Show notes
These are Steven’s Notes for chapters 77-79. Usually they are only published on the Patreon feed, but we got to 35 Patrons, and Steven liked this set in particular, so we’re releasing these to everyone. Lies and Damned Lies July 27, 2021“Come on, let’s talk about this in my room,” I said, gesturing for her to lead the way. Like Val isn’t going to take the wrong message from ‘let’s talk about this in my bedroom’. July 27, 2021There was something haunting about her in the light that filtered in through the window, like I was looking at a wisp of a person. Haunting image there. July 27, 2021“Do you know what a locus is?” I asked.“Mary said that it was one of a kind,” said Val. “A creature that was hated and hunted.”“Like you,” I said.Val shrugged. This is either some awesome manipulation by Amaryllis or the natural conclusion Val reached. I’m leaning toward manipulation. Loci aren’t exactly hated and hunted now, so saying they are is disingenuous and seems to appeal to Val’s emotions specifically. July 27, 2021“You’re in control of the devils though?” I asked.“They’re just a collection of parts,” said Val. “Not devils anymore, when they’re past my maw.” Metal. As. Fuck! July 27, 2021“I feel so much better like this,” said Val. She stretched her arms out to the sides, then moved them in, pushing her breasts together, which I tried not to notice. It wasn’t clear before that she could suck in a devil at will. I thought it was just bad luck for whatever devils happened upon her. I wonder if the devil’s knowledge of people gave her the insight to know that this is a gesture Joon would notice. I imagine she didn’t learn a lot about flattering boys in her prison home.I also realized that in my head I’ve been basically picturing Belatrix Black with red eyes, but Val isn’t described as an emaciated half-corpse. July 27, 2021her arms were still pushing her breasts together, showing more pale cleavage than the dress would normally allow for. She grinned at me. “The confidence is faked.”“Faked?” I asked.“I don’t feel it, internally, but there’s a part of the devil that knows what it’s like to puppet a human and pretend at being confident, so I can use that, if I think I can get what I want by pretending,” said Val. Huh. Well, I feel less pervy for my earlier guess since I was right. July 27, 2021“Val,” I said slowly. I had almost asked her what it was she wanted, but that was such an obvious trap that I was stunned I’d almost fell for it. Eneasz was right. SOC isn’t a dump stat! July 27, 2021“Too easy and too hard,” I replied with a nod. My heart was slowing back down. This whole exchange was played awesomely. Conveying a difficult to explain concept through an wonderfully executed example. July 27, 2021“I can tell what she’s thinking,” said Val. “Other people are so easy to pick apart. It’s myself that I have trouble with. She told me not to say anything about the things that I could see in people.” She looked me over. “You agree with her, but you want to know anyway. Should I tell you?”“No,” I replied. That’s awesomely respectful of Joon. It’s not like he doesn’t have his own ways to be invasive of other people’s minds, and he’s deliberately choosing to not follow those paths. July 27, 2021“It’s not always pretty to see people laid bare,” said Val. Her eyes were locked with mine, and now I was the one that wanted to look away.“If there’s anything that you’re getting off me … I won’t deny that you can probably see through me, but we can’t always be the people that we want to be, even when we know who we want to be,” I said. Joon, that was eloquent as hell and I wonder what sort of linguistic master you’d be with more SOC points. I’m going to remember that quote. July 27, 2021“I wasn’t talking about you,” said Val with a small laugh and a shake of her head. “Everything I see in you is beautiful, even the flaws. Perhaps not the flaws, but the way you work against them. It’s very appealing.” That’s probably the most romantic thing in this book so far. That does indeed sound like love to me. July 27, 2021“Well, I’m introspective enough to realize I’ve been finding this experience a little bit terrifying, and open enough to say that,” I said. Wisdom 8!!! July 27, 2021“Don’t try to convince me,” I said. “We already had our vote, we’re going to put the locus first, I want to know why you care because I want to get to know you, however confusing the concept of ‘you’ is to you right now.”Loyalty increased: Valencia the Red lvl 19! Well hey! Good job, Joon! Adhering to the results of a vote is part of the consequence of allowing voting. Good job being cool (apparently) about it. :) July 27, 2021“I’m hoping that the locus, when we meet, is the second person that truly doesn’t care.”I kept my mouth firmly shut. It’s not a person. That didn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could say to someone who had just finished explaining that her entire life was going to be dominated by people thinking that she wasn’t a person. I hoped that she couldn’t read all that from me, and then realized that I was doing exactly what she’d complained about Amaryllis doing, which was flinching back from the all-seeing eye. Is it just me or is Joon being particularly wise today? Self awareness is rare enough, but self awareness in the moment of needing it is another level entirely. July 27, 2021“Juniper, I want you to take me seriously when I say that’s very dangerous,” said Amaryllis.“Yeah, I learned that the hard way,” I said. “I don’t know what class of demon she was chowing down on, but it was very, ah, stressful, like if I hadn’t been careful she might have talked me into … I don’t know.” Except that I do know. Blegh. Bleeeegh. Bad brain. Lol. ‘Curse my useless hormonal teenage brain!’ July 27, 2021“Devil, not demon,” said Amaryllis. “Devils are the thinkers and talkers, demons are the fighters.”“Right, I know,” I replied. Oh, so Joon just knows this but didn’t tell us yet. ;) July 27, 2021“And I think that we have to be a little bit watchful,” she continued, “I don’t think it’s probable, but given her demonstrated ability, it’s at least possible that she voted the way she did in order to provoke you into spending some time with her, and whatever you two talked about, the outcome might have been one that she was steering, especially if you came away feeling ‘good’.”“I was really hoping that with Fallatehr dead we could leave that kind of thinking behind,” I muttered. Maybe that flashback last chapter wasn’t foreshadowing forthcoming team strife. Maybe it was showing that Joon doesn’t enjoy that stuff and will work to not let it happen. He and Amaryllis are jamming nicely and respectfully here. July 27, 2021“The ones that everyone remembers, the successful ones, married themselves to the infernal, became a willing tool of abject evil.”“But they were still people,” I said.“Yes,” said Amaryllis, slowly, hesitantly. “But I’m not sure that the distinction is one that matters.”“It seems to me like what you do and do not consider a person matters a lot,” I replied.“Not for them,” said Amaryllis. “Whether they’re people or not, the solution would have been the same. The quality of life a non-anima can expect to live, the things that they would see, the death and destruction that they would be complicit in? It was, is, better to end them.” Heavy stuff. Personhood is a semi-complex subject and Joon is right that considering it is important. He must not view Doris (Fucking) Finch a person. The Sacrifice July 28, 2021Eventually, we decided on Bows, Unarmored, Unarmed Combat, and Shields. The first two were fairly easy choices, because Fenn had high skill in both, which meant that through Symbiosis I was at least middling. Unarmed and Shields both had the virtue of being little-used and seeming like they’d be straightforward to train. I wonder if this will drain Fenn’s skill somehow and it won’t come back as easily as Joon’s. Also, they’ll have to go over 100 or he’ll only be a 100 level soul mage for 5 minutes. It took him 4 hours to tap Grak’s soul. They’re going to need plenty of wiggle room or he’ll drop the ball in the middle of testing things out. July 28, 2021Amaryllis had been the one to plan out most of the safehouses, and while they each served their own specific purpose, I’d eventually cottoned on to the fact that she’d deliberately chosen inconspicuous and uninteresting places, and given them the most boring possible names. Smart move. Finding a bunker with 12 inch steel reinforced walls and calling it The Bunker would be bad ass, but it would be *just what they were expecting!* July 28, 2021Contrast a mostly anonymous cottage in the woods with spartan furnishing to an immense cathedral with a significant name that had once belonged to a dead god, and you might understand her line of thinking. See?? Joon and Amaryllis get it. July 28, 2021Steady Aim: Completely eliminates the penalty for firing a bow while moving. Halves the penalty for firing a bow under pressure or duress. Triples the amount of time you can hold a bow at maximum draw.Bulwark: Shields you hold are twice as durable. If a force acts on your shield to move you, you will move only half the usual distance, with the reduction capped at ten feet of movement negated.Hardened Skin: Lessens the toll that physical damage in combat takes on you. Slightly increases natural healing. Increases force required to break skin. These are solid perks! Too bad he’s going to have to trade them for a while to cheese his Essentialism skill. July 28, 2021Monkish Warrior: While unarmed and unarmored, you may parry attacks as though you held a weapon, dodge at twice your effective skill, and automatically re-roll injuries if they are in the lowest five percent of outcomes (you keep any lower rolls). Wow. And explicit reference to rolling dice for attack outcomes. July 28, 2021I ended up putting the two extra ability points into MEN even before we went into the bottle. Fenn already augmented my social skills, just through Symbiosis, and if Amaryllis got up to 20 Loyalty (something that both of us wanted), I thought that I would pretty much be set. Solid thinking. MEN is the path to overpowered mage. Plus being super smart is powerful on its own. July 28, 2021We descended into the bottle together, as a group. For me, Grak, and Val, it was the old travel-by-glove routine, while Fenn held onto Amaryllis, who was taking us all down in the immobility plate. Fenn had refused to go into the glove, citing one too many bad experiences with it, and for whatever reason, Amaryllis indulged her, even though it meant that the descent took quite a bit longer than it otherwise would have. No reference to the