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| In the Depths | |
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| Category | Story Event |
| Type | Story |
| Data ID | 287762 |
In the Depths is a Sunless Skies Story Event.
Story description[]
Piscine bodies ribboned with nearly human eyes. Starfish like human lips, razored and rinded with blue coral. Creatures even more peculiar still, more illusion than flesh, whirling through the Mists.
Trigger conditions[]
Area: Limbo
Frequency: Always (100%)
Interactions[]
| Actions | Requirements | Effects | Notes |
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| Behold the Fluke
Through the tendrilling mists, a Scorn Fluke regards your arrival, a cyclopean presence over-encumbered with spare corneas.
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Something is very wrong with this Scorn Fluke.
For one, it possesses an eye, red-veined as though it had spent eons in ceaseless lamentation. The Scorn Fluke, its species usually possessed by a jagged geometry, looks diseased, its body warped and weeping with cancers, cysts of unnatural dimensions. Aberration that it might be, the Scorn Fluke remains a primordial revelation, ancient and so steeped in anguish that the air itself twists in commiseration. This isn't pain as mortals might know it, but something almost holy in its vastness, an entire cosmology of suffering contorted into a being. |
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| Soothe the Scorn Fluke
Nothing in the High Wilderness could ever be lonelier than the Scorn Fluke. Its suffering is contagious. Perhaps applying a modicum of sympathy will reduce the pain it shares with you.
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You stretch a hand toward the nearest spine. It trembles at the contact, the oil-black calcite rippling. Suddenly, it is more tar than gleaming obsidian, viscous, ravenous for the warmth that lies embedded in your cells. Rills of black matter spread and grow, tugging at your arm, and almost you can hear it: the Scorn Fluke's loathing. Its need to be something, anything but what it is.
Just as abruptly, it releases you. There is only the echo of its despair.
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Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.
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| Prepare the explosive
You retreat to prepare the bomb. A harm-free process, they'd murmured optimistically.
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It is difficult to say precisely what the bomb is, let alone how it functions. The charge is a dull copper sphere, haloed by stylised flames, a representation of the Clockwork Sun, perhaps. Pewter rings, their insides teethed, circle the sphere, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot identify their precise number.
You repeat the ritual as you've been instructed: you turn three rings clockwise, two rings the other way, upturn the globe, and glaze it with a thimbleful of your blood. Something clicks deep in the orb. It's ready.
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Game note: After you do this, you will have to use the bomb. You will not be able to return here.
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| Bombs away!
You lob the bomb out of the hatch and tug three times on the tasselled red rope: the sole communication between your vehicle and the world without.
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Afterwards, all you will remember is the glare.
The bomb goes off. The world flattens to ultraviolet, no dimensionality at all, nothing but a silence as if the universe decided to elide the very concept of sound. The explosion pares the language from your lungs, empties you, fills you instead with memories of first times. First loves, first kisses, the first taste of roast beef, the first time someone stood in the rain on the edge of an ocean so blue that it is impossible to separate it from the sky. And threaded through that all? A peculiar, pained indignity. The Fluke recedes even further into the depths; retreating till its vast shadow is a mere hint in the constantly swirling mists. It has been wounded. It has been wounded by one of the port. It will be ceasing its communion with the cult.
In the End
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| Return to the surface
The Fluke keens, its despair sub-dermal, and you pull on the rope and refuse to let go until the ship jolts upwards.
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Up, up, up you go until you crest the Mists and arrive in the cold, hungry air. Officials from the Bureau of Entertainment pry you from your vehicle, their smiling expressions without judgement. Despite the cheerful atmosphere, one of them leans in, still grinning, and whispers, "The Toymaker's worse than the Scorn Fluke, you know?"
The Bureau of Entertainments
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Game note: You will be able to return, but you will have to go through the descent again.
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Links[]
Links In[]
Links Out[]
In the End, The Bureau of Entertainments
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