Lucy
Lucy’s inventory, left to right, top to bottom:
- Backpack from Mission Canada, weatherproof and insulated. Has inscription on padding where it is hidden from sight while worn.
- Lucy’s fox mask, with inscription on inside (shown below), painted orange-red.
- Hat, with inscription on brim
- Mantle (cape)
- Dog tag
- Two cans of pop (Gushing Granny Smith Soda & Cherry on Top Pop)
- Notecards, empty
- Pen & markers
- Investigation notebook (with watercolor pic of Charles, by Verona).
- Flashlight
- Hunting knife
- Inscription is depicted from backpack, a complex tri-elemental sign with radiating triangles (‘jet’) and hooks (‘turn’).
- Part of the inscription is depicted from hat brim. Interlocked diamonds, keywords (school, police, family, foes, innocents, family, school, foes), and extended arms with a T-shape (‘block’) toward the brim and a circle toward the wearer.
- Inscription from the inside of the mask has three interlocked circles in a row, the leftmost and rightmost one surround the eyeholes for the mask. ‘Light’ runes are depicted with two arms each, extending to triangles without underlines.
- The sword ring, with the point extended.
Verona
Verona’s stuff, from left to right, top to bottom:
- The folded up hungry choir pamphlet sitting in a circle of insulate signs.
- Verona’s backpack, striped canvas with some leather bits.
- Verona’s cat mask, painted black. Has an inscription on the inside, detailed below.
- Verona’s cloak, bundled up. Has an inscription on the inside, detailed below.
- Verona’s hat, sitting in the background.
- Dog tags.
- Pencil case with various colored pencils, pens, and other implements.
- Box-cutter knife.
- Some notecards with various incomplete inscriptions on them, waiting to be finalized. One resembles her attempt to create light from 1.6
- Verona’s basic notebook, for scribbling down ideas and lessons. Has the rune for light (a circle with a dot in it), a rune for darkness (a circle containing a large black circle sitting at one side, creating a crescent shape), and elaboration with runes for sun and moon; the same things but surrounded in six-pointed stars.
- Verona’s spellbook. Has compiled & tidy notes from her basic notebook. Her pages from ‘notes on practices’ are shown.
- The metal box for the Hot Lead. The Hot Lead sits beside it.
- Verona’s watercolor sketchbook. Her illustration of Stiles is depicted and labeled.
- Verona’s feather pen, with a gold stem and black feather.
- Verona’s plastic watercolor brush, teal plastic.
- Inscription: from the interior of Verona’s mask. The structure is similar to Lucy’s, but it has three interlocking diamond symbols.
- Inscription: from the inside of Verona’s cloak. A large dark rune is surrounded by a circle with five radiating lines. Words are depicted around the rim, difficult to read.
Avery
Avery’s inventory, from left to right, top to bottom:
- Avery’s gym bag with shoulder strap.
- Avery’s dark blue cloak hangs on the gym bag, with the dog tag wound around one portion of it.
- Avery’s deer mask sits leaning against the bag. Her hat sits to the right.
- A first aid kit in a carrying case sits leaning against the front of the bag.
- A multitool sits by the kit.
- Avery’s hockey stick, inscribed, sits to the far right of the image.
- Avery’s sneakers, inscribed.
- The inscription is complex, with a circle within a triangle. Within the circle, a sign for mercury overlaps an air rune. Two cross shapes stand out a diagonal. Extending from the left and right of the triangle’s base are two more circles, each with earth runes.
- The hockey stick’s inscription is depicted at the bottom; two signs for ‘male’ or ‘mars’ stand out to either side. Within a diamond at the center is a circle with radiating triangles in every direction. It houses a large earth rune.
Images have lists of the contents below them.
For the website (fourth image), the content is
‘DEVOURING SONG; Research & Collab’
(Welcome Gabriel007)
Table of contents reads, in order: HOME/INTRO, DISCUSSION (subheading of ‘Paid Access’), PATTERNS (subheadings are The Papers, Applicants, Locations, Meals), OBSERVATIONS (Analysis, Rules, Waifs, Witnesses, Environment, Time, Alterations, The Prize), STRATEGY, (Considerations, Before Applying, Memorization, Travel, Gearing Up, Prep: The Night Of, Roles, Hand Signals, Setting the Field, The Ritual, Injuries, Aftercare). Prep: The Night Of is highlighted.
Main part of the page reads as follows:
Yes! Even with the ‘have no knife’ rule there
is a great deal of preparation to be done.
Rest well. This can be hard! It is essential
when you need to be in top form in every way.
Use medication if you have to. Clothes that
are too hardy may violate the ‘have no knife’
rule.
Eat and hydrate. Hydration is more important
than eating. Yes, many of us have difficulties
when it comes to eating. Try.
Wear clothes and shoes you can move in.
Wear tough clothes if you can. Dress in
layers and be prepared for a variety of
environments. Most locations seem to be
Ontario but Ontario’s weather varies. Wraps
can double as quick bandages.
Two hours before the ritual, take an
antiemetic. Sodium citrate/dextrose/fructose
phosphoric acid, bismuth subsalicylate (the
pink stuff) are available over the counter. Get
something better if you can. Antihistamines
and dopamine receptor blockers cause
drowsiness which will get you killed. NK1
inhibitors and serotonin receptor blockers
cause dry mouth which will get you killed.
