Dark Jack

The Prophecy

Zerul City, the Drunken Dove

Hearing and nodding her head at each of their answers, Violet finally threw up her hands and patted the air placatingly with both of them, offering them a smile. “Of course, of course, take all the time you need; it’s an open invitation that you can make your decision on whenever you want. It’s not like my sister and I are carrying around extra badges for recruitment in the field, anyway... not only would we have no idea which circle to assign you, but we don’t even have the authority to do so. We may belong to the sixth circle, but we’re really just hunters like everyone else.”
“You’ll need to visit one of our branch headquarters to join,” Rose creaked sullenly. “The closest one is in Fokon.”
Her sister nodded her agreement. “Yeah, just find someone there from the fourth circle or higher, and tell them that Violet and Rose invited you. Normally the deo’iel accepts pretty much anyone, as you know – Rose and I are living proof of that – but having our recommendation should make them take you a bit more seriously, at least.”
“I’d probably wait a week or so before going, though,” the masked sister pointed out grimly, “or chances are that you’ll get killed long before the Fixer has a chance to come back. I’m sure you’ve heard about the monster causing havoc in Nemhim. Trust me, if our suspicions are right, you won’t want to wear a deo’iel badge until that thing is gone... because if the higher-ups think what we think, chances are that there’ll be a lot of deo’iel in Rodoria very soon, and most of them won’t make it back out alive.”

The Prophecy

Thank you for reacting, yoshua and Rhaevnn, but eh, yeah, as you realize yourselves you can't really do anything. I'm just quite worried with how long it's been with activity in the RP being so low... Nessa just posted, and I know that Shien is waiting for @Legion X51 to post before she can, which stalls things in that scene. And I know that @Mercinus3 is busy with his stuff, but eh... yeah, he said he was going to post "ASAP" more than two months ago, which stalls that scene... And naturally @Ashgan has his turn up in his scene, as well.

Eh, all in all I'm just worried for the RP, and (no offense to you for writing it, of course) only become more so when I notice status-messages of the players denoting that they have gone too long without being excited for an RP. Hell, The Prophecy has been practically standing still for two months, aside from a few posts from myself, Nessa and Shien; I wouldn't even blame people for losing their passion for the RP at such an unforgivably slow pace. I just don't know what to do about it...
So yeah, in summary I'm worried.

It has also been recommended to me that, once the main group reaches Zerul City (at current pace, sometime in the early 2020'ies), an effort is made to try to recruit some additional players for the RP... a recruitment thread and possibly (was suggested, still debating with myself whether it would be an advisable course of action) the reposting of the RP itself to make its age and length less apparent and imposing to new players (not that the age reflected on this thread is an accurate portrayal of the true age of the RP. How old is it by now? Must be about seven or eight years...

From Downfall ReRisen

While Kay was happy that Enn was not opposed to partaking in the measly provisions she had brought with her from Eighfour, it was the comment immediately after that statement that made her break into a genuinely delighted and relieved grin. He had humor! There was really no overstating how much a relief that was; after how unwaveringly serious he had been since their meeting one another, with the whole prediction of doom for her faction, telling of how his old faction had left him to die and him having been pretty clear about being prepared to kill her... well, he had said that he was “just a gun”, after all; a soldier. She imagined that if all she did was getting shot at and killing people, her sense of humor would probably also suffer.
Still, it was such a relief to confirm that being around him was not going to be completely boring and grave.
And of course, it was also quite the relief to be told that she was allowed to move now, and that he was not going to shoot her unless she gave him a reason to do so.
“Great! I’ll be sure to shoot you in the face instead, then, if the mood suddenly hits me,” she chirped happily, bounding eagerly to the side of her cart in Enn’s direction, where she started fiddling with the panels to access the storage inside. “Sorry, I’ve never been taken hostage before – is that right? Is that what you call it? - so you’ll have to forgive me if I didn’t do it right.” It was not that she was unused to guns being aimed at her – approaching Eighfour, despite how peaceful it was, usually meant being watched during one’s approach through the scope of a high-powered rifle, for one thing – but not only was the reason for her being aimed at different from the usual, but she also been fairly convinced that Enn had been prepared to shoot her, whereas normally her buddies in Eighfour decided against it once they recognized her as one of their own.

