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[colour=lightseagreen][h1][b][i]Ashalla[/i][/b][/h1]
[b]Goddess of Oceans[/b][/colour]
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The Abyss was mostly quiet and calm. There was the low hum of flowing water, cracking stone and bubbling magma echoing from all corners of the Sphere which gave enough background noise to keep the Abyss from total silence. The currents of the Abyss gently rocked Ashalla back and forth. Water was heated by the magma below, then rose to the top of the Abyss where it cooled against the stone above and sank to repeat the cycle. Ashalla found it soothing.

As she drifted through the Abyss, something peculiar happened. Magma rose and fell regularly in the Abyss, but in one particular spot a column of magma was rising with more determination of any of its peers. The column reached the ceiling of the Abyss and burrowed through it. Setting it apart further, the column's girth grew as a vast quantity of magma was pulled up through the rising stream of molten rock. Around this great stream rose other smaller columns, which also made it through the ceiling. Ashalla circled around this peculiar new formation, watching the dancing magma and pondering why it had appeared or where it led.

Her thoughts were interrupted when a terrific shockwave pulsed through the Abyss, rippling through Ashalla with a dull [i]whomp[/i] and causing many of the lesser magma columns to collapse. Attuned to the Sphere and water as she was, Ashalla could identify that this had arisen from some kind of powerful impact somewhere on Galbar above her.

She had wandered a long way from the Abyssal Rift. She could try navigating the magma tubes in front of her in the hope that they would lead to Galbar's surface, but she was not yet willing to brave such a dangerous passage. Instead she opted to swim back to the Abyssal Rift, but not wishing to miss the events on the surface Ashalla pushed herself to swim faster. She shifted her means of propagation from pulling a large mass of water through a flowing current to a propagating pressure wave in the water, pulsing forwards at the speed of sound.

Even at this great speed it took Ashalla almost an hour to make it to the Abyssal Rift. She turned upwards and in seconds she shot through the rift, struck the surface of the ocean and propelled herself upwards as tall and narrow columns of water which spiralled around each other for support. Ashalla made it up a kilometer before running out of momentum. The tops of the columns shaped themselves into watery eyes and looked out over the world for over a hundred kilometres in every direction. Yet she was still too distant to see direct evidence of the impact, although she could see the front of the tsunami which had radiated from the epicenter.

But another more stunning sight imposed itself upon her senses. In the sky was a point-source of intense light which illuminated Galbar. The ocean and the sky were both painted in brilliant shades of blue. Ashalla's towering watchtower form collapsed after a couple of seconds of gawking. Just under the waves the way light refracted and danced made her giggle in artistic glee.

As the shockwaves of the distant collision rolled past her, she was reminded of her original intent. She swam towards the source of the great disturbance. Before she saw the impact site, she saw the great cloud mixed with dust which had risen from the impact and was spreading out over the sky. Yet from the centre of that expanding cloud was a blue light and unnatural air currents causing the clouds to coalesce and the dust to precipitate out. It was Azura the windy one at work, cleaning her own domain. Ashalla left Azura to her work as she swam up to the colossal crater.

Ashalla's dizzying pace was slowed somewhat as she crossed through the rocky crags and shallows of the rim of the Eye of Desolation. The obstructions caused scattering and reflection of her wave-like advance, forcing her to slow down to keep her essence coherent. But soon she was past the rim and into deep water once more and could return to full speed.

The ocean in the center of the Eye was very deep indeed. While some depth made sense for a feature made by a great impact, if Ashalla had known about asteroid impact dynamics she would know that even this was surprisingly deep for such a crater. The waters were still hot from the cataclysm, the rim of the crater inhibiting the water from mixing with the cooler water outside. The floor of the crater was unlike the seafloor elsewhere. Here the floor had been molten by the impact then solidified soon afterwards, creating smooth and twisted patterns. Dust made the waters turbid, although the dust would settle eventually. Yet in this dust was also a taste of some strange and foreign mineral.

Then, finally, Ashalla came upon the pupil of the Eye and the cause of this crater. It was a mountainous lump of strange black metal submerged in the ocean, its form rippled and warped. The great lump was half-buried by the new sea floor. Ashalla tasted it and found that this new substance was related to the strange mineral she tasted in the water around her. But they were not the same thing, for the mineral was inert while she sensed that this metal, as hardy as it was, harboured a terrible amount of destructive energy. Destructive energy which tasted of the essence of Orvus.

