You are Noel Tiberius di Hazaran, queen of the realm whose name you share. Until two days ago the “continent” was just some far-off place to you, a place from which armed soldiers and their war machines would arrive to do mischief in your homeland. But now, on the second morning after your arrival, it feels oddly normal.

Sure, the standard of technology is a hundred years ahead of your own home – two hundred in terms of military technology. That’s entirely by design of course. It wouldn’t help the old Organization to have your people using equivalent technology to their own, or else you might be harder to control. But beyond that technology, some of which is gradually being introduced even back home in Hazaran, there isn’t much other than the scale of the land itself that strikes you as being especially foreign.

Perhaps you could say that the prominence of Hazaran’s mountains is much more dramatic, rising as they do across a much shorter distance from the sea to dominate the center of the island landmass you’ve spent the balance of your life on. Maybe there’s more evidence of modern amenities visible from the streets, and the presence of automobiles is somewhat jarring when compared to the horses, wagons, and carriages you’d normally expect. You’re not even sure how many of the people walking between stores and cafes and private homes have even seen a horse. But more broadly their daily lives aren’t too dissimilar from your own subjects’.

There is however one difference that’s relevant to you – the complete lack of yōma.

They’ve been rare these days even in your homeland, though they still do certainly exist. It’s actually something of a mystery how any have appeared after the loss of the Organization’s labs at Lavinia, which by all accounts should have been the end of it.

Add that to the list of questions you’ll want to try getting answered while you’re here.

To do that, you’ve made certain arrangements with the local government. It was a bureaucratic wrestling match just to get the powers that be to consider letting you do what you’ve come all this way for, and even at that it’s plain to see that they don’t like it. Just the word “asarakam” carries such a weight here that at least in this country its utterance carries actual legal penalties under normal circumstances, and so the first challenge was to convince the representatives of the government that your case wasn’t normal.

Now comes the hard part. You’ve convinced the people you needed to convince to get information on the location of one of the asarakam. That means now you and your cohort get to go and find that asarakam, approach them, and establish a dialogue – hopefully without it coming to the sort of violence only awakened beings and partially-awakened warriors are equipped for.
>1/2

>>6261121 (OP)
Sir Arthur Clairemonte, the Third Earl of Wickeshire and Governor of the Territory of Arondeight, has come to see your party off. With you are Salem, your mother Sabela, Serana, Nessa, and Aurora – a hand-picked team representing your own kind, all three types and degrees of half-blooded warrior which exist in your homeland. As an honor guard, you also have Sergeant Agnew, Corporal Duncan, and six riflemen – Brydone, Irving, Matheson, Forbes, Kaylor, and Garvie.

“I was going to lend you and your people some horses,” Clairemonte muses, stroking his chin for a moment. “But after seeing how horses reacted to your presence… I figured that wasn’t the best idea.”

“Where we come from some horses are bred and trained to accept us,” you shrug. “Hardly surprising the horses of Arondeight would spook.”

“Instead we’ll provide you with two steam carriages,” Clairemonte tells you with a resolute nod. “Those will get you up to the village of Sant Verran, which is where the roads basically end.”

“Remind me,” you muse. “Sant Verran is at the foot of Mount Rochebrenne?”

“That’s right. It’s the closest permanent settlement to the location you want to get to.”

“And if you hear any word about our companion, the one who came earlier…”

“I’ll send a messenger to find you.”

After a moment, you make a simple gesture with your hand. “Lead on then, Governor.”

…

The steam carriages are remarkable bits of engineering, designed to carry as many as ten people each at a fair clip – a little faster than a canter perhaps, but not up to a gallop. It feels like the streets are a wild, chaotic mess of moving vehicles as you’re taken out of the city, though in all honesty the absence of horses in the mix probably balances out against the sheer number of wheels and engines and horns. By noon it’s time to stop in a small town to refuel, and your party takes the opportunity to eat at a local cafe. At night, you rest in a village where there’s a cheap hostel.
>2/3

>>6261122
On the second day, you find the roads to be lined more with fields and stands of carefully-managed trees – not as windbreaks, but as pinewoods grown for straight-grained lumber. Little creeks crossed by wooden or stone bridges wind between rolling hills, some topped by outcrops of what looks from the road to possibly be marble. Fewer carriages pass you by.

By the morning of the third day, you awake to find the air clear and mountain-crisp for the last few hours’ journey into Sant Verran. In the distance, the mountain and its glaciers loom large and majestic. Near the center of the town there’s a traffic circle, at the center of which is an obelisk made from tightly fitted red bricks. Many of the nearby buildings are faced with the same red brickwork, meticulously maintained for what must have been a few hundred years or so. Most also have wooden window-boxes with alpine flowers.

“Lovely,” your mother muses. “But this still only gets us part-way.”

