Got the morbs.

[polymods]

✖ VICTORIA'S SECRET

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL & THE TEMPLE
You can read all about your character's arrival in the game lore.
The ferry pulls into port in the evening, when shadows are long and gas lamps burn through a veil of mist. Dozens of other ships are docked as well, with men unloading crates and boxes from their holds. Beyond the wet wood and lapping sound of the ocean, a city looms like a charcoal smudge on a purple sky. The air is smoggy and thick, and the river that flows from the sea into the city smells foul. Walk the cobbled streets and you will find that the city is crowded and filthy, but full of merchants, pubs, and theatres. Vast wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side.

In the center of the sprawling city is a temple with towering gothic spires and huge stained glass windows depicting all manner of beings that might be gods or angels or monsters. You could look for hours and still be finding new figures plucked straight from books of myth and religion. Inside, the main chamber has a grand vaulted ceiling, and dozens of pews line the aisle up to the altar, which is oddly anticlimactic compared to the lavish surroundings: just a plain stone table with a lit oil lamp in the centre. Two hallways branch off on either side of the room: one leads to private baths and a communal kitchen, the other to monastic style chambers with thin beds. Not the most comfortable place to stay, but it’ll do in a pinch!

Alternatively you can venture into the city and find yourself some other lodging - every Traveler has been supplied with some pocket money. Just be careful that it isn’t stolen by some street urchin. Travelers can also find an era-appropriate outfit that will fit them perfectly laid in the first sleeping chamber they visit.

Notes:
1. Unless this is your character’s first island, the High Temple and anything you may have stored there is off-limits this month.

2. Please remember to mark threads appropriately with Content Warnings when necessary.

3. The city greatly resembles Victorian London, and the technology and general way of life is all of that era. Feel free to explore the city! These prompts are a jumping off point - how they affect your character and their development is up to you.

4. Most food is safe to eat, and is consumable by non-human entities. Most. Some of it’s going to be pretty gross or cooked improperly, so be careful.

5. The people in the city are normal humans unless otherwise indicated. Killing them is possible and will affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation.

6. Have fun!

---

Ⅱ. SEANCE
CW: grief, past trauma.
Perhaps you overhear talk of it at a pub, or maybe you’re handed a small card as you push your way through the crowded city streets. Maybe you just wander in by accident. However it happens, you find yourself being ushered into the parlour of one Miss Mary Price: Spiritualist.

You and several other people are instructed to sit at a round table in a very dark and musty room. The walls are covered in thick black curtains, and maybe you’re the type to suspect that there’s someone hiding behind them somewhere. Once everyone is seated, Mary Price herself enters the room. The lights are all extinguished save for a single candle.

Mary calls out to the spirits. They communicate through a series of knocks, or the movement of a Ouija board. Someone at the table is put in contact with a deceased aunt who reveals the location of a family heirloom. Someone else is able to say goodbye to a son.

Mary Price looks at you with eyes so dark they look black, and asks, “What haunts you?”

Maybe you answer honestly. Maybe you don’t answer at all, but that doesn’t matter because the spirit tapping around the room is more than happy to narc on you and tell the whole room what or who it is that you cannot forget.

You can deny it all you like, but the spirits don’t have a reason to lie. And if you try to mess up the seance, you will spend a month being hounded by an angry poltergeist.

Notes:
1. The spirit can communicate through knocks, the Ouija, actually vocalising through the medium, or via ectoplasm.

2. What haunts your character does not have to be the memory of a dead person. It can be an event - maybe they’ve never gotten over losing that science fair in grade three. It is the feeling of being haunted that is important.

3. If you choose to trash the seance, the spirit will follow you for the rest of the month. It can range from annoying to actually dangerous.

---

Ⅲ. THE RIPPER
CW: murder, gore, violence.
You’re lost at night. Maybe you were in the pub too late, or maybe you were searching for more illicit fun - weren’t there opium dens around this time? - or maybe you just weren’t keeping an eye on the time. However it happened, you’re on the streets in the dark.

It’s very foggy; you can barely see a foot in front of you. The streetlamps look like dimly burning ghosts and when the odd person passes you they are felt more than seen, just a darker shadow in a world of shifting shades.