Ashalla shuddered briefly. Could her brother already be attempting to poison her oceans? She analysed the metal and its salts more carefully, seeing how their taste evolved, yet their taste did not change, even with her trying to gently pry apart the substances. The salts and minerals made of the reacted metal were inert, of no more consequence than the sodium chloride and other more natural salts found throughout Galbar. The metal itself, despite its latent potential, refused to corrode, and its incredible hardness protected it from erosion. The metal was less likely to pollute the water than Galbar's native bedrock. Having finally assured herself that this new substance posed no risk to the oceans, she swam away from the Eye.

Her next destination was whatever had been drawing all the magma up from the Abyss. It was not far from the Eye, at least not on a global scale, so soon Ashalla came in sight of a new island, its sea-bed also made from freshly solidified lava. Ashalla rose up and stood at the shore of that island, inspecting it, and she saw a peculiar sight. It was a conical mountain of stone, spewing forth molten rock which poured down into the sea below, solidifying into new land. Ashalla tasted one of the lava flows where it met the ocean with hissing steam, and this taste verified that it was the same molten rock which had been drawn up out of the Abyss. The taste also revealed the essence of the fiery one, Sartravius. Had Sartravius known from where he drew the magma from when he created this volcano? It mattered little to Ashalla.

Although, watching the island grow ever so slowly, a pang of worry struck Ashalla. Could this growing island one day overtake the whole ocean? But then she realised the nonsense of such a concern. The lava merely displaced the water, it did not destroy it. Even if the fiery one was able to muster enough strength to have this volcano cover the entire planet, the ocean would remain and the volcano's base would remain submerged. Not that she considered such an outcome likely.

Ashalla departed from Muspell and meandered around the ocean for a while longer, aimless for a time, watching the sun circle around Galbar and drifting with the currents, until she eventually came back to the Eye of Desolation. There she discovered that things had changed. Things coloured green and brown with a multitude of limbs of varying sizes now coated the larger island, and among the greenery moved entities which in the broadest sense possible could be said to superficially resemble Ashalla's siblings, in that they had legs, heads and other similar biological features. Ashalla moved under a cliff face and felt a leaf which had fallen into the waves, tasting its essence. This was a creation of Phystene, the green one.

Ashalla rose up so that she was peering over the top of the cliff into the jungle beyond. She marvelled at the beauty of each species there and wondered at the mechanisms of the ecosystem. She stretched out a seawater pseudopod and engulfed a branch of a nearby tree. She could taste the oxygen diffusing out of its leaves and carbon dioxide being drained away. Ashalla then saw a lizard and scooped that up with another pseudopod. It struggled against Ashalla's grip and she let the creature go, but it had been in her grip long enough for her to taste its carbon dioxide rich and oxygen poor breath.

Ashalla paused to ponder this for a moment. Oxygen was a reactive gas, and was useful for extracting energy from other substances. Carbon dioxide was the product of oxygen reacting with carbon, and all these living things were made mostly of hydrogen and carbon. Watching the animals for a little longer, Ashalla noted that they consumed the plants and smaller animals. So it would appear that this was the way in which the animals obtained their energy, like how the ocean currents obtained their energy from the Abyss. Without divine essence creating energy from nothing for them, they would have to obtain their energy from an external source. As Ashalla considered this it was a manner which made sense. The mighty took energy from the weak, and those with plenty had their energy taken from those with few.

But what of the plants? They did not consume other creatures, yet somehow they obtained adequate energy to reverse the binding of oxygen and carbon to create free oxygen gas. Ashalla uprooted a small shrub to inspect where its roots went, and while the soil contained many useful nutrients it contained very little usable energy. Ashalla tried to search for some other source of energy. She quickly ruled out heat and divine power, and was left puzzling over the source.

As Ashalla stood there inspecting the jungle, she slowly came to realise that her back was getting warmer. She twisted her head to look behind her, and saw the afternoon sun shining at her. Then realisation struck her. Right there was a source of limitless power (at least, limitless as far as these mortal creatures were concerned), one readily accessible for all creatures on the surface of Galbar. It was simple for her to test that the rate of respiration of the plants slowed down when a shadow was cast over them.

