[centre][img]https://i.imgur.com/7HlmcQK.png[/img] [h3]This Giant's Different[/h3] [i]Circa 3 years PR[/i][/centre] The camp had something extra today. The ogres shouted, they struck each other, they stank, they abused the slaves, they ate, they stank, they placed bets on wrestling matches, they reinforced their command structure through brutality, and they stank. This was all the usual. Yiga the slave hain was used to it all. To anyone else, that something extra would be drowned in filth and barbarism. They had put up more sentries. They had been shouting up at their leaders more. And Yiga and her companions in servitude were digging another ditch to encircle the camp in front of the perfectly good ditch that they had already dug. The ogres had some reason to be afraid. Yiga paused her digging into the hard soil to peek up at their overseer. Big Fromp was asleep again. He was afforded that privilege by being one of the only ogres in the camp that did not snore like a falling tree. In turn, his charges were afforded the freedom to whisper and gossip under his sleepy ears. "Johtn," Yiga hissed. "Johtn! Tsst! Why are they so jumpy today?" Johtn did not stop digging. "Rumour's about," he whispered. "About what?" "Monster came out the Weald recently." Yiga tilted her head in confusion. "Ogres aren't afraid of Weald monsters." "Different one. Something strange." Johtn's staccato only became more so. "Kills ogres. Killed a whole camp of 'em." "Wouldn't they hunt it?" Johtn finally hazarded a glance at Yiga as if he didn't know the answer for sure. "Probably not 'cos they can't find it. Or, if they find it, all the hunters die. It'smart. It's weird 'cos it's a white giant, but..." Yiga let out a disappointed sigh. "Ogres can kill white giants. I've seen it. They'll catch it." "Not this one. Don't know if it's a white giant for sure. Just looks like one." "So...a smart white giant?" "More'n that. Leaves these marks everywhere. Fights smart, too. Like it plans. No'ne knows what the marks mean, though." A loud waking snort tensed both slaves up. Everyone doubled their efforts in digging. Behind them, grinding soil and detritus heralded a wave of nauseating body odour approaching. A large shadow swallowed Yiga and Johtn. Neither dared look up at its source. [i]"SHAGGANK! BO FIK-BAB!"[/i] Shut up. No talking. Probably the most common thing they heard from Big Fromp. The hain to Yiga's right was kicked into the wall of the incomplete ditch with a thud. The already filthy slave wheezed and crawled back to work. Her eyes grimaced in pain. Yiga gave the kicked hain a glance. You're lucky today, Sem, Yiga thought. He didn't break any shell plates on his randomly assigned punishee today. [hr] "Yiga! Yiga! Wake up, right now! Quickly!" Yiga shuddered awake in the pit the slaves were forced to sleep in. The sun was up. They should have started work hours ago. Yiga panicked at Sem waking her up. "Sem!? What are you doing!?!" She breathed. "Don't speak so loud or Fromp will crunch us both! If we're lucky, we can sneak to the ditch and pretend..." She trailed off as she sat up. It was quiet. The camp was never quiet. Nothing smelled different. There was still just filth. She wondered for a moment whether the ogres had moved on without them all. "Something's happened," Sem said, clearly enough to be kicked by any ogre in earshot. "Come, have a look." A number of hain were awake and standing, looking through the wooden pen the ogres had built for them. Sem helped Yiga up to her feet and lead her through the mud to the pen walls. Yiga gently shouldered through the gathered hain. No one was saying anything over a whisper. She saw why. The structures around the camp were all toppled, burnt, or fallen in the breeze. The smell of filth, garbage, and blood was overwhelmingly biased to the latter. And ogres lay still in the wet dirt in red puddles. They had wounds, blunt force, normally not what bothered an ogre. They also had sickening divots where their fatty necks were meant to be. They were all crushed in like a great pair of fingers had squeezed their throats like lemons. Yiga tried to see as far as she could. More dead ogres. More destroyed camp. She somehow slept through it all, probably because of the camp ruckus and hard work training her to be a heavy sleeper. She took her aching, overworked limbs and clambered up the side of the pen. "Yiga! Wait! You don't know if whatever did this is still out there!" Johtn shouted from below. "I gotta know," Yiga said. Her voice was stronger than ever. She reached the top and straddled the pen fence. It shuddered as she tried to keep her balance. The camp had something extra today. The mud, the fences, everywhere that blood could be smeared or dirt could be furrowed, there was this symbol written over and over. Stretching around the corpses of ogres, penned onto their pale, dead bellies with blood, arrayed with bits of bones on the floor, there was the same symbol. Yiga had not seen it before. She did not think she knew what it meant until she saw its many incarnations around the pen. It came together as a pattern. A rune with an intrinsic meaning. It was a question. A scared question. Missing some context, true, but understandable by one word in Yiga's language. "Mother?" Yiga read out loud. [hider=GUESS WHO!] I promised to do this ever since that post a year ago. Hohohoho, it feels GOOD. (Nevermind that this is continuing the trend of short, smashed-out posts from players recently). This post starts with some hain slaves working for some ogres on a frontier camp. They note, even under their horrid living conditions, that the ogres seem a little on-edge today. One has heard a rumour that might be the cause. A white giant has wandered out of the Venomweald, and this one is different. It's been hunting and killing ogres with an uncharacteristic cunning. It leaves this weird symbol wherever it goes that no one can understand. Before further discussion, the hain overseer wakes up and tells them to shut up. Skip to the next morning. The hain wake up perplexed in their slave pen. The camp has fallen silent. When they check out the camp through the holes in the fence, they saw the camp had been razed in the night and all the ogres are dead with crushed necks. One of the hain slaves climbs the fence, risking punishment from the ogres. She not only confirms that there were no survivors except those in the pen, but also that a strange symbol has been written in blood and dirt just about everywhere in the camp. It's the Tounic character describing the word 'mother' posed as a question. Whether it is a request for one's mother or asking if someone before them is their mother is unclear. That said, this is just a one-off, so I'll reveal the mystery here: [hider=SPOILERZ] [@Lauder], this is quite relevant to you, my dude. The murderous white giant in question has been inhabited by the young soul of Keriss' dead child. As mentioned in the white giant creation sheet, white giants are powered by synthetic pseudo-souls that perform the bare minimum required to carry out their purposes. Nearby to catastrophic events of emotional pain and death, these pseudo-souls can be shunted out of their tenuous hold upon their white giant bodies by the flurry of real souls that escape the nearby disaster. The white giant body snares one of these souls and becomes a host for it, holding the memories of the soul's original owner and carrying out old habits. The trauma of being killed by its own mother combined with the power of divine-descent and, you know, a whole tribe being turned into a crater, allowed the baby's soul to hold on to a nearby patrolling white giant. It's inherited a few habits of Keriss and Kri'Tral. Remember kids, contraceptives are [i]everyone's[/i] responsibility! [/hider] [/hider]