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3,676 checks

Birdsong, dread. Footsteps ascend a staircase.

She is decomposing.

Not asset. Dead weight.

It could be perfect. Blissfully unaware of your pulse as it slows, relieved, descending to its final crawl. A shrug as you depart the stage.

This is a protracted suicide.

Told you there's something awesome happening here. Get involved!

Look at all this power, this sheer coruscating energy! It's cooking something groovy.

The sigil means 'repetition' -- it's on a lot of shop doorways and shrines. She could be using it to mark the equipment, a note to self.

Witch shit. Stay away.

On the plus side: she's probably so psycho-fucked from this that she won't remember that you abandoned her.

If she's staying conscious through sleep then it isn't real sleep. She'll die of exhaustion.

Probably some kind of curse. She's cursing you.

What's that? An odd etching noise coming from somewhere else in the sprawl. Familiar, somehow.

Something's not working right over there.

A soft hissing noise accompanies the steady beat of its cooling pumps. Sounds like a human body, amplified.

Patrolling cadres of Milites Sacrarii, clad in tallow-white surplices, never noticed you there. An early lesson in craft.

We only pieced it together a couple years later. Sniffing around her desk, finding the stacks of passports -- all under different names.

Novessa sputters beneath an implacable leaden sky. Smoke billows from Obrekh furnaces. Stone gryphons leer down on Kalandar Square. Rail lines thread through blocks of dark slate and vermillion-streaked towers. The streets teem with people -- an endless, thrumming patchwork of crimson, charcoal, and indigo.

Though we might thrive when coursing with energy, we appreciate the downtime, sis.

Statistically possible...

The angels stop their shimmering and turn to watch this one perfect throw.

Told Eszti that fucking seagull was watching us! But shit, it's helping?

Seagulls are territorial. It was defending its airspace.

It was fucking magical!

That's twice you've been saved by a trash animal. Kin?

He waves his hand in a circular motion, tracing the course of lost interest that will one day return.

True shock in her voice.

She winks at you.

Amused by her own obscurity.

She'll be in Novessa's underground dancehalls by spring.

It wants to fall on them. It wants to smash bone.

Get them out of here. You're all going to be crushed.

No smell of gas, though a person suffering from chemical hallucinations would be unlikely to suspect themselves of the fact.

The kind of song that you can only write if you know how to hope for things.

Of course! But what is the song?

Novessa, 81. Vodka, three-day old outfits, cigarettes. You all danced together to a half-broken speaker system in someone's kitchen. It was happiness, all the sweeter because it felt stolen.

Upstairs, something screams.

Droplets of rain break in to party with the dust.

THEN FALL IT MUST. NOTHING THAT CANNOT BE RADICAL CAN BE CALLED COMMUNIST. THIS WAS THE PARTY LINE ALL ALONG.

Moonlight peers in to see what you're doing.

You glimpse the sky through a concrete frame, grey teeth with a grey maw.

A sacrificial offering. Better than a pigeon.

Smells like blood.

These people are like human dowsing rods for architecture that wants them dead.

The hand on its oscilloscope twitches in recognition of their voices.

Half-laughing, as if firearms are ridiculous at a conceptual level.

3,676 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 35 of 74