And We All Fall

[CoconutKing]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/King_in_Paris_1660.jpg/400px-King_in_Paris_1660.jpg
And We All Fall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSWaIvyQ3o)

They'll laugh as they watch us fall
The lucky don't care at all
No chance for fate
It's unnatural selection
I want the truth!


Proclamation the First: All slayers of city pests (hereby defined as doves, mice, and ravens) who present said pests to the dottari shall be rewarded with a bounty of 1 copper piece!

Proclamation the Second: All places of public business must display in a position of prominence within the first room accessible from the building’s primary entrance a portrait of Her Infernal Majestrix Queen Abrogail II. Said portrait must measure no less than 11 by 17 inches!

Proclamation the Third: Anyone who captures, alive and unharmed, a feral dog of a weight exceeding 50 pounds is to be rewarded with a payment of 2 silver pieces upon transfer of the dog to the dottari. Such noble guardian creatures should find homes worthy of their kind!

Proclamation the Fourth: The right to wear fine embroidered clothing in public is hereafter proscribed to anyone other than agents of House Thrune or the Holy Church of Asmodeus. Exceptions can be awarded or purchased at the city’s discretion!

Proclamation the Fifth: Grain is life! Should grain be spilled in public, it must be gathered, cleaned, and repackaged within the hour. Any person who allows grain to go ungathered after a spillage shall be fined 1*copper piece per grain!

Proclamation the Sixth: The imbibing of night tea brings a dangerous imbalance to the slumbering mind. Between the hours of sunset and sunrise, the taking of tea is proscribed!

Proclamation the Seventh: The odor and flavor of mint is an abomination to the refined palate. Be not the cretin! Mint use in candies, drinks, and all manner of confections is hereby proscribed!


It is hard to believe that a simple week is all that has passed since the passage into the morn from the Night Of Ashes, the greatest purge of citizen life and property to have been arranged in all of Kintargo's long history, that you are aware of at the very least. It has been a weak since what many have quietly described as the end of Kintargo's long history of diversity and embracing of oddly un-Chelish ideals of liberty, for that was when the crackdown began. The morning after the Night of Ashes, long since declared a Morning of Mourning by many priests of the newly banned religions, the people of Kintargo woke up to a new breed of Hellknight marching the streets, with the repetitive clak-chak of a parade of an entire division of soldiers from the Order of the Rack marching down the main streets of the city echoing across empty husks of burned property where role models of entire communities and leaders of entire organizations had lived the night before. It has been a week since posters were nailed to every wall in Kintargo, describing the new Proclamations of a man most had never paid much attention to before he assigned himself the Lord Mayor of the once festive city, one Lord Inquisitor-Tyrant of Asmodeus Barzillai Thrune.


https://sites.google.com/site/samsrebels/_/rsrc/1466013870327/kintargo/barzillai-thrune/Thrune.jpg?height=320&width=320

Kintargo has always been the City of the Arts and Free, holding the true essence of a now forgotten Golden Age of Cheliax to its core as the remnants of a millennia of Aroden's teachings have yet to be completely wiped from the memory of the city's old walls, and so it chafes greatly under the introduction of a tyrannical power more similar to the controlling aspects of the rest of Cheliax, something it had avoided by sheer ability to make trouble over the past several decades. This introduction of martial law, however, might have broken the spirit of city, for most people who supported the revolutionaries of Kintargo in their respective organizations, whether religious or secular in nature, awoke to being completely leaderless, for the incredible speed and awareness with which the Hellknights under the new Lord Mayor took action was able to effectively make hundreds of people disappear and their properties all burn... over a single night. The new yoke of the Thrice Damned House Thrune has firmly planted itself into the soil of a city that might've found this incredibly onerous and threatened immediate rebellion at any other time, but now only manages to simmer in response, as minor protests pop up every so often on the streets, but get cleaned up easily by the highly disciplined and militarized dottari, a type of gendarmie composed of Hellknights of the Rack brought in from fronts of the fighting in the South and a newly formed militia of Thrune sympathizing military age men called the Chelish Citizens’ Group.

