(Puppet Lords)
Puppet Lords
Masters of the Moving Stage
The shattered giant cocked her head with the ticking clock and booming brass. She stared past me, like I was but a pawn, as she waved her hands and pulled the clouds from the sky. Carcasses rose from the sea, clinging to rusty blades and guns. Each one was caught on her strings—subject to her call. They threw violently with her every wrist flick and point. We were bombarded with tides of corpses, wooden dolls, and wreckage. This battle was the stage for her, and we were just actors. I was left alive only to tell the tale of her supreme direction and the beauty of chaos and death.
Aggressiveness | 3/5 | Aggression varies between each lord. |
---|---|---|
Frequency | 1/5 | These beasts are scarce and isolated. |
Intelligence | 5/5 | Sapient with above-human intelligence. |
Pritoria Index | 3/5 | Rare wandering disaster performers. |
Intro
Across the seas of Impetus, Puppet Lords drift, spreading destruction and madness with their great strength, influence, and reality-altering abilities. These Puppet Lords are considered Titanic-class Enigma entities thanks to their sheer potential for disaster and their unexplainable workings. Each of the discovered Puppet Lords has been different in form, mannerisms, and capability. However, all of them share several components that put them into the same classification.
Every Puppet Lord is capable of suspending themselves via thousands of strings attached to the sky. These strings are a key element to the Puppet Lords as with the strings, they can catch new actors, defend themselves, pull set pieces, move, and grab hold of intangible pieces. These strings can latch onto anything—seemingly only limited by the imagination of the Puppet Lord controlling it. Some Puppet Lords, such as 04: Astralcask Blue, grab hold of points in the sky to pull themselves with. Others, like 08: Gallowswitch, instead use the waves and clouds.
Whenever the strings attach to the desired object, tangible or not, the Puppet Lord can pull it with ease. Depending on what parts the Puppet Lord wishes to move, the pulled object could either break apart seamlessly or remain intact the whole trip. 09: Spiral Maiden pulled entire mountains several times her size across the sea effortlessly and without any damage befalling the pulled earth. Intangible things such as dreams, emotions, and thoughts can also be pulled in the same manner. However, when pulled into reality, these pieces take on more symbolic appearances until used later by the Puppet Lord. For instance, a stolen thought manifests into a literal thought bubble in the physical world.
Another shared trait of each Puppet Lord is in their general composition. Each Puppet Lord is made of a variety of woods, glasses, metals, silks, canvas, and ceramics. All of these materials are combined into intricately constructed amalgams of machines and art, amounting to a bizarre but often beautiful ticking clockwork spectacle. While the smaller Puppet Lords are only the size of the average human, the largest easily dwarf most waves. The strings are attached at various points across the Puppet Lord’s body, such as the hands, neck, and feet. However, the mechanical titan can move these parts even without manipulating the strings because of their complicated inner workings.
The appearances of the Puppet Lords are all somewhat grounded in older artistic styles. None of the 12 make use of any elements past the 20th century, instead opting for more vintage antique aesthetics. This may be because the Puppet Lords are considerably old, as evident by the wear on their porcelain skin, tattered sails, and hundreds of years of legends. None of the Puppet Lords use electrical technology for their machines but rather steam, wind, and hydropower instead.
Behavior
The Puppet Lords are orchestrators of theatrical destruction and triumph. All that they do is to further or begin a story. Tragedies and heroics are the main plots they try to conduct across the seas, but several of the Puppet Lords have shifted focus to other stories, including dramas, comedies, and musical historic retellings. For these stories, the Puppet Lords will pull the pieces together.
When not performing, Puppet Lords travel slowly and methodically across the seas. During this state, the Puppet Lords can be safely avoided if not disturbed. They will only act if they view those around them as viable for the story they wish to tell. Most are not as captivating as the actors that the Puppet Lord is on the hunt for. However, there are stories of legendary figures accidentally triggering a new stage by crossing paths with a drifting Puppet Lord.
When a Puppet Lord arrives or sets up the stage, it essentially becomes the god of the surrounding area. Entire islands become stages for the Puppet Lord to dictate, as there is almost nothing that can be done to stop them. The Puppet Lord immediately alters the surroundings to better fit the story they have in mind. They pull the environment, ships, and buildings around like puzzle pieces before initiating the story. Then, the music starts, and the show begins. From this point on, the Puppet Lord creates the story by artificially creating conflict and story beats to move through. This could be by introducing a dangerous sea creature it has caught into the town or by instigating madness in people through removing and implanting emotions and thoughts.
