Administrative journal for Bete Noire (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
betenoire_admin) wrote2010-07-07 02:59 pm
betenoire_admin) wrote2010-07-07 02:59 pm
PLOT SUMMARY / ARC 1: November 2009 - July 2010
So, now y'all are probably wondering what the fuck all happened this first plot arc. This is the official Plot Arc 1 summary and question post -- anything unclear? You ask, we'll tell.
First, BETE NOIRE. The City of Sin is one of three cities of power: Sin, Life (Babylon) and Death (Yellow Springs). These three cities, together, create the multiverse and bind it together, in a deeply mystical and thematic way. Bete Noire's origin was of Enoch, the city built by Cain for his sons, and the lineage of Bete Noire's Magistrate has been down through the line of Cain through all of that time.
Magistrates tended to be extremely short-lived. Not because they were particularly prone to being assassinated -- the city's magical protection ensured that they were almost entirely immune to violence -- but that the position of Magistrate was such acute torture that they tried to pass down the job as quickly as possible. The job meant an intimate psychic connection with the city itself, the 'voices'; any Magistrate constantly hears those voices, awake or asleep, and it's more than enough to drive an ordinary mortal insane. The average Magistrate, therefore, only lasted long enough to have a son and pass down the city to him on his 18th birthday, the day he would become old enough to take the position.
And that brings us to THE MAGISTRATE. The Magistrate's name was Samuel David; born in the early 19th century in the antebellum South, David was raised as the son of a city merchant with pretensions of upper-class aristocracy. He believed that he would inherit the family business until the age of 18, in 1843, when he was unexpectedly fetched by a dark-clothed man who told him he had a destiny in the City of Sin. David's biological father, a fairly typical if perhaps excessively opium-addled Magistrate, did the ritual immediately, and gave David the city.
David, at first, followed the usual pattern. He turned to drugs, alcohol, sex, indulgence of every kind in order to block out the voices. He had a son, and counted the days until he could give the city away. Wondering, hopelessly, if he could perhaps return someday and take over his adopted father's business.
One day, when his son was seventeen years old, he made an attempt on David's life. In a fit of rage, David killed him. And stood there, in shock, over the body of his son.
After that, David went into a cycle of addiction, swearing off sin for months or even years at a time before indulging again. He lasted this way for almost a century and a half, alternately raging at his situation and accepting his duty of leadership over the city. His situation was impossible, but his own personal strength wouldn't allow him to give up; he killed every son he had in order to make sure that he would stay Magistrate, that someone who at least understood good and evil would stay in that role.
Finally, the Magistrate succeeded in his 'detox', so to speak. He shut himself up in his tower for nearly two decades and never so much as touched a woman, drank a drop of alcohol, took a single drug. In those two centuries, he had time for deliberation on himself and his situation, and he emerged with an idea. An idea to fight for total control of the city, and shrug off the Hierarchy.
And now, THE HIERARCHY. The Hierarchy is an organization of demons, hodgepodge, discontent with the worlds and their lot in life. They united under Moloch, one of the oldest and most powerful demons in all of existence. One scary motherfucker. Moloch decided to take over everything, slowly, and he began with Bete Noire.
As each Magistrate died, and each new Magistrate was given the title, the Hierarchy was there. They corrupted the ritual, slowly at first, and then, finally, gained enough power that they were the ones fueling the Magistrate, not just the city anymore. The Magistrate would depend on them for his magical protection. And finally, hopefully, Moloch himself would be able to take the position. Of course, the fact that David stayed Magistrate so long meant that they had no opportunity to expand their power. They were stuck.
Now, the Magistrate emerged from his long dark teatime of the soul and decided that he was going to try and fix the City of Sin. He was going to make reforms, lessen the impact of crimes, make people happier, because any good he did here would be magnified so much in the multiverse.
He made a post, asking for people to help form a police department. This is November 7, 2009, and marks the opening date of Bete Noire.
At this point, the Magistrate is a genuinely good person. His intentions are completely good, he’s willing to examine his motives and correct his actions if necessary and wants to go all-out to convince people he’s doing good. Unfortunately, he’s not very experienced at this ‘being a good person’ thing, and his temper tends to get in his way, and he sometimes forgets that people aren’t as knowledgeable as him.
