Crusader Lord

⤫ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 ⤬

@Haha What would be the desired age range for characters? Would they vary all over the place at all, or given how long time has passed would they all be older?

Psychological Horror Fantasy Post-Apocalyptic + Anime (Interest Check)

I am....curious.

👀

Empire of the Clouds

Erinia Sylric

A mild nod came from the Elga woman, a basic and polite acknowledgement that the party was indeed a rather jovial thing and that Miss Vasiliou had been well thus far this evening. Basic pleasantries to be sure, but all the same the suggestion to go out and make herself merry further in it did bring a midly bemused smile began tugging at the left corner of her mouth in this case. Not a mocking smile, nor a knowing smile, a simple smile with polite restraint and self-control that spoke to her own thoughts on the matter.

Even so, her eyes trailed carefully and calculatedly over the party's participants and area's occupants before returning her gaze once more to the woman she was sitting next to.

"I am in relatively good spirits overall, I'd say, and it is all rather pleasantly jovial and upbeat, isn't it? Hmm. Even so, I must decline to indulge too much in the goings-on here. I certianly won't seek to quash the right of those here this evening to celebrate getting this far out of danger either," the Elgan woman noted, her tone kept ever professionally calm and polite as she made her thoughts known in brief on the matter before her gaze turned somewhat more curious in kind, "Though alas, I'm afraid I am saving my merriment more so for a later time, however, once we see the results of our arrival in Mitteland and the consequences therein."

Indeed, some seemed to think this whole affair would end decidedly in Mitteland as far as their part came. War, politics, and the complexity of potential consequences, it all was never as simple as that to her though. Not after five centuries of life it all wasn't.

She and others might drop off the others, then glide on back to support the war effort of Inbur, etc, etc. That was always on possibility. Another potnetiality might be that some aspiring Mittelander could seize the gold and use it as leverage for a political move inside their own nation. Yet another still might see potential enemy agents make use of their situation to remove the struggling Inbur's potential access to part of its gold reserve. The paranoia of many different peopel crammed into one vessel could pan out more or less worse before they even landed. In other words....she was keeping an open mind, and aimed to survive the ordeal if she could as they saw what came next in more certain terms moving forwards. Even the nomads of the plains knew to keep track of what way the wind was blowing before making their move during a hunt.

A further thought to entertain in her mind was also....well, how Inbur had been overrun on two fronts so quickly? Mitteland was in a relatively good position to be less than a mere buffer state, even though war had come to its borders, depending on the thoughts of those there and how the actions of those fighting below ended up going as well. Weapons and mass numbers were one thing, but for these issues to occur so close to each other in timing on the back end of a losing propoganda war? Hmm. It was also to be said that good hunter had to know how to corner and kill their prey, moving carefully and then striking quickly whether they working with others during the hunt or even potentially seizing sudden opportiunities that might [u]land at one's own doorstep unexpedctedly[/s] on the part of hunter and prey alike. There was also the use of things such as traps for hunting as well, of course, but she didn't want to digress too much into the hunting analogies that ran through her mind at first.

"I also wished to know in passing if you'd like to be given some of my old notes, ones that I belive could be of interest to you if I remember right. They're notes from an interview with a Shariq family I conducted some years ago, during the earlier resettlement efforts, who were headed to help settle what I believe is currently the revived kingdom's capital if I'm not mistaken."

A small offer, a gessture of goodwill, but one that based on prior conversation and knowledge she hoped would prove enticing. A way also to....say...get some more thoughts from the scholar, get the topic moving in a particular direction even, before dropping the greater question she had for her tonight (if possible). Still, she'd have to see how Mitunbaal responded or reacted to the offer and revelation of said notes. Or, well, if she even belived she had such a thing back in her cabin (she, in fact, have those notes and more with her yet still) to offer up in the first place for that matter!

@Bingelly

Pokemon Singularity

Clarissa Ryte

"The Cave of Tuff", Tunnel Network, Hidden Cavern, Grand Glory City

It-...Sir Lopsalot's move wasn't very effective? Hmm. What was it that resisted fighting moves again? Poison, Psychic, Bug, Ghost maybe....and Fairy! She'd studied the typing charts rather well even as far back as Orre for that matter. Plus when it came to Iglybuff it was what she'd heard was the type of the Igglybuff evolution line in the past, if she was recalling correctly, from a sailor back in Orre right before moving when she'd asked him about his own. Igglybuff didn't seem to be any of the former types anyways save for, if she remembered right, Fairy typing!

But there was another problem, and that was because these two also rather clearly weren't your average or standard Iglybuff eitherfor that matter! They didn't look like the Kantonian ones that seemed so ubiquitous elsewhere if her memory served. Likewise they obviously were using Fire-type moves as well. So what did this mean? Well, she had a suspicion based upon it all. These two were, more than likely, clearly Fire/Fairy types! Yes, that theory seemed to make sense, though given their use of a poison move that Poison typing could be just as likely in hindsight. Hmm. Well, in any c ase if she caught one then the Pokedex could prove or blow apart her theory in any case! So onwards with the battle they went!

But how to handle the ineffectivness of Sir Lopsalot's signature attack? As long as he kept going in battle, the poison afflicting him would only get worse and worse. Then if he couldn't build up enough of a punch in time to down his opponent, then it would spell disaster for him! They knew how the battle against Tors has gone when the former couldn't end the battle against the latter soon enough, and while he couldn't be poisoned again or burnt due to his condition it was still an uphill fight in enough of the sense....so...hmmm...

As she thought on the matter in the heat of the moment, seconds passing almost like minutes as Clarissa's thoughts whizzed about, Pyrite and Scrapper continued to watch on from the sidelines as Sir Lopsalot landed back on the ground from his initial attack. The bunny Pokemon grit his little teeth, the numbing and stinging feeling of the poison in his body cutting away at him despite having dodged his opponent's initial attack at the very least.

To Sir Lopsalot it was...ssemginly a grating situation to be in on his part as he grit his little teeth. Especially now that he was struggling even now with lesser than optimal HP and this affliction, as well as a less effective first attack, after all he'd been putting in to start off this journey right for he and his partner! He seemed to somewhat still feel the sting of that first real battle and the loss it had been, and yet now he was fighting alongside the same Pokemon he'd battle earlier to seemingly save a human boy. It was chaotic, it was odd, and it was-...it was...it was a struggle that reminded him of his old home somewhat. Reminded him of the past as well. He also didn't...he...he didn't want to lose! Not again! But the opponent had just barely unleashed a wicked Ember attack to rain down upon him, and-

It was at this point in time that small voice spoke up amidst it all, suddnely and without warning, cutting through the trainer and Pokemon's thoughts alike as the origin of the voice stepped out in front of his new trainer after a brief moment of hesitation. He'd been watching alongside his new trainer, and the Roggengola held in her arms, but seeing how things were going thus far...yes. He had an idea of his own!

"BISH, Trub Trub Trub!"

...Eh? One of his little garbage-baggy arms even waved at Sir Lopsalot out of the corner of the latter's eyes. It was enough to get Clarissa to look to the side and own at him, and enough to get Sir Lopsalot to take a moment's pause before a small smirk popped onto his face back at Scrapper for his part. For Clarissa's part, however, it didn't take much of a psychic glance on the bare surface to get the idea her two Pokemon were having. Pyrite also seemed to concur with his own little...nod? It looked like he was nodding, but the fact he did lack a more distinctive face did make it hard. Even so, the psychic, for her part, felt it was a good idea as well and rolled with the first words to escape her mouth as she gave her next battle orders.

"Sir Lopsalot! Attack your opponet with Pound through the Ember, and then bounce back here to swap out with Scrapper!"

They all seemed in agreement on the matter to enough of an extent at least. Yes, Sir Lopsalot would take damage in the process of this, but it also meant he would also get a moment of respite from his poisoning after switching out and hopefully not fainting in the process. Scrapper, then, would hit the field to take up the fight as well! He was a sturdy little guy, for what it seemed on first glance, but with that Black Sludge he would get a little healing once he got going (hopefully) in battle. Meawhile Pyrite was seemingly food for these two wild Igglybuff, unless he wanted to try out a turn or two of battle for his part, but as Sir Lopsalot hadf done a fair bit of fighting more than the other two already before this point in time it seemed good to play their cards right as best as they could. And the bunny would hopefully deal a decent more neutral (and STAB) attack that would open the way for Scrapper!

Meanwhile, Clarissa would use her left arm to hold the heavy little Roggenrola, all while reaching back to grab a spare Pokeball in her right hand. She was going to keep a trained eye on her own battle....and once this Igglybuff was within a good capture range she was going to strike and try to capture it! She just had to keep looking out at the battle and waiting for the right moment in time, and with Scrapper having been healed up prior with her last Potion she felt this gambit might give her just the chance (whether Sir Lopsalot's parting attack managed it or it took Scrapper a turn or two to get there, etc, depending on how it went down).

[Sir Lopsalot uses Pound against the enemy Igglybuff, charging through the falling Ember(s) to attack!]

[Clarissa will then switch out Pokemon, swapping in the full-health Scrapper to take over for Sir Lopsalot!]

[Clarissa is also still keeping an eye out for a good chance to try to capture the opponent Igglybuff she is fighting!]

@Remram@Shazamrock

Current Pokemon/Money/Items

Current Pokemon:

• Sir Lopsalot - Buneary - Male - Level 7 - POISONED
• Scrapper - Trubbish - Male - Level 6
• Lady Goowain - Alolan Grimer - Female - Level 4 - Low HP
• Libera - Aron - Female - Level 5 - Low HP
• Pyrite - Roggenrola - Male - Level 5 - Half HP

Pokedollars: 4000

Items:

• Camping Gear/An Extra Change of Clothes
• Potion x0 - Need To Refill
• Pokeballs x6 (Has one in hand for a potential capture during the course of the current battle!)