>We’ll ask around town for a local guide to take us most of the rest of the way.
>I doubt anyone will go with us, but we can at least get good maps and advice.
>I doubt anyone can help us, and pressing might actually cause some backlash.
>Other?

>ask around town about the alpine flowers

>>6261123
>>I doubt anyone will go with us, but we can at least get good maps and advice.

>>6261123
>I doubt anyone will go with us, but we can at least get good maps and advice.

>>6261123
>>We’ll ask around town for a local guide to take us most of the rest of the way.

>>6261123
>3d10 best of three

Rolled 9, 3, 10 = 22 (3d10)

>>6261679

Rolled 10, 3, 6 = 19 (3d10)

>>6261679

Rolled 7, 10, 3 = 20 (3d10)

>>6261679

>>6261123
“No one’s likely to want to join us the rest of the way,” you observe. “But if this were back home I’d expect anyone we asked to give us information, if for no other reason than to be rid of us.”

[That may be as much as we can hope for,] Serana signs, speaking to the resignation many of your kind have long shared.

Well then, with no real disagreement it comes down to a question of where you go, who you ask, and how you present yourselves. But there’s one move you think will help in your cause, and that’s the unusual step of lifting your sword up out of your back scabbard rig and flipping it in your hands to present its hilt to Sergeant Agnew. The man looks at it like you’re handing him the very crown on your head – which as a warrior, it almost feels as if you may as well be doing.

“… ma’am?”

“I want you to hold onto this,” you clarify. “It won’t do us any good to walk fully-armed into a place where nobody has seen one of our kind before.”

“I understand, ma’am,” the Sergeant replies curtly, accepting your blade with a ginger touch. “I’ll take good care of it.”

Serana follows your lead, though neither Nessa nor Aurora do so. Instead it becomes clear that they’re going to wait with the honor guard while you and Serana go in search of information. Salem and Sabela both have a degree of freedom here in that if you can’t sense yōki they’d seem more or less normal to you, and neither has a big sword to concern themselves with.

…

You and Serana find yourselves walking into a store dedicated to selling hunting equipment, which it stands to reason is a good place to go for information about the nearby wildlands and back countries. There are a good number of finely-crafted rifles up on the walls with presentation-quality wood for their stocks, along with the style of sword used to finish off boars and similarly dangerous prey featuring bars that keep a pierced animal at a distance. There are also specialty clothing, not the least among which are boots and socks.

“Excuse me,” you greet the man you take to be some kind of manager. “I hate to bother you, but I’m not from around here and I need to ask for directions.”
>1/2

>>6263913
The man, who has been reading from what looks like a novel, puts the book aside and looks the two of you over. He seems to find something he sees amusing for some reason, and you quickly learn what that is.

“Interesting fashion choices,” he muses. “What is that crown made from, steel?”

You nod. “And gems, yes.”

His expression changes somewhat. “Not glass?’

You shake your head. “No, not glass.”

He swallows. “… I see. So more precisely, ma’am, what is it you’re looking for?”

“We’ll need maps and map-related paraphernalia,” you reply. “As well as some amount of local advice.”

Now the man seems to notice Serana’s missing arm, though he can’t see her ruined throat. That must make your little duo seem that much more unusual, a pink-haired woman with a jeweled crown and a one-armed mute, both with sharp silver eyes, built like statues carved to the specifications of heroes recorded in song and story.

“Who are you?” he asks with a frown.

“Not your concern at present,” you answer carefully. Not a full denial, but an initial refusal. “We’ve come here at the suggestion of and with permission from Sir Clairemonte, Earl of Wickshire.”

The name-drop seems to finally tip the scales. “I see.”

“I assume you mean maps of the local area?”

“To include the mountains, yes,” you answer.

The man considers this. “We can only provide you with tentative survey maps of certain areas.”

“Then that will have to do,” you decide.

“Will you be needing anything else?” he asks.

“Would climbing equipment typically be needed in this area?” you ask.

[For that matter, what does said equipment look like here?]

The man watches Serana sign with interest. “She’s using sign?”

“Of a sort,” you reply. “Not one you would recognize.”
>2/3

>>6266074
“Well, to answer your question,” the man resumes, “most people around here don’t bother with anything beyond the basics of staves for rough terrain. But more advanced tools are available.”

“What does that look like, in this region?” you present Serana’s question.

“Pitons, safety ropes, and harnesses,” he answers. “That sort of thing.”

“Materials?”

“Steel for the pitons, musa for the ropes, sailcloth for the harnesses.”

“I know what two of those are.”

“Steel I’d assume, and… sailcloth?”

“In general terms yes, I know what sailcloth means.”

“So you don’t know musa?”

“I do not.”

“Well, it’s related to the banana.”

“What’s the banana?”

There’s a pause. “You… aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Let’s just admit no and leave it at that.”

“Understood,” he nods. “Anyway, keep the rope as dry as you can – it’s not as prone to rot as many other materials but it is still organic.”

