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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 8935485" data-attributes="member: 16760">"Dun dun DUNNN!!! Big reveal!" Or, to be more descriptive:"I guess I'm... somebody else?" Okay. It was a short session, but a bunch of stuff went down.First, you gotta know that the Face power comes with one little hitch:  The only face and form you can't ever take on is your real one.Ludovico was made a Face as a little boy. He has no memory of what he actually looks like, and has become obsessed with finding out. (In Fate terms, this is his Trouble.)So, we have found out that Ludovico's master has been taken across the sea to the nation of Stygia - basically legendary Egypt. And we know there's been a couple Stygians, brothers, who've been doing some quiet snooping in Fortia.We know that Chloe was looking for one of them recently, but we don't know why. She did tip us off to the location where the ritual to drain Ludovico's master's power will occur, though, and we've been able to work out the date - several months in the future.So, before walking into that mess in a foreign land, we decided to talk to Hakar of Atmose, one of the Stygian brothers. We managed to track him down, but he spooked and got away. We did get his journal, though - he's been looking for his older brother Moshiyah, and also trying to develop a complicated ritual that seems to be for draining a sorcerer's power... Or one of his powers? What?! You can't be two kinds of sorcerer at once, one bloodline will always be dominant.Hot on Hakar's trail, he escaped us once again, but he left us a message saying he'd be seeing us soon in Stygia... And he used a Stygian word for "brother".Horrible suspicions began to stir in us. We consulted with a contact of ours, an expert on ancient Stygia (he's also kinda-sorta a centuries-old semi-vampire, but no judgy) on what kind of sorcerous bloodlines Stygia has.He's like, "Why do you want to know?!" Apparently Stygian sorcery is Not Very Nice for the most part. "They were obsessed with the boundary between life and death, what do you expect?"He knows of four bloodlines:Hardcore necromancers.Immortals who get less human each time they die and eventually turn into raging monsters.Astral travelers who tend to go mad.Oh, and the royal family of God-Kings. Who can command obedience from those of Stygian blood, among other things.So. We gotta know where we stand. The only one of us who could possibly be Hakar's brother is Ludovico, despite his protests that he's Fortian to the bone. His master and adoptive dad wouldn't have lied to him!! (Marco: "He's a spy, isn't he?" "Well... yeah.")We adapt the power-stealing ritual to (temporarily) transfer Ludovico's Face power to a willing street urchin. (Our contact the semi-vampire insists on being present, and says he'll shoot me in the leg if I turn out to be a necromancer.) And a young Stygian prince stands before them, with eyes of solid, glowing green.I can instantly sense that our contact is half-Stygian, and sweetly ask him to hand me the gun. His hand shakes as he struggles to resist the command, despite his centuries of life and experience. He settles for setting it down instead.So. Ludovico - Moshiyah - is not only Stygian. He's the closest thing left to the country's freaking God-King!(In game terms, he's only half-blooded. If he were full-blooded, he'd basically be Pharaoh for the asking, but there hasn't been one of those for a long time. The GM said that if one half-blood could drain another, though, they could effectively become full-blooded, which is probably what Hakar is planning to do to Ludovico. The catch is, Hakar has the blood but can't get full use out of it since Moshiyah is the eldest!)I've known since the first arc finished that Ludovico was actually a Stygian sorcerer that many factions wanted to control. He was turned into a Face to suppress his power and hide him away. I've been plotting with the GM toward this for some time, and it's really satisfying to see it come out.But the GM kept one twist to himself. I was NOT expecting the God-King business, which... Yeah. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Makes everything more complicated!Meanwhile, poor Ludovico is going through a major existential crisis right when he needs to be at his best! Yep, this is gonna be fun!</blockquote>

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