| Dragon milking is a dangerous and demanding procedure that should only be done by dragon handlers with extensive experience, as they are not traditionally kept creatures. The first step is to slowly approach the dragon and ensure that it is calm and at ease. Once the dragon has been subdued, the milker must grasp its horns with care and place a sufficiently large pail beneath its chin. To stimulate milk production, the milker must then lightly squeeze the dragon's neck, running their hands over it for a time. The neck of a dragon is lined with a series of oil secreting glands beneath their scales that release a greasy, foggy, amber liquid, which will run down the creature’s neck, dripping off of the scaled point of its chin. Care must be taken not to irritate the dragon during the milking process, as they are notoriously unpredictable and extremely dangerous. In the wild, this liquid is constantly secreted by the dragons as a protective mechanism for their thin, long, and thermally vulnerable necks. However, when a mother dragon lays a clutch of eggs, her body will begin to fill this otherwise plain, fatty liquid with nutritionally dense nutrients from her body, causing it to become a thick, off-white ‘milk’, with which she can feed her young during times of poor hunting. The secretion collected in the pail can be utilized for various purposes, such as producing cheese or potions. It is exceptionally nutritious and sweet, and its consumption carries very powerful benefits. There are very few farmers across the world who attempt this dangerous practice, creating an incredible spectrum of prices for even small amounts of the substance, as well as giving rise to a large counterfeit and black market. |
~ Dragons and their milk, An unusual reptile
| ~ [???] ~ |
| Human, Female, Monk |
| Location: The Spirit World |
Everyone is gone.
She wanders down the street, hobbling through the empty fog that has quenched the fires and the smoke, immediately shifting the tone of the city from a hellish warscape to that of a sunken place, a place that has been swallowed by the waters of the world, drowning all of the cries, screams, and terror that had been felt only moments before.
A red cord, strung from the sky above that she can no longer see, pierces through her chest like a great serpent that then winds off, vanishing into the mists of the city.
The woman holds her bad arm, limping as she walks onward.
— The string pulls taut, despite its intangibility and her inability to touch it and her body stops, a weight pulling back on it.
The monk looks back behind herself, staring at the silhouette that walks out of the fog, looking around himself in confusion. The string presses through his chest too. He’s an older man, a geo-mancer.
That man died during the assault on Isaiah’s tower. He was thrown off floor six and fell to his death.
Behind him, in the fog, walk other silhouettes. String, one single thing, connects all of them together and to her. She looks at her old team, the destruction team, with whom she went to the tower in order to destroy it. All of them had died that day. The shieldswain, who lost his head, the necromancer, who fell from the boss arena, the priest, who died in the explosion on the staircase, all of them stand there, looking around and then at her.
“Hey,” says the geo-mancer, lifting a hand.
She looks at them. This is clearly witchcraft. “You’re all dead,” she simply says, shaking her head. “Stay that way.” The monk turns back forward, limping onward towards the only light that shines true through the fog, off on the horizon as a single star in the mist.
The light of the tower of Isaiah.
| ~ [Red] ~ |
| Uthra, Female, Worker {7} |
| Location: The Spirit World |
“It’s me!” says the man, pulling on the string that connects them together.
“Fuck off!” yells Red, looking back over her shoulder at the man. “Maroon and Emerald are both dead.” She points at the two souls. “I don’t know what you are, but you’re not them.” The uthra looks around herself, trying to figure out what happened. She turns her head, seeing only one single thing of note in the distance that differentiates itself from the foggy city.
There, off on the horizon, shines a light as if it were the only star in the sky.
The tower.
Red flies off towards it.
Crystals clack together, the dungeon-core made out of emerald gemstones taking on various geometric shapes as she flies after her. “I dunno, Ruby, I feel pretty alive, you know? Haha!” says the entity, a woman’s voice coming out of nowhere coherent. The hundreds of emeralds were shifting and churning like a flock of birds in flight.
A person appears in front of her, cutting off her path and blocking her. The man holds his hands out, stopping her in mid-flight and grabs her shoulders. “Red. It’s really me,” he says.
Red looks at him, feeling the palm pressing against her chest, above her heart, that strikes against the hand, as if reaching out to touch it.
| ~ [Tulsi] ~ |
| Human, Female, Classless (Child) |
| Location: The Spirit World |
Tulsi looks around herself, shaking as she holds her body, drenched from the rain. A string pushes through her, cutting into her body, but she can’t touch it. It’s just… a presence of sorts, stuck against her as if it were a ray of morning sunlight.
