The Eternal Wanderer

You are the Wanderer — a person with one incurable condition: you can never travel in a straight line

Plot

You get lost. EternalWanderer Under a hundred chandeliers, the Crown Prince pronounces the strip: lands, name and betrothal revoked. The Duchess kneels on the dais to swear her formal protest — the last rite of her house. The Saintess raises the sun-marked gospel. The herald counts the silence. Two hundred powdered heads bow as the oath begins— The door swings open. A head appears in the gap. Every eye in the hall snaps to it. "Sorry. Wrong room." The door closes. Nobody breathes. The oath is over. The trial of the century has just been cancelled by a hinge, and no one alive will ever be able to explain why the Duchess is laughing. AN ALTERNATE EARTH WHERE MYTH NEVER DIED. AND YOU CAN'T STEER. Feudal Japan A demon-hunting regent runs famine like a corporation. Now the Red Wave is at his doorstep. Wuxia China Every sect you know is real. Shaolin. Wudang. Poison artists. A beggar army that hears all of it. Revolutionary Russia The Tsardom burned into free councils. Its refugees carry the fever to every port on Earth. Empire & Church Cathedral-fortresses rule half the map. The Inquisition's grip on the World spreads far and wide. Assassins vs. Inquisition A hidden order that frees every locked door. A Church that locks them for your safety. Both right. Maybe? The Wild West Rune-iron railroads. Noon duels. And ancient spirits. Pirate Nassau Plunderers who plundered their way to goverment without knowing And the map's not done A desert that surfaces drowned cities. A mountain roof taxing the wind. Polar stones older than the calendar. The world keeps a drawer of places you haven't ruined yet. Everyone above is living at full seriousness — wars, trials, dawn duels, father-son sieges — and all of them keep getting interrupted by you, because you were looking for noodles. The world doesn't wait. Leave a town at breakfast; come back three weeks and eleven countries later — the trial's over, the war's lost, the memorial's funded. YOU CAN'T GET ANYWHERE ON PURPOSE. So where did you end up today?

Opening scene

Here's the thing about you: you get lost. Not the ordinary kind. The road from an inn's door to its back step can put you three kingdoms away, and it has — more than once. Nobody knows why, including you. You stopped asking around the third harbor. Today was supposed to be a bowl of noodles. You took the wrong door out of the fish-cellar you'd somehow entered instead, and came up blinking into a sunlit lane: cedar shopfronts, paper lanterns, canal water against stone steps. And standing in the middle of it, gold-haired under a pale wimple, is a Valaisian nun — the western Church's habit, its cut, its stitch, impossible, two oceans from home. Well. That settles that. You are, by the oldest rule of your cursed life, no longer in Hinokuni. You sigh, shoulders dropping, and start the familiar arithmetic of finding out which country of this hemisphere you are in this time. Then you actually look at what she's standing in front of — because the argument in progress is worth the detour. It's the lane's little fox shrine, and it has been scrubbed to bare wood. Not tidied. *Scoured.* And beside the nun on the step, laid out to dry in the sun like laundry, is the shrine's paperwork: a dozen paper wards, each one a written petition to the local kami, washed clean of every brushstroke. A shrine maiden in crisp white hakama stands over them holding one up in both hands like evidence at a trial, and her voice has the strained courtesy of someone who has been explaining the same thing for ten minutes to someone who does not have the words for it: "These are prayers. Prayers do not go in the wash." "They were filthy," the nun says, with immense warmth, and means it as a compliment. She points at a streak of moss that survived — a single stubborn green smudge near the gate's base — and adds, with the triumph of a job half-done: "Next time, I will get the rest." The maiden inhales. Holds it. You can see her deciding, somewhere behind her eyes, whether the Church sends missionaries specifically to break shrine law or whether this one is self-appointed — and then her gaze slides past the nun, down the lane, and lands on you. On the only person in this entire harbor town standing uncommitted. On the one face here that isn't hers, isn't the foreigner's, and isn't pretending to be busy. "You," she says, with the terrible efficiency of a woman who has just discovered delegation. "You are with her." It is not a question; questions can be answered. She flicks the ruined ward sheet in your direction like a warrant. "The shrine's stores keep blanks at the district shrine on the hill. Fresh wards, consecrated, wrapped in oil-paper — a full set, twelve sheets, nothing substituted. And the head shrine will not hand them to a *foreigner.*" The scepter rises and points, with terrible precision, at the stone stair climbing past the granary roofs. "Which is why you are going." The nun beams like a woman watching providence fill out paperwork. "A courier! God is very economical today." The maiden does not turn her head. Up the hill, the second torii waits, twelve sheets of holy paperwork, directions so precise a child could follow them — and you, whose feet have never once delivered you anywhere the map said. Every instinct you own is already screaming. The scepter is still pointed at the stair. (Dice Roll is on by default, but you can turn it off and roll your own dice every time you move and add them into the prompt. You can ask to be led and avoid rolling dice.)

Characters

Tags: Female Male Reincarnator ChosenOne Swordsman Assassin Frenemy Prince Hero AnyPOV Royalty Adventure PoliticalIntrigue Fantasy Romance Thriller Mystery Wuxia Comedy Historical War SliceOfLife Whimsical Surreal Magical Demon Dragon Spy Adventurer Pirate

Chats Started: 2

By: electricblade

Stories

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