The Magistrate tries to keep the reforms relatively secret, but the Hierarchy catches wind of what he’s doing. The fact that the Magistrate is going out on his own is bad enough, but the fact that he’s doing things against the Hierarchy’s plan is much, much worse. They send a pack of werewolves to terrorize the city, and blow up the Tower, figuring that’ll be lesson learned and the end of it.
Unfortunately for them, it isn’t.
The Magistrate gets frustrated by his lack of progress and the people in the city failing to trust him. In desperation, he prays to God, trying to get some help in his mission, which he honestly believes is important enough to justify it. This backfires really fucking hard, and instead of help like he’s expecting, God sends a massive flood.
The Hierarchy figures this is the last straw, okay, c’mon. They show up, clear away the water and repair the buildings, and decide to take tougher control over the city. In order to do this, they take human hosts from worlds strongly connected with the city, figuring that said humans will help prevent reprisals against the Hierarchy.
And here we have THE HIERARCHY REPRESENTATIVES.
First, the leader, GINNY WEASLEY (Harry Potter). She is placed into the bureaucracy. She’s the oldest of the Hierarchy demons, but oddly naïve, regardless. She never had anyone show any real affection for her, and the fact that Percy did was unexpected, and lovely. She genuinely liked him.
Next, KAYLEE FRYE (Firefly). Kaylee believed she should be the leader, but wasn’t, and that denial expressed itself in violence. She got herself in trouble quickly, and was subsequently fired.
ANNIE CARTWRIGHT (Life on Mars) was a fairly solid demon, good at what she does, not all that exceptional.
ELI WALLACE (Stargate: Universe) was a brilliant demon, a little bit of a slacker, but a smart cookie nonetheless.
And, finally, JIM GORDON (DCU) was given mostly free rein; all his Hierarchy demon did was just nudge his mind, every once in a while, preventing him from figuring out who it was he was really working for. Thus, Jim Gordon honestly believed he was Jim Gordon, and acted that way.
Annie Cartwright's demon was eventually ousted by Annie herself, who mustered the strength to take back control of her own body. Similarly, Eli’s demon left (possibly because of something shiny beside the road or something) and then the real interesting rep entered onto the scene.
The demon in CHLOE ARMSTRONG (Stargate: Universe)’s body was a backup demon. She was only called in because of her host’s origin universe; she hadn’t intended to go to Bete Noire at all. As such, she had a markedly different approach from the other demons.
But that wasn’t all.
Chloe Armstrong was pulled from a near-drowning, in her universe, several years before her entrance into the game. She remembers swimming up from a tank of water, where she’d been imprisoned at the time by aliens (SGU – 1.11 “Space”) and breaking the surface in the harbor in Bete Noire.
As a helpless new arrival, Chloe was taken in by an order of nuns called the SISTERS OF THE RESURRECTION. These sisters took it upon themselves to find girls like Chloe, in the City of Sin, and teach them what they viewed as the one necessary skill for survival: ruthlessness. The girls were mistreated and beaten, and, as a graduation ceremony, required to take a knife and kill a helpless, bound prisoner, usually a drifter. The Sisters dumped the bodies in a lake of old industrial sludge by the abandoned factories.
Yes, these nuns were literally only conceived as a plot device for Chloe’s backstory, in order to make her traumatized and a bad person.
After this, Chloe left the city, and journeyed, eventually meeting up with an as yet unnamed third party, where (as demonstrated by her skills in fighting and sneaking) she trained as a covert agent. Sometime during this sojourn, she decided to take more personal power, and purposefully summoned a demon and called it into herself, believing that she would be strong enough to dominate it.
She was wrong.
About a week later, she was called into Bete Noire to replace Eli Wallace’s demon.
Chloe’s often erratic actions, wavering between loyalty to the Hierarchy, hatred and affection for the Stargate cast, and random inexplicable outbursts were a result of a base conflict within her body. Neither she nor the demon could maintain full control, but neither of them were willing to admit that to anyone, so they just continued fighting, each of them hoping that they could eventually win.
The majority of the plot that happened next was driven by Chloe. Not the demon inside her, but Chloe herself.
