Daniel Sell
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Dead Letter
🕑 Added 2023-11-21 22:35:42 +0000 UTCSkill 5
Stamina 5
Initiative 2
Armour 0
Damage as Letter Opener or Small Beast
Mien:
1. Collapsed in a puddle
2. Heckling post carriers
3. Vandalising post
4. Asking others to read their faded address
5. Menacing with a letter opener
6. Laying in ambush for someone to pick them up
In an effort to surmount the challenge of delivering twice daily post to every door in Troika, Master of Post Salvatore Flavius IV instituted the Lifesome Act by which one half of all mail deliveries must be performed by self-directed animate post. Since then the infinite city has had industry leading mail service and a growing dead letter problem. An animate letter, left undelivered, has no postmaster to carry them back for incineration. Instead they stand in the street, watery eyed, until they either harden their hearts and start a new life or get snatched up by a passing owl for use as nesting material. Those who survive the first few days of their dead life almost invariably fall in with established dead letter gangs and live short lives of petty crime and violence.
## Violence
Dead Letters will work in gangs of up to a few dozen, disguising themselves as street rubbish or potentially valuable discarded mail to draw people near enough to rob. They don't eat or need anything much, so the money is usually stored inside themselves.
## Ecology
Any undelivered package can become a "dead letter", and there are cases of whole pallets becoming formidable underworld bosses with armies of small parcels and canny-edged letters.
## Lair
Dead letter gangs occupy lofts of abandoned buildings with good dry roofs. If ambushed the lighter letters will hurl themselves from windows to escape and be carried by the wind, while the larger packages will grimly defend themselves. Lone dead letters are usually found in alley ways or sewer grates, sheltering as best they can from the rain and careless footfall of the city.
## Special
While usually easy to chop up into pieces, the animating magic of dead letters only truly stops if the letter is incinerated or Undone (at skill 9).