She opened the compartment she wanted, sliding the panel aside to access what was inside, and took out her mechanical glove, which she began fitting onto her left hand. “It’ll be a bit of a walk to reach Eighfour, so I figure you’ll probably want your snack first,” she told him over her shoulder in response to his question of where to go from here. “I kinda didn’t keep track of where I was going when I followed you and the birds, though, so I’ll need to reorientate myself before we go.”
A moment later, with the glove in place and a very distinctly digital “ping” in her head confirming that the brain-machine interface was picking up on its signal, she sat back for a moment, staring into the canopy above with a thoughtful expression. “I don’t really know how to make them forgive you, other than maybe leave them some food; I usually make it a priority not to piss off vengeful omnipresent wildlife. But that is interesting...” She turned her head to look at him. “You can’t see them? Even with thermal imaging? I always assumed that they were just really good at hiding themselves in the trees and such, but maybe it’s more than that. How cool would it be if they could, like, make themselves imperceptible or something?” She chuckled, shaking her head at the improbability of it all, and turned back to the cart just long enough to reach inside it and grab the little spherical drone from its charging-station.
Standing up and turning around fully to face him, she beamed him a smile as she held up the tri-rotored drone in the palm of her right hand. “This here is Aitch Cee. I put him together myself! He’ll be checking out the area to figure out where we need to go.”

The Prophecy

Uh...?

From Downfall ReRisen

“Uh,” Kay murmured, cupping her chin in her right hand as she pondered how to explain the magnitude of the power of the Eighfour-nuke. Obviously a number was pointless without a unit, and “kiloton” was a unit of weight, which was probably confusing in and by itself if one was not too familiar with the jargon commonly used on the subject... and to be honest, even she – though she understood all of those things – had a hard time actually comprehending it.
“You know TNT, right? The explosive?” she asked hopefully, counting on the fact that TNT was sufficiently low-tech and common that almost anyone from any faction – especially a soldier from a relatively advanced faction like Enn – would be familiar with it one way or another. “Eighty-four kilotons is the amount of TNT it would take to produce the same yield as the nuke. It...” She hesitated, pondering a little more, trying to imagine what she had tried to avoid imagining her entire life: what would actually happen if the Eighfour-nuke was detonated. “I think it would probably straightforwardly annihilate almost everything within twelve kilometers, just with the initial blast. Add to that the heat... I think it’d probably set everything flammable within twenty-five kilometers ablaze, to be honest.”
Of course she did not know this, since she had obviously never detonated, nor witnessed the detonation of, a nuke before, or any kind of weapon of that magnitude. There were a lot of things she did not know concerning how effective it would actually be, but however big a chunk of the forest the nuke eventually took with it when it went, she was fairly confident that all there would be left of Eighfour would be a very large crater in the ground.

She listened to Enn’s prediction of what would happen if Eighfour actually put its age-old defensive strategy into action with downcast eyes and a wistful smile on her lips. What he said made perfect sense, of course... unlike the idea of detonating a nuclear device in one’s own home in order to ensure that they would at least end in a spectacular way. [I]That’s what happens when an entire population gets taught not to think about something,[I] she thought with grim humor. When no one wants to think about it, no one realizes just how bad an idea it is.
Granted that the nuke might have worked as a deterrent once, back when the factions were formed and Eighfour founded, there was no arguing with Enn’s logic that telling people they had the nuke now, in this day and age, would be an incredibly bad move. Of course it would ultimately be of no consequence to Eighfour – it sounded as though the Trenians and Anderekians were not going to leave survivors any way, and the idea had always been to only detonate the nuke if there was no way around it – but obviously it would only make it easier to wipe them out, which was exactly the opposite of the original purpose of the nuke.
Supersonic bombers, toweringly huge artillery cannons, unmanned drones with explosive payloads... there are plenty of ways they could target our nuke without even putting a single soldier in danger. She raised her gaze and looked at Enn regretfully. And even beyond that... These people sound like they don’t care if their soldiers die either way. They’ll leave them to fight rather than call a retreat, even if there’s no hope of victory. Even if they attacked with infantry, would it really bother them all that much if a couple of hundreds of their own soldiers were evaporated?
She sighed. “We’ve been raised with the idea that the nuke would keep us safe for generations... I doubt anyone in Eighfour has even questioned it.”
For a faction whose sworn purpose was the pursuit of ingenuity, the accumulation and adaptation of as much different technology as possible and just generally being clever, it struck her as odd that not a single person had spoken up against the use of the nuke... They had so many inventors and tinkerers, several of which worked mainly with the nuke itself, someone had to have thought –
But that was the thing: they had not thought about it. It was unpleasant, so they had ignored it. It was almost enough to get her genuinely angry with Eighfour; it was that kind of thinking that had lead to her losing her right eye! That they were taught not to do, lest they blow themselves up or something. All while that was specifically what the faction planned to do.

