text 💎 un: Tohsaka Rin

[defenceless]

[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! ))

Comments

[adlantisag]

[ 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.

[heelies]

[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.

[adlantisag]

[ 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. ]