Quests & Challenges

This challenge is inspired by [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/frd/1150203/1]Noodlesthing's nuzlocke challenge[/url] and [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/qnc/2121309]Tar's Pinkerlocke challenge.[/url] [quote=Rules][b](1)[/b] If a dragon faints in the coliseum, it will be exalted. No exceptions. [b](2)[/b] Activity of the day corresponds with the grab from Pinkerton's plundered pile.[LIST][*][b]Food:[/b] Coliseum grinding. Any team and venue can be chosen, and dragons may flee / refresh at any time. Minimum of 15 battles. [*][b]Material:[/b] Writing. This may be an RP interaction, bio writing, etc, with no restrictions. [*][b]Trinket:[/b] Event. Roll for one of the following events, and write the clan's interaction with it.[LIST][*][b]1.[/b] Food shortage [*][b]2.[/b] Injury or infection [*][b]3.[/b] Weather event [*][b]4.[/b] Territorial conflict [*][b]5.[/b] Beastclan interaction [*][b]6.[/b] Internal conflict [*][b]7.[/b] Raid [*][b]8.[/b] Elemental magic [*][b]9.[/b] Supply shortage[/list] [*][b]Familiar:[/b] Buy the cheapest dragon in the auction house of a specific breed. [LIST][*][b]1.[/b] Fae [*][b]2.[/b] Guardian [*][b]3.[/b] Mirror [*][b]4.[/b] Pearlcatcher [*][b]5.[/b] Ridgeback [*][b]6.[/b] Tundra [*][b]7.[/b] Spiral [*][b]8.[/b] Imperial [*][b]9.[/b] Snapper [*][b]10.[/b] Wildclaw [*][b]11.[/b] Nocturne [*][b]12.[/b] Coatl [*][b]13.[/b] Skydancer [*][b]14.[/b] Bogsneak[/list] [*][b]Apparel:[/b] Breed two of your dragons, if possible. [list][*]Flip a coin for each hatchling once they hatch. If tails, the dragon is dead and will be exalted. [*]If no dragons can be bred, you can gene / breed change / scatterscroll one dragon.[/list] [*][b]Battle items:[/b] Flip a coin. Heads = DEATH STREAK. Tails = Nothing happens. [list][*][b]DEATH STREAK rules:[/b] Randomly select three dragons using a random number generator. Fight in the coliseum using the "food" rules 10 rounds consecutively (ie. you cannot leave that arena), quitting midway if a dragon dies. The team is selected randomly and must fight in the venue the level of the highest-level dragon.[/list] [/list] [b](3)[/b] If all dragons die, the challenge is over. You have failed.[/quote]

[center][size=5]CLAN MARTHANÓIR[/size] [columns][center][url=http://flightrising.com/main.php?dragon=30836593] [img]http://flightrising.com/rendern/350/308366/30836593_350.png[/img] [/url][/center][nextcol][center][size=3]Asclepius swore the surgeon's oath, and her background in plagues and plague magic gave her just enough strength and knowledge to survive the virulent plague that burned through her former clan. She is bitter at her failure to do more for the clan who looked to her for healing. [color=red]Day 6: Killed by a Crimson Emperor in the training fields.[/color][/size][/center][/columns] [columns][center][url=http://flightrising.com/main.php?dragon=32432193] [img]http://flightrising.com/rendern/350/324322/32432193_350.png[/img] [/url][/center][nextcol][center][size=3]Survivor is just that. The violent disease which claimed his mother and which destroyed the clan that took him in seemed to pass over him. Despite the best efforts of Asclepius, both she and he seem to be carriers for the plague, with those who spend too much time with them likely to fall to the same reaper's scythe. [color=red]Day 7: Killed by a Ruby Webwing in the training fields.[/color][/center][/size][/columns]

They should never have taken her in.

Asclepius thought about this frequently as the plague ripped through the clan, the plague with no name and no cure. They should never have taken in the imperial, injured and infected, carrying the pustulent boil of her egg. They should have taken more precautions; they should have kept better quarantine. She should have done these things, rather than letting the clan rely on her prowess in healing disease, rather than letting her pride get in the way of sense.

One called it Vengeance, and another Rot, for the disease did no harm as long as the hide of a dragon remained sleek and unmarred. But the moment there was a scrape, a puncture, the smallest cut, even a bruise, the disease sank its fangs into them with hideous infection, spreading through the body and opening weeping sores and purulent wounds until the very skin and muscle sloughed off, even while the dragon remained horribly, terrifyingly aware of their fate, a living mind inside a rotting corpse.

