A new character appears!
We open today with a thief.
She called herself Vicious Whisper, and she was dressed in black. Such was her wont when she was working, swathed in it from head to toe. Black boots muffled with black cloth were on her feet, and black leather gloves covered the constantly twitching fingers of her hands. She crouched in a patch of shadow and waited, patiently.
Minutes passed. A stableboy hurried past, rushing to an assignation with a lover, and never noticed her. A snake wound its way lazily by where she squatted, flicked its tongue at her twice, and then moved on. Still she waited, until the sound of snoring became regular and drifted down gently through the open window.
A competent, stylish thief, no less! She hops into the air and manages to land on a windowsill fifteen feet up, so she’s additionally one of the chosen magic user cool people.
She makes her way silently toward the +1 dagger and goes on about how totally amazing it is, just like everyone does upon seeing it.
Here was a treasure truly worth stealing, rather than the petty caches of jewels and jade she normally had to filch. Here was a challenge, and a prize worth having.
But there’s more!
She’s amazed by this being in such a backwater town, but the same could be said of herself. What keeps her here? She evidently makes her living at this rather than farming, or else she wouldn’t be complaining about having to steal things she doesn’t care about. Does she have family connections? Is she afraid that moving to a bigger area, or just moving at all, will lead to the Wyld Hunt finding her? Is she nervous about all the other challenges she’d face besides thieving and so instead she’s sticking to what she already knows?
While from a PC standpoint, you get your powers and rush out, the given characters in Exalted usually don’t make waves immediately. A lot of them take a while to get their bearings. Most try to apply their new godly power to whatever their existing goals and lives were, and if those were petty, mortal concerns, they quickly succeed and get everything they ever wanted…and then, slowly, they start to cast about for what next.
I would guess our thief’s background is such that being an elite thief, the sort who can afford the fancy outfit and who can steal anything that crosses her territory, was an untouchable dream all in itself. Now she has it, and she’s finding what she thought was the best thing imaginable really isn’t. She’s better off, but she’s still stealing trinkets in some backwater. She no longer has to let prizes go because they’re beyond her abilities, but now she’s not challenged at all – all these new abilities, and no room to put them into practice!
Getting the dagger would likely be the thing that pushes her toward bigger things. It’s too lovely a thing for her to want to fence and she certainly shouldn’t need to when she finds chunks of jade unimpressive, but neither does she have any use for such a weapon in her business here.
Of course…this presumes a fair story, and this is not that. What’s about to follow makes sense if you assume that Holok nor Unforgiven Blossom are run by the DM.
So – our exalt, and I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that yes, she is a solar, the top tier of the top tier – slowly reaches for the dagger, in utter silence. Holok snores away like a saw. She grabs the handle.
“I would not do that if I were you,” said a woman’s voice. It was full of pity.
As we learned with Ratcatcher, the power level is basically Yushuv > mortals > exalts.
Our, and I really cannot overemphasize this, experienced solar does not do any overconfident bullshit at this point. She got what she came for, things got weird for reasons she doesn’t understand, she’s out.
she sprang for the window, clutching her prize to her chest. She never made it, Halfway there, a sudden cloak of darkness descended on her and a heavy blow caught her on the side of the head.
That was Holok. I will grant you that he’s a fate ninja, and they’re good at the whole martial arts thing, but this is the same person who you may recall got his intestines handed to him by an exhausted child.
Vicious Whisper, further earning my love by continuing to be smart, explains that this whole thing is some sort of trap. And she is pissed off that these assholes set a mousetrap on what’s a lion.
She reversed her grip on the dagger and swung it on a wide arc as the bald man charged at her. A crackling trail of fire hung in the air behind it, and he barely managed to leap over the curve of her swing, and the blade’s edge caught the trailing hem of his robe. He was barefoot and bearded, she saw in that instant, and in his eyes was an unmistakable glint of recognition.
“Dragons’ asses, Blossom, we’ve got an Anathema in here!”
(It is interesting, is it not, that it’s only when they attempt to murder her that she attacks. Another reason to like her.)
