Jump 053: Sword and Sorcery

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Jump #53: Sword and Sorcery
>The World (A great work. Achievement, reward, and well-earned recognition.)
A fitting card for Sword and Sorcery. I've been looking forward to this for some time now, especially since I didn't take any drawbacks the first time around. The change to this jump makes it all the sweeter for me.
>Age: 32
>Location: The Blasted Wastes
>Identity: Sorcerer (-50)
I have become but a man. No longer a vampire, no longer a lich, no longer a mind flayer. Perhaps this is for the best. Perhaps it is time to embrace my humanity again.
>Drawbacks: Branded And Shamed (+200), To Live In Interesting Times (+200), A Stolen Mantle (+300), The Root Of All Stories (+300)
Marked by a ritual that stole that which I was gifted. Branded when sold into slavery. Locked into a struggle that will last me all of my time here. Yes... this will be something, all right.
>To Truly Live (100)
I need not concern myself about losing focus. There is no room for doubt, there is no time for worry. The worlds await.
>The Will To Live (100)
Not all worlds will be friendly to me. This one is my most immediate concern, but this is certainly going to be merely one of many. I shall let no man break me, nor bend me to their will. If my travel between worlds is meant to be a crucible, I shall be hardened as steel in a forge.
>One of the Wise (Free, Sorcerer)
An affinity toward that which is presently considered the realm of sorcerers and alchemists... and in the future, scientists and chemists.
>A Scholar's Treasure (50, Sorcerer)
More easily locating things worthy of attention, most useful.
>To Treat With Spirits (150, Sorcerer)
I wonder if there are merely otherworldly spirits, or if I can indeed conjure the dead?
>The Arcane Craft (150, Sorcerer)
Channeling arcane power... creating such things for those who need it... knowing how to use that which already exists.
>The Heart of Man (600)
Quite possibly the most important thing for me to gain and keep: perspective. Instead of looking through the lens of my experience, I can see things clearly on their own merits, both good and bad. This is quite possibly the one thing that changes Sword and Sorcery from being only a cornerstone of my chain to quite possibly being the keystone.
>A Wanderer's Cloak (100)
I will be travelling for a very long time, and protection from the elements is treasured.
>A Thief's Satchel (100)
A satchel with a fondness for nostalgia, perhaps... or something more.
>An Occult Tome (Free, Sorcerer)
A curious book, one that I shall reference for a long time to come. It shows what happened to me. It shows how to manipulate the energies of this world... how to regain that which was taken from me, piece by piece... how to consolidate my abilities, help them grow in harmony. Yes, very useful.
>An Arcane Tool (100, Sorcerer)
A simple rod cast of some rough, crude metal, fourteen inches in length... reminding me of a wand that I once had at my side, but no longe, but with an even greater ability to act as a magical focus.
>An Arcane Chamber (200, Sorcerer)
A suitable place for any and all magical ceremonies.
>The Eye of Set (300, Sorcerer)
This gem fit onto the tip of the rod, as if the rod were meant for it... and the rod shimmered, abruptly becoming more solid, shifting from the black of pig iron to the silver of steel. How curious.

I woke from darkness to find myself bound upon an altar and nude. Not the way I would have hoped to start a new jump, but it was the way of things. My immediate desire was escape, but I found myself unable to take any action as the dozens of men in the tiers of the chamber I was in chanted, feeling myself weaken with every passing second. In time this came to an end and one of the robed men came over to release me, only for his apparent subordinates to grab me and drag me away with unnaturally strong arms.

I was given to what I came to understand very quickly were slavers, and cruel at that. They branded me as they branded everyone, and when I finally was alone to inspect myself I found that I had strange tattoos etched into my skin in a language I could not, all over my body. My first attempt to escape the slavers was unsuccessful thanks to bad timing and a slaver I had not seen, and they dragged me back after beating me - but not beating me hard enough to make me useless for work to them. The next morning they lined all of us up. "Look to your left. Look to your right. The next time any of you try to escape, we will kill not just you, but also the slaves standing beside you."