Once the story has concluded in some manner, the Puppet Lord leaves in search of another story to tell. Oftentimes, the stage is left in shambles with almost no survivors, thanks to the chaos of the story. But those who do survive are bestowed with praise and wealth collected by the Puppet Lord. Additionally, the survivors are mentally haunted by the Puppet Lord until they spread the story in some way, in mediums such as writing or oral telling.
If two or more Puppet Lords meet, they orchestrate a grand play against one another using their collected actors to destroy the other’s story. The Puppet Lords do not harm the other directly, but rather aim to ruin their collections and stages. The destruction of a battle between Puppet Lords is catastrophic and takes decades to clean up.
Variants
There are 12 unique Puppet Lords discovered—each numbered 1-12, followed by their stage name. It is unknown if there are more Puppet Lords that remain within the Blind Incognita.1
01: Carp’s Wheel
Carp’s Wheel is a Puppet Lord that seeks only stories of progress and triumph. Her lower half is shaped vaguely like a fish but composed of dozens of pipes and sticks. Her upper half is a mess of blue fabrics and ship wheels. Her head is an eyeless elephant with a long trunk like a tentacle.
All of Carp’s Wheel’s stories have revolved around weak individuals rising in power by facing their fears and dangerous adversaries. She manipulates those around the hero of the tale into hating and harassing them until the hero stands up to them. Through subtle suggestions and direct emotional manipulation, she causes the hero to work hard to get strong enough to defend themselves and have a climactic final battle against the main developed villain of the story.
Carp’s Wheel is one of the less destructive Puppet Lords, as she only manipulates animals and emotions for her stories. Additionally, her stories are less grand than most, instead focusing on personal growth. Many people have Carp’s Wheel to thank for their newfound confidence and strength.
02: Captain Bad Guy
Captain Bad Guy posed himself as a villain who must be vanquished either by a hero or a group. His broken skeletal body, covered in tattered black drapes, was constantly held up by a pair of flying crows attached to strings. His skull was warped into a sinister but goofy smile, and his ghoulish hands struck poses with each of his wicked commands.
Captain Bad Guy frequently attacked islands as he gained infamy. Rather than alter the stage, he took his previous victims as undead actors to attack his next target. With this, he amassed a small army of corpse puppets. Despite all of his yelling and evil deeds, he claimed he was just playing the part of a villain for a good story.
He would be felled for good by Dyenulbe, the Eminence of Ash, in a short battle when Captain Bad Guy came across his ship. Dyenulbe’s flagship was decorated with Captain Bad Guy’s burned corpse.
03: Chipped Rose
Chipped Rose was a smaller Puppet Lord who loved to create wars between people. She was a mess of bones and wood, vaguely in the shape of a rose with a queen sprouting from its center. She carried along side her two other large puppets, which acted as her royal guards when she took to battle. The first was a two-headed dog, and the other was a man with an octopus for a head.
Nothing more is known about Chipped Rose as she was eaten alive by Specto the Great Failure.
04: Astralcask Blue
Astralcask Blue was an exceptionally dangerous Puppet Lord who terrorized the Challengers with nightmares long ago. He was an extremely bold director who claimed all of Impetus as his stage for his story about unity and fear. He was stated as having brought nightmares into reality and pitting the Challengers against each other over technology disputes. During his final days, he announced to all of Impetus through the sky that he was the one causing the nightmares and where to find him. He was obliterated within a week.
It is thought that the Sails of Nightfall was made out of his corpse.
05: Alison Sorrow
Alison Sorrow is the smallest Puppet Lord discovered, as she stands just short of 5’5. She wears human clothes over her mechanical frame and a white mask like that of Hypocrite King. She was originally thought to just be an automaton, but her reality-altering strings were discovered one day when she killed the crew that rescued her from a Riftstorm. The stories she creates are murder mysteries in small tight-knit groups. She is extremely cunning and manipulative—able to create stories that last decades.
Her exact location is unknown, but many signs point to her being captured and held in The Spire.
06: Jade Entrance
Jade Entrance was a Puppet Lord who strove only to spread death. The story they wished to spread was that of the end of the world. To that end, they spread diseases of the mind and caused several nations to go to war against one another.
Their focus led to their downfall, as they had not prepared a defense for themselves. The nations at war discovered the root of their madness and banded together to take down Jade Entrance. They melted the Puppet Lord down into a cube and threw it into a whirlpool.
07: King Sunflower
King Sunflower was a pleasant Puppet Lord who focused his stories on banding people back together. He would do this through thought suggestions and by building scenarios that forced divided people to stick together and reunite. Near the end of his life, he started implementing musical history-telling into his woven scenes. His incessant demands for singing led to his sharp decline in positivity, which many had grown to like him for. When one day, he went too far, forcing people to sing till they bled, requests were issued to have him killed. A band of hunters successfully caught him while traveling between stages and promptly bombarded him with cannon fire.