Very suddenly you hear a scream - short, and swallowed up quickly by the fog. Still, it’s enough to get you to turn and hurry down a narrow alleyway.

Sprawled on the ground amid a lake of blood is a body. It’s immediately apparent that this person is probably beyond help - their throat has been slashed ear to ear. Your appearance was not expected, however, and you can see that you’ve startled the killer: they’re running down the alley in the opposite direction.

You have a few choices: you can chase the killer and attempt to catch them, you can try to help the victim, you can get the authorities, or you can just walk away.

What will you do?

Notes:
1. The inspiration for this prompt is Jack the Ripper but you do not have to use that case as a basis for your killer.

2. You can get as involved with this as you would like. You can have your character catch the killer in a chase, or form your very own detective squad and hunt them down that way.

3. Naturally, walking away from a potential serial killer might not be great for your Scrywatch grading!

---

Ⅳ. RESURRECTION MEN
CW: dead bodies, grave robbing.
You’re not entirely clear on how you agreed to this. Maybe it was a barroom bet gone wrong. Maybe you’re broke enough that you need money fast. Or maybe you want to help some wannabe medical students. However it happened, you’re in the cemetery.

And you’ve got a shovel.

Time to rob some graves! You’ve convinced yourself somehow that this isn’t morally reprehensible, and so you and your partner are just going to get down to business! What corpse should you unearth? You feel like a kid in a candy store!

The problem comes once you’ve unearthed the body because it seems terribly familiar. Which is… creepy. Creepier still when it starts talking.

Maybe it’s a family member, or an old friend. Maybe an ex partner. Whoever it is, they immediately start telling your fellow grave robber about some incident from your past that you just. Can’t. Let. Go. Of. And even if you whack it with a shovel it won’t stop. Bad corpse! BAD Corpse!

Which of course is exactly what you have to try and do if you want this chatty Cathy of a corpse to shut the hell up.

Notes:
1. If you do NOT let go of this past event, the corpse will follow you the rest of the night singing Henry the Eighth I am, I am.

Sometimes I can still hear his voice...

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

Comments

I

[unkindled_madness]

Sephiroth is still wearing the clothes he picked up at the mall, because changing them isn't going to help him blend in. Apparently some people don't even think he looks human.

He recognizes a few of the deities depicted in these windows, but the winged demon isn't one of them.

"...has that one done something to offend you?" he wonders.

[detectivemiracle]

"Hm?" Chloe is momentarily startled out of her reverie - she didn't realize anyone else was here. "Oh, no." She offers a sort of half-smile to Sephiroth. "No, it's just... wrong. They all get him wrong."

[unkindled_madness]

Sephiroth tilts his head, considering the image. "How so?"

He's thinking of the griffin the other Chloe embroidered on his old robe, with its strange lion's tail. Horses with only four legs. The difference between the real and the mythical.

[detectivemiracle]

"Well, for starters, Lucifer doesn't have horns or a tail," she says bluntly. Not even in his most Devilish form has he ever manifested those that she's seen. And then she shakes her head.

"But it's not even that. They just -"

She gestures at the stained glass, at the way the Devil's face is twisted into an evil rictus grin, the sense of pleasure in inflicting pain that the image depicts.

"He's not like that, at all. He let my daughter paint a unicorn on his cheek once."

[unkindled_madness]

Oh, so this is a depiction of her boyfriend?

"I'm not certain what a unicorn is, but I assume it's considered pleasant." Sephiroth shrugs, then asks, "And the wings?"

[detectivemiracle]

"Face painting is usually pleasant, yeah," she says with a faint snort. Mostly remembering how silly he looked, how he bitched and moaned about it, but held still and let Trixie do what she pleased, regardless. It had been precisely the opposite of evil and monstrous.

His next question takes her back out of her reverie of pleasant memories and she blinks in confusion at Sephiroth. "What about them?"

[unkindled_madness]

There is such a thing as war paint. And he'll have to look up unicorns later, maybe.

"You said he doesn't have the horns or tail. Does he have the wings?"