We get a fight scene where Holok and Unforgiven Blossom both attempt to bash her head in. Finally she throws the dagger to try to kill Holok, but-
Instead, he caught it. His hands clapped together on either side of the blade, stopping it a hair’s breadth from his chest. A soft halo of light shimmered into existence behind him
I know the charms didn’t exist yet, but I’m still sad that we didn’t get some bizarre parry effect worthy of a sidereal charm instead of just that he burned essence and parried. Sidereal effects are SO COOL. We don’t even get that the color is the wrong color – it’s unlikely that she’d have enough experience with exalts to really know, but she could have enough past-life memories to bridge the gap.
Holok and Unforgiven Blossom begin banter-bickering about how Holok’s taking forever because the author heard this was funny and didn’t quite grasp how to pull it off. Anyway, apparently what Holok meant to do was ask if this is a random bit of theft or if someone sicced her on them, something he doesn’t actually manage to ask because he’s busy arguing with Unforgiven Blossom about how that’s what he means to do.
Meanwhile, Vicious Whisper cannot believe she’s having to listen to this tripe and nobly attacks to save us from it.
Sobs of fury rose in her throat as she threw everything she had at him, swinging and kicking faster than the eye could see.
Also, she gets some weird descriptions that I think boil down to her being a girl.
Nothing works, because her name isn’t Yushuv, despite sidereal motepools really being more of a small puddle.
Holok, having just told her that he’s used to dealing with anathema and implied that he’s a Wyld Hunt veteran, tells her she can always surrender. I think the book thinks this is a nice offer, unaware that she has every reason to hear this as “You can always just give up and sit quietly for your execution instead.”
Anyway, shockingly she does not think this idle offer with no suggestion she won’t be murdered is a good deal, and instead, seeing she can’t take down the guy who’s repeatedly tried to break her in half, she switches targets.
With a backhanded blow, she spun Unforgiven Blossom aside. The woman’s head caught the side of the table with an audible crack, and she slumped toward the floor. Without looking back, Vicious Whisper reached for the door. If she could make it downstairs without Holok catching her, she’d be able to dodge him through the kitchens and then make her escape.
Well, what did you idiots expect?
Again, I think the book thinks Holok was being nice. But the opening of the fight involves stuff like she rolled to the left and spun out of the blanket, a mere second ahead of a thunderous blow that hammered the floor behind her. and that’s not exactly a subduing attack there. Exalted combat is brutal and by all appearances they were trying to kill her originally, especially given they thought she was a mere mortal – the fact Holok is currently parrying when she’s attacking doesn’t prove he wants to resolve their differences with talk, it could just mean she’s throwing enough blows his way that all he can do is block them but the moment she lets up he’ll go back to trying to crack her skull.
What’s strange is it would’ve been easy to portray her as the aggressor here. She’s a thief who snuck into their room. If she’d responded to them being awake with a shrug and a, “Welp, gotta kill you guys now so nobody raises an alarm, no hard feelings!” then seeing the tables turned on her would be satisfying and Holok’s offer of surrender would seem like more leniency than she deserved. It’d also have helped if Holok and Unforgiven Blossom hadn’t repeatedly wiped out groups and otherwise consistently been the overdogs in every confrontation, since that’s just making the extra sympathy I built up for those other people spill over onto her as well.
Anyway, as we all know it’s all fun and games when you’re trying to crack someone’s head but when they do it back they’re the worst people to ever live, so Holok flips out. Seriously my least favorite character trait. I would take all of Dresden’s bullshit over the idea that your group can kick other people around but when they fight back successfully it’s monstrous and deserving of bloody revenge.
Vicious Whisper runs while Holok roars threats.
She bounded off the table and ran for the kitchens. Behind her, a heavy thud told her that her pursuer had followed her course. A crash an instant later told her of the fate of the table.
This is fine, she thought as she leapt over a drunk sleeping on the floor. He can chase me but he can’t catch me. He’s too slow.
I don’t think she’s meant to sound like a kid but she does and it really doesn’t help. We’ve already got a baby exalt getting hunted by someone who’s lived for at least a millennium and is expertly trained in murdering their kind.
Ducking to avoid the hanging cheeses, she sprinted down its length leaving wisps of purple light behind her.
We’ve been getting a lot of essence notes. Either the author is finally getting into the hang of letting characters use magic or other people complained that he needed to put more bits about aura effects in because it’s kind of Exalted’s thing.
But anyway.
Now, I did say that I think Holok and Unforgiven Blossom are being run by the DM.