Not sure what to do, she follows along, calling out for her sister. But nobody responds.
The girl sniffles, rubbing her wet eyes, before she walks through the foggy city, not sure where it is that she’s going.
Should she go back home?
Jizalia can find her there if she goes back.
But what about the monsters? It’s not safe. Where is everybody?
“Hellooo?” calls the girl, looking around herself.
No response.
Her words vanish into the fog, as if swallowed whole by it.
She’s all alone.
“…I want to go home…” sniffles Tulsi, rubbing her face.
“Tell me about it,” says a woman’s voice. Tulsi stiffens up, turning to look at the stranger. She’s floating in the air a few feet off the ground. Her long, blond hair is matted in the wetness of the fog and drapes down from beneath her pointed, floppy, wide-brimmed hat.
She looks down at herself and then at the woman, who also has a red string connected to her.
The two of them look down, staring at the strand that ties them together.
“Do I know you?” asks the stranger, raising an eyebrow.
Tulsi sniffles, shaking her head. “I’m looking for my sister.”
The woman sighs, rolling her eyes. “Well, you got the wrong person,” she says, sighing and then floating away into the fog.
“Wait!” calls Tulsi.
“Get a job!” yells the woman over her shoulder.
Tulsi stands there by herself, not sure what that’s supposed to mean.
A job?
What kind of job is she supposed to be able to do? What a mean woman. The girl shakes her head and then looks around in the fog. “Jizalia!” she calls, trying to find her sister in the mist.
| ~ [Witch Perchta] ~ |
| ???, Female, Witch of the Blackwater |
| Location: The Spirit World |
This was her fault for asking Spilli for help.
Perchta grumbles, looking around herself and then down at the string that pierces through her chest now that she’s gotten away from that weird kid.
It’s a red string of fate.
Like the arteries of an underground river, fate runs all across the world, connecting people, places, and creatures to one another in a link that exists physically but only in the spirit-world, which is where they are now.
This is Spillaholle’s affinity — the witch of the Red string. She can interfere with the clear separations of the many realities of the divine – the underworld, the physical world, and the heavens – and break them apart, allowing pieces of these realms to drift into one another in specific locations.
The spirit-world is a tricky place.
It looks just like the real world, as it is simply a layer that lays over it like a draped fabric over a chair, but there are rules.
There are things that would prevent one from leaving the spirit-world, essentially causing death.
Eating or partaking of food, for example, will tie one to the spirit-world forever.
Getting killed by any of the creatures that reside in the fog will destroy one’s essence. They have yet to arrive, as the shift is fresh, but they’ll wander here from the far reaches of the other plane soon enough, now that there are fresh souls to smell. Creatures, monsters that lie even out of her own control.
Falling for the tricks and traps of the many cunning ghosts who take the forms of those who would cause weakness in the hearts of a person, so that they can keep them here long enough to be trapped in one of the many ways. A pact, a promise to stay will make sure that a person never leaves and the ghosts will go far out of their way to trap the living here with them.
Witch Spillaholle isn’t deadly in her own right in the same way that her magic is. But it is broadly, far more potent. Spillaholle doesn’t do the killing. She just brings people to a place where they’ll die on their own.
Perchta looks down at the string of fate that pierces even through her own chest and turns her head, following it as it snakes down a trail, down towards the distance outside of the city, where there glows a single star in the mist.
— The tower.
“I HATE YOU!” yells Perchta at the emptiness in which the light shines, hoping that the feathered freak who lives up there can hear her, even in this other domain.
Perchta turns her head, looking down at the wishing fountain at the center of the dungeon plaza. The waters of the black-fountain bubble and boil here in the spirit-world, where the essence of her curse over it is visible. Dark vapors rise up from it, staining the fog around her.
She has to get out of here before the eaters arrive.
Even if one survives them, getting lost here for too long will make it impossible to leave. The tinge of the spirit world works like an anchor on the soul.
| ~ [Red] ~ |
| Uthra, Female, Worker {7} |
| Location: The Spirit World |
Red looks at the familiar face of the person she once loved.
Sure, in that other life he had a different form, as was the case with every life of theirs prior. The two of them had served many dungeon cores together. They came and went, and in all of the cases, barring one, the two of them escaped while the core died, allowing them to live on and then serve a new core later.
Except for the instance of the emerald-core, the dungeon that had broken her before she found this new life.