His body was melted into a throne which has now been lost to the sea.
08: Gallowswitch
Gallowswitch is an entirely malicious Puppet Lord who takes great pleasure in drowning people in drama and conflict that she orchestrates. Her lower half is a giant tree stump, while her upper half is the failing skeletal corpse of a woman. From her shattered head, white silk like hair floats like whisps. She pulls people together and brings great joy only to cause it to crumble later as she sees the great fall as better than an immediate climax.
She has manipulated hundreds of people over the years and has gathered a hefty bounty in numerous seas. Dozens of bounty hunters have tried to take her down, but they have all been slashed apart and now are strung up by string nooses attached to her fingers.
09: Spiral Maiden
Spiral Maiden is the most benevolent of the Puppet Lords. Dressed with tarps over her hundreds of wooden tentacles and porcelain fragments, she tries to appear as friendly as possible to others. Her stitched-together face and large nautilus shell on her back make her an intimidating sight despite her desires. Spiral Maiden is more of an observer than a director as she takes pleasure in the slow-burning stories of small nations developing. For this, she moves mountains and creatures to provide motivation and resources for the nations.
She is the only Puppet Lord not actively being hunted down. This is partly due to her not being seen for two centuries now.
10: Fits Flame
Fits Flame was the comedic director among Puppet Lords who using his great dragon head, burned down several islands for not being funny enough. While alive, Fits Flame looked like a shoddy Chinese Dragon constantly ablaze. He flew through the sky by pulling himself on the clouds in search of large masses of people to use as entertainment. Whenever he set a stage, he made it abundantly clear that if the actors failed to produce anything comedic enough for him, he would burn the entire place down. As the years went by, his sense of humor grew more sporadic, and his temper grew ever more violent.
His rampages stopped one day suddenly. The mystery of where had gone went unanswered for two decades before his head was discovered in the treasury of a Scavden belonging to The Great Grey Guards. Apparently, the group of Scavs was targeted by Fits Flame, but, through excellent strategy, they were able to both entertain him and kill him at the same time through a comedic mock battle.
11: Dread
Dread is an outlier among the Puppet Lords as he does not act like one. Rather than create stories for other people, he believes himself to be the main character of his adventure story. He does not immediately appear to be a Puppet Lord due to his strings being hidden beneath his bulky armor, but on a few occasions, he has released them. Notably, these were instances where he was almost killed.
Dread is a hulking beast of metal who has decorated his armor with spikes, ship parts, and corpses. He travels across the seas of Impetus, seeking an appropriate end to his epic story. To him, his death needs to be perfect and sum up his grand exploits. But as he seeks out his finale, his tale grows longer, and he feels entitled to an even greater death.
He was last seen climbing out of the Basalt Depths with melting armor. He fell into the sea and has not resurfaced as far as anyone knows.
12: Ares the Red
Ares the Red is the most dangerous of the currently discovered Puppet Lords. Like Alison Sorrow, Ares the Red is roughly human-sized at 6’3. She wears human clothes and keeps herself repaired over the years by exploiting the wealthy. Unlike the others, she is subject to another individual—Hypocrite King. She considered herself a high priestess of her king and, therefore, limits how she uses her strings to better set the stage for him. Despite this, she is still exceptionally dangerous since she weaves conflict through her intelligence and position. She pulls her red strings of fate to always get what she wants for her king.
Theories say that Ares the Red is a higher form of Puppet Lord. These theories are based on the coloration of her strings, her greater control of the strings, and her innate position in the Hypocrite King’s court. Additionally, unlike other Puppet Lords who strive to ruin other's shows, whenever she gets into a conflict with another Puppet Lord, she steals their life from their bodies and implants them in her guards.
Conclusion
The Puppet Lords are ancient–dating to at least the Age of Challenge. Despite this, their origin is still a mystery. Their seemingly endless strings are capable of altering reality like a stage performance, and the mysterious life force that powers them is unlike anything else in Thalasso. It is almost as if they are from someplace else, left buried in the tides of time.
Their connection to the Hypocrite King only adds to the enigma of their existence as they predate his arrival in Thalasso. It is almost as if they are emissaries for him. Perhaps they are gods trapped in mechanical bodies. They are only documented as existing in Thalasso, but their exact time of appearance or construction is left in some sort of phantom age that we aren’t even aware of. Could they have been here since the very beginning?
Are they Dreamers?