#woods creatures

[city-in-the-high-pines]

I've had this thought for a while that I was troubled by, because I didn't know whether it was canon. But I've just remembered I'm a fanfic writer. I can just say things.

The Silverers' Guild numbers a few dozen. It is, essentially, a secret society. It is not particularly complex, but it certifies new entries, presses unaffiliated Silverers into leaving the business or joining them, and enables greater communication between practitioners of the subtle arts. Well, this subtle art. Ashcroft is a member; this is a touchy subject, but luckily he's one of the least relevant members of the Guild. He gets very little business due to his irregular hours. They've occasionally been called as a group to investigate Parabolan difficulties; Ashcroft's silenced them on the matter of the Railway's little shortcut.

As to the other advanced professions:

There's six Correspondents in London before Strider becomes one. A few years after her self-promotion, two Correspondents collaborating on a project accidentally tear their laboratory from space, and are presumed dead.

The Crooked-Cross are the Crooked-Cross, so you really can't trust them. It's possible that there's a Crooked-Church, but unlikely. If one exists, Nicodemus is unaware.

There's a number of Licentiates, a few less than the Silverers. They have no true organisation aside from the Gant List.

God knows what the hell the Midnighters are doing.

Monster-Hunters have an informal order. They frequent the same haunts and aren't hard to spot, so they tend to know each other.

[manorinthewoods]

consider:

guy who is Completely in control. Always calm. All emotional responses are immediately regulated. always thinks through problems Rationally and Evaluates Outcomes and the Cost of Achieving Goals.

gets into One embarrassing conversation with friends while in a public space. immediately has a mental breakdown and manifests memory deletion field and is categorically impossible to see for the next seven days

[city-in-the-high-pines]

(FLiscord prompt: "The next generation of Ambitionful folks are coming down to the Neath, and your FLOC is tangled up in it somehow. What is the Ambition, and how does this involve your FLOC?")

Ambition: a New Form!

You've dreamt of it. Everyone has. Lights on high towers; eyes glimmering in the dark, like stars in the night; claw, scale, fur, wing. Most find these to be terrible nightmares. But you always rise with a terrible heartache...

Similar to Evolution (though not motivated against Destiny), the FPPC is pursuing a transformation under peligin light into something quite strange. The quest towards that dream is sinuous and shadowed, sending you all around the Neath to learn what it means to be a monster. Along the way, you'll find a colorful cast of characters who all have their own perspectives on the question, and the liberation and loss involved.

One such character is William Ashcroft. Pointed to him by Minerva, who's a guest character from another Ambition (The Grand Hunt!), you find what seems initially to be a Parisian academic but is soon revealed to be a shaken survivor from the Fifth and already a monster. Bereft of purpose in his life by the vast tides that swept through the world, heedless of whatever it was he wanted to do (he's forgotten), he ends up being quite willing to tag along with you. I am, alas, too hungry to work out how he ends up. It's probably dependent on your choices; Ashcroft's will is fickle, and if he doesn't have a purpose he'll happily take any offered to him.

Third-act twist is that the New Form things are essentially four-sexed, with the claw/scale/fur/wing theme actually being the tetrachotomy, providing the near-obligatory Treasure forking - the FPPC chooses one to turn into or to reject the New Form and accept their humanity, which is possibly a worse and less justified ending than LF Diamond.

Treasures

First in the Order of the Cavaliers Chthoniform - +13 Dangerous, +7 Persuasive, +2 Monstrous Anatomy, +4 Dreaded Your armor has not yet formed; your new eyes have not yet opened. But your fangs and your claws are keen as ravenglass, and your blood courses in the drumbeat of war, and others walk behind you, in the shadow of the banner you will fly - when the time comes - when your towers rise, against all who might rend them to the stones from which they came - when it is, at last, the hour of liberation.

The Hood of the Emerald-Eyed - +13 Shadowy, +7 Persuasive, +2 Mithridacy, +2 Respectable, +2 Bizarre Silk and spice, life and love, are traded in the markets of mankind; but you no longer count yourself among their number. You take for your coin the scales of dragons and the tears of gods, and in their exchange memories, hearts, secrets, snatches of song. You are still so nascent; but already your eyes glitter, green as venom, and soon you will cloak yourself in scales to mark what you have become. Nothing will be beyond you; and even the merchant-kings of the Bazaar, worn in their age, will be bought in time.