However, it seems like the embers of the fire that once burned will not go gentle into this darkest of nights, for rumors have reached each of you from the streets that the largest and most well planned protest so far will be taking place in Aria Park, a large gathering ground to the South of the now closed-to-the-public Kintargo Opera House, where the Lord Mayor has made his residence.

On the morning of the day, citizens wake to a light drizzle granted upon the city as soon as the Sun makes its first appearance above the horizon, though it quickly disappears into grey clouds that pepper the darker blue skies above. Dozens of these Kintargans accumulate at the northern end of the park in groups, with signs made of a harder material than paper but with some ease of use that you've not seen before, and on which there are all sorts of writing. All four of you find yourselves pushed into the same group, surrounded by groups of similar size but without the problematic realization that none of you quite know each other. Perhaps this is a time for introduction, or not...

Even with the cobblestones of Argent Avenue and the foliage of Aria Park still wet from the morning’s light rain, some of the groups out of these dozens of Kintargans that have gathered along the facade of the opera house to protest the city’s new lord-mayor are chanting, "NO BARZILLAI! NO THRUNE! NONE TYRANT TO STAND!". The city’s new leader was appointed by Her Infernal Majestrix, Queen Abrogail II, in the wake of the previous lord-mayor’s sudden flight from the city— an event that still has local rumormongers whispering furiously. In a scant seven days, Paracount Thrune has instituted martial law, a curfew, and seven outlandish and polarizing proclamations! It's not surprising that the signs of a renewed resistance has shown itself in this protest, really. There’s been no sign yet of Barzillai Thrune himself, and the opera house’s doors remain tightly closed—as they have since the man chose the landmark as his new home—but judging by the growing sound of the protesters, he surely can’t ignore the scene on the streets below much longer? Most likely not, for... In distance, you can see the entrance of the Opera House, grand in its silver and gold engravings depicting the hundreds of years of musical history gracing its halls, covered by a dozen dottari guards and one of his personal bodyguard, a red and black armored woman whose definitive dimension of character appears to be the raging scowl that mars her possibly beautiful face. The guards appear nervous and edgy, but the woman stands at attention with a kind of dignity and discipline one can expect of only the most trained of warriors, nay, soldiers.

The hours press on, and you discover that your group has dissipated into an ever increasing crowd, which no longer simply is encompassed by an ideological bubble of those who protest Thrune's rulership, but entire political groups that you know make up the landscape of Kintargo's ever complex electioneering scene. Some of the protesters call for their new lord-mayor
to lift his unreasonable restrictions, while others call for an end to foreign rule and demand a proper election to determine the now disappeared Lord-Mayor Bainilus’s successor. Many seem content merely to yell and agitate, but a growing minority show their unabashed support of Barzillai Thrune by arguing back at the other protesters. It seems like the entire pie-chart has made an appearance, from the earlier Kintargo partisans (who despise Cheliax’s tightening grip on their city and demand local rule) to economic conservatives (who feel the squeeze as Thrune enacts new taxes and business policies); advocates of democracy (whose bitterest complaint is Thrune’s appointment instead of legal election); anarchists (who hope the protest turns into a good riot), all the way to Chelish loyalists (who support Thrune’s actions to curb the city’s dissentious streak).

"Division! Distraction! Destruction!" cries someone from the crowd, somehow getting above the commotion with a high pitch and a loud scream, but their words and existence is quickly swallowed up again.



ALRIGHT PEOPLE, **** IS NOW WHACK

you have THREE OBLIGATIONS.

FIRST! Make a perception check!

SECOND! As the protest goes on for the hours, you can take a few actions! Fun, right? You have the following options: Listen for Rumors, Pilfer, Rabble Rouse, Search for a Contact, Silence Undesirable
Elements, or Watch the Crowd

Each one of these actions takes an hour, and each individual may do this three times before my next post. Describe that crap in your post, thank you very much!