Stretch and study the devouring song in the
hour leading up to the ritual. I mean it.
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Some very minor elaborations on the item descriptions. Lucy’s backpack is black with red highlights. The sword on Lucy’s ring looks like a fencing blade with basket and guard for the handle, though the tapering blade of the sword seems a bit thicker than a typical skinny fencing blade. Lucy’s mantle is black, and Avery’s gym bag is black with grey highlights and orange zipper pulls. All of that hats are pointy witchy things, though that was already described in a previous chapter. Avery’s sneakers are white athletic types.
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The insulating circle around the Choir’s pamphlet has a handwritten “stay put” note on it.
The borders of Avery’s detailled inscriptions are covered with handprints, one of them especially more red than the others (top-left of the hockey stick one).
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to add to this (albeit quite late), the borders around the inscriptions also correspond to how verona and lucy See the world. verona’s inscriptions have a border that resembles meat (natural curves, splatters) while lucy’s inscriptions have a border that reminds me of knives and sharp edges
altogether, a v well thought-out piece of work, as always the case w/ wildbow 🙂
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If Lucy uses her Sword-Ring as an Implement she can do the Hand/Finger Blast thing right?
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The inscription on Verona’s cloak seems to read: “Shroud myself in your shadow” and then another section that i can’t make out. Combined with the Dark rune, probably meant to keep her hidden in the dark while she’s wearing it?
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The last section is “forms my,” or at least I think it is. So… Shadow forms my shroud myself in your shadow forms my shroud myself in your shadow forms my shroud myself… You get the idea.
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The website is so helpful and informative… Chirpy even.
And then it just has vaguely distributing comments like “Meals” “Witness” The cutesy yet concerning “aftercare”, and “Will get you killed”.
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Leave it to millennials to realize they’re in a supernatural death game and make a wiki for it. Or is this more of an online support group? Either way, the joke works.
Seriously, though, I’d be surprised if more of these didn’t exist. I wonder how many people are introduced to the supernatural world because they found a website like this and decided to check the rumors out in person…
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These “extras” pages sounded silly when I first heard of them, but they’re actually an interesting, effective way to deliver information that would be tedious to go through in prose. I really like this one, basically setting up what tools the protagonists have to deal with the Choir and hinting at the danger they face…Also the worldbuilding, in that apparently enough people have been caught by the Choir and decided to look online for help that they made a supernatural WikiHow for it.
I like this, and I bet cosplayers will like it even more. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Worm cosplay on the subreddit.)
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Looks like Avery ascribes to the old adage “walk softly and carry a big stick.” That hockey stick looks like it could pack a serious punch, and I bet the sign of mercury is versatile enough that it could be used for either flight or silent movement, especially in combination with both earth and air runes.
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The shoes have the symbol of Mercury, but the hockey stick has the symbol of Mars for stabilizing runes. The symbol of Mars, as it happens, is also the symbol of iron.
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i love this! im trying to puzzle out how the hockey stick rune might work. if avery is able to soak the central circle with “earth” energy, then the hitty end of the stick will radiate that energy in all directions. but some of the earth radiation is being funneled into mars runes, which is the symbol for iron as pointed out by ganurath, which might make the stick as hard as iron? that could help deal with the recoil from whatever the earth radiation would look like while also helping the stick back a bigger punch? loving the antlers avery ^__^
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I just assumed the male rune was a targeting rune in case she swung that hockey stick to try to hit a guy between the legs. : )
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Not sure that would work, but if it does the girls should be able to design a trap to keep boys out of their clubhouse. Assuming they get a clubhouse and run it on grade schoolers’ rules.
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Beside its alchemical association with iron, Mars was also the Roman god of war. 🙂
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Hmmm… If I remember correctly, real world alchemists had a 1:1 correspondence between the classical planets and the classical metals. I’m pretty sure Sun = Gold, and Moon = Silver, Mars = Iron is mentioned above, and I’m pretty sure Quicksilver’s modern name comes from the planet Mercury… anyone know the correspondences between Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn with Tin, Copper, and Lead?
I’m also wondering if there’s some combination of runes that could render an improvised weapon hard as Iron but dense as Gold(yes, lead is the classical metal most associated with weight, but Gold is the densest of the classical metals(~19g/cc compared to Lead’s ~11 g/cc) and never saw much use as ballast mainly due to its expense).
Also, but do these Thursday updates remind anyone else of the little bits of extra world building that sometimes crop up on the pages between chapters in collected manga volumes or on eyecatches in anime? Admittedly, Pale as a whole is giving me a Dark Magical Girl vibe.
Also, does Canada really have soda that’s flavored like Granny Smith apples?
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I’m pretty sure they associated planets with metals in a mostly arbitrary fashion, once they were done with the obvious colour stuff. Just in case you had them listed together, Jupiter is Tin and Venus is Copper.
I suspect Earth is Antimony because it’s often found mixed in various minerals (the ancients often confused pure Sb with Lead, on top of that).
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Huzzah! Looks like Thursday posts’ll be a reoccurring theme. I’d missed em, to be honest, and I like the way they’re going so far.
~Teian
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Eek, loving that FAQ.
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