scaly creatures simply called “scavengers” from Morda. One morning we ended up tracking a group of the latter back to the town whence they had come only to discover them tormenting a guy in the final stages of the factory disease-his skin was completely black and beginning to flake off, exposing his musculature.
We drove off the scavengers and managed to heal the guy, who introduced himself as Nesmet and said that he had contacted the disease from trying to get underneath one of the city’s main factories. Rumor had it that under said factory was a way out of the Seven Cities, so we wasted no time in heading down there with him. What followed was a long trek through something that can only be described as something like a combination of jail, genetic laboratory, barracks and Japanese horror movie.
After making our way past the imprisoned humanoid creature with hands growing directly out of her shoulders, wasting a great deal of time in a room with an enchanted mirror that took us to a mirror version of the same room, finding cocaine and seemingly empty notebooks in a dresser drawer and fighting off waves of guards grown in tanks, we ended up at the end of a long hallway with a strained-looking door at one end. Not quite sure what to do, we opened it-draining the entire contents of the nearby stupid-making lake into the barracklabrajailhorror compound.
For the story of the drained lake, the talking blob and the extremely silly rite of passage into a carnivorous forest, stay tuned for Part the Second.
In some capacity, we had all gotten lost. One guy was walking through an outpost of Hell. Something else had been physically misplaced and wound up somewhere completely different. My character was dancing (eventually we decided he was doing the Time Warp and jumped a little too far to the left.) Regardless, in the end this left us all in one place: an eerie infirmary of sorts run by a weirdly happy blonde woman who proceeded to welcome us to Kaddath, one of the Seven Cities.
So there we were-a pathologically cheerful and violent hunter, a Japanese pro wrestler of sorts, a cowardly, bisexual thief, a mind-blowingly beautiful dancer and a priest of The Church of Hot Addiction. After some preliminary questioning we found that we had ended up in a strange, tiny land run by three factions formed by people who had wound up there after getting lost. We were in a safe zone of sorts, surrounded on all sides by cities controlled by the factions:
Aut Crecis Morda (ACM or Morda for short, made up of equal parts inbred weirdoes and horribly diseased factory workers)
Surcia (creepy nature-worshippers who mostly lived in the scary forest to the far south)
and Delganome (essentially a cross between the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984.)
All the factions were constantly squabbling over local territory, a slightly futile endeavor since all controllable territory belonged to the respective faction-controlled cities, and the military forces of said cities were so equally matched that in the end it pretty much added up to a deadlock.
It was slow going at first. We formed into a loose band of brothers-in-lostness and began making our way around the Seven Cities, trying to find out how to get back to our homes and summarily failing. We ransacked crypts. We browsed the library in a Morda town bordered by a strange lake that seemed to make the town residents really stupid. We talked with everyone we could find from the rulers of nearly all the cities to a freaky Surcian dude named Mandrake with way too much hair to a crazy ancient Egyptian girl. The turning point came, though, when we decided to follow some Mordan “footsoldiers” back to whence they came.
In the Seven Cities, if you stayed out at night you would die. Every night the armies of the different factions would clash just about everywhere-highly trained werewolves from Surcia, freaky humans with 360-degree vision from Delganome, and horrible little scaly creatures simply called “scavengers” from Morda. One morning we ended up tracking a group of the latter back to the town whence they had come only to discover them tormenting a guy in the final stages of the factory disease-his skin was completely black and beginning to flake off, exposing his musculature.
We drove off the scavengers and managed to heal the guy, who introduced himself as Nesmet and said that he had contacted the disease from trying to get underneath one of the city’s main factories. Rumor had it that under said factory was a way out of the Seven Cities, so we wasted no time in heading down there with him. What followed was a long trek through something that can only be described as something like a combination of jail, genetic laboratory, barracks and Japanese horror movie.
After making our way past the imprisoned humanoid creature with hands growing directly out of her shoulders, wasting a great deal of time in a room with an enchanted mirror that took us to a mirror version of the same room, finding cocaine and seemingly empty notebooks in a dresser drawer and fighting off waves of guards grown in tanks, we ended up at the end of a long hallway with a strained-looking door at one end. Not quite sure what to do, we opened it-draining the entire contents of the nearby stupid-making lake into the barracklabrajailhorror compound.
For the story of the drained lake, the talking blob and the extremely silly rite of passage into a carnivorous forest, stay tuned for Part the Second.