Empire of the Clouds

Erinia Sylric

The Elga woman had been sitting in her room, re-examining her wounds after the end of the firefight with the enemy had concluded to ensure she hadn't re-opened anything. She wasn't a medic, yes, but one had to learn much when in battle and surviving in hostile conditions over the centuries as well. Indeed, though, it had been centuries. Five centuries that had spelled out the birth and effective death of an Empire, the rebirth of another, the emergence of new ideologies and new wars, and so forth. From a human perspective, she could imagine the scope and scale of it all being frankly and uterlyy dizzying just trying to comprehend it. From an Elga perspective, well, perhaps it came down to one's perspective on how to live life as to how such a life as hers might be viewed.

Ah, but she had digressed.

"Hmm."

Even so Erinia mulled a bit in her mind, even as she re-buttoned the top button on her shirt and stood up from her cabin's bed to stretch for a moment. It had almost been tempting to take a nap after the day's events, but all the same she'd kept herself professional well enough thus far as well she supposed. Her fellow occupants of this zeppelin would likely be doing something or another, and in the long run it'd perhaps pay off to try to socialize a bit more for once. Of course seeking out where the vessel was being piloted from could be another way to check in on any possible further word coming to them from the Empire as well.

Given the gold onboard, the ongoing war, and the like, it wasn't too farfetched to think that the most straight-laced sorts aboard the vessel would want to preserve as much as possible for the conflict. Maybe hire out mercenaries, pay new soldiers, purchase weapons, actually pay those aboard this vessel who'd pitched in a helping hand and avoid more issues regarding that matter, etc. But if things were going badly enough? Well, maybe that gold would better belong out of possible Calarian Communalist or Fifth Columnite hands at the very least. Hmm. It made her think even more about how it could all go down, but first and foremost in the immediate sense she had to look after her own life and at those immediately around her before anything else.

With a light click, the handle of her cabin's door turned and opened up for her before she stepped out into the hallway and took a look about herself. From there, she momentarily paused....and then all it would take is beginning to follow the sounds of music and congregated voices from afar to trace them back to the source. Yet from here it wouldn't take long to run into some in the halls with whispers and a few rumors going about, chief among those to her years being that a certain someone had actual healing magic, before she'd manage to arrive where the partying was still seemingly ongoing.

...And indeed, a sight to behold it was to her own arrival to the ad-hoc venue as well.

Trails of cigar smoke hung in the air, like puffs of wafting perfume drifting across the air, while the clink of alcohol was audible and visible as the scent of it was partly masked in the aroma of the cigar smoke itself. As her eyes drifted across things, hints of smiles as people talked and the movement of bodies across the open part of the floor to the tune of the music in the background was a familiar sight. Even with all they'd been through thus far, and the unknown yet to come, and yet people never seemed to change despite the era or the age in that they wished to seize the good moments and on occasion dance the time away more pleasantly before things went awry again later. Ah. But it was a welcome familiarity in her eyes, tugging the left corner of Erinia's mouth up ever so slightly in the noticeable sense as she leaned back against a wall and watched on at the scene before her.

Perhaps it was this sort of fammiliarty and comfort it provided that pushed many of her ancestors to pursue the same old nomadic lives even now. To see the changes in the land without things being too much the same all of the time, and yet keep things...familiar. Consistent. Predictable. Things that in a very long life one might come to value after so much time, and yet do so at the risk to becoming lost from the reality of the world around them in her mind. Hmm. But tonight wasn't for mulling over things too much, now was it?

Stepping up to the bar and behind it, a few strands of brown hair lingering about the sides of her face as she leaned back on the bar with her arms crossed, Erinia sought out a good bottle of drink. In particular, her height would grant her some advantage as a bottle of older-looking, amber-colored liquid seemed to call to her. Or, rather, that it sat out of reach of some of the others it seemed. Haha. Perhaps she'd get something nice, given the more luxurious nature of this military craft, after hearing beforehand that the upper brass kept some rather fine spirits aboard. Hmm~ Though she'd have to judge that for herself, of course, given she'd tried many a drink over the centuries....and within better moderation than most in her mind as well for that matter!

Grabbing a spare glass, she then walked out from behind the bar and sat down to pour herself a shot. Nothing too much, just enough to get the flavor and look mildly busy on the side while holding a glass and sticking the corked-up bottle on the counter right next to herself. From there it was only a moment before she swigged down the shot, swirling it around a little before swallowing the alcohol right down. Afterwards, a small smile seemingly tugged again at the left corner of her mouth somewhat as she looked back at the bottle itself.

"Ah, a fair bit of burn with some satisfying smokiness. Bold yet somewhat rich as well. Warmth lingers a little at the end. A rather odd whiskey if I'd say so, the men in my old unit from a few years ago would have savored this one for a while just to talk about it to others later. Ha. Or at least Peterson, that fool of a man having the oddest possible tastes in everything."

She quietly spoke to herself for a moment, a warmer smile coming to her lips before the smile that in kind would slowly fade as she sat thinking before it abruptly collapsed as she let out a small sigh. Yes, they'd have enjoyed this one for being so peculiar and likely rare a taste to be found in Inbur. Tasted more like something she'd have found back in Brendahl, though looking at the label belied the origins of the bottle as being from likely just that place anyways.

From here, her eyes would linger about the room once more seeking something...different for the time being. Yes. That'd be preferrable, wouldn't it, at a time like this? In that vein, her vision would ultmately land upon a certain someone sitting off and away in a seat of her own to the side for now. A certain 'mitten' that had word about her spreading about the zeppelin it seemed. A curious, if not devout, scholar from what she'd gathered from their time around each other thus far. But she hadn't seen magic in a rather long time to be sure, though was yet still old enough to remember the price a magic user might fetch among the nomadic Elga lords.

Walking over to there Mitubaal sat, regardless of her own thinking for the moment, the Elga woman would politely take her seat next to her.

"How do you fare this fine evening, Miss Vasiliou?"

A simple icebreaker. An attempt to drum up a conversation of sorts. Whatever it was, it was hopefully better than sitting idly by drinking an array of spirits from the bar like some drunkard thinking back on the lives of the dead for far too long.

@Bingelly

Pokemon Singularity

Clarissa Ryte

The "Cave of Tuff", Tunnel Network, Hidden Cavern, Grand Glory City

After all of this searching, all of this time, and the effort to get here, it would culminate in a proper battle! Well, as proper as one got in the den of fiery Pokemon bullying a punk fan who had been kidnapped for entertainment. But the gauntlet had been thrown down, the challenge laid bare, and all that it would take was the response of the two wild Pokemon there to begin the-

With another big inhalation of air, they swelled up and then shouted,"Igglybuff!" again though this time was different. They could see the sound waves ripple through the air as they both used Echoed Voice at the same time, but uh, this looked different. It sort of looked like the sound was... on fire? The distortions in the air were crackling with flame as they headed straight towards Tors and Sir Lopsalot.

...The air was on fire. Sure it made sense given Pokemon were doing this, and the heat of a proper fire Pokemon was usually no joke, but still....why was the air just outright on fire? Perhaps it was some kind of capability to ignite the air? Something strange with their voices? Hmm. But now wasn't the time to simply ponder the matter on Clarissa's part, now was the time for action!

"Dodge it and deliver a Power-Up Punch counterattack!"

In response to her call, Sir Lopsalot would try to leap up to get over the attack, twisting himself as he reached up to the cave cieling with his leap and trying to use it as a springboard for his feet. The intent was to launch himself downward once more at his nearest opponent in a fast straight-line type attack, his tiny right fist glowing with the awesome power of a Power-Up Punch right into its face! That was the intent on his part at least, given his interpretation of his trainer's orders that is.

As for his trainer....Clarissa had hoped that she could help some Pokemon down here, and some small part of her was yet still a little disappointed despite everything thus far. Her heart had been going out to the potential that some poor Pokemon was alone and scared down here to comfort, or a potential teammate who had lost what they saw as their home to go elsewhere where they didn't feel as if they quite belonged. At the same time, however, she'd found a few Pokemon to catch, found a peculiar cave system, come down here with a new friend of sorts, had made a Steelix happy after a terrifying potential disaster situation, and was able to help someone now in the form of a human who was kidnapped by Pokemon. It was certainly a hard shift from the original expectations, but she had admittedly tried to mentally get herself pumped for the potential oddities of a Pokemon journey as well all things considered. She hadn't any idea what they'd run into or find out there, and already in the city they started in....well, all of THIS was happening!

Had she been told by anyone but herself about the events to come on this day alone, she'd have raised an eyebrow just the prior day and questioned it at least a little bit. Even so, at the end of the day her goal to hopefully save someone who was scared down here was still oddly enough rather intact in a mildly amusing fashion. A rescue was a rescue, and fear was fear, both for people or Pokemon alike as it were.

Meanwhile, Scrapper in front of her right leg and Pyrite in her arms watched on with her from the sidelines as she gave out orders to Sir Lopsalot. Naturally the former seemed more expressive about it all than the latter, inherently, though the latter semeed to look on with a sort of calm intensity on the part of the Roggenrola in her arms. Hopefully the battle would be straightforward enough that they didn't need to get involved, but with Evig already being THIS chaotic the psychic had no idea with any full amount of certainty.

However....if possible, she was curious about catching one of these Igglybuff all the same.

[Clarissa and Sir Lopsalot accept the the challenge]

[Sir Lopsalot tries to dodge the attack and launch a counterattack (Power-Up Punch) against the nearest opposing Igglybuff]

[Clarissa keeps an eye out for a good moment, depending on how the battle develops, given her emerging interest in catching one of these two wild Igglybuff if possible]

@Remram@Shazamrock

Empire of the Clouds

An Elgafolk Polymath of Inbur

Erinia Sylric

Name: Erinia Sylric

Gender: Female

Age: 522

Nationality: Inburian (most recently and currently so) ((Formerly/Historically: Haltian Empire and Brendahl respectively))

Appearance: Erinia is, for a female Elga, first of all noticeably somewhat above average at a height of 6’0” compared to the average of 5’8” of female Elga overall. Yet this height doesn’t seem to detract from her rather feminine body shape and hourglass hips, with her slender face and soft steely-grey colored eyes combined together with this have caused her to be known in current times and prior ones as ‘conventionally attractive’ by general human and Elgafolk standards. Her lighter and soft caucasian-toned skin, while able to tan and possessing a most youthful beauty to it due to her biological immortality, also currently lacks a tan at all at this point in time due to her many hours spent inside buildings for purposes of her work prior to this point in time. Meanwhile, her rather light brown hair is slightly longer than shoulder length but is normally tied up in a bun on the back of her head.

