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let fury have the hour,
WHO? Everybody!
WHAT? Agoge's third TDM! And the death of an important guy. And some very upset royalty.
WHEN? Late 1792, Paris.
ANYTHING ELSE? Violence, as always. Please warn in subject lines for anything beyond physical violence, and move to a personal journal if things go beyond PG-13.
WHAT? Agoge's third TDM! And the death of an important guy. And some very upset royalty.
WHEN? Late 1792, Paris.
ANYTHING ELSE? Violence, as always. Please warn in subject lines for anything beyond physical violence, and move to a personal journal if things go beyond PG-13.
IT'LL BE FINE;
Paris, 1792: revolutionary france.
read the France setting infopages
arrival for new recruits(Note: If you were one of the people who used the previous TDM and want to use that as canon while still participating in this one, feel free! The following will still happen, though the guide will apologize for a malfunction in your BCE causing you to zap through the intervening month instead of joining your comrades like you should have. You'll be assured the glitch is fixed now, and it probably is. Probably.)
You wake up in a Parisian hotel room with a kind woman standing near the door, waiting for you to awaken. You have none of your clothing, just black military-issued underwear, and none of your previous possessions beyond the one you chose (if you remember choosing) to bring with you.
The woman by the door speaks French, and if you didn't understand the language before, you do now. If you have questions as to what's going on, she'll answer: you are a member of COST, a paramilitary organization of time travelers fighting against the Regency, a tyrannous kingdom of the future who are trying to stamp out freedom and individuality in the name of peace.
She will provide you with the clothing necessary to fit in at this time, and show you how to use your BCE implant to look up information on this time period and its social and political mores. She won't let you leave until you're properly dressed to fit in, but once you are, she'll wish you luck.
KILL THE KINGIt doesn't matter if you're new, or if you've been here a while. You'll hear about the execution going on today. It's as though the barely restrained urban chaos of Paris has ground to a halt. Everything is about the king. Is it really going to happen? Are they really going to do it? Can they do it? Is it even possible?
Anyone out of the loop will be filled in, but with no small amount of ridicule: Today is the day of the king's execution. His trial has wrapped up, and the National Convention voted to execute him for treason and tyranny.
The crowd at the execution is enormous, a riotous mob of passion barely restrained. Everyone is jockeying for a better view, with children and adults climbing up on nearby statues, lampposts, the sides of houses, rooves, some even hang from windows. Everyone watches the scaffold.
The prison cart arrives with no fanfare save the yells of the crowd. Within it sits a small, fat little man, looking like he's doing his best to remain composed. He's brought to the scaffold, and his crimes are read out: colluding with foreign powers, and the crime of royalty, which is anathema to the republic of France.
When asked for his final words, Louis Capet, known to some as King Louis XVI, speaks in a quiet voice. "I forgive my enemies."
When the blade comes down, the crowd errupts into cheers. Many rush forward to touch the blood of a king, dipping bits of cloth in it in an attempt to save it.
I PREDICT A RIOTIt's as though all the built up tension in Paris exploded when the king was killed.
Who knows what started it. Rumors spread like wildfire, and it doesn't matter, does it? In the end, most of Paris is swarmed with chaos, especially in the areas nearest to where the king was executed. There's no doubt that the riot and the king's death are directly related; no peasant currently throwing stones and breaking windows will deny it.
Fights are happening with great frequency. It only takes a word, a half sentence, for someone to decide you're some kind of counter-revolutionary. There is a current of anxiety in Paris that hasn't gone away; after reaching a fever pitch, it has expressed itself with violence and chaos.
let's visit the tuileriesThe Tuileries was the royal palace in Paris, the last residence of the king before his death. Of course the people of France end up clamoring at its gates, screaming profanities and attempting to scale them.
The majority of the guard let them do this, making only the most token of efforts to keep the peasantry back. But one guard, a man by the name of Antoine Colin, seems to become spooked and shoots repeatedly into the crowd before someone knocks him out.
By then, though, it's too late. The crowd was rambunctious, but not murderous. Now it's bloodthirsty, and the gates are stormed. It isn't long before the common people of France are trampling through the corridors of power. Inside, they'll mostly find servants running and hiding, and lots of valuables to steal.
Most are content with that, but not all. Some clamor for the deaths of the queen and the royal children-- per the laws of inheritance, Marie Capet's remaining son is now King of France. Should he not die as well?
The queen is hidden in a safe room, a hollow wall inside her apartments. Do you try to find her? Try to save her? Try to kill her yourself?
...And what about those kids hiding in there with her?
BRING IN THE TROOPSThe riot in the Tuileries lasts several hours, well past nightfall. It's beginning to peter off, people loosing their energy or vigor, when the sound of gunfire echoes from the front courtyard.
