Saturday, April 16, 2022

Ascension Address: Dive

A sole point of light in the murky darkness, the DSV Haniver sliced silently through the eternal darkness of the abyss, its strong headlamp picking out nothing but occasional glimpses of the divergent biology of the hadal zone.

The on-board instruments read a depth of 35,211 feet, and still decending. It had been hours, and thousands of feet, since its crew had seen the light of the sun. But still they crowded around the small porthole windows, each desperate to be the first to catch a glimpse of the ruins of Atlantis.

Only one member of the crew, the linguist, kept their seat in the stern of the craft. They were the one who had deciphered the co-ordinates, who found the fragment of Atlantean text on the island temple, who had raised the funding and the crew for this mission.

In their hands, they held a tiny scrap of paper, the only piece of the written Atlantean language to have made it to the surface. They turned it around and around in their hands, as if they didn’t already know perfectly well what it said, as if that would make the meaning any more scruitable.

It was just a fragment, a torn piece of vellum parchment, half chewed away by time and tides. They held it between thumb and forefinger, the mouthing the translation as they read: “... has Achieved Victory”.

Change Department Head to Linguist Team and Research to Memories of Atlantis. Repeal all dynastic rules, and make the following changes to Special Case rules: set Dormancy to Inactive, set Mantle Limitations to Active, make the Dynastic Tracking page be [[Atlantean Codex]].

Comments

Axemabaro:

16-04-2022 18:52:54 UTC

Looks like this will be pretty fun, so somebody please unidle me!

Lulu: she/her

16-04-2022 18:55:42 UTC

Got it.  Quorum is now 5.