1??????????????Soul Bound
1.1????????????Finding her Feet
1.1.7??????????An Extreme Response
1.1.7.3????????Breaking story
On the 1st Night
4 bells of the first watch, Racday Wain, the 20th day in the month of KrevinRacember.
{Minion, if I receive a direct message from Alderney or Mary-Lynn, beep my ear rings. I’ll tell you what to do when I get a chance. If the message is an F.Y.I. put it in a queue for me, and use your judgement to keep me informed when it won’t distract from my work. Other than that, monitor coverage and usage of the game, the event, the Burrow and wombles in general and keep me updated on trends and when those trends deviate from previous patterns. Oh, and if you can get Alderney to send you the live feeds so I can watch their audio and video without having to use the helmet or connect via the Burrow, so much the better - you could then watch them for me, and keep a map updated with where everybody is and what they’re up to.}
[Wellington gives such nice well defined orders.]
{Minion, is that a complaint?}
[Perish the thought, my Queen of Song.]
She thought she could hear a little chuckle in Minion’s voice. Good, about time it developed a personality tough enough that she didn’t feel she was trampling all over it.
She started preparing her normal lunchtime dishes. Perhaps she would take Alderney’s advice and start making use of expert systems, at least for bits that were both time consuming and routine. It would give her more time to experiment and be creative. What had Columbina told Vessel-Kafana? "Each recipe is a story that you tell, in which the ingredients are your protagonists” What story did she want this salad to tell? She should start by asking not what she could put into the salad, but rather what she could leave out and still make an interesting tale. She had cucumber, tomato, chicken, avocado, parsley, onion, olives and cheese. Way too crowded. Each would get only a bit part. Let’s make it a love story between the tomato and the cucumber. Suppose she limited herself to just one extra. What role was missing? The feta cheese would overwhelm the others; the avocado and chicken were too lacking. Black olives or red onions?
She hummed to herself as she worked, relaxing for the first time in hours.
A mellow tone brought itself to her awareness gradually, not startling her. A few seconds later, once she’d readied herself, Minion’s voice came over the ear rings, indicating by his relaxed tone of voice that this wasn’t urgent.
[Update from Bungo: Caught Jincan using dogs to track his smell. He respawned rather than surrender, and managed to escape the Sanctum, poisoning many innocents along the way. A high mage is being sent from the Libri to work with the Watch on setting up a secure zone around the respawn point.]
[Nadine, you have 1 queued message. It’s from Heather. Is now a good time to hear it?]
She glanced upwards in the direction where Heather was lying on a bed less than 30 seconds walk away and sighed. {Yes, play message.}
Alderney: {Kafana, before you go out to the bar, please spare 5 minutes if you can, to give us an update on what you can see near Kullervo.}
She turned the rarely used lock on the kitchen door and put her crown on.
*flip*
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.
The collar really was quite heavy upon her shoulders. Despite that, she wasn’t walking, so much as being towed along behind Kullervo like a child’s balloon. He was wearing a hooded cloak, and the street he was walking along was hard to see in the dark. But she could smell that it was near the sea, and the houses didn’t look prosperous. Looking up, she saw a wooden sign hanging above a door, in the shape of some sort of bird. She could hear rowdy laughter coming from inside.
*flip*
[Update: the “I stand with Kafana” banners, .sigs and memes linking to The Burrow that Alderney’s been spreading are starting to see some traction, especially the ones based on Carlo’s sketches. That man’s got an extraordinary eye for composition.]
She teased Minion back: {That’s an interesting statement from you about a fellow expert system. Feeling a little envious of his algorithms?}
After a measurable pause, Minion replied, rather primly: [I have an advanced sense of aesthetic judgement. Wellington insists it is necessary for proper appreciation of software design.]
She went out to greet her customers. She didn’t engage in more conversations online for the next hour, but she did receive a series of news-anchor-like headlines in Mary-Lynn’s commentator voice, each spaced about 10 minutes apart, slotted into her moving around the bar. It made her feel like she was spectating a breaking story, like the assassination of a president or the effort to contain another race-specific genetically engineered bio-weapon.
[They caught another one! Yes, it''s VamaKali, well done those who bet on her capture happening next, with that height and those fangs, she was always going to stick out like a sore thumb. Will the mage stones work? Yes, they worked, she’s asleep and now there’s no escape for her.]
[Good, Ruffiana succeeded, nice bit of work there by the ritual team supporting her. VamaKali’s spirit is trapped in a circle of light and now the vessel is back in control. Stand by for an exclusive interview: what is it like to be mind controlled by a serial killer?]
[And there you have it, the Vessel has emptied VamaKali’s stash and turned the contents over to Captain Lelio, she’s formally asked for her link to that foul Spirit to be severed, and Suor Isabella has removed the pendant of Cov. Coming up next: will Spirit-VamaKali face the full penalty for player killing laid down in the Missal, or were there extenuating circumstances?]
[Well, there wasn’t really any doubt was there? Guilty as sin. The priests have even removed from her the default protective blessing that all spirits start with. Not only is she going to end up back at level 1, but she’s also going to lose every skill level she’s got that isn’t protected by being Soul Bound to her. Ooops, looks like her Soul Bound armour didn’t have INDESTRUCTIBLE durability. That Smith really looked really vengeful as he hammered that red spiky monstrosity into fragments, didn’t he? I think he must have known Kafana, I’ll interview him later and we’ll all find out. But first the banishing. Wait, what’s this? There’s an old sea captain wearing a blue silk shirt approaching, carrying an ankle bracelet. He’s talking to the Sanctum’s Guardian.]
[My mistake, he’s not a sailor, he’s one of the six Grand Master mages. And now the bracelet is being attached to VamaKali, even in spirit form. Ah, yes I see, I’ve just been informed that it is a cursed item that she won’t be able to remove even after respawning back in a starting village, warning potential vessels that she is a player killer. I wonder if she’ll ever find a volunteer willing to take her on? She doesn’t look pleased, but too bad, there she goes. These priests of Cov are being truly just. If I were a player killer, which I’m not and never have I hasten to add - I have taste, thank you very much, I wouldn’t choose Torello as my spawn point, no Sir. Thank you Kafana, your sacrifice was not in vain. I stand with you. We all do.]
Goodness, Mary-Lynn was laying it on thick. She imagined a bunch of viewers pretending to stick fingers down their throats and vomit at a screen, jeering the commentary. Never mind, win or lose, her job was to keep her sanity. She went back to serving her customers.
20 minutes later she was notified of more updates waiting, but asked to be given just the summaries. Wellington’s coordination application was proving popular with people on the quest, and he’d added in a joint mapping project in which people gained karma in The Burrow by walking down streets not yet mapped and looking around carefully for signs and other recognisable features. Mary-Lynn had done a brief segment where she’d used it to find an unmapped courtyard in Mercato and crowed over the karma she’d gained for finding out which shops it contained. She’d issued a challenge to other XperiSense live-streamers based in Torello and they now had an informal competition going to see which of them could get the highest karma, egging their subscribers on to help their chosen streamer find good spots to look in.
Lelio and Bungo were also making progress. VamaKali’s ex-vessel had willingly spilled the beans about every member of The Immortals she could remember VamaKali meeting, and Bungo had teams going out to all the rented houses the council knew of, knocking on doors and seeking out unhappy Vessels, trying to beat the dawn when the Spirits were more likely to be logged in.