The Mantle of Beasts - +13 Persuasive, +7 Shadowy, +2 Artisan of the Red Science, +4 Bizarre For so long, you have been only human, clay-fleshed, stone-eyed, chrysalid-skinned; but now you are aflame with rebirth. Your fur is only the thinnest of tufts, and your senses still so heartwrenchingly dull; but the Change is set in your bones and your blood, and when at last the hour comes, all that remains of what you were will perish in an instant - and you will not regret.

The Feathers of the New Wind - +13 Watchful, +7 Persuasive, +2 Artisan of the Red Science, +4 Bizarre You can almost pass for human, right now. But feathers burgeon from your skin, and their tips are a red none under the Sun could ever know. The colors and the treacheries of the Neath are old friends to your new heart (though always your wings waited in its hollows), and in their glory you break chain and chain and chain again. It is a motion as natural as breathing; as natural as flight.

(And the obligatory alternative, for if, after the Ambition all about understanding and pursuing monstrosity, you decide you don't want to be a monster.)

A Vitruvian Physique, Pure and Perfected - +13 Persuasive, +7 Watchful, +2 Glasswork, +4 Respectable Your skin is soft, your eyes are white, your teeth are just the right shape. You are scarless, and never sick. The shape of your flesh cannot be altered, for more than a moment, by blade or poison or Shapeling art. When you dream, you dream of wind on your skin, the scent of rain in the wood, the warmth and light of a sun-bathed meadow, gold and green, horizon to horizon. And your heart - your heart, at last, is quiet.

[city-in-the-high-pines]

And here's Ashcroft as an Ubergoat.

[city-in-the-high-pines]

[city-in-the-high-pines]

Today's #fanworks has been complete lunacy, and packed full of spoilers for LF, BaL, and Nem - but not HD - so I'll only feature stuff from the moon-milk segment.

Which would they prefer: moonmilk or cardinal's honey?

Ashcroft, Strider: moonmilk

Minerva, Nicodemus: cardinal's honey

What would happen if Ashcroft got moonmilked to...

Olivier: Standard moonmilk nonsense. He's not particularly more upset about it than just the baseline extremely freaked out. Olivier is mild.

His own vines: 28% chance he rips himself apart in madness. On the 72% survival, he dissociates extremely hard, effectively treating his mind as being completely separate from his body and just in love with it really hard. And inside it. He's completely raving mad.

The Bazaar: His breakfast was moonmilked and he was looking at the bare wall at the time. Desperately seeks the bottom of the Bazaar, probably tries to either cut his way into a wall and bury himself inside or jump into a lacre pit.

A Whitsun creature: He's moonmilked to Reynardine, probably by Fiora. This is actually pretty workable; it's disturbing and extremely eccentric even by London standards, but you can with some practicality go around London perpetually on the back of a Spindlewolf. They change size.

Nicodemus: Fiora is also responsible. Nicodemus is ruined rapidly by the experience, but accepts his damnation.

Someone of his choice: Ashcroft became convinced in a depressive episode that the way to fix his deep Flaw, which makes him a broken person, is Love. And the way to find Love is moonmilk. He analyses the list of options to determine who's both interesting enough to be viable and stable enough to be able to Fix Him, and then moonmilks himself looking at them. It doesn't end well.*

In all cases, Ashcroft will usually fairly quickly develop his moon-milk obsession to always be together with his love into a "I need to stab them with my vines and physically enter them without killing them". He has the knowledge and skills to do this, although the research is hard with the Chirurgeon having fled and him constantly terrified that his love is gone every time he looks away. If successful, he basically removes most of the internal organs and replaces them with his own; his vines become the circulatory system, and the resulting creature is horrifically scarred and bloated, with vines and flowers constantly bursting out from under the skin. Both are now basically inexorably together, although they aren't mentally merged.

*I once considered Nicodemus seeking out moonmilk to try to force himself to fall in love with a woman. This was ultimately a lackluster derivation from a deeply delectable event mentioned offhandedly in #fanworks concerning two PCs from a @creekschaoscorner and a @a-dux, which is ultimately quite a complex affair and not particularly my story to tell. Broadly it was "getting turned away at the Shapeling Arts gender transition clinic because you seem weirdly halfhearted about it".

[city-in-the-high-pines]

Ashcroft, no. You already had two destinies. You can't have a third.

[city-in-the-high-pines]

This is what Ashcroft's skills look like before Firmament.