Screed, Chant, Rumors and Darks

Jeremo the Natterer has been heard muttering wrily about a Conclave of Cats summoned by the Cat Lord's agents, who have gathered near Darkwell Court to discuss the threat of the cranium rats, and what to do about The Us. The furry felines are said to be appalled at the guerrilla tactics of the psychic rodents, and are threatening to pool their mind powers in like fashion. Jeremo wasn't muttering anything about dogs; perhaps they don't really care. Either way, strange silver-tailed cats have been slipping through doorways into the houses of the Golden Lords and others, on missions unknown.

Reports coming in from Plague-Mort report an unusually high number of murders among preachers and practitioners of the darker faiths, particularly those with ties to tanar'ri. Chant is an individual, for unknown reasons, is striving to keep the burg from sliding by removing those whose beliefs may add to the pressure.

Six berks newly returned to the Cage from a jaunt in the Ether were found dead in their hotel rooms last night. Witnesses heard the berks screaming in the middle of the night like they were cheek to jowl with a torqued off tarrasque. No signs of a struggle were found, each berk was alone in a locked room warded against teleporting, and none of them showed signs of violent attack, disease or poison. None of them were staying in the same case, they were each in a different inn. The berks had no known connections to each other and were never seen together. The only clue anyone found was a scrawl on the wall of one berk's room "FEAR". It was apparently written with a quill from the nightstand next to his bed right quick before he got put in the deadbook...

A bubber that I occasionally fish out of the tank at the Prison recently told me a "great and evil secret" about the Madhouse. 'Course, with him being a bit planetouched and all, I figured it was all screed. See, he kept chattering on about some kind of 'liquid despair' that the factors of the Bleakers had concocted from the essence of a demiplane of fear or something. The berk figured they would want to spread it through the portal pipelines that bring water into Sigil, to give everybody a 'taste of their philosophy', but I doubt the dabus would allow something like that to happen. So I left the bubber to his drink and walked back to my kip. Then I saw the first one. A lone dabus hovering low to the ground, his skirts trailing after him, moving lethargically across the pavement. It might have been nothing. After all, the dabus are quite enigmatic on a good day, but that lingering suspicion persisted. I don't know about you, cutter, but I don't drink anything that doesn't come out of a bottle these days....

Something you should know about that place berk, that prime world its clueless natives call Ebberon, it's dying. No, no, don't run away yet, I'm far less crazy then I look. See I been there, I chatted it up with their "clerics" of the silver flame, I dropped from one 'ah the towers of Sharn straight into Sigil, but now I can't get back. Why not? Well besides being locked up in here like some kinda soding barmy the dragons won't let me back. Dragons y'ask, yeh of course dragons. The whole damn world is crawling wit 'em, Ebberon is a dragon! Y'see the whole soding place is a kinda cosmic contest, its a practical joke, two gods dreams y'see. Thoth and Chronepsis were having this squabble y'see, one thing led to another, and now both are thinkin they'll teach t'other the truth. See that old power Thoth, that tricky son of a guvner 'gypt power said faith makes reality, and the poor excuse for a lizard says no, no, that its the dragons that make the wheel go round. So they make this little contest y'see, they make a world together where people worship everything for no reason a'tall, and dragons love booksies an learnen more den coins. Now no one thinks of fate gods as gettin bored, but they do I say, cause eventually they got bored and called it a tie, sealed up their little world and forgot 'bout it. Meanwhile Ebberon has been goin' pure crazy it has. Stead of letting their souls go to the right and proper place they just get recycled in some half plane called Dolurrh, like a washboard takin out the stain of emotion and will, then they get recycled as brand new baby mortals right back on Ebberon. Thing is though its got nothing to do with how well a body does, just happens, no ascension, no greater good, just rinse and repeat. Slowly though their breakin through, the giant breach zones those clueless berks call "planets" (or pseudo-planes) will eventually open all the way up, and then bye bye Ebberon. Doesn't matter anyway, they're not real. But you, you're real, and ah course I'm, so you just sit an' listen while I spill the dark 'bout how I won the gift ah life back from Hades, so now I rule the planes from my grand palace here in the alternate reptile Sigil.(degenerates here into meaningless babble)

The bandits of the Great Pass were once rogue soldiers from Rigus - some of them even from the preceding town before Rigus was ever built. They seek to end their fugitive existence, so when they steal from travelers, they steal more than jink; they steal civilization itself. They steal sophistication; they steal political instinct. As their victims become progressively more barbarous, so the bandits become more subtle and urbane. Eventually they may create a complex city of their own from the leavings of those whose social nature they plunder, assuming the armies of Rigus don't slaughter them all first.

