Back to comparatively interesting and reasonable Ratcatcher!

So, he’s still climbing the metal-thorn-rail steps and being all :D at how he’s jamming his hand into barbs without any injury.

Even the pain this inflicted was slight, just a vague reminder that in a sane world, such wounds should render him gasping with agony.

Ratcatcher than thinks that this probably is just an underworld thing, but resolves to test it just in case because hey, maybe he’s super double invulnerable for reals now. Anyway, if somehow that’s true, then perhaps the prince would learn a few lessons himself the next time he tried to exact some discipline. As if that’s really what keeps you obeying him, Ratcatcher.

He recognized the doorway, of course. It was the entrance to the Prince of Shadows’ dungeons, a route he’d taken many times before. He did not recall there being quite so many stairs, but he shrugged this inconsistency off after a moment. Things down here changed. That was the only constant; that and shadow.

I’m not sure what’s being said here. Ratcatcher is still in the underworld, so that means he’s referring to a door directly between the dungeons and the underworld, but the door we know connects to the underworld last book wasn’t in the dungeons because Wren has to leave them and wander around a bunch before finding it. And furthermore, that door isn’t in use – Ratcatcher didn’t come that way when summoned and the Prince of Shadows has it barred and the stairs give way to void pretty quick, which was presumably why the neverborn had to make stairs for Ratcatcher to go up. So how can he be looking at this and thinking it’s the thing he uses all the time that normally has just a few stairs?

My best guess is this is a clue we’re still in neverborn dreamtime and so this is running on dream logic. Ratcatcher is confusing this door with the dungeon door that’s inside the castle with a regular staircase leading to it then brushing off the inconsistencies that result.

The door is also open.

The lintel was surmounted with sigils and runes, all glowing a soft, poisonous green. Ratcatcher read them with mild interest. They were warnings and guardians, an announcement of the prince’s curse on any who’d dare trespass on his domain. There were threats of torment as well, detailed scripts of vengeance to be enacted, and a few other less interesting notations.
“Unusual,” Ratcatcher said, and reached up with a bare hand to caress the runes. They snapped and crackled at his touch, and small gouts of energy splashed over his fingers. He felt an unpleasant warmth, but nothing else, and abruptly the glow faded. The signs were still there, but dull and dark. He sensed that they still had power, but instead of warning they would now ambush. Sooner or later something would come crawling up out of the dark, see the open doorway, and attempt to shamble through. Then the runes would strike, and the twisted remains of whatever made the attempt would serve as a better warning than any message the prince had left behind.
The thought made him smile, and he stepped through the door.

This is even more confusing. These don’t seem to have been there before because Wren just sees a black void. So, after the Prince of Shadows bars the gate, he comes back down to open it up to stick sigils all over it, and he’s insecure enough to have them be warnings rather than being a proper abyssal and just killing everything that displeases him until natural selection fixes things.

The sigils either are capable of discriminating between wanted and unwanted guests or the neverborn can LOLNOPE them or Ratcatcher’s current neverborn-fueled sorta existence is just too confusing for the spell.

Regardless, the neverborn and/or Ratcatcher (he certainly seems to like the idea and who knows how much control he has over where this dream logic fanfic is going) then alter the spell to become unobvious as a sort of passive-aggressive note about how proper abyssals should behave, which is hilarious but ironically also doesn’t seem like how abyssals should behave.

Anyway, as soon as he goes through the stairs all crumble to dust and the doorway is just void, which is what the passage to the Prince’s castle normally looks like as far as I can tell. It may well be that the stairs actually didn’t exist in the first place and what he saw was just sort of like an afterimage of a dream as you wake up.

The meaning of this was clear, he thought. There was no turning back.

No, there’s definitely lots of different meanings we can read into it besides the boringly obvious direct metaphor. Show some imagination, Ratcatcher! If you dismiss everything as metaphor you’ll never get to speculate on metaphysics.

After a moment’s search in the dim light, Ratcatcher found the scarred and heavy bar that should lay across the door, and hefted it. It was lighter than he remembered, or perhaps he was stronger.

For example, dismissing that as having some sort of narrative meaning would miss out on the fact I’m pretty sure that just confirmed Ratcatcher is on his third character sheet. He’s got a really nice GM! Even someone letting a person get back their old character wouldn’t usually say it’s okay to redistribute all your dots. On the other hand, given what a failtastic semibyssal Ratcatcher started off as, maybe he made the pitch that this was just helping Ratcatcher to be what the character should’ve been all along.

He then explains that despite the lack of stairs to the doorway and the super magic on the doorway, something still might climb up out of the Labyrinth to pound on the prince’s door, and where magic might fail honest timber and iron might still prevail on occasion. No, I don’t think so. Doubly so, actally – as “honest timber” is so very worthless for this, there’s no way the Prince wouldn’t be using something else for barring the door in the first place.

He then says that also a locked door reminds you there’s no retreat so you won’t be tempted and again, no, not so much, and again, doubly so! An exalt could punch through it and an exalt wouldn’t need to given you’re on the side with the bar and could just unbar it again good god Ratcatcher did you use your mental stats as the dump ones? I thought your player knew what they were doing by now! And you’re about to go up against a social monkey wtf how did this seem like a good plan?!

He then walks to the “next chamber” after what he previously claimed was the door to the dungeons, and it’s a random small room that has his stuff ready for him. At this point, I give up and I’m just going to assume the castle is close enough to the Labyrinth itself that the neverborn can shift it around a bit.

With his stuff is a new shield.

It was made from heavy wood banded with steel, and the entire thing was lacquered over in black. The spike in the center looked to be pure silver, its point sharp enough to punch through most armor.

