Hydra was amazing!
Spoilers if anyone else wants to play these games.
Let’s see… On Friday I went to the feast of Adversia. While pickpocketed most of the beggars (which was surprisingly profitable) got a magic ring, gained an orc minion and then was so chuffed by his willingness to do whatever I said that I stole the money from the guy who controlled rats so that my orc could open a restaurant specializing in serving rats. I also convinced the rat guy that showing up at the feast of Fortuna next week with all of his little ratty friends was a GREAT idea because there would be cheese and lots of people to listen to his claim about being the prince. I didn’t in any way believe he was a prince, but I’d promised my thief friends I’d get them a distraction for the occasion. We also learned of the potential arrival of an army of orcs. With my new pretty ring I wasn’t really worried, though I did tell the guards and thieves so that I could say “I told you so” later.
I had many good conversations with Daniel’s char, who turned out to actually be rich. My favorite moment probably was the LotR quote… even if I couldn’t keep a strait face afterwards. Also Ants standing on one leg because I told him to and offering to kill anyone who mildly annoyed me.
On Saturday morning I put on my purple tights and went back to my old school. There I found my long lost daughter, learned my loyal minion was in love with me (rather than the dozen or so other people I suspected from using my invisibility to listen in on his conversations), awkwardly avoided my two old flames (a hero and a villain respectively) and used my invisibility to punch a blackened star into the heart of a world destroying evil. My hand got frozen for the trouble. The Amazing Mr. Amazing and I then retired to France to clean out the Louvre and try dating.
My favourite moment was probably listening in on the last half of a conversation between my minion and my old love and jumping to completely the wrong conclusion.
Saturday afternoon was spent trying to find out who murdered my captain and several other passengers. Unfortunately I learned every other plot first, including the treason plot, which got me poisoned. My life was saved by a man who later turned out to be a cultist, but the antidote wiped out my memory of the event, making me useless as a witness. However when the restored my memories I remembered that in fact I was the killer of innocent children and passengers all along. After having a breakdown and reassuring myself that I now had magic beads that kept me sane (admittedly given to me by a lady who insisted on handing out bags of live spiders as the cure for everything) I pinned everything on the poisoner and the cultist and became ships captain.
My favorite moment was probably right after I was poisoned and I was incoherently babbling about a black bandana, but it was so mangled no-one could work out what I was saying.
Saturday evening…. A LOT of great things happened on Saturday evening.
Saturday evening confirmed my theory that loyal minions are in fact the best things ever as my dedicated winter court leapt to obey my every whim despite me being a psyco-crazy-bitch. I rampaged, I flirted, I gave cryptic advice, I froze the lips of anyone who kissed my hand but got very offended if they dared try to get out of it…
Much of the evening was spent in self-blinding denial that my daughter White-doe had murdered her sister Snowflake. Any-one who told me this to my face was very very lucky that they were on neutral ground, the only exception was my hand-maiden whom I probably would have let live due to her exceptional service and loyalty, but I still denied that she was in the right until I had no choice. White-Doe’s insistence that I was boring and the Red-court was more fun was very hurtful, as I personally prided myself on being the best torturer around. People kept trying to give me information on the murderer in exchange for favours when I was quite clear that what I WANTED was the murderers head on a plate, or at least their eyeballs on a stick.
I had good fun taunting the Denarians, especially the ones whose hosts still believed themselves to be in control. I deigned to give Al Capon a chance to make his case, but walked off laughing when he asked what I, I the Winter Lady, could bring to the table. Later I gave him another chance due to the tireless campaigning of his pet red court vampire. I liked the way he looked to my fey sight, and having a mortal hitman (who isn’t as well known as my loyal winter knight) could be useful… so I generously agreed to sign in return for three open-ended favours (which would not hurt his organisation or his family). This became an even better deal for me when he became a red court vampire, and the second in command of that group to boot! It almost made up for the disaster of the rest of the evening.
I slowly got more and more upset and crazy as the evening continued. At one point I had frozen a vampire into a vamp-ice-statue and was at the point of just declaring war on the Red Court as an outlet for my rage, but Duke Garcia quickly negotiated me down to simply killing this one vampire who was inappropriately close to my daughter. The deal was that the vamp could live as long as I got the real killers head on a platter, so I shoved a shard of ice into his heart that would kill him at midnight and stormed off. He then married my daughter while . This rather increased my desire to see him in pieces, still alive and screaming for preference, but since Garcia and I had a deal I was resigned to simply waiting for him to be dead.