Beyond this, small faded scars and evidence of long-faded and very well-healed burns left over from the past centuries of her life can be found by looking close at areas such as her upper back and forearms, though most of the wounds she’s ever sustained so long ago have faded so much that only a very close inspection of her skin allows one to notice most of them. However, four more recent knife/bayonet and bullet scars from her years of service as a frontline soldier can be found on her mid-lower torso, left shoulder, and upper back, as well as some small but more faded scratches from barbed wire or scratches caused by rough terrain and such, are still visible currently. Likewise she has a number of worn or newer callouses on her hands from the hours of work spent in her lab and using tools there, or time spent holding a gun at the firing range, as well. Most notably, the right upper arm has a slightly angled but mostly horizontal wound from a piece of larger shrapnel, and her lower left side has sustained a grazing blow from a stray bullet, with both of these spots have been rinsed with water and then bandaged up with strips of what seems to be torn spare sheets or the like.

In terms of clothing, she currently wears a pair of brown pants, a short-sleeved button-up white formal shirt with a collar and a black tie (has some blood and damage to it due to her sustaining her latest wounds), and a pair of military-issue combat-ready boots. She has appropriately tall socks on her feet, the height of which is hidden underneath her pant legs in turn. A black leather belt is worn about her waist as well.

Personal Effects:

• Krausser Firearms R-01M Trench Pattern Rifle (Gewehr 98 with a trench clip with its attach-able bayonet, plus the accompanying looted bayonet scabbard; is one round short of being fully loaded, but remains loaded and ready to use)
• Haltian Bow (For use on or off of a horse; is rather well maintained and fixed-up), plus a quiver she once had attached to her backpack and has by now detached from her backpack that contains twenty five arrows (three of which have had blood cleaned off of them) in it
• A Well-Loaded Military Backpack ((Things are both inside of it and strapped to it.)) ((Overall Contents Include: Spare clothing, personal journal plus a spare notebook and writing materials, a series of preserved ancient documents accrued throughout her life and travels, a week’s worth of tightly packed and preserved military rations for one person, a currently still mostly-full and large-sized water filled canteen, a Standard-Issue Trench Knife (German Nahkampfmesser trench knife), a rather old gold Brendahl noble’s signet ring engraved with the specific shape of a particular house crest that has been stored away with rather noticeable care, an old polished Elgafolk-style gold bracelet once owned by her mother (which is embossed with a highly detailed and beautiful artistic design of a running horses in motion across the band itself), and personal toiletries.))
• An All-Metal Sealable Case ((Exterior Made To Be Weather Resistant And Watertight When Closed; Is Shaped Like A Suitcase But Is Deeper Than Normal; Metal Used Is A Lighter-Weight Metal Mixture Of Some Kind)) ((Overall Contents Include: A cushioned and roughly flame-resistant internal lining, five functional test grenades filled with “sticky fire” substance, three thick and sealed glass tubes of “sticky fire” with metal caps on both ends (each about the size of the palm of her hand in width), and myriad official files for a project working on a lighter machine gun design as well as the official files and the formula for “sticky fire”.))
• Spare Rifle Ammunition (Ten standard clips and seven individual bullets, once stuffed in her pockets or outer pouches of her backpack, that by now have taken out and hidden inside her cabin underneath the mattress of the bed inside of said cabin.)

---

Background

What Is Your Job: Inburian Military Engineer/Chemist (“Elgan Polymath” would better summarise the fullness of her total skillset though.)

Backstory:

Erinia was ultimately born the third of four children, and the only daughter, to a mighty elven noble and warrior named Haykr Sylric and his wife Nimue. The Sylric are a name not as famous among humans, admittedly, but among Elgafolk even now he is remembered for serving as a mighty fighting companion and tactician in the service of Voron Corfina. Haykr was even present and fighting during the sacking of the Inburian Empire’s capital at that, standing out for his bravery but also his rather well-honed mind for matters of combat, and in return for his faithful service and humble desires to serve he was given a good share of loot and was handed some territory to manage in what is currently the southwestern corner of the Inburian Empire. Her father didn’t want a far more vast tract of humans to manage, truthfully, but simply wanted a place to live and set up with his people while continuing to serve the First Emperor where he could. Thus Erinia and her family came about to living in an area with lush forests, open areas, rolling hills, and a daunting set of mountains to his south, all where her father would begin his rule as a chief of the Elga and would seek to establish himself well over the human population of his area as their proper ruler ordained by the Emperor.

It was within this framework of things, however, that Erinia was only 75 years old at the start of the Haltian Empire, all with her father keeping the Elga of his region moving from place to place and levying tribute on his human subjects at first as per tradition. Yet even within this framework, and despite her father’s ties to the traditionalism of the western part of the Haltian Empire, things would come to change just as many of the other Elgafolk lords in the east began to be shaped by the human framework of the east. Her father had no worries about being elected chief several times more again in the coming two centuries, and yet he would even in his ‘first term’ be forced to move on from the simpler model of levying tribute and sending warriors to bring back said tribute from time to time and to keep tabs on the human population. Indeed, he would likewise take notes from the human feudal model and seek to adapt them to the Elga way of life during his initial tenure as chief, delegating positions of sub-management to what he dubbed the new “Council of Warriors”: A new secondary body of specifically unlanded Elgafolk warriors, a rotating and elected set of positions after each time an election for a chief was held, who were put in charge of keeping order and maintaining the flow of tribute from human populations within Haykr’s territory.

Said warriors didn’t own the land they helped look over for the chief, but rather were in charge of it and judged based on how well things went in their ‘area’ and how well it contributed back to the tribe and try to avoid the ‘decadent pitfalls’ her father claimed to have seen in the human manner of rulership during the conquests of Voron Corfina. Likewise, however, with this system the rising need came for at least some delegated portion of tribe members of the elected warriors’ families and of each chief’s households to need to learn more about their human subjects and their language in order to contribute to the management of territory in turn. Such was an unavoidable reality of the situation, and in Erinia’s case she would take up the position of studying looted and traded-for human texts and language in order to assist her father as would her second-oldest brother Silvyr Sylric to an extent.

Known for her keen mind, uncannily good photographic memory, and ‘natural beauty’ among her peers, Erinia was seen as a rather ‘prime candidate’ for being the future wife of a chief or mighty warrior and a prodigy of her people. Indeed her future was a matter her father was working on arranging after the conquest of the east and settling his people into their new territory, seeking to gather his daughter a ‘fitting husband, and the best life he could secure for her’ in his own mind. Yet the seeming thirst she had to learn while growing up, and which had fueled in good part her ultimate drilling in the legends, singing methods, and ways of the horse and bow to the point they were as natural and utterly instinctual to her as breathing, would prove useful as well within the scope of assisting her people within her tribe’s territory. It also, however, spurred on something else within her….an awakening to matters of the complexities of human designs, constructions, and ideas that her people had long cast aside for the ancient ways. It was, for Erinia, even something that became more of an obsession as she gathered up a hoard of texts and useful humans underneath her wing to study and learn and seek to also build upon growing human knowledge over the two centuries (especially regarding gunpowder and matters that would currently be sorted under the label of ‘chemistry’) following the founding of the Haltian Empire.

It would also be within these two centuries that her family itself also began to shift, as did the ways of the east, despite her father’s ever-constant vigil and resolution to maintain the traditions of their people and to ensure they remained intact. The first blow that began these changes, however, was that her mother would, 150 years before the fall of the Haltian Empire, die from complications after giving birth to her youngest brother/sibling. Said youngest sibling would be named “Voron Sylric” in honor of the Emperor, after her father received permission from his ‘old friend’ to do so, though her mother’s loss inevitably devastated her father as well as herself and her older siblings and other members of their tribe who were close to them alike. Likewise her growing skillset was looked upon by her father as simply a ‘hobby’ where she went beyond its normal scope, rather than him perceiving the truth of her increasingly growing distance with the mindset of the ‘old ways’, even as he finally organized her future marriage to a prominent warrior of a slightly younger age who lived in the (at the time) capital of Alveby and likewise had a role in serving as one of the guards of Voron Corfina himself (doing so after over a century of negotiation and work due to the seriousness of the matter in his mind). Her father would, aside from overlooking the growing truth of her own situation, also come to chafe more and more with her second oldest brother as he proved more interested in human currency and the accruing of wealth and influence than he did in assisting his father in human matters. This her father saw as a more direct problem for the future, eventually leading to arguments and forcing Silvyr eventually into a compromise. It was one where he would be put in a position to be able to travel for their tribe and perform economic dealings and trade with other more independent human polities, but would do so in return for having to take up a more traditional position as his ‘primary role’ back home as a dedicated merchant for the tribe.

As her father came into power as the chief again for what would be the last time, however, it would be in a time of great contention and local struggle. It was during and right after the time of the assassination of the First Emperor, the struggle between Voron’s sons, and the emergence of the long-feared human uprisings in the east to boot. Out of all the lords of the east, however, her father was ever still a die-hard traditionalist tied to the west and was among the minority in the east who supported Orrian Corfina despite his desperate desire to believe that neither of the Emperor’s sons had slain their father and that it had been a human-related conspiracy or ‘some other Elga traitor’ of some kind. Yet the tribe’s home territory was itself struggling to keep up, both internally among the Elga there and compared to other lords of the east. Many younger and newly-born Elga over the past two centuries had become more accustomed to or taken toward settled human ways, including even herself and a minority of even the other older Elga over time, while her youngest brother was among the minority of youth in the tribe who remained on the traditionalist side (her father had strictly ensured this in his upbringing after his wife’s death). The settling of several of the younger warriors on land in defiance of tradition, which had led to some internal conflict known as the “Silent Rebellion” among their tribe at that, the growing need for and use of centralization of the sitting Chief over matters of the territory and its human over time out of pure necessity and amidst other growing troubles didn’t help matters either. Finally, the more notable but even more slave-driven and settled lords of the east (who were more prosperous than their own tribe’s territory) as well as rising human factions also frankly also saw their tribe (her father most especially) as a potential threat once open civil war finally came to the Haltian Empire due to his open and staunch support of Orrin and the traditionalists in the end.