1) Exalted doesn’t actually run on pure bullshit. Pure silver is just as soft in their universe as it is in ours.

2) To access the LOLNOPE of Exalted items, you need magical materials. That and only that is how you get invulnerable items. “Heavy wood” all you need for a shield? In a universe where people can use moose to play hackysack?

ARG. Why not soulsteel? A soulsteel spiked shield works so well! It so clearly gets across not only “I want to hurt you more than I want not to be hurt” but also “here’s how I hurt lots of people and how I’ll be hurting your ghost later!”

Anyway, this didn’t just materialize out of thin air. Instead there’s some weird servants behind it all.

The general theme of the servants seems to be underground maggot. pale skin and bulging eyes, thick, wet voices, pudgy feet and hands, Bulging, bloodshot eyes met Ratcatcher’s. Fat, blubbery lips quivered. A thin line of drool spilled from one comer of the soft mouth. Ratcatcher, who huggles humadoggies and literally was a bloated river corpse, finds them gross and pokes them with his sword rather than touching them.

They are, for all this, weirdly complex characters. While at the moment they’re falling over themselves to grovel and make out with his shoes, they’ll first claim to have been given to him by Pelesh the mortal who pwned Ratcatcher in social combat, then be weirdly assertive about how oh no Ratcatcher you can’t X you need us to Z for you first and how it’d be so mean to not put on the stuff they worked so hard on and muffled giggles when they talk about how yeah sure they’ll take him to Pelesh in just a second, and then things finally got obvious enough even he noticed:

“It’s marvelous,” Ratcatcher said softly, and meant what he said. What he held was a silvery half-mask, polished smooth and inlaid with tears of ruby and jet. The features of the mask were his, but subtly altered. They were fiercer, less human, and seeing them, Ratcatcher felt his lips curve back into a smile. “You made this?”
Mold nodded emphatically. “Oh yes. For you, Lord Ratcatcher, all for you. Pelesh gave us the metal, gave us the old mask, but we made it better. We made it for you.”
Ratcatcher nodded, then dropped the mask and grasped the squirming little man by the throat. ‘“This is deathmetal, you little worm. Pelesh wouldn’t part with tin for the likes of me, let alone this. Who gave you this? Where did it come from?“

Okay so the fact you got pure silver and bands of steel when he wouldn’t give tin didn’t make you notice, the fact your armor got repairs with whatever presumably non-tin material it was made of didn’t make you notice, the fact he gave you a pair of servants at all didn’t make you notice… My best guess is that once the oh boy a shiny for me!!! reaction wore off, he realized they had soulsteel but used it on an ornament rather than put into his actual shield and that’s where the outrage is really coming from.

So they clarify now that when they said “Pelesh”, at least some of the time they actually meant “the neverborn”. No explanation is given for the lie (that doesn’t even make sense, because the neverborn is less suspicious an answer than that this is all a gift from a mortal who hates him) and Ratcatcher doesn’t think to try to get a solid answer on if Pelesh is involved at all or if saying now that they serve two masters is still a lie because hey, why be suspicious just because you just met them and found out they’ve been lying the whole time?

Also, the mask isn’t with his stuff and they explain it’s because the mask is so awesome they feared it’d be stolen, except as he says, the mask is extremely personalized. The only reason to steal it then would be just to get your hands on the metal in it, but his sword, also soulsteel, is right there in the room. I’m pretty sure the real reason for this is just the author wanted to drag everything out so he had to separate the two items somehow and this way lets him add more padding as Ratcatcher complains it doesn’t make sense and they give their flimsy justification.

So anyway, they finally put all of this on him and he asks yet again to be taken to Pelesh.

(and the sound issued forth from his helmet like a big cat’s growl. awwwww he’s a fuzzybelly cute cute)

Anyway, they now finally say that by the way Pelesh isn’t even there and they’re all scared he’ll be mad which is why they kept implying the guy was there and creating the situation where Ratcatcher, who initially wasn’t even thinking about Pelesh, would be pissed off to hear this. It’s unclear if this is bad writing or if they’re being manipulative.

“We can show you the path, if you let us. We have a horse for you, yes, something very much like a horse. You will like it.

Incidentally, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the “like a” phrase.

One line that really stuck with me is from Lies My Teacher Told Me. It’s about settlers in America and includes this historical account:

The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a fine bow…. We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered up the body again.

You could argue that of all the things a horse is like, it is most like a horse, but that’s not how English works. “Like a” means the thing is not that. Imagine you were told this was “like a horse” and you go see it and it just looks like a horse.

Two options exist:

1) There’s some way this is not like a horse and it’s a bad way because otherwise people would say it direction. What horrible thing is lurking beneath the skin of this apparently mundane creature? What are you missing?

2) There’s no way this is not like a horse, yet either the other people are perceiving it differently for reasons you don’t know, or they know it’s just a horse but somehow don’t want you to think that again for reasons you don’t know.

In the case of the record, did they refuse to process this as digging up a grave, or did they know but wanted to obscure what they were doing to those they told? In one case, you’re dealing with mad people, in the other, people are trying to drive you mad.

“Like a” is really good for subtler horrors and unreliable narrators.

Sadly, we don’t get to see what’s like a horse because Ratcatcher is a lazybones who tells them that okay fine whatever gather stuff for a journey while I stay here all day and we’ll leave at dusk (without actually finding out what time of day it is, for all he knows it’s midnight). Why they aren’t already packed when they prepared the like a horse for him in anticipation is unclear and probably just to drag things out further.