I am moving house soon and the heat is driving me mental so posting will be slow. Here is some more development on the
Queen Mab project with
Alcopopstar which is still ongoing.
You Hear
She treads the air upon blue flame which pierce the vault
like spears, keening like kettles, roaring like rain or a river piercing rock.
The Silent Shroud - Her Grace can silence her step. She
sings a song of interference which reaches out with a rhythmic throb, the only
sign of her presence a pulse of pressure, until she drops the shroud and the
scream of her blue tongues lashes forth.
You Smell
She passes in a stink of acrid pitch, a biting smell like
curls of metal from a smiths work fallen into a hot forge or, (whisper it), the
sharp tang of a tanners yard.
You Feel
Her gaze prickles like ant-bites and heats the skin like
a boiled bath.
You See
A perfect
blackness, without depth or inner shape. Only the blue tongues of fire and the
borders of her form are clear. Her shape is ever-shifting, never still, her
edges crackling with angular sharpness like paper endlessly refolded into
different forms; an hawk, a kite, an armoured angel. She dances through the air
on tongues of blue flame twisting like a weavers hands.
Her Character
Her manner tilts between a cavalry commander and a bitter
courtesan.
The teasing false solemnity of woman of great beauty, the
arch and prickling vagueness of an artists model, almost flirtatious, then, a
shift to the imperious violence of an impetuous knight or a bloodthirsty
general. Her Grace moves constantly between a near-coyness, as if she were
considering a kiss, to a barely-repressed belligerence, as if she were about to
demand a duel.
Beneath all this lies an uncertain bitterness. For all
her power and wrath, one might think she were a teenaged girl abandoned by her
lover.
Her Desires And Demands
- From the Parliament, Elpizoi & the Pythians, she
wants TROOPS, meat for the Crusade
- From Melinoe she wants FOOD and WATER for her
Courtiers.
- From the Nome Queen she wants DRAGON BLOOD - for the
old fraction engines to be awakened
- From Mab she wants ATTENTION and VALIDATION - "Do
I not serve you my creator?"
- From Night she wants TARGETS - "Find me fat realms
ripe with unearned wealth!"
Her Powers and Frustrations
A Mistress of Dragons who have slept too long. Gifted
with startling powers of annihilation on a battlefield, or the skies of realms
undreamed of, yet these do her little good amid the mouldering schemes and dim
poverty of these shrunken times.
Much of her Power is born from possibility; if or when
the Wyrms are loosed again to harrow another realm _then_ she will decide who
goes, and who returns, she will be the arbiter of gifts and the mistress of
favours.
Contrarywise;
if Her Grace were to set herself to
the direct destruction of any Court or Lady, she
might do them terrible
harm. Yet this would mean terrible destruction as she cut her way through the
palace like a knife, followed by chaos, anarchy, broken oaths and the
disapproval of Queen Mab.
Yet still, she
might, she
might do so, and
from this
might-be, much might be devised.
Unfortunately the nature of Her Grace is too-direct to
take best advantage of this trade in possibilities. Schemes, she loathes, and
wishes only to once again cut the sky above a trembling realm.
The Harrowings
When the time comes for a great Harrowing of the
corrupted, earth bound and unwise, the Beasts of the Parliament, many dancers
of the Symphony of Forms, the detritus of Midnights Realm, and all the flotsam
of the palace are herded and driven and piped into the Wyrms and the Queen of
Air and Darkness opens the way, tearing open a gateway to the sky of a
defenceless world, a world to be liberated, its resources commandeered for the
revolution and the most oppressive of its rulers and decadent parasite repressive
class, brought back for trial and justice.
[DESIGN DIAGESIS]
[In game terms she is loaded with ship-killing and
lady-killing weaponry, killing a crowd or a bunch of PCs is not going to be
very hard for her, so the essence of dealing with her is going to be that the
PCs are very much beneath her immediate notice - she is involved in super-war,
constantly trying to organise shit, fending off endless requests for resources
and attempts on her loyalty from various powers while also trying to get fuel,
supplies, target information and TROOPS, legions for the crusade, from various
powers.
She can’t employ her super killy powers in the palace, so
she is FRUSTRATED - like a tank commander trapped in a party. Though she is
super powerful and courted by all she is not very powerful socially, and in
these circumstances, it all comes from a promise and a potentiality of what she
might do either good or bad, for others, and since she is not politically adept
- this makes her frustrated, so she is easy to manipulate, or fears she is, and
so might have an interest in some low level drones she can bully into doing
something useful for her - or at least into disrupting the schemes of others
and hopefully hastening the day when the Jacks meet and
she can get a target for the next revolutionary crusade.]
[I imagine Her Grace of Wyrms as a pure A.I. starkiller
hyperweapon, liberated from its creators by Queen Mab and allowed to destroy
them. Intelligence and adaptability increased and given some kind of
dimensional folding ability, like the ability to pack herself within a kind of
dimension of herself.
Something like an f16 fighter or stealth fighter - matte
black, anti radar, impossible to tell her depth, folding new or old parts of
herself out of the blackness, like an angular black origami angel balancing on
wings of vectored fire. Aer voice roars like that of a god, the boundary of her
form is always changing, like paper being endlessly refolded, but usually in
the shape of a woman wearing armour, or an ornate gown, or a winged creature or
a shifting collapsing pattern of symmetrical jags. She is usually bilaterally
symmetrical, crowned, balancing on jets of blue fire.
Light will not reveal her, no matter how much you use.
Deep scans will suggest an opening to some impossibly deep space with the
occasional wild ping of hard returns as somewhere within a flexing surface or
edge returns and EM signal for a moment.
[PERSONALITY]
[yes a Courtesan turned murderous revolutionary, with all
of the style and elan of a high fashion mistress, to which is added a
near-deranges hyper-violence and a commitment to the cause of uplift and
transhumanism - probably more than any other High Lady; for them it’s a cause
they created but from which they are all slightly alienated by its unexpected
consequences, mutual fuckery (and they fact they are all fucking insane and
blitzed out of their minds), whereas Her Grace of Wyrms is a direct result of it
and is actually a main 'hitter' for the organisation, their version of a
military leader, who actively does much of the harm head-on and suffers much of
the trauma thereof.]
The more I read about this the more interested I become, it's like a world where Titania quarrels with her matter compiler's AI instead of Oberon.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Thats not far off the intended effect.
DeleteI am very happy to see the project continued.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is a wounderous being.
Thanks K, hopefully it will be a book eventually.
DeleteI haven't been keeping track of all the Queen Mab posts. Looking back at that tag, the one directly before Her Grace The Almighty Pseudo-Insane Hyperweapon is... the Gongfarmers.
ReplyDeleteThe contrast pleases me greatly!