Combine all of this with growing human resentments even within their own territory during this time period of agitation and war, and her father would ultimately make plans to move their tribe out to the West once more. They would journey to Alveby, as he explained it, and fulfill his daughter’s arranged marriage before throwing his support behind Orrin for the war. After the slaying of many young warriors who had once sought to defy the tribe, and unseating of the prior chieftain who had begun to learn toward the reformist and settled Elga’s side, in Haykr’s eyes this was the best way to ensure his family and the tribe survived and prospered in the end. The old ways were all he knew. He had, during his times as chief, even sought to spread out new healers and gain storages for his human subjects and had protected them from outside harm. Yet blind to his daughter’s growing rift with him in his ignorance, and some lack of skill in non-martial matters on his part, would lead to him being genuinely shocked when, after having the tribe pack up over the next two weeks and prepare to leave the next morning just before first light, Erinia attempted to flee the whole situation that night and was caught doing so. He would then have her, already with her pack full of things and documents and most dear belongings already put together most conveniently, kept isolated in her tent and under the guard of five loyal veteran warriors he had known for a long time.

….This very same night, then, an unknown force (the Red Wyvern forces as it would later turn out to be) would attack the tribe by surprise. It was an unexpected attack, but one that her father and the assembled warriors at the tribe’s camp would still manage to hold back for a while despite a third of the camp becoming overrun by the sudden assault from all sides at first. Her oldest brother, Halafarin Sylric, would soon be commanded by their father to ‘take your siblings, as well as the rest of the warriors, and leave with as much of the tribe as can be evacuated’ after Haykr himself sustained a major gunshot wound to the right side. He would remain behind with the other warriors to hold back the assault in the meantime. Despite Halafarin being a notable Elga warrior in his own right after centuries underneath their father’s tutelage and gaining experience in battle at his side, though, he was unable to get to his sister’s tent that fell just within the overrun part of the camp but would command the warriors that were guarding her to ‘evacuate with her to Alveby’ as commanded by the chief before being forced to leave with those he could take with him in kind.

Erinia, during all of this, would be evacuated with her things by the five veteran warriors that had been keeping her under watch. Four would die to get them to where some of the horses were still being kept, luckily, while the fifth would place her on a horse sitting behind him and ride off despite being wounded in his torso by an enemy blade. The wound said warrior sustained would, however, prove to be too much for even him as after three days of traveling and trying to patch himself up he would succumb to his wound in the dead of night due to internal bleeding even despite Erinia’s efforts. Why had she tried to save someone trying to deliver her away to the west, and the people she had become much more distant to than not by now? She….well, he was still someone who had tried his best to save her at the cost of his and his comrades’ lives. Or, well, it had been a reflex for her part to just…try to….save him.

Even so, with her escort gone and being left in the silence of that starry night the Elga woman would take pause….and then ride off to the north instead of to the west. Indeed, while her brother and company would make it westward after a dangerous journey, and even later move farther westward to the new capital of Usantaka beyond that in the decades to come, Erinia herself would instead flee across the plains and steppe and forest and fire toward Brendahl. It was a place seemingly so isolated from much of what was going on, at least, that perhaps she’d find something for herself there. Maybe. To the people of Brendahl, though, she was at least not hostile….sure the Elga were a ‘boogeyman’ of the area, but as most dealings with the Elga had been in doing trade with Brendahl it would make the transition to moving to Brendahl that much better on Erinia in kind.

With her pool of personal knowledge and texts, at least, Erinia would come to find eventual employment in translating for Elga merchants at first to ‘get her foot in the door’ into Brendahl. This was soon followed by turning to the job of an alchemist to make an income, which would in turn lead to her getting another job in particular by helping create batches of black powder for firearms at a private powder mill. Proving an adept mind at the job, and able to survive longer than most workers said mill had hired on, the private patron of the powder mill would approach her with an offer to pay her more to go help start up powder milling at a new mill he was working on setting up over in “The Main” with the help of a friend. Looking for the profit and greater distance from the Haltian conflicts in the south, she would accept the job before being sent over via ship to the Calarian Main to help get said colonial powder mill up and running. It was here, however, that Erinia would also come into contact with a blue-blooded officer of the military of Brendahland named Salómon Gustav Hektorsson….the human man who would become her first love.

He was a younger military officer seeking glory and renown in the Calarian Main, whose father had died and mother relied on his paycheck while managing the estate back home alongside his older brother. She was managing a new powder mill her patron was trying to get up and running, trying to get away from the past and make a life for herself but finding herself unable to fully let it go. How they came into contact was a story as peculiar as it gets, being while she rinsed herself off after the day’s work was done in a nearby spot upriver of this particular colony and he was wandering about on a walk and walked in on her by mistake. Heated words were used, a wooden bucket was thrown, the blustering and normally adventurous younger blue-blood was blushing profusely while standing there just staring at her before he nearly got a new black eye, and she was nearly arrested in the nude before the officer vouched for her to be released and handed her a blanket to cover up with and stammering out an apology and a half-thinking compliment about her beauty and ferocity once he dismissed the two soldiers who had heard the situation and come running to them. From there? From there it was a peculiar romance between a younger noble and an Elga, a slow simmer that eventually ignited into a humble romance and resulted in her learning how to shoot firearms and him getting teased by some of his peers for ‘falling in love with a tall Elga woman’ much taller than him and some others shunning him or giving him odd looks for it. Ultimately Salómon would return to the Circle Sea Region after serving for ten years in some conflicts with the less-friendly locals, and assisting a friendly tribe in its own conflict over there, but would only then take up a human wife to satisfy his family’s need for children and an heir once his older brother had died without producing an heir for the family.

As for Erinia, she would mourn the loss of her love but would soon find herself in trouble as the colony was attacked by a less-than-friendly local tribe. Not only this, but her patron went out of business due to legal issues back in Brendahl and she was now out of a job. In turn she would come to fight as an unofficial militia woman for seven years, which is where her learning how to use a gun came into actual serious use, and then became an apprentice to and then later an assistant to a local gunsmith for the following decade. After the death of the smith she would take up the shop he ran, as he had died unmarried and alone, but from there the growth of the particular colony she lived in and better arms arrived from overseas. In turn she would ultimately pool what money she had left to return to Brendahl, seeing no future in work there, taking what savings she’d brought back with her left to seek work with a guild as a gunsmith to further her skills. In this time, she became known for testing her own handicraft and putting herself behind her work. Though it helped being seen more as “that Elga” than “a woman” in her case when it came to finding work, though when the Guild itself was abolished in due time she would take stock of her prospects in Brendahl once more before deciding on a change of scenery and pacing. She would enter a university there at Disakov to study several subjects, though being an Elga and seeking to flatter a potential patron to support her would prove necessities to getting a foot inside the door in any case.

Erinia would seek to further her understanding of engineering and chemistry, before likewise taking a stint in more biological-learning studies ‘for fun’ during her duration there. She would even work with the university itself for a number of years amidst her studies, mostly in assisting teachers if not almost only that (much to her chagrin), though this was more to do with her being an Elga and possessing historical information that the university found valuable to record for its own records and her ‘useful nature’ according to several of the teachers. Finding this state of affairs less than agreeable, she would leave the university and the city of Disakov altogether as she wound up traveling southward toward Addonian lands and its city-states to ‘get away’ from things for a while. Along the way she’d end up seeing more of the changes in the reborn Inburian Empire as she passed through its territory, and its peculiarly pragmatic approach to the Elga along the way, fascinating her somewhat on her trip but not being enough so to stop her fully either. From her initial arrival point at Mina-Sakh, then, Erinia would go about journeying eastward and then gradually northward to study the retreating Blight, investigate old ruins in much more rural and remote areas, and to get a look at the people resettling the lands there in Xaq-Shariq for herself out of a simple curiosity.

Making her way back westward toward far less isolated or remote areas, along the coast, the Elga wound up running into a family of traveling Inburian Shariq who were among a rather small minority of Inburian Shariq traveling further to the east to settle in what is currently the Xaq-Shariq capital city of Sarekni. She stayed with them for several days as they prepared for another leg of their journey, doing an interview with them and some others in the same traveling group to get their thoughts about ‘returning home’ to the land of their ancestors and so forth and writing it all down by her own hand. The account would later on be published, but even so this encounter would in the short-term lead to the Elga woman learning from this family of Shariq that there were many Elga within the Imperial University back in Inbur. The husband of the family could vouch for this, even, as before leaving Inbur itself he had worked at the university to help keep the grounds. Well, he had done so of course until the support from Inbur being given to repopulate the lands of the old Eminent Kingdom came along alongside a financial incentive to do so in his case.

Piquing her interest at the mention of a proper university where there were more Elga present there than just herself, Erinia would finally deign to set aside some old fears of her to ‘give a chance’ to the reborn Inburian Empire at large. In this vein she would give a farewell to the family that had hosted her, take up her things to go westward even as the migrating Shariq moved eastward in kind, and continued traveling all the way to the great city of Inbur itself. This would, in turn lead to her meeting a fellow Elga there named “Dalyor Quijyre” in Inbur who, after some negotiation and showing of her personal studies in the field and past education and experience, lead to her worming her way into a scholarship of sorts to enter the university and its halls of learning in kind.

Here, in the capital of Inbur, her prior skills in chemistry, travel, biology-related studies, and things such as learning languages that she had gleaned during her journeyings would in turn be furthered and advanced over the coming decades. It was, for one, a place that she felt more at home with than not in a rather long time. She hadn’t been to the territory of the smaller Haltian Empire, frankly, nor to its newest and more traditional capital of Usantaka. Not for….personal reasons. Yet with her further education and picking up of studies in the area of mechanical engineering to boot, for her part, she would finally take time to turn to something of a potential personal project. It was a project centered around a substance she had seen mentioned in her collection of texts….something that historically was called “sticky fire” by the ancients. It was a substance that was, at least, seemingly used for ship to ship combat and in handheld devices to burn down ships, floated and burned even atop the water, and was used to even defend walls or in handheld ‘hollow clay spheres’ of some sort. Curious about the ancient substance, and feeling motivated to see if the accounts could be true, Erinia would spend some years on this ‘personal project’ during her education while she in due time eventually sought to work within the Inburian Military as a means of getting a ‘secure job’ for the future. Pushing her way into the door with her own two hands, then, Erinia was accepted in and served as both a chemist and an engineer (primarily the latter) in the designing, refining, and development of improved arms and such like.

