I think I am here.

“Obviously not,” Alask hissed at the newcomer, but gestured to his companions to lower their weapons. “Hutch! Westan! Get this woman to a doctor,” Alask ordered two of the men who were gambling. They scrambled beside the woman. Alask looked up at Sam and the other two newcomers. “Everything is not alright.” He looked exhausted. “That’s why I put those posters up. If we don’t do something, more innocents will end up like her.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a scream from the darkness. Alask turned sharply towards the direction of sound before a figure came tumbling out of the shadows towards the group. They were a woman, wrapped in a shawl and running faster than her legs could carry her. She tumbled over the ground in front of the group and Alask knelt down beside her. Her clothes were stained unnaturally red. When she reached out for someone to help her, her hand dripped red, little drops landing on the stone in front of them. “Shadows,” Alask muttered, kneeling down beside her. “Help… me,” she groaned. @Thaidakar the Ghostblood @Emery the Steelrunner @Stormblessed0421

@Emery the Windrunner

“Might as well have five good hands than twenty useless ones,” Castled remarked, crossing his arms and leaning against the carriage. ‘Dallikar’ was a weird name, but wasn’t like any of them could judge. “Should we set off?” he asked, suddenly anxious to get moving. He looked to Scarred. “The further we get before nightfall, the better, right?”

The shadowy figure came closer and closer, until the glow of spheres illuminated the face of Alask. A deep frown was set into his face, and the dark circles under his eyes seemed more prominent. He wore different clothes tonight, a brownish-black cloth that covered most of his body. Only his right arm stuck out. At the sight of the two men, he smiled wearily. Help had arrived. “You,” he said to Darien, shaking the man’s hand with his right arm. He had hoped this man would arrive since their encounter at the tavern. “You certainly don’t look two sips from death anymore.” At Deckh’s wisecrack he turned and waved, again with his right hand. “You have no idea,” he said with a grin. This man also looked tough, strong. Exactly what he was looking for. “Are you also here to help? We need every hand we can get.” Lastly, he turned to the man who’d activated the spanreed and his companions. He waved at them and they smiled and waved back. They all knew each other. Tough conditions built strong relationships, especially when you were the guy fixing up their homes and providing them light.

The man nodded, then grabbed something wrapped in cloth beside the box. The other man looked at him, but otherwise didn’t comment. “I’ll get him now,” the man said, revealing a chunky, rusting spanreed. The ruby attached to the pen glowed erratically and small bits of the fabrial seemed to be falling off, but the man wrote a message and pointed to a small flat beyond the gate, where a shadowy figure stepped out and began walking towards the group. “That’s ‘im,” said the man fondly. He sighed. “I don’t know why he don’t just get the Night Protector to do it ‘stead of bringin’ in newcomers. Feels weird.”

The men took their time, playing quietly in the misty night. The spheres they gambled with - clips and marks, no broams - glowed gently in the darkness, casting blue shadows against the box. One of the men went bust. He cursed and leaned back in his seat, scratching his head. Only then did he turn to look at Darien. “You saw the bulletin, eh? You’re here to offer help?” He turned towards Deckh. “Some ‘help-for-hire’ thing goin’ on. You didn’t hear? Alask’s orders. Needs people with ‘special skills’.” He nodded towards a shack beyond the gate that still had its lights on, before returning to gaze at his lost spheres with a forlorn expression.

No worries, you’re doing everything fine. And you don’t have to catch up on anything. The Forge thread has been used for a variety of purposes, and now it’s being reused as the setting for a side plot. All the necessary information is in that post that begins with ‘Era 5’. Most of the players who’ll be on that thread (Emery, Thaidakar) are also new players like you, so everyone’s starting from the same point. In essence I’ll just be there to guide the plot/events.

Oh, my bad I saw the intangibility and I thought that was part of it too. I might as well try and make Voidus' job easier. Here's a (tentative) scoring. Duralumin Allomancy: 5 Average Melee Weapon Skills: 35 First Ideal Radiant: This is technically 85, but since her ability to use Transportation is extremely limited, I'm leaning to somewhere around 65? Ametrine Blade: Shardblades are 30, so I'm thinking this should be around 20? 23? Hot Headed + Superiority Complex: -5 5 + 35 + 65 + 23 - 5 = 123 Even by scoring the Radiancy at its maximum (85), that still makes it 143, which is within the limit. Do we still follow the rule where only 100 can be used for magic, and the other 50 have to be skills? I'm unsure. Again, this is just tentative. Hope it helps

Gotcha, thanks for letting me know. I’ll say the Forge thread is post-time skip, and that it took Alask a week to make the poster

Post-Timeskip A beggar boy runs to the bulletin, looks left and right, then pins a rough poster to the board with a rusty iron spike. He scurries off without a word.