Her foot found a patch of fat that had not been scrubbed away, and she tumbled forward. Her head hit the wall and she lay there, crumpled, for a long instant. Behind her, Holok burst in the kitchen, his shout of “Where is she?” echoing off the walls.
And God have mercy on your soul if you screw with a DMPC.
A shrieking woman grabbed her sleeve, and instinctively she landed an open-handed punch to the woman’s face. She crumpled, blood jetting from what had been her nose
Probably the worst thing Vicious Whisper does and it stands out as something she seems to have done by accident, a far cry from the deliberate malice we’ve seen elsewhere.
Anyway, she’s still moving and she kicks in the bar holding the door, then the door itself.
She drew her anima into herself and sprinted forward into the darkness. There was no way Holok could catch her now.
The sudden, sharp pain at the back of her neck told Vicious Whisper just how wrong she was. She took another stride, then suddenly her legs ceased to obey her will
Like I said. DMPC.
So great was her speed that she flipped twice, spinning through the air like a rag doll hurled in anger.
Finally, she came to a stop, face down in the cracked soil of a furrow. She could feel the hot wet blood seeping from the back of her neck, but nothing more. Her arms and legs refused to obey her commands. She was very warm, though, she realized. She’d expected dying to hurt more.
Suddenly, Holok‘s face was beside her own. “You’d better pray she’s all right, girl, or death‘s not going to be enough to keep you from me.
Vicious Whisper assumes it’s over – but no, it isn’t, not really. You really can’t cripple a solar and expect it to stick, and I don’t think Holok has access to the level of magic that’s required for even long-term inconveniences. She’s doomed, of course, since she’s a solar with a sadistic enemy standing over her, but her attitude here is that of the mortal she was.
He asks who sent her, she says nobody.
“If you’d said that earlier, you would have earned more mercy.
You never actually got around to asking that, though. The only thing you asked was for her surrender, while telling her you were a well-practiced solar-killer.
“You’re going to sleep now, Vicious Whisper. Tell the Unconquered Sun not to be in any hurry to send your soul back to earth again, and pray that Unforgiven Blossom’s not waiting on the other side for you.
But on to another, more pleasant topic – why the hell doesn’t this sidereal have a clue how the world works?
My guess at this point is that somebody mindwhammied Holok hard. He doesn’t seem to be a very good sidereal. I think the idea was to give him an alternate secret history of everything so that when he starts blurting out stuff that isn’t Immaculate-approved, it’s a pile of garbage that’ll just lead their enemies on false paths.
Her last thought was that her killer’s hands were too gentle for the job, and then she knew nothing.
The book really wants to sell all this as Holok being a virtuous man, though.
He heads back to see if Unforgiven Blossom is okay and there’s a crowd that he only notes now, really selling my argument that he’s someone you feel bullshit to in the hopes your enemies end up eating it.
a pale, slender old woman wrapped in a woolen cloak.
“You’re well?” Holok said, dropping the body at Unforgiven Blossom’s feet.
“I am,” she said, sparing the corpse a single glance.
“She did me no real harm, and I thought that the possibility of an injury to myself might inspire you to stop playing.”
Anyway in conclusion fuck these assholes and fuck the DM for making his pets invulnerable.
Unforgiven Blossom continues a bit about how oh ho ho you sure got mad when you thought I was hurt, huh? Because I super care about the romantic subplot between these characters who are traveling together for no reason.
They finally start discussing the issue of the dagger itself. Apparently, Holok’s been pitching taking the dagger to the Isle where it’ll be safe from any exalt getting their hands on it, except, of course, the swarm of exalts living there – arrogant as sidereals may be, I’m pretty sure they do recall that the dragonblooded are still exalts, however many “but technically”s their egos add on, and exalts are completely capable of using a different exalt’s magic substance. Orichalcium is even objectively the very best one, and this is some wonder from a previous age, so if you’re going to be paying the mote surcharge for something, it’d be that.
I’ll see you get anything you want in exchange for it. A new orrery, a laboratory, jade, a country estate-anything you wish.”
She pursed her lips delicately.”“All I wish is not to go to the Isle. They’d kill me there. In your heart, you know this. The stain of my previous service is not so easily washed away.
