futurology | text 💎 un: Tohsaka Rin

[shortly after the storm clears on may 11th and the network connection between both sides of the group is reestablished, the following post appears:]

We're fine, as far as I know. I don't think anyone's dead, at least.

The storm that separated us was brought about by a Dakal named Pomarr. Some of you may remember her as our feline friend who sold her soul to Ryba—or whatever it is she did—to continue to live on after death.

She swept us to an island that looked like it was raised from the seafloor. It wasn't a vacation, but there were definitely remnants of what those big cats must have called home.

Her plan is to revive her entire race, in the same way Ryba "revived" her. As if life-or-death deals with shady goddesses aren't concerning enough, she wants to grant Ryba the power to carry out this mass revival by having her suck Nalanni dry. Pomarr understandably doesn't care much for Nalanni after she drowned everyone she loved; in fact, she showed us this in morbid detail. She's taken Nalanni. Hence, all the Nalawi losing their Gifts and all of this inconvenience we have to deal with.

Pomarr knows where Nalanni is, but she's asking us not to interfere, and she wouldn't give us the opportunity to speak with Nalanni when I requested it. For some reason, she didn't expect that we would be suffering like the Nalawi are. She's promised to try to fix that.

What do we do now, ALASTAIR? I can share anything else you want to know about our meeting with Pomarr, or Yukimura Sanada-san or Mr. Keats can, but this is most of it. We have a situation where the balance of this whole world might be upended if we sit and twiddle our thumbs.

I don't think I need to remind anyone of the potential consequences of messing with either goddess. Or a litter of zombie cats roaming free.

(( ooc: infodump for rin, yukimura, and keats' conversation with a dakal npc, for one of the plot slots! feel free to handwave your character (in either the marooned group or the left behind group) learned this info by reading the post or talking with rin/yukimura/keats/another recruit. yukimura and keats may also be replying to tags! ))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You presume to know much, daughter of Nedakh, for one who has arrived in this land only lately. When a stone is tossed into a pool, do the ripples caused thus touch the far bank all at once? No - but one need only wait and he will see that at last the whole body of water is disturbed where once it lay at peace.

It is you who presumes, son of Peleus. Why say you that these gods are just as the ones you know?

Do all gods not uphold the same laws across lands? Are their decisions not absolute? Who among men can sway their hearts but with proper sacrifice? And even then, their hearts might yet remain fixed as stones half sunk in the soil. Indeed, the gods can be cruel in measure equal to their glory and benison - this I will not deny. Who among men too has not felt the heavy hand of Fate lay upon his shoulders great sorrows? But to challenge the gods, who take for the kingdoms the vastness of the seas and the fiery stomachs of volcanoes - what will such a foolish plan accomplish?

Across all lands? Achilles, if there were gods in my world worth knowing then surely in eight thousand years of life I would be aware of them!

[ Kida has always believed in the existence of unnamed 'gods' in a peripheral way, though Atlanteans are ancestor-worshippers. After seeing the death of her city, however, her stance has hardened considerably. If there existed any gods beyond the Atlantean crystal, surely one of them--any of them--would have done something. Reacted. That's what the gods Achilles knows would've done. ]

And so we should allow the mighty to go unchecked, because that is how it has always been? I thought you a warrior, Achilles. A leader of men. How many innocents need to die before you take a stand?

[He would concede her first point, for he cannot say he knows the lands of all those whom this crew comprises: it is simply the habit of man to assume that what holds true in his dear native land holds true across other nations. Achilles has trouble enough fathoming the countless landss that lie not across great Oceanus as he once assumed, but across the stars themselves - he cannot begin to imagine all the myriad ways those races carve out their lives.

But then she challenges his honor, and civil discourse wanes where his temper waxes.]

If it is the Dakal of whom you speak, then what care I for their kind? Do the branches of our lineages tangle together somewhere in the far past? Has any of this race been welcomed as guest in my father's house, or in my grandfather's? Tell me, at what time did their ancestors and mine seal with gifts the bonds of guest-friendship which are held so sacred? Yet you insist my honor is bound to the cunning Dakal! Indeed you stir my heart, daughter of Nedakh, but it is not for the sorrows of this accursed race that my ire grows.

[ She can't believe what she's hearing. Achilles, Hero of Troy, whose feats of strength and honour precede him wherever he goes--reduced to a cutthroat, a mercenary, with no care for anything or anyone beyond his own interests? ]

Then this is who you are? I took you for a hero of legend, valorous and decorated in war, not a craven with no strength left to safeguard the weak--guarding only his own instead.

Be the plaything of the gods if that is what suits you, son of Peleus. I will not let this world suffer again by my inaction.

[The problem is that each has a very different definition of honor, and a different threshold for probable cause.]

Show me the man whose shield is broad enough that behind it the people of all races can crouch. Moreover, the Dakal are dead and their bodies lie beneath the enormous pall of the sea. What more would you have me do for them, but retrieve their bones that they may be granted proper burial? They wielded malice for Nalanni and sought to desecrate her volcano, and so they answered to her divine temper: for their misfortune they have naught to blame but their swollen pride.

However, you are mistaken if you believe that idle shall my spear stay. Pomarr must not be allowed to raise her race from the shadows of the underworld, whose entrance their miserable shades clog. Such an act defies the gods and Fate itself - it defies the very cycles to which the earth must submit. Their return bodes ill for the Nalawi too, who hold the Dakal in mutual enmity. These are the weak to whom I shall lend my strength.

[ What more would you have me do for them, he says. She doesn't want him to do anything. I want you to be angry for them! she doesn't say, her teeth increasingly grit together as he speaks. It's when he gets to speaking of 'swollen pride' that Kida feels ill.

Did all of Atlantis deserve to fall for the pride of its king? Did its children deserve to suffer? What of a people 'deserves' divine retribution for mortal sin? Who is Achilles to speak to her of fate? Again that cold sweat of fear grips her: are her people fated to die? Are they merely staving off the inevitable?

Her hands tremble so badly with her rage that she has to lay down her bracelet. This man understands nothing. They agree, at least, on Pomarr--though it's little comfort. She thinks of Atlantis, the great shield, and all those not lucky enough to be caught within it. The screaming, endless and ringing, the light and the cold. Water in torrents. The earth caving over them. How for the longest time, all anyone would say was that it had been an act of the gods. The gods! Kida had always thought that any creature, earthly or divine, capable of such mindless destruction should be defied.

How anyone rational can look upon the deaths of thousands and say they deserved their fate makes her stomach churn. ]

text 💎 un: Tohsaka Rin

kida: kanye shrug

i don't use keywords BUT IF I DID that'd be it

yes good

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject