In the beginning, there was only the cruelty of the world, and your hunger to be Believed In. You have forgotten how to even notice the passage of time, but you have been hoarding your meager reserve of Belief in the hopes of someday finding a Believer, and convincing them to worship you.

It has been a very long time since you've even heard of any Believers. After the Dead Thing In The Sky opened its Eye, there have only been the Dead Things.

Who are you? Where do you live, in this post-apocalyptic world that has long ago been reclaimed by nature?

Are there other spirits you trust not to eat you? Are you part of a hierarchy of spirits, like the Dew Drop kami, who pay fealty to the Blades of Grass kami, who themselves are protected by the Third Ledge of the Valley Where 5 Mountains Meet? Or do you wander the world alone and defiant, like many of the Restless Dead Kami?

OOC: Your answers will shape the world we play in. You may also decide, at this time, whether your small god lives {alongside, near, close to, far from, or very distantly} from the other PCs.

Salt.

Gnawing hunger, an emptiness of Believers, waxing and waning like candles.

Candles? Flickering flames in their hundreds, a flash of the Dying Man and the Man of Many Places. Were they Believers, when the Song That Is Forgotten was sung?

Crescendo, a swell of sound. Is it the Song?

Disappointment, it is but the waves on the shore, where the river meets the ocean, the crash of surf upon the sand that leads to the last remnants of the Road Without a Name, its number faded and its signs long since flaked to rust.

Salt? Tears, or sea spray? Or blood, perhaps, close by where the Shark hunts in the shallows further out.

Lingering on the shore, a silvery glint in the river caught its' attention. Another memory? Or fish sunning in the slow water by the bank, more likely.

It seemed the memories were thick and turgid, like tar and honey, today. Perhaps it was time to speak to Father of Otters, who held them for it and protected them from the restless ones? If he could not be found, then he would return here, where shore and sea and road and river met, and squat comfortably and let them flow over it.

Prologue

Ninth Augmented Fifth

Down the Road With No Name and into the mouth of the snake built out of the bones of a mountain, Ninth Augmented Fifth trudges towards the abode of Father of Otters with its thick, sound-dampening mud walls, lest the ears of the Dead Things that combed the shoreline heard what goes on here.

Father of Otters was one of the more powerful Small Gods, somehow, for all his lack of Followers, and as a result, his dwelling place was one of the safer places that Ninth Augmented Fifth knew of.

As the Memory turns a corner in the labyrinthine passages leading to Father of Otters abode, you catch sight of one of the Dead Things up ahead. It's a skeleton, the most common type of necromancy, though it's seven eyes do not emit their usual red glow. As you watch, it closes a gate made of ancient necromantic bars behind it.

As a small god, you find the touch of unsanctified necromancy to be extremely unpleasant.

You could spend some of your precious Belief to open the barred door, but who knows when you'll ever get the chance to gain more?

You could find an alternate route inside this labyrinth, though with no Followers and so little Belief, holding onto the mental map needed to navigate may be tricky.

As a Memory Spirit, you could push through the necromantic barrier, though some of your (lower-case-M) memories might shed off of you in the process, and you would need to remember to pick them up again on the way out.

As you debate this, you can feel the approach of others.

---

Everybody Else

Conveniently, so far everybody's suggested starting locations all mesh well, so please find a way to add yourself to the current scene

Water, Air, Salt, blood, Fear.

Water? It's still there and Im still in it. The oceans and coasts look much different from when the last believers still drew breath. The depths have gained more secrets and mysteries though. I do not venture there since my death. There is always a bigger fish after all.

Air, the faintest memories are of transitory air, short breaches into the world above. Later, after the decent into the deep, I could swin through air as it was water. There was a time i shared the air with the sky whales of the believers, but none of those are left. It holds less for me now but who knows what the future holds.

Salt, can't get enough of it, don't know how the river and lake spirits do it.

Blood! The blood is constant. Predation is one of the few truly persistent attributes of life and its sweet taste draws me from miles away. I used to have blood of my own and spill the blood of others, now I am satisfied cruising through a cloud of it.

Fear.....fear is the addiction I am missing. They used to come, see us chasing the seals, and I could feel it whenever the believers got deeper than their waist. The fear intensified whenever my kin would break the surface with their fins. I guess that is why the coasts call to me, long after the fear ran out. There was a time, around summer every year when a delicious wave of fear traveled around the world even to believers on land. Oh it was ecstacy. I never understood it, but we could tell it was coming when the glowing boxes called started saying "Shark week."

Iridiana looked at the gate as it was being closed by a necromantic construct. the scene felt familiar to her, though she couldn't quite figure out whether it was a good or a bad thing, lacking the memories to give her context on what good or bad was supposed to be. But she knew she had passed through a gate once.

Would entering that gate bring her back to a familiar place? But then, since she had crossed a gate into these unfamiliar lands where she remembered nothing, would it be wise to cross back without knowing what had made her cross to begin with? And that was assuming this was even the same gate. She thought it was though, since she had passed through one and this was the first gate left open that she had come across in these lands.

There was much to think about, though with her own memories hidden from herself and her knowledge being restricted to her name being Iridiana without also letting her know why her name would be Iridiana, there was only so much thinking she could do. But maybe the thinking would trick her mind into recalling a memory? It was worth a try, and so she thought about the various things she saw around her, not really seeking anything in particular, but simply trying to get better at thinking by thinking, the way one would improve by performing a skill.

Grootwithaai smelled something stirring.

He was cruising the shores, this one he named the gulf of the infant bones when he caught a wiff of what could be fear.

Curious, he broke the waters surface and was mildly annoyed at the skeletons on the shore.

He dove back down, sped towards the surface and breached into the air, adding a bit of speed to avoid the shambling bones below. Cruising the sky, he followed the scent towards a tunnel, not something he was usually drawn towards.

Soon he finds himself in the company of two other small gods, he observes them and determines they are too strong to consider prey.
This message was last edited by the player at 00:27, Sat 12 Feb 2022.

Prologue

Grootwithaai

The Spirit-Shark briefly recalls an image of the sky whales, magnificent creatures yoked by the Followers of some name-flayed land god, the crude howdah necro-grafted onto their bodies, spikes driven into their shorn tusks to provide "steering."

These thoughts are quickly overwhelmed by the pangs of addiction withdrawal as the shark recalled feasting on the Terror ripe within the Believers during Shark Week.

His incorporeal form suddenly wracked with the ugly hunger, Grootwithaai instinctively retreats to a place of safety, diving up through the air (so much more vacant than the sea) and into the half-sunken corpse of a sky whale, amidst the shores near the ruins, that once was the town, that used to be city, that was the heart of a nation that was called Salvanas That Was.

The salt-bleached bones and hammered alloys of the sky-whale corpse holds some ancient memory of grace and safety for the shark, and for some reason the ancient necromancy of its walls do not bother the simple-minded shark.

Soon reassured by his special place, Gootwithai sails through The Gulf of The Infant Bones and joins the others.


Discovery: Ruins, multiple. Ruins may hold secrets that can be acquired by crafty small god. Most ruins, however, are made from necromancy, which is debilitating for a small god to come in direct contact with, making it hard to mine the place for the good stuff.

---

Ninth Augmented Fifth, Iridiana, and Grootwithaai

As you move closer together, the presence of multiple Small Gods in a small area increases the intelligence and divinity of all the adjacent small gods, sufficient for you all to have a slightly greater understanding of where you are and how to navigate the space.

Discovery: Ruins, The Sewers of Salvanas That Was. Ruins may hold secrets that can be acquired by crafty small god. Most ruins, however, are made from necromancy, which is debilitating for a small god to come in direct contact with, making it hard to mine the place for the good stuff. These sewers are wide enough that you can hover through without touching the edges, and the detritus in the central channel is safe to walk on, being made of natural processes.

---

Iridiana

As Ninth Augmented Fifth turns the corner while Iridiana watches a gate close, the sharp edged stone blocks around the oni are a reassuring difference between this damp, suffocating place, and the one that haunts your nightmares. The gate is very similar though, and you wonder if somewhere out there is a gate with a shard of your own memories lying nearby, scraped off you as your struggled through.
This message was last edited by the GM at 01:05, Sat 12 Feb 2022.

