Shentu Wo: 3124Power, 1282Followers
Kikai Senso: 3,200 Power, 80 Followers, Next Form Progress: 12%
Lin Sun: 4585 Power, 1146 Followers
Con Lai: 3522Power, 1456 Followers
Kikai Senso: Jinko take up the ancestral home, making them no longer nomadic. The spiked tree is raised once again.
Daisuke finally returns after being away for 4 years with this whole Ryner fiasco.
Akiao went missing for about a year after moving into the new city. Turned out he never went anywhere its just really dark underground and Akiao never talks.
Shento:
Lin Sun: Eret’s home. With his own airship, and his girlfriend(s)…and he’s an asshole. But he’s finally home! and geared. He has the sword of athalia, an amplified force rapier, a tattoo of minor illusions, and some gold embroidered pistols.
Eret’s Odyssey Summary
Personal Kill Count: 87
Kill Count under Command: 438
Towns Plundered: 14
Wenches total: 24
Ships stolen: 12
Last Title: Southern Pirate Lord of Atlantis
Final Rank: Yarr harr fiddle dee fucking dee
Eret may be home, but he isn’t the cute kid anymore. He’s killed a lot of people both innocent and not. He is responsible for leading some of the most successful pirates in recent history and even though you may wish not to see it, those were real pirates. He has done things that you’d have hanged people for. His overall attitude has become very obviously affected by his time with the pirates and though in the end he still came home he’s really out of place now. Eret has been observed to have a bit of a mean streak now, having physically struck people for giving him trouble and breaking an Aetas member’s leg with a swift kick to their knee. The victim described it as the worst pain he’d ever experienced. Were it not for Shento’s cult embassy they could have been crippled for life. Eret is not evil but he’s definitely lost sight of the line that defines acceptable behavior and has not yet adapted to the fact that he doesn’t need to assert dominance to keep people in line anymore. The Aetas members besides Thandar and Kinzoku are genuinely scared of Eret right now and try to avoid him. Even Vris makes a point to shrink away into other halls when she notices him coming through, and she used to love that kid.
Sahar cured him of all his former weaknesses, but gave him new problems. He used to walk into walls while spending too long in his visions and always thought very slowly, trying to make the best decisions he could. Now he reacts almost instantly as if expecting everyone to try and stab him in the back at any moment. To be fair, that was the situation he was living in for years before he came home and while its made him strong it has also made him a little jumpy and instilled a need to keep people afraid of him for his own safety.
Velius suggests sending Eret to live with Song Yi or Milenkosi for awhile, both of them have supernatural calming effects and might help to rehabilitate Eret into a civilized leader instead of this pack alpha he’s become. Though, by the fact seven other Aetas also voted to send him to the warrior Song Yi instead of the therapeutic Milenkosi, you’re relatively sure they just want him to get his ass kicked by her. It’d probably make them happy if you had Eret spar her at one of your future training sessions, so that they can watch.
Vris gets along fine with Aetas, they do revere her a little bit as the archivist. Its just that what she wants to talk about and what they want to talk about are different things. She’s a nerd, a well respected nerd, but a nerd none the less. It doesn’t help that she’s become even more reclusive since Eret got back though, but then again all of the Aetas has been.
The Aetas militarization goes swimmingly as people prepare for war to eventually resume. Despite the fear he instills in them, Eret is a very strong commander now and knows how to build an army….as evidenced by the pirate legion that is giving Con Lai so much trouble.
Vris tells the world that she has a dream. Kinzoku still remains kind of a loner, Vris and Kinzie are very different people and even though they like each other one acts far younger and more interested in fun or funny things and the other wants to spend all day exploring the world’s mysteries through its books. Your society doesn’t have anyone anymore who can keep up with Vris…well Eret could but she’s scared of him.
Song Yi’s fights with you actually result in her teaching you and the Aetas something important: Fighting like a Lengdonian is stupid. Their fighting styles were developed fighting honorable opponents or wilderness bandits, it was never intended for combat against black mages or demons where every enemy could act radically different from each other. She’s come to realize this is why she couldn’t beat Raijin, he used his powers to their fullest and understood how to react to and counter hers. This is why Kaisa can beat half your forces on her own already, she knows how to use her powers and defensively probe to figure out her opponents and react to that information. The old lengdonian arts are just novelties now, Teijin’s methods are now more appropriate to study. If you were to seriously fight Song Yi, who has no vital organs and bleeds magma, everything you ever learned from Lengdon’s fighting styles become pretty pointless.
The Silk Trade Begins! Moar money. Guess who is very very good at managing in selling luxurious goods for profit? Eret both exploits his power to find the best sales locations for you and just plain knows how to do this kind of stuff now.