The other slaves did not talk to me for a week, and I had to fend off beatings from some others for weeks afterward. Once about ninety days in total had passed, however... I was found missing from the morning count. The slavers looked, but did not find me, and threatened to kill the slaves' families if the men did not go out to find me in the wasteland. And so, the men fanned out, about half the slavers going with them, the other half staying behind with the now-hostage slave women and children. What they did not expect, however, is that I had never left - as they roamed about, they found their numbers dwindling. I had been stripped of my powers, but I was fresh from Metal Gear at the time, and while I may not have been at the peak of my skills, having exercised CQC for twenty years is bound to leave some muscle memory. Not to mention skills obtained over the years that did not rely on perks.

When the slavers and the men returned, they did so in small and irregular groups, to find the women guarded by dead men. They did not see that they were corpses, only quiet, some of them in positions that feigned sleep; by the time they were close enough to realize they'd fallen into a trap, either I had come up to attack them, or the slaves themselves realized what was going on and did so.

Mere hours after I had feigned my escape, the slaves were all free, and while they still had no trust for a tattooed and branded stranger even though he'd freed them, they were nonetheless thankful for their liberty and fled to rejoin their tribes. I returned to the location that I'd been taken from, now a free man, and found a deserted spire. I searched it and found a few artifacts, but it had been clearly stripped bare, save for the gilded arcane chamber at its heart. The cloak I found would be useful to protect me from the sandstorms and the sun, the satchel worked to carry whatever I might need... but the tome was the key to find what happened to me, and how I could fix it. The metal rod called out to my senses, as did the gemstone in a statue of Set, and combining the two had definite effects. I left the tower and followed my instincts, locating a township nearby and staying under my cloak to hide my marred appearance. I heard from there that many things has changed in the nearby world - some kingdoms had fallen into the grips of iron fisted tyrants, while others had been abruptly dissolved and splintered apart by warlords, while a handful of others were travelling about and pillaging for their own fun.

I spent time there there quietly working on the local type of magic, before I came across one such... or rather, he came across me, while he brought his fellows along with him to simply act like jackasses right out of Fist of the North Star. The locals did not take well to this, and unsurprisingly they reacted a little better than one might expect while waiting for Kenshiro, but seeing several of the raiders attacking having otherworldly talents, and their leader outright being supernatural - an obscenely overpowered vampire, with a form similar to one I recall having - made things difficult for those trying to resist, even if he was slightly weakened in sunlight he was still obscenely powerful.

I cast a spell that would freeze him in place, then calmly walking over and decapitated him with a borrowed khopesh as he ranted at me - this dealt with him handily in a way he couldn't avoid. His minions watched, transfixed, as his body dissolved into golden motes and I regained the power stolen from me - but only a small fraction of what should have been mine. Still, it was enough to push me from human to superhuman, if only just, and it made the fight against the remaining raiders a rout. When the winds blew my cloak open in the wake of the battle, I found that some of the inscriptions on my skin were now gold instead of black. The course of action from that point seemed quite clear.

Of the fights to come, the worst was two years later against three men who had seized a small kingdom and split it into three, but who united to fight against me. I recognized the powers brought to bear against me - how could I not? - and witnessed a Dead Apostle, a planetouched warlock, and a firebender uniting to charge at me. By then I'd hunted down the dozen-and-a-half warlords who were said to roam the wastes and been working on eradicating the slavers across the land. There was no practical purpose to slavery here, or at least not the cruel implementation that they had. Regardless... a Dead Apostle is not impossible to kill, certainly not outside of the world where they belong, and as for the others, it was not too difficult to deal with them when I had a moment that I was not on the defensive.

From there... I began my attacks on the rest of the cultists who'd stolen my abilities and gotten themselves entrenched. The first was one that had taken my abilities from A Certain Scientific Railgun, and met me at a crossroads and knelt, exposing his neck.

>"I have seen how this ends. I am no good man, but I do not want to see the world consumed by fire - I have a family and their lives must be spared. Take my life. Reclaim your mantle. Find Charon and strike him down."

Like him, a few cultists regretted what they did, but there was only one way to take back what they'd stolen, and it was the cost of their lives.

I faced no armies, and with only the barest remnants of my power I found and faced the man who called himself Charon. I saw in him a shadow of what I could have become, if I'd chosen to embrace inhumanity instead. He sent men after me, men who swore to defend him, and while they slowed my approach they did not stop it. Each of them that I slew caused a tattooed letter to fade from black to gold - some of them with their own pieces of my power, others with things that belonged in my warehouse. All such things that fit in the satchel, fortunately.

