[center][img]https://i.postimg.cc/MKK5m0sX/Kid-s-Hat-2.png[/img]

[i]feat.[/i]

[h3]GM[/h3]
[@Lugubrious]

[b]Level:[/b] [color=8258fa]4 (12 -> 15/40)[/color]
[b]Location:[/b] [color=8258fa]Forest Temple[/color]
[b]Word Count:[/b] [color=8258fa]1759 (+3 EXP)[/color]
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The familiar sung expression of gratitude from the orange fire spirits that passed for a death throe and marked the dissipation of their flames confirmed Hat Kid’s initial suspicion of a repeat trial, and with her curiosity satisfied, she pressed on through the blue door to the next room, where another test surely awaited her. Within, she found herself momentarily entranced by the soothing, if inauthentic depiction of space--her ‘true’ home. The familiar visual made her feel a touch more at ease in her otherwise unwelcoming surroundings. Though, she didn’t linger gazing at artificial stars for long before bringing her attention downward to the actual point of interest.

The hollow reverberations of her tiny footfalls upon the glass plane that separated her from the isles beneath it filled the chamber as she paced about, examining the curious scene below. A single mountain (the tallest of them) protruded through the floor from the center of living tropical diorama, and atop its peak, instructions inscribed in stone were laid out for the child. After carefully reading them over, she followed them to a T, hovering her hand over the black mass--the ‘ritual’--as per the first step.

At the kid’s provocation, the black orb hatched like an egg, giving forth a luminous entity like a great golden snake with a smooth black head. From the moment of its inception, the Breath -ever in motion- circled around a point directly below its creator’s hand. In the strange, lustrous world beneath the glass, this thing would be the child’s avatar--a deity made miniature.

Her eyes followed the ritual entity as it traced around the map with every movement of her palm. Sure enough, it was bound to her, ready to carry out her commands, which started with testing the extent of its ability to ‘shape the land’. After a minute of trial, she found that it largely involved simply gathering and redistributing the existing material, but being unable--as far as she could tell--to create any new material, dramatically alter what was already there, or even mold it into a refined shape. She found out as much when her childish mind prompted her to try building a sand castle only for her attempts to falter as the loose accumulation of soil fell into a formless mound. No matter what shape or motion she made with her hands, the outcome remained unchanged, and the elements would not fully obey her, much to her disappointment. She pursed her lips to one side and nodded her head at the underwhelming development that made her wonder if what she was controlling was really much of a deity, because it didn’t exactly feel like it. Just as well, it would be better that she take her new godly responsibilities seriously.

Turning her attention back to the matter at hand, Hat Kid wiped over the map above the sandy mound she had built up to flatten it out into a traversable bridge of land for the water-locked villagers to safely pass over.

[color=8258fa]“Over here!”[/color] She signaled to the tribespeople to make their way to the flooded totem while she began to ‘scoop’ water from the pool it sat in, leaving just enough around for them to supply their resettlement unimpeded. It was equal parts unclear and unlikely that they could actually hear her order or in any way perceive her at all, but they needed only follow the beacon--their god--encircling the structure to know what to do next.

Sure enough, the villagers followed the Breath as it crafted for them a bridge to new land. They waited for the sandbar to take shape, then crossed the span in small groups. Those first among them reached the second totem just as the Breath finished clearing away the water. Mimicking their god, they surrounded the totem in a circle, and a new ritual commenced. Chanting resounded beneath the glass, and prongs extended from the earth. Entire buildings soon emerged from the sand, rising upward on their stilts, until a circle of them arose to form a village around the monolith. Plant life began to spread immediately, blanketing the new island even as greenery spread across the bridge from the old. Correspondingly, the green meter above the glass rose.

There was something slightly fascinating about seeing greenery manifest beneath the villagers’ feet to gradually spread out and recolor the once barren sand as far as it reached, all simply as the result of their arrival and subsequent prayer at the totem. It was as if where life went, life would flourish and follow, and where life was absent, life would go to create life. While the process at work didn’t make too much logical sense by itself, Kid came unusually close to a thoughtful philosophical realization of some kind that might reconcile the idea. The partially filled gauge on the tablet was more easily explained. It served as a clear indicator of her progress for one of her objectives: to revitalize the land. By the looks of it, she still had a good ways to go.

