Heart of a Sentinel: The Training Arc Begins!

Heart of a Sentinel: The Training Arc Begins!
Date	2/1/2025 - 3/7/2025
Storyteller	Dag
Tier	The chosen
Player Characters	Sanaa, Hogo Pok'sharr, Life Giver, Melfyra, with a cameo by Kali
Rewards	250 exp, blessings from the constellations
Result	We learned a lot
Author	Melfyra
Downtime	30

On the night of the winter solstice, a series of strange events had affected myself and a few other associates. I was out for a walk, helping an innocent dog who had landed in my yard get home, when a gentle spring breeze carrying cherry blossom petals lifted me off the ground, and left me with a small token: a glass blossom without flaw. Curious about this incident, I kept hold of it, and went to the library to look for more information on what happened, figuring I'd start with books on weather, plants, and magic items to see if any of those would end up helping. They didn't, but it turns out that Life Giver, from the Guts and Giver law firm, was also there, looking into an incident that happened with him that same night. He had been shot with an arrow from a giant spectral archer, and had received a silver arrowhead from it. He had figured out that this was tied to the Archer, a constellation from the Old Country's Zodiac. Figuring that this sounded similar to what happened with me, I looked into this, and found out that one of these constellations was known as the Blossom. This seemed like it was no coincidence, so we decided to go and ask Kali for advice on what this could mean. On the way there, we ran into Hogo and Sanaa, an Oni and Nagaji who had also had encounters with constellations, Hogo being involved with a hit-and-run with the Sea Dragon and getting some bracers out of it, and Sanaa encountered the Forest Dragon and got a bundle of leaves. We offered to bring them to Kali with us, but they elected to go in their own direction with this. I don't know if they found anything out on their search, but we did learn a lot from Kali. She told us that long ago, twelve champions accompanied a hero named Tian Shen, and harnessed the power of the constellations in their battles. It looks as if we've been chosen to bear that mantle now. Kali was interested in helping us figure out what kind of power these tokens gave us, so we went out and found Hogo and Sanna again, and brought them to the Tattoo Parlor with us. We started by getting a feel for the inherent magic in the tokens, and Life Giver was the first to figure out how they worked. With a flourish and a proclamation, Life Giver had taken on a taller, more humanoid-looking form. Following his example, Hogo, Sanaa, and I took on our own transformations, with Hogo and Sanaa gaining horns and draconic armor, while my antlers bloomed like a cherry tree, and my regular clothes were replaced with a beautiful dress. I then started testing out what kind of magic these transformations were capable of, and accidentally sent a burst of magic at the wall. It was around this time, while we were discussing a better location to practice, that the transformations wore off, a time limit of ten minutes. We then went off on our own to experiment and figure out more of how this works. Hogo figured out how to harness the burst of magic through weapons, and we all found some weird quirks with the transformations, such as Sanaa being unable to use alchemists fire but being able to move through plants better, Hogo not being able to hold creatures down but being able to aim better in the rain, Life Giver being better with archery, but worse with other weapons, and I became better at making art, while being unable to hide my face when I get nervous, possibly being unable to hide my appearance at all. This seems like a very effective way to hide one's identity, but considering how bad I was at hiding the fact that I'm a vampire, I don't think there's any way I'm going to be able to get away with that. I think it would be fun to put on an alternate identity while under the transformation though. I don't know if anyone else is doing this, either.