“We can stay here, Red,” says the man, his words twisting around her heart, making her feel as if the very blood of her essence were coming to a slow crawl, as if the memory of a deeply nostalgic summer were placing itself at the forefront of her mind.
Life was so good back then.
She was always alright with everyone, but she never felt understood in a real, deep, true way until she met him. Maroon was everything for her.
“It’s not so bad. Everyone is here. There’s me, there’s Emerald,” he says, explaining. The dungeon core crackles and glows alight, still talking in the background, despite the fact that she is clearly ignoring her.
Emerald has always been a non-stop talker, always chattering like some chirping bird day and night.
“Look,” he says, pointing at the many strings that come from her. They run off in all directions. Each of them is connected to a soul with which she is, in some fashion, bound. “All of the others are here too; they’re just not here yet,” he explains. “Yellow, Purple, Blue, everyone.”
She looks back at him as he stares into her eyes, a hand on her cheek as he slowly leans in to claim a kiss, as might have been done in those warm, soft days of a time now prior. “…I missed you…”
Red looks at him, feeling something wet on her cheek. She lifts a hand, placing it on his face as she leans in too. “Maroon…” says Red, looking at the lost, true love of her soul through blurry eyes as their lips come close.
| (Red) has used: [Isaiah - Seasonality: {Chronal Decay}] |
“You’re fucking dead to me,” says Red, her hand glowing vividly with the magic of Isaiah that she is able to channel through herself as a high-level dungeon worker. The air rushes, the spirit twists and shakes, Maroon’s body lashing out all around itself as his arms and legs seem to go wild, stretching and warping as the soul that has been here for a time now changes and shifts, as if it had been sitting here in rot and decay for a forgotten aeon.
His limbs grow long and slender, dripping down towards the ground below them like the long, hanging roots of a tree over a cliff-side. He screams, his head dropping into his chest and his chest falling into itself.
— Red doesn’t watch whatever happens to him and instead stares off towards the star on the horizon. That old season of her life is over. She lives in a new world now. A new spring has come and with it, new radiance and joy of life.
The uthra holds a hand over her chest and flies off to get back to Isaiah.
Razmatazz
Pardon me if I'm slow on answering comments. I promise I'll get to all of them! Just going through the usual xmas stuff, so I am little underwater =)
| Dragon milking is a dangerous and demanding procedure that should only be done by dragon handlers with extensive experience, as they are not traditionally kept creatures. The first step is to slowly approach the dragon and ensure that it is calm and at ease. Once the dragon has been subdued, the milker must grasp its horns with care and place a sufficiently large pail beneath its chin. To stimulate milk production, the milker must then lightly squeeze the dragon's neck, running their hands over it for a time. The neck of a dragon is lined with a series of oil secreting glands beneath their scales that release a greasy, foggy, amber liquid, which will run down the creature’s neck, dripping off of the scaled point of its chin. Care must be taken not to irritate the dragon during the milking process, as they are notoriously unpredictable and extremely dangerous. In the wild, this liquid is constantly secreted by the dragons as a protective mechanism for their thin, long, and thermally vulnerable necks. However, when a mother dragon lays a clutch of eggs, her body will begin to fill this otherwise plain, fatty liquid with nutritionally dense nutrients from her body, causing it to become a thick, off-white ‘milk’, with which she can feed her young during times of poor hunting. The secretion collected in the pail can be utilized for various purposes, such as producing cheese or potions. It is exceptionally nutritious and sweet, and its consumption carries very powerful benefits. There are very few farmers across the world who attempt this dangerous practice, creating an incredible spectrum of prices for even small amounts of the substance, as well as giving rise to a large counterfeit and black market. |
~ Dragons and their milk, An unusual reptile
| ~ [???] ~ |
| Human, Female, Monk |
| Location: The Spirit World |
Everyone is gone.
She wanders down the street, hobbling through the empty fog that has quenched the fires and the smoke, immediately shifting the tone of the city from a hellish warscape to that of a sunken place, a place that has been swallowed by the waters of the world, drowning all of the cries, screams, and terror that had been felt only moments before.
A red cord, strung from the sky above that she can no longer see, pierces through her chest like a great serpent that then winds off, vanishing into the mists of the city.
The woman holds her bad arm, limping as she walks onward.
— The string pulls taut, despite its intangibility and her inability to touch it and her body stops, a weight pulling back on it.
The monk looks back behind herself, staring at the silhouette that walks out of the fog, looking around himself in confusion. The string presses through his chest too. He’s an older man, a geo-mancer.