General Lafayette has arrived to save the queen, and brought with him a retinue of personal soldiers. All on horseback, brandishing firearms and sabers, they stream through the expansive halls of the Tuileries and attack anyone who looks out of place. They're here to clean up this mess with no concern for more filthy peasants getting in the way.
AftermathThe night is a long one. Several fires break out in various parts of Paris, shops are looted, and several die in the Tuileries. The queen has disappeared, along with Lafayette. Some say she and Lafayette died, and they'll show you the bodies for a couple sou. Others claim they saw them riding off into safety just before sunrise. There are already talks of hunting them down, trying to find the traitors.
Only one thing is known for sure: It may be advisable to stay inside for the foreseeable future.
read the France setting infopages
ADDITIONAL.
QUEEN MARIE ANTOINETTE JOSEPHE JEANNE & HER CHILDREN
Now, it is their prison. A prison of grand rooms and bustling servants. Who desperately scramble to shove whatever valuables they can into their aprons and satchels as the riots spread like a sea wave through the corridors. Forthing up over the walls and around corners, tearing at paintings, ripping at beds and linens, overturning furniture in its churn. Like horses charging, they do not look where they put their feet and the rooms are torn asunder. Like the sea, it cannot be stopped.
The only mercy to the crash and break is the size of the palace itself. There are so many rooms - some grand, the height of aristocracy, either past or present, the rooms are gold at the edges, grand in their views of the river. Others are small, pokey back room stairs, servants passages. A clear cut between the two worlds. Rich and poor, and in those spaces, if you get far enough ahead of the riot, perhaps you find a quiet empty room.
But perhaps it is not so quiet. Perhaps, when you stand very still, there is a creak heard, the wooden panel in the wall that doesn't look quite right. Doesn't sit even as it should. Perhaps it's the eyes that glint in the second when it looks like a wood box slides open and someone appears to be looking out behind the royal chambers.
Or maybe, it's the sound that is unmistakable. Of sobbing, softly, quiet, coming from the walls themselves. Faint, the type of tears that are past the point of stopping easily, but are simply, more so than anything else, resigned. Soon enough, the riot will swallow that up too.
I have come to right the wrongs
An arrhythmic clicking pattern stifled the noise of everything else. Closer and closer it hurried, until it came to the point in the wall at which the glint of an eye had been seen in the darkness. All that was left was to tear it open.
His knuckle raps against the wall in three prolonged taps.
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And slowly, surely, behind it is revealed the figure of the Queen - her children desperately clutched at her sides. Hiding in their mother's ample skirts. Like all children, they look to their mother like she might shield them from all evil's in life - and she like any mother holds them dearly close like they are the only thing that matters. They are, after all, all that is left of her.
A window, a second, where they all look up at him, and he is greeted with the sight in return, silent still. Her eyes are wet with her crying, her children snotty nose, staining their fine clothes in miserable wet streaks.
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His face shows no reaction to the family in tatters before him. It doesn't change at their tears which would make the hardiest of men quiver, nor at the children whose fearful reliance on their mother signals an innocence that has yet to be ruined. What short time he spends staring the queen in the eye is cut short as he lowers his head - either in shame, or repulsion.
As the panel slides open, his figure becomes more clear within what little light is scattered around the room. He carries no torch with him, but as he lowers the hand with which he knocked, in its place is revealed to be a rifle, held from the barrel with its butt firmly placed into the ground beside him.
There are no words he can say.
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"My husband is dead."
She cannot believe they - the riot, to which is not but one more face of that stands before her - can have another purpose, here and now, with her son - the son of France, clutching not like a Dauphine, but a little boy sobbing over a hatred he does not understand. "Let me kiss them goodbye."
The boy, fair-haired and soft-featured, cries and cries and cries.
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Eren had been there to see the blade fall, and the rule of a mob made him question the worth of the people's freedom. On death row, there was little anyone could do but resign themselves to their fate. And, if all went according to how it was supposed to, this widow and the last vestiges of her family were to follow in their father's footsteps up to the chopping block.
Fuck that.
"This is not the end." He says it in a voice clear as a prayer.
At that same time, from behind him comes a raucous clattering. From the door in which he had earlier entered, in streams one, two, and finally a third. Each of these people carried with them rudimentary weapons, their silhouettes cutting a clear figure in the light that came in from the hall.
All that the ruined family can see of Eren now is his back. He's turned with a resolve that signals nothing short of absolution. He speaks as firmly as before, quivering not even an inch.
"This is my apology for not being able to save your husband." He takes aim. "You should cover your ears."