It’s at this point, I think, it’s really dawning on the author that he has no idea why these people are wandering around. He made it happen so the dagger would leave the Prince of Shadows’ area and be ready when he wanted to drop it into the main plot again, but he’s done it with a string of “and then she just did because I say so, okay???”
We have no idea why Unforgiven Blossom took the dagger in the first place – even she can’t give an answer. Worse, we know the forces after the dagger and we know she knows them. The longer she has the dagger, the more likely the Prince of Shadows tracks her down personally and tortures her horribly until she dies, then tortures her ghost horribly, then hammers her ghost into a useful object that doubles as eternal torture, because abyssals do nothing by halves. The only way this doesn’t happen is if she runs into something too strong for them to fight off before that and they’re just killed. She’s not an essence user, so the +1 dagger of specialness is just a sharp knife for her.
This is the sort of setup that normally motivates someone to try to find a safe place to dump it as soon as possible, and maybe that’s what the author was thinking at first, but now he’s got Holok pointing out there’s a perfectly viable dumping ground. And her response is just “but I personally can’t go!”
Holok continues to point out the obvious – he can take the dagger by himself (and promises to come back, presumably to give her the stuff despite her expressing such disinterest in it, but possibly because love). If she were the exalt and he the mortal, the issue would be obvious, but as is, he really doesn’t need her help for the trip.
She smiled sadly. “I know you would try.
Lady, he’s a sid. As long as he doesn’t call a conference meeting to discuss his plan, he’ll be fine.
She finally says she’ll use her divination skill tomorrow to see what it says, despite the fact that sid sid sid sid, this is just making it more obvious that she has no meaningful abilities next to Holok.
“Tomorrow,” he said, and closed his eyes.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed, and watched him until sleep came, and years fell away from his face.
I seriously have no idea what’s up with the two of them.
Anyway, Unforgiven Blossom does do something worthy of her inclusion as a main character now. Where other characters wander around in circles, Unforgiven Blossom can be counted on to act, even if she’s not enough of a main character to get coherent goals and is still pretty much a plot device.
Point is, while he’s out she drips sleeping potion into his mouth to keep him out. That’s not so she can make her leave without being followed, either – it’s so he stays asleep while she hamstrings him to make SURE he’s not going to follow. Good job, Unforgiven Blossom!
The blood had flowed, but she was reasonably sure he would not bleed to death.
…
it was highly unlikely he would ever walk again.
That said, you do need to pay more attention to your surroundings, Unforgiven Blossom. You hung out with abyssals, you know the amount of punishment they can take.
As I’ve said, Exalted as intended has a gritty combat system that the chosen PC opt out of. I think that’s part of what makes these books entertaining – I think the author has a similar sensibility about what mortal level conflict would look like as the Exalted design team, but didn’t understand it was supposed to be contrasted with the way the world works when you’re a god-king.
So yeah, bleeding out is a huge factor in combat. If you’re a mortal and you take health levels of slashing damage, you keep hemorrhaging health levels just as one generally does when stabbed with a sword and whether you win or lose the fight, you’re probably going to die at the end of it unless you get immediate medical attention. If you’re an exalt, a bad fight means you might not feel like doing your usual victory backflips at the end – though you still could if it’s important to you.
An exalt can contemptuously turn their back on a badly injured mortal (and sometimes pay for it when the mortal uses that last gasp to put a knife through their spine). But you can never turn your back on a still-moving exalt. Anything short of death isn’t enough, and even then…
Hamstringing your gods is a good try, but it’s not going to last. Exalts heal fast – and worse, while sids in particular may be fragile as glass compared to the rest, they compensate here as everywhere with cheaty bullshit, like charms that make reality stop keeping track of their injuries. Should you be able to run without your archiles’ tendon attached? No. But you definitely shouldn’t be able to shoot haddock at people and have it function like a legitimate arrow either, and somehow reality’s cool with that. By sidereal standards, actually bothering to have legs you’re running on is already an immense concession to the pattern spiders.
Also, remember Yushuv collecting the weird, undrying blood of his murder patron?
She withdrew the dagger from the jury-rigged sheath she’d made for it and gazed at it in the morning light. Somehow, it was still wet with his blood.
Ominous! Either Holok is a creature just masquerading as a sidereal or something in the intersection of Holok and dagger made reality glitch out to produce the same effect as an injured god’s blood. Either way, that’s worrying.