Oh and THIRD! This is FOREMOST! Before anything else, try to introduce yourself to the group you get stuck with at the beginning of that protest before you find yourself doing anything else whatsoever, in SOME way. Because guess what? That's the PCs! You're all gonna end up bunched up AGAIN some time soon because GM Fiat (Trademarked) and Railroading Bull**** (Also Trademarked)
'

[Bhaakon]

It was a good thing that the boring side of her cloak was made of slate-gray oilcloth, or the morning damp might have seeped into the silks carefully arranged on the inner surface, or worse, the indigo and violet of the dress underneath. The outfit represented most of her remaining wealth, what with her shop liquidated and shuttered before it could be expunged like who knew how many others. What little remained had taken a week to stitch into this arrangement, indigo depths at the hem, silver embroidered fish darting up through a layer of green surf to breach an undulating ruff of white mink foam pierce the lowest band of goldenrod sky. Next orange and crimson and violet, crossed here and there by darting birds bedecked in beaded rainbow tails of lapis, peridot, a half dozen other minor gemstones. The final layer, the hood, was back to the same unfathomable indigo as the sea, but this time sparkling with a hundred rhinestone stars arranged to suggest a pattern without actually forming one--save the twenty real, though small and flawed, diamonds that roughly described a thorny rose. The dress was rather plain by comparison, the simple black of mourning with a daringly form-fitting cut and enough silver embellishments to make Ulfen longboat veer south.

It wasn't a particularly warm outfit, but Lucrezia's breakfast wine made it easy to ignore that inconvenience as she wander among the early arrivals, listening to the disappointing lack of seething in the early turnout. It took longer than she'd hoped--nearly half a bottle--to stumble on to a likely-looking pack of candidates clumped among a knot of rather desperate-looking folks. People not unlike Lucrezia herself, but even worse off. A few of them looked ready for a fight, some were drunk, and many were angry. An ideal medium to work with.

Another swig to bolster herself and she begins, bumping into people, getting their attention long enough to whisper some doggerel she'd made up on the spot. "Barzilai's been grinding them birds and mice into mince and selling it in the market so he can ship the pork and beef back to Egorian." She starts. Not the finest work, but it's a gullible audience. "You know why the Rack haven't broken us up yet? They're storming the Songbird Hall right now." A little better. Certainly believable. "You know he's going to ban night tea completely, don't you? He's sold all of our souls and now he's just fattening the city up with more fresh ones before delivery."

[Hattish Thing]

Radimus Fletch - Aria Park Protest:

Radimus had been living within his small butchershop located within the Greens District of the city of Kintargo for many months now, and during his stay, he'd been to Aria Park several times, yet the busy, chaotic streets made the man more and more uncomfortable with each visit. The incredibly tall, heavily built gray-haired man stands awkwardly near the back of a large crowd of particularly raucous citizens, looming over the small crowd as he gazes on towards the much larger gathering just ahead. The intimidating man stares ahead from behind a pair of simple spectacles, fitted with thick, darkened lenses, the shine of sunlight glinting against the frame as he watches the crowd. Long, gray locks of greasy, matted hair have been combed back, though several messy strands hang over the butcher's face, hiding more of the man's disfigured features.

The barest hint of the man's weathered, scarred face can be seen from certain angles, despite the fact that a majority of the man's wind-worn face remains hidden behind a dusty, gray scarf, and a tall brown collar. His skin is flaky and sunburnt, dotted with liver spots inflicted by dozens of years spent laboring. Scars of all shapes and sizes race across his leathery skin, the wounds never fully having healed due to poor self-stitching, giving him a rather imposing appearance. Many of the scars appear as deep lines in the flesh, which split and spread into smaller branches of painful scar tissue, almost as if the man had been whipped.

Time passes in silence before a rather loud individual begins to move about with the crowd, muttering about Hellknights and the fattening of souls. Radimus merely grunts in the general direction of the rabble-rouser as she draws near, taking a long draw from a bottle of whiskey kept within the confines of his brownish coat. "Hmph." His voice is deep, and hoarse, almost difficult to understand. With a very neutral expression on his face, the man simply shakes his head towards Lucrezia in disapproval.

--

Several rumors and gold pieces later, Radimus returns to his position near the back of the crowd, watching over things.

