The Fallen King

The Fallen King
Location
Region:	London
Zone:	[[:Category: Characters|]]
Location:	Ealdwic Park
Background Information
Species:	Human
NPC Information
NPC Type:	Mission

The Fallen King is a sardonic homeless street-preacher located near Ealdwic Park in London. He states that he used to be a futures trader but now lives underground and, when he mentions "pan-handlers on the Tube", adds an "I should know." He has been moved on several times by the police. He wears plastic bags on his feet and dressed in layered coats, mismatched clothes, scarves, perhaps a small mattress, and pin-on buttons, and speaks with a North London accent. It's unclear as to whether his name (The Fallen King) refers to himself or to the crowned and scepter-wielding hand-puppet in visible blackface which he uses as part of his diatribe.

New Templars agents listen to him speak as part of the mission London Calling where they pass out and then are transported to Tokyo Flashback. It's unclear as to whether the Fallen King uses some form of magic on the agents, or else some form of hypnosis or memetic suggestion.

Missions

Initiates

Tokyo Flashback - NOTE: Listening to The Fallen King as part of the London Calling mission finished that mission and automatically starts characters on the Tokyo Flashback mission. As opposed to most quest givers where players select to start the mission.

Involved In

London Calling

Dialogue

[The player cannot interrogate the Fallen King, but the King cycles through several monologue routines if the player waits in earshot.]

• The Fallen King: You! I remember you, I'm very good with names.
• The Fallen King: Very good with making them up as I go along.
• The Fallen King: Here's a thought. If things don't work out with saving the world...
• The Fallen King: that's not prophecy, you can have that one for free.
• The Fallen King: If things don't work out, there'll always be a place for you in my kingdom.
• The Fallen King: Underground,
• The Fallen King: down among the refuse and the wreckage.
• The Fallen King: It's homely. It grows on you.
• The Fallen King: Like lichen!
• The Fallen King: We've been down there since before you were lying in your bedroom,
• The Fallen King: pretending love songs on the radio were about you, ha-ha-ha. Those were simpler times.
• The Fallen King: Not for you, you had puberty and acne to get through. For us, in the secret world.
• The Fallen King: What was hidden stayed hidden.
• The Fallen King: There were rules.
• The Fallen King: No one liked the rules, but there they were, and there we were.
• The Fallen King: Well, everything ends.
• The Fallen King: Can I get your home phone number?

• The Fallen King: Ladies and gentlemen, the sky is falling!
• The Fallen King: Not quickly, hah, that would be ridiculous.
• The Fallen King: At the speed of mould spreading across your kitchen walls:
• The Fallen King: Aeons 1 - IKEA nil.
• The Fallen King: It's creeping closer every day, and it's not bringing Heaven with it.
• The Fallen King: Sorry! Heaven has left the firmament.
• The Fallen King: Don't believe me? Look up, and ask yourself how anything good
• The Fallen King: could come from such a vast and uncaring space. Look up and imagine the light has died.
• The Fallen King: See the tower blocks clutching at its dull blackness like the ribcage of the spent,
• The Fallen King: appalling creature our city is... for example.
• The Fallen King: The future is in cowering underground, it's under the Underground.
• The Fallen King: You can take it from me, I dealt in futures once. The futures market.
• The Fallen King: Years ago, and now there's no future left to trade.
• The Fallen King: That's why I'm not asking you for donations, ladies and gentlemen.
• The Fallen King: We're running a charitable organisation here, this is a public service announcement.
• The Fallen King: A public convenience! The end is slowly nigh.

• The Fallen King: Word to the wise. Use your self-help books for combustible fuel.
• The Fallen King: Cancel that yearly gym membership, barely used.
• The Fallen King: Don't bother to return your overdue video cassettes.
• The Fallen King: All too late!
• The Fallen King: The horizon's going dark!
• The Fallen King: Things are gonna be different for you, but not like they promised on internet dating sites.
• The Fallen King: Not like the Morninglight zombies told you on their no-obligation personality test!
• The Fallen King: They go on and on about change more than panhandlers on the Tube. I should know.
• The Fallen King: But change into what?
• The Fallen King: Sorry! Still.
• The Fallen King: The grass is always greener on the other side of the millennium.
• The Fallen King: We're just telling you to be prepared.
• The Fallen King: It's not all doom and gloom. You've got a few months. Maybe you'll get a windfall.
• The Fallen King: Someone tipped a bottle of gin down a drain on me last Christmas.