Yet after many years of this, in 1059, a new officer put in charge of her work group would strike up a sort of rivalry with her. He didn’t like her, and she in turn didn’t like him, and the conflict this generated led to him questioning her education and mental acuity and commitment to her work and taking steps to try to pressure her to leave. This was due to her being a woman rather than an Elga, as well as, in his words, her not having ‘served on the front lines like a real soldier’ first. So….after much time going about this mess a wager was made, one where if she served as a soldier for five years and ‘went through the wringer’ he’d eat his words about her. She was stubborn to prove her point and commitment to the job, as she had come to do with any serious job she put her mind to, and she accepted the wager. While the temporary transfer forms taking her out of her primary job was supposed to be temporary, however, the officer would instead send her to the ‘toughest fronts’ he could in this time period, put her in the toughest unit he could find, and then took what steps he could to drag out her service for another eight years as he tried to force her to quit (or get killed) and blocked her return despite the temporary nature of her transfer. Yet it would be this officer sleeping with a general’s wife that got him later kicked out and replaced, however, only for his Elga replacement to learn from the sitting team lead (a former subordinate of Erinia’s) about the wager. From here he would delve into the mess of paperwork his predecessor had left in his wake over the matter, retrieving a promising scientist back from a grand total of thirteen years and four months of frontline military service.

Finally returning to her desired work as a military engineer/chemist, Erinia in 1072 finally returned to her original work for the military and rejoined her former team. From here she was placed into the lead in the development of trying to create a lighter and more portable form of machine gun and such business. Here she also would take back up the work on her personal project to boot for the next five years. In this period she’d even throw in occasional target practice at the range with some of the soldiers at the military base set up next to the Imperial Palace, or would otherwise head to the range most evenings to ‘keep her skills sharp’ outside of her habit of reading or spending occasional time with members of her team. It was no wonder she gained the moniker of “The Busybody” for how often she was either doing something or another or was busy with work somehow.

As of four months ago, though, her personal project on ‘sticky fire’ would finally bear its desired fruit after so many years and she would get permission from a curious higher-up and her immediate superior officer about trial testing the substance and how well it functioned. It would at least enable her to begin work on testing the substance, and in turn she would begin to excitedly prepare a full paper for the Imperial University of Inbur to speak about the potential and theoretical uses of this in ancient times, give data on its performance (while keeping the formula strictly classified according to her military higher-ups), and compare all of this to what little was noted about it or accounted for it in historical documents overall to boot. Thus testing this recreated substance from ancient history began in earnest at the military base in the capital, then, and she pulled more than a few late-nighters to see the results of this project of hers that she’d been unable to start for so very long and which had taken many years to see to fruition.

….And then the world around her seemed to set itself on fire, even more so than this anciently-wrought substance could set things alight.

A fourteen day invasion of Communalists with Chlorine Gas weapons from the south, a rising up of Fifth Columnists within the Empire itself, and an invasion from the east from the territory-hungry Xaq-Shariq only served to grind months of paper writing and substance testing to a halt. The only reason she learned of the three-way mess of affairs for the Inburian Empire at all was her superior officer leaking it to her, and her team, during a meeting with them to try to prepare them for ‘the worst’ in his words. It was also a meeting in which he admitted he didn’t know how fast the Calaraians (the biggest worry in his mind) would reach the capital, and warned them as well as provided for them to help prepare the group to leave the capital at a moment’s notice in the coming days. Thus Erinia ended up with a sealable all-metal carrying case he’d given to her that’d been made beforehand, which case he’d then had her load with contained test materials and grenades for her “sticky fire” project as well as other files and designs for the lighter machine gun project she and her team had been working on. Other than that she’d personally acquire a military backpack to load with her personal things and provisions, including her old bow and some arrows, packed and ready for more things to be strapped to it if need be and keeping it at the ready out of some personal anxiety over the situation.

From there it just so happened to be that two days later when things fell apart at the capital, and in turn that Erinia was in her lightly military-guarded ‘secret’ staff apartment a few blocks away from the military base and still in Inbur proper. Still, she’d tried to write more of her paper in the meantime to pass the time at least….but with how fast things went down even the military didn’t seem as prepared as she’d hoped in her mind. She hadn’t planned on the two guards of the building (plain clothes soldiers) being killed, or having to put an arrow into the neck of a pair of rebel soldiers and their friend at the front door just to escape her apartment. Nor had she planned on having to loot a bolt action rifle from a soldier she’d been talking with just the other day about his more rural home, or grabbing up ammunition from the dead and several others along the way shove into her pockets while trying to find a military group to meet up with. Failing to find a military group to evacuate with, then, Erinia made her way back toward the base next to the palace and the zeppelin she had seen stored there for a refit. Along the way she would catch a stray shot from a nearby street battle, a shot that would end up grazing her left side, or managing to catch a piece of shrapnel that cut the outer side of her right upper arm after an explosion that had landed somewhere behind her.

…Yet at least she had made it to the zeppelin alive in the end, thank the deity of her ancestors, but she also wasn’t the only person to make it to the zeppelin alive either. She didn’t want to bother with messing about, however, retreating farther back into a cabin on the ship and closing herself inside at first. From there she’d work on patching herself up as best as she could, tearing up some of a soft spare sheet in the cabin to help bandage while rinsing her wounds with as little water as she could spare from a large canteen she’d packed. Given the circumstances, then, she’d proposed first taking the zeppelin to safer territory within the Circle Sea Region and before settling the matter of their 'final destination' afterwards. Was no use jumping ship to the Main or simply sitting idly by in an invaded Inbur when they remained in potential danger, thus to her regrouping was important first and foremost before they took another look at the situation and such before they came up with a longer-term and more solid plan. Then when it came to picking up the gold reserves, even as she felt the matter was a risk to their safety, she'd kept her lips shut about her own opinion and had helped in the moving it up and onto the zeppelin from the zepplin side and helping get it into the cargo hold without complaint. In the ensuing firefight with the infantry formation that had spotted the zeppelin, she'd gone and manned one of the guns at the rear to fire on the enemy infantry formation from afar in turn (rifle nor bow would help in this current matter anyways).

From there, well, she'd just try to get some brief rest thereafter. Yes. That would be best. Make sure her bandages were secure, double check the wounds, and ensure her things hadn't been tampered with. Even so, Erinia kept her old bow and the bolt-action rifle alike right by her side and within proper reach of the bed....just to be safe. Just in case someone onboard was actually some Calarian spy or Fifth Columnist or other ill sort who, in the end, would try to kill them or the like.

Extras/Other:

• Her older brother (Halafarin Sylric) and youngest brother (Voron Sylric) currently live in the Haltian capital of Usantaka, with families of their own and so forth. They think she’s dead as well.
• Enjoys spicy and sour foods
• The Languages That Erinia Speaks - Inburian, Brendahlander, Elgafolk Language, Addonian (but with a minor but noticeable Mina-Sakh-ish accent), Shariq (no real discernible accent)

Pokemon Singularity

Clarissa Ryte

The "Cave of Tuff", Tunnel Network, Hidden Cavern, Grand Glory City

Pokedex Entry- Igglybuff, the Ember Pokemon. Igglybuff are filled with highly flammable gas that turns into a 1800 F flame when ignited, leaving their foes blackened. Their diet consists of rocks that are converted into flammable gas and typically favor Roggenrola as their prey.

So Two Pokedex Walk Into A Bar, And The-

....

....

....

....

The psychic slowly looked down at the Roggenrola in her arms. Pyrite looked back up slowly at his trainer in turn. It was only a moment of pause, and yet no words needed to be said. The exchange of looks was more than enough, both after the Steelix, after seeing this scene and hearind the dex' information, and due to her powers allowing her to get a hint if she needed when it came to her own Pokemon if it had come down to it. But the message was clear, and perhaps the poor guy had endured enough for-

"Rogg! Rogg. Roggen Rolla. Rolla Roggen-Rolla."

...Never mind, he seemed a little less than pebbling himself this time. But...why? On top of that, he was gesturing with his head fin to the Pokeballs at her waist that held her other Pokemon. Apparently it was enough chatter to even get Scrapper, who had been hiding behind her legs at this point and watching the scene, to poke his litle trash bag head out curiously and catch the eye of the Roggenrola.

"Trub?"

"Rog. Rolla?"

"Bish! Trub Trub. Biiiiiish bish. Trub."

The Trubbish then pointed at the Pokeball holding a certain murder bunny, before the two then stared back at her. They stared as if she would understand, but it didn't take a genius to get the idea either. That had been her idea already for the situation, aside from maybe putting Pyrite back up, but on top of that....she felt Nils was also right in that these two Igglybuff might not be the only ones here either. From what she'd read up, Pokemon could form larger social groups in some cases, and in this case the place seemed too big for just two of these to be mulling about.

Nils took another step and splayed his hands open in front of him. "Hey, hey, can't you two see you're scaring him?" he said. He was talking to the Igglybuffs, but he did glance over to meet the punk's eyes once before looking back at the pokemon. "Why don't you play with us instead?"

Nils

Setting down Pyrite, who with a gesture motioned for Scrapper to step out from behind his trainer's legs, Clarissa grabbed up a certain Pokeball and let it open up in her hand, releasing a certain Buneary out onto the field of probable battle in front of her. In turn, the unleashed Sir Lopsalot would take a glance at the situation, look at Nils to the side, then baack at the two other Pokemon now standing on each side of their trianer's side, and then back at Clarissa. Silently she nodded. That was all he needed.

"BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!"