“Understood,” you nod.

…

The store owner produces several hundred-foot lengths of rope, dozens of steel pitons – spikes with a ring forged into one end – along with harnesses for each of you which are to go over your padded armor. These, together with dried trail rations and other basic necessities, will facilitate the rest of your journey into the mountains. You also have maps (and several copies at that), as well as spotting lenses.
>3/4

>>6267223
Outside the town, there is a seemingly well-traveled trail that winds away into the wooded hills. As the sun begins to hang low in the sky, you find a spot just off that trail that possesses all the traits you look for in a camp site – a small creek nearby, windbreaks in the form of trees, and no fragile vegetation that might be trampled underfoot.

“Seems to me that a camp might work well here for several days at least,” your mother muses once the basic tasks of setting up tents, getting water, and laying a fire are all out of the way.

“You wanna leave the humans here?” Salem wonders aloud. “We’d be faster without them.”

You also can’t be sure how the beings you’re out here looking for evidence of might react to a group of humans in their territory… or even whether the consider any of what you can see out here to be ‘their’ territory.

>We’ll leave them here to guard camp, split up and search deeper in the mountains in smaller teams.
>We’ll go a bit deeper into the mountains before splitting up.
>We’ll leave them here, scout ahead. If we find no problems, they can set a camp deeper in the mountains.
>Other?

>>6267746
>>We’ll leave them here to guard camp, split up and search deeper in the mountains in smaller teams.

>>6267746
>We’ll leave them here to guard camp, split up and search deeper in the mountains in smaller teams.

>>6267746
>>We’ll leave them here, scout ahead. If we find no problems, they can set a camp deeper in the mountains.

>>6267746
>We’ll leave them here, scout ahead. If we find no problems, they can set a camp deeper in the mountains.

>>6267746
3d10 best of three please.

Rolled 8, 7, 8 = 23 (3d10)

>>6270970

>>6270970

>>6270970
It's been so long for me I always forget how to roll...

Rolled 6, 4, 10 = 20 (3d10)

>>6270970
Sigh

Rolled 9, 10, 9 = 28 (3d10)

>>6270970

>>6270970
“They can stay here,” you decide. “Split up into small teams to scout ahead. Then we can decide whether to have them move camp once we know what we’re dealing with.”

With no disagreements to that plan, you set an intended departure time for just before dawn the next morning. That gives you time to refresh yourselves somewhat, drink a little clean, cool water, and take a modest meal before resting for the night. After singing a few songs around the camp fire, from several of your respective homelands, each of you gets about four whole hours of uninterrupted sleep. All that is more than adequate to meet your needs for routine rest and recovery.

…

By sunrise you’ve separated into three pairs – the skilled young sensor-type Nessa with your long-time partner in crime Serana, the former single-digit warrior ‘Shining’ Aurora paired with your mother Sabela, and the ‘Abyssal One” Salem with you. Not quite a perfectly balanced division of raw power, since Nessa and Serana together is clearly behind in those terms, but you and your mother are probably the best two sensors aside from Nessa who specializes in it. It’s something of a call made on the spot, but you judged that Nessa and Serana would probably work better together as a team due to both having an ability to disguise their yōki than Nessa would do with Salem (who wouldn’t be able to fully hide her presence even had she trained).

You choose to proceed roughly northward – any cardinal direction will lead deeper into the mountains except for south, which is the direction from which you’ve come, but there’s a peak more or less straight north that caught your eye. High enough to be wreathed in snow year-round, glistening pale in the morning sun, you can’t help but gravitate towards it as though it’s pulling you in.

The trail and terrain grow rough the further you work through your day, winding between towering, scraggly green larches and over outcrops of banded marble boulders. For as cultivated and developed as the continent seemed when you first arrived here, you suppose this is just a reminder of the sheer size of this place. There’s plenty of room on this side of the world for both great cities and great stretches of wilderness to exist.

…

“Any guesses?” Salem asks curiously as you sit beneath a pine, sipping a little water and nibbling at a slice of cured sausage from your small pack.

“As for what to do next?” you ask.

She nods. “I have seen little physical evidence of the asarakam you came to this continent in search of.”

>The evidence on our own island all lies below the mountains. That is what we are searching for.
>This is really just based on intuition. If we get close, our yōki senses will do the rest of the work.
>I’ve been considering that. It may be faster to attract an asarakam to come to us somehow.
>Other?

>>6278104
>>The evidence on our own island all lies below the mountains. That is what we are searching for.

>>6278104
>The evidence on our own island all lies below the mountains. That is what we are searching for.

>>6278104
>>The evidence on our own island all lies below the mountains. That is what we are searching for.

>>6278104
>The evidence on our own island all lies below the mountains. That is what we are searching for.

>>6278104
>The evidence on our own island all lies below the mountains. That is what we are searching for.
Let's hope they don't consider it home invasion