#starling.

Hello everyone! With two new skeletons re-opening I wanted to come back to the main to update lurkers on the status of Caedes Corvi! We’re currently in part one of Act I Scene II with the hope that *crossing fingers* we’ll be finished with part one by the end of October or early November. I’ll be slowly updating the summary google document and the github with chat logs so potential members / lurkers can read along! 

I also wanted to lay out a few new updates I presented to members of the group that I didn’t post on the main here:

New gameplay manual

New activity rules

In addition to this, STARLING has a a story component that we’d like to see stay the same in future applications:

Must have attended a boarding school of some kind in her childhood

STARLING. SOLÈNE D. HEREMOER  —   26,  W.

Ally Empowerment: You strengthen other people’s power or natural skills (+) works on non-nihilum where the enhancement a person is given is based on their personality e.g. making someone more charismatic, or having them appear scarier than they are — for nihilum, you can make their magic more powerful (+) has control over what trait/skill she enhances (-) must be in proximity of the person for the enhancement to work (-) magic may work on multiple people, but empowerment is lessened (-) passive ability, you must be focused for it to work on a specific person.

HISTORY

cw: implied suicide

THIS STORY IS TOLD IN A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS, in a thousand different songs, by a thousand different people. Still, this story is yours and yours alone to retell. It begins with a girl and a name she sheds like skin. There is little light where she comes from, little pity for girls like her, and darkness swells like a throbbing heart in the marrow of her home. The girl survives not by strength or wit or charm but by the callous hand of luck. It ensnares the lives of those more privileged than she and demands she adore the hand that feeds her. It’s a waste of her potential. The flowers she tends to are not worthy of their beauty or their fortune or their lives — and if violent beginnings require violent ends than she will become the hand that reaps them. But all things soft require a delicate touch and so it is her with open arms bent low in supplication that rotting flowers tend toward. Her hand over theirs they do not take notice of the slow dismembering of their lives. Only when there is very little to survivie on does she reveal the cause of their infection — only then does she take what should have been hers to begin with.

In every death you’ve overcome you leave a piece of yourself behind for the ravenous girls yet to be. They’re minor deaths and the things you lose in the interim are quickly replaced by other golden objects. The latest iteration of the life begins and ends in coincidence; a fated affair that released honorable men and women of their senses. What you offered was nothing short of divine inspiration and in your clever care they transformed into something more than they ever thought to bear. You unnfurled desire like a scroll and became the muse for all things great and powerful. Swathed in gold, you did not want for much. However, familiarity breeds contempt and shortly after your fixation changed from one devastating thing to the next. You live a fine life now, killing every iteration of yourself so that no one knows where you came from, so that no one may understand your desire. You will not allow anyone to lodge a knife in your ribcage, turn the thing so you suffer once again. You will die each day until the sun does not rise and when you finally succumb to death it will be at the hands of yourself and no one else’s.

CONNECTIONS

GOLDEN PHEASANT﹒  THE FLOWERS ALL AROUND ARE SOAKED WITH BLOOD

Is love not synonymous with hate? Envy with pity? Desire with apathy? GOLDEN PHEASANT was spared from the fate you survivied, and in their hesitation you understood that some girls will always be wanted more than others. You recognized early on that she was a doll to be looked at — pretty and useless and completely unaware of the life around her; and you hate how even in her most vile state someone still wants her. You look upon her with hate because even if she is forced to distill herself into something more transparent she is treated with more deference than anything you had previously known before. Fine, so be it then. You’ll come to her with submission in your eyes and your palms turned up. You ask for forgiveness and lay by her feet to weep. This facade will take time to develop, for her to be deceive, but eventually she will be and no matter how much you loved her, you vow it will not be enough to save her.

NIGHTINGALE ﹒ THE MOON SHINES LIKE A LOVER

Even as a child you knew the world was not enough; nothing could ever satiate your hunger, no dream was big enough for you to want. What you desired was for man to give you meaning, but what he failed to supply you pray NIGHTINGALE will do with ease. There is something sacred about her, something you wish to possess. Most people you meet are only worth half the time you spend on them, but not her, never her. You know this to be certain just as you know the moon will rise every morning. She will be the thing to complete you, to make you whole. And by befriending her, allowing your shoulder to be the perch she rests upon, you will one day come to understood her completely. When that time arrives you will then become her.

HUMMINGBIRD﹒  THE GRIT OF LIFE AND THE GRIT OF DEATH ARE EQUIVALENT 

It was a pastime, a hobby that transformed into a terror. HUMMINGBIRD pulled you into the tightly wound dance of his life and left you unable to speak. He wore danger like a cut tie and brought you along as company to the end of the world. “What would you give for its destruction,” he asks, “What would you do for it to end?” This is a story that tells itself without ever being asked, man seeks a way out and asks you to join him. Man offers an apple and forgets it is rotten. HUMMINGBIRD is a beast unto himself and does not inspire the devotion you are accustomed to. So when the spring arrives and brings with it new life you forget about him. You leave his name as a whisper in the wind and you move onto others unlike him. This is the lie you tell yourself to overcome the fear that he may be different — that he might actually do what he says he will.