(no subject)

[baloonworld]

So, apparently, I write TL fanfic these days.
Inspired by my interpretation of the result of Steve's idea for an apocalyptic system setting reset.



Biscuit, Breeze and Aurinyan have arrived on the far side of one of the evacuation rifts with four or five civilians. After a certain amount of very quiet argument, they've started to move.
They can't stop and rest- Biscuit might hit with the wrath of an angry god, but none of them last in a stand-up fight, so if something hits them rather than the other way round, they lose. Also, none of them can hunt or trap, and Biscuit's enthusiasm for eating odd berries* is only occasionally a good survival strategy.

It's been awful.

They've been running into dimensionally-displaced goblins, lost zombies and other minor annoyances scattered by the rifts. None of the borderlands posse has blinked at anything they've seen, but their new friends have done a lot of screaming and cowering. Healing is limited to Aurinyan's ability to photosynthesise, a couple of portions he got so he'd have something to do between fights against things with eyes and Biscuit and Breeze's very minor blessings from Life. Everyone but the mages has taken at least some scratches, and many of them are down the use of a limb; they can only move at any speed because Breeze has declared that the injured should "stop rubbing themselves on the ground like some sort of earth nerd". Everyone feels lost and exhausted and things are bad enough that stumbling across Interfector would count as a positive.

Apart from having no wilderness survival skills, invisible and/or teleporting mages make pretty good scouts, and they've managed to avoid some truly vicious encounters. Aurinyan slowly and invisibly walks back to the group and reports that there are 'Two or three people ahead. Dark robes, look like cultists. Arguing.'
'Right. I'm going to try lying. 'Riniyan, you're my demonic associate. Do look the part'

'Hail in the name of Eris Esoteric! Hail in the name of the Laughing Dancers and the Shivering Brigade.'
'I am pope Biscuit of the host of Chaos, and with me are the incredible Mr Breeze who's feet are too pure to touch the base earth!'
'Beside me stands Tom Bellows, greatest Baker to ever walk this land! He welds the transformative fire of the ovens! Praise his works!'
'Also, there stands Gavin Miller, Miller. No grain can escape his ever-ravenous grindstone, harbinger of its destruction!'
'With me also is the thing that the darkness fears.'
'Greatest of us is Felicity Nevins, pink and four years old and closer to my Goddess than I by far. Witness her erratic mood swings! Behold her unreasonable excitement at bubbles!'
'We propose to spread chaos by building an advanced civilization based on destruction of grain and other consumables! Many things shall be fed to the engines of our creation! Many shall be the fires on our hearths!'
'The society we form shall have freedom of personal expression for all, not just the strong. Change-based activities will be raised to an elaborate degree of sophistication. Nothing we touch shall remain the same, and nothing we hold shall be held for long. Join us! Build a new world.'

*and much-boasted understanding of what they describe as the "apple-baking secrets of the normal people", which no one has had the heart to explain is really very common knowledge.

Comments

[same-difference.livejournal.com]

I adore this.

There's a typo in your second sentence of the fic, not sure if the word you meant to use was 'amount'

[same-difference.livejournal.com]

Also you've inspired me to write the following as a possible cause of the apocalyptic reset:

Aurinyan sat and watched Biscuit attempt to bake something out of the seeds and plants they'd collected throughout the day largely by enthusiastically shouting at the remarkably still alive peasants. He smiled to himself at the success of his plan, but he couldn't help wondering if he'd been perhaps a little too successful.

It had been during the last spring solstice while he sat locked in his room of mirrors waiting out the day that he'd come to the conclusion; his current plans to wipe out the drow were going to take a few thousand years more than he'd hoped. Looking at himself reflected infinitely in all directions a new solution came to him.

It had taken months of reading reports, all the money he'd earned patrolling and even selling his prized notes from the Tower of Vekk, but he'd done it. The Kingdom's most incompetent patrollees gathered in one single huge patrol on the winter solstice to attend a tournament of arms held at some ancient ruins to celebrate a wedding to unify a vital treaty between two houses. The houses and the treaty were both fake of course, the wedding staged but it wasn't like patrols ever checked the credentials of their employers. Not that it mattered it was fake, the inevitable doom still triggered, and true to form the party failed.

Aurinyan took the proffered food Breeze brought him over as his stomach grumbled.
"Well at least none of the Drow could have survived." he muttered.

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

I kind of love the idea that Aurinyan has done some sort of regression analysis to plot "incompetence of patrolle" and "type of not-yet-disastrous gathering" against "size of inevitable doom" and has carefully scaled his event to get the right outcome at a price he can afford. "If I put Paladin Archer in the mix, I get another tribe of fire Orcs and a massively drawn-out honour dual. Good. If I hold it in the abandoned city, I can drop four patrollees and still get the same amount of Doom."

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

Ta! Fixed!

[xanthipe]

*loves*

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

*glees*