Everything rather came to a head when my daughter (whom I had managed to freeze thanks to her being delayed by the most lovely were-wolf EVER and whom I will totally be trying to recruit to my side later) finally told me flat out she was the killer, and as I procrastinated (not actually wanting to kill her) her vamp-husband stabbed me in the back with cold iron. Of course at this point an outsider, a being I specifically existed to fight, arrived and began to cause havoc. The Winter Knight gave me his mantel back to keep me alive long enough to get me to the Summer Lady, who healed me. The imbalance caused by this mess was extreme, but luckily someone took care of the outsider while I was in pain. I spent the rest of the night horribly injured. I was forced to ask the Winter Knight to kill my daughter and indicated to the Summer Lady that if her Knight felt he could help in killing my daughter I wouldn’t get in the way/retaliate. The whole mess was particularly upsetting as the knife I was stabbed with had been offered to me as a gift earlier that evening by Mistress Gobbo in exchange for being freed from the Winter Court. She had earlier insulted me by telling the Summer Lady something rather than coming to me, so instead of taking the knife I had released her with the promise she would not try to evade her punishment (which thanks to the vamp getting his hands on her knife is now going to be EXTREMELY unpleasant. Seriously. People will be talking about it for millennia).
My favourite moment… too many… but I guess one I hadn’t covered above would be when early in the evening my handmaiden asked me who White-doe’s father had been, since apparently my daughter was asking. I told her it was just some mortal who had been fun at the time. Later that evening White Doe glamoured Tom’s character and dragged him to me with the words “Here’s a fun mortal, have more babies so I don’t have to be the Winter Lady!” I broke her enchantment and explained that if I wanted a mortal, then no matter who that mortal was I could HAVE that mortal with minimal effort. We then had to negotiate a weirguild for her breaking the accords.
Oh and the deal the Troll made with me that the temple dog could go home if she fought the Summer Knight and the Gruff and won… and then I missed both of the fights so I lost the dog AND didn’t get any entertainment out of it. I also missed the fight between the gruff and my troll, which was upsetting cause I LOVE watching my trolls and the Summer Ladies Gruffs duke it out.
… ok I’ll stop now.
Soooo moving on… on Sunday morning I was the Architect of a very fine city. I carefully planned everything, and it was quite annoying when people got in the way of my perfect vision. People insisted on being irrational and emotional about things, like art, which should only exist to serve a purpose. I needed to find a new designer, since mine had been killed, and somehow work out what the heck the Tokyoto ambassador wanted. I stalled her by claiming grief and then bluffed my way through the inevitable meeting using one of the potential new Designers. Turned out we’d borrowed and then destroyed a priceless artefact of a book. The city was almost destroyed by war but disaster was averted when it turned out the ambassadors bodyguard was the assassin, there was a decent forgery of the book available, and for some reason Tokyoko wanted the most irrational poet I had ever met as a citizen. I hired a new designer and continued my work. Apparently my designer later tried to get me assassinated…
Favourite moment. Explaining in perfect monotone that I couldn’t make any decisions right now, I was too emotional.
On Sunday afternoon I felt rather useless for most of the event until I successfully err… distracted the drunken Pirate Captain from trying to ‘help’ with my friends with their relationship issues . I also freed a Raven-fear demon from Sparrow (I TOLD that Alexandra we shouldn’t have tried talking to it), learned my favourite student was Puck (darn it), and found the true source of magic. He was a bit of a bully, but I convinced him to become my apprentice, figuring that with some one-on-one training and some proper heroics under his belt he’d come right. I also started hinting that he could take up a stage magician theme in order to continue my family tradition since I was unlikely to have kids all things considered (but no pressure. Really. You can come up with your own theme. But think about it…) . With my perfect occult knowledge and his extreme power I think we shall do well together, we shall use our powers for justice! Truth! And picking up chicks in bars! Merlin wasn’t happy about this, but really he’s only been a REAL mage for about a year, the true source of magic deserves a more experienced super-hero.
Favourite moments, staring down Merlin regarding my new apprentice, disappearing Jean’s rum under my hat “where is the RUM?!” and feeling a moment of terror that someone who was one of my best friends was genuinely going to strike me before another one of my friends shoved me out of the way and into a doorframe. It was intense.
In conclusion having loyal minions apparently makes games twice as fun for me.