First, Chloe convinced the Hierarchy that it was best to seek out the Icon of Illyria, the most powerful object in the city. It had once been one of three weapons wielded by a goddess named Illyria, who had achieved total domination of one dimension of reality, but the goddess had been long gone and somehow one of the weapons ended up in Bete Noire. Chloe, on the other hand, was a member of this shadow organization, and her mission was to start a war between Yellow Springs and Bete Noire, hopefully ending in the destruction of the power center for one or both of the two cities. She connected the Icon of Illyria with a curse that would alert the leader of the City of Death, when it was found, and made an announcement of rewards to anyone who could locate the icon.
No one managed to find the Icon, but the Sisters of the Resurrection were curious about the actions of their former pupil, and sought it out themselves. They found it buried in Bete Noire’s graveyard and dug it up.
As soon as they touched it, the curse was activated. A pulse of energy shook the city, and it broke the icon into pieces, giving perhaps hundreds of people a little mysterious bladed weapon.
NOAH, the king of Yellow Springs, the City of Death, sensed this, and he took action.
So. Noah. Noah’s the dude from the Bible, you know, God told him there was a flood coming and to get his boat on, and Noah built the boat, saved humanity, etc. But, seeing that, seeing the utter devastation wreaked on the world – it affected him. He got a kind of religious Stockholm Syndrome, and decided that sin was evil, and deserved to be wiped out. Projecting God’s actions onto a canvass of right and wrong, and making sure that God defaulted to ‘right’.
He hates the City of Sin, has long suspected the Hierarchy of having bad intentions towards him, and has, for years now, been hearing rumors of an impending invasion from the Hierarchy. He’s pissed, and he seizes the opportunity to send the power of Death into the City of Sin.
(Of course, the simple fact is that the Hierarchy was planning an invasion into Yellow Springs. They weren’t planning one so soon, but the rumors had such weight because they were based in fact. Indeed, the Hierarchy was hoping to use the citizens of Bete Noire as an army; this is why they seized the chance, after a brief alien invasion of the city, to train up as many people as possible.)
The knives, when they stab someone, transfer this curse. They drag someone into Death, at the same time as the City of Sin tries to hold onto them. Thus, they enter an in-between state, not dead or alive, on the brink of Death and Sin. That was the first set of zombie events.
Finally, Chloe revealed herself to the wrong person, he told the Hierarchy she was a spy, and she was executed as someone who worked for Yellow Springs, taking the secret of her true allegiance to the grave with her.
The Magistrate, meanwhile, hatches a plan. He doesn’t believe he’ll ever be truly rid of the Hierarchy as long as they have their grips in the Magistrate’s power. So he decides that if he can find his eldest daughter and transfer power to her, then it could be a clean transfer, not according to the old rituals, and she could rule the city free of their influence. So he decides to get some people to leave Bete Noire on the day when the city is weakest – July 1st – and go get her.
At the same time, the mysterious organization responsible for Chloe and for rumor-mongering in Yellow Springs about a possible Hierarchy invasion takes action again. They leave a piece of paper with the ritual for leaving Bete Noire on the table of a certain young underground advertising specialist, in a coffee shop. The specialist realizes that this is a possible gold mine for people who want to GTFO, and she starts marketing like crazy. By the time July 1st rolls around, tons of people have this ritual. They execute it, simultaneously, and in seven places, the fabric of Bete Noire is worn just thin enough.
And then Yellow Springs breaks through.
Noah wants the Hierarchy’s heads. He wants Benny’s head, since he blames him for original sin and therefore for the flood. And he does everything he can to make that happen. The city resists, but eventually gives up Benny, and then uses the Hierarchy to bait a trap for Noah. Noah falls for it, but the instant he realizes it’s a trap, he tells his warriors to kill Benny.
The city reels in shock from Benny’s death, and an earthquake engulfs the final battle. The Magistrate manages to kill Noah, Noah slaughters Gordon and stabs Ginny, and, at the very end, the Magistrate has a heroic death just as his daughter arrives. A tearful moment of reconciliation, and he gives her the city.
We leave Plot Arc 1 with the old Magistrate dead, and his daughter brought in as the new Magistrate of Bete Noire, free of the Hierarchy; with Noah’s death, the power of Yellow Springs is broken, and death has simply halted, everywhere in the multiverse. Finally, Bete Noire is in shambles, ruins, most of the buildings just rubble and great sinkholes open in the streets.
And now we enter Plot Arc 2.
Any questions, clarifications about what I have here or what I failed to mention, address them to this post!
