Alicornutopia

Kappa wrote:I am totally willing to expand on my spoilers if there's interest, by the way. I'm not even actually sure what counts as spoilers.

*chin hands* I am interested.

Right, so!

Keeper:

The Exalted were created to defeat the Primordials, the vast powerful beings who created the world (Creation) and its gods. The Primordials were by and large kind of jerks, but they probably didn't deserve to be torn apart and cast into various forms of eternal suffering.

The keeper was a Primordial, but she never really got along with the rest of them. They always insisted on going around playing games and doing things, when all she wanted to do was preserve Creation against being destroyed. When the armies of the Exalted found her, she complained that they were interrupting her work. When they insisted, she grudgingly allowed them to confine her in - I forget its real name, Andaisq and I have taken to calling it "the Yozibox", but it's where the defeated-but-not-slain Primordials ended up. (The dead ones ended up elsewhere and are a whole different problem.)

The other imprisoned Primordials became the Yozi: twisted beings intent on taking over and/or destroying Creation. The keeper sulked off to a distant corner of the Yozibox and enclosed herself there, apparently cutting herself off completely from the outside world. Any other denizens of the infernal realms who attempted to bother her in her retreat were violently repelled, and eventually they stopped trying.


Eights and Chainsaw: So it turns out that all the time since the defeat of the Primordials, what the keeper has been working on was her own flavour of Exalt-spark.

You see, her behaviour has always indicated that she was among the least powerful Primordials - she abstained from all status games and other social interaction, almost never exerted visible power on anything, and surrendered to the armies of the Solar Exalted without any attempt to fight. But actually, she's extraordinarily powerful - she just hates doing things. So she was fully able to replicate one of the greatest feats of celestial engineering in the history of Creation - the forging of the Celestial Exalted. Granted, it took her several thousand years longer than it took Autochthon, but she's a perfectionist with a somewhat hazy grasp of the passage of time.

I haven't decided on the precise characteristics of keeper-Exalted, but the local Anna and Sandy are the first two.


Matilda: So, Sidereal Exalted are... let me just quote this chat log.

AndaisQ: i shall think on a very irritated sidereal matilda then

Kappa: and what's a one of those

AndaisQ: they are the arbiters of fate
unfortunately many of them happen also to be colossal assholes
they were the ones who ended up engineering the massacre of the solars because it was that or try to talk to them
i feel that matilda would be less than delighted having to navigate the celestial bureaucracy
but it would still be an appropriate place for her

Kappa: hahahaha oh man
i. i don't even want to think about it
putting a matilda into a bureaucracy full of assholes is a good way to empty the bureacracy of assholes in short order, let's put it that way

AndaisQ: there is at the very least a cell of the sidereals who are dedicated to not being assholes
unfortunately as there are exactly 100 sidereals in existence there's only actually between 15 and 30 of those guys

Kappa: why are there exactly 100
and matilda asks "can there perhaps be fewer if i try hard and believe in myself", damn girl, you haven't even met these people yet, why so ruthless

AndaisQ: there are 300 solars, 300 lunars, and 100 sidereals precisely; i believe there's also 300 abyssals, though i might be wrong

Kappa: matilda: "the arbiters of fate should at minimum be not assholes. if they insist on being assholes anyway I will take whatever measures I need to."

AndaisQ: when an exalt dies, their soul begins to make its way towards the wheel of reincarnation, but it is grabbed by the spiders of fate (not all that important) and unceremoniously shoved into a fetus instead
the fetus is influenced by the soul, but it is also itself, to a varying degree, so killing exalts until they reincarnate as less shitty exalts is a much more reasonable strategy than it has any right to be
and of course, even if they're still shitty exalts, she'd outrank them

Kappa: pffffffffffffffffffffff
matilda: "i can work with this"
so apparently matilda is now the murderous tyrant queen of fate???