“Hell-lasers?” Kay muttered when Enn started thinking out loud, taking a second to remember the blinding rays of destructive light she had seen last night. “Oh yeah, those were awesome! I’ve never seen anything like that before. I’d love to examine one of them...”
He kept talking, though, and Kay listened with her head cocked to the left. Leaving was an option? Maybe the people of Eighfour could be convinced to relocate... but they would want to take all of their “treasures” with them, which they did not have the ability to do... not to mention, they still did not have any vehicle suitable for moving the nuke itself. If they fled their settlement and left the nuke behind for their pursuers to discover, would that not just make the situation even worse? At least it sounded like they would have a little time before they were targeted, at least by the Anderekians...
Kay stiffened uncomfortably at the mention of “machine-humans”, her right hand going reflexively to cover the right side of her face. The way she positioned her hand, the tips of her middle- and ring-finger were actually on the eyeball itself, though touching her artificial eye was obviously not as painful as touching a real eye. Not only was the eyeball itself made of metal and plastic, it was also grafted directly into her skull on some kind of suspension, so there was minimal contact between the unfeeling robot-eye and her sensitive biological body. She barely even realized that she was touching the eye directly.
He must be talking about the people to the west the others warned me about, she thought, recalling how she had been cautioned against computers getting into her head. Or someone else entirely, someone Eighfour doesn’t even know about.

Finally, though, Enn suggested that they went somewhere else for various reasons. “I have some food with me,” Kay offered, gesturing vaguely at the sun-powered cart in front of her. “I was supposed to be out scavenging for another couple of days, so there should be enough for a proper meal, even if it’s just dried meat and crispbread. Can’t do anything about the clothes, though.”
Despite saying that much, she did not move to retrieve the food from the cart, though; not without his explicit permission to do so. He did still have a rifle in his hands, after all, which he had aimed at her just minutes earlier and could easily aim at her again.
She looked up towards the canopy above, which was obviously more of a symbolic gesture rather than based on an actual expectation of spotting one of the birds; realistically, she figured that she was probably more likely to see debris falling from space than a spotter bird.
“Yeah, I guess the birds are displeased that we aren’t killing each other... or specifically that I’m not killing you. Hopefully they won’t go crazy as they did before, but you’re probably right that we’d better move either way.”

From Downfall ReRisen

Kay bit her lower lip nervously, so far beyond having second thoughts about telling Enn about the “treasure” of Eighfour – it would likely be closer to ninth or tenth thoughts by then, so many times had she decided and reconsidered – but as anxious as it made her to tell him about the nuke, it was not something she could back out of now. Besides, it was not just that she was telling an outsider about the nuke – which any hostile faction would be, as well – but also a matter of her simply not wanting to talk about the nuke at all. There was an unspoken agreement in Eighfour to simply not speak of it to anyone, and even less speak out loud doubts about it... it was just this grim monument, visible from almost anywhere in the settlement, working as a reminder of the ultimate fate of their faction.
“Why indeed,” she murmured, chuckling to herself as she absentmindedly scratched the scars on her right cheek. She sighed. “For lots of reasons, I guess, but the ‘right’ one is probably that it’s just fair that you know, if you’re going to stay there.”
She also inwardly wondered how well-received he would be in Eighfour if he showed up. Her faction generally was not the “shoot first ask questions later”-kind of people, and they were known to be rather hospitable to visitors on occasion, welcoming opportunities to trade with small groups. If it had just been a matter of Enn wanting a place to hide until things calmed back down, Kay had no doubt that Eighfour would have accepted him, fed him and protected him for as long as it would have been reasonable, but... Enn had said it himself: a place “to serve and live in”. He wanted to stay there forever, which was not unheard of; Eighfour had taken in factionless before, or so she had been told. The problem was not with the concept of joining Eighfour itself, but rather a cold and practical one: what did Enn have to offer Eighfour? Would he be a scourer? A farmer? A tinkerer? Once again he had said it himself: he was a gun, and no one in Eighfour was “just a gun”.
If it had been up to Kay he would have been taken in and given shelter for as long as he wanted, just as she would welcome any guests that did not seem too dangerous – which Enn, despite having aimed a rifle at her, did not strike her as – but she was just a kid in the larger scheme of things, with no particular influence in the faction.