A certain someone now seemed pumped up to issue an adamant declaration of battle to one of the two Igglybuff, roaring out with a mighty battle cry of challenging even as he flexed his two little arms with gusto. he then assumed a battle-ready stance on his part, ready to follow up with more after the little show of bravado. Little eyes took notice of the area's height, rocks walls, and so forth. Good. It hadn't been too long for him, in hindsight, but it felt like forever since he'd gotten a chance at a good fight! So this, this would do very nicely, especially with these two tormenting a poor, strange looking human already being a frustrating sight to his eyes.

"Lucky for you two I know a ton of games. We could even test your strength! What do you say?" he said, forcing a grin.

Nils

Clarissa likewise assumed a stance and stared back with determination in her eyes. She wasn't going to sit and leave Nils and this kid to some 'fate' or misery at the hands of kidnapping Igglybuff. Sir Lopsalot wouldn't, and it seemed Scrapper and Pyrite wouldn't hide away either right now. So....she had no excuse herself not to stand up as well!

"A game about strength sounds good right now. But....are these two 'Tuff' enough to step up and play?"

[Clarissa Backs Nils Up, Trying To Sound Cool, And Sir Lopsalot Helps Issue The Challenge To Battle!]

@Shazamrock@Remram

Empire of the Clouds

@Bingelly@InfamousGuy101@Dyelli Beybi

Ok, app is finally done! Just let me know whatever I need to change or fix, anything that's not ok, etc, and I'll get it fixed up.

Here is to hoping I didn't bungle stuff up. (@_@)

An Elgafolk Polymath of Inbur

Erinia Sylric

Name: Erinia Sylric

Gender: Female

Age: 522

Nationality: Inburian (most recently and currently so) ((Formerly/Historically: Haltian Empire and Brendahl respectively))

Appearance: Erinia is, for a female Elga, first of all noticeably somewhat above average at a height of 6’0” compared to the average of 5’8” of female Elga overall. Yet this height doesn’t seem to detract from her rather feminine body shape and hourglass hips, with her slender face and soft steely-grey colored eyes combined together with this have caused her to be known in current times and prior ones as ‘conventionally attractive’ by general human and Elgafolk standards. Her lighter and soft caucasian-toned skin, while able to tan and possessing a most youthful beauty to it due to her biological immortality, also currently lacks a tan at all at this point in time due to her many hours spent inside buildings for purposes of her work prior to this point in time. Meanwhile, her rather light brown hair is slightly longer than shoulder length but is normally tied up in a bun on the back of her head.

Beyond this, small faded scars and evidence of long-faded and very well-healed burns left over from the past centuries of her life can be found by looking close at areas such as her upper back and forearms, though most of the wounds she’s ever sustained so long ago have faded so much that only a very close inspection of her skin allows one to notice most of them. However, four more recent knife/bayonet and bullet scars from her years of service as a frontline soldier can be found on her mid-lower torso, left shoulder, and upper back, as well as some small but more faded scratches from barbed wire or scratches caused by rough terrain and such, are still visible currently. Likewise she has a number of worn or newer callouses on her hands from the hours of work spent in her lab and using tools there, or time spent holding a gun at the firing range, as well. Most notably, the right upper arm has a slightly angled but mostly horizontal wound from a piece of larger shrapnel, and her lower left side has sustained a grazing blow from a stray bullet, with both of these spots have been rinsed with water and then bandaged up with strips of what seems to be torn spare sheets or the like.

In terms of clothing, she currently wears a pair of brown pants, a short-sleeved button-up white formal shirt with a collar and a black tie (has some blood and damage to it due to her sustaining her latest wounds), and a pair of military-issue combat-ready boots. She has appropriately tall socks on her feet, the height of which is hidden underneath her pant legs in turn. A black leather belt is worn about her waist as well.

Personal Effects:

• Krausser Firearms R-01M Trench Pattern Rifle (Gewehr 98 with a trench clip with its attach-able bayonet, plus the accompanying looted bayonet scabbard; is one round short of being fully loaded, but remains loaded and ready to use)
• Haltian Bow (For use on or off of a horse; is rather well maintained and fixed-up), plus a quiver she once had attached to her backpack and has by now detached from her backpack that contains twenty five arrows (three of which have had blood cleaned off of them) in it
• A Well-Loaded Military Backpack ((Things are both inside of it and strapped to it.)) ((Overall Contents Include: Spare clothing, personal journal plus a spare notebook and writing materials, a series of preserved ancient documents accrued throughout her life and travels, a week’s worth of tightly packed and preserved military rations for one person, a currently still mostly-full and large-sized water filled canteen, a Standard-Issue Trench Knife (German Nahkampfmesser trench knife), a rather old gold Brendahl noble’s signet ring engraved with the specific shape of a particular house crest that has been stored away with rather noticeable care, an old polished Elgafolk-style gold bracelet once owned by her mother (which is embossed with a highly detailed and beautiful artistic design of a running horses in motion across the band itself), and personal toiletries.))
• An All-Metal Sealable Case ((Exterior Made To Be Weather Resistant And Watertight When Closed; Is Shaped Like A Suitcase But Is Deeper Than Normal; Metal Used Is A Lighter-Weight Metal Mixture Of Some Kind)) ((Overall Contents Include: A cushioned and roughly flame-resistant internal lining, five functional test grenades filled with “sticky fire” substance, three thick and sealed glass tubes of “sticky fire” with metal caps on both ends (each about the size of the palm of her hand in width), and myriad official files for a project working on a lighter machine gun design as well as the official files and the formula for “sticky fire”.))
• Spare Rifle Ammunition (Ten standard clips and seven individual bullets, once stuffed in her pockets or outer pouches of her backpack, that by now have taken out and hidden inside her cabin underneath the mattress of the bed inside of said cabin.)

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Background

What Is Your Job: Inburian Military Engineer/Chemist (“Elgan Polymath” would better summarise the fullness of her total skillset though.)

Backstory:

Erinia was ultimately born the third of four children, and the only daughter, to a mighty elven noble and warrior named Haykr Sylric and his wife Nimue. The Sylric are a name not as famous among humans, admittedly, but among Elgafolk even now he is remembered for serving as a mighty fighting companion and tactician in the service of Voron Corfina. Haykr was even present and fighting during the sacking of the Inburian Empire’s capital at that, standing out for his bravery but also his rather well-honed mind for matters of combat, and in return for his faithful service and humble desires to serve he was given a good share of loot and was handed some territory to manage in what is currently the southwestern corner of the Inburian Empire. Her father didn’t want a far more vast tract of humans to manage, truthfully, but simply wanted a place to live and set up with his people while continuing to serve the First Emperor where he could. Thus Erinia and her family came about to living in an area with lush forests, open areas, rolling hills, and a daunting set of mountains to his south, all where her father would begin his rule as a chief of the Elga and would seek to establish himself well over the human population of his area as their proper ruler ordained by the Emperor.

It was within this framework of things, however, that Erinia was only 75 years old at the start of the Haltian Empire, all with her father keeping the Elga of his region moving from place to place and levying tribute on his human subjects at first as per tradition. Yet even within this framework, and despite her father’s ties to the traditionalism of the western part of the Haltian Empire, things would come to change just as many of the other Elgafolk lords in the east began to be shaped by the human framework of the east. Her father had no worries about being elected chief several times more again in the coming two centuries, and yet he would even in his ‘first term’ be forced to move on from the simpler model of levying tribute and sending warriors to bring back said tribute from time to time and to keep tabs on the human population. Indeed, he would likewise take notes from the human feudal model and seek to adapt them to the Elga way of life during his initial tenure as chief, delegating positions of sub-management to what he dubbed the new “Council of Warriors”: A new secondary body of specifically unlanded Elgafolk warriors, a rotating and elected set of positions after each time an election for a chief was held, who were put in charge of keeping order and maintaining the flow of tribute from human populations within Haykr’s territory.

Said warriors didn’t own the land they helped look over for the chief, but rather were in charge of it and judged based on how well things went in their ‘area’ and how well it contributed back to the tribe and try to avoid the ‘decadent pitfalls’ her father claimed to have seen in the human manner of rulership during the conquests of Voron Corfina. Likewise, however, with this system the rising need came for at least some delegated portion of tribe members of the elected warriors’ families and of each chief’s households to need to learn more about their human subjects and their language in order to contribute to the management of territory in turn. Such was an unavoidable reality of the situation, and in Erinia’s case she would take up the position of studying looted and traded-for human texts and language in order to assist her father as would her second-oldest brother Silvyr Sylric to an extent.

Known for her keen mind, uncannily good photographic memory, and ‘natural beauty’ among her peers, Erinia was seen as a rather ‘prime candidate’ for being the future wife of a chief or mighty warrior and a prodigy of her people. Indeed her future was a matter her father was working on arranging after the conquest of the east and settling his people into their new territory, seeking to gather his daughter a ‘fitting husband, and the best life he could secure for her’ in his own mind. Yet the seeming thirst she had to learn while growing up, and which had fueled in good part her ultimate drilling in the legends, singing methods, and ways of the horse and bow to the point they were as natural and utterly instinctual to her as breathing, would prove useful as well within the scope of assisting her people within her tribe’s territory. It also, however, spurred on something else within her….an awakening to matters of the complexities of human designs, constructions, and ideas that her people had long cast aside for the ancient ways. It was, for Erinia, even something that became more of an obsession as she gathered up a hoard of texts and useful humans underneath her wing to study and learn and seek to also build upon growing human knowledge over the two centuries (especially regarding gunpowder and matters that would currently be sorted under the label of ‘chemistry’) following the founding of the Haltian Empire.