Only two minor things:
No, I will not tell you what mysterious organization Chloe belonged to. And no, I will not tell you what their motivation was in bringing war between Yellow Springs and Bete Noire.
First, BETE NOIRE. The City of Sin is one of three cities of power: Sin, Life (Babylon) and Death (Yellow Springs). These three cities, together, create the multiverse and bind it together, in a deeply mystical and thematic way. Bete Noire's origin was of Enoch, the city built by Cain for his sons, and the lineage of Bete Noire's Magistrate has been down through the line of Cain through all of that time.
Magistrates tended to be extremely short-lived. Not because they were particularly prone to being assassinated -- the city's magical protection ensured that they were almost entirely immune to violence -- but that the position of Magistrate was such acute torture that they tried to pass down the job as quickly as possible. The job meant an intimate psychic connection with the city itself, the 'voices'; any Magistrate constantly hears those voices, awake or asleep, and it's more than enough to drive an ordinary mortal insane. The average Magistrate, therefore, only lasted long enough to have a son and pass down the city to him on his 18th birthday, the day he would become old enough to take the position.
And that brings us to THE MAGISTRATE. The Magistrate's name was Samuel David; born in the early 19th century in the antebellum South, David was raised as the son of a city merchant with pretensions of upper-class aristocracy. He believed that he would inherit the family business until the age of 18, in 1843, when he was unexpectedly fetched by a dark-clothed man who told him he had a destiny in the City of Sin. David's biological father, a fairly typical if perhaps excessively opium-addled Magistrate, did the ritual immediately, and gave David the city.
David, at first, followed the usual pattern. He turned to drugs, alcohol, sex, indulgence of every kind in order to block out the voices. He had a son, and counted the days until he could give the city away. Wondering, hopelessly, if he could perhaps return someday and take over his adopted father's business.
One day, when his son was seventeen years old, he made an attempt on David's life. In a fit of rage, David killed him. And stood there, in shock, over the body of his son.
After that, David went into a cycle of addiction, swearing off sin for months or even years at a time before indulging again. He lasted this way for almost a century and a half, alternately raging at his situation and accepting his duty of leadership over the city. His situation was impossible, but his own personal strength wouldn't allow him to give up; he killed every son he had in order to make sure that he would stay Magistrate, that someone who at least understood good and evil would stay in that role.
Finally, the Magistrate succeeded in his 'detox', so to speak. He shut himself up in his tower for nearly two decades and never so much as touched a woman, drank a drop of alcohol, took a single drug. In those two centuries, he had time for deliberation on himself and his situation, and he emerged with an idea. An idea to fight for total control of the city, and shrug off the Hierarchy.
And now, THE HIERARCHY. The Hierarchy is an organization of demons, hodgepodge, discontent with the worlds and their lot in life. They united under Moloch, one of the oldest and most powerful demons in all of existence. One scary motherfucker. Moloch decided to take over everything, slowly, and he began with Bete Noire.
As each Magistrate died, and each new Magistrate was given the title, the Hierarchy was there. They corrupted the ritual, slowly at first, and then, finally, gained enough power that they were the ones fueling the Magistrate, not just the city anymore. The Magistrate would depend on them for his magical protection. And finally, hopefully, Moloch himself would be able to take the position. Of course, the fact that David stayed Magistrate so long meant that they had no opportunity to expand their power. They were stuck.
Now, the Magistrate emerged from his long dark teatime of the soul and decided that he was going to try and fix the City of Sin. He was going to make reforms, lessen the impact of crimes, make people happier, because any good he did here would be magnified so much in the multiverse.
He made a post, asking for people to help form a police department. This is November 7, 2009, and marks the opening date of Bete Noire.
At this point, the Magistrate is a genuinely good person. His intentions are completely good, he’s willing to examine his motives and correct his actions if necessary and wants to go all-out to convince people he’s doing good. Unfortunately, he’s not very experienced at this ‘being a good person’ thing, and his temper tends to get in his way, and he sometimes forgets that people aren’t as knowledgeable as him.
The Magistrate tries to keep the reforms relatively secret, but the Hierarchy catches wind of what he’s doing. The fact that the Magistrate is going out on his own is bad enough, but the fact that he’s doing things against the Hierarchy’s plan is much, much worse. They send a pack of werewolves to terrorize the city, and blow up the Tower, figuring that’ll be lesson learned and the end of it.
