This now appears to be fixed and does not take a full action. Thanks, Failbetter!
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You are right. You can find this in your character scrapbook options where it’s named “Adrift on a Sea of Misery”.
They’re fairly consistent with marking world qualities as such when you mouse over them, if you’re on a system where that’s easy to do (i.e. not using your finger on a touch screen).
There are some personal qualities that are hidden from both story update notices and your scrapbook. I don’t know if any world qualities are hidden; how would we know if there were?
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“There are no cheers, no slapping of backs. Only sombre contemplation, and silent tears that drip into the iron vessels carried by every warrior of Skite.”
Talk about wet blankets!
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Right, given that the Dream of the Tigers’ enemy is a bunch of Snakes that eventually take on the appearance of a once-beloved Tiger, the Tiger King being a Fingerking-possessed Tiger would make sense.
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So I reckon there is a love-hate triangle relationship between these three:
Cats - Tigers - Snakes (Fingerkings).
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Tournament of Body. Let’s support the Skite, because novelty and both Tigers and Tomb Colonies have each already won a previous tournament.
Total shutout for those Khaganate bastards!
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“I know you think you’re helping.”
Luv, I know I very much am not!
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Whilst I feel uncertain about your avowed dislike for our cross-sea brethren, I must agree on the Skite. We need someone competent to join us the Sixth Coil, and no warriors are finer than the folk of Skite!
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That reminds me: is it the first we hear of Skite?
Frustration of tigers is so sweet, we should put them on the pedestal again.
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They’ve been in some Fate-Locked Elder Continent stuff, and one of the Estival items is related to them. (the Epicurean Helm, if I remember correctly) Their gimmick is that they can’t heal any of their wounds, despite living quite close to the Mountain, due to a curse of some kind. And if they win, maybe all that will be elaborated on! GO SKITE!
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So they don’t know we know, despite Huffam’s office becoming a hub of particularly intense journalistic activity. And they also seem to not have rigged the game from the start. And they did participate in 3/4 tournaments. Interesting.
The Striped Officiant doesn’t specify who we think we’re helping by making the tigers win, though.
Putting the pieces together : The Sixth Coil contains a tiger who has been posessed by fingerkings, probably the King of Tigers. The Tigers have to open the coil for some reason. In a slightly different reading from the one in the first paragraph then: the Striped Officiant meant that the player character thinks they’re helping London by spiting the tigers and we are wrong in this belief because the Tigers consider themselves least prepared to face their former King? The way I get it that could tie it all together. They didn’t bother organising this whole shebang just to sacrifice some random Neathy creatures to whatever scary thing is in there. They actually wanted a great team to defeat the evil within the Sixth Coil?
I just wanted to also give credit for my theory above to many other posters, the one with the ideas closest to mine being waterpls here.
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Mmmh… That’d fit if one of the contests wasn’t “how good are you at giving shape to your imagination”. Though given the nature of Parabola, that may well prove to be the most important one.
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What I can’t for the life of me figure out is why Surface spies would think they stand to gain anything? I am thinking in particular of that Dutch spy who was instructed to steal whatever’s in the Sixth Coil. Maybe they really didn’t know what was going on?
I really don’t think they know. As we learn from the Aunt storyline, most Surfacers don’t even believe that basic neathh specialities like Prisoner’s Honey does anything, (because after all, it really doesn’t on the Surface) and most Neathy dwellers don’t know about Parabola, so how would an average Surface government be able to find out that some sort of Parabolan being is locked in the Sixth Coil?
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I guess that depends on for whom this message was intended - ‘A Negative Impulse, Poorly Resisted’.
Was it the impulse of the winning tiger, or the impulse you prescribe?
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The messages may also all be tied to the King of Tigers.
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The way I see it, if there is some terrible thing to fight down there, the Tomb Colonists will enjoy fighting it and won’t mind dying by it. If there is something really good down there, they will have earned it.
Hmm… a thought just struck me. The Red Queen lives in Venderbright. Given who all are involved, where is she?
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What happens to the Coilheart Renown if i don’t spend it? Can i cash it in for a prize at the end, or the Court when i get there? (Am nowhere near getting there.)
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I agree with this line of thoughts. I was contemplating the same thing earlier today.
I also have a theory why the tigers don’t want to win.
The winners of the tournament are not there to defeat the thing. They are tribute to it, but also it’s jailers. They have what it takes to survive what horrors lie within (Body), they can outsmart the thing (Intellect) and they have means to imprison it (Invention) [We know from a fate locked story that machinery can be used in Parabola to imprison Fingerkings at least (Dream of a Thousand Tails) and art can be used to imprison or even permanently dispose of them (some ES, I don’t remember which one)
They made a deal with whatever is imprisoned there. That deal includes that the tigers are not allowed to keep it imprisoned. Which they don’t, if the tournament winners are the ones reinforcing the “seals” or whatever there is.
But now we have a problem. We don’t have a full team. The tigers failed their mission. That is why the tiger who talks to you is so depressed. They did not loose some comrades. That happens in war. They may be about to loose the war itself.
Which brings me to my guess for the second week of the vent. The player characters will have to step in and ensure partial success of the sealing, since the tigers can’t do that.
But it will only work to some degree, meaning that in the future there will be a need to repeatedly repair the seals and deal with whatever monstrosities manage to escape. Thus, our new permanent activity is born.
If this is how it plays out, I will say, FBG played us pretty well into forcing the tigers into a win. And I will love it.
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