The trigger is pulled. It's a noise that sends one's head spinning, but within the mire of chaos it's likely to go unnoticed. One of them falls, and before anyone has a chance to breathe, Eren surges forward, beating one down with the end of his rifle before stumbling to the ground, having taken a knife to the back.
The only one to remain begins moving close.
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Marie herself, she doesn't waste time - she knows the layout of the Queen's chambers now, like the back of her hand. A plan she had half formed a dozen times. She takes Marie-Therese by hand, scoops up Louis-Charles, and with her children in hand - the Queen of France bolts for the next door to put space between her, this man who had come - and those who he fights. She runs as fast as corsets and skirts and her children's legs will let her from this room into the next.
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Before the queen's would-be killer opens the door fully, behind his already menacing silhouette rises an even more fearsome shadow, shown first gripping the man's shoulder, then returning the knife to its rightful owner, leaving it in the nape of his neck.
A body crumbles within the doorway leading to the remnants of the family. This time, it's not Eren. Though he's ragged and bloody, and feverish to boot, he's still able to remember what he came here to do. He steps over the body and comes forward with one hand raised in a gesture of peace. And, whether it's from exhaustion or respect, quickly kneels before the crown, though their crowns only existed now in the annals of history.
"Quite a mess you're all in," he says, blood leaking down the side of his face. His gaze, as kind as someone so haggard can manage, is directed at the children, who he so dearly wants to see spared from this conflict, against all odds. "Don't be afraid. I'm here for you. And I've got a plan to get you out of this alive."
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She wasn't getting very far like this.
"Why? Why would you risk yourself for us, monsieur? Do you not hate us too?"
He looks like no royalist she has ever seen.
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The royal apartments at Tuileries almost seemed to exist in his mind's eye partially as a place set as a stage for future violence. He hadn't seen it at first, in the first few days he had worked here, but as time had gone on and the vivid electricity of bloodlust from the people of the city saturated his understanding of what was going on, he seemed to think it was inevitable. He knew from what the Sargent had said and what Ryuji had told him that the king was destined to die, to be executed by the people he had left feeling subjugated. It was a moral quandary that Ashitaka didn't have time to unpack, but he had told himself that he would try to search within the major threads of history for things that he could try to help. Some small positive changes he could affect without changing the flow of history too much. The king might have been taken away, but the queen and the children were still in the palace, so when things take a turn for the worst, Ashitaka goes in search of them.
He had what the crowds of rioting people did not: understanding of the palace, and also a few ideas as to where they might go to hide. Even after a month or so of working here, he did not know all of the secrets of the palace, but it gave him a framework of ideas to work with. He checked each in turn, trying to stay carefully apart from groups of rioters and looters that had progressed this far into the palace.
He might not have given a second thought to the empty room if he hadn't heard steps thundering through the hallway outside. Ashitaka hides out of view of the doorway for a moment, waiting for them to pass. They did, though another sound become evident in the ensuing relative silence. The soft, sightly muffled sound of someone crying.
Once he heard that, he finds the wall panel that doesn't seem to fit quite right relatively easily. He moves towards it, crouching down and placing a hand on the surface. "Your Majesty?" He speaks loud enough that he think he might be heard, though he doesn't want to draw any more undue attention to them. "I am one of the palace guards. Please, allow me to get you to safety."
For he had heard that the king was destined to be killed by his people, but he had not heard of the similarly-famous death of the queen. In Ashitaka's mind, this is something that he can still salvage, and so he will do what he must.
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She's separated from the queen and Jon when it happens. Cleaning, as it were. Or rather, admiring the egg which has grown over the weeks. When the shattering of glass sounds, it seems as if the world itself freezes. The air grows heavier with anticipation--
--and then chaos erupts. The mass of bodies racing past her would be impressive in and of itself, but she's quickly brushed aside, none-too-nicely, in the face of greed and panic. A quick message is sent to Jon. Another to Ashitaka. How do they fare? There was nothing to do for the king, and though she found him to be incompetent, wishing death upon him was cruel. The same could be said of the queen.
Likely why she darts down a familiar corridor and off toward Marie's rooms.
The children. They would be with her, or nearby. It was still possible to halt that course, was it not? To create something new? These actions would go against what she's discussed with the others and with the Commander as well. Still, the unraveling of these events shows, judging by her comrade's distress and surprise, that history is not playing itself as it should.
So caught up in her thoughts, she nearly misses the familiar voice before it's too late. Stumbling to a stop, she spins around and ducks into the room that--
"Ashitaka!"
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He sends messages to Daenerys and Ashitaka telling them to get to safety, that he's heading for the Queen's apartments and isn't much ahead of the mob.
When he reaches his destination, they're both already there, and Ashitaka has his face pressed to the wall.
