Bloodmoot

I had the good fortune to attend a bloodmoot once, and I consider it a formative experience both as a person and as an academic. I was visiting a conference in the Fractured Cities with my dear colleague, Dr. Julie Mandel, where both of us were presenting papers. My talk was on the subject of my graduate research, the justification of state suppression of academia. Dr. Mendel's talk, which was scheduled right after mine, was supposed to be about the liberating power of education, but she ended up spending the first half giving refutations of my talk. Naturally, this annoyed me, so I invited her to the nearby bloodmoot that was going on that day.

Now, the most important thing to know about going to a bloodmoot as a foreigner is that everyone there, with no exception, is out to get someone. A few of those present are primaries, who have the unenviable task of trying to kill the opposing Hierarch directly. These are your snipers, your poisoners, your stagehands holding up anvils by ropes (tried surprisingly often since Roerbach), etc. This task is unenviable because all of the other attendees at the bloodmoot, the secondaries, have the task of either neutralizing the opposing primaries or neutralizing the people trying to neutralize their own primaries. If you're lucky, you'll be so far up the chain of counterplays that nobody is specifically tasked with neutralizing you, which means you only have to fear the free agents looking for any weak points in the opposing counterplayers. When you attend as a foreigner, you naturally present as a free agent, so you're safe as long as you don't appear to be on either Hierarch's side. If you do accidentally show support for one side, it's best to leave the premises immediately before one of the other free agents gets to you.

Dr. Mendel, unfortunately, was wearing a red cardigan, which just so happened to be the color of one of the two Hierarchs meeting at that bloodmoot. I last saw her being stuffed into a box by two orderlies wearing what was possibly red and being loaded onto a mail gigatrebuchet. Right before it was fired at one of the Hierarchs, though, The Lunchtime Fallacy appeared out of the warp and hit it, diverting the aim, and the payload ended up being fired through the ceiling. This must have been according to plan, because one of the Hierarchs started cackling as a flock of marionette children descended through the new hole in the ceiling. I took that as my cue to ditch, but I must have made a wrong turn, because I ended up in a hallway with the Hierarchs at one end and the corvid flock on the other. Had to use my spare flashbang to stun the Hierarchs and get to the fire escape ahead of the crows. I was barely able to slam the door shut behind me before they got out.

Anyway, that's how I became, at least on paper, one of the competitors for the throne of the Fractured Cities, which figured prominently in my subsequent misosophy degree conferral.