In the end, I confronted Charon in his throne room. A bleak and desolate place decorated with the broken bodies of his enemies, his throne put together from the skulls of the fallen. And he faced me with my wand in hand. I was now wearing a mailed glove - a couple of my own artifacts had merged with the rod that I carried, and now it shifted shape and had assumed a golden color, my recovered hand cannon gripped within it. He was quite irate that I refused to kneel to him, in hopes of sparing myself the fate of everyone else who had confronted him.

>"I'll flay the skin from the bones and destroy you where you stand!", screamed he.
"You've already lost," I responded. "There is no point to it."
>"You could never hope to strike me down. I have power enough to make even the gods quake!"
"And yet, with the power at your fingertips to create a paradise the likes of which the world has never seen, you used it to dig a graveyard and call it a kingdom."
>"Kings kneel before me! Men weep when they see my visage!"
"You're a twelve foot tall walking skeleton. The common man is going to piss himself and pray if he sees you. Regardless, you've already lost. You know it, or else you would have attacked me already," I said, and this served to enrage him as I hoped it might.

I raised the hand cannon - some may recall this weapon was made to kill the supernatural, and was empowered enough to kill gods before I retired it - and pulled the trigger even as his hands wrapped around my throat.. Light flashed from the barrel and Charon's sternum imploded, as though his whole ribcage had suffered a hammer blow. He stumbled to a stop on hands and knees. I raised the pistol again and fired - his skull shattered, and he exploded into golden sparks afterward.

The man was a king by his own hand, perhaps, but took that crown with stolen magic and powers... a king only of bones and dust. The crushed ruin sank into the ground behind me as I walked away, left to be forgotten in the sands of the wasteland, joining its owner in the oblivion of obscurity.



Old Version:

>Jump 53: Sword and Sorcery
>Judgement (A change in point of view, most frequently towards greater enlightenment.)
Okay, okay. I've been really immature the last couple of jumps. Maybe this is the point where I need to start thinking of the future instead of just screwing with everyone.
>Age: 32
>Location: The Blasted Wastes
>Identity: Sorcerer (-50)
Sorcerer vampire mind flayer lich. Yeah, that pretty much sums me up.
>One of the Wise (Free, Sorcerer)
So, an affinity toward what might have once been considered the realms of alchemy and sorcerers? Sensible. That's where mathematics got much progression, after all.
>A Scholar's Treasure (900, Sorcerer)
Finding more artifacts and treasures of such types. Most certainly.
>To Treat With Spirits (750, Sorcerer)
Now here's an interesting one. I wonder if these are merely otherworldly spirits or if I can conjure up the dead? That has implications.
>The Arcane Craft (600, Sorcerer)
Ah, and building up the artifacts and magitech, here we go. A pity neither of the capstones appeal to me, but everyone has their own tastes.
>An Occult Tome (Free, Sorcerer)
I can see that I'm going to be referencing this for a long time to come.
>An Arcane Tool (500, Sorcerer)
You know what? I think I'm going to integrate this with the Skeleton Key from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Let it have the appearance of an orb while at rest, and when in my hand change its form as I will it. It matches being a Ditto, after all, and will work nicely to channel magic as needed, whether a staff, a wand, a ring, or a gauntlet.
>An Arcane Chamber (300, Sorcerer)
Finally, a suitable place for doing everything. I don't think it's going to be as dark as I intended before, instead we're looking at something well-lit. Just a place that will suit my needs for all types of work and not keep any persisting energies from the aftermath, good or bad.
>The Eye of Set (0, Sorcerer)
This... this is going to be integrated with my arcane tool, whenever I need to get a little extra oomph. Coupled with Overcharge... well. If I need to use a spell designed for one opponent to eliminate fifty, or change a fireball spell to a nuke, it will be the thing to use. And especially for crafting any artifacts.

Damn, I always end up with building things as a big part of my chains.

I can only imagine what the locals might think when a floating city appears above the wasteland, a city populated by a half million magic users, even if they are mostly cantrips. But Carcosa is a place for the intreped locals to visit, and while I'm sure that many of them will, my place is on the ground, seeing what this world has to offer. I suppose if anything I am but an ambassador of the city, hardly a leader, just someone who works to make the lives of everyone there a bit better... and, hopefully, those on the ground as well.

Plus it means I get to claim diplomatic immunity if things go south, which they INEVITABLY will.