• The Fallen King: Living underneath the city, as I do, a man notices the expiry date on the bottom of the world.
• The Fallen King: That's how humanity will bow out.
• The Fallen King: Produce-style, in a dying fridge hopelessly leaking CFC's!
• The Fallen King: Not with a bang, but like a punnet of strawberries left out in the sun for too long. A putrid whimper.
• The Fallen King: I know what you're all thinking. You're hearing the world is ending, all of it, no more cycle,
• The Fallen King: and you ask yourselves, "So what's in it for me?"
• The Fallen King: Just like our gracious Templar governors upriver in their marble hall.
• The Fallen King: Deliver us from evil, with a hefty delivery charge.
• The Fallen King: Oh, we shouldn't begrudge them it, Hah! Heating that place must cost a French king's ransom.
• The Fallen King: Oh, don't mind me, officers, I am a reduced man and cannot hold myself responsible for what I'm saying.
• The Fallen King: Sedition in a built-up area, move along, move along. No time for heroics!
• The Fallen King: The road to the crusades was paved with good intentions and bounced cheques.

• The Fallen King: Everybody wants to take a bite out of you these days.
• The Fallen King: The big boys muscled out the vampires.
• The Fallen King: Poor old things slumming it door-to-door, while Orochi drains your blood through the television.
• The Fallen King: Through the billboards.
• The Fallen King: That's progress. That's how it will be until the Starbucks go supernova.
• The Fallen King: Old Drac needed to get himself better PR.
• The Fallen King: Impaling means about as much to you lot as tonsillitis.
• The Fallen King: All the nobility's gone out of the bloodsucking business. The opera capes and romantic evenings.
• The Fallen King: Slaughter with a smile. Sorry, mothers of Twilight, sorry!
• The Fallen King: Your teams will not be making the beautiful game this year.
• The Fallen King: It always looks better in the movies, even the end of the world.
• The Fallen King: "What if all the myths and legends were true?" Oooh!
• The Fallen King: Then all the myths and legends would be picking through rubbish bins like storks,
• The Fallen King: or living on minimum wage in dead-end towns,
• The Fallen King: wondering where it all went wrong.

[Templar players' first encounter with the Fallen King, at the end of the London Calling mission leading into their Tokyo Flashback tutorial, is this cutscene monologue:]

• The Fallen King's Handpuppet: Too late to start recycling! To go to raves to save the gorillas! To cash out those Anansi shares!
• The Fallen King's Handpuppet: There's a storm, coming, mondo storm. Paint your glass houses shut!
• The Fallen King: You don't have to take his word for it.
• The Fallen King: This is a warning from the sun. It says it's old and tired and scared of death.
• The Fallen King: It says you've lived as young gods for too long! Spoilt children who only need to wish for something and it'll come true!
• The Fallen King: Well, those days are gone now and won't be here again! Hahaha! Sorry!
• The Fallen King: I'll show you how it all goes down, through the medium of unreliable narration.
• The Fallen King: A vision of the future. This could be your lucky day!
• The Fallen King: Tomorrow and the ones after... not so much.
• The Fallen King: It's a hot, wet day. You ever notice how the apocalypse always comes on a wet day?
• The Fallen King: There's the smell of warm air and stale piss.
• The Fallen King: The atmosphere is electric. I mean actually electric,
• The Fallen King: sparking off the tracks, lifting and snapping your hair.
• The Fallen King: A voice over the speakers that you don't hear, you itch. The black signal sounds ...
• The Fallen King: Lights out.

[To complete another, investigation, mission, the player must seek him out and then endure this cutscene monologue:]

• The Fallen King: "Knock knock!" No takers?
• The Fallen King: Ah, fair enough, I'm not convinced I can remember how the rest of this one goes.
• The Fallen King: Ah. The gist of it is that the planet doesn't like you.
• The Fallen King: Ha-ha! Don't expect to be on her recycled paper Christmas card list.
• The Fallen King: Oh, I know, snap judgements are harmful. She's only had a few millennia to get to know us.
• The Fallen King: It takes time for a person's true personality to come out.
• The Fallen King: Ask the Romans, they had a good run.
• The Fallen King: Laid this pretty paint-by-numbers under your feet, and that road too.
• The Fallen King: Ask the stones. Lot of blood and sick and kebab sauce spilt on those stones.
• The Fallen King: They turn up in the strangest places, the Romans. So
• The Fallen King: ask their stones, lay your head down on them and go the whole milia passuum.
• The Fallen King: Not right now, you'd look crazy and I'd be done for inciting mass hysteria. Again.
• The Fallen King: Here's what they'll say:
• The Fallen King: nothing. Ha-ha! Sorry!
• The Fallen King: Their whole empire meant nothing.

Trivia

• The voice actor for The Fallen King is Jonathan Dow

Media

Images

<gallery> File:Fallen_King.jpg|Concept art <gallery>