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| Bully's Acre | |
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| Category | Story Event |
| Type | Story |
| Data ID | 283644 |
Bully's Acre is a Sunless Skies Story Event.
Story description[]
Humble wooden coffins pepper the sky, here. This is a bully's acre – a pauper's graveyard. There is little room for the dead in London.
Trigger conditions[]
interacting with Bully's Acre discovery.
Interactions[]
| Actions | Requirements | Effects | Notes | |
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| Pay your respects
It is all you can do for them.
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Failed event | Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.
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A hush falls as coffins pass by the windows. The silence is broken by an insistent scraping against the hull. One of the coffins has floated too close. A few words are necessary to assuage your crew's unease.
You remind all present that were it not for the competence and efficiency of all aboard, a cold grave in the sky might have been all your fates.
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| Successful event | ||||
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Silence as coffins drift past the windows. A stoker removes his hat.
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| Dispose of a Death in a Jar
After all, what ghoul would ever think of rummaging through an unmarked coffin?
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A fitting home
There: a death hidden with the dead. A solution as apt as poetry.
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| Break open a coffin
Even the poorest sometimes manage to take a keepsake to the grave.
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Failed event | ||
| Graverobbing
Two of your crew keep the coffin from drifting while you get to work with the crowbar. The lid comes off abruptly, unleashing a cloud of noxious vapours. The wind snatches them away, but not before one of your compatriots get a whiff of them through his sky-suit. Inside, you find mouldering bridal lace and a gaudy ring.
Later that day, your compatriot begins to cough. The next day, the cough has a meaty wetness to it. The crew begin avoiding him.
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| Successful event | ||||
| What the dead don't need
You enlist your least-scrupled crewman and exit the main hatch. Manoeuvring close, your nominee gets out on the footplate, in the driving wind, and hooks a coffin with a coal-shovel.
The lid comes off with a groan, before falling away into the sky. Well. It seems this poor soul tried to take it with them, after all.
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| Break open a coffin
Some coffins bear crests, indicating a significance pauper's graves are rarely afforded. Perhaps you'll spot one.
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Failed event | ||
| Ashes to ashes
After several silent minutes of watching coffins drift by, a keen-eyed signaller cries out. A flash of silver!
You are leaning from your engine, coal shovel in hand to hook the coffin, when your boot slips on the frosty footplate. For a long moment the sky gapes hungrily for you before you find your grip and haul the crested coffin aboard. Unfortunately, the crest is fake. A replica University seal; dignifying the impoverished scholar inside with honours he'd never achieved. Still, he did take something with him.
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| Successful event | ||||
| The treasures of heaven
After several silent minutes stood at the window watching coffins drift by, a keen-eyed signaller cries out. A flash of silver!
You hurry to the footplate, coal shovel in hand to hook the coffin as it passes. You almost stumble over into the sky, but you reach the coffin with its crest of silver, and haul it aboard. The crest is the University's. The silver is real; as are the chains that seal the coffin. You fetch the bolt-cutters. Inside, an experimental device for fracturing navaratine: too precious to leave in the hands of academic scholarship, apparently. | ||||
| Break open a coffin
Quietly, mind. Some of your crew have superstitions about the dead.
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Failed event | ||
| Things best left buried
You take your least scrupulous signaller out onto the footplate.
Soon enough, a promising coffin of pleasing bulk passes by, close enough to touch. Deft work with the coal shovel brings it aboard. You drag it to your cabin as your stoker cuts the lights on the corridor. Breaking open the lid you find: good lord! The mangled remnants of a murder. A triple murder, judging by the assemblage of body parts. You send your signaller back out with the coffin.
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| Successful event | ||||
| Her Majesty's man in death
You take your least scrupulous signaller out onto the footplate. You bring no lanterns, relying on your sight and distant sunlight that scintillates off a few broken fragments of glass nearby.