They fell, in droves, and even the ones who fled decayed as they ran, and there were none with the strength to bury the dead. When even her own magic failed to touch her clan, Asclepius gave the mercy-stroke to those who begged for it, even as her own hide slipped and wounds festered. Eventually she was too weak to do even that, and lay on the fetid ground, pouring her own plague magic into herself while her family died and rotted around her. She was going to die, too; this she was sure of. As her magic guttered and her wounds festered, she even thought that she would welcome death - that she would welcome the end to the nightmare. The end to her failure - the failure to save even one.

She was woken from the blackness she thought to be her last sleep by the weak and piteous cheeps of a starving hatchling, its creels made faint by hunger. Some instinct drove her up, opened her eyes, even as her own body ached with the gaunt pain of illness and starvation. Rage rose in Asclepius then, a killing rage that hazed her vision and left her panting, at the pitiful thing crying to her - this monstrous thing that should not be, the child of the imperial who had cut them down with the poison in her blood and breath and bone.

But it was, and shame flooded the coatl even as the demands of her own body came into clear and vicious focus. Her wounds had scabbed, but her ribs showed through under her greyed and sickly hide, and her feathers were gummed and caked with dried pus and blood. Asclepius turned and started walking away from the flies and rot of the killing ground, for her wings could not carry her, and her spirit could not stand to be among the bones and rotting flesh of her friends and family. She had to rest often, every breath painful, and she feared she could not catch so much as a fingerling to feed herself. The waters were poisoned from the dead that lay in them, and so Asclepius moved upstream; and the survivor followed, snapping at flies and eating the weeds that sprung so joyfully from soil made rich with blood and guts.

She ate the fish that had died in their waters, their reek making her gag even as the scent burned her assaulted nostrils, but her stomach held the food and refused to let her vomit even as her mind revolted against the necessity of eating. She rested, and moved on, her haggard form healing even so, as she followed the waterway upstream, until she got far enough away from the lairs of her clan that she could no longer even imagine the scent of death on the breeze, and still the survivor followed.

Asclepius even grew glad for his company in time, for the trek was long and she feared that if anyone approached, she might pass the plague on to them. And the plague must not be passed; the Rot must die with her. And with Survivor, for she soon realized that he, too, must carry the death with him. They would be their own clan, staying far away from strangers. Please, Plaguebringer, let it be so. Let them carry the plague back to its homeland, and expire there.

[center][size=5][b]Day 1[/b][/size] [item=pretty buttercup neck bow][/center] [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] I can't breed anyone, and I don't want to gene / scatter / breed change anyone, so I guess nothing happens! @Coolkid Since you wanted Pinkerlocke Challenge pings, here's the one I'm doing!

[center][size=5][b]Day 2[/b][/size] [item=white-eared hummingbird][/center] [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] Asclepius is the only dragon I have who is fighting-worthy at this point, so into the training fields she went, and all alone. Since I'm used to running glass cannons and uh... level 25s... I gave myself a one-time 3-faints-allowed to get used to how hits and crits work at this level again. I then proceeded to use them all up in the first 5 battles and desperately chug health potions for the rest!! But, Asclepius made it through in the end. She's now level 3; I equipped a scratch on her and am dumping into the Culex build to try and survive. It is NOT EASY to do with one dragon! I think I burned through 25 health potions? Curse those webwings...

[center][size=5][b]Day 3[/b][/size] [item=silver horn][/center] [rule] His world was movement, and rot, and a sort of endless hunger that kept him snapping at anything that flew up in the wake of the one he followed. Perhaps if he had been older when his world began, he might have known that this was not the normal sort of life - that many dragons lived lives of plenty, whether they were hatched in the Gladeveins or the Wyrmwound itself. But he did not even have the words for those things; he had nothing to compare this life to at all, and so it was tolerable. After a while, a change came into the world: the rot was left behind, and the one he followed started making sounds, strange dissonant hums and croons. He imitated them after a while, and then started to even make connections with the humming. There was a series of hums that meant things like "food" and "hurry up" and "look out!" The first time he made an alarm call, the one he followed ducked and slashed at the thing dropping at them, and he did not have to snap at insects for the rest of the day. One day, he realized the one he followed was not so grey as they had once been, that the feathers and plumage were molting out and being replaced with crimson-and-white, free of the stain of what they had long ago walked away from, and then that she was female, and then that she had a name, a hum that meant who she was, and would call her back to him. And he learned, too, the sounds that she used for him, and when she used them for another creature he realized their meaning: survivor. Survival. The one left alive. [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] I like the idea of Survivor growing up really strange, without any of the usual pearlcatcher traits. Without any access to culture or interaction besides Asclepius (and of course when she starts finally talking again it's in coatl...), I suspect he's going to a huge weirdo. Assuming he survives...