[Xenopax]

Mufu slowly rode through the crowd on his mount. He was receiving dirty glances from the crowd and the Dogetti but he ignored them. People always looked at him weird. He watched as his friend begs and steals from the people in the crowd, before Mutt nudges him and points at the window. He cranes his neck to look before dismissing it. 'Twas not his business.
Mufu had dressed his best for the protest. Unfortunately he had the style sense of a crow. Shiny meant stylish. Luckily no embroidery. He was dressed in a red coat covered in brass buttons, that he received as a gift for healing a man's son, with a Shirt covered in Brass links underneath. He was blinding in the sunlight.
Like wise, Mutt was covered in Shiny things. Brass door knobs, copper links, Tim coins etc.
while he pretended to pay no attention to the conversations of the protesters, Mufu was carefully listening for anything interesting. When he hears about the tiefling he grows pale. The slasher was back?!? Hopefully he didn't come to Mufus area.

[CoconutKing]

As the third of the many hours spent at the clumping of the protest in Aria Park draws to its end, the tenor of the crowd grows increasingly hostile with each minute. Whether it comes from each of the groups rallying amongst themselves, or some general semblance of agreement amongst many groups of the absurdity of the situation that has persisted unchecked for the last week, or maybe it was both of these, the matter remains that the crowd has become agitated to the point that it appears as though they will break into a riot at any moment. The shops that had assembled to the sides of the protest have already packed up and left, disappointed and worried about the outcome of this massive protest as it spirals into what seems like a future conflagration of disproportionate rage, and at best, a mob formation. The bells of the Cathedral of Asmodeus begin to ring, showcasing that the noon has arrived, banging for thirty seconds before slowly stopping, though this might be easily ignored due to the furthering intensity of the groups assembled in the Park.

Only three minutes pass before the bells of the Cathedral begin to ring again, an event that seems to make the commotion and chatter immediately come to halt as people begin to realize the magnitude of the Cathedral having performed an act never heard of in the history of Asmodean Cheliax, the bells doing something other than their regularly scheduled ringing. Surprisingly, the sounds, which come to the ear like an amalgamation of brass scraping brass and the sound of a club striking a shield, even seem louder than the regular screamings of the Cathedral. Something, a vast majority of the crowd has quickly realized, is afoot. The silence is deafening, though it lasts only a moment before the loud sound of curtains being thrown open, with rings clattering across a metal bar, reverberates through the park from the direction of the Opera House. A unanimous crowd all turn their head towards the apparent source of this sound, before realizing that two of the most enormous of windows both lie open in the middle of the third floor staring into the park. Behind it, or in it even, stands an imposing man dressed in red, orange, and black clothing and an ornate breastplate, all emblazoned with the pentagram of Asmodeus and the heraldic two barred cross of Cheliax. In his hands, he cradles a diabolical looking mace that appears to glow red, in which some of the keener eye'd folk might have even noticed a bare momentary appearance of a screaming face.

With a condescending sneer, he opens his mouth to speak, and what follows is the most deafening barking sound that could only barely describe as humanoid speech. “Ah, my adoring little chickadees. I am sorry to say I have not yet adapted to your quaint, country ways, being accustomed as I am to the sophistication and learning of Egorian. Nonetheless, know I have heard your concerns, and that I appreciate your valued feedback, and I know we shall eventually find a mutual understanding in the fullness of time. I take pride in updating Kintargo’s quaint, outdated laws to the modern standards the city deserves, and strengthening its ties with the empire in these cruel times, but obviously I have approached my duties too aggressively. You say you chafe at the presence of nonnatives in positions of power? That authorities not of this city have no place as its leaders? That you will not be yoked by intruders? Your lord-mayor hears you. And so it is with a heavy heart that I issue this proclamation, in response to your demands: all ships’ captains are hereafter barred from leaving their vessels and setting foot on Kintargo docks or streets, under pain of... let’s say... squassation!”

