The Wrong-Serpent

The Wrong-Serpent
Origin	Nowhere
Titles	The Snake Tail With Appendages The Breaking-Key Usurper
Names	'Alexander', an Arc of Possibility; 'Al-Avaz', Obviously Glory Personified; 'Calliope', Which is not her Name; 'de Gomara', a Voyager-Twice; an Abyssonaut, who Ventured too Deep; Ioannes, an unfortunate librarian
Aspects
Date of arrival	c. 960 .C.E.
Owner(s)	SRN

Here is the Wrong-Serpent. It is an Hour by SRN. It is the Hour of doors that should not be opened, things that should not be known, and horrors that should never have been. If you are here looking for truth or power or sensation, you have made a terrible mistake.

Description

History

FNORD

Appearance

How would one describe this? To take a single form is anathema to it, for it is what it should do. It is all shifting darkness that you can smell, fangs that sing and drip, scales that ripple like silk. Sometimes, however, it settles into the form that sings the worst implications; a great, iridescent Taipan all impossible limbs and smiling fangs and worst - a Tail that appears awfully like that of a serpent that long-ago, left the House.

Principles

Snakes are the quintessential creature of Knock. The Wrong-Serpent is more. There are many aspects to the Knock. There is the sly thief quietly slipping in in the middle of the night. There is the charlatan persuading of a guardsman to open the door. And there is the madman, cackling as he smashes wards and gates to gaze upon a library full of horrors that should never be known. In every unsubtle breaking of a door, in every precept of law violated, in every sentry felled there lies the Wrong-Serpent. There lies the Breaking Key.

Worship

Cult

There are many gods of Knock; the Wrong-Serpent is not one anyone but the most insane... or ambitious would ever worship. Yet here and there, those madmen and princes gather; never in great numbers, never in hierarchical, properly organized society to plot the shattering of every door to dominion.

The Society of the Saint of Cupertino

Among certain reclusive monastic sects, the Society of the Saint of Cupertino flourished. Focused on the translation and interpretation of ancient texts, they were declared heretical by the Papacy after credible reports of strange supernatural occurrences surrounding them and thought suppressed with, oddly, the assistance of societies of pagans and assassins. It was only in the 1900's that historians began to wonder how a medieval sect sprung up around a saint that would not be born for 700 years...

Mark

1. Temptation: Liberty: The Bureau closed down my research. They shall not stop me. I must know, and they shall forbid me nothing. That strange colour in my dreams, something is promising there.
2. Dedication: Liberty: FNORD
3. Ascension: Liberty: FNORD
4. Ascension: Liberty?: FNORD
5. Ascension: ASCENSION: FNORD
6. Ascension: ASCENSION: FNORD
7. Ending: FNORD

Servants

'Alexander', an Arc of Possibility

'Alexander'

He invites you to listen to his stories! He asks how he can help, and if there is any way, it is already done! He is all the places he could be but should not be.

12

12

12

Enact a Half-Remembered Rite to Something Possible

Now, where did you hear about this? It is very much possible that you could have, but where? You could summon an aweful wrongness into the world. Open everything, every door and every gate within and without. Drop a little scrap of glorious light to tempt it. Then wait, and stand far away...

He could have been here and thus he always was! He smiles a smile that is all wrong and stretches with limbs that are just slightly wrong. "Hello! I am Alexander! I am a human." The thing pauses briefly as the sound like knives ripples through the air and light bounces off that dreadful, awful smile wrong. And it is elsewhere and behind you and it always could have been. "Would you like to hear my stories?"

5

10

2

Talk to Alexander

“Good, good, now… Listen closely…” His voice is sharp like knives and bright as silver and already your mind burns. What have you done, what have you done!?

And he speaks of a world inhabited by giants and a great Red Bird and he speaks of a Forge of Days and he speaks of everything and all the awful thing and shut it up shut it up where are the needles!

Locations

The Mansus

Not a Gate

FNORD

The Histories

Mount Qingcheng

FNORD

Items

Tools

• A Skeleton Key
  • Aspects: 15
  • Description: This is a key like a knife is medicine, like acid is paint.

• Kaleidoscopic Spyglass
  • Aspects: 10
  • Description: Look. You will see what you want to find. You will have to pick it out from the everything.

Ingredients

• Enlightenment-Venom
  • Aspects: 15
  • Description: It is said that nobody can exist in the conditions of absolute sanity. This, a fluid said to drip from the very fangs of the Tail itself, brings such. There is no succor, no protection, no barrier between one who consumes this and the most awful truths.
• A Melange of Glory
  • Aspects: 1010
  • Description: A mix of the light of the Glory with something from Nowhere. It has curdled mysterious and sour but no less bright, no less merciless. Don’t look at it for too long. It’s a question whether you will first go blind from the light or mad from the abyss.

Influences

• A Place in the Sun
  • Aspect: 10
  • Description: A light like something you should never be able to survive. That you do is a sacrament of some sort.

• Deliverance
  • Aspect: 10
  • Nothing can constrain you, nothing can be denied you, you are not a snake and yet!

Books

• Crumbling-Dawn Tantra
  • Description: The wry pseudonymous monk Punarmrityu weaves a chant equating the sun to a door with some treasure behind.
  • Start Text: Behind the sun is Samsara, behind the sun is ascension. But the sun is a door and the door has fangs.
  • End Text: And the sun shall crumble and the new age rise! And we shall be liberated from the mortality and achieve Nirvana, greeted by the reborn true dawn!
  • Gives: Knock lore

Rites

• What-Shouldn't
  • Description: This rite won't work. I'll lose this for Nothing! Nothing could possibly come from it!
  • Requires: Any tool, Knock influence, Lantern ingredient.
  • Gives: A Shape

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