fact that the bottle is the size of, well, a bottle. How the hell did they descend into it without being tiny? July 28, 2021The Six-Eyed Doe was pretty, I supposed, aesthetically pleasing, but I couldn’t quite help myself from appending ‘for a deer’ to that. Lol, he has to assess it on how pretty it is because he thinks he’s gonna have to fuck it at some point. ;) July 28, 2021When her trembling hand was a few feet away, the Six-Eyed Doe bowed its head, took a step forward, and licked her on the face. Val let out an ‘eep!’, then began to laugh as the doe nuzzled her. Deer are cute and this one’s a sweetie. Joon, quit being a sourpuss. July 28, 2021(And though I saw it happen, I still couldn’t quite say how the locus managed the feat of lifting Val up with its head and having her tumble backward along its neck to reach a perfect sitting position with no seeming effort on either of their behalf. It annoyed me, thinking about it later, because it seemed like the same kind of bullshit ‘fuck you I’m magical’ thing that I’d come to expect of the locus.) ‘Fuck you, I’m magical’ is sort of the doe’s whole thing. :) July 28, 2021“Fenn?” I asked. Hand going to my heart. “My most loyal companion? How could you wound me so?”“I’m the self-appointed court jester,” said Fenn. “My role is to tell the king the things that no one else can, because he’d get pissed off if it came from someone else. Ergo, you’re being a whiner about your very nearly godlike powers.”“Not for the first time,” muttered Grak, loud enough that I could hear it. Ha. Also, it’s somehow true that it hurts less coming from her than Grak’s unconcerned phrasing. July 28, 2021“I’m coming around to it,” I said. “And even if I weren’t, you can’t maintain a democracy if you’re willing to defect from it when the votes don’t go your way.” Good guy Joon! Not sour about the outcome of the vote. July 28, 2021“I want to do everything possible before the Sacrifice,” I said. “That will mean trying to at least see the Six-Eyed Doe’s soul the normal way. There are a lot of ways that this can go wrong, and I want to minimize them.” Thank goodness. I was really hoping he would try to do this. July 28, 2021He ran his hand over his beard. “Juniper, you treat the world as though it owes you something. You treat me as though I owe you my attention, affection, and loyalty.”I thought for a moment before responding to that, trying to pick the right words. “Oh fuck off,” I said. I don’t want to highlight the whole thing, but I really liked this interaction. Grak doesn’t mind being what would commonly be called ‘rude’ when having a discussion to eliminate the tedium of beating around the bush. Two standard people would take ages to communicate this for fear of hurting each other’s feelings. July 28, 2021“If the game layer hadn’t said anything about it, we would have used him to get up Aumann’s tower, rescued Amaryllis, and then went off without him, leaving him in the lurch.”“Well that’s fucking harsh,” said Fenn with a frown.“It was your plan,” I replied.“Oh, right,” said Fenn, brightening up. “That was ages ago.”“Water over the bridge,” nodded Grak. Haha. Oh Fenn. Also, apparently ‘water over the bridge’ is the Aerbian idiom, or he’s just playing off of Fenn’s wrong way of saying it. I’m glad he has a sense of humor. I know he hasn’t found his Purpose, but I hope he’s healing. July 28, 2021I closed my eyes and scrunched up my face, trying to think of some response without the distraction of having to look at anyone. “Okay, I can see it now. I’m going to have to hope that I can explain what was going through my head at some point, but I want some time to think about things, how it looks from your perspective, and where our different cultures are getting in the way. And even if I could explain it perfectly, that probably wouldn’t be enough, because with you, I failed. I need to just … listen more, I guess, and focus less on the end goals, at least when it comes to our kharass.”I opened my eyes.Loyalty increased: Fenn lvl 22!Loyalty increased: Amaryllis lvl 16!Loyalty increased: Grak lvl 10!Companion Passive Unlocked: Twinned Souls (Grak)!” Humility goes a long way. Being able to own up to your mistakes and shortcomings is admirable – apparently even admirable enough to boost loyalty from a very reluctant Grak. July 28, 2021“The monocle will burn the retinas, if overused,” explained Grak. “I no longer need it. It takes thirty or forty years of intensive study to develop the sight. It marks a person as a true master.” Leveling up your homies is tight! This honesty feels like a new level of trust and communication for the group – especially for Joon and Grak. Screw the concern of team conflict! :) July 28, 2021“I’m happy for you, Grak,” said Amaryllis. She looked over at the Six-Eyed Doe, which was approaching with Val on its back. “It looks like they’re finally finished. Fortuitous timing.” Amaryllis is a good friend too. Fenn… I feel like I’d never be quite sure where I stood with her if I knew her IRL because of her tendency to deflect and make everything a joke. I wonder what the doe will get at loyalty 10. I suspect the effort of The Sacrifice will go a long way. I wonder if at level 20 Val will be able to eat any souls she can get her hands on. This may allow some brief semi-…
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