AndaisQ: ❤
i believe i mentioned that exalted does very surprising things to one's characters

Kappa: matilda: I WOULDN'T NEED TO BE A MURDEROUS TYRANT QUEEN IF I HAD ANY BETTER BLOODY OPTIONS THAN THAT

(It turns out that the mechanism of Exaltation isn't quite like that and is instead even more amenable to killing shitty exalts until they become less shitty, because the divine spark of an Exaltation is totally separate from souls. Murderous tyrant queen Matilda is pleased.)

Holy shit this is becoming a long post, I will post it while I go remind myself about Lunar Raksha Joker

Of course Exalted!Joker would be a Lunar.

*Claps hands delightedly* Lunar Raksha Joker?

This is not Lunar Raksha Joker but I had to share

Kappa: i have been having fun with the motivation slots
Ameida (Matilda): "I can't be having with this"
Cathak Adiar (Aral): "why can't we have nice things"
Mark, as yet unnamed: "fuck you"
(Naveis or Cathak) Mirai: "Exalt ALL the things"

Okay so, Exalted Joker isn't just a Lunar.

He is a Lunar fae - one of the raksha, the denizens of the Wyld, who were once the same type of beings as the Primordials before the Primordials decided to get together and make Creation. This was not a popular decision among the rest of the raskha, particularly since when Creation came into existence it kind of exploded and killed any who happened to be standing nearby.

Unlike all the other raksha who took one look at Creation and went "The fuck is this? Get it off me!", however, the Joker took one look at Creation and went "AWESOME! I want twelve!"

Lunar Exaltations come for those who want to defend something, and Exalted!Joker wants to defend all of Creation. He adores it. It is just so itself. And Lunar Exalted are very linked to the Wyld and the fae, albeit in a somewhat antagonistic role.

I haven't actually decided whether he accidentally ate a Lunar Exalted who ran across him in the middle of the Wyld, or if he was just hanging out at the edges of Creation and happened to catch a stray divine spark that was passing through while he was engaged in the passionate defense of Creation, but either way, now he is a Lunar fae, which totally shouldn't exist to an even vaster extent than the extent to which a dual Celestial and Terrestrial Exalted shouldn't exist.

Kappa wrote:Right, so!
*Nips large and extremely awesome post*

*excited clap* I am inordinately happy about all of this!

Keeper-Exalted! Murder-Matilda! My prediction that the Joker is a Lunar was right!

I checked my Anathema character sheet files and apparently Mark's name is Kiore, Lunar Raksha Joker goes by Iron Will, and I've got a Lunar-caste Gregor calling themselves Silent Raven who is probably Mirai's destined soulmate.

Now I am going to go to bed like a good and responsible kappa.

Kappa wrote:I checked my Anathema character sheet files and apparently Mark's name is Kiore, Lunar Raksha Joker goes by Iron Will, and I've got a Lunar-caste Gregor calling themselves Silent Raven who is probably Mirai's destined soulmate.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

Kappa wrote:Now I am going to go to bed like a good and responsible kappa.

Good night and sweet dreams

Further notes:

So some Lunar Exalted have moonsilver tattoos (moonsilver is a Magical Substance) that essentially work to protect them against being driven mad by the large number of things that can drive Lunar Exalted mad, including the influence of the Wyld and iirc their own damn Exaltations. The tattoos can also be crafted into various Magical Artifacts, like weapons and armor, as long as the Artifact is something suited to being made out of a tattoo that never leaves somebody's skin.

Normally these tattoos also fix the Lunar to a specific moon-phase-based caste, whereas casteless Lunars depend on the actual phase of the actual moon for their caste characteristics.

Lunar Raksha Joker has moonsilver tattoos, but they don't fix his caste. And he doesn't need protection from the Wyld, because he is Wyld. Instead they protect the rest of the world from the Wyld in him, making it so that he isn't throwing off eldritch radiation 24/7.

That is an excellent use of tattoos.

Are you mostly planning to play this off against Exalted Ari and whatnot?