He raises his voice, now screaming with a tinge of hate, to speak, quietening the crowd with sheer strength of exerted will alone. "Behold, my Proclamation the Eighth, under fear of prosecution! All nonnative ships’ captains must remain on board their ships and are barred from setting foot on land within Kintargo’s city limits—their crew and agents are free to come and go, but their actions are directly the responsibility of their captains, and any crew caught breaking Kintargan law shall have its punishment visited upon the crew members as well as their captain. Any captain caught setting foot in Kintargo is to be punished by squassation." Suddenly, he grins, in a manner that sends a chill down the spine of even the most tolerant of those holding high the Thrune banner, and speaks, quieter than before and with a far more satisfied tone. "We even have our first demonstration!"

All of a sudden, he lets go of one hand upon his mace, reaching backwards as though to tug on something, and suddenly launching part of a rope out of the window, followed by the snapping of an entire body out of the window, which he lets hang from the sill, the body dangling and twisting on its rope. There are audible gasps of horror from the crowd as it becomes apparent that this man has not been given the dignity or release of death, and instead lives in an excruciatingly painful state. The Lord Mayor tugs with his arm again, whipping the body back in through the window with a superhuman strength, and Barzillai shows no sign of exertion at this. As the body groans back into the window, the loud sound of cutlery being crashed into is heard, followed by a scream weakened by the effects of the treatment.

This composure and strength over his audience seem absolute for the moment, but this is oddly broken as some dark grouping of material finds itself flying out of the crowd towards the Paracount. Though strongly thrown, this object misses Barzillai, but causes enough of a flinch for him to stumble backwards into... something that cannot be seen from this angle. As Barzillai and the rest of the crowd realizes this grouping of material was most certainly some kind of dung, laughter erupts from some in protest. Barzillai seems stunned for a moment, before he flies into a rage, the dominant expression changing from one of condescending amusement to one of spittle-flicking violent rage. He screams out, his voice still amplified somehow as it blares across the Park, "Enough of this! Nox, run them off, arrest them, or kill them. I don’t care which!", before he bellicosely slams the windows shut on himself, having retreated further into his room.

Suddenly, there is chaos. The grim, scarred woman at the gates of the Opera House advances quickly into the now rioting sets of commoners, the dottari keeping pace behind her with their serrated weapons now drawn, but they are not the only concern. It seems that many of those who appeared like organic attenders of the protest have drawn hidden weapons, and removed cloaks or other clothing hiding the red and black uniform, paired with sadistic grins displaying an eagerness to dole out 'justice', known to be worn only by the Chelish Citizen's Group, causing the entire crowd to begin surging like waves of the ocean, crashing in and against one another as countless fights break out.

Each of you find yourselves having backed into the other members of the group you started the day with, in some bizarre coincidence, though this is of little concern as four thugs of the Citizen dottari approach towards you, eyeing the large rhino in the mostly isolated group as a target to beat and sell.



You don't know what that word is without a DC 15 Knowledge local check. Squassation????

Also, roll initiative

[Hattish Thing]

Radimus Fletch - Aria Park Protest:

Once the Lord-Mayor reveals himself within the window of the expansive manorhouse ahead, Radimus instinctively rests his hand against the oversized surgical tool hidden within his sleeve. The man's weathered face goes white for a moment, still mostly hidden beneath collar, scarf, and spectacles.

As if purely by instinct, the man clenches a fist, his eyes glazing over as he stares intensely towards Barzillai Thrune, an unsettling expression forming upon the man's scarred face.

--

Once the final proclamation is given, Radimus steps forward, stiff and blocky, his zombie-like expression betrayed only by the insidious glint of scathing hatred glimmering in the man's cold, gray eyes. He mumbles something to himself, his tone guttural and harsh, muffled by the scarf worn over the lower half of his face.

He nearly draws the sharpened blade hidden within his sleeve before his ominous focus upon Barzilla is broken by the approach of several citizen Dotarri.

--

Radimus stares towards the approaching men, then back to Barzillai, before glancing finally towards the sleeve in which his blade was located. Breathing hard, the man shakes his head, whispering something to himself once more before simply stepping away, knocking over a crate in the chaos and using the distraction to vanish entirely.

Like a ghost, Radimus seems to simply disappear despite his impressive frame, another face in the crowd.

"Not now, not yet."