Plantlife’s grip reached only as far as the beginning of the stone isthmus that stretched out across the sea to the west, an infrequently-connected archipelago. Enough sand existed to bridge the gaps, but creatures like enormous horseshoe crabs dotted those islands. On the other side of the broken isthmus lay a third, much larger island with varied terrain. A few great mounds of sand dotted its surface, and upon a high bluff stood a carved stone inscribed with crashing waves.

A keen eye could spot worried body language given off by the villagers. Their elderly shaman watched the sea, restless.

Little by little, Kid started redistributing soil by the ‘handful’ to reconnect the isles so that the plants and people may continue to cross them, putting forth a little extra effort to carve out a taller trenched path that steered manageably clear of giant crustacean territory to keep the churning waters off of the villagers, and keep them out of the waters. On that note, the noticeable increase in the tidal fluctuations had the people feeling uneasy. She looked to the sea in the same direction as the shaman, but could see nothing yet. S/he somehow knew something that the child didn’t, even with her superior perspective view of their world. The runic monolith atop the bluff struck her as a clue, and perhaps held the solution to the yet unforeseen (by her) problem they were about to have. Obviously, she couldn’t do anything with it herself, so she directed a small party of around three or four able-bodied villagers uphill to investigate.

The villagers approached the totem warily. Two of the three men studied it from a distance, but the last approached to run his hands along the deliberate grooves. At first it looked as though he merely felt the thing, but after a few moments the deftness with which he navigated the curves and contours spoke of some sort of deeper understanding. Another minute went by before he stepped away, but he did not leave empty-handed. The runes on the stone glowed with soft white radiance, wafting into the air around it. Bit by bit, the squiggles fashioned themselves into floating words.

[i]Ancient...knowledge...recovered[/i]

[i]Ritual of Repel Water[/i]

An ill wind was blowing. It whipped the sea, turning it turbulent, and bit at the dunes of sand. Enough blew from the hilly isle to expose the very top of an ivory-white shape, the hidden third totem. Even with very little sky in the world beneath the glass, the landscape grew stormier and stormier. Behind Hat Kid, on the mountain plinth that gave her instruction, runic characters appeared in the air.

[i]1:30[/i]

Then, second by second, the counter ticked down.

Yeah… that didn’t look good. It seemed the people were correct in their fearful prediction of the weather. The atmosphere went murky with obscuring grey storm mist, and even without being able to feel it, Kid could tell it was getting harder to stand up down there with the sudden increase in wind speed. On the bright side, it was at least nice enough to reveal the next objective to her… and wait for the villagers finish exploring before counting down to disaster. The bad news was she didn’t have long to prepare for whatever was coming. All she knew was that the village needed the newly acquired knowledge, like, [i]NOW[/i], so she ordered the scouting party to hurry back as quickly as they could (or quicker) so that they may begin their preparations to perform the ritual.

Meanwhile, Hat Kid would start unearthing the next totem and laying the soil in a perimeter around the village island as high as it would go to help hold off the waves somewhat, taking care not to bury any of the villagers while she was at it. Once she was done digging a great dip around the third structure down to its base, she would cut a relief ditch into one of its edges to allow the inevitable floodwaters to flow downhill (away from civilization, of course). After that, all she could do was wait for nature to take its turn and hope for a miracle to save the village…

Something came, but it wasn’t a miracle. As if given some invisible signal, the waters began to recede. Large amounts of sandy seabed laid itself plain to view, unlucky fish flopping in the muck. Then, from the southeast edge of the map, a wave rolled in. It grew higher and higher, five, ten, twenty times as tall as a human. The villagers, under order of the Breath, gathered around the perimeter of their village in a circle, locking hands. A chant began, its voices nervous but swelling in strength as desperation clutch the villagers’ hearts. The rampaging tsunami bore down on them, dark as pitch and taller than the tallest trees. It swept over Hat Kid’s physical defenses like they were nothing and crashed against the village, but instead of sending it to the abyss, it broke as though against an invisible dome. Thousands of proportional tons of water washed around the village, inches from the outermost huts, held back by only faith and unity. Another minute passed before the floodwaters began to subside, dwindling until the shaken villagers could breathe easy once again.

