Millimax (ᴀᴋᴀ “Kettle Hooves”) @millimax@high.cat

alright this gets meta but hear me out

[dc] means 'destiny crusade' because that's the title
[ooc] means 'out of character' because it's complicated

i'm still gonna be lovable old me but i'm getting the chance to show up in a game @orrery is running for my friends @mawr and @kelseyhusky and @IceWeasel and @kobunny

if you see [dc] but not [ooc] then it's my game-me's journal

if you don't see those it's just me being stoned

i feel i should explain the look of my legs in my user photo here because i'm not a "robot" pony or a "cyborg" or any sort of machine or portion of

i am a living sculpture and i will resculpt myself in copper and porcelain until i am whole even if i have to get there one piece at a time

the big difference here is that the first is a mind-meltingly complicated system of logic circuits and actuators and code

the second is just me haunting a pony-shaped teapot

then the fighting ended and our group was alive so that part was good

medya and zer' got me home safely so i'm journaling this now in case memories get fuzzy later on

i learned so much today

i now understand the minimum safe distance for lecturing

i have a new appreciation for what directions one can fall in

and it's a good thing i already prepared the casting molds because i'll need my new front legs a little more urgently now

this pair doesn't work right anymore

then i saw an archer nock three large arrows at once on a very large bow so i pinned them to the pit's wall

medya swooped at them with her crossbow and ... she's a good shot

i was still in shock so it didn't occur to me in the moment but that's the first time she's ever taken a life

part of me wishes i hadn't seen that

she did the right thing but i can tell she's affected by it and we'll have to spend some time working through those feelings

oh medya i'm so sorry

zer' healed me and teleported me out of harm's way but i missed that part

the next thing i knew i was very groggy and on my side near the rim of the pit and i heard shouting

i tried to stand up but i couldn't get my front legs under me so i pushed myself with just my hinds so i could see

cazha wasn't visible but i saw that spark was in very bad shape so i focused and cast my renewal spell and somehow it worked even though she was at least a dozen pony-lengths away

there was a burst of motion so fast i didn't even have a chance to react

she dashed forward and swung her maul at my legs

i felt more than saw the magenta flash as the spell matrix of my sculpted shell collapsed

i definitely felt everything go very wrong with the flesh and bone of the legs i grew up with

and then before i could begin to process and fully commit to panic she caught me with a second swing and i lost track of gravity and then consciousness

there was a crowd around a large natural pit in which cazha and zhakil and four others stood waiting

i layered a couple defensive spells on myself and we descended the ramp

cazha stood there with a very large maul resting across her shoulders

i walked up to what seemed a safe distance and explained why it was in her best interest to release lem and avoid a fight she couldn't win

i honestly expected i'd get some sort of verbal response from her

i don't remember adding the word "falling" to this journal but there it is

i'd better explain

after we got word from zhakil that cazha planned to bait us into an ambush i made some preparations in the form of spell-infused tokens for medya to carry but the whole time i was lining up what i would say to her when we got there

i even managed to trim it to a very short lecture before i sensed lem's alarm token

i refined it further as we travelled to "malleon's gate"

so a fairly dramatic ouchy thing of the grievous bodily harm sort happened to yours truly during the most recent game session and that means posting about it here

i promise that there won't be any gory descriptions or extended dwelling on the matter (in large part because i'm not interested in dragging it all out) but it seemed worth giving a heads-up to anyone reading

don't worry folks this is going to work out just fine

falling

any guesses why lem didn't come back from running a errand?

don't bother guessing

zhakil dropped by to tell us that cazha had him abducted and stashed in the back of shamukaar

she's headed somewhere else with his emergency alert-us-if-something-goes-wrong token and she plans to trigger it and see what we do

we have about an hour to prepare

i am extremely done with cazha's game and today we are ending it for good and for goodness

i must have hit a nerve because that's when he got up and stormed out of the h&h

spark and relic chased after him to make sure he wouldn't be wandering around alone

and that brings us to now

i've been working with bell on ideas to help him make the necessary leap of self-acceptance but right now i'm frustrated because he's the one blocking his own progress

so brilliant but so bucking stubborn

he dismissed my current forelegs as not even being a worthy proof of concept

i told him i knew that but i made them to ease my internal disquiet before i left the everglow precisely so i wouldn't rush and make the same kind of mistake he had

he said his work was absolutely perfect and dared me to explain what was missing

i said "you don't love that arm like part of you and from the look of it you don't even love yourself and that's what's missing"

it's like he went down the checklist of every motion he needed it to be capable of but never put a single thought toward aesthetics or expression

he went on about how there was nothing wrong with his design and then in the same breath he'd complain about how it wouldn't do what he wanted

he said "the mana bleed is just feedback from the failing emotional response" as though that were just a symptom and not the root cause

anyhow a good night's rest brings me to this morning

apparently transom came by to ask if the h&h was hiring and the answer was yes so now we have an administrative assistant who's learning the basics of forged renewal under bell

meanwhile i sat with morran to study the arm he made for himself

the good part? it's the very model of precision and functionality

the bad part? that's all it is

bell said it best when she said "i feel like i'm putting together a jigsaw puzzle and i just found a fifth corner piece”

the manuals we found in eston were helpful but for anything to do with the core directly they reference "the whitehearth manuals"

"whitehearth" was the cannith family workshop in some other part of what is now the mournland

i wonder how many more puzzle pieces we'll find there

given her journals and what we learned in cinnabar's autopsy i think dust makes sense now

she wanted the stuff to be a gift of comfort to her fellow forged in the same way glitterreed is to ponies

but she may have wanted that primarily to spite the grown who would be attracted to the stuff and then become addicted to a painful poison

i'm glad whatever possessed her to do that is gone

i wish her life hadn't been defined by cruelty

i could ramble about cinnabar's shell and metamatrix for days but i'll skip to the most important part

zer' identified her core as being made of "mabaran obsidian"

"mabar" is the plane of night and the blacker-than-black crystal sure gave that impression

it was clearly the source of the "raw" cinnabar referred to in her journals and her core's casing still had some of the same purple glow

it felt like she was designed to operate entirely on spite

brief digression here since morran explained

d'cannith merrix 1 is widely credited for creating the "warforged"

what he actually did was take an existing schema he couldn't fully understand and fill in the gaps with awkward work-arounds

where'd he get that schema? he reverse-cast it from his son aaren's work on what he called a "forgeborn"

morran knew this forgeborn from his youth but couldn't bring himself to talk about that

more mysteries

it seemed like a good time to autopsy cinnabar's remains

first i quietly apologized and thanked her because we obviously couldn't ask permission but she'd be helping us learn a lot

leali and lem took notes while morran shared his knowledge and bell and i set to it

she was at most twenty years old and morran was unfamiliar with some of the methods in her metamatrix but he said it looked like his grandfather's custom work

when we shared the note the others agreed that it was worrying but the h&h was well protected so that counts as careful

when we described the messenger lem was reminded of a daask lieutenant named "takren" but she's dead so probably not? unless necromancy?

anyhow leali was there with morran's dissertation and she had to dig it out of a sealed archive so someone really wanted it not to be seen

probably merrix 1 – morran's grandfather

what a family

after visiting every apothecary in the "everbright" district – and getting the "trying to pretend one isn't surprised by the sight of a unicorn and a gryphon" reaction from all but one – we managed to fill the list

we were enjoying a quick meal on the way back when medya noticed we'd been followed

they walked past us and dropped a note which read "you have friends; be careful"

and with that so-simple-it's-baffling statement we decided to hurry home