If you're going to write someone into the deadbook, might as well sodding do it "perfectly", slicing them up with real precision...

...But this is too sodding queer, I have trouble believing it myself! I was in the pub, Agony's Rest, scragging a few winks in a jink kip upstairs, all by my lonesome, when I had a dream one night about the time I ran into a Prime beastie called a bonnacon. It's a like horse, but it has a head like a bull and horns that torque inward so they're sodding useless for attacking anything. Gar, can the sodding things let go a vapour, though! I saw one let go a fart that blew down an acre of barley, burnt it all to ashes!

Well, I woke up and made to get me shoes on, and there in the middle of me sodding room is a bloody bonnacon! Solid as the spire, no sodding illusion, standing right in me way! Well, you could have knocked me over with a sideways skeg! Flay me I know how it got in me kip!

Well, bonnacons are the most cowardly beasties on the Prime, any sodding noise or movement can make them turn tail and hie away, and that's when they're sodding dangerous, cause they lose control of their bowels, let it all fly. So I was just sitting there real calm like, trying not to scare it, stirring me worms trying to think of a way to get it out of me room, when all of a sudden some berk from the bar bangs on the door to tell me to pay up or get flayed. Well, the sodding berk scares the blek out of the bonnacon, and I mean that sodding literal like, and it lets loose a blast of flaming gas that knocks me straight through the door and burns the whole bloody room to ashes! The blast blows out the room and down the hall, knocking over everyone there and lighting up the carpet, the tapestries, the walls, even the bloody ceiling! I'm lying there burnt like a piece of toast on top of the berk who knocked on the door, and everyone in the sodding case is going barmy, screaming and running around, while the flaming bonnacon is running loose in the hall way blowing out flaming blasts of stench!

Well, I got out of there right quick, but the top floor of that place has only half a roof, it smells like the inside of an otyugh's arse, and the owner wants me dead! Worst of all though, I can't sodding sleep a wink for fear of what I'll dream up next!

[if you're playing the Dead Gods adventure, don't read this cause it's a spoiler]

"Is there a way to reach Agathion, the deepest and most forbidden layer of howling Pandemonium? An upright man just returned from the Madhouse and talked for many hours about two groups of planewalkers scarpering through the caverns towards Agathion. They both claimed to know a path, and they weren't telling porkie pies.

Perhaps the Ingress knows a path. Perhaps that path is both horrendous and unthinkable, so unthinkable that even the archmage Shekelor did not imagine it, but merely stumbled upon it in his madness, and was consumed by it. Fear not, for the Ingress will take you were you want to go...but you may not arrive as you had left."

Well, y'know that tiefer Shemeska's hired t' carry 'round her mirror? Colcook? He's gone. Also the Athar say that the rilmani are ful stirred up, what with some revolutionary appearing n' all.

Y'know that asuras, Koe? Weapons trader, works with Estavan? Well, the chant is that he's been chattin' up with one of his old employers; Maybe he's trying to get back into their good graces.

Y'know the Moon District? Word has it, there've been some unusually smart rats around, over there; not cranium rats, either: these guys look just like normal rats, except they're smart as all hell. The cranium rats aren't pleased, either, as I hear. They should be, what with Parrak suddenly stopping hunting them, in favour of the "Moon" rats.

/mypw/node/ One of mine, from before.

"I heard the Athar were trying to build a god. Just to show it wasn't so hard. They're forging a big body for it and the whole process's right secret. Somewhere on the Astral Plane. Now that's all good for them, in my opinion, but how do you get the great thing out of there when you're done?"