Where are the children? He had been unable to help his sisters when the Red Keep had erupted in violence against his family, and he's seen the consequences of that in Sansa's face and eyes. He had been unable to help Bran and Rickon when Winterfell was sacked, when he'd thought they'd died, and later, when Rickon had been used as bait in a trap for Jon himself. These French children are not his family, but they are only children, and their parents' faults in ruling are not theirs. And the Queen had, in her way, tried to be kind to him.
He closes the door behind him -- let the mob waste time looking through all the rooms with closed doors before they reach this one -- and approaches Ashitaka, adding his voice.
"It's Jean Neige, and Danielle. We'll help if we can, but there's no time to waste."
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Though not far - Marie Therese and Louis-Charles stumble straight for their beloved Jean's leg, wrapping around him as Therese begins to sob. Holding fast like only children can - sure, sure that he will be their protector, their saviour.
Marie holds her hands in front of, reached without truly looking for - someone, anyone, to hold them. Her face stricken, exhausted - an emptiness of the soul that will never again be replaced as she looks between Jean, Ashitaka and Danny. "The King is dead."
It is neither a question - but as she looks between all their faces, tear-wet and face white as the white linen cap that sits over her hair, she wants the confirmation absolutely. She is beyond her grief, right now.
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Jon is not far behind, a further salve to his worries (though they were certainly still present). He nods to the other young man, moving to stand, though he was distracted from any response by the stirring of the false panel. Ashitaka steps out of the way as it slides away, revealing not only the queen but the children as well, huddled into the cramped space. Something twists in Ashitaka's chest at their tear-streaked faces, the mark twinging with pain as he hears a crash and raucous shouts down distant hallways.
He knows well enough that Jon and Daenerys had more rapport with these individuals; Ashitaka had spent his time with men that had done next to nothing to stop this violence from spilling like a flood past the gates and into the grounds they were meant to protect with their lives. This thought is a bitter taste, like bile in the back of his throat.
With all of this in mind, he steps aside, allowing Dany to the aid of the queen and leaving Jon with the children (locked around his legs).
His expression, however, is one of mingling remorse and resolve. "Your Majesty," the words seem to stick in his throat, and there is a hair's-breadth of pause before he continues in a grave tone, "I am sorry."
It was all the response she would likely need.
"But," he continues, speaking now with urgency, "We must now make sure that the same fate does not befall you or your children. You must come with us, at once."
spot the glaring irony in this tag, aegon
He looks down at the Dauphin -- the king now, he supposes, but maybe he never really will be, not now that his family has been deposed -- and at Marie-Therese, and pats each of them gently on the head and speaks to them softly, turning his voice into a low rumble. "I know you're afraid, but that means you have a chance to be brave," he says to them. "You'll have to be very brave."
But where will they take the Queen and the children? That's a part of Lafayette's plans that the three of them haven't discovered, and they don't know if there was a contingency for something like this. And with the children wreathed around his legs like this, Jon isn't likely to be able to go far, or do much to defend any of them.
"Is someone ready to take you out of the city?" he asks the Queen. It's better to make no allusion to their more solid suspicions of the plans that had been taking shape.
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...It's close enough.
The children flock to Jon, and Dany's halfway across the room, clasping Marie's hands before she realizes. These moments hold a surreality to it, as if she watches beneath water, separated enough from what occurs. The king is dead. Did her mother hold the same look to her as the queen does?
Soft crying leaves her heart aching, and it shows in her eyes as she looks at Marie. Ashitaka and Jon are correct: now is not the time to grow distracted by what's come to pass. Already the shouts in the halls grow louder, still faint echoes, but drawing nearer with each moment they waste here.
"You must be tired, my lady, and greatly miss your family," she says, voice soft. A gentle squeeze to the hands within her own. It's a similar ache she's felt countless times and is, perhaps, what allows her to sound so genuine. "We will protect you as best we can in the hopes that you will be reunited with your family. Is your brother aware of your plans to leave? Is he the one to receive you and your children?"
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She keeps looking at them, trying to make sense of them. Their expectant looks. Her plan as it was, was to hide. "Now they will do the same to me." Her voice breaks, cracks. Her eyes look and do not see them, a blurring emptiness of something like fate.
And it is understanding, utterly on her face. She is a poor Queen. As much to blame for this suffering as her husband, a defeat that creeps up against her throat. She will not be leaving this palace alive. "Take them. You must get them out."
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COMMANDER GROTHIA | NPC
FROM: @CMDR
Once the mob starts, there will be no influencing. If you want to survive it, I suggest moving with it. Get ready, soldiers.
@DIEDHARD
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Your goal is at present to survive the next 24 hours without incident. We need to finalise our resources for extraction and we would prefer not to lose anymore soldiers.
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Try to keep some of our more inexperienced troops alive.
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