It would also be within these two centuries that her family itself also began to shift, as did the ways of the east, despite her father’s ever-constant vigil and resolution to maintain the traditions of their people and to ensure they remained intact. The first blow that began these changes, however, was that her mother would, 150 years before the fall of the Haltian Empire, die from complications after giving birth to her youngest brother/sibling. Said youngest sibling would be named “Voron Sylric” in honor of the Emperor, after her father received permission from his ‘old friend’ to do so, though her mother’s loss inevitably devastated her father as well as herself and her older siblings and other members of their tribe who were close to them alike. Likewise her growing skillset was looked upon by her father as simply a ‘hobby’ where she went beyond its normal scope, rather than him perceiving the truth of her increasingly growing distance with the mindset of the ‘old ways’, even as he finally organized her future marriage to a prominent warrior of a slightly younger age who lived in the (at the time) capital of Alveby and likewise had a role in serving as one of the guards of Voron Corfina himself (doing so after over a century of negotiation and work due to the seriousness of the matter in his mind). Her father would, aside from overlooking the growing truth of her own situation, also come to chafe more and more with her second oldest brother as he proved more interested in human currency and the accruing of wealth and influence than he did in assisting his father in human matters. This her father saw as a more direct problem for the future, eventually leading to arguments and forcing Silvyr eventually into a compromise. It was one where he would be put in a position to be able to travel for their tribe and perform economic dealings and trade with other more independent human polities, but would do so in return for having to take up a more traditional position as his ‘primary role’ back home as a dedicated merchant for the tribe.

As her father came into power as the chief again for what would be the last time, however, it would be in a time of great contention and local struggle. It was during and right after the time of the assassination of the First Emperor, the struggle between Voron’s sons, and the emergence of the long-feared human uprisings in the east to boot. Out of all the lords of the east, however, her father was ever still a die-hard traditionalist tied to the west and was among the minority in the east who supported Orrian Corfina despite his desperate desire to believe that neither of the Emperor’s sons had slain their father and that it had been a human-related conspiracy or ‘some other Elga traitor’ of some kind. Yet the tribe’s home territory was itself struggling to keep up, both internally among the Elga there and compared to other lords of the east. Many younger and newly-born Elga over the past two centuries had become more accustomed to or taken toward settled human ways, including even herself and a minority of even the other older Elga over time, while her youngest brother was among the minority of youth in the tribe who remained on the traditionalist side (her father had strictly ensured this in his upbringing after his wife’s death). The settling of several of the younger warriors on land in defiance of tradition, which had led to some internal conflict known as the “Silent Rebellion” among their tribe at that, the growing need for and use of centralization of the sitting Chief over matters of the territory and its human over time out of pure necessity and amidst other growing troubles didn’t help matters either. Finally, the more notable but even more slave-driven and settled lords of the east (who were more prosperous than their own tribe’s territory) as well as rising human factions also frankly also saw their tribe (her father most especially) as a potential threat once open civil war finally came to the Haltian Empire due to his open and staunch support of Orrin and the traditionalists in the end.

Combine all of this with growing human resentments even within their own territory during this time period of agitation and war, and her father would ultimately make plans to move their tribe out to the West once more. They would journey to Alveby, as he explained it, and fulfill his daughter’s arranged marriage before throwing his support behind Orrin for the war. After the slaying of many young warriors who had once sought to defy the tribe, and unseating of the prior chieftain who had begun to learn toward the reformist and settled Elga’s side, in Haykr’s eyes this was the best way to ensure his family and the tribe survived and prospered in the end. The old ways were all he knew. He had, during his times as chief, even sought to spread out new healers and gain storages for his human subjects and had protected them from outside harm. Yet blind to his daughter’s growing rift with him in his ignorance, and some lack of skill in non-martial matters on his part, would lead to him being genuinely shocked when, after having the tribe pack up over the next two weeks and prepare to leave the next morning just before first light, Erinia attempted to flee the whole situation that night and was caught doing so. He would then have her, already with her pack full of things and documents and most dear belongings already put together most conveniently, kept isolated in her tent and under the guard of five loyal veteran warriors he had known for a long time.

….This very same night, then, an unknown force (the Red Wyvern forces as it would later turn out to be) would attack the tribe by surprise. It was an unexpected attack, but one that her father and the assembled warriors at the tribe’s camp would still manage to hold back for a while despite a third of the camp becoming overrun by the sudden assault from all sides at first. Her oldest brother, Halafarin Sylric, would soon be commanded by their father to ‘take your siblings, as well as the rest of the warriors, and leave with as much of the tribe as can be evacuated’ after Haykr himself sustained a major gunshot wound to the right side. He would remain behind with the other warriors to hold back the assault in the meantime. Despite Halafarin being a notable Elga warrior in his own right after centuries underneath their father’s tutelage and gaining experience in battle at his side, though, he was unable to get to his sister’s tent that fell just within the overrun part of the camp but would command the warriors that were guarding her to ‘evacuate with her to Alveby’ as commanded by the chief before being forced to leave with those he could take with him in kind.

Erinia, during all of this, would be evacuated with her things by the five veteran warriors that had been keeping her under watch. Four would die to get them to where some of the horses were still being kept, luckily, while the fifth would place her on a horse sitting behind him and ride off despite being wounded in his torso by an enemy blade. The wound said warrior sustained would, however, prove to be too much for even him as after three days of traveling and trying to patch himself up he would succumb to his wound in the dead of night due to internal bleeding even despite Erinia’s efforts. Why had she tried to save someone trying to deliver her away to the west, and the people she had become much more distant to than not by now? She….well, he was still someone who had tried his best to save her at the cost of his and his comrades’ lives. Or, well, it had been a reflex for her part to just…try to….save him.

Even so, with her escort gone and being left in the silence of that starry night the Elga woman would take pause….and then ride off to the north instead of to the west. Indeed, while her brother and company would make it westward after a dangerous journey, and even later move farther westward to the new capital of Usantaka beyond that in the decades to come, Erinia herself would instead flee across the plains and steppe and forest and fire toward Brendahl. It was a place seemingly so isolated from much of what was going on, at least, that perhaps she’d find something for herself there. Maybe. To the people of Brendahl, though, she was at least not hostile….sure the Elga were a ‘boogeyman’ of the area, but as most dealings with the Elga had been in doing trade with Brendahl it would make the transition to moving to Brendahl that much better on Erinia in kind.

With her pool of personal knowledge and texts, at least, Erinia would come to find eventual employment in translating for Elga merchants at first to ‘get her foot in the door’ into Brendahl. This was soon followed by turning to the job of an alchemist to make an income, which would in turn lead to her getting another job in particular by helping create batches of black powder for firearms at a private powder mill. Proving an adept mind at the job, and able to survive longer than most workers said mill had hired on, the private patron of the powder mill would approach her with an offer to pay her more to go help start up powder milling at a new mill he was working on setting up over in “The Main” with the help of a friend. Looking for the profit and greater distance from the Haltian conflicts in the south, she would accept the job before being sent over via ship to the Calarian Main to help get said colonial powder mill up and running. It was here, however, that Erinia would also come into contact with a blue-blooded officer of the military of Brendahland named Salómon Gustav Hektorsson….the human man who would become her first love.

He was a younger military officer seeking glory and renown in the Calarian Main, whose father had died and mother relied on his paycheck while managing the estate back home alongside his older brother. She was managing a new powder mill her patron was trying to get up and running, trying to get away from the past and make a life for herself but finding herself unable to fully let it go. How they came into contact was a story as peculiar as it gets, being while she rinsed herself off after the day’s work was done in a nearby spot upriver of this particular colony and he was wandering about on a walk and walked in on her by mistake. Heated words were used, a wooden bucket was thrown, the blustering and normally adventurous younger blue-blood was blushing profusely while standing there just staring at her before he nearly got a new black eye, and she was nearly arrested in the nude before the officer vouched for her to be released and handed her a blanket to cover up with and stammering out an apology and a half-thinking compliment about her beauty and ferocity once he dismissed the two soldiers who had heard the situation and come running to them. From there? From there it was a peculiar romance between a younger noble and an Elga, a slow simmer that eventually ignited into a humble romance and resulted in her learning how to shoot firearms and him getting teased by some of his peers for ‘falling in love with a tall Elga woman’ much taller than him and some others shunning him or giving him odd looks for it. Ultimately Salómon would return to the Circle Sea Region after serving for ten years in some conflicts with the less-friendly locals, and assisting a friendly tribe in its own conflict over there, but would only then take up a human wife to satisfy his family’s need for children and an heir once his older brother had died without producing an heir for the family.

As for Erinia, she would mourn the loss of her love but would soon find herself in trouble as the colony was attacked by a less-than-friendly local tribe. Not only this, but her patron went out of business due to legal issues back in Brendahl and she was now out of a job. In turn she would come to fight as an unofficial militia woman for seven years, which is where her learning how to use a gun came into actual serious use, and then became an apprentice to and then later an assistant to a local gunsmith for the following decade. After the death of the smith she would take up the shop he ran, as he had died unmarried and alone, but from there the growth of the particular colony she lived in and better arms arrived from overseas. In turn she would ultimately pool what money she had left to return to Brendahl, seeing no future in work there, taking what savings she’d brought back with her left to seek work with a guild as a gunsmith to further her skills. In this time, she became known for testing her own handicraft and putting herself behind her work. Though it helped being seen more as “that Elga” than “a woman” in her case when it came to finding work, though when the Guild itself was abolished in due time she would take stock of her prospects in Brendahl once more before deciding on a change of scenery and pacing. She would enter a university there at Disakov to study several subjects, though being an Elga and seeking to flatter a potential patron to support her would prove necessities to getting a foot inside the door in any case.

Erinia would seek to further her understanding of engineering and chemistry, before likewise taking a stint in more biological-learning studies ‘for fun’ during her duration there. She would even work with the university itself for a number of years amidst her studies, mostly in assisting teachers if not almost only that (much to her chagrin), though this was more to do with her being an Elga and possessing historical information that the university found valuable to record for its own records and her ‘useful nature’ according to several of the teachers. Finding this state of affairs less than agreeable, she would leave the university and the city of Disakov altogether as she wound up traveling southward toward Addonian lands and its city-states to ‘get away’ from things for a while. Along the way she’d end up seeing more of the changes in the reborn Inburian Empire as she passed through its territory, and its peculiarly pragmatic approach to the Elga along the way, fascinating her somewhat on her trip but not being enough so to stop her fully either. From her initial arrival point at Mina-Sakh, then, Erinia would go about journeying eastward and then gradually northward to study the retreating Blight, investigate old ruins in much more rural and remote areas, and to get a look at the people resettling the lands there in Xaq-Shariq for herself out of a simple curiosity.

