Synodiporia OOC community

In the world of Chikyuumaru, for a generation, people have been finding ways to cope with the mutagenic epidemic called X-Pressure. X-Pressure is unique in that it makes the body more like the mind in unprecedented ways, and over time, the stigma of infection has faded, and people have adapted to the unique abilities left in its wake. Among the most common strains of X-Pressure are Audiocaudal Syndrome - developing animalistic ears and tail - and Ganymede Syndrome - the acceleration or regression of aging processes to leave an individual with a physical & hormonal maturity typical for those between 14 & 18 years old.

But it’s not all bad. A large percentage of people are naturally immune to X-Pressure, and even those affected can lead normal lives - in fact, there are advantages. Social Techniques, or S.Tech, have long been recognized as a powerful advantage in business, politics, romance, and entertainment, but many X-Pressure carriers have a heightened grasp of S.Tech, becoming true adepts, able to use words and gesture to convey their message by manifesting glitter, or hearts, or flower petals, changing the weather around themselves, or in a variety of other ways.

The most elite school for training S.Tech Masters is Heartbeat Academy, or Doki Doki no Gakuen, in the city of Bunkyo, Nihon. Heartbeat Academy teaches all of its students, both the X-Pressure affected and natural adepts, how to harness their feelings and channel them into S.Tech using Emo Medi, or Emotional Meditation, which intensifies and empowers already volatile teenaged emotions, allowing them to cry literal lakes of tears, light fires with anger, brighten dark rooms with joy... Additionally, there is a fine curriculum of politics, economics, psychology, media, philosophy, and domestic studies.

But it’s not the only school. And every year, between fall term and spring term, there’s an Exhibition Exposition Competition in Yokohama, where the Top Four schools compete in S. Tech & Emo Medi events. While Doki Doki is generally regarded as the best of the Top Four, and has a record number of titles, the underdogs are still fierce competition - the military academy, Hagane no Gakuen; Tensai no Gakuen, which holds the best standardized test scores in the country, and the exotic and prestigious Mahou Kagaku no Gakuen, which studies Western S. Tech techniques and accepts a great many foreign students.

This year, the competitors being sent to the festival are dramatically reduced - an X-Pressure outbreak spreading less common strains of the disease has struck, like a flu epidemic, and many competitors are staying home. But not the most determined. For the teachers, it’s a matter of pride to coach the winning team, and the pressure is on. For the students, it isn’t just the jy of representing their school - it’s a chance to show off and cut loose in a new city, to sneak out at night and hit the tourist spots, to make friends or find blossoming romance.

Whatever school they’re from, the competitors and their chaperones have just one week to make things count.

Skills & S. Tech | The Competition | Schedule | Player Resources | Questions | Plotting

A return to the Cursed Kingdom setting, from Nov. 7th-Dec. 17th.

When an elder wyrm flies north from the Ash Wastes, the Baroness of Flamegard leads an embassy of diplomats, dragonslayers, gryphon knights, and hedge-magicians heads to the nearby frontier city-state of Misericordia to track it, but finds themselves under suspicion from the moment they arrive, quarantined along with a cadre of wandering tinkers and other foreigners.

( Read more... )

But if the dragon can shapeshift, it could be any one of them, at any time... or their own suspicion could tear one another apart.

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THE LIGHTNING AGE
September 12th-October 19th

It is the Hijra year 1314, the 12th day of Rabi Al-Akhir, and in the Flying Market of Nova Venezia, there is trouble. That is not new. Nova Venezia is a balloon city, tethered above the neutral city-state of Venice, a Vatican protectorate. At first, the balloons were meant only to keep the buildings below from sinking, but the people who maintained them began to build settlements on their platforms, and eventually it became a small but thriving sky-port.

Northern Italy lies at the border of three of the Great Imperial Powers. To the north and east, the Prusso-Zaporizhian Empire, a warrior-state of aerialists whose superiority in the skies is unquestionable. To the south and east, the Golden Khanate, a pan-asian pluralist kingdom who have done things with gunpowder no other nation has dreamed of. To the west, both north and south, the Ummah Caliphate, careful mercantile masters of steam science whose rule circles the Mediterranean.

To all three of the Powers, no resource is more valuable, or weapon more dangerous, than the innovations of the human mind. And the Prussians and Caliphate have both dispatched forces to the Flying Market now seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Captain Phoenix, a pyromaniacal pirate, used to be a servant of the Caliph, may he live forever, before the Captain’s impetuous ways and destructive urges became simply too much. The greatest pyrotechnician in the world, the Captain is a human time-bomb in every sense but the literal, and is hiding in a city held up by vast envelopes of hydrogen gas.

Herr Doktor Kilroy Schweizerkaze Von Blitzkopf was once the greatest aeronautical engineer in the Prussian arsenal, designer of airships which could survive thunderstorms unscathed, until the good Doktor raided designs, arsenal, and fleet, and vanished utterly for causes unknown. Blitzkopf, along with the Masked Senseis of Uchinaa, is a master of electricity, deviser of devices which can run on this strange force and not mere hydraulic power or combustion. The nation who owns the Doktor can harness the lightning. But again, not the most comfortable personage to share a balloon with, really.