Now that she knew what it was, it was obvious. She could taste the chlorophyll in the leaves, which converted light into chemical energy, which the plants used to bind carbon dioxide, water and soil nutrients into more plant. Animals then came along and consumed the plants, or parts of the plants, converting plant into flesh and energy, consuming oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide and water in the process. Larger animals did the same to the smaller animals. And thus the food chain unfolded before her. And not only the food chain, but the oxygen cycle.

Yet this tiny jungle island seemed deficient in that regard. The atmosphere of Galbar as a whole was quite low on oxygen. In fact, these plants seemed to be the only source of oxygen on all of Galbar. By Ashalla's reckoning, there shouldn't have been any oxygen on this planet at all, as oxygen is not stable. Perhaps the Blue leaked some oxygen into the Middle Sphere from when Azura created it not long ago, but it seemed unwise to rely on that source to persist forever. Furthermore, it seemed likely that the pantheon would desire to create a great multitude of animals, as animals mimicked their godly forms, yet Galbar in its current state could not support a great number of animals.

What Galbar needed was more plants. Yet these plants of Phystene's design would be inadequate, for the world was mostly ocean. So what Galbar needed was some kind of plant which lived in water and would live in all the oceans of the world.

Ashalla felt another quake rumble through the planet and ripple through the ocean. Another great disturbance from the other side of the world, and likely another landmass made. Ashalla figured that, with the world still being a blank canvas, the gods would be creating more continents. In this Age of Galbar's life investing in a fragile ecosystem like the jungle before her would be unwise. Whatever she created would need to be resilient, able to survive shifting continents and powerful waves, if not individually then at least corporately. Something which grew on the sea floor would not do for this purpose, for then it could be buried. She would need simple lifeforms which would float in the ocean such that they were impervious to the changing world around them.

Yet plant-like photosynthetic organisms would not be enough. She'd need a whole ecosystem of drifters. Some to consume the plant-like ones to prevent them from growing too plentiful and depleting the seas of their resources, and some to consume the remains when the drifters inevitably wore out and died. She'd need other drifters which could convert nitrogen gas into more usable forms of nitrogen. Other elements would also need to be harvested.

With designs formulating in her mind, Ashalla dived back into the ocean and swam off to enact them. She pulled together the elements around her to form the basic cells which would make up this life, using designs based upon those she had seen Phystene use. It was a fiddly task, but one that paid off as she finished her first life-form. It drifted in the sea, photosynthesising light into energy, stripping carbon from carbon dioxide to build itself and releasing the excess oxygen. Once it had grown large enough, it divided into two smaller copies of itself. It was a microscopic little thing, but it was only the beginning.

The act of creation became easier with each subsequent being Ashalla made. Once she became confident with one design, she switched to a new design. Soon her designs become more elaborate, involving multicellular organisms. After a while she was able to produce beings like tiny versions of the animals Phystene had made, albeit designed for life drifting in the ocean. It was not long before she became so proficient in the task that she was able to create measurable quantities of these tiny drifters as she moved, ecosystems blossoming in her wake. Algae, polyps and tiny crustaceans were among her creations and she swam through the ocean, spreading these tiny yet plentiful creatures wherever she went.

And Ashalla went everywhere, for her siblings had created several new features in her time down in the Abyss. She discovered Parvus' Maw and Chopstick Eye's Mount Chop. She circumnavigated Kirron's continent and delved into the depths of the hole it had left behind, where she found a few faint fissures leaking mineral-rich volcanic gases up from the Abyss. Her little drifters, or [i]plankton[/i] as they might be called in another tongue, would like those nutrients. Ashalla even considered the possibility of creating an ecosystem which drew its energy from volcanic vents rather than the sun, but she deferred that task until later.

Ashalla wandered the globe and found other features which her siblings had built. She started to detect the influence of other Spheres emerge. Clouds which rained fresh water came from So'E. The night sky had been darkened by the Great Dark, yet the distant incandescent flames of the Sky of Pyres punctuated the black backdrop. And drifting in the night sky, in direct opposition to Heliopolis, was Asceal's Lustrous Comet, which cast a very faint glow in the night sky. It seemed uncharacteristic that Asceal's Sphere would be so dim, so Ashalla assumed that it must be incomplete.