~-~-~-~-~ Era 5 ~-~-~-~- Post-Timeskip The Northern Slums were a smattering of browns and blacks and greys, squat shacks and ramshackle buildings squeezed together with no heed for safety or comfort, and - in some places - extending as far as the eye could see. The streets stunk of cheap liquor and engine oil, and the main roads (if they could even be called 'main roads') ran in odd, twisted directions. The homes and shops here were cramped and unfurnished, hastily put together with as few materials as possible, and very few buildings exceeded one story, as if the architecture itself was afraid of reaching beyond its place. Like ghosts, the residents here clung to the shadows at night, hid behind closed doors and winding alleys, taking on odd, unsavory jobs. Adults took on dangerous levels of debt. Youth turned to vandalism and random acts of violence. These were the abandoned people. The 'collateral damage' that politicians liked to talk so much about yet leave in the dust. Though slums existed all over the city, the North were where it was concentrated the most. Turned into ruins by the Seven Day War, then knocked down again when PlasmaCore decided to waltz in with an army of the Void - for those who lived here, poverty was all they'd known. The Slums were a dreary place, and to the rest of the city, almost forgotten altogether. Almost forgotten. In the darkness of midnight, a section of the slums - almost a third - had their lights on. The warm, electric glows were beacon of hope. In this section of the slums, the buildings were just a little bit higher, more fortified. The streets, they were just a little wider, less vandalized. And the people - well, the people, for the first time in their lives, they were just a little bit more hopeful. Clean water ran through their taps, and though crime was still higher than outside the slums, it was steadily decreasing. A tall, chain-link fence separated this section from the rest of the slums. This was the Forge's territory, and over the course of the last three years, it had been expanding rapidly from its epicenter - a humble blacksmith's building that now stood taller than anything else in the slums. There were only a few entrances and exits to this territory. The main one was an old, brassy gate from a bygone era. It had been repurposed and shoddily fit into the chain-link fence. A few men in brown clothes waited by the fence, using a cardboard box as a table for a game of cards. Their job was to sit and wait. They were expecting visitors soon. @Emery the Windrunner @Thaidakar the Ghostblood @Stormblessed0421

Looking at Voidus' previous scoring and taking into account your changes: Slider: 40 Raysium Knives: 30 Prone to emotional breakdown: -10 Now, onto your changes: Nauseous in other people's speed bubbles and traumatically afraid of Selish Investiture: -5 (I score this because there aren't many instances where you'd be in somebody else's speed bubble, but you're likely to come across Selish Investiture. I guess this sort of depends on how afraid he is). This allows for: Average Assassination Skills (1-5 years of training): 40 Skilled Melee Weapon Skills (5-10 years of training): 50 40 + 30 + 40 + 50 - 10 - 5 = 145 Seems like this should all be good and approved, but I'll tag @Voidus since I haven't done this in a while and may be rusty I'd score this one too, but since her powers are so linked to her Epic-ness, I'll handball this one to Voidus

Just then, a forgotten flyer, old-timey yet charming all the same, drifted from an open window and floated in the air for a moment before landing gently on a nearby table.

I think there was a theory that Orders have a “primary” surge and a “secondary” surge (supported by the fact that Kal learns Adhesion before Gravitation and that Szeth learns Gravitation before Division when he becomes a Skybreaker) but I don’t think it was confirmed. Obviously, Shallan learning Soulcasting before Illumination, which disputes that theory, though one could argue Illumination came far more naturally to her. WOB: This seems to imply that for most orders, all of their abilities are available right at the start. I’m not sure if any more info exists on this topic.

Castled nodded, a little uneasy, then looked to Scarred. The man must’ve been desperate. “Well, you look strong enough,” he said to Jami. “You been through the Forests before?”

“He’s Scarred,” Castled said, eyeing the newcomer. “As in, his name is literally ‘Scarred’. Not that he is scarred. Which he is. But that just so happens to be his name as well.” He shook his head and thumbed at himself and the Shade. “I’m Castled. That’s Willem. I think with you here, the crew’s complete.” The boy looked pretty young. Castled narrowed his eyes. “Say, how many jobs like this have you been on?”

Alask tried not to look surprised as the man took off. A friend of his. That sounded eerily familiar to… “I have a friend like that, too, you know,” he called after Darien as the man left the tavern. “If you ever need a hand, you know where to find me!” The bar was quiet again in Darien’s absence, and Alask was unsure if the man had even heard him. “Shadows,” he cursed as he snatched his jacket from the coatrack. A man like that was an opportunity, and Alask had just squandered it. Maybe he needed to follow Shez’s advice and be more direct. He hadn’t even gotten the man’s name. “What are you all looking at?” he called to the few bar-dwellers who had paid attention to their exchange. They returned to their drinks, and Alask pushed himself through the thick tavern doors and into the night. The Forge was waiting.

Alask stood up beside Darien, eyeing the man’s movements closely. Though he was thin, he looked like he could hold his own in a fight. And those pockets by his sides — for coins, or the perfect place to hide a knife? Alask smiled. “You’re from around here, aren’t you? You’re no newcomer.” He took steps towards the tavern exit. No use tempting the man for another drink at the bar. “I only ask,” he continued, turning back to look at Darien. “Because on other planets, they have… easier ways to forget. The Nightwatcher. Soothing stations. A quick soul Forgery.” He shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, we have all those methods here, and then some, but…” Alask nodded his head at the shattered mug on the floor. His grin melted into something more somber. “For some reason, drinking’s the way everyone wants to do it over here.” He looked up at Darien. “You must have been trying to forget some really messed up crem, hey?”

The man awoke. First he groaned a name Alask had never heard of. Most likely a friend or lover or something of the like. Then, he opened his eyes and addressed Alask directly. “Hey,” Alask said, returning the greeting. Now that the man was awake, Alask could take a better look at him, at the clothing and cloak. Alask himself was dressed in simple browns and blacks. Slum clothing. “I’m Alask. Good to meet you.” He waved to Darien, holding up the goldmind. “Before I go further, I want to ask if you were trying to die of alcohol poisoning. If so, it’s really no inconvenience. I can leave you to it.” And he was honest about that. Maybe a year or two ago, the words would’ve seemed out of place coming from Alask. But a lot had changed in a year or two.