T is for Tale

T is for Tale
Come tell us another story
Fill our minds with ease
And remove all doubts and worry.

What Can I Do?
You tell stories. You don't really know where they come from. At first you thought you were making them up, but you know better. The stories are too old for that, too primal. You can tell the tale of how fire was stolen from the heart of creation, of how the dark was left cold, of how bold heroes and ancient warriors, and terrible monsters. All passed down from ages gone, but no one ever told them to you.
When you tell these tales, people stop, and they listen. Tell the right tale and you can move them, make them laugh, or cry, or tremble in their shoes.
And it's not just people who listen. Tell the right story, and you can almost hear buildings lean down to listen, fire stills to embers to hear, the whole world stops, and listens to the oldest tales.
Not all the stories are that old, either, some are more recent. And they're always true. You can learn a lot by listening to yourself, or teach a lot.

1-2: Capture a small audience, or distract someone with a short tale. Shift or redirect their emotions. Tell a someone's life story, full of all the information they might know.

3-4: Completely change the emotional state of a large crowd. Still fire with the tale, stop an army with your words, halt even a bullet from a gun with the tale of the first death. Tell the story of a culture or an event in history to learn the truth about it.

5-6: Stop the whole world. So long as the story flows, everything else will stop, and wait, and depending how the story goes, the world may never be the same. Tell a story of the nature of reality to learn the greatest secrets, perhaps even the story of the Mad City, and how it came to be.

How Does it Break Me?

Fight
When things go down, you no longer feel the need to lash out with anything more than your tongue. Words fly to your mouth, and pass through your teeth almost by reflex, and words can be terrible. Stories of rage and death, of violence and war, fly from your lips with such power that they leave those who hear them nothing more than a miserable weeping ball of flesh.

Flight
The stories don't leave you much better. The truth about where the world comes from, how it was built on theft and death by terrible entities and archetypes, it can shatter the mind. You don't want to hear them anymore, but you can't stop speaking, babbling like an idiot through your tears as you try to shrink down and disappear, hide from your own words. But you can't hide from truth.

How Does it Change Me?
You become disillusioned. After all, there is no more illusion for you, only the stories, and the truth. You understand the world, the narrative that flows through it, that made it what it is. You're sick of it. But, you can't help but keep telling the stories, passing them on to others, letting the truth be known, be spread, and each time you tell you tell them better, with more details, greater poetry, greater art.

What Am I Becoming?
You can't stay in the Mad City when you have these stories. You must spread them also to the City Slumbering, and people there will listen just as much. You travel from city to city spreading the word. You dispense the truth, and as such become the Biblical serpent, dispenser of knowledge, and you change to fit that reality. Your arms and legs wither away, and your body becomes a long ophidian tail, though your face remains your own. You shift from city to city dispensing the stories, the truths of the Universe, as a Tail of Two Cities.