Making her way back westward toward far less isolated or remote areas, along the coast, the Elga wound up running into a family of traveling Inburian Shariq who were among a rather small minority of Inburian Shariq traveling further to the east to settle in what is currently the Xaq-Shariq capital city of Sarekni. She stayed with them for several days as they prepared for another leg of their journey, doing an interview with them and some others in the same traveling group to get their thoughts about ‘returning home’ to the land of their ancestors and so forth and writing it all down by her own hand. The account would later on be published, but even so this encounter would in the short-term lead to the Elga woman learning from this family of Shariq that there were many Elga within the Imperial University back in Inbur. The husband of the family could vouch for this, even, as before leaving Inbur itself he had worked at the university to help keep the grounds. Well, he had done so of course until the support from Inbur being given to repopulate the lands of the old Eminent Kingdom came along alongside a financial incentive to do so in his case.

Piquing her interest at the mention of a proper university where there were more Elga present there than just herself, Erinia would finally deign to set aside some old fears of her to ‘give a chance’ to the reborn Inburian Empire at large. In this vein she would give a farewell to the family that had hosted her, take up her things to go westward even as the migrating Shariq moved eastward in kind, and continued traveling all the way to the great city of Inbur itself. This would, in turn lead to her meeting a fellow Elga there named “Dalyor Quijyre” in Inbur who, after some negotiation and showing of her personal studies in the field and past education and experience, lead to her worming her way into a scholarship of sorts to enter the university and its halls of learning in kind.

Here, in the capital of Inbur, her prior skills in chemistry, travel, biology-related studies, and things such as learning languages that she had gleaned during her journeyings would in turn be furthered and advanced over the coming decades. It was, for one, a place that she felt more at home with than not in a rather long time. She hadn’t been to the territory of the smaller Haltian Empire, frankly, nor to its newest and more traditional capital of Usantaka. Not for….personal reasons. Yet with her further education and picking up of studies in the area of mechanical engineering to boot, for her part, she would finally take time to turn to something of a potential personal project. It was a project centered around a substance she had seen mentioned in her collection of texts….something that historically was called “sticky fire” by the ancients. It was a substance that was, at least, seemingly used for ship to ship combat and in handheld devices to burn down ships, floated and burned even atop the water, and was used to even defend walls or in handheld ‘hollow clay spheres’ of some sort. Curious about the ancient substance, and feeling motivated to see if the accounts could be true, Erinia would spend some years on this ‘personal project’ during her education while she in due time eventually sought to work within the Inburian Military as a means of getting a ‘secure job’ for the future. Pushing her way into the door with her own two hands, then, Erinia was accepted in and served as both a chemist and an engineer (primarily the latter) in the designing, refining, and development of improved arms and such like.

Yet after many years of this, in 1059, a new officer put in charge of her work group would strike up a sort of rivalry with her. He didn’t like her, and she in turn didn’t like him, and the conflict this generated led to him questioning her education and mental acuity and commitment to her work and taking steps to try to pressure her to leave. This was due to her being a woman rather than an Elga, as well as, in his words, her not having ‘served on the front lines like a real soldier’ first. So….after much time going about this mess a wager was made, one where if she served as a soldier for five years and ‘went through the wringer’ he’d eat his words about her. She was stubborn to prove her point and commitment to the job, as she had come to do with any serious job she put her mind to, and she accepted the wager. While the temporary transfer forms taking her out of her primary job was supposed to be temporary, however, the officer would instead send her to the ‘toughest fronts’ he could in this time period, put her in the toughest unit he could find, and then took what steps he could to drag out her service for another eight years as he tried to force her to quit (or get killed) and blocked her return despite the temporary nature of her transfer. Yet it would be this officer sleeping with a general’s wife that got him later kicked out and replaced, however, only for his Elga replacement to learn from the sitting team lead (a former subordinate of Erinia’s) about the wager. From here he would delve into the mess of paperwork his predecessor had left in his wake over the matter, retrieving a promising scientist back from a grand total of thirteen years and four months of frontline military service.

Finally returning to her desired work as a military engineer/chemist, Erinia in 1072 finally returned to her original work for the military and rejoined her former team. From here she was placed into the lead in the development of trying to create a lighter and more portable form of machine gun and such business. Here she also would take back up the work on her personal project to boot for the next five years. In this period she’d even throw in occasional target practice at the range with some of the soldiers at the military base set up next to the Imperial Palace, or would otherwise head to the range most evenings to ‘keep her skills sharp’ outside of her habit of reading or spending occasional time with members of her team. It was no wonder she gained the moniker of “The Busybody” for how often she was either doing something or another or was busy with work somehow.

As of four months ago, though, her personal project on ‘sticky fire’ would finally bear its desired fruit after so many years and she would get permission from a curious higher-up and her immediate superior officer about trial testing the substance and how well it functioned. It would at least enable her to begin work on testing the substance, and in turn she would begin to excitedly prepare a full paper for the Imperial University of Inbur to speak about the potential and theoretical uses of this in ancient times, give data on its performance (while keeping the formula strictly classified according to her military higher-ups), and compare all of this to what little was noted about it or accounted for it in historical documents overall to boot. Thus testing this recreated substance from ancient history began in earnest at the military base in the capital, then, and she pulled more than a few late-nighters to see the results of this project of hers that she’d been unable to start for so very long and which had taken many years to see to fruition.

….And then the world around her seemed to set itself on fire, even more so than this anciently-wrought substance could set things alight.

A fourteen day invasion of Communalists with Chlorine Gas weapons from the south, a rising up of Fifth Columnists within the Empire itself, and an invasion from the east from the territory-hungry Xaq-Shariq only served to grind months of paper writing and substance testing to a halt. The only reason she learned of the three-way mess of affairs for the Inburian Empire at all was her superior officer leaking it to her, and her team, during a meeting with them to try to prepare them for ‘the worst’ in his words. It was also a meeting in which he admitted he didn’t know how fast the Calaraians (the biggest worry in his mind) would reach the capital, and warned them as well as provided for them to help prepare the group to leave the capital at a moment’s notice in the coming days. Thus Erinia ended up with a sealable all-metal carrying case he’d given to her that’d been made beforehand, which case he’d then had her load with contained test materials and grenades for her “sticky fire” project as well as other files and designs for the lighter machine gun project she and her team had been working on. Other than that she’d personally acquire a military backpack to load with her personal things and provisions, including her old bow and some arrows, packed and ready for more things to be strapped to it if need be and keeping it at the ready out of some personal anxiety over the situation.

From there it just so happened to be that two days later when things fell apart at the capital, and in turn that Erinia was in her lightly military-guarded ‘secret’ staff apartment a few blocks away from the military base and still in Inbur proper. Still, she’d tried to write more of her paper in the meantime to pass the time at least….but with how fast things went down even the military didn’t seem as prepared as she’d hoped in her mind. She hadn’t planned on the two guards of the building (plain clothes soldiers) being killed, or having to put an arrow into the neck of a pair of rebel soldiers and their friend at the front door just to escape her apartment. Nor had she planned on having to loot a bolt action rifle from a soldier she’d been talking with just the other day about his more rural home, or grabbing up ammunition from the dead and several others along the way shove into her pockets while trying to find a military group to meet up with. Failing to find a military group to evacuate with, then, Erinia made her way back toward the base next to the palace and the zeppelin she had seen stored there for a refit. Along the way she would catch a stray shot from a nearby street battle, a shot that would end up grazing her left side, or managing to catch a piece of shrapnel that cut the outer side of her right upper arm after an explosion that had landed somewhere behind her.

…Yet at least she had made it to the zeppelin alive in the end, thank the deity of her ancestors, but she also wasn’t the only person to make it to the zeppelin alive either. She didn’t want to bother with messing about, however, retreating farther back into a cabin on the ship and closing herself inside at first. From there she’d work on patching herself up as best as she could, tearing up some of a soft spare sheet in the cabin to help bandage while rinsing her wounds with as little water as she could spare from a large canteen she’d packed. Given the circumstances, then, she’d proposed first taking the zeppelin to safer territory within the Circle Sea Region and before settling the matter of their 'final destination' afterwards. Was no use jumping ship to the Main or simply sitting idly by in an invaded Inbur when they remained in potential danger, thus to her regrouping was important first and foremost before they took another look at the situation and such before they came up with a longer-term and more solid plan. Then when it came to picking up the gold reserves, even as she felt the matter was a risk to their safety, she'd kept her lips shut about her own opinion and had helped in the moving it up and onto the zeppelin from the zepplin side and helping get it into the cargo hold without complaint. In the ensuing firefight with the infantry formation that had spotted the zeppelin, she'd gone and manned one of the guns at the rear to fire on the enemy infantry formation from afar in turn (rifle nor bow would help in this current matter anyways).

From there, well, she'd just try to get some brief rest thereafter. Yes. That would be best. Make sure her bandages were secure, double check the wounds, and ensure her things hadn't been tampered with. Even so, Erinia kept her old bow and the bolt-action rifle alike right by her side and within proper reach of the bed....just to be safe. Just in case someone onboard was actually some Calarian spy or Fifth Columnist or other ill sort who, in the end, would try to kill them or the like.

Extras/Other:

• Her older brother (Halafarin Sylric) and youngest brother (Voron Sylric) currently live in the Haltian capital of Usantaka, with families of their own and so forth. They think she’s dead as well.
• Enjoys spicy and sour foods
• The Languages That Erinia Speaks - Inburian, Brendahlander, Elgafolk Language, Addonian (but with a minor but noticeable Mina-Sakh-ish accent), Shariq (no real discernible accent)

Pokemon Singularity

Waha Farfetch'd says:
Fair maiden, thy champion hath besteth me in glirous battle. I henceforth offer thee my services as thy newest retainer and knight. Prithy thou should accpt mine oath of alleigance and vow of fealty, forsooth my leek shall serve thee and thee alone, what say you, fair amiden of the ironclad spirit? Will thou allow me the honor of serving thine will?

What Vivian hears:
FARFETCH'D!!

@Xaltwind

This likely isn't even the most Ferfetch'd thing Evelyn might experience in Evig at that!

Ba Dum Tiss