That man died during the assault on Isaiah’s tower. He was thrown off floor six and fell to his death.
Behind him, in the fog, walk other silhouettes. String, one single thing, connects all of them together and to her. She looks at her old team, the destruction team, with whom she went to the tower in order to destroy it. All of them had died that day. The shieldswain, who lost his head, the necromancer, who fell from the boss arena, the priest, who died in the explosion on the staircase, all of them stand there, looking around and then at her.
“Hey,” says the geo-mancer, lifting a hand.
She looks at them. This is clearly witchcraft. “You’re all dead,” she simply says, shaking her head. “Stay that way.” The monk turns back forward, limping onward towards the only light that shines true through the fog, off on the horizon as a single star in the mist.
The light of the tower of Isaiah.
| ~ [Red] ~ |
| Uthra, Female, Worker {7} |
| Location: The Spirit World |
“It’s me!” says the man, pulling on the string that connects them together.
“Fuck off!” yells Red, looking back over her shoulder at the man. “Maroon and Emerald are both dead.” She points at the two souls. “I don’t know what you are, but you’re not them.” The uthra looks around herself, trying to figure out what happened. She turns her head, seeing only one single thing of note in the distance that differentiates itself from the foggy city.
There, off on the horizon, shines a light as if it were the only star in the sky.
The tower.
Red flies off towards it.
Crystals clack together, the dungeon-core made out of emerald gemstones taking on various geometric shapes as she flies after her. “I dunno, Ruby, I feel pretty alive, you know? Haha!” says the entity, a woman’s voice coming out of nowhere coherent. The hundreds of emeralds were shifting and churning like a flock of birds in flight.
A person appears in front of her, cutting off her path and blocking her. The man holds his hands out, stopping her in mid-flight and grabs her shoulders. “Red. It’s really me,” he says.
Red looks at him, feeling the palm pressing against her chest, above her heart, that strikes against the hand, as if reaching out to touch it.
| ~ [Tulsi] ~ |
| Human, Female, Classless (Child) |
| Location: The Spirit World |
Tulsi looks around herself, shaking as she holds her body, drenched from the rain. A string pushes through her, cutting into her body, but she can’t touch it. It’s just… a presence of sorts, stuck against her as if it were a ray of morning sunlight.
Not sure what to do, she follows along, calling out for her sister. But nobody responds.
The girl sniffles, rubbing her wet eyes, before she walks through the foggy city, not sure where it is that she’s going.
Should she go back home?
Jizalia can find her there if she goes back.
But what about the monsters? It’s not safe. Where is everybody?
“Hellooo?” calls the girl, looking around herself.
No response.
Her words vanish into the fog, as if swallowed whole by it.
She’s all alone.
“…I want to go home…” sniffles Tulsi, rubbing her face.
“Tell me about it,” says a woman’s voice. Tulsi stiffens up, turning to look at the stranger. She’s floating in the air a few feet off the ground. Her long, blond hair is matted in the wetness of the fog and drapes down from beneath her pointed, floppy, wide-brimmed hat.
She looks down at herself and then at the woman, who also has a red string connected to her.
The two of them look down, staring at the strand that ties them together.
“Do I know you?” asks the stranger, raising an eyebrow.
Tulsi sniffles, shaking her head. “I’m looking for my sister.”
The woman sighs, rolling her eyes. “Well, you got the wrong person,” she says, sighing and then floating away into the fog.
“Wait!” calls Tulsi.
“Get a job!” yells the woman over her shoulder.
Tulsi stands there by herself, not sure what that’s supposed to mean.
A job?
What kind of job is she supposed to be able to do? What a mean woman. The girl shakes her head and then looks around in the fog. “Jizalia!” she calls, trying to find her sister in the mist.
| ~ [Witch Perchta] ~ |
| ???, Female, Witch of the Blackwater |
| Location: The Spirit World |
This was her fault for asking Spilli for help.
Perchta grumbles, looking around herself and then down at the string that pierces through her chest now that she’s gotten away from that weird kid.
It’s a red string of fate.
Like the arteries of an underground river, fate runs all across the world, connecting people, places, and creatures to one another in a link that exists physically but only in the spirit-world, which is where they are now.
This is Spillaholle’s affinity — the witch of the Red string. She can interfere with the clear separations of the many realities of the divine – the underworld, the physical world, and the heavens – and break them apart, allowing pieces of these realms to drift into one another in specific locations.
The spirit-world is a tricky place.