Unfortunately for them, it isn’t.
The Magistrate gets frustrated by his lack of progress and the people in the city failing to trust him. In desperation, he prays to God, trying to get some help in his mission, which he honestly believes is important enough to justify it. This backfires really fucking hard, and instead of help like he’s expecting, God sends a massive flood.
The Hierarchy figures this is the last straw, okay, c’mon. They show up, clear away the water and repair the buildings, and decide to take tougher control over the city. In order to do this, they take human hosts from worlds strongly connected with the city, figuring that said humans will help prevent reprisals against the Hierarchy.
And here we have THE HIERARCHY REPRESENTATIVES.
First, the leader, GINNY WEASLEY (Harry Potter). She is placed into the bureaucracy. She’s the oldest of the Hierarchy demons, but oddly naïve, regardless. She never had anyone show any real affection for her, and the fact that Percy did was unexpected, and lovely. She genuinely liked him.
Next, KAYLEE FRYE (Firefly). Kaylee believed she should be the leader, but wasn’t, and that denial expressed itself in violence. She got herself in trouble quickly, and was subsequently fired.
ANNIE CARTWRIGHT (Life on Mars) was a fairly solid demon, good at what she does, not all that exceptional.
ELI WALLACE (Stargate: Universe) was a brilliant demon, a little bit of a slacker, but a smart cookie nonetheless.
And, finally, JIM GORDON (DCU) was given mostly free rein; all his Hierarchy demon did was just nudge his mind, every once in a while, preventing him from figuring out who it was he was really working for. Thus, Jim Gordon honestly believed he was Jim Gordon, and acted that way.
Annie Cartwright's demon was eventually ousted by Annie herself, who mustered the strength to take back control of her own body. Similarly, Eli’s demon left (possibly because of something shiny beside the road or something) and then the real interesting rep entered onto the scene.
The demon in CHLOE ARMSTRONG (Stargate: Universe)’s body was a backup demon. She was only called in because of her host’s origin universe; she hadn’t intended to go to Bete Noire at all. As such, she had a markedly different approach from the other demons.
But that wasn’t all.
Chloe Armstrong was pulled from a near-drowning, in her universe, several years before her entrance into the game. She remembers swimming up from a tank of water, where she’d been imprisoned at the time by aliens (SGU – 1.11 “Space”) and breaking the surface in the harbor in Bete Noire.
As a helpless new arrival, Chloe was taken in by an order of nuns called the SISTERS OF THE RESURRECTION. These sisters took it upon themselves to find girls like Chloe, in the City of Sin, and teach them what they viewed as the one necessary skill for survival: ruthlessness. The girls were mistreated and beaten, and, as a graduation ceremony, required to take a knife and kill a helpless, bound prisoner, usually a drifter. The Sisters dumped the bodies in a lake of old industrial sludge by the abandoned factories.
Yes, these nuns were literally only conceived as a plot device for Chloe’s backstory, in order to make her traumatized and a bad person.
After this, Chloe left the city, and journeyed, eventually meeting up with an as yet unnamed third party, where (as demonstrated by her skills in fighting and sneaking) she trained as a covert agent. Sometime during this sojourn, she decided to take more personal power, and purposefully summoned a demon and called it into herself, believing that she would be strong enough to dominate it.
She was wrong.
About a week later, she was called into Bete Noire to replace Eli Wallace’s demon.
Chloe’s often erratic actions, wavering between loyalty to the Hierarchy, hatred and affection for the Stargate cast, and random inexplicable outbursts were a result of a base conflict within her body. Neither she nor the demon could maintain full control, but neither of them were willing to admit that to anyone, so they just continued fighting, each of them hoping that they could eventually win.
The majority of the plot that happened next was driven by Chloe. Not the demon inside her, but Chloe herself.
First, Chloe convinced the Hierarchy that it was best to seek out the Icon of Illyria, the most powerful object in the city. It had once been one of three weapons wielded by a goddess named Illyria, who had achieved total domination of one dimension of reality, but the goddess had been long gone and somehow one of the weapons ended up in Bete Noire. Chloe, on the other hand, was a member of this shadow organization, and her mission was to start a war between Yellow Springs and Bete Noire, hopefully ending in the destruction of the power center for one or both of the two cities. She connected the Icon of Illyria with a curse that would alert the leader of the City of Death, when it was found, and made an announcement of rewards to anyone who could locate the icon.