Into this morass of espionage, manhunt, and international trade; sky pirates, smugglers, and innovators from around the world, a new element has come into the mix. Foreigners not only to the nation, but to the world itself. Paranoids and conspiracy theorists have whispered of their existence for a year, and some in Venezia remember them, and know a few signs and tricks that may be used to identify and get the better of these strange invaders… because knowledge is power, power is money, money is opportunity - and opportunity is about to strike like lightning.

The question is what it will leave behind.

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The Harrowing of Harrogate: January 10th-February 13th

May, 1897. Harrogate, Yorkshire, England. Amidst moors and bare highland rock is a curiously prosperous little village, once used as a Viking gravesite. The unusual properties of its waters are key to its success - it became a spa town, a reclusive resort for blue-bloods of all Europe’s ancient lineages, when sulfurous mineral springs were discovered there. Its eccentric, philanthropic mayor tapped those same waters to make Harrogate one of the first cities in the world lit my gas-lamp. Nights in Harrogate’s streets are not black as pitch, but a pleasant quavering green.

In one month, Queen Victoria will have sat her throne for sixty years. An auspicious number. An influx of celebrants from the continent is expected any day. The townsfolk are girding themselves for the occasion, making preparations. The mayor, who built the town theater, has commissioned a classic play translated from German, in the honor of the late Prince Albert, and hired a troupe of traveling players to put it on. The village’s more mystic clubs for gentlefolk - the Hellfire club (notorious for its decadent immorality), and the resurrected druidic sect The Scions of Silver Dawn - are both recruiting, advertising their mysterious ways. And of course, when the rich come to town, thieves always follow, scenting gold like crows scenting blood before battle.

Far out on the moors, a sinkhole has opened up, revealing within it a Lake, perfectly round, prone to the same mineral vapors that make the spas famous. In honor of the grove of trees nearby, local geographers have taken to calling it Lake Holly.

Drifters and vagabonds near town have been disappearing - and, indeed, a few locals. But the moor has always swallowed travelers, a few a year. It is natural. No cause for alarm.

in one month, on the occasion of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, there will be a party such as Harrogate has never seen. Reveling in the streets, strangers and townfolk, noblemen and actors, thieves and druids and notorious cultists alike. All will rejoice. And the play the mayor commissioned will be performed. The show must go on. It is the centerpiece to all of this.

Harrogate is an idyllic place. What possible imagined catastrophe could dampen the spirits of the town between now and Opening Night?

Please indicate under the Permissions thread which characters you're all right subjecting to body horror, mental trauma, temporary insanity, and possible death. It's cool to itemize, and be okay with some of those things and not others. Anyone uncomfortable with these aspects will still have ways to meaningfully participate; however, anyone not okay with at least one of these dangers should not become a plot-important infiltrator, all of whom will be at risk. Other infiltrators may be exposed to just as much danger as you like.

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( Could you be... The Last of Us? (updated as of 10/17/2014) )

La Tour Ivoire Academe is an isolated university in a world devastated by nuclear and chemical warfare. A safe haven, a center of learning, it takes in refugees and trains them to make a difference in the outer world. Surrounded by high walls and running water to keep out contamination, its greenhouse-gardens grow all the food needed, its underground generators make the place self-sufficient - a helicopter and a radio tower are its only links to the outside world. In a way, it’s a little slice of paradise on a planet gone to Hell.

But there’s always the problem of funding. Three departments trying to save the world in three different ways are competing for the same grant money. Technical Systems & Salvage has spent years working to push the school’s computers and electronics up to the mid-1980s or so, but is it really worth it to struggle so hard to regain the technologies that helped destroy the world? Ecological Sciences ranges from physics to biology in an effort to re-terraform the world around them, but how much of a difference can they really make on a global scale? Cultures & Humanities insists that it is our expression of knowledge that makes us worth saving - music, philosophy, history; all the knowledge and beauty of human endeavor… but very little that will help anyone survive without hazard gear outside the walls.

Who gets the grant may determine the course of the future, funding the research that saves the world. Or… it may make no difference at all. Academia always looks important to academics, after all, but there are other schools, other researchers, and nobody is facing the end of their department - just more or less funding from the outside world for the next five years. Whichever department has the most impressive project will win it.

But that isn’t all that’s happening in the school. A new batch of refugees has appeared outside the walls, asking for admission, and settling these strangers into the comfortable routines of the school will take a lot of work - after all, Investigators aren’t your typical student body or prospective faculty.

And then, of course, there’s The Ground, the coffeeshop at the base of the University Tower, just where the lightning rod touches earth. In the ground, new coffee-grinders and brewing machines deliver the product from new organically grown beans to students having new conversations, listening to new entertainments - the only place on campus safe from departmental rivalries, because it’s so dependent on all three. But the Grant Committee has to get its funding from somewhere… and a coffee-shop seems like a frivolous luxury for students.

Can it be saved? Can the money be found elsewhere? Even that might not stop students from worrying about their grades and relationships, and to Travelers used to the fate of empires hanging in the balance… mostly, it seems like a nice vacation, and a chance to get caught up on their reading. And it might not be any more complicated than that.

Welcome to the Ivory Tower.

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