Shrugging off such concerns and postponing dealing with them to when she absolutely had to, she crossed her arms over her chest, not even realizing that doing so put her hands right next to her own gun in its holster, though at a wrong angle to draw it. “We’ve had the nuke since... well, since whenever. We’ve studied it, maintained it and guarded it, and if we had the materials I imagine we could even reproduce it, but we’ve never had any reason to use it. That is, we don’t have any vehicle capable of delivering it elsewhere.”
She threw back her head, groaning in annoyance. “No, I’m not saying it right... We don’t have the nuke for offense, we have it for defense. It’s something we’ve been passed down from past generations, that if someone threatens to destroy Eighfour, we tell them that we have a nuke and know how to detonate it.”
She looked at him intently, her mismatched eyes wide open. “Eh, do you understand? What I’m saying is that if what you say is true and the Anderekians or Trenians find Eighfour and decide to attack it... with how much stronger than us they are, we’ll tell them about the nuke. And if they still attack, and it seems like we’ll definitely lose...” She averted her eyes once again, unhappily. “We’ll detonate it, vaporize Eighfour and probably incinerate most of this forest.”

Still not looking at him, she finally asked demurely: “Is there any way to save Eighfour? If they’re searching the forest...” She shook her head. “I don’t want everyone to die.”

The Prophecy

The Duchy of Zerul, by a road in southwest

“Huh?” Olan murmured, distracted from the exchange between their group and Domhnall’s by first a light tugging at the edge of his frilly tunic, then seizing his arm and squeezing it tightly enough to fully get his attention. He turned away from the others – it was not as though they needed him anymore for what they were talking about, anyway – and looked at Thaler, who had apparently come up beside him while he had been busy being fascinated first by people of races belonging to a land far away, then his newfound ability to not only speak all languages, but to speak all languages at once.
He grinned at her widely, happy to see her on her feet and proud that she had mustered the strength to get to him, but as was usually the case with him he was not quite as simple-minded as he appeared. He would have had to be a sociopath with no prior experience reading other humanoids’ expressions not to realize that she was worried about something.
All it took was a quick glance over at Aemoten to confirm that he was not the issue – which should have been obvious from the start, since he figured she would have made them aware of the problem much more urgenty if there was a problem with the Sekalyn or anything else immediately problematic – to realize that her worry was for him.
“Did you know I could do that?” he whispered to her conspiratorially, a chuckle riding his voice without being fully allowed to come to fruition. Speaking to her, however, he made sure to switch back to speaking Rodorian, rather than in True Words. Only then did he realize that he felt somehow... drained, and that speaking like that had been consuming his magical energy. “Oh, I see! So talking like that is a kind of magic, you know? I only just realized. Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be more careful about it now that I know I can do it, and that it isn’t free.”

Jaelnec and Domhnall, meanwhile, continued their conversation. “Not really, no,” the Squire of the Will replied to the other’s inquiry on whether hunting gods and relics was the purpose of their group. “Nor was hunting vampires or goblins, or crusaders... or demonspawn, or harvesters, for that matter.” He sighed again, even deeper this time. “A lot of bad stuff just happened, and we either couldn’t or wouldn’t ignore it. We’ve been doing so much fighting lately... we were already exhausted before fighting Rilon.” He paused for a second, thinking. “Our objective is to end the Withering, though.”
The young Nightwalker actually smiled when Domhnall shared the fact that he had almost been killed by a boar at some point, and nodded his head in agreement. “Dealing with men, monsters and gods, it’s easy to forget that mundane stuff can be just as deadly.” He chuckled. “And I’m sure we could tell you... actually, I guess we could talk now, while Aemoten get’s some rest.”

The Prophecy

It's quite all right, though I was getting worried for you; it's been a while since I've heard from you, after all. I'm glad that you're still around.

The Prophecy

@cthuluNessa?