No one managed to find the Icon, but the Sisters of the Resurrection were curious about the actions of their former pupil, and sought it out themselves. They found it buried in Bete Noire’s graveyard and dug it up.
As soon as they touched it, the curse was activated. A pulse of energy shook the city, and it broke the icon into pieces, giving perhaps hundreds of people a little mysterious bladed weapon.
NOAH, the king of Yellow Springs, the City of Death, sensed this, and he took action.
So. Noah. Noah’s the dude from the Bible, you know, God told him there was a flood coming and to get his boat on, and Noah built the boat, saved humanity, etc. But, seeing that, seeing the utter devastation wreaked on the world – it affected him. He got a kind of religious Stockholm Syndrome, and decided that sin was evil, and deserved to be wiped out. Projecting God’s actions onto a canvass of right and wrong, and making sure that God defaulted to ‘right’.
He hates the City of Sin, has long suspected the Hierarchy of having bad intentions towards him, and has, for years now, been hearing rumors of an impending invasion from the Hierarchy. He’s pissed, and he seizes the opportunity to send the power of Death into the City of Sin.
(Of course, the simple fact is that the Hierarchy was planning an invasion into Yellow Springs. They weren’t planning one so soon, but the rumors had such weight because they were based in fact. Indeed, the Hierarchy was hoping to use the citizens of Bete Noire as an army; this is why they seized the chance, after a brief alien invasion of the city, to train up as many people as possible.)
The knives, when they stab someone, transfer this curse. They drag someone into Death, at the same time as the City of Sin tries to hold onto them. Thus, they enter an in-between state, not dead or alive, on the brink of Death and Sin. That was the first set of zombie events.
Finally, Chloe revealed herself to the wrong person, he told the Hierarchy she was a spy, and she was executed as someone who worked for Yellow Springs, taking the secret of her true allegiance to the grave with her.
The Magistrate, meanwhile, hatches a plan. He doesn’t believe he’ll ever be truly rid of the Hierarchy as long as they have their grips in the Magistrate’s power. So he decides that if he can find his eldest daughter and transfer power to her, then it could be a clean transfer, not according to the old rituals, and she could rule the city free of their influence. So he decides to get some people to leave Bete Noire on the day when the city is weakest – July 1st – and go get her.
At the same time, the mysterious organization responsible for Chloe and for rumor-mongering in Yellow Springs about a possible Hierarchy invasion takes action again. They leave a piece of paper with the ritual for leaving Bete Noire on the table of a certain young underground advertising specialist, in a coffee shop. The specialist realizes that this is a possible gold mine for people who want to GTFO, and she starts marketing like crazy. By the time July 1st rolls around, tons of people have this ritual. They execute it, simultaneously, and in seven places, the fabric of Bete Noire is worn just thin enough.
And then Yellow Springs breaks through.
Noah wants the Hierarchy’s heads. He wants Benny’s head, since he blames him for original sin and therefore for the flood. And he does everything he can to make that happen. The city resists, but eventually gives up Benny, and then uses the Hierarchy to bait a trap for Noah. Noah falls for it, but the instant he realizes it’s a trap, he tells his warriors to kill Benny.
The city reels in shock from Benny’s death, and an earthquake engulfs the final battle. The Magistrate manages to kill Noah, Noah slaughters Gordon and stabs Ginny, and, at the very end, the Magistrate has a heroic death just as his daughter arrives. A tearful moment of reconciliation, and he gives her the city.
We leave Plot Arc 1 with the old Magistrate dead, and his daughter brought in as the new Magistrate of Bete Noire, free of the Hierarchy; with Noah’s death, the power of Yellow Springs is broken, and death has simply halted, everywhere in the multiverse. Finally, Bete Noire is in shambles, ruins, most of the buildings just rubble and great sinkholes open in the streets.
And now we enter Plot Arc 2.
Any questions, clarifications about what I have here or what I failed to mention, address them to this post!
Only two minor things:
No, I will not tell you what mysterious organization Chloe belonged to. And no, I will not tell you what their motivation was in bringing war between Yellow Springs and Bete Noire.