[center][size=5][b]Day 4[/b][/size] [item = tattered canvas scrap][/center] [rule] How easily she had turned from healing to battle when it had been demanded of her. She had nearly died, out there in the fields, and perhaps she should have. Her magic had failed her before, and Asclepius quailed to rely on it now, and so she learned to claw at her enemies, pitiful though her first attempts were. At least she was a healer, the coatl thought bitterly, as she drank the healing potions she had made for the clan whose bones lay moldering in the wreckage of their lair. At least she could keep living, though [i]why[/i] she kept living was beyond her, except perhaps for the survival instinct that thrummed with almost violent strength through the marrow of any plague-eyed dragon. She still was not used to fishing for herself, but the hardships of travel seemed to agree with her, and her soft curves gained the new outlines of muscle, even as her feathers grew back, clean and vivid and still marked with the colors of her surgeon's calling. Asclepius was still a healer, her feathers proclaimed, though she bloodied her claws on the field of battle and could barely bring herself to talk to the young pearlcatcher hatchling who followed her still. (She hadn't realized she'd been talking, endlessly and remorselessly, with every step, filling the air with vibration, until the young survivor had begun humming back to her.) Travelling seemed to have replaced all form of life, until, nose to one of the Gladeveins, Asclepius looked up and realized - she had no idea where she was. They had left behind all the landmarks she was familiar with, and though by scrambling up a tree she could catch sight of the Behemoth, she had no idea where she was in relation to it. East? North? Southwest? She cursed, in colorful dissonant coatl, cursing her feathers for taking so long to molt in after the wreckage of the disease. (Down below, Survivor echoed her sounds, with a hint of curiosity in his hum, and Asclepius' frill flattened in embarrasment.) They needed to leave Nature! They could not remain! The Rot needed to be taken to the Wyrmwound, returned there - destroyed there. [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] It seems like this challenge is going to be something of a journey. Perhaps once Asclepius has passed on (assuming she will), Survivor and any other will continue journeying, knowing no other life, but having forgotten the destination...

[center][size=5][b]Day 5[/b][/size] [item=pine logs][/center] [rule] [center][img]http://flightrising.com/rendern/avatars/308366/30836593.png[/img][/center] Asclepius had an interest in diseases and plagues ever since she was a small chick. Living near the Wyrmwound, the young coatl got to see the birth (and death) of many new plagues, and even several times caught sight of the Plaguebringer herself. Only after the flock first took to the skies and traveled to the Ashfall Wastes did Asclepius see what plague and disease could do as it tore through populations less resilient than those that hatched in rot and decay, and that discovery set her firmly on the path of a surgeon. Before long, she had left her small clan and took to trying to understand and cure disease where she found it, and within a few years she knew that this was her calling, and took the surgeon's oath, forever being marked out as a healing dragon. Never happy in one place, Asclepius took to travelling, passing through many lairs and helping with illnesses ranging from minor colds and sniffles to virulent diseases. In particular, she sought out plague dragons who had left their homeland, helping them to live with the diseases that they carried with them always, and giving them ways to deal with the sometimes horrific side effects of those diseases, whether it be the growths of rotclaw, or the oozing wounds of diseases too innumerable to name. It was just dumb luck, then, that Asclepius happened to be in the clan that fateful night, when a dying Imperial brought her egg to a clan in the Gladeveins, trying to out-fly the death-blow dealt to her by the breath of the Plaguebringer. Nevertheless, Asclepius feels responsible for what happened. She was there - she could have stopped it. She should have stopped it. [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] I didn't feel like writing more RP / story, so here's a little bit of bio background for Asclepius! She's been a wanderer her whole life, and hails from the Wyrmwound. There's a certain symmetry in her trying to bring a disease back to the Wyrmwound, when she herself left from there, that I really like!

[center][b][size=5]Day 6[/size][/b] [item=blackberry][/center] [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] Things were going so well. Asclepius was level 4, she could take multiple enemies in a row, things were looking up! I got a bit too cocky. What were the odds of [i]THREE[/i] crits in a row? How the gods laugh. Farewell Asclepius. You leave in your wake a strange little pearlcatcher who speaks only broken coatl. Alas.

[center][size=5][b]Day 7[/b][/size] [item=ambush] [i]Coin flip:[/i] HEADS [b][size=4][color=red]DEATH STREAK[/color][/size][/b][/center] [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] WELP. Survivor did not make it long on the Training Fields. Sad days. The clan has died, and with them, the Rot.