[detectivemiracle]

"He does, but they don't look like that, usually. He doesn't usually look anything like that."

Fortunately. And not because he looks scary - he does look scary when he looks like that, but that's not why she's glad he doesn't usually have that appearance. It's because the monstrous part of him is his own self-loathing made physical, and she never wants to see him so consumed by it.

"They're white and feathery - you know, angel wings." And then she realizes what she just said, and who she's talking to. "Oh, right, you don't know. Nevermind."

[unkindled_madness]

"Bird wings," Sephiroth offers instead. He knows feathers. "I suppose that would be my preference as well. But surely dragon wings command a certain respect."

A pause. "Even if your dragons are mythical."

[detectivemiracle]

Bird wings. Oh no. Chloe snorts faintly with laughter, mostly at the mental image of Lucifer's face if he ever heard someone compare him to a bird.

"Maybe it'd command respect from some people, in some circumstances," Chloe says finally, after getting herself under control. "And if that's what he wanted. But there are other ways to earn respect. You don't have to be big and scary for that."

[unkindled_madness]

Between this and the chocobos, he really doesn't understand why she seems to find birds so humorous.

"It does have its benefits," he says, as a man who is very tall and often considered scary. "However, it doesn't much encourage children painting on you."

[detectivemiracle]

Maybe Chloe is just too used to “tall and occasionally scary”, so her meter for such things is broken.

Also, birds are funny.

“To be fair, if anyone would be okay painting on Lucifer’s devil wings, it’d probably be Trixie. She’s always been much braver than me.”

That last is said a little more quietly - almost as if to herself.

[unkindled_madness]

Birds are beautiful and majestic. He's gonna have himself so many wings one day.

"...did he used to frighten you?" He's probably not reading that remark correctly.

[detectivemiracle]

Chloe looks at Sephiroth for a moment, as if considering how to answer that. Eventually, she settles on,

“Yeah.”

[unkindled_madness]

"...that's quite a change in opinion then." He isn't sure if it's strange or not. It's very far from his area of expertise.

[detectivemiracle]

Chloe shrugs, and nods. "I was already in love with him. He always told me what he was - he never lied, but he never showed me, so I never believed him. Because the Devil isn't real. That's what I thought. He's the big, evil boogeyman in my world. The source of all bad things. A monster." She gestures at the stained glass. "I never saw Lucifer like that - until I did. And then I had to figure out what it meant, that he was real, and that I was in love with him."

[unkindled_madness]

"I see." He looks somewhat perplexed, but he knows about as much about her world's religions as he does about relationships, so this is two entirely different levels of new information. Is it useful information? Unclear.

"...I suppose he's some sort of shapeshifter?" If he can have different wings or, apparently, not have them visible?

[detectivemiracle]

"Uh... something like that," Chloe says with another shrug. "He usually just looks like a normal human being."

Well, a very attractive human, but normal.

[unkindled_madness]

"I'm not certain if that's boring or not."

Of course he's sometimes wanted to look normal, but he can't imagine liking it so much as to make it his usual appearance, if he had the choice.

[detectivemiracle]

That gets another faint snort of laughter out of her. "Lucifer is many things; boring has never been one of them."

He'd be offended at the very suggestion.

[unkindled_madness]

Sephiroth is okay with offending this total stranger he never expects to meet. He'd do it to his face, too.

"He's just that fond of humans then? That he wants to look like one."

[detectivemiracle]

Chloe shakes her head. "No. I don't think so. I think he was created that way. His other appearance is - it's something he did to himself."

His punishment.

[unkindled_madness]

"...what do you mean, created?" He absolutely does not know how angels work.

[detectivemiracle]

"Oh, um. According to Lucifer, he wasn't born. His parents just... created him. And all his siblings. Don't ask me exactly what that means - I don't know and he's never bothered to elaborate. His parents are the God and Goddess of our universe, though, so I guess Lucifer and the other angels just... popped into being?"

Chloe's a little in over her head with the celestial stuff, too.

[unkindled_madness]

"I see. I suppose if your domain as a deity encompasses an entire universe, then creating a few beings from nothing is a simple matter."