Hat Kid felt the villagers’ desperation as her own as she watched with increasingly heavy, nervous breath as the sea threw itself at the island, set to consume it in its entirety. She bit the collar of her sweater nervously while she helplessly chased the ever enlarging wave with narrowed eyes, her atypical anxiety growing with it the closer it came to the settlement--both out of fear of failure as well as an inkling of underlying compassion for those that counted on her. When positive change didn’t come soon enough, she equipped her ergokinetic cap, inhaled sharply, and reared back a charged, unsteady fist, ready to act dramatically in likely futility as if she could affect the world below from where she was. Before she could throw energy she didn’t know how to effectively use at the problem, however, she saw that she wouldn’t need to. Her expression and stance loosened immediately upon seeing the mountainous tide split to pass around the village and spare its people. Talk about a [i][b]moving[/b][/i] display of prayer and song. With the storm subsided, the sea level normalized, and the village safe from it all, Kid, too, was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Still, there was work to be done before everyone could celebrate another day of continued life. Hat Kid checked the map from the currently settled totem to the next for any damage to the path between them to rectify as needed before sending the villagers on their way. As much as she would rather not rush them along, there was no telling if or when another event like that would sneak up on them, so for the sake of all, extended delays could not be afforded. Once Kid was done on her end smoothing out the trail for them, she left the beacon to rest at the next totem and sent the people on their way.

Just one island remained in between Hat Kid’s dominion and the elusive gate beyond. North of the sandy -now soggy- island, connected by a long stretch of shallows, lay a volcanic atoll. Cooled lava formed a good amount of exposed stone, enough to take intrepid travelers all the way to the atoll’s opposite side. However, the stone wall eroded over the eons sported a sizeable hole in the center, and every minute or so the crashing waves rushed through it to sweep across the landbridge. Barely any earth bespoiled the place, though a steadily-flowing volcano still remained.

Upon attempting it, Kid found out she couldn’t use the Breath to carve away stone, so shaving off a section of the volcano’s rim to strategically redirect lava flow into the ocean was out. No matter. She was still perfectly capable of directing the entity to the crater to gather the necessary raw material to patch the hole in the dam herself; it just made for a slightly less satisfying solution. Although, rather than correcting thousands of years of damage right away, she figured she could let it help her out with some additional roadwork first. She halted the villagers’ advance no less than ten meters from the area affected by the waves and began collecting full spheres of molten rock to lay down flat over the partially sunken path, allowing the periodic tide to cool and harden the primitive asphalt with every other pass. Though, she couldn’t do anything to smoothen the newly paved road, the villagers would now have solid, reinforced footing above the water to tread to the other end of the atoll. With that finished, Kid proceeded to pull from the same resource pool to fill in the gap in the wall left over by the passage of time, waiting for a moment to check the quality of her work (i.e. structural stability) before giving the villagers the go-ahead to press on.

The child’s braininess made short work of the final obstacle. With the waves’ onslaught blocked by her freshly-cooled wall of rock, her villagers forged onward. They reached the end of the atoll in moments, and ahead of them, a natural incline led right up to the gateway. While the Kid worked, her plants had continued to spread, and by the time her villagers were ready the gauge was full and the doorway had come open. Particles streamed into it in a black whirlpool, which came off as more than a little menacing, but Hat Kid’s goal remained before her nonetheless. The people had braved (for [i]them[/i]) a great deal already under her watch; she wasn’t about to let a spooky door to who knows where--that she was supposed to reach anyways--stop her just shy of achieving her goal. Without delay, She ushered the villagers onward through the gateway...

The villagers disappeared inside, and the world beneath the glass began to darken. A new light came on as the ocean faded away: a spotlight highlighting the mountain where she’d received her instructions. Before her eyes, the land turned to sand and blew away. In its place was left a painting of a villager on the beach, holding a staff to the sky as a tsunami rose to the right and a volcano blew to the left.

When the land, sea, and sky began to fade into pitch nothingness, Hat Kid sauntered over to the dissolving mountain where the key to her true objective lay beneath its surface. After the last grain of sand fell, the painting stood, unsupported, beneath to lone light, waiting to be claimed. Smiling wide, the child took the painting by the trim in both hands, observing it for a second like a prize she had just received before heading for the chamber’s exit. Even without the artificial light that led her in before, she would have no trouble finding her way out… and on to her remaining objectives...