Between The Lights, Session 11: Words

[liquidcitrus]

This is an actual-play writeup of a game I am running on the Jenna Moran fanclub on Discord.

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Is magic what is left when everything else has been explained? Why, then, the Nobilis have no magic.

-- The Other Side of Reality, by Caitlin Katsaros

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Today, Maddie gets set on fire, and Sonja talks past Toby Houston on the topic of Purity.

Mountain Dragon

<HG> Helen can turn into fire.
<HG> I mean, now her name is Helen. It was Loowit, once. But everyone calls her Mount St. Helens now, so Helen it is.

Maddie decides that she wants to continue looking for her Forbidden Alphabet, and decides that learning to speak words of fire could be helped by learning to breathe fire. She slips away from a tour group and goes to look for the Power of Mount St. Helens. She finds a tiny fire dragon, with tiny black eyes. She challenges the fire dragon to a wrestling match.

<Maddie> "I'm going to beat you in a wrestling match," Maddie says.
<Maddie> "If I lose, I'll give you my whole entire estate."
<Maddie> "But I'm not going to lose, and since I'll win, afterward you're going to teach me how to breathe fire."

The dragon - Helen, of course - uncoils and increases in size. Despite Helen's initial reluctance to fight, Maddie goads her into fighting by screaming into her ear. At which point Helen sizes up again, and swallows Maddie.

Inside Helen's stomach, Maddie attempts to wrestle Helen's tongue into submission. Unfortunately, since Maddie is inside a dragon made of fire, she also gets extremely burnt. She takes this as a Deadly Wound, and gets herself trapped into the shapeshifted form of burning fog.

<Maddie> So Maddie feels herself burning. "That's not good," she thinks to herself. "I know! Fog doesn't burn, does it?"
<Maddie> Quick as a flash, she's become a Maddie-shaped fog cloud.
<Maddie> It turns out fog does burn.

Maddie continues to needle Helen with pedantry and definitional arguments. Eventually Helen gets annoyed enough to force Maddie out. And since Maddie is burning fog, that technically counts as breathing fire!

Unfortunately, now that she is burning fog, Maddie is having some trouble getting back into the Chancel. She needs to go through a door to get in, and burning down a door does not count as going through a door.

<HG> Are you going back to the Chancel?
<Maddie> Yeah
<HG> Okay, how are you going to do that when you're fire and would burn down any door you tried to touch?
<Maddie> I'm sure Keith will take care of it
<HG> Nah, Keith thinks it's hilarious that you accidentally shut yourself out

Every Single Book

Sonja, having also discovered Diane Spinnaker's Metaphorical Dirt in the back of her mind, decides to go read some books. By which I mean she decides to read every single book in the Chancel.

This is a level 9 Aspect miracle, which gives her the ability to read and recite every bit of every book that exists in her Chancel. Unfortunately, since this is also a Word of Command, it inflicts a Deadly Wound. For that Wound, Sonja is temporarily incapable of reading, since she's seen every word so many times that none of them make sense anymore.

A Level 9 Aspect miracle allows you to do the thing unlimited times for the rest of the story, and protects your ability to do so with an Auctoritas 4. So, despite the Wound, Sonja is still perfectly capable of recalling everything in every book. She'll be a veritable exposition machine for quite a while.

The Other Sort Of Purity

Sonja decides that, since she's thinking about moral failure and impurity, she should go pay Toby Houston a visit in Locus Liana. After entering a cutscene, they begin talking. Sonja discusses how she thinks the purity of society is compromised. Toby Houston says that she is using the wrong words for it.

<Sonja> "I see a taint on the Society and its members, one I wish to scrub clean."
<Sonja> "You can't honestly tell me you look at the Society and see the behavior of the good and pure."
<HG> "Ah," he says. "That purity."
<HG> "The one that is in lowercase."
<HG> "To be clear: traditional practice of Purity places 'good' and 'pure' on orthogonal axes. If you intend to cleanse Society of evil influences, I can't help you."

Sonja continues to keep talking about lowercase-p purity, Toby Houston continues to talk about uppercase-P Purity, and they both miss each others' points by several miles. This is when Sonja decides to bring up That Thing Diane Spinnaker did. She expects it to be a shocking revelation, but it bounces off without making a dent.

<HG> "She stopped doing that eight hundred years ago."
<Sonja> "You knew about this?"
<HG> "Was I supposed to care?"

Sonja is quietly furious. Toby's habit of calling people who don't understand him "young" does not help.

He tries to say that the arguments and infighting don't actually matter, because the Nobilis have an outside threat, and they have always unified to fight it off.

<HG> "The social shenanigans matter in the abstract, and they matter in our free time, and maybe some people get the privilege of letting others do their fighting for them."
<HG> "But here's the thing: when the chips are down, when the Excrucians are right in front of you, the infighting stops mattering."

Sonja does not find this particularly convincing, and turns to leave. Unfortunately, one of the Region Properties of Locus Liana is that [Things only exist when you are looking at them.] Which means the door has disappeared. Too proud to ask for help, Sonja leaves by making her presence metaphorical.

Coda

A few loose thoughts, too small to be a scene of their own, follow.

Purity has made Toby Houston's morality alien. He now values only extreme dedication, and that's all he can promote. Maybe his past self would have resisted that, but his past self doesn't exist anymore. It is too late for him to stop being the personification of Algorithmic Hell.

Meanwhile, Maddie has completed a Project bubble! She is now meaningfully closer to her goal of learning the Forbidden Alphabets. (Okay, so I haven't been consistent in marking which scenes yielded Destiny points, but it's happened.) She finds herself thinking about words that are fire, reviews every Destiny-bearing incident that got her here, and realizes something.

She can't speak fire. But she might be able to speak to fire.

On The Next Episode...

Pigeons.

Comments

[l33tminion]

Nobilis PCs sure don't do half-measures.

Also that first bit is a pretty great example of the canonical (i.e. I'm paraphrasing this from somewhere but don't remember where) way Nobilis Wounds work: "Your enemy stabs you with a sword! You could fall over and die, of course, but perhaps you should instead consider absorbing the power of sword and becoming sword?"