Your tournament does okay, though the cards prove to be more interesting to most people but infringes on Zaeed’s copyright. Granted he doesn’t care anyways, he’s rich as hell and the card game was him bored one night in a tavern. The issue with the actual tournament is Shento’s is bigger and better, pitting black mages to the death using his healer wife to prevent the death of some combatants and allowing people to just go full blown crazy has made his tournament a worldwide phenomenon. Its hard to compete with that, especially when you live out in the middle of nowhere.
Kaisa and Kinzoku actually become decent friends as they’re both young and a little bit reckless.
Cannons have been emplaced here and there around the city but as not to break Song Yi’s traditions they’re a bit awkward in their positioning and spacing.
And no I’m not making 6 champions for every NPC god unless I have content for those champions to do, so you talk to a bunch of people who are important to her and may some day come up but just Astrid for now gets a card. There are also uncarded demon champions too for the record.
Con Lai:
YARR HARR FIDDLE DEE DEE war continues. So far its pretty back and forth, Jin is fairly competent as a grand admiral and has taught his crew how to keep up their skills as needed. Recruiting however is a bit tricky as you guys now inhabit what was once wild lands, you live next to a tribal nation who never had much for a navy, and you are from a formerly landlocked nation. Finding able sailors to join up proves difficult but Jin does what he can to train some up.
The global anti pirate coalition continues along, establishing the convoy system to basically go in a back and forth trail from Divus to the Jade Empire, though Divus can provide very little as the most powerful of the pirate fleets (under the command of Rackham) keeps preying on them very directly. Divya Samrajya on the other hand doesn’t really participate, as they are not in the naval game anymore now that they developed airships…and eret already stole a dozen of those so they’re dealing with sky pirates instead.
The effort to build the smaller ports is still taking awhile, your empire’s population is low and its territory is vast so colonizing abroad isn’t so easy even if it is just a port across the way.
Mook #26 takes over treasury
The Sanyang takes over leading an anti pirate fleet convoy, one of the larger ones, and patrols from Adelaide to Divus back and forth.
Over the last 2 years Lo’c produces something similar to a farcall unit but not quite. It can’t transmit vocal messages like Divya’s can, just detect a vague persistent signal. It helps in the anti pirate efforts by allowing registered merchants to equip them to help with detection. Though not all merchants have them and the pirates sometimes get their hands on these, it does help a little.
Isis actually pulls through on this and her order is able to provide each of your ships with a tag that makes Lo’cs little signaler more effective. If the owner of them dies, the signal turns off, this dramatically improves pirate detection and is quickly becoming popular throughout the naval world.
In regards to researching devices to move things around, you could submit Milenkosi to Isis and Shento for analysis to see how his abilities work but then he’d be doing things other then his job while they probe him.
Also his ability to give solace doesn’t seem magical in any way somehow. He just has that sort of vibe of peace and comfort radiating from him, which means it has to be magical but you can’t actually pinpoint it as magical. It does seem that he can do it outside of the dream realm though, those who cuddle with him seem to get better after a shared nap.
Nah Shento For Real this time:
The Crimson Order begins its founding. Kaja seeks men throughout the land to join, while not quite a full blown military since Kaja trains knights, its a good start to a promising method of warfare. Meanwhile he has also begun to raise a proper military to back those knights up, though training both at the same time proves troublesome and he appoints a questionable sergeant but everyone in this jungle is questionable.
Anna is a bit grumpy that Carmilla got the position…and that Kaja is the lord general…and she’s not even the sergeant. She does as told but she’s still grumpy about it. Though one could only wonder what she might do if given the opening.
Alexandria manifests the hemomancy common to Vlad’s bloodline upon receiving the powers of high prophet. Otherwise she’s a bit young but does her job dutifully enough.
WAAAGH in 10 years.
Also the search for dragon aspects turns out to be ridiculously hard, you’ve only heard of 5 so far and yet no one seems to be able to find any hint of others. Well, Vris and her ‘where are the fire dragons?’ thing is kind of a hint of others but not really a result.
Technically, all the knights of crimson are blood paladins. They are elite warriors that fight for a god and a church, so paladins. Though he has taken on finding some healers to mix into their crowd but little success so far.
Two Years Later
The last two years were fairly quiet. Most of the action was between the various navies of the world and the Atlantean pirates. The increased control over trade routes in order to combat the Atlanteans have also forced all other pirates to join them or face unbeatable odds. So battle on the high seas is upscaling especially around the western side of the continent where all sea gods have died. Taiyo navy is still paranoid because Eli is famous for a particular thing, and Ryujin is the last sea god. They’d rather not lose the head of their pantheon.
Divya has stopped producing a navy altogether and now focuses exclusively on its airships, they are annoyed that the Pirate Lord Eret has stolen ten of them already, including a the country’s flagship. That was embarrassing. So Atlantis has a carrier now, thanks Eret.
Si Da laid low for a little while after the Ryner massacres, remobilizing forces at its leisure since everyone who shares a border with them are not particularly threatening anymore. With the exception of the pirates its been pretty quiet for the last two years. Too bad thats over.
