#lurks

When in doubt, bug the fuck out.

So I was looking through the Lurk special abilities, and they have one called ‘The Devil’s Footsteps’, which allows you to push yourself to perform a near-superhuman feat of athletics, such as “climb a sheer surface that lacks good hand-holds, tumble safely out of a three-story fall, leap a shocking distance, etc”. And it occurred to me that this is absolutely the ability for when you need to get the fuck out of dodge now and need to jump out a window or hurdle a ten foot wall to do so. Also the ability to get in to places, yes, but my first thought was escape. So. A Lurk on a theme of running away?

So I want someone … paranoid. Skittish. Forever ready to run. And what makes you more paranoid than having been burned? Let down by someone who was supposed to have your back, by someone who was supposed to be better than that.

And it could have been just an old gang, an old friend, but looking at the factions in Doskvol. The reputations of the factions in Duskwall. The law. And the Bluecoats, of course, are corrupt as anything, a gang of thugs with a thin sheen of official legitimacy on top, but the Inspectors. The Inspectors are ‘famously incorruptible’. The Inspectors are above bribery, above corruption. The last bastion of uncorrupted justice. Supposedly, anyway.

And the Inspectors are also foreigners. Chosen specifically because they have no close ties to Duskwall. Presumably specifically to prevent corruption, preventing them from favouring friends and family and pursuing enemies. But it also means that they’re alone. The very mechanism that is meant to make them impartial in pursuit of justice also means that if that mechanism is turned on them, they have no safety net. They hold themselves aloof, depending only on each other, so if they are betrayed, from within, well. What can they do?

So if we had an ex-Inspector. One whose resignation was handed in for her, her death certificate signed and filed before she ever left the office that morning. A Lurk with a background of Law. And a heritage …

Things are complicated between Akoros and Iruvia at the moment (yes, I bought Deep Cuts, there’s some good stuff in there). Things are a bit strained, especially in Doskvol, whose Leviathan fleets are in direct competition with Iruvia’s. So it’s not surprising, really, that an Iruvian inspector might have an ‘accident’. The mood on the street is hostile, after all. All it takes is one crime scene in the wrong area, down the Docks, for example, and an unfortunate window of opportunity in which you were … unsupported. Very deliberately cut out and left alone by your colleagues.

But then, very annoyingly, you don’t die. You make it out by the skin of your teeth, very much not dead, and you try to go back and you realise that, oh. Your death certificate was signed and stamped before you went out. What now, darling? Where do you go from here?

To the streets. To the other side of the line. To the life of a Lurk.

Which. Friends and rivals. One of the Lurk’s potential friends is Petra. A city clerk. Because it’s ridiculous to expect someone to live in a city for years on end and make no friends. Even if they are only colleagues. So Petra received some paperwork telling her that her friend had been killed on the job, but that didn’t make sense because, well, her friend wasn’t dead. Was she? And she didn’t notice this in time to save our Lurk, not from the initial ‘accident’, but maybe she noticed in time to catch her battered, fresh-from-running-for-her-life friend before she went back to the Inspectors to try and report in. Because Petra is a really good friend like that.

So. Playbook is Lurk. Background is Law. Heritage is Iruvian. Special ability is The Devil’s Footsteps. Our friend is Petra. That leaves our action dots, rival, vice and purveyor.

For action dots, we get two in Prowl and one in Finesse from Lurk. For her background, we’ll give her one in Consort. Because she was an investigator, and again, ideal or no, you can’t expect someone to spend years in a place without making some contacts. For her heritage, we’ll give her a dot in Survey, as a foreigner specifically brought in to investigate crimes, she’s perforce gotten good at ‘spotting the telltale signs of trouble before it happens’. Then for the two free dots … I’m torn between three. An extra dot of Survey, an extra dot of Finesse, or a dot of Hunt. I feel like her paranoia would suggest Survey? Her need to get out of dodge would suggest Finesse. But her background as an investigator might suggest Hunt. And if she’s turned to work on a scoundrel crew, Hunt could be very handy. (It also gives her a combat option for ranged combat. Run away, shooting if necessary as you go). But … Okay. Let’s go Hunt and Survey. Out of paranoia. Heh. That’ll give her two in Prowl, two in Survey, one in Hunt, one in Finesse, and one in Consort.

Enemy … I mean. Darmot the Bluecoat is an option. Maybe he recognised her as a supposedly-dead Inspector, which could mean all sorts of trouble if that gets back to the Inspectors themselves. And maybe Darmot isn’t above trying to leverage that to his own benefit.

For vice … Odd choice, but I think I’ll go Weird. Because I suspect this betrayal has highlighted to our girl that civilisation is very much not safe, and so … perhaps she’s developed a bit of a fascination with the Deathlands. With a potential means of traversing the Deathlands. What if you could just ditch the city altogether? So lets have her purveyor be Sister Thorn, in Gaddoc Station, and her crew of Deathlands scavengers.

For her name, we’ll go with Farisa Kessarin. Iruvia is broadly Persian/Indian/Egyptian in inspiration, and Faris is a (masculine) Arabic name that apparently means ‘knight’ or ‘horseman’, which I’m fond of and fits well enough for both an ex-incorruptible force of justice and also someone ready to bug out at the drop of a hat. Her alias will be ‘Mist’, because she’s insubstantial, there and gone again. And her look …

She’s a small, slim, watchful woman, with a faint air of skittishness, who dresses with ruthless pragmatism in tough, fitted, flexible clothes that she can move in at a moment’s notice. She’s cynical, slightly paranoid, and deeply sceptical of any pretensions or reputation for virtue. She is always conscious of the potential for betrayal, even if she doesn’t actively expect it. She’s doing her best to lie low, to avoid the attentions of the Inspectors, but there is a certain temptation there, now that the blinders are off, to poke her nose into the deeper, more entrenched corruptions of the city. The ones that cannot be tackled from inside the law. She’s not going to be burned again, though. When all else fails, when in doubt, bug the fuck out.

Beware that which lurks in the liminal spaces.

Sighs.