Iridiana took a deep breath, or at least simulated the concept of one given that she had no lungs to breathe with, nor a body that needed it, but whatever made up her substance felt a bit of relief at the muscle memory of the gesture, and so she allowed it even if the air passed straight through her to emerge from her back. The stones were different from the gate of her memory, but since it had been open until recently, maybe something else had passed through it recently.

She decided to check it out. If one passed through this gate in the same way she had passed through hers, then maybe in the same way she had left memories behind in the passing, whatever had crossed here would have left memories behind as well, and when her mind was as blank a canvas as she could remember it being, any memory was a pleasant addition. Maybe if she could find the original owner later, she could trade them for some of her own that the Other might have come across if they too had stumbled across a gate?

Careful not to get too close to the skeleton, for her Self did not trust it, she imagined herself creeping closer to the gate, and in doing so found herself drawing closer. She didn't know what a memory was supposed to look like, but mayhaps there were things to Learn that she could apply once she would come across her own Gate?

Clarification: the skeleton started on your side of the sewer grate door, stepped through it, and then closed it behind them, and then continued walking away.

Reassured by the presence of the others, Ninth Augmented Fifth sought to push on through the gate, making themselves as sharp and piercing as the chords they remembered, so as to avoid those necromantic bars as much as was possible

He had once been someone.

No, more than just someone.  He had been someone important.  Someone others looked to for guidance. Someone others looked for answers. Someone others had considered significant in the tapestry of this world, and the flow of time through it, and the happenings that transpired in it.  He had once been named, once had connections, a family, a past.

All gone.

He had been down in the sewers for some time, trying to find , something,  at first he had told himself he was looking for tools, at others food, but just mapping out the city, what was left of the city, town, certainly not a village, had occupied most of his time.  He was certainly still interested in tools. If he could begin to repair parts of the place, “Salvanas”, yes that had been its name, then he could attract… something.

Something good, or something bad, he could not say. Still it seemed like a better course of action than simply waiting for who knew what to happen. He had been hungry from time to time, but not for food, but something else. He couldn’t say what that something was and it bothered him.   Too many things bothered him.

He had been here for two months he believed, although  keeping track of time was difficult.  He found him near where the sewer system met the river , or rather he could hear it through the walls where he floated. That river had once been called  “Tears of the crescent,”    in the trade tongue, and before that “Kwashu” back when the Empire of Adujeni   had held sway. Before that it had been called “Agnanana,” for the Goddess that had supposedly ruled it, under the belief of the ancient Azterue.

How did he know that?

He wasn’t sure.

If he could hear the river though, then the purification systems and transfer pumps should be around here somewhere, right?

Back to the search, but be careful not to touch the walls, something seemed wrong about the walls, or something on the walls, but what? Too many questions.  Keep searching.

Submerging into the mire of the sewers, the spirt shark stalks the smaller gods, amusing himself, observing as they all push towards their own agendas.

He reaches out, rough psycho-electro signals emanating into the ruins of the old world.

"Well well well, what have we here? Three morsels groping their way towards....something. What hunger drives them so?"

The words rough, jagged, harsh
This message was last edited by the player at 22:55, Sat 12 Feb 2022.

In reply to Grootwithaai (msg # 12):


“I’d be a bitter fill for you to make your meal, whomever thou be.”

He wasn’t any more certain whether he was pleased to be speaking to someone, than he was certain to whom he spoke. Not any of the Essential Terrestrial  Servents, he was almost sure, but still that left a lot of room for others.

“Welcome to the remains of the city of promise, welcome to Salvanas.”

For that was what the place had meant, that was the places name, and by saying it he felt, somehow, different. It was the trigger to something, but what he could not yet say.

A 'city' you say...the rock caves of the believers I have seldom visited. They felt safer on land and in larger groups and were less...appetizing. Though the aquarium was nice, a spring of belief it was when the moon was still whole and the tides ebbed and flowed.