From Downfall ReRisen

I figured that you were a soldier, yes, Kay thought, still feeling less than confident that she could trust Enn not to present a danger to Eighfour, not with the kind of information he had just requested of her. Judging from his equipment and behavior, it was quite evident even to a civilian with virtually no experience with militaries to realize that he was a soldier, this was true, but almost everything else Enn told her was hardly something she could have – or should have, for that matter – been able to determine just by looking at him or listening to the few sentences he had spoken until then. For that matter, was he really front line infantry? His comment on even basic troops having the equipment to make a difference if they saw their chance to do so explained his some of his gear, including that with the ability to process thermal imaging, but she still was not sure. His gun did not seem like the type that would fare well in the thick of battle; indeed, just by looking at it, it seemed more suited for mid- to long-range engagements than anything. She could be wrong, though; she would have to take it apart and examine how it worked in order to be sure.
But even beyond that – while it was indeed quite evident that this man, for all the intriguing abilities granted to him by his equipment, was not an air force – she had had no way of knowing that he did not command any forces... not beyond the deductions she had already made in regards to his loneliness, at least. And even if he did not command the “Anderekian” forces, someone almost certainly did, and that commander usually acted upon intelligence gathered by “common soldiers”. Reporting strengths and weaknesses of the enemy to one’s commanders was certainly a way to make a kind of difference, as she saw it... She did not think this guy was in a position to do that, which was one of the reasons she had been so indulgent in chatting with him up to that point, but she did not want to divulge potentially dangerous information on her faction to a stranger based solely on gut feeling.
That said... as much as the part of her that simply wanted to protect Eighfour wanted to implicitly distrust everything Enn told her now, it was pretty hard to convince herself that he was lying, or even just omitting details such as him intending to report what she told him to his superiors. The way he spoke seemed frantic, almost desperate, and it struck her as slightly odd how hard he was trying to explain that he was just a pawn. A “gun”, whose purpose was apparently solely to follow orders, and whose orders consisted primarily of instructions to kill others.
Still, being a professional killer was hardly something that made her trust him more...

But then he kept talking, moving on from trying to describe his own role in the Anderekian military to explain his current situation, which appeared not to be in the Anderekian military... or any military, for that matter. Indeed, from the sound of it one of her guesses from before had been spot on: he was indeed a deserter, which apparently also made him factionless by the rules of his own – or old, rather – faction. The circumstances under which he had become so, however, were something that were quite simply beyond her to deduce on her own, at least with what she had known beforehand. His side lost, overwhelmed by the “Trenians”, and everyone was killed... and, since he realized that he had no chance of surviving, much less making any significant difference in the battle, if he stayed and kept fighting, Enn had fled. He had become a deserter and a factionless only because doing so was the only way for him to survive.
Kay’s posture relaxed some during his eager explanation, and her expression softened from one of steadfast dismissal to one of sympathy and pity. It was one thing to not want to put your faction at risk, another to follow orders blindly, and a third, completely different thing to throw one’s life away for practically no potential gain for anyone. If what he said about how thoroughly they had been defeated by the Trenians was true – and from what she had seen last night through her drone, it may very well have been; the bit about extraordinary anti-air certainly seemed right – then she did not think that she, nor anyone, should fault him for leaving the battle.
Besides, what did she know about how it actually felt to be in that position, anyway? To be in the thick of things, with gunfire, explosions and the screams of the dying and wounded everywhere around you? To point your gun at someone and pull the trigger, only to put a bullet in another person rather than a soulless target? She had never actually been in combat, and did not think she could even begin to imagine what it could feel like. Actually, it was easy for her to decide that she wanted to be brave and defiant before a threat to her faction, but would she have been so if Enn had actually made an effort to break her? Would she still have had the courage if he had shot her in the leg, or just hit her with the butt of his rifle? Or even just shot next to her, or aimed at her with an explicitly stated intention of shooting? Making decisions like that was easy as long as one felt relatively safe and calm, but how much pain and stress would it really take for her to break?

Offering the man she had named Enn a compassionate smile, she drew a quiet sigh, taking a moment to wonder whether she could trust him... and ended up deciding that no matter how much she wanted to stay wary of him potentially betraying her, she could not ignore her instincts telling her that he was being sincere, and that she should try to help him. She only had to think for a couple of seconds to set aside her suspicion and regress back into naively trusting this man.
“So you need a place to hide,” she stated softly, lowering her gaze to the ground in front of her regretfully. “We have people that take turns keeping an eye on the walls around our settlemet, but we don’t really have a functional military, or any soldiers. Almost everyone has a gun, but there’s no one who are ‘just a gun’. We have some flak-turrets for anti-air, but they aren’t usually manned unless we expect trouble.” She sighed again. “Usually other factions don’t notice Eighfour since it’s hidden among the trees, and because people are afraid of the forest, so there isn’t usually a lot of danger for us when we’re at home.”
She bit her lip, arguing with herself on whether to continue talking for a second. Nervously kicking a tuft of grass with the tip of her boot, she spoke without looking up. “It’s not just me that’s bad at naming, eh? It’s a tradition in Eighfour; we’ve always been really bad at naming people and stuff. Even the name of our faction has no imagination in it whatsoever.” She chuckled to herself. Oh man, if Enn was lying, she was going to be in so much trouble for telling him this.
“Eighfour is an abbreviation of eighty-four, because that’s the number on the ‘monument’ our settlement was built around.” She finally looked up, nervously and almost pleadingly. “It’s the yield in kilotons of the nuke inside it.”