Ashalla did not expect what came next.

Suddenly the night sky was lit up as bright, no, brighter than day, light of ferocious intensity blazing out from the crystal moon. The light burned itself into the sky, turning it blue, and Ashalla could feel the heat radiating from the sunburst. Yet after a few seconds the light faded enough for Ashalla to see that what had once been a spherical moon was now a rapidly expanding cloud of luminescent debris. The many of the glimmering fragments stretched across the night sky, filling the night with stars, but some fell from the heavens and descended through the atmosphere, trailing incandescent air behind them as they fell to Galbar below.

Ashalla was not entirely sure whether that was planned, to fill the night sky with glittering dust, or whether something had gone horribly wrong and the backlash had resulted in a cataclysmic explosion. Ashalla assumed the latter, as Asceal's moon had been utterly destroyed in the blast and she considered it unlikely that Asceal would take the care to build a moon only to blast it to pieces.

Yet while the explosion was well beyond Ashalla's reach, the fragments which had fallen to Galbar below were not. Ashalla stretched out her essence, found where the nearest fragment had touched down and contracted around it. It was a tiny crystal fragment the size of a pebble that had a persistent glow. Ashalla inspect it, finding it rich in Asceal's essence, and surmised that this glow would be permanent. As the glow emanated from the crystal through its cracks and facets, the light refracted to create a scintillating rainbow.

Ashalla considered the fragment quite pretty and decided she would keep it. She went to the Abyssal Rift, which was a slow journey because she could not propagate as a sound wave while carrying a solid object, although Ashalla continued to sow plankton as she travelled. Ashalla left the fragment near the Abyss end of the rift, where she could easily find it again. Then Ashalla headed back to the surface and continued to wander Galbar and create plankton.


[hider=The Origins of Life according to Ashalla]
Ashalla notices something drawing magma up from the Abyss. She later discovers it is Muspellsheim.

She then feels the impact of Orvus' meteor. She swims really quickly, at the speed of sound in water, to get there before all the action has passed.

On her enhanced swimming ability, it lets her propagate her essence like a sound wave rather than dragging a mass of water around with a great current. This lets her go really fast (~5400 km/hr) in open water, allowing her to travel global distances in hours rather than days. However, in shallow water or water with lots of obstructions, she does much slower due to scattering, and she can't carry things with her while moving in this manner. She also can't manifest an above-water form while travelling in this manner.

She notices the sun once she gets the the surface. Its light is pretty.

She finds the Eye of Desolation early on, while Azura is still cleaning the skies. She inspects the Orvium meteor. She is initially concerned about the potential of orvium and orvium compounds to pollute the ocean, but she finds that orvium compounds are inert and harmless, like most other oceanic salts, and that metallic orvium is impervious to corrosion and rust so it poses no pollution hazard.

Ashalla wanders off, discovers Muspell, then comes back a time later to discover a jungle in the Eye of Desolation. She inspects it and deduces the mechanisms of the food chain, oxygen cycle and photosynthesis. However, Galbar's current atmosphere is rather oxygen poor, and she figures the other gods will need oxygen for all their creations, so she resolves to fix this by seeding the oceans with photosynthetic life with an ecosystem to support it.

Thus she creates [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankton]plankton[/url], also referred to as drifters because they drift in the ocean rather than make a permanent home where they would be vulnerable to shifting continents and the like.

Ashalla explores the rest of the ocean, seeding plankton everywhere she goes.

Ashalla witnesses the supernova explosion of Asceal's Sphere. She finds one of the crystal fragments which rained down from the ex-moon. It has a permanent glow and its shape splits the light into rainbows. Ashalla decides to keep it.

Ashalla keeps wandering the ocean.

[b]Might Summary[/b]
[u]Ashalla[/u]
[i]Start:[/i] 2 MP & 5 FP
[i]Spent:[/i]
-1 MP on sonic swimming ability (enhanced by Oceans).
-4 FP on creating a global ecosystem of plankton (enhanced from large to global by Oceans).
[i]End:[/i] 1 MP & 1 FP
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