Soon enough, a promising coffin of pleasing bulk passes by, close enough to touch. Deft work with the coal shovel brings it aboard. You break it open in your cabin: inside, the waxen face of a newly dead Auditor (who bothers to bury an auditor in state?). Within his stiffening fingers, the favoured poetry of the Empress.
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| Break open a coffin
Quietly, mind. Some of your crew have superstitions about the dead.
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Failed event | ||
| Frozen blood on knuckles, on skin, on teeth
You douse your lantern and step out on the footplate. You are alone, facing the lonely sky, bathed in uncaring starlight, watching coffins drift by in the night. You don't have long.
A coffin, slim and crooked as a witch's finger floats by in grabbing distance. Your muscles knot and strain, but you're able to haul the thing above. Wheezing, you drag it into your cabin to ply your own form of the resurrectionist's trade. Inside: oh dear. They were alive when they were shut in here. Thankfully, they are not any longer.
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| Successful event | ||||
| The unlicensed collection of souls
You douse your lantern and step out on the footplate. You are alone, facing the lonely sky, bathed in uncaring starlight, watching coffins drift by in the night. You don't have long.
A slight coffin passes by. You draw it in with the coal shovel. The wood is imitation bronzewood. Something sloshes within. In the security of your cabin you wrench off the lid. Within, the jaundiced and broken corpse of a middle-aged man, frigid and putrefied. Clutched in his rotting hands, a jar of unlamented souls. A spirifer, and the punishment for his crime. | ||||
| Partial success event (5%) | ||||
| A plea in the night
You creep out in the middle of the night, and proceed along the least well lit corridor to the exterior hatch. You bring no lanterns and rely on your eyesight, as you step out into the yawning dark. Before you a cluster of coffins drift by: death's trophies scattered across the starless waste.
A promising coffin passes by: you reel it in with the coal shovel, and haul it aboard. You secure it in your cabin and are about to open the lid when a knock sounds at your door. A pious stoker, crucifix in hand. "Captain. Please. Don't do this. Let the dead rest." |
Respect your stoker's wishes
No point stoking resentment.
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Your stoker smiles and nods, and assists you in walking the coffin back through the corridors to the hatch, before tossing it back into the void.
Unfortunately, your stoker is not quiet and scrapes, bumps, and on one occasion drops, the coffin. Between this and their lengthy and morbid prayer over the departing dead, your crew suffer a very disturbed sleep indeed.
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| Throw open the lid
It's your b____y ship!
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There is no further argument. Your stoker shuts the door behind them. The coffin lid comes off with ease (they weren't made for durability, really). Inside, predictably, a corpse. There are rings on the fingers and a small coinpurse for whatever pyschopomp it might have found barring its passage onward.
Your stoker departs at the next port.
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| Investigate a mysterious gleaming
Some of the coffins sparkle under a shroud of glass dust. And what's that amongst them? Something larger, winking with starlight.
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Failed event | ||
| A secret
You lean precariously from the exterior door, reaching out with your coal shovel. At last, you make contact with the object and slowly – painfully slowly – draw it in. As soon as you see what it is, you bundle it in your coat, but too late. A stoker has already seen.
Later, you examine it in privacy. It is a human head fashioned from bottle-green glass. Glass hair. Glass teeth. Glass gums. A glass mole, distorting the watery light of your lamp that shines through it. A third of the head has been sheared away, as if struck with something heavy. In the exposed cross-section, you can see the glass scalp, the glass skull, the glass brain.
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| Successful event | ||||
| A treasure
You stand on the footplate, a crewman holding you by the belt of your sky-suit for safety. After a few misses with the coal shovel, you hook the gleaming thing. Clouds of shimmering dust float up like a constellation of fireflies.
Back aboard, you examine your catch. It is a glass hand, perfect in every detail. Its knuckles are calloused. When you peer at its fingertips, you can distinguish the whorls of fingerprints. A plain silver ring sits on one finger.
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