It looks just like the real world, as it is simply a layer that lays over it like a draped fabric over a chair, but there are rules.
There are things that would prevent one from leaving the spirit-world, essentially causing death.
Eating or partaking of food, for example, will tie one to the spirit-world forever.
Getting killed by any of the creatures that reside in the fog will destroy one’s essence. They have yet to arrive, as the shift is fresh, but they’ll wander here from the far reaches of the other plane soon enough, now that there are fresh souls to smell. Creatures, monsters that lie even out of her own control.
Falling for the tricks and traps of the many cunning ghosts who take the forms of those who would cause weakness in the hearts of a person, so that they can keep them here long enough to be trapped in one of the many ways. A pact, a promise to stay will make sure that a person never leaves and the ghosts will go far out of their way to trap the living here with them.
Witch Spillaholle isn’t deadly in her own right in the same way that her magic is. But it is broadly, far more potent. Spillaholle doesn’t do the killing. She just brings people to a place where they’ll die on their own.
Perchta looks down at the string of fate that pierces even through her own chest and turns her head, following it as it snakes down a trail, down towards the distance outside of the city, where there glows a single star in the mist.
— The tower.
“I HATE YOU!” yells Perchta at the emptiness in which the light shines, hoping that the feathered freak who lives up there can hear her, even in this other domain.
Perchta turns her head, looking down at the wishing fountain at the center of the dungeon plaza. The waters of the black-fountain bubble and boil here in the spirit-world, where the essence of her curse over it is visible. Dark vapors rise up from it, staining the fog around her.
She has to get out of here before the eaters arrive.
Even if one survives them, getting lost here for too long will make it impossible to leave. The tinge of the spirit world works like an anchor on the soul.
| ~ [Red] ~ |
| Uthra, Female, Worker {7} |
| Location: The Spirit World |
Red looks at the familiar face of the person she once loved.
Sure, in that other life he had a different form, as was the case with every life of theirs prior. The two of them had served many dungeon cores together. They came and went, and in all of the cases, barring one, the two of them escaped while the core died, allowing them to live on and then serve a new core later.
Except for the instance of the emerald-core, the dungeon that had broken her before she found this new life.
“We can stay here, Red,” says the man, his words twisting around her heart, making her feel as if the very blood of her essence were coming to a slow crawl, as if the memory of a deeply nostalgic summer were placing itself at the forefront of her mind.
Life was so good back then.
She was always alright with everyone, but she never felt understood in a real, deep, true way until she met him. Maroon was everything for her.
“It’s not so bad. Everyone is here. There’s me, there’s Emerald,” he says, explaining. The dungeon core crackles and glows alight, still talking in the background, despite the fact that she is clearly ignoring her.
Emerald has always been a non-stop talker, always chattering like some chirping bird day and night.
“Look,” he says, pointing at the many strings that come from her. They run off in all directions. Each of them is connected to a soul with which she is, in some fashion, bound. “All of the others are here too; they’re just not here yet,” he explains. “Yellow, Purple, Blue, everyone.”
She looks back at him as he stares into her eyes, a hand on her cheek as he slowly leans in to claim a kiss, as might have been done in those warm, soft days of a time now prior. “…I missed you…”
Red looks at him, feeling something wet on her cheek. She lifts a hand, placing it on his face as she leans in too. “Maroon…” says Red, looking at the lost, true love of her soul through blurry eyes as their lips come close.
| (Red) has used: [Isaiah - Seasonality: {Chronal Decay}] |
“You’re fucking dead to me,” says Red, her hand glowing vividly with the magic of Isaiah that she is able to channel through herself as a high-level dungeon worker. The air rushes, the spirit twists and shakes, Maroon’s body lashing out all around itself as his arms and legs seem to go wild, stretching and warping as the soul that has been here for a time now changes and shifts, as if it had been sitting here in rot and decay for a forgotten aeon.
His limbs grow long and slender, dripping down towards the ground below them like the long, hanging roots of a tree over a cliff-side. He screams, his head dropping into his chest and his chest falling into itself.
— Red doesn’t watch whatever happens to him and instead stares off towards the star on the horizon. That old season of her life is over. She lives in a new world now. A new spring has come and with it, new radiance and joy of life.
The uthra holds a hand over her chest and flies off to get back to Isaiah.
Razmatazz
Pardon me if I'm slow on answering comments. I promise I'll get to all of them! Just going through the usual xmas stuff, so I am little underwater =)