The spirits have demanded Divya cease its aggressive expansion and destruction of the wild lands. They refused when Song Yi confronted them about it. Song’s spirits started to mobilize and become more aggressive around the wildland borders to combat the Divya colonizers. After the first few attacks Divya got mad and deployed the Sanika to just murder wild spirits with genocidal efficiency. Of course you realize, this means war.
Eret warns this is an absolutely terrible idea, the Si Da are to the north and you only have four years left until all shit breaks loose. Without Naberius though, Eret can’t actually check for sure what it is yet. However, Divya is literally invading Halea Jeongsin’s border and killing its citizens. Song might agree this is not a fight they should be having but its fight or let them just keep invading.
As an also very spiritually and nature-tuned nation, Altepetl offers to assist on the condition of formal Alliance in a pact made directly by Song Yi, since they trust she will stay true to her word. Despite her discomfort with their recent love of dark magic, the spirits apparently support the alliance and she does need the help against a nation as powerful as Divya. And so the alliance is made and Saldis marches her forces through Hale’a territories to join the eastern front. Sooo you guys have new friends? They’re just really corpsey and like ritual human sacrifice.
This is also the first time you guys have really taken that close a look at the new undead nation. While its tribal roots are still evident in most of its population, it is also clear some of them have started to move away from loincloth look. Actually it turns out Zaeed and Con Lai’s traders have been supplying them with the silk from Lin Sun’s land. Go figure. You can recognize who in their society is of higher standing then the others quite easily as they’re the one with actual clothes, though some of their tribal tendencies are still evident.
The other immediately apparent thing is that they have something akin to the avatars of Si Da, but more so incarnations of death. Resurrected beings who retained their sentience, liches really. They’ve definitely changed since they were just that one little tribe nation of no consequence, and its rather fortuitous they like you guys as they have a surprisingly large army. Not every citizen is a soldier, but every corpse can be.
They have several thousand human warriors on hand as well as several more thousand corpses. Among them are death speakers, those who have been given the power by the cult of Saldis to command the dead.
Roster Updates:
One of those Altepetl Lich things we mentioned . Nitis is the warchief of the nation, perhaps an outdated name for a rank but they still have it. Its basically warlord, or grand marshal. Nitis is the main mortal (well..not god) leader of the Altepetl military, which might be more accurate to call a horde.
Despite his ominous appearance, he still has a love of the land and is happy to lend his aid to stopping Divya’s destruction of the forests. He’s not actually all that scary to talk to either, his body just looks…well like a lich.
Dyani is one of the major champions of Saldis, having come into power through aggressive use of force against her former chief. Instead of becoming the new chief of her tribe after defeating him, she was taken into the cult of saldis to become one of its champions. She is a competent commander with a strong understanding of her powers and the powers of the bones around her, as well as a vicious fighter in her own right.
She is also a fangirl for Song Yi, who lived the same life as her almost but achieved far greater heights.
Helaku is one of the old style heroes of the nation, he celebrates the new death culture by killing his enemies so that they might join the ranks.He has little to do with the death cults and leads the actually living warriors for the most part. He may well be the most fearsome mortal warrior within their nation, and could give even warriors like Ryner a challenge.
Unlike the death speakers, Helaku had only his spiritual weapon which healed him every time it tasted the blood of his foes. Song Yi gave him a spiritual blessing as well to help with the war effort, now he’s physically super powered with the ability to do the moonlight walk Izumi could do.
Before his death, Poseidon left a menagerie of sea monsters around the port of Adelaide to help protect it from pirates at her request, and in exchange for some trading stuff. With Poseidon’s death most of these monsters have nowhere to go, the deep ocean is home to the Atlantean sea monsters. So fulfilling Poseidon’s last command to serve Con Lai, they remain in her port loyally.
Rena however, did not. Instead she discovered with Poseidon dead there was nothing actually keeping her to her stationed post. So she got up and went to go visit the city and see what people on land were like. She is a siren, and as such has the power of a hypnotic voice and magically excessive beauty. Along with the ability to live underwater. She’s still a part of the Vua Cai, but she’s on land and exploring around. Somehow she found and befriended Milenkosi in the dream realm by going through the door in Con Lai’s church.
Also known as “Lord Scar”, or just Hector. Hector is an old friend of Kaja’s apparently, upon founding the order Kaja sent out a message to Divus, and this guy showed up. Upon joining he received an awakening from Shento as was requested by Kaja to manifest his powers, but even before that he took down some of the jungle’s inhabitants on his walk in. He is a proper knight and gentleman, not nearly as scary as Kaja but the regal poise definitely intimidates the less cultured. Carmilla loves him already, a man of sophistication and proper manners. His powers once manifested turned out to be electrical, and for some reason he is already oddly strong with it for having just manifested it.